Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Of course he had many rivals. Judy’s best friend Gaye Brown, a large, jolly, boisterous fellow member of the chorus-line in the revue The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, introduced her to Sean Kenny, the extremely fashionable designer of Beyond the Fringe. Kenny, a guilt-ridden, hard-drinking, monosyllabic Irish Catholic, proved to be an even e irresistibly sexy figure. ‘I knew that what this man, responsible for these designs, was about was the same thing I was about. And I knew that he could be my teacher,’ she said.48 Besides, Peter was engaged to be married to Wendy. Judy took up with Kenny and eventually married him. Peter remained good friends with her, and put his courtship on the back burner until a later date.

  After a year in the West End, the cast of Beyond the Fringe were beginning to get on each other’s nerves slightly, which was hardly surprising bearing in mind the artificial circumstances in which they had been thrown together. Most of the obvious sources of tension had been avoided – Oxford v. Cambridge, north v. south, middle class v. working class, tall v. short – but their four characters were so distinct as to cause complex individual frictions. Miller was getting bored with saying the same lines every night, and was tending to rush through his material: this annoyed Moore’s thorough sense of professionalism. Moore came in for a degree of intellectual snobbery, the effect of which was emphasised by his inferiority complex. Peter and Jonathan Miller tended to seize control of interviews, leading the press to assume that they were responsible for the bulk of writing; this irritated the underrated Bennett. ‘There was just a great deal of stand-off and subdued friction,’ says Miller.

  Peter tended not to reveal his feelings, but confided later to Michael Parkinson that he believed Miller and Bennett to be ‘a bit phoney in a sense, a bit contrived.’ He felt a distance between himself and his two colleagues; but then, says Parkinson, ‘he probably felt that for the world and most of the people he met. It wasn’t said in an offensive way, because he had too much natural charm and vulnerability for that.’ Peter coped with boredom on stage by varying his performance every night, sometimes dangerously, taking it to the verge of embarrassment. Initially his improvisations had been hilarious: Bennett remembers that his ‘frustrated miner’ monologue ‘was less of a sketch than a continuing saga which each night developed new extravagances and surrealist turns, the mine at one point invaded by droves of Proust-lovers, headed by the scantily-clad Beryl Jarvis. Why the name Beryl Jarvis should be funny I can’t think. But it was and plainly is.’49 (Actually one could write an essay about why the name Beryl Jarvis is funny, but there is a limit to the value of dissecting humour.) As time went on though, Peter became bored with merely being hilariously funny. According to Dudley Moore, ‘The sketch got longer and longer and sometimes it got very boring. He used to be willing to bore people with endless monologues as long as he could exit on a laugh.’50

  Drawing on his experiences from the Pembroke Players’ German tour, Peter started to improvise his lines in the Shakespeare sketch. This annoyed Bennett, who was less impressed with his abilities in this area than Peter’s fellow students had been: he reckoned that Peter ‘couldn’t do it for toffee’, and that only his Elvis impersonation was more ‘deeply embarrassing’.51 Moore felt better-disposed to Peter’s improvisations, and himself tended to change his lines regularly in Royal Box and Civil Defence (as Whose Finger on What Button? was now called). During a relatively highbrow Miller–Bennett two-hander about philosophy, Moore would sometimes stand in the wings and shout ‘Nurse! The screens!’ or something of that sort. ‘Peter used to look forward to those moments,’ recalls Moore.

  Although there had been no really deep-seated problems, the show was clearly in need of a shake-up. It had won awards. The book and the record had been completed and released. The atmosphere at the Fortune was further downcast by the death of Hugo Boyd, Dudley Moore’s bass player, in a car crash. Moore started afresh and formed a new trio with Chris Karan on drums and Pete McGurk on bass. It was time for Beyond the Fringe to start afresh as well, and the opportunity to do so arrived with an offer to transfer the show to Broadway, starting in October 1962. There was one obvious problem: Peter’s satirical nightclub, the Establishment Club, was now up and running in Soho. But Peter had become known as a man who could apparently surmount any obstacle, more often than not with a grand gesture.

  Author’s note: The Complete Beyond the Fringe, published by Methuen in 1987, contains the official performance history of the show. This document contains a number of discrepancies with original programmes and contemporary press reviews. Where such discrepancies occur I have relied on contemporary sources and interviews with surviving cast members.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sorry, Sir, There Is a £5 Waiting List

  The Establishment Club, 1961–62

  By the autumn of 1961 Peter was regarded not just as the nation’s foremost satirist, but also as one of its most celebrated entrepreneurs; which was ironic, as he didn’t consider himself much of a satirist and didn’t want to be an entrepreneur. The club he had dreamed of in Berlin, which had taken shape in late-night Cambridge discussions with Nick Luard and John Bird, had come to fruition. Peter’s main reason for opening it was not to change society or to make money, just to have somewhere to go ‘where we could be more outrageous than we could be on stage’.1 In 1961 the Lord Chamberlain’s Office could and frequently did censor public theatre, but the club format legally sidestepped his attentions. In the process Peter anticipated the Comedy Store and its ilk by twenty years.

  Jeremy Cotton, his friend from the first-term curry club at Pembroke, had bumped into him in the early summer, loping down the Charing Cross Road. Peter explained that he was ‘looking for premises’. He’d do better to return to the junction of Oxford Street, Cotton suggested helpfully, as the Cambridge Circus ‘premises’ were closed. Once the confusion had been cleared up, Peter explained that he was actually touring Soho’s seedier parts looking for a disused nightclub. Originally his search had fanned out through Covent Garden from Donaldson’s office and had settled on premises there, but planning permission had been denied; now he was tracking west to the familiar territory behind the Apollo Theatre, a tackily glamorous gangland of strip joints and sex clubs. Eventually he discovered the Club Tropicana in Greek Street, an ‘All G Strip Revue’ that had gone bankrupt after being shut down in a police raid. He cabled Luard, who was en route to a Mexican holiday: ‘Have premises. Stop travelling.’ Luard flew home at once, and declared it the least appealing property he’d ever seen. Within six months, Jeremy Cotton would be taking his girlfriends for nights out to the Establishment Club, and profiting from the amazing sexual kudos bestowed by a mere passing wave of Peter Cook’s hand.

  The club’s name was of relatively recent invention: it was Henry Fairlie in the Spectator who had coined the term to describe the invisible nexus of power that controls our lives. Soho was the perfect place for an anti-Establishment headquarters – exotic, sybaritic, unconventional, crooked, late to bed, a place the real Establishment found difficult to control. This in itself presented a handicap, though, for a young man who on the face of it politely epitomised the real Establishment and its vulnerable good manners. There were people who would need to be paid off, people watching and waiting to see what was afoot, like cautious jackals keeping one eye on the approach of a very confident-looking giraffe to the waterhole. Mr Lubowski didn’t know what to make of the cool, elegant boy who wished to negotiate a lease on his premises, and so kept ‘discovering’ new conditions in the lease that would hike the price up. Peter, unfazed, paid these tiny demands in a manner which signified that they meant little to him, and not at all that he was too apprehensive to protest.

  In fact, raising a huge sum of money with which to start work proved no problem at all. Peter simply let it be known that he was starting a London club. One year’s membership would cost three guineas – or two guineas if paid in advance – and life membership would cost a mere twenty guineas. Invitations were sent out to the famous a
nd influential, just in case the news had slipped them by. Within a matter of weeks 7,000 people had taken out membership, including Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley, Yehudi Menuhin, Ben Travers, Lord Russell of Liverpool, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Somerset Maugham, Lionel Bart, Brian Rix and an unnamed bishop. Life members, as many of the 7,000 were, received a free pin-up of Harold Macmillan. All this in August when the Establishment was just a ruined strip joint. Virtually the only money Peter had to pay out in advance was the premium of a £50,000 insurance policy against libel damages.

  His first appointment was Sean Kenny, designer of the Fringe, who gutted the whole place and rebuilt it using pine, hessian, steel, glass and black paint. The outside of the building was pink. ‘No plush’, noted The Observer wonderingly, ‘and nothing Caribbean.’2 A restaurant was installed, and the chef from the Mermaid Theatre lured away. The menu would feature the latest trendy middle-class dishes, such as paté and creme caramel. Peter hired his own flatmate Colin Bell as Head of Publicity. He also took on a personal secretary – Judy Scott-Fox, a jolly, oversized, upper-class woman with a hooting laugh that can clearly be heard on every Beyond the Fringe recording. Lewis Morley, the Fringe photographer, was given the first floor to open a photographic studio, and Sean Kenny started up a design studio on the floor above that. Art exhibitions were planned, along with a cinema club showing free films every afternoon, ‘including the Marx Brothers, Rudolf Valentino and Adolf Hitler’. A ticker-tape machine was installed, together with a library of newspapers and journals, and a programme of informal but serious lunchtime discussion sessionswas arranged, so that members could mull over the issues of the day. An advertising slogan was devised: ‘If you can’t join them, beat them.’

  For all the bright ideas though, the club would have to stand or fall on its comedy content. Peter wanted a twice-nightly cabaret, the first bill at 9.30 featuring a resident cast of regulars, the second at half past midnight to feature the cast of Beyond the Fringe, fresh from their evening’s performance at the Fortune Theatre. It soon became clear that this last was a pipe-dream: the others simply didn’t share Peter’s boundless energy, particularly when their colleague was intending to elevate himself to the status of their employer. Only Dudley Moore agreed; meek, obliging Dudley, who dutifully came to the club every night and played jazz in the basement with his trio. Jonathan Miller compromised by appearing in Red Cross, one of a number of short humorous films shot in the summer of 1961, which were played to the audience between sketches. He appeared as a chain-smoking surgeon who keeps flicking cigarette ash into his patient’s innards. Another short featured Neville Chamberlain’s celebrated prediction of peace on his return from seeing Hitler in Munich, shot over and over again by a bumbling director as Chamberlain continues to get his famous lines wrong.

  One young comedian to arouse Peter’s interest as a possible performer was John Wells, who had just received rave notices for a show at the 1961 Edinburgh Festival. Peter dispatched a telegram to Scotland offering to buy up his services. Wells came down to meet him amid the sawing and hammering at Greek Street, picking his way through the debris to shake his hand. Wells recalls: ‘He was incredibly well-mannered. He was wearing a suit, while everybody else wore sweaters and gym shoes. I remember the formal way he shook hands, very English and polite. Even though he was exactly, to the day, a year younger than I was, I found it difficult to treat him as anything but a star.’3 Wells, it transpired, had already secured a job as a schoolmaster at Eton, but Peter persuaded him to take the late spot on the opening night. Wells’s old friend Willie Rushton, too, was to make frequent late-night appearances.

  Eventually, an in-house cast of regulars was put together for the main evening performances. John Bird was enticed away from his directing job at the Royal Court and encouraged to become a performer; John Fortune, who had just come down from Cambridge, was also hired. Jeremy Geidt, a thirty-one-year-old actor and TV presenter, was taken on to provide a more slapstick element – ‘He was great at falling over and farting,’4 said Peter. There were two other short-lived professional actors, David Walsh and Hazel Wright, although in due course they were replaced by Eleanor Bron, once she had been released from her dull job in the personnel department of a large company. The jazz singer Annie Ross was hired for a short engagement; her place was later taken on a permanent basis by Carole Simpson, performing satirical numbers with lyrics by Jay Landesman or Christopher Logue and music by Tony Kinsey and Stanley Myers, the husband of Fringe director Eleanor Fazan. The sketches were all written by Peter himself, along with John Bird and John Fortune. Peter had perfected the remarkable knack of giving everyone the impression that his attention was fully committed to their particular area of the enterprise. Bird recalls: ‘The nuts-and-bolts things had somehow been taken care of: money raised, premises organised. He was heavily involved in all this, but he must have done ound n his lunchtime, or his sleep; as far as I was concerned, what he was really interested in was the show.’5

  There were variety acts too, slotted in and around the comedy, including Norman and Laura Sturgis – banned by a directive of the American High Command from every military base in Europe – and the Unforgettable Alberts – ‘Unforgettable at least to the gentleman diner who was rendered unconscious by the collapse of their half-ton exploding harp,’6 according to Peter. Roger Law was also taken on, to produce a brand new 14-foot-by-18-inch satirical drawing opposite the bar each week. These tended to be fairly surreal: St Francis of Assisi being devoured by crows, or Sir Roy Welensky, the white supremacist Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, turning slowly into a pig. Says Law: ‘People either liked them or they’d get cross about them and chuck red wine all over them. Colin McInnes was always getting cross about them.’

  Peter appeared to be planning more of these attractions than it seemed possible for one person to organise, while simultaneously appearing in the West End’s most successful show. The key to this achievement was a blitzkrieg approach to problems, knowing which obstacles to tackle head-on, which ones to skirt and which ones to ignore. Lashings of charm and a judicious assessment of when to delegate surmounted every difficulty. Finding a parking space near the Establishment, for instance, was one of those tiresome little problems that could have wasted half an hour or so of valuable time every day. So he simply parked his car illegally outside the front door, and every day the police towed it away to their car pound at Waterloo. Every evening two stagehands from the Fortune would go down to Waterloo to collect it for him. Total cost: a mere £6 a week, excepting those occasions when the police had left a ticket on the windscreen instead, which Peter would simply ignore. Eventually a constable turned up at the Battersea flat, bearing a sheaf of unpaid tickets. Peter welcomed him like an old friend, ushered him in, gave him a cup of tea and treated him royally. After about half an hour of chat and laughter, the policeman nodded sheepishly to the tickets and said: ‘About these parking offences, sir. Would they by any chance have occurred during the period when your American business partner was over here and borrowing your car?’ Why yes, replied Peter, that must have been the very period. ‘Probably tricky to trace then,’ said the policeman. ‘Scarcely worth the trouble sir.’

  The Establishment set its opening date for 5 October 1961. On the 4th, £13,000-worth of fire escapes were installed, forgotten in the earlier rush, and the workmen only cleared out the last of their tools on the morning of the opening. By now Peter and Nick Luard hadn’t been to bed for seventy-two hours. The papers were gratifyingly full of publicity. Peter, asked about what precisely the Fringe cast would be contributing, as previously advertised, deflected the truth of their non-involvement with a joke. Alan Bennett would be doing the catering, he said – ‘He’s in favour of didactic cooking’; and Jonathan Miller would ‘of course, feature his talks of old Africa centred on the rise and fall of Mr Nobitsu and his weekly encounters with the Baluba tribesmen. He will be assisted by an African waiter who will be held responsible if everything goes wrong.’7

  Mil
ler, in fact, wrote a huge article in >Frhe Observer to coincide with the club’s opening. Can English Satire Draw Blood? expressed the hope that the club might ‘develop the weapons necessary for the final overthrow of the Neo-Gothic stronghold of Victorian good taste.’ England, said Miller, was still a country where the posthumous rallying-cry ‘Theirs not to reason why’ represented ‘an expression of praise and approval rather than a signal for a rain of scorching contempt which such blinkered loyalty richly deserved. “Bloody fools” was the only healthy reply on hearing the news of the Light Brigade fiasco. It is to be hoped that when The Establishment opens its doors the cry of “Bloody fools” will ring loud and clear through Soho and down the courtly reaches of Whitehall.’ Miller’s hopes were not, however, entirely matched by his expectations: ‘The success of this project is seriously threatened by a subtle defence with which the members of the (real) Establishment protect themselves against these new attacks. It is the threat of castration by adoption; of destruction by patronage. Cook is already somewhat disturbed by the number of applications for membership which bear the post-mark SW1. We have begun to experience the same threat in our revue. Each night, before curtain-up, sleek Bentleys evacuate a glittering load into the foyer. Some of the harsh comment in the programme is greeted with shrill cries of well-bred delight which reflect a self-indulgent narcissism which takes enormous pleasure in gazing at the satiric reflection.’8