Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The Establishment was snapped up by a Lebanese ‘businessman’ calling himself Raymond Nash – a former partner of the slum landlord Peter Rachman – and his associate Anthony Coutt-Sykes, who’d added the ‘Coutt’ in order to try and sound distinguished. ‘Nash was a traditional Soho type,’ said Cook. ‘He never drank, never smoked, and always carried a briefcase full of cash. He was later sent to jail for gold smuggling in Tokyo. Nash came out to New York and promised me that nothing would change, but we all knew he’d wreck the place. He was a crook, and a tough crook at that. When I eventually got back it was just absolutely different – filled with very heavy men. The atmosphere was so bad.’

  Nash was presented to creditors as a man with experience, who had previously co-owned the ‘La Discotheque’ and ‘Le Condor’ clubs. He offered to pay preferential debts in full, trade debts at 6s 8d in the pound, and to pay Cook & Luard absolutely nothing. They, in return, agreed to ‘continue their association with the club’. The New York cast were sent over to play a few weeks there at the end of the year. ‘We were surprised by the number of large Levantines in slightly iridescent suits who seemed to be in charge,’ says John Bird.18 Gaye Brown remembers that ‘gambling then came into the upstairs bar, which had been this wonderful bar with nice lunches. The members hung on for dear life actually, we wanted that club, everybody wanted that club. But you can’t hang on to an old result.’ A few months later, Bill Wallis, from the replacement cast of Beyond the Fringe, was lucky enough to secure a job in the replacement cast f the Establishment’s late-night cabaret. ‘There were a total of three people in the audience,’ he recalls. ‘In fact six of us once played to a honeymoon couple. And that was it.’ Nash and his fellow gangsters were utterly bewildered as to why the goose had suddenly ceased to lay the golden eggs. ‘It soon reverted to a sex cinema,’ noted Peter, ‘dedicated to the overthrow of the government and all that it stands for.’19

  Undeterred, Peter threw himself into the expansion of his financially separate American empire. In July he announced the construction of a new 200-seat Establishment Theatre, presenting serious drama, to be built not beside but actually on top of the Strollers Club. With Beyond the Fringe off the stage for its summer break, Peter and Wendy had flown back to England for the initial bankruptcy hearings, visited Peter’s family in Uplyme (where ‘Knollside’ had recently been redecorated at Peter’s expense, just in time) and had snatched a short break in Bermuda. The rest of his holiday, however, was cut short so that he could devote all his time to raising money for the theatre project. Together with producer David Balding, he secured backing from Joseph E. Levine, the President of Embassy Pictures, and Richard Burton’s wife Sybil. The opening was set for the following January; Peter was so busy that he forgot his mother’s birthday.

  In August, the Establishment cabaret acquired a second cast: one group stayed in New York, while the other toured San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and points in between. Among the new performers was Peter Bellwood, his old Cambridge friend. Peter also set to work writing a brand new show for the dual opening, and spent all his spare time in the summer shooting satirical short films to complement the sketches. Then, in early September, all his rushing hither and thither was suddenly pulled up short, by the news that Wendy was pregnant. Peter and Wendy’s relationship had been wavering somewhat during the preceding months; now Wendy, in particular, wanted to make a go of it. With indecent haste – this was, after all, 1963 – they set their wedding date for just two months later.

  Peter’s parents, stunned by the speed of it all, dropped everything and flew out to New York, where they were politely shuttled around the expatriot comedians’ social circle: supper at the Millers’, lunch with Peter Bellwood, tea with Alan Bennett, to an art gallery with Judy Scott-Fox. They went with Peter to Sardi’s, his favourite restaurant, and took in performances of Beyond the Fringe and the Establishment cabaret. When he returned home, Alec Cook gave a lecture to the British Legion in Lyme Regis about all the astonishing things he had seen in America – automatic glass doors, push button pedestrian crossings, driver-operated buses, digital temperature displays on buildings and aircraft seats with collapsible tables in the back.

  The wedding took place at St Luke’s Chapel in Greenwich Village on 28 October. Wendy looked stunning in a dark blue crepe-de-chine empire dress with a diamond clip, and a felt emerald trilby; she carried a bouquet of gardenias and a slight three-month bulge which did not impress the vicar at all. Peter Bellwood was the best man and Sybil Burton helped with the organisation. There was a Hungarian trio, and Dudley Moore played the organ; the reception was at Strollers. For their honeymoon, Peter took Wendy to see a double horror bill at a Times Square cinema.

  Despite the aura of excitement generated by all Peter’s projects, and the social novelty of his wedding, a sense of inertia was beginning to weigh upon the British satirical community. The cast of Beyond the Fringe, in particular, were beginning to get seriously on each other’s nerves after more than three years together. Miller and Bennett’s relationship was the most frayed: in one row during the interval, Miller had upended the table of sandwiches in the Green Room. Then Moore, too, fell out with Bennett: ‘One evening I changed some lines in a sketch we did together and well, we didn’t have an argument, he did, and I don’t think we have really ever spoken much after that.’20 Peter observed that ‘Dudley had gone from being a subservient little creep, a genial serf, to become an obstinate bastard who asserted himself.’ Bennett campaigned against Peter’s ‘vaudeville exuberance’. Miller became angry with Peter after having a furious transatlantic row with Private Eye magazine: a supposedly anonymous piece he’d written about ‘pooves’ had his name and medical title carelessly appended to it. The letter he fired off – ‘You stupid bloody irresponsible cunts’ it began, and continued in much the same vein – still hangs on the Eye office wall.

  Curiously, the more irritable with each other the four protagonists became offstage, the more they began to corpse and giggle onstage. ‘It got worse and worse,’ says Miller. ‘There were moments when the show simply didn’t go on.’21 Practical jokes became the norm. Dudley Moore would stand in the wings trying to put the others off; if they directed their performance away from him, he would dash round the back of the set and appear in the opposite wing. When Miller’s wife Rachel was standing in the wings one day holding their newborn baby, Peter grabbed it, marched onstage mid-sketch and announced: ‘Excuse me, Sir. Your wife’s just given birth to this.’ Miller replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh, just bung it in the fridge.’ The audience roared. In reality Miller was furious. A few days later Peter came on carrying a limp Dudley Moore instead: ‘Excuse me, Sir. I’ve just discovered this man in bed with your wife, so I shot him.’ To which Miller replied, ‘Oh, well, just drop him anywhere.’ The atmosphere had become semi-hysterical. At the end of 1963, Miller decided he’d had enough, and resigned from the show. ‘It was a great relief,’ says Bennett. ‘He and I really got on each other’s nerves.’22

  Beyond the Fringe was relaunched by the surviving three cast members in a new version that began on 8 January 1964. The part of Jonathan Miller was acted by Paxton Whitehead, an English-born actor with US sitcom experience. The script was substantially rewritten to include seven new items, some of them on an American theme; Peter, more parochially, contributed topical nonsense sketches about the Great Train Robbery and the British space programme. Another of his ‘new’ sketches was actually One Leg Too Few, now resurrected once again to appear in its fourth incarnation, with Dudley Moore as the hapless unidexter. This pairing was very much the beginning of the Cook–Moore partnership that went on to dominate British comedy throughout the rest of the sixties. Moore was perfectly cast, as the sketch already seemed to sum up their offstage relationship of languid superiority versus hopeful deference. ‘I think Alan tried the part first,’ he says, ‘but he made it too maudli, an unhappy figure. My boundless optimism was the key.’ On account of his club foot, Moore could only hop o
n his right leg night after night. Eventually he developed a serious water-on-the-knee problem, which persists to this day.

  One Leg Too Few apart, the critics were lukewarm in their reception of the new material. Newsweek felt that ‘The days of the show’s satirical leadership are over’, and that its ‘original vitriolic radicalism’ had been diluted. The new performer fared little better: Paxton Whitehead, according to the New York Times, ‘reminds you of a man who isn’t there’. In April 1964, after 669 performances, the American version of Beyond the Fringe dwindled to a halt. The British version, although it lasted longer – it was transferred to the Mayfair Theatre, where it played until September 1966 – suffered a similar slow decline. ‘At first it was wonderful, and it all went terribly well,’ says Bill Wallis. ‘Then we discovered that things were diminishing, like laughs. We got rather depressed. Eventually we recorded a show, after a year or so, and played it sketch by sketch alongside one of our early shows, and we discovered that we weren’t performing anywhere near as well as we had been, any of us. It was a most salutary experience.’

  The decline of Beyond the Fringe was mirrored by the dramatic collapse of That Was the Week That Was. The satire boom, it seemed, had run into a brick wall. Macmillan had resigned in October, and his successor Alec Douglas-Home was enjoying a brief wash of public sympathy before being swept aside by Harold Wilson in the 1964 election: a TW3 sketch which encapsulated the choice facing the voters as ‘Dull Alec versus smart-alec’ had received an astonishing 909 complaints from the public. One of the BBC’s governors, Sir James Duff, was among the outraged. The Director-General Sir Hugh Carleton-Greene didn’t want Duff to resign – ‘an excellent man’ he said – so he used the excuse of the impending election to announce the programme’s cancellation after thirteen episodes of the new series.

  As if in sympathy, Private Eye’s circulation suddenly crashed from a peak of 95,000 to 19,000, and London newsagents were awash with unsold copies. According to Peter Usborne, one of its ex-Oxford University founders, ‘At that time the Eye became the last thing to be seen carrying.’23 The staff had to take 50 per cent pay cuts and look for part-time jobs elsewhere, ‘We really didn’t think the magazine would last,’ said Willie Rushton. TW3 had taken a terrible toll on the Eye’s comic talent, and loss of morale caused by the collapse in sales compounded the problem. ‘We’d almost forgotten about jokes, we were so depressed,’ recalls Usborne. The Sunday Times described the magazine as ‘The last and dying echo of the satire boom.’

  Jonathan Miller once said that ‘There never was a satire movement, only the Cook empire.’24 It’s not that much of an exaggeration. Peter’s astonishing, virtually unchecked explosion, from tentative first year trying out his material at a Pembroke College smoker to king of satire on both sides of the Atlantic, had taken just five years. After that, it had taken less than a year for the whole edifice to crumble. He had managed to create a mass fashion across the whole Anglo-Saxon world, but had invested in it so heavily both creatively and financially, that when the fashion passed his investment went with it. Almost simultaneously, in America and in Britain, a hiatus occurred in public cynicism. The assassination of Kennedy made it difficult, for a short while, to mock American politics or politicians. The impending and apparently guaranteed election of Harold Wilson in this country seemed to obviate satire, by convincing a new generation of naive British youth that a golden age of socialist prosperity was just around the corner. There was a sense that the satire boom had done its job, that the money changers were on the point of being driven from the temple. Of course, they would simply be back later with bigger and better pitches; and Peter, ironically, was one of the minority of young British people who had never believed or suggested otherwise.

  Naturally, he kept working with the same furious energy: he and John Bird wrote a new Establishment revue which opened at Strollers on 15 April 1964, featuring Eleanor Bron in a suit as Sir Alec Douglas Home, in a sketch that confused many of the audience into thinking the British Prime Minister was gay. ‘Enough is enough’, complained the New York correspondent of the London Evening News. ‘Isn’t it about time that we tried to export a little better picture of British life today?’25 Peter was discovering, like all empire-builders before him, that the impetus of construction is easier to sustain than the hard slog of maintenance. Once the empire is built, the personal charisma of its creator is no longer enough to keep it intact, because he cannot continue to captivate all parts of it at once.

  The Establishment Theatre Co. finally presented its first production in the new theatre in May 1964, a performance of Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack directed by Mike Nichols and starring the then-unknown George Segal. Subsequent productions included Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, featuring the equally unknown Dustin Hoffman, who was fired during rehearsals by his frustrated director Stuart Burge. Peter did not stay to see any of them. Although he claimed that he would henceforth ‘divide his time between New York and London,’26 he actually left the theatre company exclusively in the hands of his partner David Balding, who shepherded it safely through the rest of the sixties. The US Establishment itself dribbled on as far as 1965 – John Cleese was in the cast of the touring version – but the next time John Bird visited New York he noticed that the building had been demolished and replaced by a branch of Habitat. A Las Vegas impresario offered Peter a lucrative contract to stay on in the States, as a stand-up comedian working the casinos; but most of his friends were fed up and wanted to come home, and he didn’t want to be left alone. ‘I couldn’t face it – I didn’t have the nerve,’ he confessed.27 The move back to London filled him with no less apprehension. He later admitted that he had been ‘dreading it’.28

  By 19 April, Dudley Moore was the only member of the Fringe cast left in the USA. His girlfriend Celia Hammond had flown out to join him, and had then left him for her ex-boyfriend the photographer Terry Donovan; possibly because she had discovered the awkward fact that he was also going out with another model, Cynthia Cassidy, at the same time. So distraught was Moore at the break-up that he made his first visit to a psychiatrist, and embarked on a course of treatment on the quite ludicrous premise that – at the age of twenty-nine – time was slipping by and he had not achieved anything. He finally returned to England four months later, and was immediately offered his own BBC TV music series, Offbeat. The Cool Elephant Club in Margaret Street made a home for the Dudley Moore Trio. He was sorted.

  The BBC also found a job for Jonathan Miller, at the helm of the arts programme Monitor. Ned Sherrin employed John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron and Alan Bennett on his new venture Not So Much a Programme . . . a three-nights-a-week chat-cum-sketch show fronted by the brightest star in British broadcasting, David Frost. Lady Pamela Stitty, the Conservative lady devised by Peter, became a regular character; but there was no room, anywhere, for Peter himself. He was hardly a pariah, but a tainted whiff of satire continued to hang rather unfairly about him. Defiantly, he protested that ‘When people talk about the satire movement being over it’s like people saying that “singing is over” or “swimming is out of fashion”;29 but producers and backers were nervous of antagonising the Gods of fashion, and all Peter’s ideas were quietly filed away. The only work he got that summer was when the BBC finally recorded a performance of Beyond the Fringe for broadcast. To make matters worse, in the autumn he slipped and broke his ankle, and was confined to a wheelchair for several weeks.

  He started to work on a play set in a police station, with a cast of forty policemen, but nerves made it difficult to concentrate; he tried without success both to complete it and to interest anyone in it for sixteen months. He offered an item for inclusion in an American film, in which Jesus Christ arrives in present-day America, and runs into trouble with the Carpenters’ Union. He and John Bird also wrote an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for the cinema, updated to the 1960s and featuring an African dictator who had modelled himself on Macmillan to the extent of wearing shooting tweeds and employing
a ghillie in the sun-baked African landscape. The scenes were divided up between the two writers: ‘I was heavily influenced at the time by Jean-Luc Godard,’ explains Bird, ‘so you would get a scene written by me which consisted of meticulously described camera movements, followed by a Cook scene which was pages of unadorned dialogue, sometimes without even the names of the characters. So you can imagine how difficult it was to work out.’

  Another abortive film project united the Beyond the Fringe cast, in the story of a fiendish nineteenth-century German plot to undermine the monarchy by flooding Britain with dozens of substitute Queen Victorias. ‘It never got beyond the treatment stage,’ remembers Alan Bennett. ‘Such writing sessions as we had were what nowadays would be called “unstructured”; as it was nobody’s job to take notes, there would be lots of ideas flying about with suggestions for dialogue and so on, and when the meeting broke up we’d have the impression we’d got somewhere whereas in fact we’d got nowhere at all.’ Peter recollected that ‘We sat round the table simply destroying each other’s stuff. I don’t know if it was successful but it made us all take up smoking again.’30 Peter Sellers and Sam Spiegel expressed interest at various times, but the quartet were past being able to work with each other again. Their later relations with each other were described by Jonathan Miller as ‘distant’. When the Beyond the Fringe scripts were reissued in book form in 1987, Ala Bennett wrote to the publisher to say that ‘Reading through the BTF stuff is quite painful. So relieved it’s all over. I regard the book as a burial more than anything else.’ Only Peter’s rediscovered cigarette habit was to stick faithfully with him, despite repeated attempts to jettison it.