Towards the end of 1967, the Daily Express ran a feature, along the lines of What-ever-happened-to-Peter-Cook: ‘A year ago, he was a pillar of entertainment. He and Dudley Moore were the darlings of television, backing their own shows by appearing week by week as guest stars, the most original young men ever to hit the mass medium. Then, unaccountably, Cook virtually disappeared. The television companies which pursued him were largely out of luck. God and the Devil had claimed him and his typewriter. For Cook it has been a big, expensive decision at the height of his fame and earning power – for nobody is more quickly forgotten that the performer who removes his face from the fickle public.’43 Peter himself estimated that writing the script of Bedazzled had cost him in the region of £50,000 in lost wages. Everything was riding on it.
In fact, in the eighteen months following Not Only . . . But Also and the Rustle of Spring benefit, Peter had taken just two jobs, so dedicated was he to his lonely obsession with perfecting his film script. One was the Not Only... Christmas special. The other was a cameo role in Jonathan Miller’s TV film of Alice in Wonderland. Miller’s lavishly budgeted BBC film was Alice for grown-ups, a visually stunning, languorous, bone-dry adaptation played to the fashionable sound of sitars, with no concessions to commercialism or to a young audience. Alice herself became a sullen, pouting, pubescent with no sense of bewilderment; the whole piece was strangely lacking in either humour or fear. ‘Alice is a story of domestic strife,’ Miller had explained. ‘The King and Queen of Hearts are obviously Alice’s parents and the Knave is her elder brother. Even the changes of size are only a child’s sense of growing up. It’s a marvellous, hard description of Victorian domestic life.’44
One of the few characters to inject humour was Peter, who played the Mad Hatter at the cobweb-strewn tea party in his ‘Isn’t she a sweetie’ voice from Not Only . . . But Also. Wilfred Lawson and Michael Gough (two of the regulation star-studded cast) appeared as the Dormouse and the March Hare with no concession to mammaldom – they had been shorn of their ‘disguises’, explained Miller – although Peter did at least wear a top hat. ‘His was a rather brilliant performance,’ Miller recollects, ‘but I think I probably allowed him to do too much, and it went slightly over the top during the tea party. Though there was a marvellously inventive thing which came completely unexpectedly during the final courtroom scene, when he dreamed up this extraordinary coming and going as he entered the courtroom – for which we then set up, under the pressure of his invention, a shot which would actually enhance the effect. The cameraman, Dick Bush, built himself a great swing, slung from the roof of the studio, which allowed him to swing fore and aft as Peter advanced and retreated. Peter was mainly a solitary performer; he found it very difficult to meet people’s eyes. Playing the Mad Hatter, it was very fortunate that I chose (to cast him as) someone who in fact was a lunatic, who had no relationship with the other participants at the tea party.’
The Not Only . . . But Also Christmas Special of 1966 further exacerbated the slight froideur in relations with Dudley. Peter devised a quite hilarious opening sequence in which Dudley attends his first hunt with the Berkeley. Socially out of his depth and unsure what to do, he allows Peter to provide him with a large fox costume with fresh lamb cutlets pinned to it. He then sets off across country pursued by the hounds, a sequence that Peter insisted he film for real. Dudley later remarked that the sketch entirely summed up his relationship with Peter at the time: ‘I thought, “This isn’t massively funny.” There was an element of sadism. It was Peter’s idea. Peter laughed at that idea.’45 So, indeed, did most of Britain.
Their disagreements, as ever, had no effect on their ability to make each other laugh. Dud spent much of the programme in tears of laughter, particularly during a Pete and Dud conversation in which Pete pooh-poohs unexplained phenomena, for instance the Surrey Puma:
Pete:
There’s a perfectly rational explanation, namely that a sheep has broken into a chemist’s, got hold of some benzedrine, and is rushing round the countryside in a state of excitement.
Eventually Dud is kidnapped by aliens, the chief ‘alien’ being Pete with tentacles sticking out of his cloth cap: ‘I am a superior being, so watch it,’ he says before explaining that Dud has been chosen to repopulate Pete’s dying planet: ‘You are to be a stud, Dud.’ The Christmas show also contained a sketch featuring Peter as a fairy cobbler whose wife, played by Dudley, has been unfaithful to him. As always there were no retakes, so when Peter accidentally came out with the phrase ‘a cumbler’s hobble wage’ he had no option but to recover his composure masterfully and work the mistake into the script, leaving Dudley giggling helplessly.
Elsewhere in the forty-five-minute special there was another swingeing parody of the Establishment Club, a long, rambling series of sketches linked in an experimental, pre-Pythonesque manner. Peter played Hiram J. Pipesucker, a thinly disguised Alistair Cooke, fronting a report on Swinging London: ‘I think it was Jonathan Miller who said, England swings like a pendulum do.’ The club in question was a converted Soho public lavatory, with the Rolling Stones and Alf Ramsey already signed up as members, and ten thousand people trying to get in on the first night. The doorman, played by John Lennon, explains that there is ‘a £5 waiting list’. The whizzkid owner, played by Dudley (‘Young, adventurous and horrible’), boasts that he is hoping to open several more branches – ‘A huge lavatory chain.’
The filming of Bedazzled took up most of the summer of 1967, and was distinguished by its sense of optimism. Stanley Donen recalls: ‘When people ask me about the movies I have made, and they say it must have been a lot of fun making A, B or C, I say I only had fun on one movie in my life and that was Bedazzled.’ Peter kept everybody in stitches, except for Raquel Welch who did not get any of his jokes, and when Movietone News came to do a report from Syon House (the location for Heaven), Peter and Dudley took over their cameras and presented it themselves. Donen did, however, keep the cast on a very tight rein. He was a professional film-maker working on a tight budget, and permitted none of the indiscipline and messing about that had characterised the TV series (and indeed had made the TV series so enjoyable to watch). As with Bryan Forbes, Peter found himself overawed by the expensive paraphernalia of cinema, and allowed himself to be led meekly from shot to shot.
The results were excellent, but they weren’t recognisable as anything Pete and Dud had ever done before. The film was polished, fast-paced and choppily cut, awash with Dudley’s jazzy incidental music, full of visually impressive long shots. Any spontaneity had been carefully rehearsed out. Audiences and reviewers were puzzled. Where were the cloth caps and grubby overcoats they had been looking forward to? Where wereey’s helpless giggles? Box office takings tailed off and reviews were mixed. ‘Funny, but what went wrong?’46 ran the headline in the Daily Mail. American reviewers were kinder, but not much. There was a glamorous New York premiere, attended by all Peter and Dudley’s friends from Beyond the Fringe days; Peter even found time to appear as best man at Peter Bellwood’s wedding. Bedazzled, though, was never going to do massive business in the States. A British film with an almost entirely American-free cast, whose main character was a highly sympathetic Satan, was hardly the sort to pull them in across the Mid-West, however good it was. It did respectably in the end, taking five million dollars, but as far as the distributors Twentieth Century Fox were concerned, that wasn’t good enough. The intended follow-up (a medical musical called The Whack, about ‘rejuvenation, acupuncture and spiritualism’) that Peter, Dudley and Stanley Donen had already been discussing, was immediately shelved.
Dudley, naturally enough, blamed the script that he had been prevented from helping to write. ‘It was rather gawkily written,’ he says, pinning the blame squarely on Peter’s desire to have the solo writing credit.47 Peter preferred to point to the manner in which Donen had shot the film: ‘I think we were acutely aware that the film was costing money. It wouldn’t have been made if Stanley Donen hadn’t directed it.
I’m extremely grateful to him for making the movie; but I think we were too overawed. I don’t think we relaxed enough in performing, and we did takes which we weren’t satisfied with, which were too tight.’48 Dudley concurred that he and Peter had been too timid with the director: ‘Stanley Donen had a great sense of humour, but he held us down very strictly. We didn’t feel the same freedom as we had in the television series. I can see why people objected to the film, it’s gauche, it’s awkward, it’s not as flowing as our other work.’
One problem was that Peter was not sufficiently engaging when playing himself (as he was, to all intents and purposes) to attract the sympathies of a mass audience. He was a natural comic turn, but there was something too vapid and distant about his performance as a leading man. A successful leading man – as Dudley Moore later became – has to be prepared to offer his real self to the audience, and must not be afraid to show vulnerability. Peter was afraid to show vulnerability even to his closest friends. Audiences could detect his reticence, even if they did not analyse it as such. His co-stars all had concerns along these lines, which at the time they were reluctant to voice. ‘It may be that essentially he was always a solo performer,’49 reflects Eleanor Bron. Barry Humphries is more forceful: ‘He was a very bad actor. You can see it, you can even see how nervous he is.’ Dudley Moore goes yet further, describing his former partner with hindsight as ‘one of the world’s worst film actors. He even enjoyed the idea of post-synching because he though it might improve the performance. He was much too self-aware. But he still liked the film a lot. He never brooded at all, as far as I know, about the rather iffy reviews and notices that Bedazzled got. He just liked the idea of being a movie actor.’50
Of course Peter would have been cut to the quick by the subdued reaction to the film, but he would have been keen to prevent Dudley becoming aware of any weakness. Also, he knew in his heart that the critics were wrong, that it was truly a great film. Despite the limitations that Barry Humphries discerned in Peter’s performance, he for one regards Bedazzled as ‘a very underrated, brilliant picture’. Mel Smith, a comedian whose later career with Griff Rhys Jones was unquestionably influenced by Pete and Dud, regards it as ‘a terrific film. It is actually terribly, terribly funny.’ Smith even believes that Peter’s detachment adds to the Satanic characterisation: ‘He was always slightly removed from it all, which is like a wonderful technique all of its own.’ John Wells, who thought it ‘a very very good film’, recalls that Peter was happy with the product but not with the press reaction to it: ‘He knew this was probably the crucial point in his career.’
Outside Britain, Bedazzled was a raging success – not that it mattered – in the rest of Europe, where they had never heard of Pete and Dud. In Italy, where the religious theme fascinated the viewing public, it became the third most successful film of the year. For a while Peter became an object of fascination to the Italian tabloids, who linked him romantically with Raquel Welch, Candice Bergen and others. Federico Fellini telephoned to offer him the lead in Satyricon, before subsequently withdrawing it upon discovering that he was a Scorpio. Peter was relieved when he in turn found out that the part would have required him to writhe around in manacles, stark naked. He had also been offered the lead in another European film opposite Brigitte Bardot, which he had turned down ‘out of stupidity. I thought she was the most attractive woman in the world, but I didn’t like the script. In those days it was almost mandatory to go to bed with her . . . and I turned it down. I mean, how fucking stupid can you get?’51
When the dust had settled, it was clear that the jury was still out on Peter Cook the film star. Hollywood was certainly no longer interested for the foreseeable future. Peter analysed the situation, and came up with a profoundly misguided set of conclusions: that the two things holding him back were Dudley Moore, and the need to be funny. In fact, these were the two principal foundation stones upon which his screen career was built. Peter was a brilliantly perceptive man, but perception and self-perception are two entirely different things. In the wake of Bedazzled, the press had often quoted Stanley Donen to the effect that Peter could become the next Cary Grant (although he now denies ever having said it). There is no doubt that the idea of becoming a romantic light comedy lead became fixed in Peter’s head as the only way to make the next quantum leap forward.
Only a year previously he had rejected the possibility of diversifying in such a manner outright. Now, in an unusually revealing series of newspaper interviews, he signalled his intentions. He told the Express that ‘You are, in fact, no more than a bore unless you have moved on and at least tried to find some different kind of comedy. I see a great danger of becoming prematurely middle-aged – an affluent gentleman completely unfulfilled simply because there was an easy route. Over the past three years I’ve appeared as a forty-five-year-old loony. Now I’d like to do a few things in which I appear nearer myself.’ He informed the Mail that: ‘I’d like to diversify a bit. Every time I stare at myself in the mirror I think, “Good Lord, there’s a romantic lead I see peering at me.” stupiuo;
For a decade, Peter’s career had been expanding virtually unchecked, meeting almost no resistance, like the universe spreading outwards from the Big Bang. Only the collapse of the satire boom had temporarily hindered his progress. Now, he hoped he had encountered nothing more than another minor glitch. Deep down, though, he must have feared the truth: that he had reached the limit of even his considerable abilities. The explosion was running out of gas.
CHAPTER 9
Nice Though This Be I Seek Yet Further Kicks
Family Life, 1964–71
Peter’s relationship with Wendy had stuttered through the Fringe and Establishment years, surviving rather than underpinning the whirl of professional commitments and its accompanying sexual licence. The nature of Peter’s work entailed his being surrounded by a permanent crowd of friends and admirers, and he made sure that his home life was not dissimilar. He preferred, if at all possible, not to be left alone. Wendy, by contrast, had long yearned for a more conventional marital existence. The arrival of their two daughters Lucy and Daisy had forced Peter’s hand; but any doubts he may have entertained about the appeal of domesticity were dispelled by the lavish outpouring of love and affection for his children that welled up within him. He was fiercely protective of his girls, especially where the press was concerned. He explained: ‘I’d rather my children were known for what they did and what they were, than as Peter Cook’s daughters. One of the moments in my life when I felt most ashamed was when someone came up to my father and said, “You’re Peter Cook’s father.” I felt ashamed because he wasn’t just my dad – he was Alexander Cook.’1 Alec Cook’s asymmetrical ears, a trait shared by his son, were inherited by Daisy. Otherwise, the two girls received the best of their parents’ good looks.
On returning from America, the family did not go back to Battersea – Peter had found South London ‘drab and seedy’. Instead they moved in with the Luards, then to a rented flat in Knightsbridge, until such time as Wendy’s daily house-hunting yielded a permanent residence. On 24 September 1964 they completed the purchase of 17 Church Row, NW3, a splendid, black-railinged, seven-bedroomed early Georgian terraced house that had once belonged to H. G. Wells. Situated in a gentle, secluded, hilly part of Hampstead, Church Row is a broad, elegant, tree-lined street that slopes downhill into the Churchyard of St John’s, and is dominated from below by its graceful spire. Any lingering notions that Peter might have harboured a secret, radical desire to destroy society would have been dispelled by the discovery of his next-door neighbour’s identity – it was the Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, complete with permanent police presence – and by the extremely substantial purchase price of £24,000. Although the money was handed over in September, the family did not move in until April 1965; in the ensuing seven months Wendy set to work with a team of workmen, to gut the house and create her dream home.
First, all the pine had to be stripped. The heavy front door,
the floorboards, large areas of wall panelling on five floors, even the kitchen furniture, all was stripped to the natural wood. Where there was no wood, dark, thickly patterned William Morris wallpaper went up instead. To add light and space by way of compensation, windows blocked up in the days of window tax were re-opened, and smaller rooms were knocked together to make bigger ones. An aga was installed in the cavernous basement kitchen, which was also fitted with a vast table and two refectory benches so that dinner parties could be held there. At the time, these were all radical, free-thinking ideas in home design. The old dumb waiter, which had once transferred food to a ground-floor dining room (and elsewhere in the house) became instead a taxi service used by Lucy and Daisy to ferry themselves around the building. Virtually all the fixtures and fittings were genuine nineteenth-century antiques, with the exception of the built-in wardrobes, which were treated to look like genuine nineteenth-century antiques. Converted Victorian oil lamps supplied pools of soft light in the evenings. The kitchen was dominated by the huge industrial wheel of an antiquated coffee grinder. In the knocked-through ground-floor drawing room where two cats prowled, a bright yellow Victorian mail cart stood before the fireplace. An ancient sofa had been re-upholstered in olive velvet, a buttoned Chesterfield in tobacco-coloured corduroy, a Victorian armchair in printed plush. The sideboard was early English. On the first floor was Peter and Wendy’s bedroom, dominated by a darkly polished nineteenth-century American bed, with a stripped pine rocking cradle at its foot. The huge en suite bathroom featured a free-standing bath with marble slab surround, carved wood sides and an overhanging wall of Edwardian ceramic tiles. The second floor was the nursery floor, an entire storey given over to the children and their nanny. On the third floor, up a steep and creaking wooden staircase, was Peter’s rooftop den, an attic conversion with marvellous views over London and a huge old desk, where he would closet himself in the afternoons to work with Dudley, and from which the sounds of helpless laughter would filter down through the house.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 32