Outside football, Peter’s hobbies were few. He often recommended books to friends and family – Fran Landesman was urged to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain – but nobody ever actually saw him read anything other than the papers. Conscious of the need to make Wendy’s life as busy as his own, in Autumn 1965 he presented her with the funds to start er own fashion business; the up-and-coming Royal College of Art design graduate Hylan Booker was taken on to design clothes, with Wendy doubling up as boss and assistant designer. ‘Peter and Wendy were an idyllic couple really,’ cliams Sue Parkin, the children’s nanny. ‘She’d have presents and flowers. I really think he worshipped her then. I know he worshipped the children. I just think he really worshipped the whole family idea. He was happy in Hampstead with his children and his beautiful wife and success. It was just a really brilliant time.’
Sue Parkin was Wendy’s right-hand girl, recruited through a personal ad in the Telegraph. ‘I arrived at number 17 Church Row and this, well, I can only describe her as a dolly bird really, answered the door. Big eyelashes and loads of hair tumbling over, she really was quite striking, and I thought she would be the au pair. Anyway, I said, could I speak to Mrs Cook. And she said, “I am Mrs Cook.”’ Sue Parkin was appointed in spite of her faux pas, and more or less became a fifth member of the family. At Wendy’s insistence, she had to address her employer as Mrs Cook; Peter preferred to be called Peter. Immediately, the young nanny found herself pitched into a living and breathing Who’s Who of British entertainment: flirting at the door in Upstairs, Downstairs mode with Dudley Moore, or serving breakfast sausages to Paul McCartney and his enormous Dulux dog. ‘I just didn’t believe it was happening really.’ The only visitor to whom Peter utterly and completely deferred, she noticed, was Kenneth Williams: Peter would become part of the audience, in fact, while his guest turned the tables on him. ‘I’d never seen Peter laugh so much as he did that night,’ says Sue Parkin, ‘listening to all Kenneth Williams’s hilarious, wonderful voices.’ Gaye Brown observed the same phenomenon on a separate occasion: ‘Peter sat at Kenny Williams’s feet and this guy entertained us until I was ill with laughter. And I said afterwards as we were going home, “I’ve never seen Peter quiet before, listening.”’ Sid Gottlieb remembers Kenneth Williams imposing a serious conversation on the Cook household one evening, a trick that he had only ever seen Jonathan Miller pull off, of Peter’s other friends. ‘Both he and Miller simply refused to be entertained by Peter,’ he recalls.
By the beginning of 1967 Peter was contentedly pronouncing himself middle-aged. He had taken to attending the opera, something he had openly scorned in the early sixties. The money was flowing in, some of it salted away in overseas bank accounts. He smoked and drank, but not to excess: he managed long periods off the cigarettes, and never once got drunk – ‘He was terrified of being drunk,’ recalls Wendy, ‘because he was scared to lose control.’ He kept himself fit, going for tennis weekends with the Garlands at Harriet’s family home in Great Bardfield. He was a dab hand at entertaining the children, not just his own but the Gottliebs’, always being ready to start an impromptu game of cricket on the lawn or a game of football on the beach. He never forgot his parents, and took the whole family to see them for a week’s holiday twice a year, in 1965 and 1966. His sisters were treated royally when they came up to London, lent the latest fashions by Wendy and packed off to exciting nightclubs.
In September 1965 he spoke of his contentedness to the Sun newspaper (in its pre-tabloid days), in an interview which hinted that the opposite sex was still, in many respects, a foreign country to him: ‘I rsquo;t think I could operate at all unless I was well looked after, which I am. Of all the things I dread, the worst is that awful bachelor state – making the phone call at six in the evening: “Hello so-and-so, you don’t remember me, but . . .” You take a girl out and at the close of the evening she says to you indignantly: “You take me to the theatre, you take me to dinner, then at the end of it – in addition to my company – you expect me to indulge in some vile act with you! Do you think you can buy my kisses?” And here is the poor man left on the doorstep, counting out his change and confirming that the evening has cost him £17 18s 6d. “What does this girl think?” he shouts to himself, “that I’m going to spend the whole evening listening to this rubbish pour out of her mouth for nothing?” Everybody ends up hating everybody. Thank God that’s behind me. I have my cosy domestic life.’8
Dudley envied Peter’s cosy domestic life so much that in February 1967 he moved out of his Cheyne Walk flat and bought a seven-bedroomed Georgian house of his own, just round the corner from Church Row, into which he moved with Suzy Kendall. But for all the apparent rock-like contentedness of the family structure that Peter and Wendy had built, it was clear from the Sun article at least that theirs was not a meeting of minds. Their relationship was founded initially on love, sex and mutual regard, but they had very little actually in common. In particular, Wendy was becoming increasingly interested in the alternative beliefs, philosophies, diets and lifestyles that became popular in the mid-sixties, which were meat and drink to Peter’s comic imagination. She was a serious soul at heart, without a highly developed sense of humour, whose enthusiasms solemnly mattered to her; from that point of view, Peter was probably the worst person in the world for her to have married. At one stage, she believed that she had witnessed an alien spacecraft; she also believed that their house was haunted by the ghost of H. G. Wells. These were the sort of claims that made Peter snort with laughter. Sometimes, she would inadvertently speak in feed lines: ‘I’m a romantic about furniture. Look at that chair – who knows who has sat in it?’ Such hanging questions were irresistible targets for her husband. ‘To begin with it was probably quite healthy to be made fun of,’ she admits, ‘but eventually it began to erode my self-confidence. I think it was the same with Dudley.’ Within the marriage, the appeal of Peter’s wit wore off.
‘When Wendy told Fran how lucky she felt to be married to such a funny man, we suspected the marriage was really in trouble,’ recalls Jay Landesman. ‘Fran couldn’t believe there could be anyone funnier than Peter Cook. By then, neither could he. Having watched the disastrous effect success had had on so many of our friends in the same situation, I warned him of the perils which lay ahead. “It’ll never ruin me,” he said. “I’ll have the same wife and friends that I have now. I can handle it.” We wanted to believe him, but as his career moved from strength to international recognition, we watched the tiny cracks form in their once-idyllic marriage. I told them the reason we were still married was because neither of us had ever had a success that had lasted more than fifteen seconds.’9
‘We married very young,’ said Peter haltingly, in an unhappy attempt, many years later, to explain what went wrong. ‘And we weren’t very good a it beg married. I don’t know why. We just started not getting on.’10 He admitted later to Eleanor Bron that ‘women had always been a bit of a mystery to him’, on account of his isolated start to life; he had, for instance, found it a distressing experience to be present at his children’s birth. According to Bron, ‘I think his being really rather beautiful and very attractive didn’t make that side of his life any easier.’11
Wendy’s unhappiness began to communicate itself back to Peter. ‘He was in fact nervous of her, let it be said on the record,’ maintains Sid Gottlieb. ‘His jokes at her expense were never meant to hurt, I don’t think, but she could put him down devastatingly and he would go down.’ According to Willie Rushton, ‘I think she gave him a bit of shit really. And when you’re doing rather well the last thing you want to do is go home and be beaten up. After the adoring millions have just been hailing you and waving their hats in the air, to get back and be reminded of your various shortcomings – not the sort of thing he was looking for.’ Thus are relationships distorted by fame. The children sensed that something was going wrong. Lucy Cook remembers that ‘one morning Daisy and I both literally dragged on his trouser legs, not wanting him to go to work
. I’m a great believer that children feel a lot more than they’re given credit for, perhaps not on a conscious level, but they’re sensitive to emotions that run underneath. And I think perhaps there was stuff going on then between Mum and Dad that was not spoken, and we just didn’t want him to leave, we didn’t want him to leave the house.’
Wendy turned to Sid Gottlieb for advice and therapy, followed by her husband. Sue Parkin – who had herself become distressed by the turn of events – followed suit, giving rise to an absurd situation in which every adult member of the household was going to the same person for counselling. It was all to no avail. ‘I don’t think it was conceivable that Peter could have been happy,’ explains Sid Gottlieb. ‘I don’t think he knew what it felt like. If you take the start, if you take the outlines of his evolution from a young boy, sent away, millions of miles away to England, to a residential public school; never any length of time of association with his parents or with his sisters even, or with chums in a home setting. This was a child alone, this was a boy alone, this was a man alone, he was always alone, from whatever time it was that he signed off from entertaining people.’ Loneliness was perhaps the only thing in the world that Peter feared, but he always carried his loneliness within himself. ‘Alone together, I could no longer be comfortable with Peter,’ relates Wendy. ‘He was never rude, or abusive, or sullen. He was polite. But I never knew what he really felt about anything. Humour was his way of keeping the world at bay, and he never let anyone, not even me, right inside.’12
Even when he had found love, Peter continued to search for it. Sexual infidelity bedevilled the marriage, both his and Wendy’s. She blamed him for having been the first to stray from the relationship; he claimed that she was at fault, for having been the first to transgress after the actual wedding. In fact it wasn’t really important whose fault it was. What mattered was that they were both looking for something that they knew the other could not provide. Peter’s was a lifelong, hopeless quest for reassurance. With his looks and his fame he was not short of willing conquests, but the fact that they found him attractive and desirable in the first place was what mattered. ‘I would have said that Peter was looking for instant adulation rather than instant sexual gratification,’ suggests Barry Fantoni, ‘and there is a big difference.’ Wendy confided in Willie Donaldson at the time that she had considered hiring a barrage balloon, and flying it across London with the words ‘Peter Cook is an attractive man’ emblazoned across the side. All of which is not to say that Peter was incapable of straightforward lust; but there is no doubt that his behaviour was principally governed by a longing for intimacy. He might be faulted for amorality, rather than for immorality.
This was partly, but not entirely, conditioned by an absence of childhood cuddles. Peter also had a profoundly addictive personality, and had not yet come to realise it; the rush, the ‘fix’ itself, was what he sought, over and above the general pleasure to be derived from taking part in an activity. The rush of onstage adulation, the thrill of the horse race finish after an hour of moiling tedium, the romantic ‘fix’ that comes with finding a new lover. Peter was addicted to being wanted. Actual drugs, the chemical means of creating or prolonging a rush of excitement, had only just made an appearance in his life through showbiz contacts; from being profoundly disapproving of them at first he quickly became hooked. Speed was widely prescribed as a slimming drug in those days, and he took to ‘borrowing’ it from his female friends’ medicine cabinets. He began scoring purple hearts in Soho and was totally hooked by the end of the decade. ‘You could always tell, on television, when he was on amphetamines,’ remembers Sue Parkin. ‘He’d have a dry mouth and you could see him licking his lips.’
Wendy, by contrast, temporarily diverted her unhappiness into drinking too much. Peter’s racing buddy, Jeffrey Bernard, later boasted in print how he had dropped round one night, seduced her, then robbed her when she was drunk: ‘I tapped her for some money. So she started to write me a cheque for £5, and as she wrote the “fi” – of “five” I got hold of her hand and guided it into another “fty”, so that the cheque was for £50, and I was at the bank the next morning at one minute to ten to cash it. She was pissed but she was loaded. He was very mean, Peter.’13 Dudley Moore reflects pertinently that ‘Peter certainly had a lot of acquaintances, but not many deep friends.’ With a few glasses of wine inside her, Wendy was liable to attack the superficialities of the showbiz lifestyle. At dinner with Mr and Mrs David Niven, for example, she laid into her hostess for boasting that they had had to hire an extra suite at Claridges, simply to house all their Christmas presents.
There were rows, walkouts. Wendy turned up at Roger Law’s house in Cambridge, having pranged the car on the way up: ‘My wife never wears make-up, so my daughter was fascinated by Wendy’s cosmetics. Wendy slept on the couch, and the little girl kept getting out of bed and going downstairs to check Wendy out because of all the make-up. And she had a suitcase which was half full of clothes and make-up, and the other half full of bottles of drink. The whole thing was getting out of hand.’ When she was absent, Wendy had to leave the children to be looked after by someone else, which bothered Peter because Daisy was asthmatic and liable to serious attacks. Under normal circumstances Wendy was an excellent mother oted on her children, so the extent of these dramas reflected the depths of her collapse in morale. Peter was frantic with worry and full of reproach. Wendy was not impressed by this aspect of his concern for the children: ‘He’d never got up in the night or gone to the doctor’s with them. I’m sure he loved them, but what is love?’ It was all getting horribly messy.
As early as December 1966, Wendy had begun to look for a way out of their dream lifestyle. She admits to having an inner restlessness that militates against domesticity: ‘I see a pattern in myself that when things feel settled, I think, “This is incredible, this is awful, is it going to be like this for ever?” And one sort of starts to try and shake things up. That was the start of my going abroad.’ She began looking for a holiday home in Provence – no more than a holiday home at this stage – but by the time her search shifted to Majorca in 1967 she had one eye on a permanent move. That Easter the whole Cook family took a holiday at the Villa Colina, along with Wendy’s sister Patsy and her husband. The adults would lie in every morning, while Sue took the children to the beach; an experience that Wendy enjoyed so much, she decided to come back out for the whole summer while Peter filmed Bedazzled. The authoress Nell Dunn lent her a villa owned by her father, the steel millionaire Sir Philip Dunn, for a month; thereafter she moved into a third villa for the rest of the summer, with Peter paying just one brief visit. ‘She was so happy over there, we all were,’ recalls Sue Parkin.
An extremely attractive, well-off and manifestly unaccompanied twenty-seven- year-old woman with her own villa naturally became a magnet for the young men of the neighbourhood; especially as the presence of Sue, who had rather modelled her image on that of her employer, doubled the attraction. The local pop group, in particular – three young men named Francisco, Santi and Eusebio – were unusually keen to have their lyrics translated into English. Peter told friends that he was unhappy about the possibility of various Spanish men playing with his children; the story began to find its way around the entertainment world, and one morning a tabloid reporter, sweating in black suit with briefcase, stepped from nowhere on to the terrace of the villa. He had come, he said, to investigate reports that the Cooks’ marriage was in difficulties. Wendy sent him away with a flea in his ear.
Towards the end of the year she put in an offer of £3,000 for a picturesque but semi-derelict 300-year-old sandstone farmhouse, and in January 1968 announced publicly that she and the children were moving permanently to Majorca, to cultivate fig trees and olive groves in the sun. ‘I’m tired of London,’ she told the Sunday Express, ‘it’s a ghastly scene at the moment – like living in a goldfish bowl. How much time I spend on the farm is something Peter and I have got to work out. It will mean being parted at ti
mes but that is nothing new – Peter’s work often takes him away. The atmosphere will be more conducive to peaceful thought. And I will find the self-discipline to do some writing. Peter and I will divide our time between London and Majorca.’14
In fact it would have been patently impossible for Peter to have operated professionally from Majorca for any length of time, but Wendy was happy enough to see less of her husband. By the time the article appeared she had already departed, driving south in a car packed with as many belonginge fould fit in. Sue Parkin and the children travelled separately, flying out on the 9 January along with Peter, who was coming for a fortnight’s inspection of their new property. On the trip down he confided that he objected to the ‘laissez-faire attitude’ that prevailed in Majorca, and that he wanted other people prevented from picking his children up and playing with them. ‘He adored those children, absolutely adored them,’ says Sue.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 34