Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Wendy and the children moved into temporary accommodation while the interior of their farmhouse was gutted and redesigned, a process that took the best part of a year. Lucy and Daisy were enrolled in the local (Spanish-speaking) school, which they enjoyed, although Daisy has profound memories of nuns jabbing huge needles into her bottom, as she had to endure a course of injections to counter her asthma. Eventually, however, the ‘laissez-faire lifestyle’ and the amount of work it entailed for Sue Parkin began to pall on the nanny. ‘I was getting too fond of the children. Me and these two little girls, we did everything together, we were together all day, every day. They were darlings, absolutely gorgeous children, but I was so fond of them that I felt it was time to go really.’ Sue walked out in the summer of 1968 and found a bar job. Wendy was very upset and phoned Peter, who flew out and demanded to know what had happened, to no avail. Sue never saw the children again, although when she had her own daughter, she named her Daisy.

  Back in London, Peter was drifting further and further away from his wife. One day in May 1967 he was hailing a taxi outside Turnbull and Asser, when he ran into Judy Huxtable, whom he had not seen for a couple of years. They chatted for a bit. The old spark was still clearly there. A few days later Gaye Brown gave a dinner party and invited them both. ‘I don’t go to parties, but she said Peter Cook would be at this one, and I went,’ recalls Judy. ‘I may add, she was setting me up a bit, mind you. She said, “He’s going through a bad time right now with his marriage.” Things weren’t so hot for me either.’15 The dinner party was a riotous one, and at the end of the evening Judy invited Peter back for coffee. Her husband Sean Kenny was away, and Wendy and the children were in Majorca. She drove home in her white E-type, while Peter followed in his Citroen convertible.

  Judy remembers that ‘I was twenty-three or twenty-four then, very grand to be inviting married men back to my place. I just was not one of those ladies that bopped around the town. I’d been faithfully married to a Catholic Irishman all this time. I was living in Cheyne Row. I gave Peter whisky after whisky and he seemed quite happy. There were general gropings around but, in fact, I was known in those days as “Untouchable Huxtable”. Finally, he went up to bed and I slept on the sofa, because I thought if you got in the same bed with a man, that’s it. I didn’t know at the time Peter had quite a few famous girlfriends. In the morning he came down and said, “Where am I?” So I made him a very proper breakfast, with fresh orange juice. He was very straight, which I liked: he told me his wife was in Majorca and seeing other people, and he was in London seeing people – he could fit me in between the others if I liked. When we started going to bed I had to explain that I didn’t sleep around, and it was a traumatic experience as far as I was concerned.’16

  Since her Establishment days Judy Huxtable had become a reasonably successful actress and model, appearing in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Nothing But the Best (a 1964 film with Willie Rushton) and taking the lead in the successful short Les Bicyclettes de Belsize. She was described by one observer as ‘remarkable to look at, face wide at the cheekbones, chin narrow, a tilted nose, a thousand curls.’17 Slight of frame and always immaculately presented, her appearance put one in mind of Pete’s ideal woman, as described to Dud in a Not Only . . . But Also sketch:

  Pete:

  Above all others I covet the elfin beauty, very slim, very slender, but all the same, still being endowed with a certain amount of . . .

  Dud:

  Busty substances?

  Both Peter and Judy had the weakness of vanity, and revelled in their mutual good looks. Barry Fantoni recalls that ‘with those two, there’d often be a fight as to who could get to the bathroom mirror first. Peter found his looks fascinating, and he looked at himself in the mirror as if he was looking at a stranger.’

  Their mutual attraction was, however, based on a lot more than physical beauty. She was scatty, elusive, charming, sensitive, and behind a shy public persona, extremely witty. She made Peter laugh, and of course he did the same for her. After years with Wendy, the idea of a girlfriend who shared his sense of humour was immensely appealing. It was to form a deep bond between them. Furthermore, Peter fitted the pattern that Judy unconsciously sought in all her men. Her father, a Lloyd’s underwriter, had been a heavy drinker, and her husband Sean Kenny likewise. Their marriage was turbulent, and on Kenny’s part, jealous, accusatory and threatening. Eventually he was to drink himself to death. Although neither of them yet knew it, Peter too had an extremely addictive personality: the exact statistics are disputed, but the proportion of women with fathers who have a tendency to alcoholism who grow up and seek out partners of a similar nature is extremely high. There was, incidentally, one other unexpected quirk that united the pair: Judy, like Peter, was fascinated by bees, and enjoyed stroking them.

  Judy fell madly in love with Peter, and he with her. ‘I remember once seeing him with his kids Lucy and Daisy,’ she says. ‘They were these two exquisite little things. He was bathing them and making them laugh and put their knickers on their heads because they’d lost their bath caps. I thought, “Here is this bright, intelligent, witty, sexy man, and it’s ridiculous, he is so nice too, cooking and coping,” and other Woman’s Own thoughts of that kind.’18 Gaye Brown remembers that ‘Peter flipped for Judy, pletely and utterly. He really wanted her. She was a bit like a drug in a way.’ At the end of 1967, Judy became pregnant by mistake. Peter arranged for her to get rid of the baby, but they resolved that one day they would have children together. Peter’s marriage, meanwhile, was deteriorating further. Judy recalls that: ‘He and Wendy had been to a party near Clapham Common – they were having an argument driving home, and he opened the car door and fell out. He turned up on my doorstep at 3.30 a.m. He later told me that when he returned to Church Row the next morning she was furious and worried, but he deflected it by saying he’d spent the night on Clapham Common doing his best to find shelter.’

  With Wendy remaining in Majorca from the beginning of 1968, the relationship became a permanent, if discreet, part of their lives. ‘Peter, with all his silk-lined Savile Row suits and Turnbull and Asser shirts, would wash his socks in my bath as I didn’t have anything like a washing machine,’19 Judy remembers. The affair was carried on both in her house and at Church Row, where Peter was supposed to be living alone, but where she would occasionally stay the night. ‘Once I had come back with him after the theatre. The next morning we heard the cleaning lady coming in with his breakfast, and he pushed me under the white fur rug on the bedroom floor so she wouldn’t see me. Another time John Cleese came bounding up the stairs saying: “Peter, Peter, where are you?” and Peter pushed me into the wardrobe. The wardrobes were very elegant mind you, and Peter had some wonderful clothes, so John started going through everything in the cupboards while Peter got dressed. He was flicking through the suits and suddenly he came to me. “What are you doing there, Judy? Do come out, dear girl!” So I did, and Peter of course made a joke of it. One night Sean, who could get very drunk, came banging on the door in the middle of the night. Peter just got up out of bed, nipped out of the back door, and took me to Dudley’s house. It was three in the morning and Peter just said: “We need a bed.” Dudley didn’t ask any questions, he just showed us to the spare room. When I woke up in the morning it was really spooky because the room was identical to Wendy and Peter’s house. The house was a complete replica of Peter’s, down to having the same William Morris wallpaper.’20

  In the autumn of 1968, Judy had to go to America to shoot a British film entitled The Touchables. On her return, she moved out of the house she shared with Sean Kenny. He was distraught, having discovered a photograph of Peter in her washbag. She moved into a flat in Redcliffe Gardens with a girlfriend of Mike Nichols, before purchasing a little house in Ruston Mews in North Kensington, the former Rillington Place. By the end of the year, when Peter had been seeing Judy in secret for more than eighteen months, he realised that he would have to tell his wife what wa
s happening. He broke the news to her at Christmas. ‘I thought we were going to have our first family Christmas in Majorca,’ recalls Wendy, ‘away from the telephones amongst the fig trees. And . . . you know, I’m no saint, we’d both had relationships on the side, but this was obviously something serious. He came and said that he’d fallen in love, and it didn’t take me too long to say, “Well I want a divorce.” I don’t think he was ready for that.’ Peter was indeed not at all ready for that, not in any way, shape or form. He was utterly, completely stunned. The prospect of losing his children struck him like an ice-cold knife through the heart. The idea virtuallyparalysed him with fear. But Wendy was adamant that there could be no point in continuing.

  Lucy Cook recalls that ‘When mum left him, dad wrote pleading letters to my grandmother – I think she’s still got a couple – begging her to persuade Mum to come back . . . He probably wanted it all, is the answer. He probably wanted sexy Judy Huxtable, the comfortable wife and children and family home – the stability of that – probably wanted it all, and he couldn’t have it.’ In fact, it is quite impossible to see how Peter could have expected to keep it all, but he did not yet seem to have faced up to the fact. Private Eye’s Andrew Osmond came across an assessment of Woody Allen provided by Mia Farrow that bears some similarities to Peter’s behaviour at this time:

  He lived and made his decisions while suspended in a zone constructed and controlled almost entirely by himself . . . He did not acknowledge other beings except as features in his own landscape. He was therefore unable to empathise and felt no moral responsibility to anyone or anything.

  Peter, although acting entirely without malice, had imposed similar limits on his own field of vision. ‘He couldn’t find it in himself really to forgive me,’ reflects Wendy.

  Ironically, Peter was an adept, decisive solver of other people’s problems, a knight in shining armour to whom his friends would repeatedly turn for help in a crisis. When Nick Garland left his wife Harriet in July 1967, she fled to Peter’s: ‘He was wonderful, he was very, very good,’ she says. He took charge of the situation and got the two sides talking. Similarly, he looked after Gaye Brown when her relationship broke up. Other female friends came to Peter to arrange their abortions, at a time when abortion involved considerable social stigma and immense legal problems. Peter was always soothing, urbane and quietly efficient, and of course paid for everything. He was able, it seemed, to carry out difficult tasks effortlessly, a degree of control far removed from the bewilderment he felt when the parameters of his own world were breached.

  Peter demanded that Wendy return from Majorca to live at Church Row so that he could see the children more often, although she continued to take holidays in Spain whenever possible. Lucy and Daisy were transferred to London schools, after one or two arguments as to the religious element in their upbringing (Wendy wanted one, Peter didn’t). Peter moved into Judy’s Ruston Mews house, taking only the Tiffany lamp and a few clothes. The press did not catch on until late in the year, when Wendy was forced to announce that Peter had moved into another flat ‘for work purposes’, in order to ‘write in peace and quiet’. As far as possible, appearances were kept up. In the first week of March 1969, Peter and Wendy took the children on a family holiday to see Peter’s parents. On account of the Majorcan adventure, it was their first visit as a family unit for two-and-a-half years. It was also to be the last. There were no more glamorous dinner parties at Church Row. Peter and Wendy’s friends began to polarise into two groups: the great majority gravitated towards Peter, leaving a bitterly upset Wendy with one or two loyal diehards. ‘All the more well-known ones wanted to be with Peter. That was really incredible to me,’ she reflects. ‘I was devastated by the shallowness of the thing showbiz people call friendship’.21

  It was a terrible time of rows and dramas. Wendy walked out of a screening of Peter’s latest film. She accused him of getting their Swedish au pair girl pregnant, incorrectly as it turned out. She was also injured in a car crash. ‘The two of them seemed to be off their rocker,’ says Richard Ingrams. ‘Wendy came here with the two little girls and started barricading herself in – she thought that Cookie was going to come down here and break into the house in the night.’ Lucy recalls that ‘Mum became absolutely paranoid – she thought that dad had all this wealth and notoriety, and she thought he had a strong possibility of being able to get hold of us. She used to scare us that we might be kidnapped from school one day. Meanwhile, he was a bit scared of her. There was a statue, an iron cast statue of an African head that they had bought when they were together; and I think she thought that Dad admired it, so she sent it to him, and Dad thought it was black magic or voodoo or something. He said, “Get it the hell out of the house, I don’t want it.”’

  Both sides believed that the children would be better off with them – ‘Judy and Dad at that time were very much holding out, trying to get custody of us,’ says Lucy – but custody was only ever going to be awarded to Wendy. Peter turned to drink and drugs to blot out the awful black misery of losing his daughters, and to help him go on with his job of trying to keep the public entertained. An ex-girlfriend who came with him on a shopping trip to help him buy jewellery for Judy remembers that he was shaking uncontrollably from the amount of speed he had taken. Eric Idle and Bill Oddie bumped into him, tipsy in the Fulham Road, drinking from a silver hip flask after a Chelsea v. Tottenham game. Peter’s Citroen convertible, filthy, undriven for two months and covered in catkins, was driven away by a passer-by. Finding an envelope addressed to Peter inside, the man wrote offering to dispose of the car for him; he was arrested (coincidentally by a PC Peter Cook), charged with theft and subsequently acquitted.

  ‘It was all very traumatic, with both of us going through the hell of separation and the misery it caused,’ remembers Judy. Peter lived for the days when he could see his daughters. Judy was good with the children, and they became extremely fond of her; Daisy remembers Judy taking her for an emergency asthma injection, and keeping her spirits up by getting her to sing in the doctor’s surgery. But Wendy was resentful of the fact that she had been forced to leave Majorca, and of the relative financial superiority that enabled Peter to lavish the children with expensive presents. ‘The relationships between he, Judy and myself were not easy or supportive,’ she admits.

  Eventually Dudley Moore persuaded both Peter and Judy to go into psychoanalysis, and they enrolled with a celebrated Kensington psychiatrist, Dr Stephen Sebag-Montefiore. Dudley and Suzy Kendall came along for the ride. Peter explained: ‘I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t involved and who had no bias, so I could sort of talk about how unhappy I felt without being a burden on friends. From my experience, most people I’ve known going through a difficult time in a relationship only want you to say: “Yes, you’re right, how could she do that, isn’t it awful?” I didn’t want to burden my friends with that. Terribly English thing to feel. But the psychoanalysis helped.;22 It may have helped to talk about things, but Peter was too smart for the psychiatrist and played intellectual cat-and-mouse games with him. ‘He used to come back and say, “I bluffed him,”’ reports Dudley. ‘And I’d say, “How can he know anything about you then? What is the point?”’ Also, Peter simply could not take the whole procedure seriously. When Peter and Judy saw the psychiatrist together, they got the giggles. Eventually, his innate resistence to the whole procedure tended to find its way into sketches:

  Peter:

  Right you are Sonia, will you send in the next patient please.

  Sonia:

  This way please Mr Withersgill.

  Peter:

  Ah Mr Withersgill, come in five guineas, sit down ten guineas, how are you fifteen guineas.

  Michael Bawtree, who had not seen Peter in a long while, was surprised to discover that his old friend was seeking psychiatric help, and asked him why. ‘I have been talking in other people’s voices for so long that, when I don’t, I have a terrible sense of emptiness. I don’t know who I am,’ Peter co
nfessed.

  In May 1970 Peter and Wendy’s separation was formally announced. By this time they were getting on so badly that he was not sorry to split up with her; but the destruction of his family as a unit still troubled him deeply. He and Judy flew to Jersey just before the news was made public, to avoid the attentions of the press. Judy was due on location in Portugal to film Die Screaming Marianne with Susan George; she and Peter spent part of the summer there, and the rest of it house-hunting. In August they moved into Kenwood Cottage, a detached house opposite one of the ponds in Millfield Lane, Highgate. ‘What more can I say but that I love Judy very much, and we’re living together?’ he told the journalists when they finally caught up with him. ‘Judy found this place, an old farm cottage. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was the first one to call here, and the owner said he didn’t want all kinds of strangers tramping over his house. We fixed up the deal at once. I’ve turned myself into a do-it-yourself man. I moved in with a bed, a cooker and a fridge, started chipping away at the plaster, and discovered a mass of beautiful oak beams which we’ve varnished.’23 Peter’s flirtation with manual labour completed, Judy was left in charge of the decoration. When she suggested putting up William Morris wlpaper, he replied: ‘Judes, I’m sick of it. I don’t ever want to be asked about wallpaper and dinner parties and curtains and carpets. Just do whatever you like.’

  There were no celebrity evenings, as there had been at Church Row. ‘We lived like lovers,’ explains Judy. ‘We were very close’. They sat and enjoyed each other’s company in a haze of smoke. Only a few close friends like Sid Gottlieb received a dinner invitation: ‘They’d entertain in the local restaurant,’ he recalls, ‘Take you to dinner, reciprocate. You’d have them home, they’d take you back. Judy wasn’t an entertainer. She was a funny, amusing girl, but it was a totally different lifestyle from the Wendy era.’ Without Wendy organising his wardrobe, Peter’s natural lack of sartorial elegance began to show through for the first time in over a decade. Ray Connolly, writing in October 1970, found him attired in a T-shirt, the bottom half of a smart pin-striped suit which had split at the crotch, a jean jacket and a pair of lace-up wrestler’s training boots. Another journalist remarked on his elegant suits, but noticed that the cuffs and trouser hems were badly frayed. One night Peter went to the Savoy Hotel, late, by himself, looking so scruffy that the Head Waiter felt obliged to inform him that the myriad empty tables were all booked. ‘D’you mean to tell me that hundreds of people are going to descend on sixty-five tables at eleven o’clock at night?’ asked Peter. Yes, replied the Head Waiter, they were expecting a large party at that very moment. Peter strolled out to the telephone booth in the lobby, phoned the restaurant and said, ‘This is Peter Cook speaking, could I have a table for two?’ ‘Yes, of course, Mr Cook, at what time will you be arriving?’ they said. ‘In ten seconds,’ replied Peter, and strolled back into the restaurant. The Head Waiter didn’t say a word. Whatever traumas he had been through, Peter had certainly not lost his sense of panache.