Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  He spent his spare time working on a book of children’s verse, because it was in his nature to fill his every working hour with new projects, but he never finished it, or looked like finishing it. The coiled spring was unwinding more slowly now. He eventually converted the most successful poem into a television sketch instead. He also took up playing golf on the local course, for its reflective qualities, even though he admitted he’d always hated the types he met on golf courses. That year he became an uncle, which cheered him up a bit: his sister Sarah, now married to Mike Seymour, produced a daughter named Aletta, whom Peter said resembled Bill Oddie at birth.

  Peter was still desperately in love with Judy, and extremely happy to be with her, but he had become profoundly sick at heart at the collapse of his family. He took the extraordinary step of publicly attacking those, like the Underground Press, who advocated the use of drink and drugs: ‘To preach drugs is, I think, very sick. I doubt if anyone would approve of a magazine which preached the use of alcohol. What annoys me particularly is that they print all kinds of information about what things give the best trips, without also printing, or even knowing about, the findings of medical research which point out the dangers.’24 It was a surprising statement, perhaps brought on by a desire to make a good impression in the divorce courts, because his own use of drugs – and particularly drink – was getting out of hand. In November 1970 he was arrested, hopelessly drunk at the wheel of his car, and given a year’s driving ban the following April.

  Peter’s divorce came through on 11 January 1971. He did not try to defend Wendy’s petition, which cited his adultery with Judy, although Wendy admitted adultery as well. Judge Curtis-Raleigh formally awarded custody of the children to their mother. Again, Peter flew out of Britain for the announcement, on a filming trip to Australia with Judy and Dudley Moore. The following day Peter and Judy posed for pictures in Sydney and announced their engagement. Judy’s divorce from Sean Kenny was harder to arrange, as Kenny had proved difficult to track down, but eventually went through with Peter named this time as the third party. In April 1971, Peter went to visit his parents. It was the first time he had been able to face them for two years.

  The divorce, sadly, was not the end of it. A furious campaign of attrition followed through the spring and summer, over the details of Peter’s access to the children. Neither he nor his wife could bear to see them leave, when they visited the other. Wendy, who had given up the fashion business and thrown herself into voluntary work with the Hampstead branch of Task Force, an old age pensioners’ charity, remained extremely fearful that one day Peter would not bring her daughters back. One afternoon, when he picked up Lucy and Daisy and took them out for a permitted access visit, she telephoned the police in a panic. He then had to spend some time explaining himself to policemen and sorting out the mess. Eventually, Peter became too upset to cope. ‘Although he didn’t want to leave his children,’ explains Judy, ‘he really wanted to get out of the country because the divorce was making him feel sick. He needed a change of scene.’ Peter packed his bags, and prepared to flee.

  CHAPTER 10

  Learning to Fly Underwater

  Pete and Dud, 1968–71

  In the wake of Bedazzled, Peter rather enjoyed hoisting the devil’s banner sympathetically around town. He appeared in a lunchtime debate at St Mary-le-Bow Cheapside against the Rector, Joseph McCulloch, and put up a spirited defence of Lucifer and his forbearance in the face of the raw deal handed down to him by God. A packed congregation heard the Reverend McCulloch counter with the argument that ‘Jesus was, in a way, the greatest satirist of all time,’ thereby proving that Alan Bennett’s contribution to Beyond the Fringe had changed nothing. The Rector, who had expected to face a wild, angry, irreligious subversive, was so surprised by Peter’s gentility, humility and excellent manners that he actually wrote to Margaret Cook to compliment her on the way she had brought up her son. ‘I’d rather go to hell with Peter Cook than to heaven with the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ he confessed.

  On 28 January 1968, the day after losing his front teeth at Old Trafford, Peter bravely fulfilled a commitment to defend Satan’s point of view on a BBC religious programme: ‘I don’t believe those fellows were the instruments of God’s revenge,’ he remarked cheerfully. It began to dawn on TV producers and the organisers of public events, rather belatedly, that he was an absolute natural at the chat show game – witty, articulate, combative and bursting with amusing anecdotes. The organiser of a symposium entitled This Is England managed to lure Peter, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller up to Manchester later in the year, an event that caused Bennett to reflect in his diary: ‘Seven years since Beyond the Fringe have hardly altered the relationship between us. We still retain much the same characteristics we had when we first worked together, only in an intensified form. Jonathan is voluble and lucid, Peter seizes opportunities for laughs and delivers good cracking insults, while I make occasional heartfelt but dull remarks. The difference between 1961 and 1968 is that all feeling of competition between us has gone.’

  From the beginning of 1968, Peter became a regular and much-requested guest on The Eamonn Andrews Show, the principal TV chat show of the time. One of his earliest appearances, recorded at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 8 January, set the tone for the rest of the series: Andrews spoke to each of the guests in turn, soliciting bogus showbiz compliments for the Hollywood star Zsa Zsa Gabor, who sat alongside him blushing, batting her eyelashes and stroking the small dog that sat sweating in her lap. ‘Who do you think is the real Zsa Zsa?’ gushed the Irishman. The other guests obliged with suitably fulsome remarks before Peter, reclining languidly, fag in hand, replied that the real Zsa Zsa was almost certainly a vain, untalented non-event. He was not in the best of moods: his family was due to emigrate to Spain without him the following day. The fur flew, literally in the dog’s case, Zsa Zsa pointing out that Peter was the rudest young man she had ever met, who would do well to get his hair cut. ‘It doesn’t matter, because I’m a raving poof anyway,’ retorted Peter to a round of audience applause. The row continued for weeks afterwards by telegram, and Peter later predicted that when he finally expired the newspaper headlines would read ‘Zsa Zsa man dies’. The show’s producers were delighted, and made his a semi-regular booking as a consequence.

  Peter enjoyed appearing on chat shows: they involved little by way of preparation and it was usually easy for him to steal the scene. Once, for instance, he persuaded Dudley (who’d come along to watch) to walk onstage instead of him, to Eamonn Andrews’s utter bewilderment. The shallow nature of the programme’s remit – in one show he was called upon to debate hanging with the actress Dora Bryan – did not seem to bother him, and may even have perversely appealed. It was all just harmless image-building. After almost two years out of circulation, writing and filming Bedazzled, it was time for another co-ordinated assault on the British public. For a while Peter and Dudley had considered having a direct crack at America: Alexander Cohen had offered them a run on Broadway in their own two-man stage show, which they had provisionally entitled Good Evening. From there a further assault could be mounted on Hollywood. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a West Coast blond God,’ Peter admitted, ‘although I’d be coming in on a piddling little wave.’1 But experience told him, in the end, that the idea was likely to prove little more than a sideways step, a career-freezing move like the US tour of Beyond the Fringe a few years previously. The plan was shelved in favour of a British-based campaign.

  One thing Peter and Dudley agreed was that they should move on from Not Only . . . But Also. The BBC’s offer of a third series was rejected. ‘We’re bored doing quick w&rsqu sketches on television,’ announced Dudley, who explained that they wanted to make ‘a bigger splash’.2 Peter opined that ‘I would rather take the chance to do something I really want to do than work myself into a withered rag by the time I’m forty doing things which I despise.’3 It was a harsh analysis, and one that indicated a creative burning of boats. The cinema was the
thing, and Peter signed no fewer than three film deals: a straight role in A Dandy in Aspic, Anthony Mann’s film of Derek Marlowe’s ingenious spy thriller; an appearance alongside Dudley in Richard Lester’s version of the Spike Milligan–John Antrobus play The Bedsitting Room; and a reprise of his moustache-twirling antics of The Wrong Box, again alongside Dudley, in the Franco-Italian comedy Monte Carlo or Bust. All of these were essentially compromises; what Peter really wanted was to star as the lead in his own light comedy vehicle. Sadly, his commercial clout at the box office was considered insufficient to secure him a deal. The most likely possibility in this direction was The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, a script by John Cleese and Graham Chapman, about a talentless but two-faced young go-getter who rises to become Prime Minister. Ironically, given that the project had been devised and commissioned by David Frost, the two writers had actually fleshed out the central character as a vicious parody of Frost himself. Apparently oblivious, Frost was set on making the film with Peter in the lead, but he was finding the fundraising a slow and tortuous process. In the interim. Peter decided unwisely to ‘keep his hand in’.

  The first of the three to be made, A Dandy In Aspic, was bedevilled by bad luck from the start, when the director Anthony Mann fell ill and died halfway through shooting; the film’s star Laurence Harvey completed the job. Harvey played Eberlin, a British spy charged with tracking down and assassinating Krasnevin, a Russian agent in Berlin. Eberlin was placed in something of a dilemma, as he actually was Krasnevin, operating under an alias. Derek Marlowe’s script was clever, if labyrinthine; Mann’s directing style, faithfully mirrored by Harvey, served only to muddy the waters. The result was impossibly mannered, full of odd angles and sudden zooms, jump-cutting wildly from handheld to still shots and from wide angles to close-ups. Harvey’s performance was dour and resolutely wooden, while that of his co-star Tom Courtenay was as camp and mannered as Harvey’s direction. In fact the only two of the contributors to emerge with any credit were Mia Farrow, strangely cast as an English debutante, and Peter himself, who enjoyed fifth billing just ahead of John Bird.

  Peter was appropriately cast as Prentiss, a vacuous, effete FO type instructed to look after Eberlin; who appears to be interested only in chasing women, but who in fact knows more than he is letting on. His was an entirely respectable performance, but viewers couldn’t help wondering what he was doing wasting his considerable abilities on a small hack film part. Peter later described it as ‘a mad decision. I don’t think I was that embarrassing, but I was slightly embarrassed by it. Luckily, not many people saw it.’4 The opportunity afforded by the film to revisit Berlin was not as enjoyable as it should have been: nerves about his performance got the better of him, and he finally lost his up-and-down battle to control his smoking, moving to a permanent forty-a-day habit. An air of impending disaster hung about the location, an apprehension which was to be amply borne out at the boxwildce. For many years Peter claimed to have forgotten A Dandy in Aspic and its title altogether, but when he did finally bring himself to discuss it in 1980, he reflected that ‘I had the idea of becoming a romantic lead, so I did a film which had me running around with a gun in my hand. But I looked such a berk I couldn’t carry on.’5

  The Bedsitting Room was to encompass yet further personal disasters. A bleak satire on bureaucracy’s attempts to administer a Britain destroyed in a three-minute nuclear holocaust, the play was sufficiently hard going on stage to make it an extremely risky proposition to put before a mass cinema audience. Although the script was brimming with ideas, Spike Milligan’s inability to handle the conventions of plot structure, so charmingly quirky a feature of his work over the course of a half-hour Goon Show, made for a relentless and tiring ninety minutes. One look at the cast should have kindled immediate forebodings: it was the usual British stellar band-aid, consisting of Peter and Dudley, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Arthur Lowe, Rita Tushingham, Roy Kinnear, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Michael Hordern, Dandy Nichols, Ralph Richardson, Frank Thornton, Bill Wallis, Jack Shepherd and Marty Feldman. Many of the characters underwent surreal nuclear mutations during the course of the film, Arthur Lowe becoming a parrot and his wife a cupboard, Dudley turning into a dog and Ralph Richardson into the Bedsitting Room of the film’s title. Peter and Dudley played two policemen, operating for the most part from a squad car suspended from a hot air balloon, whose job entailed instructing the nuclear survivors ceaselessly to ‘Move on.’ Peter was given the closing speech, which he was allowed to adulterate personally: ‘The earth will burgeon forth anew . . . the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the goat will give suck to the tiny bee.’

  The film was only made as an emergency measure, after Richard Lester had been given a million dollars by United Artists to make a Mick Jagger musical scripted by Joe Orton. Orton had been murdered by his homosexual lover in the project’s early stages; once the money had been allocated, though, it had to be spent, so Lester had hurriedly bought up The Bedsitting Room as an alternative. His solution to the film’s lack of commercial viability was to punctuate it with ‘comedy’ brass musical stabs. Dudley Moore found him a difficult director to work with: ‘He gave peculiar instructions which were hard to follow. He was a very nice man, cheerful and affable, but there was nothing you could do to please him. He wanted different opinions but rejected them all, which was very disconcerting.’6

  Filming took place in a disused quarry at Chobham in Surrey, from May to July 1968. In the first week of June the wind began to pick up. The ballooning expert crouching in the bottom of the basket, suspended high over Chobham Common, remarked to Peter and Dudley in the car below that he ‘wouldn’t go up on a day like this’. Peter pointed out that all three of them were, indeed, up on a day like this. ‘Well, it’s just for Mr Lester,’ explained the expert, ‘but I wouldn’t normally go up – we’re at the mercy of the winds.’ At which point, with remarkable comic timing, a sudden gust seized the balloon and the battered car suspended from it, and dashed them a hundred feet to the ground. By a miracle, Dudley and the balloonist escaped completely unhurt. Peter was less fortunate. He was taken to the Nuffield Hospital in Bryanston Square, where an entire cartilage was removed from one knee in an emergency operation. He subsequently had to learn to walk again using crutches, which took up the four weeks’ holiday he had intended to spend visiting Wendy and the children in Majorca. His future sporting activities would be severely curtailed. The episode put a dampener on Dudley’s wedding to Suzy Kendall on 14 June, which Peter was unable to attend. The atmosphere was then even further cast down, with the news three days later that Pete McGurk, bassist of the Dudley Moore trio, had killed himself following his girlfriend’s decision to leave him for the group’s drummer Chris Karan. The Bedsitting Room’s release was delayed until 1969, but everybody concerned suspected from the start that it would be a commercial disaster. In the event Richard Lester was not given another film to direct for almost five years.

  The residual prestige attached to the stage play meant that Peter and Dudley’s reputations were not unduly damaged by their participation in the failed film version, but they did their best to make up for this with Monte Carlo or Bust. A limp Italian-produced attempt to recreate the box office success of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, the film was originally entitled Quei Temerari Sulle Loro Pazze, Scatenate, Scalcinate Carriole. Twenty replica vintage cars with modernised Fiat engines were entered into a fictionalised, slapstick recreation of a Monte Carlo rally of the 1920s. Part of the action took place in Italy and Sweden, the rest in front of a blurred back projection. Every character was a national stereotype: Tony Curtis was imported to play the victorious American, with a clear eye on transatlantic sales, Gert Frobe played the evil German and Terry-Thomas appeared as the dastardly Brit. Peter and Dudley, hired on the strength of Bedazzled’s performance in Italy, played two twittish British officers, Major Dawlish and Lieutenant Barrington. The film was not too badly received by the critics, but like the preceding two pro
jects it bombed utterly at the box office. ‘Peter acted terribly I thought,’ claims Dudley dismissively. ‘Really badly. He couldn’t deliver other people’s stuff at all.’ Peter’s film career was beginning to resemble a bull trapped in a bullring, charging furiously hither and thither, trying to break through the encircling walls, growing gradually weaker by the minute. Increasingly, the David Frost project The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer was taking on a crucial significance, outstripping even that of Bedazzled to Peter’s future prospects.