Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Interviewer:

  Who do you think is behind the criminals?

  Sir Arthur:

  We are.

  Then there was the self-undermining statement, the apparently minuscule qualification which destroys the confident pronouncements that have proceeded it. Peter’s Beyond the Fringe miner, for instance, spoke favourably of the leisurely lifestyle enjoyed by miners: a mine being a place where you can do almost anything you like, he explained, as long as you have collected several hundredweight of coal by the end of the day. One could go on listing such comic devices, but ultimately they were all salad dressing. The secret of his humour lay in his bizarre and original mental processes. Peter himself had no time for comedic theory, precisely because comedy came so easily and instinctively to him, although he did derive considerable enjoyment from portentous Californian and East European analyses of jokes.

  As a genuine original, Peter had been directly influenced by very few other comedians – Milligan, Sellers and J. B. Morton (Beachcomber) perhaps being the most important. He deferred to few of his colleagues in company: Milligan and Sellers again, Kenneth Williams, Peter Ustinov and Mel Brooks were among this select group. Interestingly, those comedians he cited as his favourites often tended to be old-fashioned gag merchants, capable of doing something that he couldn’t do and therefore worthy of admiration: Groucho Marx, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis. In performance Peter was closer to a comedian like Harry Enfield, able to come up with a stream of funny lines without actually resorting to wisecracks. A number of commentators have observed that most of Peter’s humour was verbal, which is true, but then a lot of it was to do with the expression of immensely visual ideas, which could never be realised except in the imagination. Sometimes, as with the leaping nuns or the Good v. Evil cricket match, the ideas were filmable, but enormous snakes many millions of miles long or saintly bees were condemned to remain forever locked into Peter’s mesmeric, droning delivery.

  Peter knew full well that he was in the front rank of British comedians. Asked by David Dimbleby how he felt about being ‘probably the funniest Englishman since Chaplin,’ he replied: ‘Well, this is no time for false modesty.’27 Peter enjoyed compliments, and grew irritated when critics dismissed his humour as ‘schoolboy’ or ‘undergraduate’. This, he reasoned quite correctly, was a feeble device used by those who have failed to understand or appreciate a joke, to endeavour to raise themselves above it. ‘I don’t go round saying “That’s senile humour”, do I?’28 he protested. This confidence in his own ability, as every comedian knows, had nothing to do with the confidence – or lack of it – that it will be all right on the night. ‘Professional confidence combined with a personal un-confidence’ is how his fellow-sufferer Dudley Moore summarises it. According to his first wife Wendy, ‘His outer confidence, at least to begin with, was just pure delight at being able to share his inner community of these characters that inhabited his imagination. But it was a total façade. Somebody who smokes three packs a day is not confident.’

  In Peter’s case, these fears became self-fulfilling. With every triumph, the effort required to equal it or better it became greater, while the thought of just giving up and allowing his best work to pass into history became ever more seductive. In attempting to better what he had already achieved, he drove himself to try and succeed outside the confines of that area in which his genius enjoyed total command, with the result that failure became inevitable. The loss of momentum in his career around the turn of the 1970s, together with the upsetting upheavals in his personal life, combined to create an especially vulnerable state of affairs in which he was overwhelmed by that depression which had always been present in his make-up.

  His second wife Judy remembers that throughout their time together in the 1970s, Peter’s moods would alternate: at first he would be elated, and increasingly so, which was when he would be at his funniest, most extrovert and most convivial. Then, like a plane rising into an ever steeper ascent until it stalls, he would plunge rapidly and without warning into a black, inconsolable depression, accompanied by bitter reproach for himself and those closest to him. Gradually, he would emerge from these depths, normality would re-assert itself, and then the build-up of elation would begin again. These are, in fact, the classic symptoms of manic depression, and it now seems likely that Peter was an undiagnosed manic depressive. Certainly Judy now believes that this was the case.

  Depression of this sort is often hereditary, and let us not forget that Peter’s grandfather was a charming, convivial, witty man, doing well in his job, who inexplicably went into his garden one day and blew his brains out; nor the fact that Peter found the discovery of these events so profoundly disturbing. Manic depression is endemic, too, in comedians, often going undiagnosed in milder cases. The wave-pattern of the depressive, from elation to depression and back again, is more pronounced than that of the normal human being. Very often, rising into the crest of a wave, the depressive’s enhanced extroversion and predilection for laughter will lead him to put on a performance for those around him; in time, those who have the ability to become professional comedians learn to control the depression that follows, to suppress it while putting on a realistic semblance of the entertaining ‘high’ that characterised the previous upswing.

  This, perhaps, is one clue to the elusive wellspring of Peter’s humour. Consider this personal description of the early onset of manic depression, provided by expand sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison:

  An intoxicating state that gave rise to . . . an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed the translation of new ideas into papers and projects . . . ideas were coming so fast that they intersected one another at every conceivable angle.

  Later on Ms Jamison found herself becoming:

  Increasingly restless and irritable, and I craved excitement; all of a sudden I found myself rebelling against the very things I most loved about my husband: his kindness, stability, warmth and love.29

  Consider also this description by Oliver Sacks of one Mr Thompson, a patient in an institution, suffering from a degenerative disease connected to alcoholism:

  He is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy, of ceaseless tales and confabulations. Superficially, he comes over as an ebullient comic. People say, ‘He’s a riot’. And there is much that is comic, but not just comic: it is terrible as well. For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over the chaos that yawns continually beneath him. After finding him ‘a riot’, ‘a laugh’, ‘loads of fun’, people are disquieted by something in him. ‘He never stops’, they say. ‘He’s like a man in a race, a man trying to catch something which always eludes him.’30

  This example is, of course, not directly relevant: Peter was not suffering from the same complaint (Korsakov’s syndrome), nor did he even faintly require the services of an institution. But indirectly at least, there are undoubted similarities present. Both men were driven to fill their lives with comedy because they were afraid of what would be left if they did not. The inner demons Peter wrestled with may have been greater and more fundamental to the inspiration of his humour than many of his friends realised. In the years following 1971, they were to gain the upper hand.

  CHAPTER 12

  I Can’t Talk Now, ’Cos He’s Here

  Behind the Fridge, 1971–75

  Australia was fun at first. Peter and Dudley were ‘lauded and applauded and loved,’ as Judy put it, and the show was a triumph. ‘A supremely well-worked evening’ said the Herald, and the Melbourne Sun reported ‘a brilliant night’. The show opened in Canberra, before moving on to Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington and Auckland inNew Zealand, and finally Perth. Peter, Dudley and Judy travelled around in a gang together, although Dudley was quick to find a female companion in the shape of Lyndall Hobbs, a local journalist. ‘It was like being in a band,’ recalls Judy with fond nostalgia. ‘We all got to know each other very well indeed. There were lots of car journeys and pla
ne journeys, and we were always mucking about. Peter and Dudley used to improvise routines about the boring shops and suburbs we used to pass through en route.’ Dudley remembers ‘Nights when I couldn’t think of anything being more enjoyable. It was such tremendous fun, and you came off absolutely ecstatic and jumping about the place. We’d hit a peak and it was just hurtling along.’1 Disastrous chat shows and arguments with ex-wives seemed a million miles away.

  On 21 September they appeared as guests on a special Australian TV edition of The Dave Allen Show, and shocked Australia by saying the words ‘bum’ and ‘piss’, and performing the Bethlehem sketch Gospel Truth. More than 650 people telephoned to complain, causing Sir Frank Packer, the Chief Executive of Television Corporation Ltd, to describe the show as ‘a vulgar programme in bad taste’, and his son Clyde Packer, who by an amazing coincidence was the Managing Director of Channel Nine, to complain that it had contained ‘offensive and irresponsible remarks’. The Australian Broadcasting Control Board moved quickly, and handed Peter, Dudley and Dave Allen lifetime bans from all 47 TV and 116 radio stations throughout Australia. Peter and Dudley were stunned at first, and rather ungallantly issued a statement seeking to blame Dave Allen for allowing the show to go ‘beyond the bounds of decency’.

  They need not have worried. The incident made them into national heroes, and ensured that every night of the tour was a complete sell-out weeks in advance. Just eight days later Channel Nine ignored the ABCB ban and televised a charity gala in aid of the Freedom from Hunger Campaign which starred Peter and Dudley. The Board was dealt a fatal blow from which it never recovered. Shane Maloney, who was a student at Melbourne University at the time, recalls that ‘when the terrible duo appeared on campus in the midst of their battle with the forces of puritanism and cant, they were greeted as heroes. The hall filled to capacity as soon as the doors opened. Speakers were rapidly set up outside to cater for the overflow. When these proved insufficient, the show was piped campus-wide on closed-circuit television.’2 Peter sent a telegram to the head of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board thanking him for all the free publicity.

  Unfortunately, this high-spirited escape from the pressures of home was to be short-lived. On 2 October 1971, the day of their Melbourne opening, Peter received a cable from Wendy informing him that Daisy was in the process of having a severe asthma attack, and that specialists had ascribed it to the painstakingly installed decor and furnishings of Kenwood Cottage, which she was about to rip out. Distraught, he sat down to write as restrainedly as he could to his parents:

  Darling Mummy and Daddy,

  . . I’ve had a cable from Wendy about the house and Daisy. I didn’t reply as I think it’s just her usual game of trying to get at me – I’m sure if anythingreally wrong you could let me know. Perhaps you could give her a ring – I don’t want to get involved with telephone chats with her at this distance.

  Judy and I send lots of love,

  Peter

  Whereupon he sealed the envelope, put the letter in the post box, drank himself almost insensible, and walked fully clothed into the swimming pool of the President Motor Inn. Eventually, he had to be fished out by the hotel staff. ‘He was in agony,’ remembers Dudley. ‘To my mind, he became an alcoholic from that moment on.’3

  Somehow Peter stumbled through that evening’s performance, but it was the start of a downward slide. ‘Peter really started drinking then,’ says Judy. ‘He was missing his two children terribly, and that’s what cracked him, but Wendy kept writing these angry letters. Peter hadn’t actually told her that he was going away to Australia until the last minute. Wherever we went there would be messages from Wendy saying “The kids miss you”, and the fact that he was so far away made him feel powerless and guilty. He absolutely adored his children and was a very emotional man, much more so than Dudley. When Dudley got divorced it was upsetting to him, but the absence of children meant it wasn’t so traumatic. The strain nearly cracked Peter and it nearly cracked me. I don’t think Peter had realised the grief involved in the break-up of a marriage.’ Peter felt that he was being subjected to a particularly carefully timed campaign of mental torture. Entirely reasonably, Wendy saw things from a totally different perspective: ‘Daisy was ending up in oxygen tents and having adrenalin injections and being sent home from school regularly, and the doctors were giving her steroids and telling me that I had to get rid of the cats and soft furnishings, and make the house plastic so it could all be sponged down.’

  On 21 October the tour moved on to Sydney for four weeks, where Michael Parkinson was among the audience. He was amazed to see that ‘Dudley was literally holding Peter up on stage. If Peter couldn’t grab the furniture he’d grab Dudley; he was pissed all the time. I felt very, very sorry for Dudley – he was trying very hard, but Peter’s drinking was destroying their relationship. Of course the Australians were so chuffed to see people like Peter and Dudley out there, there was a kind of forgiveness. Peter and Dudley were allowed to pretend it was all part of the act. In fact they’d have had to dismember their grannies on stage to have had anything like a bad review.’ Dudley himself remembers that ‘Peter was drunk for the whole of the first week in Sydney. I didn’t know how to stop him, I really didn’t. I remember saying then for the first time that I wanted to put an end to the partnership.’

  It was while the pair were in Sydney that Lewis Morley, the photographer who had taken the publicity pictures for Beyond the Fringe ten years previously, invited them to a dinner party. Everyone had a little too much to drink, and Peter sat there slapping mosquitoes, quietly murmuring to himself, ‘Things have changed, things have changed.’ Dudley started to read out some John Betjeman poems, then stopped and burst into tears. ‘The other guests at the party were a little confused,’ sayey. ‘They had expected an evening of jollity with a never-ending stream of Pete and Dud-isms. It was a very quiet car that drove back to their hotel.’4

  By the time the show reached New Zealand, the alcohol problem had become a permanent feature of their professional relationship. Dudley explains that ‘I had to ignore it. If I had acknowledged it, that would have turned all our sketches into something else – me and my drunken friend, me and the drunken clergyman. He was drunk every night.’5 The trouble was, Peter kept wandering off the script into random cul-de-sacs from which he could not always retrieve himself. ‘He would come on so hopelessly drunk and start ad-libbing on something that had nothing to do with anything we’d ever performed – imagine being in front of 1,500 people and trying to get through it, never knowing what you’re going to get.’ Massive rows followed. Peter really needed time off to sort himself out, but theirs was a show which could never incorporate understudies. Dudley dreamed up a practical demonstration of what Peter was doing to their act: ‘One night I got drunk, which I had never done before a performance, and afterwards he complained, “That’s the worst performance you’ve ever given.” So I said, “Now you know what it feels like.”’

  Later, Peter tried to dismiss his drinking on the tour as a bit of a lark at Dudley’s expense, brought about by the abundance of local hospitality, but it must have been clear to all present that something was seriously wrong. Any thoughts that Dudley might have had of splitting the partnership, however, were fatally undermined by the mutually dependent relationship between the two men, both onstage and offstage. ‘They were obsessed with each other,’ relates Judy, ‘they were like brothers. Everything one did, the other had to know about. There was an extremely competitive element in their relationship, and neither wanted the other to get further ahead.’ Dudley has always been painted as the hapless victim of Peter’s excesses, and it is true that Peter’s drinking was extremely hard to cope with on stage, but Judy feels that she witnessed a different side of Dudley at close quarters – a man expert at using the appearance of emotional vulnerability to get what he wanted, from sympathy to sex. ‘He was very manipulative – he could be cold and withhold his love if he wanted to. Dudley always wanted information abou
t Peter, it was part of his manoeuvring; he would phone me solicitously to see whether Peter and I had had a row, but I felt that it was really just prurience masquerading as concern. But then Peter would also want to know what I had learned about Dudley.’ Being together twenty-four hours a day, every day, had become a stressful experience; sometimes their exchanges were hilarious and delightful, at other times they circled each other warily.

  One night in New Zealand, when Peter had got blind drunk and collapsed into bed, Dudley sat seductively playing the piano in the locked-up hotel bar; around him lounged a collection of adoring waitresses, and Judy. It was five o’clock in the morning when Dudley’s performance was interrupted by the sound of the hotel lift going up and down, apparently at random. The culprit proved to be Peter, dressed only in his underpants, too drunk to find the right lift button, jabbing randomly at the control panel in the hope of finally arriving at the ground floor. He was absolutely livid at the thought that his girlfriend might have been left unaccompanied with the sexually rapacious ahead.y – although his furious entry into the bar was somewhat undermined by his attire, and by the method of his arrival. Giggling, Judy scuttled upstairs. ‘Life with Peter and Dudley was so complicated,’ she says. ‘I’d been wary about the Australia idea. It was fun for a while and the shows went well, but in some respects it didn’t work in the end.’

  The question of what to do next was a vexed one. Alexander Cohen wanted to bring Behind the Fridge to the United States. Donald Langdon, Peter’s former agent, wanted to mount it in London first. The BBC wanted another series of Not Only . . . But Also. That, decided Peter, would be utterly pointless. In the end Langdon proved persuasive once more, and got the nod because, as Peter put it, ‘I’m damned well not going to miss another football season here.’6 And of course, there was also the small matter of seeing his daughters again. As it turned out, Langdon did not get his production together until November, giving Dudley the chance to appear in an absolute abortion entitled Not Only Lulu But Also Dudley Moore for BBC TV. It was Dudley’s way of testing the waters of a career without Peter, but he soon realised that he had made a terrible mistake. He found it impossible, for instance, to write alone. ‘I hated it, and I didn’t do it very well. I’d always coasted in before on the tails of Peter.’7