Peter returned to London at the end of February 1972, to play a small cameo role in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, a film version of the cartoon character that he had originally created in Private Eye. Barry Humphries and director Bruce Beresford had somehow managed to elicit a quarter of a million dollars from the Australian Film Development Corporation, and had telephoned Peter while they were in Australia securing the money, to ask him to take part. Peter was to play a BBC TV director in the climactic scene, in which a fire at Television Centre is extinguished by a group of Australians drinking Foster’s lager and urinating onto the flames.
When Peter arrived at the Soho location, he was drunk. Humphries, who had cured his own drink problem, remembers that ‘I was absolutely horrified. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, there I was back in London in terrific health, all ready to make this film, and I’d been thinking, how great to welcome this man without whom we wouldn’t be making this movie. He was affability itself, but as a friend of Peter’s I was quite shaken and distressed to see him like that.’ Despite an engaging amateurishness and some delicious moments, the film garnered terrible reviews and did nothing for Peter’s career – ‘The worst Australian film ever made,’ complained Max Harris – but the efforts of the Australian Film Development Corporation to restrain the language ensured that it became a cult success. It eventually made a 500 per cent profit and provoked Foster’s Lager, who had spent a decade trying to market a sophisticated image, into changing their advertising strategy altogether. There was, incidentally, a failed sequel that Peter had nothing to do with, entitled Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, that was notable for a cameo by the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. In a scene with Barry Humphries’s Melbourne housewife Edna Everage, the PM improvised the line ‘Arise, Dame Edna!’, and a character was reborn.
Peter and Judy bought a four-storey house in Denbigh Terrace in Nottig Hill Gate – Wendy and the children were still living in the re-upholstered Kenwood Cottage – and settled down there. Peter had absolutely no intention of doing any work. All he really wanted to do was see his children, and they were frequent visitors. The rest of the time Peter and Judy sat, surrounded by stripped pine, picture mirrors, oil lamps, pot plants and of course the green Tiffany lamp, gazing into each other’s eyes. They really were hopelessly in love with each other. ‘Peter was a very easy person to live with,’ says Judy. ‘We could laugh together about anything, just the two of us. We thought we would be together forever. I really loved him and he really loved me. I want to remember him as I knew and loved him, before things got so distorted by the drinking. There was a sweet, quirky gentle side to him which people don’t know, intellectual, spiritual and a little bit dotty.’8
The drink had yet to destroy Peter’s looks, and the drugs were keeping him slim. He and Judy still made a remarkably good-looking couple. He developed a passion for odd accessories – coloured shoes, interesting sunglasses, bizarre hats – and always wore a French gendarme’s hat in bed. He was invariably an interesting person to live with, on account of his unpredictable behaviour. One night a local West Indian household held a party, with reggae blasting out well into the small hours; a gang of youths shoved smoke bombs through the letterbox. Peter got out of bed, and marched across the street to sort things out. He returned at breakfast the next day, having had the time of his life.
Peter and Judy were happy together, but his depression and sadness were never far from the surface. ‘It was very sticky with Wendy,’ explains Judy, ‘there was so much tension. She resented the way Peter had dropped in and out of the children’s lives.’ Wendy developed an interest in macrobiotics, with particular reference to treating Daisy’s asthma, and took her daughters to stay at the vegetarian commune at Findhorn in Scotland; she liked it so much that she decided they would go to live there permanently. Peter had to take out a court injunction preventing his family from moving so far away. ‘He was very controlling,’ objects Wendy, ‘he wanted to have us nearby.’
Peter took solace, as ever, in alcohol. In April, he was invited to a banquet at the Grosvenor House Hotel to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Sunday Times colour supplement, in company with six hundred others who had ‘made news during the sixties’. Judy, because she was not Peter’s wife, was not invited. Peter got drunk, and worked himself into a self-propelling rage at the slight to his girlfriend. He stood up, grabbed the microphone and shouted a tirade of abuse at The Sunday Times. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – he had forgotten to switch the microphone on. ‘I have never known anything like it. It was the most embarrassing few moments for everyone,’ one of the waitresses told the papers.
In the summer, Paul Foot decided to leave Private Eye after a row with Richard Ingrams. An ardent socialist, Foot had been unable to come to terms with jokes about left-wing figures such as Bernadette Devlin, Angela Davis and the striking dockers. Peter was inordinately upset at the loss of the journalist he admired so wholeheartedly. The Eye’s Managing Director David Cash remembers that ‘We had this farewell lunch, at the Terrazza in Romilly Street, and it was the one time I saw Cookie totally legless. He got very emotional about Footie going, and then he collapsed in the gutter outside.’ Peter got drunk, too, at a Beyond the Fringe reunion staged for the Parkinson show. ‘There was an awkward feeling about the meeting,’ reflects Michael Parkinson, ‘a sense of time erecting fences.’
Peter only took on one professional engagement in the nine months between The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and the London opening of Behind the Fridge: a leading role in Mill Hill, a thirty-minute theatre presentation for BBC 2 at the end of May. Mill Hill was an embarrassingly weak John Mortimer farce in which Peter played Peter Trilby, a nervous dentist who is having an affair with the wife of his partner Roy, escaping to see her in the afternoons through the pretence of attending cricket practice. The other performances – by Clive Revill as Roy and Geraldine McEwan as his wife – were even worse than Peter’s. The script levered in plot details with an industrial lack of subtlety, as in the scene establishing the situation and the names of the characters:
Denise:
Oh, Peter.
Peter:
Yes, Denise.
Denise:
Of course, it’s been wonderful having lunch together – they must think we’re married at the trattoria – but this is the first time we’ve been really alone.
Peter:
How long have we got?
Denise:
The whole afternoon. Isn’t it marvellous?
Peter:
Until Roy gets back.
Creatively, everything Peter touched – with the exception of his collaborations with Dudley – seemed to turn to mud.
Dudley was undergoing similar problems. He spent the summer appearing as the Dormouse in a film version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was as mawkish and misconceived as Jonathan Miller’s TV version had been dry and clever six years before. He too was experiencing severe depression: his divorce from Suzy Kendall came through on 15 September 1972, an upsetting situation only partially alleviated by his affair with the singer Lynsey de Paul. He spent much of his time on the psychiatrist’s couch. ‘I just didn’t want to be funny any more. Trying to be funny to protect myself was rather annoying to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Peter was some support. He felt that this was just a normal condition, and why did I have to go through all these contortions to figure this out, when to him it was self-evident.’9
It was in such sober circumstances that Peter and Dudley drifted back together for the London opening of Behind the Fridge, at the Cambridge Theatre on 21 November. They had decided to write some new material for the show, and to include a selection of short films, but when it came to it Peter was no longer prepared to sit improvising with Dudley; he just wanted to stay at home. They wrote the new material separately, on paper, and posted their work to each other. Peter proffered the vague excuse that good ideas were ‘altered’ by improvising on tape; Dudley complained
to a Times journalist that he was finding the new method ‘more difficult . . . it’s harder to become colloquial from a written script than it is to keep it natural by continually improvising it.’10 Neither was Peter even remotely interested in the staging of the show. Dudley complained testily of his partner’s ‘sheer laziness’, recounting how ‘the staging somehow got into this extraordinary business of Peter sitting on his bottom and me doing all the work.’11
Peter maintained that it didn’t really matter how the show was staged. ‘They’ll be coming from north of Watford in coachloads,’ he predicted confidently. ‘Mark my words, the bookings will be good, regardless of what the smart West End crickets say.’ ‘Crickets’ was Peter’s term for the critics, a group of people whom he had come to dislike and distrust over the preceding few years. He was right, insofar as the show was sold out for months even before the opening night. Dudley, however, wanted reassurance, not a repeat of the onstage chaos that had marked the Australian tour, and invited Joe McGrath to direct both the show and the new film inserts. McGrath was surprised to find how much had changed since he had produced the first series of Not Only . . . But Also: ‘In the early days Peter had seemed very much in charge of the two of them, but by the time of Behind the Fridge Dudley seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Peter was occasionally in a very bad way.’ Partly on the advice of his psychiatrist, Dudley had become – in Peter’s words – ‘No longer such a servile little creep.’12
Eventually, very little new material was added. There was a sketch about Idi Amin and a song about Ted Heath entitled Heath, based on Isaac Hayes’ Shaft. Reing, a sketch that had been improvised in the final weeks of the Australian tour, was now officially included: it concerned an unemployed actor who takes on domestic work in the home of a High Court Judge. Peter explained that ‘I have had actors who are resting doing domestic work for me, and on the whole it’s been remarkable how little domestic work has been done, and how much talk about the state of the theatre, ducky.’ In keeping with the bleak tone of the show, the sketch ended on an unpleasant note with the murder of the Judge by his cleaner. The promoters – Donald Langdon for Hemdale, and Colin McLennan – were unhappy about the amount of black humour in the show, and argued for the removal of the sketch about the minicab driver. The arguments continued until a few weeks into the run, when Harold Pinter inadvertently settled matters by attending a performance and pronouncing it the best thing in the show.
Most of the specially written films were based on old ideas. Shot in the late summer and performed by Peter, Dudley and Judy, they included the ‘Diarrhoea Expert’ sketch from the Establishment Club – in which the speaker dashes offstage before he can begin his speech; the shower sketch from Not Only . . . But Also – in which Dudley’s voice and skin change colour; a musical number in which Peter got to dress up as Marlene Dietrich; and a new sketch written by Dudley, about an appeal on behalf of the Spooch Ompodiment Society, which was basically a rewrite of Peter’s Appeal on behalf of the Blond from the days of the New York Establishment.
The pair composed amusing essays about each other for the programme. Dudley wrote of his partner that:
He pretends that under his glassy exterior is a heart of gold. The exterior is just the tip of the iceberg. Rumours that we have split up are true.
Peter replied that:
Like many smallish men (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, to name but two) Dudley has a superficial charm and warmth that deceive many. Underneath lurks a demented sadist, capable in private of unspeakable deeds.
As the date of the opening night approached, Peter was seriously afflicted by nerves. According to Judy, ‘Peter hated the Cambridge Theatre – he thought it would be the kiss of death. He thought that it was too big and had no atmosphere – it was like a barn. He also began to fear the vitriolic things the critics might say; he was always more affected than Dudley by what the critics wrote. He had to be the best, he had to be seen to be the sharpest.’ Joe McGrath too found conditions at the Cambridge extremely difficult: ‘They never got the lighting cues right, not once in a whole year. The stage hands would work for a few days, then a whole new group would come in. We rehearsed for days before the first night, and half an hour before curtain up a new group of stage hands came on, who hadn’t even seen it. The guys we’d been rehearsing with just left. I said, “What’s going on here?” They said, “We’ll tell the new lot what to do. Don’t worry guv, they know what they’re doing.” They didn’t, of course.’
That was the least of the disasters that were to beset the opening night of Behind the Fridge. The This Is Your Life team, headed by Eamonn Andrews, had decided to surprise Dudley with the famous red book. With almost unbelievable stupidity, they arrived with the cameras just as Peter and Dudley were about to go into the dress rehearsal. Dudley was whisked off to the TV studios in a car. Peter, smiling politely for the cameras but crumbling inside, went with him. There was no dress rehearsal. Joe McGrath, furious, refused to come along. Nobody had thought to discuss it with any of them. ‘You should come Joe,’ begged Dudley, ‘you’re part of my life’; but McGrath stayed where he was, fuming, alone on the stage. At the TV studios, Dudley was hurried in front of the audience and the usual phalanx of friends and relatives. Peter, already a bag of nerves, was left alone in the green room with the drinks trolley.
Inevitably, by the time they got back to the Cambridge Theatre, Peter was virtually insensible. The audience began filing in after 6.30 p.m. and by seven the auditorium was packed with 1,200 people. The show was due to start, but Peter had passed out backstage, as Dudley, Joe McGrath and various frantic theatre staff tried to slap him awake. McGrath dressed him while he was still unconscious. Black coffee was literally forced down his throat until he began to come round. In the auditorium, the first slow hand claps began to start. An Assistant Stage Manager was sent onstage with a made-up story about a technical hitch in the projection equipment, to try and buy more time.
After twenty minutes, Joe McGrath came up on to the stage and peered through the side of the curtain. He could see Sean Connery in the front row. ‘I thought, that’s all I need, bloody James Bond. Dudley came over and said, “Somebody has to tell them,” and I said, “Well I’m not,” and he said, “Well neither am I.” Eventually the audience began to sing “Why are we waiting?”, and Dudley began to dance around the stage behind the curtain in time to the song, and he grabbed me, and started waltzing with me. There we were, waltzing to “Why are we waiting?”, and Dudley was pointing at the curtain and singing “I’ll-tell-you-why-we’re-fucking-waiting, the-cunt-is-drunk, the-cunt-is-drunk, he’s out of his fucking mind.” Then he unzipped his trousers, pulled them down and mooned at the curtain, in the direction of the audience.’
Finally, Peter was resuscitated to a point where it was just about possible to start the show. The curtain went up, and he and Dudley went on stage to a tumultuous round of applause. The very first joke in the show consisted of Peter and Dudley entering from either wing, as if to meet in the middle of the stage, but continuing past each other and into the opposite wing; then re-entering, this time for real. The first pass was greeted with a huge laugh. Then Dudley returned to the centre of the stage alone. Peter, in the far wing, had not moved. Joe McGrath, who was standing just a few yards away, went across to him to see what was the matter. ‘Peter turned to me and said, “I can’t do this, I can’t fucking do this.” And then he started to cry. He just said, “I’m sorry Joe, I’m so sorry.”’ Peter Cook, the Peter Cook, who had taken British comedy by storm with Beyond the Fringe, the Establishment Club and Not Only . . . But Also, was standing in the wings of the Cambridge Theatre, with big helpless tears running down his face.
McGrath grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, turned him round, and propelled him on to the stage; for a few minutes, he seemed stunned, but then, for the rest of the evening, Peter did not put a foot wrong. It was Dudley, in fact, who perpetrated the odd slip, so fearful was he that Peter would suffer another breakdown. ‘The next
day,’ relates McGrath, ‘Michael Billington wrote this review saying that Peter had been magisterial and wonderful, and that Dudley had been very very nervous. Dudley went completely mad. He told me, “I’ve had it. I’m getting out of this. It’s driving me up the fucking wall. I can’t be dealing with it. It’s totally out of control, and I’ve got to make my own future.” After that, Dudley began to take over and become very strong.’13 In the bar after the show, all the talk had been of Peter’s dazzling performance; the ‘technical hitch’ had all but been forgotten. Sean Connery, though, had smiled a little smile at Joe McGrath, and said with reference to Peter: ‘Wee bit o’ trouble, Joe, eh? Wee bit o’ trouble there?’
In general, the ‘crickets” response to the show was not terribly enthusiastic, as Peter had predicted, although the reference to Beyond the Fringe in the title had naturally provided a clutch of rather limited minds with the same obvious blunt instrument to beat the show with. Jack Tinker in the Mail spoke sarcastically and camply of the ‘clever young men’ who had killed off good old-fashioned revue. John Barber in the Telegraph complained that the ‘anything-for-a-laugh gagging was a poor exchange for the hard, eye-on-the-ball savagery of the quartet who gave a new meaning to the word satire.’ Elsewhere, Herbert Kretzmer in the Express called it ‘A curious little revue . . . curiously devoid of adventure or audacity.’ Sheridan Morley in Punch pointed out that ‘A few of the sketches are not exactly in mint condition.’ All were agreed that the longer sketches could do with a few cuts. But Time Out called it ‘A good show’, and Irving Wardle in The Times described it as ‘An outpost of original and intelligent fun in the West End.’ Audiences certainly seemed to be enjoying it, which was what mattered.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 45