Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The release of Derek and Clive (Live) had presented Dudley with a difficult dilemma, quite apart from the problem of preventing his mother from getting hold of a copy (‘The first “cunt” would give her a heart attack,’5 he predicted). On the one hand, he had told Peter that he did not want to work with him again, and that he was going to stay in LA to try and make it in Hollywood. On the other hand, he had just completed a year of dismal unemployment, sitting in his garage playing the piano and waiting for the phone call that never came. Nobody in the film business, it seemed, was interested in one half of a theatrical double act with a commercially dubious record on celluloid. Derek and Clive (Live) had suddenly rekindled an enormous amount of interest in the Peter and Dudley partnership, and had invested them with a sense of youthful rebelliousness at a time when they had produced no new material for five years and seemed in danger of slipping out of fashion. Guinness offered the pair a lot of money to do a TV ad campaign, but far more importantly, Michael White’s company let it be known that they would be prepared to finance a Cook and Moore film. It was the opportunity to revitalise their careers that both of them had been waiting for, and Dudley had no option but to climb ruefully back on board. He returned to Britain, underwent a Derek and Clive promotional tour in the Autumn, and then sat down with Peter to write The Hound of the Baskervilles, a parody which took as its starting point the Sherlock Homes sketch from Goodbye Again.

  The therapeutic effect of Dudley’s return was astonishingly swift and dramatic. Suddenly, Peter’s life was looking up again. The blanket of gloom that had swathed him for so long was suddenly lifted. With the help of Judy and Sid Gottlieb, he finally found the will to kick his booze habit. He lost weight, dyed his hair a virulent orange-brown (‘Peter’s gone prematurely orange’ reported Jonathan Miller’s wife Rachel) and prepared to take on the world again.

  Since returning from America, Peter had endured a terrible year. He had not done much work, and the only concrete project he had committed himself to had been a disaster. At the end of 1975 he had obtained a part as the chief baddie in Find the Lady, a quite wretchedly unfunny British–Canadian comedy film starring the young John Candy as one of a pair of inept cops. It was the kind of film where the female cast members frequently found themselves gratuitously stripped to their underwear, where a Chinese character’s every entrance was greeted with the sound of a gong, and where car crashes involved a vehicle being driven out of shot, followed by a crunching sound effect and a single tyre rolling back into frame. To add insult to injury Dick Emery and Mickey Rooney were cast as a pair of violin case-toting Italian mobsters without the slightest attempt to change their accents. The film predictably bombed at the box office.

  Apart from impersonating Harold Wilson on a Private Eye floppy disc, a stint helping to organise the War on Want Christmas appeal, and a failed attempt by TV producer Dennis Main Wilson to interest the BBC in a satirical show consisting of Peter, Marty Feldman and Spike Milligan sitting in a pub commenting on the week’s news, Peter’s only other project that year had been a collaboratiith screenwriter Claude Harz, the ex-husband of Tuesday Weld. Together they sat in Peter’s house and wrote a doomed film script entitled It Sucks!, about a hoover that takes over the world. Peter had met Harz in America in 1973 after the writer had started seeing Dudley’s ex-girlfriend Lysie Hastings. He felt that Harz might be just the man to galvanise a depressed comedian back to work. ‘He was trying to get back into the process of writing,’ explains Harz. ‘He was totally different from me – I’m very disciplined, I turn up every morning and I write solidly for five hours. Peter wanted someone who could make him do that. He was also looking for a transcriber – he found typing things out very boring; even going back to revise material was dull to him. He used to march round the room improvising. Even when he was drunk he could be the funniest person in the world ever, but that wasn’t consistently the case: some days he was just too drunk. He was fantastic company and incredibly generous – he once bought Lysie a transatlantic air ticket so that she could join me – but he was terminally bored with life. Sometimes you’d see it in his eyes. No matter what happened, however exciting, however funny, the break in the boredom was only momentary for him.’

  When not writing with Harz, Peter maintained a small but respectable income by appearing on chat shows. He told Russell Harty in October 1975 about his lack of energy. ‘Have you come back to England to recharge your batteries?’ asked Harty. ‘If I could find them, I’d recharge them,’ Peter replied. Four months later he turned up on Parkinson in a safari suit and Donny Osmond cap, his hair noticeably greyer and his waistline thicker, shaking visibly. ‘It was a mixture of nerves, alcohol abuse and various other substance abuses,’ recalls Parkinson. Peter explained that since returning from America he’d ‘just been inside watching the telly and reading the paper,’ and that his plans for the future involved ‘doing some more resting.’ Admittedly the house in Perrin’s Walk was taking up some of his time, partly because it had started to slip slowly down the hill and needed reinforcing, and partly because he was engaged in a topiary sculpture on the tree outside the front door, turning it into a two-fingered gesture to the world. Also, the criminal occupant of Kenwood Cottage, despite having kept his promise and departed, had simply given way to a further bunch of squatters; whom Peter only managed to evict after a protracted negotiation involving an extremely large builder friend before finally being able to sell the property.

  In the main, though, Peter’s relative inactivity was symptomatic of an ever-deepening malaise. ‘He was a classic example of the addict not being able to tell his doctor the extent of his addiction,’ explains Sid Gottlieb. ‘He might say to me, “God, I had a rough night last night, you know I must have killed half a bottle of vodka.” And I would say, “Peter, for Christ’s sake, why do you talk to me like that? You must have half a bottle of vodka before brushing your teeth every day. If you’re talking about a rough night last night, that means, what? Six bottles? Why can’t you just tell me? I need to know, because it’s a measure of the danger to your liver.’ Gradually Gottlieb and Judy had worked on Peter, steadily chipping away at his fatalistic desire to continue drinking.

  It was a huge task. On his visits to the Private Eye offices, Peter had fallen in with a journalist named Martin Tomkinson, a big, burly, bearded northerner who alone among olleagues liked to go out for a lunchtime drink; the magazine was no longer put together in the pub, because most the the rest of the staff had been forced to give up alcohol on medical advice. Once in his cups Peter’s charm would evaporate, and he would rile Tomkinson deliberately, almost as if he were trying to goad the journalist into punching his lights out. Tomkinson had an Asian wife, and on one occasion Peter purposely went into a tirade about the benefits of apartheid, which was not a cause for which he had ever shown the slightest sympathy. ‘He went on and on about it, like a dentist with a drill who’s found the weak spot,’ recalls Tomkinson. Eventually, Tomkinson lost his rag and attacked Peter with a bar stool, but was so drunk that he missed his intended target and completely destroyed one of the Coach and Horses’ chandeliers instead; which was fortunate, as Peter was far too drunk to move out of the way. The following day Norman the barman, who had barred Tomkinson on the spot but had subsequently relented on account of the journalist’s size, explained: ‘You’re a stupid cunt. Peter always does that to people. He just winds them up.’ A sober Peter did at least telephone to apologise.

  On other occasions Peter tried to persuade Tomkinson to come with him to tacky massage parlours after lunch, and find the most unattractive, unappetising girls they could. ‘I refused, and he would say, “You’ve got to come with me, I can’t walk.” I would assist his stumbling figure to the entrance of these establishments, push him through the door and then flee. It was actually quite frightening sometimes to observe the intense loneliness within him. I think he felt a huge inner void that terrified him. Booze went some way to palliating this terror, though it may well have provoked d
ifferent fears and terrors. He was finding it increasingly difficult to interest himself in himself or anything else. Horses, girls, football – nothing really seemed to work.’ Another fellow Eye journalist of the period, Peter McKay, remembers not only that Peter visited massage parlours, but also that ‘he knew to the nearest comma the humbug phraseology to condemn such behaviour.’6

  To add to Peter’s depression, Private Eye itself was seriously threatened with closure in 1976. The magazine had libelled the millionaire James Goldsmith – who had been a friend of the murderer Lord Lucan – by repeating a mistaken assertion from The Sunday Times that Goldsmith had been present at a meeting of Lucan’s friends convened to help the fugitive peer escape justice. Goldsmith, who had ambitions to start up a news magazine of his own, decided not just to sue for damages in the conventional manner, but to crush Private Eye utterly with a massive legal salvo. In his first barrage of writs no fewer than sixty-three wholesale newsagents were sued for distributing the magazine, including three which had never stocked it and one which was owned by Goldsmith himself. Richard Ingrams, the editor, and Patrick Marnham, the offending journalist, were sued for the antiquated offence of criminal libel, which carried a custodial sentence. No one was quite sure why Goldsmith was pursuing the case so ferociously. There were various theories: the Eye’s investigations into his financial dealings were thought by some to have angered him; others believed David Frost’s assertion that Goldsmith had offered to assist his friend, the much-satirised Prime Minister Harold Wilson, by ridding him of ‘this turbulent magazine’. Certainly Wilson attempted unsuccessfully to ennoble Goldsmith soon afterwards. Whatever the reason, Goldsmith was a fearsome opponent. He proceeded to se over further allegations that the Eye was confident of defending, whereupon key defence witnesses hurriedly reversed their testimony or fled the country.

  Peter’s traditional behaviour when Private Eye was threatened with legal disaster was to ride to the rescue, dispensing confidence and bravado all round. On this occasion, however, there were fears in the Eye office that Peter might be at too low an ebb to resist the enemy. ‘The regular staff were concerned that Cookie might sell them out,’ recalls Martin Tomkinson. ‘When he came round to visit there was an undoubted tension.’ A friend of Goldsmith’s, Simon Fraser, contacted Peter to say that he wanted to buy the magazine. Peter – although suspicious that this was a Goldsmith bid in disguise – went along to see what terms were on offer. Discreet measures were taken by the magazine’s accounting staff to hinder any sale. Fortunately for Private Eye, Simon Fraser brought a business partner with him, whose name was also Simon Fraser. Peter was quite unable to take seriously the idea of negotiating with two men called Simon Fraser, so the meeting dissolved into farce. Subsequently Peter went to see Goldsmith himself, without telling anyone, to see if he could identify the source of the millionaire’s extreme displeasure. ‘He was a very unpleasant man,’ Peter decided. ‘He wanted an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Peter’s resolve was stiffened by Goldsmith’s attitude, and any hope the tycoon might have had of acquiring the Eye was lost.

  In the event the case simply became bogged down in the Dickensian procedural mire that passes for a legal system in this country, and Goldsmith had to settle out of court for £30,000 in damages. He had set so many actions in train that the lawyers would have been able to keep the various cases going for decades. The ‘Goldenballs’ readers’ appeal raised most of the money, with contributions coming in from such notables as Sir Alec Guinness, the Earl of Lichfield, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, Reginald Bosanquet, Tiny Rowland and several local Liberal and Labour parties. Peter, his spirits recovered, had taken to betting on the outcomes of the various hearings, and had devised a plan to place the entire ‘Goldenballs’ Fund on Goldsmith to win at evens. That way, if Goldsmith won, the fund would have been doubled, and if he had lost, it would not have been needed anyway. When the case collapsed, Peter contented himself instead with organising a fundraising concert to pay off the remainder of the debt, at which he finally and joyously resumed his double act with Dudley.

  Peter had only seen Dudley once since leaving him behind in Los Angeles twelve months previously. At Christmas he and Judy had holidayed in Montego Bay, and had called in on Dudley – who was staying in New York – on the way back. There they had agreed to make a ‘farewell’ appearance on US TV’s Saturday Night Live, hosted by Chevy Chase, and had performed One Leg Too Few, Frog and Peach and an impression of Sonny and Cher. Peter had continued trying to persuade Dudley to come back, and had even come up with a film idea which he wanted to direct, starring Dudley as a murderer; but to no avail. In April he had tried to entice his former partner back to appear in the Amnesty International benefit A Poke in the Eye with a Sharp Stick, but Dudley didn’t come. Peter did his miner monologue, appeared in a Monty Python sketch, and took part in the Fringe Shakespeare sketch So That’s the Way You Like It with Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Terry Jones.

  The change in Peter after Dudley’s return was immediately obvious. He dieted enthusiastically from December 1976 onward, losing thirty pounds in three months; and the next time he appeared on Russell Harty, he was conspicuously drinking from a can of Fresca Sugar-Free Lemon (‘It causes death in rats,’ he announced cheerfully). Derek and Clive were put into abeyance – they had, after all, served their purpose – and Peter and Dudley immediately set to work on The Hound of the Baskervilles. They were both pleased to be writing together again on a major project, and worked enthusiastically and committedly for eight hours a day, dividing their time between London and Los Angeles so that each man could spent at least some time with his family. The script, they announced, would reinterpret the tale from the hound’s point of view. Certainly, Peter felt the weight of expectation (‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’ Russell Harty asked him; ‘A little boy,’ replied Peter) but he was also hopeful that this time they could come up with a genuinely popular, mainstream product.

  Suddenly, Peter’s old drive to work all the hours that God sends was back: from 31 January 1977 onwards he contributed an entire page of jokes every week to the Daily Mail, entitled Peter Cook’s Monday Morning Feeling, filing it from California if necessary. It came complete with his own badly-drawn but witty cartoons, under the heading I Can’t Draw Either, which tended to be high-quality one-liners in speech bubbles rather than visually based ideas – for instance:

  ‘The problem is that my wife understands me.’

  ‘I like a man who can hold my drink.’

  ‘I went to the University of Life – and I was chucked out.’

  ‘I’m leaving my wife.’ ‘Who to?’

  ‘If there’s such a thing as a racing certainty, it’s that there’s no such thing as a racing certainty.’

  The text of the column was primarily news-based, and substantially right-wing in tone. Targets included the Labour Party, the new PM James Callaghan, the Liberals, Peter Jay, Marcia Williams, Jimmy Carter, the Grunwick Trades Unions, the Social Contract, the EC, free collective bargaining, declining manners, the ‘well-known murderer’ Yasser Arafat, the Sex Pistols, pornography (while simultaneously defending the right to publish it, and with no mention of Peter’s own avid consumption), further immigration, and the notion that the problems of Africa are entirely the result of racism and colonialism as opposed to tribalism. Although Peter was always fairly conservative with a small ‘c’, in this instance he was almost certainly emphasising his more old-fashioned opinions in order to satisfy his employer’s editorial policy. ‘I felt bogus about having opinions,’7 he admitted when asked about the column years later. The Mail’s management was pleased, especially by the lack of swear words. They cut almost nothing from it, although the famous LBJ assertion that Gerald Fordouldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time was deemed too strong for the paper’s readers.

  The rest of the column was taken up with genial showbiz taunts. Peter offered to pay £5 to charity every time Michael Parkinson managed to get through an e
ntire programme without saying the word ‘Barnsley’, which earned him a further booking on Parkinson; and he initiated a debate as to whether Russell Harty had ever seen his own bottom, which earned him another appearance on Harty’s show too. After discussing the lives of the early saints, including one named ‘Sexburga’, Peter rechristened his wife ‘Judy Sexburga Cook’ and made her into a regular character in the column (she, in response, called him ‘Your Holiness’). There were also one or two wild mental leaps more characteristic of the familiar Peter Cook: the suggestion that ‘God is a benign drunk and the world is his hangover’, for instance, or the assertion that ‘I am gay and have not always been faithful to Dudley’. Peter was getting so keen on the journalistic idiom that in March he tried his hand at writing a major story for the news pages: an exposé of expense-fiddling by the Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody. Sadly, this experiment ended in disaster, when Mrs Dunwoody successfully initiated legal action. The fact that she was later revealed to be an inveterate expenses-fiddler was little consolation.

  Peter and Dudley’s performing partnership, meanwhile, was back in full swing. Early in 1977 they appeared in a televised charity gala before Princess Anne. Peter recalled later that ‘She passed gracefully down the line and paused briefly in front of Dudley and me looking understandably baffled. After a few moments’ silence I decided to break the ice and said: “My name is Stewart Granger and this is Mickey Rooney.” She smiled, and quipped: “You’re not.”’8 The pair went on to perform One Leg Too Few in an ATV special, Once upon a Century; in May they appeared together again in The Mermaid Frolics, that year’s Amnesty International show; and in the same month they recorded some sketches for an American TV special about the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

  By this time the backer of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Michael White, had selected a director to start work on the film. It was a highly unusual choice, but one that Peter and Dudley liked the sound of: Paul Morrisey, an American former protégé of Andy Warhol, who was chiefly famous for making independent art house pictures, but whose hobby was his detailed passion for British film comedies, particularly the Carry On series. Morrisey’s involvement promised to contribute both kitsch intelligence and an awareness of mainstream tastes; at least, that was the idea on paper.