The second part of the show indicated Peter’s determination to emphasise his versatility. He appeared first as Professor Heinrich Globnick, a marvellous teutonic ant expert whose central premise was that ‘ant society is a shambles’. Give an ant a bottle of vodka, he explained, and it will become incapable of operating heavy machinery. Questioned about the sex life of the ant, he replied: ‘Basically . . . it is a shambles.’ The presenter, played by Rowan Atkinson, finally tried to wind up the interview:
Presenter:
Well Professor, I’m sure we could go on all night talking about ants.
Globnick:
No we couldn’t. We’ve hammered the subject into the ground.
Peter re-appeared next as cowboy Lee van Wrangler in a musical number during which he related his drunken father’s dying advice – advice which went on and on, getting more and more useless and specific. The song even had a punchline, the final piece of advice being ‘If you’ve got any sense son, don’t take my advice.’
As if to prove that Peter had moved beyond revisiting old ideas and characters himself, the next sketch actually cast Rowan Atkinson as E. L. Wisty, or at least an ill-disguised version of him, buttonholing Terry Jones in a railway compartment:
Atkinson:
Hello . . . Are you gay?
Jones:
No . . . no, I’m not gay.
Atkinson:
Nor am I.
The next sketch, however, actually did revisit an old idea, being a straight remake of the Establishment Club film purporting to be the out-takes of Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich in 1938. Peter appeared as the camp film director and John Cleese played Chamberlain, utterly unable to grasp the required sequence of: 1. Getting out of the plane; 2. Waving the piece of paper; and 3. Making the speech.
The third and final part contained two new items and one old. The Amnesiacs saw Peter and Beryl Reid as a television-obsessed couple who could never remember any actor’s name or what else they’d been in, while their son (who knew all the answers) couldn’t get a word in edgeways. ‘I really adored that,’ says Humphrey Barclay. ‘It was delicious, partly because it was kept to a reasonable length.’ Another sketch followed with Rowan Atkinson playing a part that Peter might have been expected to take: that of a creepy, sex-fixated rural shopkeeper who intimidates a customer newly arrived in the village from London, played by Paula Wilcox. The idea clearly derived from Peter and Judy’s agreement to move towards a rural lifestyle. The grand finale of Peter Cook & Co. featured E. L. Wisty at last, singing Lovely Lady of the Roses, the B-side of his 1965 single The Ballad of Spotty Muldoon. After a brief ramble about his paranormal powers, seated at his customary park bench, a huge pink set populated by an all-girl dance troupe – the Wistyettes – was unveiled. A giant rose bloomed open to reveal a pink-clad Wisty, who sang the words: ‘Underneath the mac and trousers is a wonderful human being, if you just treat him right.’
Peter worked furiously hard at promoting the show before its September release. He took Stephen Pile to a Tottenham game for The Sunday Times, and surprised the writer not just by screaming abuse at the players and the referee, but also by shouting ‘Millwall supporters! Hooligans!’ at a party of sedate old ladies stepping on to a zebra crossing on the way to the game. He sat down and wrote an E. L. Wisty article for the TV Times, to tie in with the routine about the character’s paranormal powers:
All of us at one time or another have had a sense déja vu, a feeling that this has happened before that this has happened before.20
As it turned out, the critics were divided on the subject of Peter Cook & Co., but most agreed that it had been a triumph. ‘Twice as fresh and twice as funny as the usual jaded junk’ said the Daily Mail. ‘He could not have done better’ said the Guardian. The Express called the show ‘dazzling’ and claimed that ‘It restores hope for the survival of television comedy’, before predicting that ‘Mr Cook will rapidly be restored in the nation’s affections.’ The Times offered the opinion that ‘Cook writes sketches as brilliantly as ever (though he badly needs an editor).’ The Telegraph dissented, complaining that ‘Every sketch went on too long and fizzled out in an unconvincing or routine pay-off’, while the Evening News summed it up as ‘a series of overlong sketches which didn’t sustain the interest’. America, though, lapped the show up unconditionally, and showered Peter with trophies, including a gold medal at the New York Film and Television Festival and an International Emmy Award Nomination. The resurrection of Peter’s career was proceeding apace. London Weekend was naturally delighted, and asked for a whole series of Peter Cook & Co., but Peter stalled. Hollywood still beckoned, an unwanted but nonetheless unfulfilled challenge. Like a spider making a final, brave effort to climb out of the bath, he was determined to give it one more try.
While waiting for work on The Two of Us to restart (it had been delayed by an American actors’ strike), Peter and Bernard McKenna, together with Graham Chapman of Monty Python, negotiated a contract with Orion Films to write Yellowbeard, a spoof pirate epic in which Chapman would take the lead and Peter would co-star. The project had been around for a while – it had originally been suggested many years previously by Keith Moon – but finance now became available following Chapman’s success in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The trio set to work immediately. There was plenty of other work over the summer: Peter when sober and in a good mood was a fearsomely energetic figure, every piston and cogwheel racing full steam ahead. He became involved in Spike Milligan’s BBC series Q9, and wrote a foreword for Paula Yates’s book Rock Stars in Their Underpants, which included such gems as ‘Some men are born in their underwear and some have underwear thrust upon them’, ‘It is a measure of our liberty that such a work would not be allowed in the Soviet Union’, and, with regard to the long-lost art of pantie-reading, ‘As a Matelot on the cusp I have never really been compatible with Dudley Moore, who is a typical Boxer with Y-fronts rising.’
He also got a last-minute job as the star of the Barclay’s Bank commercials, following the death of Peter Sellers in July, playing a conman called Harry Hodgers. Sellers’ death badly upset him, and he fired off a furious letter to the Guardian after the paper published an appreciation by the Boulting brothers which he felt to be insufficiently generous. He was hardly better pleased to be offered the part of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther film that Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers had been planning, especially when he found out that Dudley had already turned it down. ‘Nobody takes over from Sellers,’ he insisted, before going on to point out that he would, however, be perfectly happy to take over from Jacques Cousteau.
Somehow, Peter found time to write yet further letters to the press, of a more light-hearted nature, such as this offer to the New Statesman:
I would be interested in financing the film being prepared by the Agnes Varda Women’s Collective. Ms Lloyd outlines a scene in which ‘a literary editor of middle years is stripped naked, covered in warm honey and suspended by his genitalia from a chandelier; whereupon a swarm of bees flies in through the window.’ Before sending a cheque I would like an assurance that this is not to be yet another bee-ist exploitation movie like The Swarm. I would not be a party to any endeavour that perpetuated the sexist myth of the idle drone and I trust that the film will depict the profoundly matriarchal society of bees in an accurate light. There must of course be no cruelty to the bees.
Perhaps most incredibly of all, given the amount of work he was doing elsewhere, in August 1980 Peter presented Judy with a surprise: Mitchell Leys Farm, a beautiful country cottage in the quiet Buckinghamshire village of Wingrave. There was stabling for horses, and plenty of room for the menagerie of other animals that Judy required to occupy her time and her unemployed maternal instincts. Peter had discovered it himself, he explained, and arranged the entire purchase through his offshore company. ‘I was really touched,’ says Judy. Peter pronounced himself thrilled. ‘It’s exactly what we have been looking for. A middle-class dream come true,’ h
e said.21 The landlord of the Rose and Crown pronounced his new tomato juice-drinking customer ‘a super bloke’. Coming from someone so city-bound that he regarded Tooting as the equivalent of West Africa, the purchase seemed a remarkably generous gesture on Peter’s part. Of course he spent most of the week working in London and living at Perrin’s Walk, but he came up every weekend; however he had developed the habit of playing a lot of tennis on Saturdays and Sundays, and Judy did not see as much of him as she would have liked.
That autumn, she made a rather unpleasant discovery. Wingrave, it transpired, was quite close to Stocks. It had not been Peter, but Victor Lownes who had found Mitchell Leys Farm. It was Lownes that he had been playing tennis with – if, indeed, that is what he had been doing. ‘I hadn’t seen the wood for the trees,’ she says regretfully. Peter was desperately keen to show her that all was above board, and took Judy with him to Stocks, where there were indeed tennis courts – as well as scores of Bunny girls. Despite his protestations, the discovery could not help but throw a dark shadow across their relationship; Peter had always previously told Judy the truth of his indiscretions, even if it sometimes took him a while to get round to it. This seemed underhand.
America remained a further point of unease between them. Peter sat idly waiting for the call throughout the autumn, before finally being asked if he’d like to return to LA just after Christmas. The fact of the matter was that he didn’t really want to go. He explained: ‘When I signed for the pilot of this series, I was told: “If the show succeeds, you are locked in for five years,” which I consider to be a cruel and unusual punishment. I did the pilot never believing for a moment it would go into a series – the chances, I was told, were 100–1 against. Then I could get home to my wife Judy and my two daughters. My only hope is that after thirteen weeks and vast critical acclaim it will be cancelled, with a terrific row.’22 Peter was being disingenuous again; faced with a direct choice between The Two of Us and making further episodes of Peter Cook & Co., he had deliberately chosen the former, even though he knew he would hate it, because it was a nut he just had to crack (and also because CBS were prepared to pay him £400,000 to crack it). Both Judy and his friends from Alcoholics Anonymous were apprehensive about his going. ‘He’d built up such a good back-up in London,’ explains Judy. ‘He hadn’t had a drink for nearly two years. But he needed to be in touch with people who could keep him on the wagon. For Peter, America could be like a candy shop. We had big discussions about it. He was seriously depressed about it – he really didn’t want to live over there.’ Compelled to give it one more try nonetheless, Peter left in January 1981. Judy did not go with him – she had her animals to look after, and anyway, she could not face America again after the tribulations of the previous trip.
At first, The Two of Us went well. Peter made two more pilots, with a view to selecting a co-star, and Mimi Kennedy was chosen from the second of them. Four trial shows were transmitted in April, garnering excellent reviews and big audiences. It shot to number four in the ratings, bringing in thirty million viewers a week, and a further twenty-four shows were scheduled for September. He stayed with Brenda Vaccaro rather than hiring a hotel suite, a domestic environment which shielded him somewhat from the more obvious temptations on offer, and he telephoned Judy every night. When he returned to Wingrave in the summer he admitted to his wife that he had indeed started drinking again – but only a small amount, he said, and it was all under control. One day the telephone rang, and Judy answered it; it was Mimi Kennedy, ringing to thank Peter for the flowers. ‘She didn’t even know he was married,’ says Judy. ‘When I asked him about it, he said, “Judes, I just had a crisis.” I don’t think they’d had an affair – he just had a crush on her. It wasn’t a sex thing any more with other women. He just needed affection. He constantly needed people to let him know he was worth being around, to bolster his confidence.’
In September, Peter returned to Los Angeles. Still on the crest of a wave professionally, he was reunited with Dudley for an interview with the Daily Mirror. There were jibes – ‘What’s a small, stunted ugly little Dagenham git like you doing here in this living temple to Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford?’ – but there was also a tremendous chemistry, that made a mockery of the two years they had spent apart. As Pete and Dud, they improvised an updated version of their first ever double-act:
Dud:
Farrah Fawcett-Majors managed to slip away from Ryan O’Neal the other evening, Pete. She said to me: ‘Come and be mine tonight.’ So I said to her: ‘Look here Farrah, we’ve had our laughs. On yer bike.’
Pete:
Know just what you mean, Dud. There I was watching the baseball and sucking an ice lolly in my hotel room the other evening, when there came this scratching at the window. ‘Who’s there?’ I enquired. ‘It’s me, Brooke Shields. Let me in, now.’ So I said: ‘Hoof it, Brooke. I’m busy, and what is more I’m expecting a discreet visit from Linda Lovelace.’ So she went, broken-hearted of course.
Dud:
Funny you should mention that. There I was the other evening, sitting there being barely entertained by the Jerome Carson Show, when I suddenly feel this hand on my cheek. I look up and Gawd, it’s Dolly Parton. So I says: ‘Get out of here, you hussy!’ and I throw that great, huge bra of hers . . .23
Dolly’s bra was too much for the pair of them, and they fell about laughing. The humour was only slightly undercut by the fact that what had been a series of absurd fantasies in 1965 would not actually have been such unlikely occurrences had Dudley experienced them in 1981.
Peter’s jollity, sadly, did not last. In the autumn, over its longer run, the all-important ratings of The Two of Us plummeted as fast as they had risen. Mysteriously, it failed to re-enter the top twenty, and by Christmas it had fallen out of the top forty altogether. This time, staying in a hotel, Peter was alone with his failure. His performances began to be affected by alcohol once more. He continued to talk to Judy on the phone every night, and one night she broke the news to him that her mother had died. She had been left a considerable amount of money, and she wanted to return to her Devon roots. She planned to sell the house in Wingrave, and move to the isolation of Exmoor: ‘I decided I wanted to try real countryside,’ she says. ‘At first Peter was shocked, but he came round to the idea.’ The switch was achieved extremely swiftly: Judy bought almost the first house she could find, an isolated building called Blagdon Close at Wheddon Cross. Peter nicknamed her ‘Baroness Blagdon’. It was arranged that he would take a few days out of his punishing, fifty hours-a-week schedule at Christmas 1981. A chauffeur-driven car picked him up at Heathrow and drove him straight down to Devon. When he arrived, he had to be poured out of the car. He was blind drunk.
The Two of Us staggered on to the end of its run at the beginning of March 1982, when it was scrapped by the network for the candid reason that it was ‘not doing well enough’. Exhausted and seriously dependent on the bottle again, Peter returned home to London. He was, according to his American agent John Gaines, ‘very disappointed’.24 Questioned about the failure of his sitcom, he tended to react bitterly and defensively. He insisted to the Sun that the series had not failed at all: ‘My carer is certainly not a flop. I can only tell you I have never been so lavishly over-praised by the critics.’25 On The Late Clive James, he claimed that he had left CBS, not the other way around, after his agent had disputed the size of his salary for the second year of recordings. He informed John Lloyd that he had ‘absolutely hated’ doing the show, and that he had done it as badly as he could in the hope that it would be scrapped. He suggested to the Sunday Express that he had deliberately left his golf clubs at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, in order to ensure that sod’s law would dictate the cancellation of the series and thus the loss of the clubs.
In the months that followed, Peter gave Hollywood and its ‘face-lifted androids’ a veritable tongue-lashing. ‘There’s an elitism and a snobbery in LA which is pretty insufferable,’26 he complained. ‘People are only in
terested in what you are doing, and they are always lying about what they are doing. Saying they’re busy. The people who work on films go to bed early so they’ll look good for early call in the morning. And those out of work don’t go out in case anybody accuses them of not working.’27 Peter liked to tell a multi-layered anecdote which encapsulated the world he had just left behind, about a charity benefit he had taken part in at the Radio City Music Hall, called The Night of a Hundred Stars. Gina Lollobrigida, it appeared, had claimed to have been mobbed by adoring fans. ‘What actually happened is that she tripped over her own dress. The truth is, hardly anyone recognised her. The only person who was mobbed was Larry Hagman. There was an acute shortage of liquor backstage. About halfway through the evening you had all these big, big stars knocking on each other’s dressing-rooms to see if anyone had half a bottle of vodka to spare. The only guy who had the good sense to bring some booze with him was Larry Hagman. No wonder he was mobbed.’ After the show there had been a cast party, at which the chief topic of discussion had been the sentimental standing ovation accorded to the wheelchair-bound James Cagney, which had caused the actor to cry. At about 3 am, it was realised that Cagney had not actually shown up at the party, and a search party was dispatched. An hour or so later he was found in the basement: he had left the stage by lift to tumultuous applause, but once in the basement he couldn’t get out of the lift unattended, and had been left there for hours.
The following day, Peter had paid a visit to Elizabeth Taylor in her hotel suite and found her in floods of tears. She told me that the worst thing that had ever happened in her life had just happened. “Elizabeth,” I said, “knowing your life, that must be pretty bad.” Well, it turned out that five minutes earlier, Jane Russell of the outsize boobs had come into Elizabeth’s suite and for no apparent reason had picked up an ashtray and flung it at Elizabeth’s left breast. Elizabeth started shrieking, and Jane had to be sedated and carried off to hospital. That’s the tacky side of showbusiness I loathe.’28 Pete and Dud themselves could hardly have composed a more ridiculous sequence of events. It was indeed a world that Peter loathed; but he had wanted to conquer it sufficiently to be in a position to reject it. Instead, it had rejected him.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 55