Both Ingrams and Hislop kept a tight rein on Peter’s scatological tendencies, and edited out any swearwords that crept into his contributions. ‘I’d have loved to get Barry McKenzie back,’ said Peter wistfully. ‘I had vague talks with Barry Humphries, but he’s a superstar now, and anyway Ian didn’t want it.’ Peter always carried with him a tattered copy of an ancient spanking mag, containing a picture of a man whom he swore looked like Ted Heath. Hislop didn’t want that either. When explicit nude photographs of the Duchess of York did the rounds (long before the Duchess’s infamous toe-sucking incident) Peter was mischievously desperate to publish them; again, the proprietor was overruled by his staff.
Obviously, Peter’s alcohol intake tended to regulate both the quantity and the quality of his Eye work. Barry Fantoni believes that the Sir Herbert Gussett letters, which parodied pompously old-fashioned letters sent to the Telegraph and tended to begin with phrases such as ‘Those of us who have died in two world wars’, actually got drunker as their author did. Peter would come into the office clutching a briefcase containing a bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag, which he would drink during writing sessions. He liked to sit in the corner of the room, perched on the back of a swivel chair that was as well-lubricated as he was, and when sufficiently drunk would sometimes find himself facing the wall. ‘To be honest, if Cookie was pissed it was a complete waste of time,’ admits Ian Hislop. ‘I mean whatever the rumours, people that are completely pissed just aren’t funny.’
When Peter was on song, though, he was as funny as he’d ever been in the early sixties. Whenever there was a formal dinner or leaving do he would stand up and deliver an impromptu speech, an event which the staff would anticipate with enormous eagerness. One such performance concerned a bottle of aftershave called ‘Mandate’ that he’d found in the office, which he accused Christopher Booker of slapping on indiscriminately in search of added masculinity; another placed the journalist Francis Wheen in an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini, enjoying a sexual encounter with a fat colleague on the London to Oxford train. Peter’s finest speech, however, was undoubtedly the one he delivered early in 1987, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, at Private Eye’s delayed twenty-fifth anniversary lunch. ‘There were all these other speeches first,’ recalls Ian Hislop. ‘I’d given this rather wooden one which I’d prepared too hard. But Cookie had been reading the menu during the speeches, and one of the items on the menu was sautéed potatoes. Instead of talking about the Eye he got up and did twenty minutes on sautéed potatoes. It was just brilliant. I was sitting next to Willie Rushton, who was crying with laughter and saying, “This is the funniest man alive.”’ Rushton himself remembered ‘looking over, and there was Andrew Osmond. He was staring, his veins were standing out and he had that sort of righteous grin that chimpanzees used to have when they were fired into space: it was fear, fear that he was going to die laughing because he couldn’t breathe anymore.’ According to Auberon Waugh, ‘It was absolute genius. Every single line was totally inspired. And I can’t remember a word of it.’44 Ian Hislop, who also cannot recall a single joke, points out that ‘Everybody else had put a huge amount of effort into these speeches, but Peter just did it straight off the cuff.’
Or did he? ‘Brilliant, hilarious stuff it was,’ agrees Andrew Osmond, ‘but here’s the interesting thing. Just before the speech I was talking to him, and I noticed that under his arm, among the newspapers, was an A4 pad with pages and pages of fast, messy handwriting. He’d written the whole thing out beforehand – probably that very morning.’ It was a conjuring trick; Peter had secured a copy of the menu in advance. A few years later, Osmond observed the same phenomenon at the Eye’s thirtieth anniversary party, at the National Liberal Club in 1991: ‘I happened to be standing beside him again, just prior to the speeches, and there again were the pages of writing. This time he was visibly nervous, edgy, perspiring. Peter was supposed to follow Ian Hislop, who went on rather long and got a few laughs. But when the moment came, Peter just signed off with a one-liner. Something in the atmosphere, the huge boring room, I don’t know what, had convinced him the magic wouldn’t work.’ For all his apparent nonchalance about whatever project he was working on, Peter’s general confidence level was, in fact, usually conditioned by patterns of success or failure in his professional life; 1987 was one of his better years, 1991 one of his more disastrous. Also, that year saw an acrimonious court hearing in the wake of his second divorce. But the fact that he was putting so much clandestine effort into preparing the speeches at all, in Osmond’s opinion, ‘makes his life, his achievement, all the more splendid and heroic. A huge, fantastic, all-consuming work of art.’
That Peter was still functioning at all by the late 1980s was much to the credit of his new girlfriend, Lin Chong. A Malaysian Chinese with a handicapped daughter, and separated from her husband, she had met him as far back as 1982 at Stocks, where she had been invited as a friend and former assistant to Victor Lownes. She had been playing backgammon, and he had come over and moved the pieces. ‘He was drunk, very drunk,’45 she says. Peter had discovered that she lived close to him, in Old Brewery Mews in Hampstead. She was, he said, ‘a nerveless gambler’,46 a freelance property consultant who invested acutely in Cameron Mackintosh musicals such as Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. She was also a ‘name’ at Lloyds. She was discreet, strong-willed, proud, quiet, affectionate and possessed of a fearsome temper when roused. Their relationship did not start properly until a year-and-a-half later, in November 1983. Before then they would bump into each other in Hampstead from time to time, until eventually she invited him for coffee at her ‘doll’s house’ and he returned the favour.
Lin was stunned by the chaos of Perrin’s Walk. ‘How could anyone live in this mess? I felt it was so sad to live in a beautiful house this way. I felt so sad for the man. His wife had left him to live in the country. He had no-one giving him any family life.’47 Unaware that he had all but driven his wife away and that he was too ashamed to let his daughters into the squalor of his house, it seemed to Lin that Peter had been abandoned by his loved ones. She started tidying up after him; he told the other women in his life that she was a cleaner. He was alternately grateful and abusive for her efforts. ‘He could be very aggressive. He would tell me to eff off or mind my own business. It hurt at the time, but he was sorry afterwards.’48
Gradually, Peter’s annoyance at the woman who had determinedly appointed herself to look after him turned to dependence, and dependence in due course to love. She became part of that select group of women who received his undiluted affection rather than a defensive barrage of humour. ‘In a funny way I had become a part of his life that he valued. For the first time, he opened a tiny door to himself. We talked like normal people about our families. He wasn’t being funny or hyperactive; he was just vulnerable. When it was time for me to go home, he didn’t grab me or fall over me, he just reached out his hand and said, “Please stay”. I regretted it the next day. Inevitably, I started getting hurt and jealous. A lot of his girlfriends were Bunnies. He admitted that he liked tarts: blondes, short skirts, fish-net stockings. I just didn’t fit into his girlfriend mode.’ Lin made it clear that if he wanted to go out with her, the other girlfriends would have to go. ‘He said he would give them all up – except for two. It seemed reasonable at the time, but I found I couldn’t cope. On the nights I wasn’t with him, I would be eaten up with jealousy in my own little house.’49
The two girlfriends in question were almost certainly Ciara Parkes and Sandy Grizzle, who provided friendship and sex respectively. Ciara, the object of his romantic infatuation, solved the problem herself by changing job and moving into her boyfriend’s house, and then failing to pass on her new numbers. The situation, she felt, was getting too complicated, and she was after all the same age as his daughters. Peter was extremely upset: one of Sven’s depressed nocturnal calls to LBC complained that Ingeborg, his girlfriend from the dry cleaners, had found someone else and tha
t he ‘didn’t know what to do’:
Bull:
Maybe we’ll play you a little record to cheer you up later on.
Sven:
Not fish.
Bull:
No no, no fish.
Sven:
No Marion.
Sandy Grizzle was dropped soon afterwards, and marked the end of their affair by telling all in lurid fashion to the Daily Star. In a two-page spread headed ‘Captain Kinky – He And His Porno Pals Wanted A Gang Bang’, her story related a legally cautious non-event of an orgy that had taken place in 1985, just after she and Peter had split up. ‘What the lusty showbiz rich and influential men had in mind is what’s known in porno circles as the “chocolate sandwich” – a black and white girl together having a bonk, or a black girl between two men,’ breathed the paper excitedly. The mysterious ‘Captain Kinky’ was, apparently, the anonymous organiser of the orgy. ‘Stunning Sandy Grizzle’ told the Star: ‘Although I’d finished with Peter, the Captain asked Amanda and me round to his house for a party, and he told us Peter would be there. But when we got there it was just all men. Me and Amanda were the only girls there.’ The writer of the piece added: ‘What those men – all prominent film directors – had in mind for the two girls was nothing short of disgusting. “It wasn’t Peter,” says Sandy. “He was a bit drunk in the corner. It was the other blokes.”’50
The mysterious ‘Captain’ was, in fact, easily identifiable as Rainbow George. The Daily Star had got it horribly wrong, accusing George – who had failed even to get a look-in – of being the sexual mastermind behind the whole thing. The idea that his house was populated exclusively by prominent film directors, as opposed to tea-stained tramps, was even more fantastic than the notion that the Rainbow Party might one day win a by-election. An aggrieved George sued for libel, but had neither the financial resources nor the organisational capacities – he tried to represent himself – to mount a successful case; the action was finally struck out for ‘inordinate and inexcusable delay’. Peter thought that his first ever kiss-and-tell was hilarious, especially the fact that George had managed to lose out yet again. Judy, who still regarded herself very much as a married woman, found the piece humiliating, and the episode drove another wedge between them. ‘I felt belittled,’ she says. ‘I overreacted to it, and I wish I’d reacted differently.’ Nonetheless Peter continued to visit his wife, and to ring her every day.
According to George, ‘Judy was definitely the love of his life, and I don’t think he ever got over their relationship coming to an end really. He used to keep all her clothes, and shoes, and photographs.’ Once, George came upon Peter sitting on his bed sobbing, all Judy’s clothes laid out on the bedsheets around him. ‘Lin was perfect for Peter because he was already on a self-destruct course with drink, and she was very good at looking after him. He loved her, make no mistake about that, though she could never stop his drinking. But Judy represented something different from Lin, and he could never get her out of his bones. He said to me many times over the years that Judy was the ultimate love of his life.’51
Gradually though, Lin squeezed out the competition with a combination of unconditional love and sheer determination. George recalls that ‘one row was so big that the police were called. Theirs could be a very stormy relationship.’ Lin admitthat ‘I left him so many times you can’t imagine – but Peter usually asked me to come back.’
According to Sid Gottlieb, ‘Lin and Peter were two different species biologically, let alone culturally, let alone in terms of their sophistication. It was a measure of Peter’s despair that at his most abject there was Lin, and there were no conditions attached to her love. She gave everything and he appreciated that.’ Peter himself said that ‘very simply, it’s nice to have a person you love around you. God, this sounds boring, but she’s very good for me because she cares for me. She’s very different, but touch wood without legs on, it works.’52 Lin herself admits that she knew nothing of Beyond the Fringe, or Private Eye, or the Establishment Club: ‘I knew who he was, of course, but I didn’t really know his work, so there was nothing for me to be in awe of. To me he was a lonely person who needed someone to talk to at 3 a.m.’53 She did his washing, his ironing, his gardening and his typing. When he appeared on TV, she sat behind the camera, quietly encouraging. She followed behind him on the golf course, absorbing his every word ‘as though it was the Bible’.54
According to George, ‘I honestly believe that if it wasn’t for Lin, Peter wouldn’t have lived to see his fiftieth birthday, let alone his fifty-seventh.’56 She set herself – as so many had done before her – the fruitless task of helping him combat his drink habit. She telephoned friends like Barry Fantoni for advice, and during the great trough of depression that accompanied the illness of his father, she took Richard Ingrams out to lunch in search of assistance, before finally persuading Peter to go back into the Eye. She found it difficult to believe that so many people, including Peter himself, appeared to have abandoned him to his fate. ‘Peter would notice my tears – I couldn’t help it – if I came in and saw a bottle by his side, and he would go and put it in the fridge. He did try. I could understand what he meant when he said he could tolerate people better when he had a few drinks. He was easily bored.’56 Lin proudly refused to admit the seriousness of her boyfriend’s condition in public. ‘If you mentioned the word alcoholism to her, she would have an absolute fit,’ says Richard Ingrams. ‘She seemed to regard it as a slur.’
Lin tried, too, to effect a reconciliation with Dudley. Unknown to Peter, she contacted his former partner when he came over to appear on Can We Talk?, went to see him at Claridges and tried to convey the true level of Peter’s affection for him. During the early 1980s, Dudley had not contacted Peter when he visited Britain. It was largely thanks to her efforts that Peter and Dudley saw each other socially on that occasion and thereafter. Dudley stopped short, however, at the idea of working with Peter again, which was what Peter openly wanted (‘I’d like nothing better,’57 he had repeatedly told the papers). Alexander Cohen arranged a meeting between the pair to discuss a new two-man stage show: ‘Dudley told me, “I can’t do it and I won’t do it,”’ recalls the impresario, ‘although he’d been gentlemanly enough at least to meet with Peter as I had asked.’5a>
In public, Dudley’s tone was different: ‘We could work with each other tomorrow. All one of us has to do is pick up the phone,’59 he lied to the press. Encouraged by such pronouncements and by the renewal of social contact, Peter tried to spring a surprise reunion on Dudley in Bermuda in December 1986, on a TV show hosted by Mike Bishop. ‘But the TV company couldn’t get past Dudley’s entourage of secretaries and business agents,’60 Peter admitted dolefully. Dudley regretted their split – ‘The stuff we did towards the end of our careers was not really the essence of us,’61 he later confessed – but he was not about to put himself through the mill again. He telephoned Peter and left a message suggesting that he should throw himself into his individual work instead, and realise ‘his wasted potential’. It was a message that Peter never once acknowledged having received.
The following year, Peter contributed by satellite to a US version of This Is Your Life for Dudley; then he flew out to Los Angeles to perform One Leg Too Few with him on the US TV version of Comic Relief, an occasion at which they were billed as ‘Dudley Moore and Peter Cook’ for the first time since 1965. After the show, Peter and Lin went for dinner at Spago’s restaurant with Dudley and his third wife-to-be Brogan Lane, and Peter finally apologised formally for his rudeness over the years. ‘Dudley had to get used to a new Peter who wasn’t saying hurtful things any more,’ explains Lin. ‘A Peter who was capable of sending him a fax to say “I love you” instead of teasing him about his height and his foot. I think they grew closer after that, and maybe my little intervention acted as a catalyst.’62 This analysis was somewhat undercut in 1988, when Peter flew to the USA to play a suave estate agent in a Diet Coke ad. He had got the job under false pretences, by s
ending a picture of himself looking younger and fitter than he actually was; he was so racked with nerves during the shoot that the director had to pretend to rehearse him and film that. His abject performance may have contributed to an interview he gave to Vanity Fair magazine about Dudley and his new wife. The article portrayed the pair’s house as a ‘Munchkinland’ filled with toys, china ornaments, rag dolls and teddy bears. Brogan was encapsulated as being part baby doll and part nanny. Peter’s contribution was to describe her as ‘vacuous’ and to point out her physical resemblance to Mick Jagger. ‘She has had a special boot made for Dudley’s foot. She marches him up and down the side of the Grand Canyon before breakfast,’ he added.
The piece left Dudley ‘severely pissed off – I’m getting fucking tired of it,’63 he snapped. Peter tried to explain that his remarks had been made off the record, but Brogan, according to Dudley, thought that his contribution was extremely insulting: ‘You know, when you’re very liberal and straightforward and sincere, and just plain nice from Virginia, that sort of thing, well she thought it was quite evil.’64 When Dudley flew over to Britain for his sister’s sixtieth birthday in 1989, he was asked to appear with Peter at that year’s Amnesty show, The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball. He really didn’t want to do it, but John Cleth rote to him to demand ‘if your Eminence would be prepared to show up at this thing; or are you the contemptible little piece of shit that the Archbishop of Canterbury says you really are?’ Cleese’s apparently primitive psychology succeeded, and Dudley reluctantly agreed to appear in yet another performance of One Leg Too Few and Frog and Peach. Brogan, however, refused to attend the event.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 62