Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Miff was born George Ferrie in Edinburgh on 10 March 1911. A musician during his early life, he acquired his nickname in homage to the American trombonist ‘Miff’ Mole. The Thirties saw him recording alongside Roy Fox, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone and Carroll Gibbons at the height of the dance band craze, before deciding temporarily to set aside his trombone to form a permanent vocal trio. When Band Waggon hit the airwaves in January 1938, Miff Ferrie and the Jackdauz [sic] found themselves billed alongside comedy stars, Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch as one of the resident vocal attractions on the series. Encouraged by this success, he then formed his own combination featuring the vocal group as part of a seven-piece orchestra, The Ferrymen. With regular radio work, a Parlophone recording contract and tours of Great Britain and the Continent in his date book, Miff was riding high. Airs and Disgraces was a short-lived series based around his talents. One imagines him as a chirpy little showman in a dour sort of way. Many years later brilliant Scots comic, Chic Murray made an art form of the contradiction. Then the war intervened. Invalided out of the army, Miff acted as Musical Adviser to United States Organization, Camp Shows. His USO work involved him in auditioning hundreds of musicians and other performers as well as production administration.

  After the war Miff and his band became the resident attraction at the Windermere Club at 189 Regent Street, his activities extending to those of ‘Entertainments Director’, in which capacity he was responsible for booking the cabaret. One Friday afternoon in November 1947 a nervous Tommy Cooper went along to audition for the floor show. Few places can be more dispiriting than a performing venue without its audience, the cold emptiness a cruel champion of fear. Tommy later said, ‘Unfortunately, the act I did that day was not suitable, but Miff made a few suggestions and told me to come back in a week or two. This I did, and to my amazement I made the musicians in the band laugh. I was working from then on.’

  It is hard to know what he was thinking. His first audition act majored on a series of impressions of Hollywood stars, the comedy magic playing a minor role. The idea of the hysterical Cooper presenting a convincing parade of Jimmy Cagney, Charles Laughton and Edward G. Robinson defies belief. The route to show business as an impressionist was the most hackneyed of them all. Moreover, it was a difficult genre to burlesque. Accuracy was the keynote to success, unless you were Tony Hancock, a frustrated pretender and buffoon of a different kind, who made a big feature of his own lugubrious attempts to mimic these very names in his own stage act. Indeed he persisted with them into the mid Sixties by which time the originals were passing out of fashion. That he did so was criticized by some, but seen as an accurate reflection of what the quintessential Hancock character would purvey in a comically jaded variety act by others. Whatever, one does wonder whether somewhere along the way he witnessed the Cooper act at this stage and the idea was sewn.

  The impressions aside, little did Miff know that the trick or two Tommy also managed to fumble that Friday afternoon were the tip of an iceberg of material already waiting in the wings. The return audition was not necessarily the challenge it might have seemed to the man requesting it. In later years Miff would himself take credit for suggesting to Cooper the idea of the burlesque approach to magic, to the extent of having Tommy apparently voice the claim himself in much early publicity, interviews that Miff in fact gave or provided copy for on his client’s behalf. There may have been a genuine misunderstanding – Tommy was now too busy and too increasingly successful to be bothered – but the claim was not based on fact, as we know from the approach Tommy had already adopted in the services and at his BBC audition. More importantly, at that second audition for Ferrie the frenzied fellow in the fez achieved one of the most difficult feats in show business. He reduced the band to hysterics. Surveying the debris of imploded conjuring tricks, Miff had no option but to offer him a week’s work at a salary of fifteen pounds, while thinking to himself, ‘My God, if we could recapture that and channel it, we’ve got something that no one else is doing.’ On and off Tommy played the Windermere for fifteen weeks over the coming year, initially as a supporting attraction to the exotic Marqueez – once described as the Pavlova of the music halls and now billed as the ‘Glamorous Star of the East, featuring her famous Dance of the Seven Veils.’ From that first booking, Miff continued to mastermind his career – through countless trials and tribulations between them – to the end of his life. At this early stage a surviving script suggests that he even muscled in on the act:

  Tommy: Well, Miff, what do you think of my magic?

  Miff: Your magic?

  Tommy: Yes, you know, the way I make things disappear.

  Miff: I haven’t seen anything disappear.

  Tommy: You haven’t? (Tommy hands wrist watch over) Yours, I believe … (Then laughs head off)

  Miff: Mr Cooper …

  Tommy: (Still laughing) What’s that noise? (Looks around) Oh, it’s you. What now?

  Miff: (Handing over a pair of socks) Yours, I believe … (Tommy pulls up trousers and displays bare legs. Registers consternation, then off)

  It took Miff a while to adjust to the spotlight favouring Tommy and his few other clients at the expense of his own ego. In the early years of their partnership, he could never completely ignore an opportunity for his own self-promotion, as shown by this gratuitous attempt at humour from a standard Cooper press biography:

  About a year ago, when coming from a rehearsal, he found a policeman waiting by his car. The following conversation ensued:

  Tommy: Yes, officer.

  Policeman: I shall have to book you for a parking offence.

  Tommy: Book me? Oh, you’d better talk to Mr Ferrie, my agent.

  His progress is indeed a tribute to Miff Ferrie, who brought Tommy into the business a little over three years ago and who has kept him working ever since.

  As the years progressed and Cooper’s good fortune headed for the stratosphere, Miff was able to come to terms with his own feelings of inadequacy, although, with his background as a minor star, self-effacement would never come easily to him. In fairness, there was not a moment around the clock when this short, bespectacled Scot with the shrewd eyes behind their tinted lenses was not prepared to fight Tommy’s corner, but the relationship between them was never without its difficulties. Praise did not come as easily as reproach, while his comedy judgement proved little short of appalling, as epitomized by the time Miff sat stony-faced while Tommy demonstrated to him for the first time his classic routine with the cardboard box of ‘Hats’. After that it became a byword of the Cooper household – as well as the production crew of many a Tommy television series – that, in Gwen’s words, ‘If Miff thought it wasn’t funny, you can bet it was.’ She used to smile, conceding that when Tommy wanted to upset Miff, he’d call him George. As we shall see, there were times when things became far more serious, Tommy conducting what amounted to a war of psychological attrition against him, but Miff – ‘that little Scottish fellow sprouting red horns’, as Tommy would refer to him – stood steadfastly firm with typical native fortitude. For the magician it remained a case of ‘better the devil you know’. For all Ferrie assumed the notoriety of a monstre sacré as the power behind Cooper, and a short while later Bruce Forsyth too, he remained among his fellow agents one of the most respected players in the game.

  This is the place to lay to rest once and for all the myth of the contract that existed between performer and agent. No arrangement in show business history has been more misrepresented. Tommy always claimed that Miff signed him unwillingly to a lifetime contract that guaranteed him a wage of twenty pounds a week for the first seven years, however many shows he performed. Gwen claimed she was livid when she heard he’d signed, guaranteeing Miff fifteen per cent – as distinct from the then standard ten – into the bargain. It became the most notorious agreement of its kind since the one that kept Sid Field out of the West End, a prisoner of the provinces, until he was nudging forty. However, even had the hearsay been true, it should b
e stressed that twenty pounds was a fair recompense at a time when the average supporting magic or comedy act was earning little more than ten pounds a week.

  The original document as signed by T. F. Cooper over its pink and magenta sixpenny stamp on 28 November 1948, which is now in the possession of the author, is a totally honourable Sole Agency Agreement, as endorsed by the Council of the Agents’ Association Limited. There is nothing to stipulate that Tommy should not receive the total earnings he has achieved in any one week, minus the commission that is set at the agreed fifteen per cent. The arrangement covers an initial period of five, not seven years during which Miff is expected ‘to use all reasonable efforts to procure employment for me … and to guide and advise me with respect to my theatrical career and to act for me as Manager and Personal Representative in all matters concerning my professional interests whenever you are called upon to do so.’ It granted Miff exclusivity in the area of ‘Manager, Agent, and Personal Representative’.

  Clause Six is a key one and certainly caused the greatest aggravation to Tommy over the years:

  The period of this agreement may be extended by you (i.e. Miff) from year to year by your giving me one month’s notice in writing prior to the end of the said period or any extension of that period. Each extension and the determination of such extension shall be governed by the preceding Clause (5) except that the figure of earnings for such extended period shall be based on my earnings for the last year of the original period where only one extension takes place, or for the last extended period of one year immediately preceding the new extension, where more than one extension takes place.

  As for Clause Five, there was no reason for Tommy to quibble. It was there to protect the performer as much as the agent, giving him the opportunity to walk away had Miff failed in his obligation to provide work in any four month period that failed in less technical language to reflect his average earnings in the previous twelve months. Here it is for the record:

  Should I at any time during the term hereof fail to obtain a bona fide offer of employment (sufficient to produce for me during the time this agreement shall have run a sum not less than the equivalent of my average earnings taken over the twelve months immediately preceding the date of this agreement) from a responsible employer in a period in excess of four consecutive months, during all of which time I was ready, able and willing to accept such employment, either party hereto shall in such event have the right immediately to terminate this contract by a notice in writing to such effect sent to the other party by registered mail, provided, however, that such right shall be deemed waived by me, and any exercise thereof by me shall be ineffective if, after the expiration of any such four months period and prior to the time I attempt to exercise such right, I have received an offer of employment from a responsible employer.

  Down through the years Miff religiously exercised his renewal option and the large stack of registered envelopes gathered in Cooper’s files are their own testimony not only to the hold Miff undeniably held over him, but to the successful way in which he managed Cooper’s career from a financial standpoint. From the moment Tommy signed with Miff his whole career represented a constant upward curve – helped not a little by the meteoric rise in fees triggered by the northern club boom – until the last few years when it became eroded by ill health. On this score the client never had reason to complain. Between the time of their first meeting and the end of the financial year in April 1948, Miff had secured Tommy work worth £223.00. The following twelve months, during which the agreement came into operation, saw him earning £738.00. By the time he reached April 1950 his earnings had more than doubled to £1,586.00, and by April 1951 almost doubled again to £2,987.00.

  Tommy commenced his first week for Miff at the Windermere on 8 December 1947 and was held over for a fortnight. Almost twelve months passed before the agreement was signed. Miff appears not to have been in a hurry. On 12 February 1948 Tommy, by now living in a flat at 105 Warwick Avenue in Maida Vale, wrote to Miff: ‘I wish to thank you for all the engagements you have procured for me in the past, and would be happy if you would conduct my future business.’ While Miff continued to find bookings for him, nothing was formalized until the end of the year. On 25 November, having moved yet again to a flat at 13 Canfield Gardens off the Finchley Road, he wrote to Miff a second time. After expressing again his gratitude ‘for the help and care with which you have conducted my business in the past,’ he continues: ‘I would be very grateful if you would accept fifteen per cent commission, continuing to look after my interests in the future as personal manager unless this agreement should be terminated by mutual agreement. Hoping this is quite satisfactory and thanking you again, Yours faithfully, Tommy Cooper.’ Two days later Miff wrote to Tommy expressing his satisfaction with this arrangement and the following day the situation was formalized. On the same day he dropped Miff a note, doubtless at the manager’s suggestion, which stated, ‘I hereby give you the authority to sign all or any contracts on my behalf.’ Gwen claimed that Tommy told her he was shaking when he signed on the dotted line. There is no reason to suppose that this was anything more than the nerves of inexperience we all feel at formal turning points in our lives. It had not been a shotgun marriage.

  Why he should have misrepresented the case against Miff so vocally in the years to come is a complex matter. He certainly came to dislike the man in other respects, feeling he treated him like a schoolboy and it is not difficult to imagine this prim Scots Presbyterian in the guise of some male Jean Brodie figure, although Mary Kay described him in a letter as possessing an additional dash of Uriah Heep: ‘I recall the ghastly meetings with Miff in darkened doorways where he would pay his fees in old pound notes. He used to beckon Tommy with the first finger of his right hand and expect him to come running. He even expected Tommy to come over to him at parties where, perhaps, he was having a chat with the Duke of Edinburgh. Miff really thought he was the original Svengali and nothing pleased Tommy more than to totally ignore him.’ Ferrie may have been insensitive, even loathsome to the performing temperament – surprising since he had been a performer himself – and he may at times have been editorially wrong, but in business matters he appears never to have been ethically incorrect. Whatever Gwen may have thought in the early days, his fifteen per cent was a fair enhancement on an agent’s typical return if management duties were involved as well, and in a realistic moment towards the end of her life even she had to concede that Miff was as straight as a die.

  Two of Cooper’s early conjuring friends, Alan Alan and Bobby Bernard share a theory that Tommy spread the rumour about his contractual plight as cover for his own innate parsimony. It also explains why he never challenged Miff in the law courts as Bruce Forsyth eventually did. To do so would have exposed the lie of his own behaviour. Bruce never claimed he had been held to a punitive and restricted wage, only that his arrangement tied him unfairly to Miff for life. In the end nothing was found against Ferrie and Bruce paid £20,000.00 for the privilege of extricating himself from his clutches. Tommy would have thought twice about such expenditure. But the agent situation had its lighter side. The whole idea of paying commission to anyone preyed both on his mind and on his sense of humour. Enjoying a meal with Tommy in the late Forties after a Magic Circle show at, of all places, the Chislehurst Cricket Club, Michael Bailey saw that he was separating the cherry stones around the edge of his dessert plate. ‘What are those for?’ queried the future president of The Magic Circle, pointing towards the few set aside from the others. ‘Oh, those are for my agent!’ was the unexpected reply. It would appear that everything was viewed through the commission prism, even matters of life and death: ‘I’ve got a clause in my contract that says I have to be cremated. That way my agent can get fifteen per cent of my ashes.’ It matters little that Groucho had done the line before him.

  Initially dates were sporadic. The Coconut Grove, the Panama and the Blue Lagoon were regular haunts, in addition to the Windermere. The names sound glamor
ous, but today alongside countless similar venues that he would play in due course, like the Bagatelle, Churchill’s, the Embassy, the Colony, the Astor, Quaglino’s, Kempinski’s, they represent for the most part a litany of shallow sophistication and B-movie glamour, a world of Max Factor make-up, Lucie Clayton poise and Freddie Mills machismo brought down to earth by Soho smog. In contrast, August 1948 saw Miff dispatching Tommy on a five week CSE tour of Europe at fifteen pounds a week. The signing of the contract between them was celebrated by a drop in pay. The week commencing 29 November saw him working his first fully fledged week in an English variety theatre, bottom of the bill at the old Collins’ Music Hall on Islington Green for a basic salary of ten pounds. Gwen, Dennis Rawlins and his wife, Betty, dutifully acted as unofficial claque in the tiny suburban hall. Tommy needed theatre experience and 1949 saw Miff targeting the provinces as the next step in his client’s climb to stardom. It must have been dispiriting trudging around the country for a year playing the infamous Number Twos for a year at twenty pounds a week. Variety was on its last legs and these would be the first to go. To a travelling performer provincial theatre is still a world of smelly, Spartan digs and cold, grimy dressing rooms in strange, ostensibly colourless places. Away from the more glamorous Stoll and Moss circuits, the despair descending over acts who until now had regarded the halls as a modest, but constant source of livelihood must have added to the shabbiness. Food rationing would not have helped.