Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  When members of the public discover you knew Tommy Cooper, the one question they always ask relates to his magical ability: ‘Was he any good as a magician?’ It is not an easy question to answer for a layman. His technical competence – if by that we mean manipulative skill – certainly lagged behind the likes of Johnny Paul and could probably be placed on a par with Woody Allen’s self-assessment when it comes to playing jazz clarinet: ‘no more seriously than a Hollywood star hacking at a golf ball in a pro-am match’. However, there is no doubt that he was far more committed to the skills of his craft than most members of the ‘buy it off the shelf’ brigade. The come-on lines used by dealers to sell their wares in the catalogues reveal how essentially lazy the average conjuror is – ‘No Sleights … Easy To Do … Ready To Work Right Away!’ – although what satisfaction could accrue in such a situation is probably more baffling than the trick on offer could ever hope to be. Because a routine did require serious practice did not rule it out of the Cooper repertoire. In the Sixties Harry Stanley brought out an item called ‘The Indiana Rope Trick’. It enabled the magician to tie a knot in a length of rope under impossible conditions and then to slide the knot along the rope and off the end to throw it into the audience. Without giving too much away it involved considerable dexterity to get the knot to appear in the first place and then a deft handling of a complex little gadget named a ‘locking finger reel’ to send it on its way into the crowd. From the catalogue pages it looked just the kind of trick that dealers like to sell to amateurs, a fleeting novelty to be played with until another little miracle comes along. No one would ever have imagined it as an item in a top professional act, not least because there were almost certainly other simpler, more practical methods with which to achieve a similar effect. And yet within a few weeks of the trick being advertised Tommy Cooper was performing it with total assurance on the Sunday Night at the London Palladium television show.

  But there is another level at which quite simply Tommy may be seen to be the greatest magician of them all. As top contemporary British wizard, Geoffrey Durham has pointed out, if the sine qua non of being a magician is the ability to express your personality through your magic, then no one expressed himself better through the medium than Tommy Cooper. There was no one to touch him because there was no one who had a personality more all-conquering than Cooper, no one who radiated until the end of his days a greater personal sense of wonder or of fun, as tissue papers changed into flowers in his hands, a wooden duck attempted to find a chosen card – ‘You may have seen a duck do that before,’ he would screech, ‘but, to be fair, blindfolded?’ – and, in later years, bottles of Martini reproduced like rabbits as an unexpected conclusion to the bottle and glass trick. No one left a Tommy Cooper performance not liking magic: his enthusiasm was contagious. When you establish communication with an audience as the criterion of greatness, matters of technical difficulty take on a different aspect. It no longer matters whether the trick has just been bought off the shelf, because in the hands of a great performer the presentation wrapped around it renders any hint of method irrelevant anyhow. Tommy himself once said, ‘You can buy a simple trick from a magic shop and you can know how it’s done. Yet a great magician can work on that particular trick and make something out of it and you’ll think it’s not the same trick you’ve got.’ Tommy proved this every night of his working life when he made a small silk handkerchief disappear in his bare hands using the most elementary of methods that has been exposed to the public thousands of times; but always the audience burst into wild applause.

  During the Thirties, Murray the Escapologist was a headline act throughout the world. He used to tell an anecdote about a special escape he performed on board ship in Cape Town with George Bernard Shaw on hand as a member of the supervisory committee to see fair play. When interviewed by reporters later, Shaw said, ‘I found the man more interesting than the trick.’ That is how it should be. Writing from the perspective of another performing discipline, the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov summed up matters thus: ‘When a dancer comes on stage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life … Each time he has chosen, and in what he is onstage you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be … Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality.’ The same is true for all the legendary magicians in magic’s history, the roll call that includes Houdini, Cardini, Dante, John Calvert, Robert Harbin, Channing Pollock, Siegfried and Roy, and Tommy Cooper.

  One further quality that registered him as a great magician was his intuitive understanding of the great psychological block that holds so many magicians back from genuine personal popularity. It has been bluntly labelled the ‘showing off’ syndrome and unless mitigated by the personality of the performer can have an excluding effect on audiences. The original premise of conjuring is to defy the laws of nature and to do so in such a way that no one knows how you achieve the task. If a magician can find a way of letting his audience in on his act without of course divulging his methods, then a bridge is secured that might allay the worst excesses of the syndrome. No one surmounted this hurdle more effectively than the great Thirties manipulator, Cardini, who presented his sleight of hand with cards, billiard balls and cigarettes in an apparently slightly tipsy haze, as if these impossible phenomena were happening to him, entirely outside of his control, rather than the result of his incredible technique. In a similar way, by adding comedy to their juggling acts, first W. C. Fields and then ‘Monsewer’ Eddie Gray of the Crazy Gang found that audiences warmed to them as characters in addition to marvelling at their dexterity. When Tommy succeeded with his magic, it was as much a surprise to him as to his audience, who subsequently shared in his delight. He brilliantly developed an attitude that enabled him to connect with the public through hocus pocus without ever seeming to challenge them with it, to force it upon them, the habitual curse of so many of the magic profession. When he failed to join the metal rings and then found one inextricably linked through his buttonhole or when he discovered that the goldfish bowl he had produced from a metal tube would not go back inside the same tube – until in a sublime moment of inspiration he squeezed it between his hands – he took things one step further, entering a truly magical universe that was beyond anyone’s control.

  His friends retain their cherished memories of intimate sessions when he would perform tricks purely for their own amusement. At times like these he was allowed to show off, but his congenial nature always steered well away from conceit. Eric Sykes was once taken aback when Tommy caused a facsimile of the chosen card that had just appeared on his forehead to replicate itself in the same position in the minuscule photograph embodied in the Cooper identity card that had been under Eric’s supervision since the start of the trick. Johnny Speight recalled the occasion he caused a shoal of little silver fish – albeit imitation ones – to materialize in his hands: ‘These fish piled up on the bloody bar and I was that close to him and I couldn’t see how he did it. It looked like real magic to me.’ According to Alan Alan, there was one trick that technically Tommy performed better than anyone else. It is known in the magic business as ‘Squash’, a descriptive term for an effect in which a shot glass of whiskey held on the magician’s outstretched palm instantly vanishes when covered by the other hand. For once Tommy’s extra large hands proved an asset rather than a disadvantage. Another favourite party piece, often paraded at press interviews, was to cause a mark of ash from his cigar to appear inexplicably in the clenched fist of a journalist. But he was never less than honest with himself, as he admitted to a writer from the Sunday Express in 1981: ‘Childish, isn’t it? But I love it. I only wish I was better than I am. Mind you, who knows, if I were better, I might have become just one more struggling magician and you wouldn’t be sitting here wanting to talk to me now.’r />
  In his own eyes one of the high points of his career in magic was the day he was appointed to Membership of the Inner Magic Circle at its highest level with Gold Star. He also joked, ‘As a matter of fact, I belong to the Secret Six. It’s so secret; I don’t even know the other five!’ There is no doubting the prestige of the larger organization that in 2005 celebrated its centenary year with a Royal Mail special stamp issue and the endorsement by its most famous member, the Prince of Wales, of a unique four day celebration attended by the international elite of the magic world. But while many of the world’s top professional magicians are members, it is not – as it is perceived by so many – an organization of professional qualification. Its membership, hovering around the 1,500 mark, consists predominantly of devoted amateur and semi-professional performers, who down the years have included Orson Welles, J. B. Priestley, Rudyard Kipling, and Lord Mountbatten.

  Upon his promotion, Tommy wrote to John Salisse, the secretary at the time: ‘As a young magician I dreamed of this, but never thought I would ever possess this great honour.’ The organization is in many ways its own magic trick, embodying a paradox whereby the most successful magical performer in British history – and other prestige magic names like Cardini, Pollock, and Siegfried and Roy – should be so much in thrall to it. But top professional that he was, of its entire membership Tommy possibly best embodied the elements of amateurism – in its original and best sense of the word – that first fired its founding fathers a century ago. There was one other level at which he might be considered on a higher plane than the average rank and file of the society or, for that matter, any of the smaller provincial magicians’ groups around the country, some of them designated as ‘Circles’ but with no legitimate affiliation to the top organization. To master sleight of hand and the mechanics of misdirection is one thing. Comedy is a far more elusive skill. It certainly cannot be bought over a shop counter, being the product of inclination, instinct and alchemy. Here, among his magical peers, Cooper was unquestionably king.

  It is proper that the worlds of comedy and magic should share a special relationship. The mechanism of a joke and that of a magic trick have a decided kinship, with their mutual reliance on timing and surprise. Moreover, both comedy and magic play tricks with our perception of the world, one favouring the quirky representation of reality and the other turning that reality on its head. We accept gravity as a fact and when the clown accidentally turns the milk bottle upside down, the milk slops all over his shoes to our amusement; when the magician turns the milk bottle upside down, the milk stays in the bottle to our amazement, or it is supposed to. Both need an essential element of surprise to be fully effective. In the clown’s case it is all the funnier if we do not see the action coming; in the magician’s case we suspend disbelief but are still pleasurably taken aback when the impossible happens. Such reactions may become dulled with repetition but the skill of the performer can instil an essential freshness to maintain our interest and recreate the original sense of wonder. When the magician and the clown become one, an exceptional double whammy occurs, the milk its own testament to both the basic reality and the failed aspirations that attempted to subvert it. The special relationship, however, is not dependent on the burlesque approach. Conjuring has proved a convenient peg for many a comedy talent over the years, not least Johnny Paul himself. One has only to note the number of comedians, most notably in America, who began their performing careers as magicians, including Johnny Carson, Woody Allen, and Steve Martin, or those who maintained an interest in magic long after their comedy reputations were established, like Cary Grant, George Burns, Milton Berle, and Steve Allen. In England, Bud Flanagan and Peter Cook provide an unlikely pair with boyhood magical roots.

  The first ‘name’ comedy magician was possibly the German – American Imro Fox, who became successful in vaudeville and in British pantomime as Abanazar around the beginning of the last century. A rotund man with a bald head and a handlebar moustache, he mined an especially rich vein of self-deprecation: ‘Yes, I’m a magician like the programme says. If you hadn’t been looking in the programme, I know you would have taken me for a delicatessen proprietor. That’s only my sideline. Wait and see …’ He would trip over his feet as he walked on stage, glancing over his shoulder to admonish the imaginary culprit, ‘Don’t push!’ Many years later Tommy would cut just such a trip out of his act, when some audiences began to credit the stumble to alcoholic influence rather than carefully rehearsed technique. Much of Fox’s humour came from the running instructions he gave the orchestra leader as the act progressed: ‘Waltz me, Professor. A little slow music. No, that is not what I want. I do not wish villain music. I want something soothing.’ And then as a trick reached its climax: ‘Now, professor, waltz me again.’ Selling his personality – ‘I have no hair to deceive you with’–was far more important than any of the tricks.

  The first burlesque magician is harder to pin down. Frank Van Hoven – encountered earlier in this volume as ‘The Man Who Made Ice Famous’–was the first to achieve anything like a star reputation with the genre, but there were others who merged wand with slapstick during the early years of the century. At this time Walton and Lester were billing themselves on the British music halls as ‘the World’s Worst Wizards’; Wally Walton then progressed to performing as a single in the Twenties, the same decade in which Lapp and Habel found themselves amusing audiences with their own travesty of the dancing spoon in the jar, long before Tommy was intoning ‘Spoon, jar. Jar, spoon,’ in his own act. Nor should it be overlooked that the magic act that self-destructs had been a staple of the circus clown’s repertoire long before music hall welcomed magicians onto its stage, the fragility of eggs, the waywardness of livestock and the exposure of the ‘Passe Passe’ bottle and glass trick so cosily at home in this environment.

  The only native performer on the halls to rival Van Hoven’s success with comedy magic was Carlton. Billed as ‘The Human Hairpin’he presented an eccentric appearance dressed in skin-clinging black bodice and tights, his already tall, thin stature elongated by the addition of a high-domed bald wig and elevators in his shoes, raising his height to almost seven feet. It is not inconceivable that Max Wall derived the ludicrous black tights of his own garb as the grotesque pianist, Professor Walloffski from watching Carlton. While, like Cooper, he was intrinsically funny in his appearance, his approach to magic was more subtle. As he performed his intricate card manipulations, he carried out a disembodied commentary on his own actions: ‘Is there no limit to the man’s cleverness?’ A favourite exchange eavesdropped on a mother and child in the front stalls: ‘Oh, Mummy, I know how it’s done – I can see the wires.’ ‘Quiet, dear. Those are not wires – they are his legs!’ ‘Where’s he gone to now, Mummy? He’s disappeared.’ ‘Hush, my dear. He’s only turning sideways.’

  In the teen years of the century Van Hoven and Carlton were two of the highest paid performers on the British music halls, their salaries far surpassing those of the average magic act and rivalling those Cooper would one day achieve on the Northern club circuit, maybe even surpassing them in real money terms. It was nothing for Carlton to earn five hundred pounds a week. He was once featured in five top London music halls simultaneously. Towards the end of the decade Van Hoven could boast of earning one hundred thousand dollars in one hundred and ten weeks. In time Carlton put on weight and fell on hard times. Van Hoven died prematurely of pneumonia at the age of forty-two in 1929, his latter years beset by alcohol and womanizing. He predeceased Carlton by thirteen years. He was his only rival, although their approaches to comedy magic came from different directions. Cooper brilliantly straddled the two styles, tricks refusing to work one moment, and others succeeding beyond his wildest expectations the next. Contemporary magician, Ian Saville feels that this ambivalence within his act contributed greatly to his popularity: ‘Lay people feel that if he really wasn’t all that good, they have somehow been fooled (in a bad way) by being made to laugh at him messing things up. The
y feel easier laughing at someone acting incompetent rather than at someone who really might be incompetent.’

  Cooper’s impact for a new generation was such that when you tell his fans that he was not the first comic conjuror they are surprised. However, Van Hoven and Carlton aside, no one had attacked the role with such charisma and spontaneous joie de vivre. As the Second World War came to a close there were, in fact, others who had a head start on him on the British variety circuits. Claude Williams, billed as ‘The Great Claude’, made great play of the medal gag, awarding himself a gong if his tricks worked, and at one opportune moment in his act throwing a bouquet over his shoulder as he went to the table for his next prop. Turning, he expressed surprise at the generosity of the crowd. Fans will recognize the business as resurfacing eventually in the Cooper act. When Tommy turned to the audience and queried, ‘For Me?’ no one ever acted sheer self-deception for greater comic effect. Williams also performed a version of the bottle and glass trick using one tube and a rolled-up newspaper.