by John Fisher
Donald B. Stuart, billed as ‘Variety’s Longest Laugh’, appeared seven feet tall even without a high-domed wig. His elongated top hat made him seem even taller as he made great play of stepping over especially low tables to reach the other side of the stage. He would hang his hat on the edge of the proscenium arch and later ask someone from the audience to take it down while he proceeded with the act. What had been no height at all for Stuart was way out of reach for the spectator and produced a hilarious audience response. He too featured a version of the bottle and glass trick. Whereas Stuart was dry and debonair, Arthur Dowler, ‘the Wizard of Cod,’ was more down-to-earth. The magical equivalent of a sturdy Northern comic in the mould of Les Dawson or Robb Wilton, he fumbled and flatfooted his way in baggy suit and bowler hat from the prosaic to the surprising, all the while going back to attend to a birdcage that wouldn’t vanish, until an alarm clock went off at the end of his act and released him from the responsibility. To the best of my knowledge he didn’t perform the bottle and glass trick, but the bit where he threw three linked metal rings off stage, only to have them thrown back still linked but twisted out of all recognition a short while later eventually found its way into Cooper’s act, as did – upon his death in 1953 – his comic pièce de résistance, the table that revealed two shapely female legs when its front legs fell off.
The doyen of British variety magicians, Mark Raffles has fond memories of Chris King, a Cockney who following an apprenticeship in America may have been the first in Britain to produce the bowl of goldfish under the large scarf and then make it ‘disappear’ for lack of a table to put it on. King’s billing – ‘You take two pieces of paper’– referred to the catchphrase that gathered comic momentum throughout his act as he unsuccessfully attempted to restore two torn pieces of tissue back together again. Mark recalls, ‘Then looking puzzled, he turned them round and about as though unsure what to do next, giving the impression of having forgotten the trick. He then put the pieces back on his table and carried on with the next item. When he finally restored the papers, they changed into a party hat and he went off to a storm of applause.’ Mark is convinced that Tommy must have seen King work at a formative stage: ‘He had a totally different style and appearance, but the way he’d put down one trick that wouldn’t work, go back to the papers, then back to start again with yet another prop, I can see how Tommy applied all that to his own personality.’
To peruse the trade papers during the late Forties there is nothing to suggest that Cooper was then either better or worse than any of these acts. They were all modestly successful, but at the end of the day they remained supporting attractions, representing an engaging sub-genre of the magic profession. Within a few years, in a career festooned by royal performances and star billing, Tommy would take the genre to heights achieved not even by Carlton or Van Hoven. In terms of stature as a comedy conjuror, the only serious competition he ever had was on the international scene. Bob Monkhouse once asked Tommy if he had seen the act of Russell Swann, a top American entertainer, who, like Cooper, combined the burlesque approach with a capacity to succeed some of the time. The answer was negative: the prominent seasons Swann played at the Victoria Palace, the Trocadero Restaurant and the Dorchester Hotel in London in the Thirties would have been outside his social sphere as a boatyard apprentice. A genial man with a large moon face, Swann played the best cabaret venues throughout the world for three decades with a hilarious act in which, with hotel towel for turban, he turned purple as he blew a flute to coax a toy snake out of a basket to find a not-so-freely-chosen card, as well as walking off half way through to grab a bag of tools with which to mend a vanishing flower pot that refused to function. However, if Tommy did not see Swann he did see Carl Ballantine, arguably the nearest equivalent to Cooper in the United States in recent times.
People in the magic world who wish to detract from Cooper’s success always cite the names of two performers, insinuating that he copied his act from both. Let us take Ballantine first. The foundation of Tommy’s act was put in place in his boatyard and service days and Ballantine did not appear in Britain – at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square – until December 1949, by which time Tommy was already established in the profession, if only in a small way. Cooper had little conscience when it came to appropriating material from other performers, but he always claimed that specific items he used from the Ballantine act were legitimately purchased by him for his use in the United Kingdom from one Abbot Lutz, who claimed to be their creator. Magnanimously Ballantine confirms the account. According to Carl, Lutz had accompanied him to London as general assistant and dogsbody and then stayed in England by means of the American GI Bill, which helped the military to study and to find jobs. Lutz became a teacher and somewhere along the line met Tommy and sold him the rights to the material to make ends meet. Ballantine claims Lutz couldn’t have invented a gag if his life had depended on it. The material probably included the most immortal line ever addressed to a rubber chicken, ‘Get dressed’; the studiously torn paper that is never restored, simply used to level up an uneven table or chair; and most memorably, ‘Now from this empty bag I shall produce a real live dove,’ followed by an explosion of feathers when he goes to burst the bag. Also prominent in the Ballantine act was the surprise spring-loaded production of a bouquet of flowers from the plinth. Other items like the tape measure watch – ‘It’s twenty inches past four’ – and the musical ‘playing cards’ would appear to have been bona fide dealers’ items accessible to all.
As a performer ‘The Amazing Mr Ballantine’ was as hyperactive as they come, a magical Jimmy Durante on speed, an intensity he has maintained with bewildering gusto throughout a distinguished career that began when he switched from straight magic to comedy in 1940 and has lasted over sixty years. His season in Cine-Variety at the Empire was not a success. The cavernous cinema was considered too large for the comic rapport he required with an audience and a fear of flying has confined him to America in recent years. Tommy is on record as having been disappointed at a performer whose reputation preceded him, although he was sympathetic enough to understand why the visitor failed to register in an auditorium adapted for movies and not solo variety turns.
While Cooper bounced on full of confidence that one day he might become the world’s greatest magician, Carl started out with the premise that he was ‘The World’s Greatest Magician’. The banner on his table said so. He then saw his claim fall to pieces around him. With his darting eyes there is a raw nerve to Ballantine’s work that always reminds me of the nervous energy that Spike Milligan, not a natural stage performer, could engender in a live situation when truly on form. With that he projects a satirical intelligence – ‘They’re catching on –no magic, just a charming personality!’–that plays off against the keynote of magical failure, as distinct from Cooper’s skilful portrayal of fumbling incompetence. Not that the Ballantine act doesn’t build to a similar shambles as props litter the stage and, on the line ‘you probably wonder what I’m gonna do next,’ a stage hand tosses Carl a broom to sweep up. To Americans he will always be better known as Seaman Lester Gruber, the character in the successful Sixties naval sitcom, McHale’s Navy, a kind of ‘Sergeant Bilko’ of the ocean waves. Unfairly American television never gave him the platform to exploit his vaudeville skills in a show of his own and, unlike Tommy’s, his act stayed static through the years.
While British and American audiences respectively laughed at Cooper and Ballantine, the French endorsed their own personal comedy magic favourite in Mac Ronay. Before becoming established as an almost resident Parisian attraction at venues like the Lido and the Crazy Horse, Ronay did make a tour of the provincial British music halls during the late Forties. There is no record that Tommy saw him perform at that time, although he did once discuss the Frenchman not too generously with Bob Monkhouse, who like me admired him. While the Cooper act was joyous and positive, Ronay displayed a magnificent mournfulness with which Tommy did not connect. If Ballantine was Dura
nte writ large, then Ronay was more akin to Buster Keaton or even Tony Hancock, his every move underpinned by solemnity, a lingering sense of tragedy in the air. That was his intention and it kept audiences laughing through a career that lasted almost fifty years, his diffidently spasmodic pathos as one trick after another went wrong brilliantly conveyed by the constant dipping movement of his head that at times seemed almost disconnected from his body.
Perhaps Cooper was disconcerted that Mac also wore a fez – albeit a squatter version with a tuft like a beret rather than a tassel – and, although he hardly spoke in his act, traded in an infantile silliness that was so much a part of his own style. At one point Ronay would hold a lit candle and an electric torch a few inches apart. Blowing out the candle and switching on the torch at the same time produced the illusion that the light had travelled across. It was daft, but it was effective. When a short length of rope refused to stand erect in his hand, his answer was to hold it taut between his hands for a considered pause, turn both hands through 180 degrees and then let go of the now bottom end. To the best of my knowledge Cooper kept both items at bay, although with the magician’s repertoire as stereotyped as it is there were inevitable echoes of material between the two acts, as pieces of rope failed to join together in the hand and a pencil rose out of a bottle – Tommy used a rose: ‘Rose, Rose, Arisen!’– only to be left dangling on a thread. More interesting is the evidence of body language that Cooper could have adapted subliminally to his own purposes: the inability to close a box without trapping his fingers under the lid, to handle scissors without trapping the thumb in the handle, the deft footwork to kick away the incriminatory evidence of a trick gone wrong, the hand that proves less resistant to the candle flame than bravado first supposed. Indeed, when Ronay flexed the empty fingers of first this hand on one side, then that one on the other, one almost expected to see subtitles accompany the mime: ‘Non comme ça! Comme ça!’ But then Ronay also made great play of Claude Williams’ medal motif! In this way what comes around, comes around.
It has always been assumed that in order to burlesque magic, or any performing skill for that matter, one has to be accomplished in the discipline in the first place. That such skill need not be a prerequisite can be shown by the large number of comedians who have taken it upon themselves to portray the role of the inept magician, quite as much as by Tommy’s own hilarious attempts at ventriloquism and ‘song and dance’. Attempts by comics to parody the hocus pocus man in the movies are numerous, including Chaplin in The Circus, Laurel and Hardy in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Victor Moore in Swing Time, Jerry Lewis in The Geisha Boy, Fred Astaire in Three Little Words, even Gracie Allen in International House. But these were single outings conjured up for the cinema. Within the British variety tradition there are several top comedy names who devised a magic pastiche that became an established part of their repertoire as they toured in revues and summer shows.
Sandy Powell developed his own burlesque as an item to follow on in satiric counterpoint to a conventional manipulator booked to appear on his stage tours. Anyone who saw his benign incompetent getting his fingers burnt as he plucked cigarettes out of the air, or trying to rid his fingers of the vanishing and reappearing billiard ball secretly attached by a loop of thread, will still laugh at the memory. Albert Burdon, another giant of North Country comedy between the wars, became identified towards the end of his life with a single routine featuring a single illusion. Wearing a grandiose turban that appeared two sizes too big for his squat physique, he proudly announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have here a magic cabinet that cost thousands of pounds.’ His attempts to present the trick were constantly frustrated by an irksome ‘volunteer’ from the stalls and a stray walking stick that kept turning up in all sorts of places when he was least expecting it. The act ended with a physical whirlwind. His declared intention ‘to show the cabinet the same all the way round’ was the cue to hold on for their lives as the simple structure spun around possessed like some whirling dervish, the legs of the sorcerer and his apprentice lifted off the ground by the centrifugal force created. It was one of the most exhilarating moments in variety and very funny. Funnier still was the moment in the repertoire of Tommy’s friends, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, when they allowed audiences the privilege of watching them portray Marvo and Dolores.
It was never difficult for Eric to upstage his shorter partner, but here the stakes were raised several notches as Ernie portrayed the cliché girl assistant bedecked in tutu and fishnets, a distant cousin of many a principal boy that ever slapped a thigh in pantomime. However, once one had taken in this spectacle there was no taking one’s eyes off Morecambe, upholstered to high heaven in an oversize tail suit that released a steady stream of tell-tale feathers as he stumped around the stage, interrupted only by the alarming bird-like noises that emanated from the innermost recesses of his person. The boys, as they were affectionately known, brilliantly extended their burlesque into reality, taking out trade advertisements for the magic act that announced they were ‘Vacant’ for January, February, March, April, and so on monthly throughout the year, with the exception of August, which was reserved for ‘Holidays’. At no point were their own names mentioned in the ad. In a similar vein theatre programmes printed the act as just another speciality act on the Eric and Ernie show, giving no clue at all to audiences that this was the comedy bonus of all time.
Cooper took the device of the failed magic act to even higher levels of humour and observation. The side of him that never missed a cue during a hectic London Palladium pantomime was the side that acknowledged that for all the enthusiasm that kept magic alive, much of its world was threadbare, substandard and anachronistic. Props that had once been perfectly acceptable because they corresponded to kitchen utensils and table furniture of the time were hopelessly out of date. The patter that accompanied performances was similarly jaded, lines that had been refreshingly witty when first uttered by the greatest of British magicians, David Devant at the turn of the century, reduced to the status of cliché: ‘We give the cards two taps – one hot, one cold!’ The prefacing of each effect with ‘And now’, the naming of each prop as ‘ordinary’, the surprise-defeating description of what will happen before it does, the giveaway ‘blink’ when the secret move is made or the gadget released, all cohered into a general picture of mediocrity. The paradox is that much of this was due to the high visibility of substandard amateurs anxious – try stopping them – to show off their miracles at every platform offered by village hall, church social, or children’s birthday party. Tommy had been there himself, but now with consummate professionalism he was on the outside looking in, tapping into peoples’ subconscious horror stories of magic in the cause of laughter.
This is not to say that in the late Forties when Tommy arrived on the scene there did not exist a public face of excellence in magic, personified as it was by the swallow-tailed elegance of the likes of Cardini, Jasper Maskelyne, and John Calvert with their Ronald Colman moustaches and fashion plate looks. The style had been epitomized for a wider audience by David Niven in his portrayal of the magician, the Great Arturo in the 1939 movie, Eternally Yours. The Danish– American illusionist, Dante provided a more story book version of a wizard, but was essentially from the same mould. They were all slick and sophisticated, neat and necromantic in the nicest of ways and the contrast could not have worked better in Tommy’s favour. Suddenly there appeared someone with the hands of a labourer and the legs of an ostrich who looked nothing like the regular model. As such he had the edge over all the others who guyed the innate self-importance of the magic profession.
He never lost his love and respect for the mystique of the magician’s craft, but was savvy enough to accept that his comedy skills shoehorned him into a public approach that needed to be kept separate from his private enthusiasms. Once early in his career he was spending the afternoon with Bobby Bernard in the Archer Street emporium of Max Andrews. His latest magic sensation was, according to Andrews, right up
Tommy’s street. Max talked Tommy through the presentation he envisaged for his star customer: ‘You crack some gags and get a few laughs, then have a card chosen, tell a few gags, have the card shuffled back in the pack and tell a few more.’ Gags and magic business continued to alternate until the chosen card was caught amid a shower of cards in the jaws of a large rat trap, about as unlikely an object as one might associate with a card trick. Tommy was unimpressed. With his deadpan stare he turned to Andrews and said, ‘Never mind the fucking trick. Where are these gags that get all the laughs?’
SIX
Comic Ways and Means
The family tree of comedy has always intrigued me, the way in which the great performerssayed a funny walk is well documented. Possibly the most influential British comedian ofs take aspects of those they have admired from preceding generations and by a process of osmosis intuitively mould them into aspects of their own personalities, as if they belonged there and nowhere else. The impact of Max Linder on Chaplin, Harry Tate on W. C. Fields, and Little Tich on just about everyone who ever e all was the Forties revue star, Sid Field. For seven glorious years between 1943 and 1950 his almost unbroken tenure at London’s Prince of Wales Theatre acted as a honey pot for the new breed of comedians emerging from the services, his multi-faceted persona a revelation to those raised on the more stereotyped approach of the average stand-up of the day.