Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Tommy’s general health did not improve the situation. In many respects he was a hypochondriac, although Eric Sykes makes the fair point that had he been one he would have taken better care of himself. Nevertheless the fascination with doctor jokes might suggest otherwise and there wasn’t a patent medicine that he didn’t buy at some time or another. Gwen would joke that if she gave one of their dogs a worming tablet, Tommy would want one too. He did for a while become fixated about his weight and would leave home sheepishly clutching a carrier bag, according to his daughter the sign that he was on his way to Cass’s, the chemist’s shop in Brewer Street where in those days slimming pills could be acquired only under the counter. When he began mixing them with the tablets he took for his insomnia – never mind the drink – you had a fairly lethal cocktail.

  In reality most of his ailments were far from imaginary and at all levels where health was concerned he was his own worst enemy. He could never be persuaded to adjust the erratic demands of his working schedule to the need for eating and sleeping properly, staying up into the early hours practising his magic tricks even when he was not engaged in theatrical work. His daughter recalls how he would make a joke of his chronic indigestion, jumping up and down after a dose of milk of magnesia because he forgot to shake the bottle. His general sense of wellbeing was also clouded from the early Fifties by recurring bouts of lumbago and sciatica, a situation only relieved by acupuncture – a cure he kept from his doctor like a guilty secret – in the early Seventies. Bronchitis and a constantly recurring bad throat did not help matters. At the beginning of 1965 there was a minor heart scare, but Tommy insisted upon continuing with his pantomime at Golders Green, in spite of medical advice that intimated otherwise. It was a mark of his professionalism, though not necessarily his common sense, that he would always go on stage when he could. A short while later, his mother wrote to him from Southampton: ‘I hope this will find you much better. You are like me, Tommy. You haven’t time to be ill, but sometimes we have to find time.’

  In 1968 surgery for his varicose veins, a problem left painfully dormant from his army days, was postponed from before his Blackpool season until afterwards, The reason for the delay was summed up by Gwen in a telephone call to Miff: ‘He’sa coward.’ Ferrie, who had to disentangle the arrangements and put them back together again, was not best pleased, although he always conceded the benefit of the doubt to Tommy on all health issues. ‘Your health is always the most important thing,’ was the constant mantra throughout the calls and letters that passed between them. When the matter of the veins was at last attended to, a period of convalescence was called for. Las Vegas beckoned; it was not the destination most conducive to a speedy recovery from such a procedure. The following year phlebitis set in and continued to cause him problems until the end of his days. When in 1970 a broken toe briefly incapacitated him while appearing in a summer show at Torquay, he did not endear himself to impresario Bernard Delfont by spending the evenings when he should have been resting attending the show at a rival theatre in Babbacombe, where he was mobbed by autograph hunters. Towards the end of his life he was visited in hospital by his friend, Peter Hudson. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Peter. ‘My blood pressure. It’s a little on the high side.’ It was actually a hundred and seventy-five degrees. Patient kept visitor entertained with magic tricks for two hours and had him crying with laughter throughout. As he departed, Tommy called after him, ‘You won’t forget my Guinness, will you?’ He discharged himself within a couple of days.

  When it comes to lifting the spirit and alleviating pain, alcohol may be said to have its own medicinal properties. Cooper subscribed to the view and Mary Kay has admitted as such: ‘I did feel drink helped him to forget his physical problems and to sustain him.’ He used to joke in his act: ‘I drink only for medicinal purposes. I’m sick of being sober. Look – bottle, glass – glass, bottle!’ But it was a vicious spiral. The big tragedy of the latter half of his working career is that all his other ailments provided the misdirection for his alcoholism, the one predicament that was never properly diagnosed in isolation and therefore never treated. His doctor first explained to Miff that something might be amiss on 7 May 1969: ‘Dr Jacobs examined T.C. Sunday, but he still has to take urine test. Says he thinks he is drinking too much.’ Gwen, for all her hysteria and the calls to Miff that he was unwell – often contradicted by Tommy who turned up for the show regardless – never received, and would never have recognized, a formal diagnosis of his actual condition. Miff, perhaps understandably in light of the fragile nature of his business relationship with the Coopers, never showed the insight, the courage or the sympathy to grasp the nettle of a cure. Barry Humphries towers above the international comedy scene today only because at a similar stage in his life he was told by the medical profession that if he continued drinking he had only six weeks to live.

  The telephone journals maintained by Ferrie throughout his long association with Tommy provide a painful glimpse of a marriage at times seemingly near to breaking point as a result of Cooper’s capacity for liquor. There was always something about his profile that recalled Mr Punch, but while in the context of the rambunctious anti-hero of the puppet world we expect belligerence and jocosity to go hand in hand, in reality it is a disappointment to discover the darker side obtruding into the make-up of the flesh and blood icon. It resonates with what for myself has always been the most disquieting moment in the whole Cooper canon. On the occasion of the Variety Club luncheon to celebrate his thirty years in show business in March 1977, he had hardly begun his speech when Gwen, pre-rehearsed, tugged at his side. ‘What?’ asked Cooper. ‘You’ve got to put your fez on,’ said his wife. ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ He then delivered the line I have always found disconcerting: ‘I told you to wait in the truck, didn’t I?’ It is said without a smile, almost with vindictiveness. Of course, the situation, the attitude made it funny. Gwen smiled demurely and everyone present was helpless with laughter. However, in retrospect it is hard not to see – just once – a fleeting glimmer of a bully behind the jutting chin and sombre eyes, the nastiness of the true Punchinello coming to the surface. He could have been beating Judy with a stick. For a fleeting moment we had come light years from the performer who was best advised not to punch a teddy bear in his act because it rang untrue with what was perceived as his basic nature. Two and a half years earlier on an episode of The Tommy Cooper Hour for Thames he had prefaced his one-man version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with the following words, taking a mickey-taking sideswipe at his scriptwriter in the process: ‘Now you know it’s the story of a man who takes to drink and he turns ugly and nasty – (and then as an aside) you know what I mean, Dick?’ To the best of my knowledge Dick Hills never had an alcohol problem. Cooper was well in the throes of his at the time.

  In April 1969 Gwen made the first of several calls of desperation to Miff, telling him he was the first to know she was leaving her husband because he had ‘struck her in front of the children’. It marked the beginning of a decade of domestic rows that coincided with the period of his acknowledged success as a public figure. In fairness to Cooper we have only his wife’s account of the situation. Alan Alan has observed that they could both become very aggressive in their cups, to which son, Thomas added, ‘He hated any trouble with mum. She was more than a match for him. They had some colossal fights and dad would spend all his time ducking.’ Notwithstanding, a second plea came in March 1973, again telling Ferrie he was the first to know. Miff chronicled the call: ‘She is divorcing Tommy. Can’t stand it any more. He keeps beating her up. Last time was on their anniversary. He drinks all the time. Buys bottles of spirits like anyone else buys beer. Would I have a word with him? I spoke to T.C. who said she must be drunk!’ It would be farcical if it weren’t so tragic. Within forty minutes she has rung Miff back: ‘When she said T.C. buys bottles of spirits like another buys beer, did I not say that that was his problem? Would I tell this to T.C?’

  Three years later on 28 March the same patte
rn was repeated. The phrase used this time around was ‘legal separation’. She stressed she could not stand being knocked about any more and added, rather optimistically, ‘There will be no publicity – just a legal separation – I do not wish to harm his career.’ A longer exchange took place six months later on 28 November 1976, when Miff wrote: ‘I had better speak to Tommy. She has had enough. Can’t get any sleep. He drinks all the time. He sits at dressing room table drinking whisky all night. He gets violent when drunk. Just a pissing bastard. Goes to bed at 5.00 a.m. then goes downstairs to kitchen and starts drinking again. She smashed a chair at him. She has had more than enough. Is going to phone all the national papers tomorrow and tell them. She sounded quite hysterical. Then T.C. came on the other extension. I suggested he phoned me later. He said there was a bit of exaggeration on her part, but would phone me later.’ He does not appear to have done so. Miff speaks to Gwen again first: ‘Has had a word with Tommy and has come to an understanding. If he gets to bed in good time instead of staying up all night she will give him one more chance. But if not, she will throw the book at him.’

  It would not come to that. Within a few months he would receive his biggest health scare yet and the domestic violence would not obviously occur again. When he suffered a heart attack prior to a show for business executives in Rome in April 1977, Gwen immediately flew to Italy to be beside her husband. There were no further pleas of help to disturb Miff’s Sundays, but the basic problem did not go away. The Rome episode served only to cloud the issue of the drink dependency, with Gwen in total denial about this aspect of her husband’s predicament. The Italian hospital report had specified chronic alcoholism as a contributing cause. Almost a year later on 15 March 1978 Miff called her with a doctor’s report following another examination: ‘She didn’t believe me at first. Said there was nothing wrong with his liver.’ Another significant phone call came on 1 December. Tommy had collapsed the night before after a show and could not work that evening. Since Rome ill health had already triggered a spate of cancelled bookings: ‘Going to sue every one who says her husband is faking illness. Could not understand what was wrong with T.C. It could be the effect of giving up smoking!’

  Interestingly, throughout the decade – that of her husband’s greatest success – Gwen loved giving interviews to the press and made no secret of the fact that they both had flaming tempers and that when they rowed you could expect to see sparks emerging from the chimney: ‘We fight. I throw things and he throws them back. But we often end up laughing.’ She was too down-to-earth a person to draw a veil over the situation, but it always emerged as so much water under the domestic bridge, with never a hint of the uglier side attached. It might have been so much domestic slapstick. On one occasion she was not above a joke: ‘When we wake up, no matter what – even if we’ve had a row and had our backs together not speaking for the night – we always have a cuddle. So that’s the way we are. Tommy might smash the furniture around a bit – that’s why we haven’t got any matching chairs – but it’s all forgotten the next day.’ At another time she explained, ‘I threaten to leave him but he’s like an old pair of slippers. I’ve got used to him. We’ve had a marvellous life and we still kill ourselves laughing.’

  For a while Sunday lunch at a favourite restaurant in Brighton was a popular ritual. There was the occasion the day began with a blazing row and Gwen jumped in the car and drove down to the coast by herself. She was halfway through her meal when a taxi arrived outside. Tommy emerged and walked in wearing only his trousers. He went up to his wife and asked, ‘Where’s my shirt?’ Both enjoyed telling of an incident that occurred a short while after they were given a most unusual present, a painting of Big Ben with a music box mechanism attached. Tommy arrived home late from playing golf, ruining another meal in the process. Who threw what at whom is unimportant. The missile ricocheted off its target and landed on the picture, which promptly crashed to the floor and started to play the tune of ‘Home Sweet Home’. In time, from one interview to another, the story became a talisman with which to shield the unhappier aspects of their marriage.

  Couples make up. Tommy bought his wife flowers and, acknowledging her birthstone, opal rings and brooches galore and from the levity of her tone in the press, it is not difficult to see why Miff might not have taken matters more seriously. Besides, surely no one knew her husband better than Gwen. He was a great big bruin of a man – a cuddlesome bundle of talent and fun for whom no one had a bad word. As she said, ‘he was the nicest, kindest – and most awkward man in the world.’ Their friends of many years, Janet and Jimmy Farrow, stress that there wasn’t an aggressive bone in his body. He was not intrinsically a wife-beater or a negligent husband. A publicity still to publicize the 1974 Christmas television show depicts a picture of seeming domestic bliss with an all-smiling Tommy, his fez replaced by chef’s hat, having commandeered the stirring of the pudding and a bespectacled Gwen giggling close to her husband’s side with cookbook in hand. It is the cheery stuff of festive celebration, but nevertheless we are back in the world of Punch and Judy. The wooden spoon is the largest you have seen. It is not too much to imagine the mood shifting and Punch using it to clout Judy over the head with a cry of ‘That’s the way to do it!’ which, when all is said and done, is only a scarier variant of ‘Just like that!’

  The fact remains that had his problem been treated, he would have lived longer. In spite of the long telephone chats discussing his client with Gwen when she was in a less hysterical mood, Miff failed to interpret the more erratic extremes of Tommy’s behaviour towards him as a cry for help. At times they bordered on the unlawful. A typical episode occurred in the early hours of 19 February 1970 when a series of four ‘drunk and abusive’ calls from Cooper to the Ferrie household was stopped when Miff’s wife switched over to their answering service. The following morning Miff recorded the outcome: ‘The operator, who was most tactful, said T.C. phoned about a dozen times during the night using different names, e.g. Police Sergeant Grey.’ If ever evidence was needed of the strain he was under as a result of the Paradine fiasco, here it was.

  On 20 November 1974 – around the time of the pudding stirring – a series of ‘rude and abrupt’ messages purporting to be by an Inspector John Smith [sic] from Scotland Yard with news that Miff’s London flat had been burgled came through in the early hours and might suggest a mind even more seriously deranged. The calls were a hoax and there is nothing on record to say that Tommy was responsible for them, but the conclusions are obvious. Miff decided against the police following through with the matter. Only a few days before Ferrie had written to Cooper to complain of his telephone manner in recent weeks: ‘I must advise you that such foul-mouthed abusive language cannot be tolerated any further … because of your insulting behaviour conduct of our business is becoming increasingly more difficult … I am prepared to meet you either here or at your own home, providing you will agree to conduct yourself in a civil and rational manner.’ The person who came closest to the nub of the situation was Miff’s wife, Beatrice, who found herself contending with him on the telephone around the time of the hoax. Her husband recorded the conversation: ‘T.C. came on line and sounded drunk. He asked, “Is that you, Beatrice? Are you still sick? You’ve been sick for thirty years!” Beatrice said, “I think you need treatment.’ He said, “Where is your stupid idiot of a husband?” Beatrice said, “My husband is here in the house, but does not wish to speak to you.” He said, “Tell him I never want to speak to him again.” Beatrice said, “Well, why keep calling him?” T.C. put phone down.’

  The whole situation had been complicated in January 1967 by the arrival on the scene of Mary Kay. They first met in a church hall used by Thames as a rehearsal space somewhere beneath the Hammersmith flyover. As the structure of British show business changed with the club boom, Tommy found himself travelling more and more. Never did he have a greater need for Gwen by his side, but she decided not to accompany him, torn between her husband and the attention parental du
ty demanded she pay their two teenage children at home. Vicky recalls the tears and distress this caused her father in the private moments they shared together. With all thoughts of romance aside, Mary, a divorcée with a respected background in stage management for both theatre and television, was an obvious candidate to step into the breach of a travelling factotum. Before long, however, Tommy found himself in the not unprecedented position of loving two women. Those who saw him together with Mary will testify to the fact that they were a devoted couple. As Royston Mayoh has said, ‘They loved each other. Mary provided something that Gwen didn’t.’ His words carry far more than a sexual connotation: ‘She fell flatly in love with him in the same way that you and I had. She knew that if ever a human being required someone to bring order into his life, he did. She didn’t “Svengali” him. She made it easy for him.’ I am certain that he lived longer because of her presence and attention, but it is also conceivable that had she not figured in his life he would – in time – not have subjected himself to the ordeal of touring so much. He quite obviously relished the excuse his work gave him to be with her.