Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Even Mary failed when it came to pulling him back from the abyss of alcohol. Her argument in response has a chilling truth: ‘Anyone who knew Tommy well would agree that I had very little chance of changing his habits.’ Sadly she too failed to interpret the signs of his schizoid rages, like the time in a Derby restaurant he flung her to the floor when she laughed at his complaint that the crackling with his roast pork was soggy; the time when in some kerfuffle about luggage he ripped apart the seam of an expensive new dress that he had just bought her; the time she was anxious about keeping an appointment and he tore another gift, an expensive watch, off her wrist and threw it across the room. The ogre soon mollified, but always lurked in the distance. The most telling line is Kay’s memoir reads, ‘Brandy, I noticed, didn’t bring out the best in people.’

  When Gwen found out about the affair, supposedly after his death, she dismissed it as a mere slip on her husband’s part, a casual one-night-stand and nothing more. One will never know whether she did know beforehand. There had been a loud tabloid whisper in 1975 when the Daily Express ran a story about Tommy Cooper having a mistress. It was categorically denied. Mary was his ‘assistant’ and no more. But there must have been times when his wife suspected that her husband’s attentions might have strayed elsewhere. One Monday in March 1973 she made an anguished call to Miff at one o’clock in the morning to advise that he had not been home that Sunday, the ‘first time in twenty-six years’. It is a fact that the more he travelled with Mary in tow, the more he came to appreciate the home away from home she provided for him on the road. The lifestyle came with a freedom attached, even if at times the caravan did resemble a small circus. His son Thomas, well within the secret in later years as his father’s occasional stage manager, confided to her two years before his death, ‘Mary, if you ever leave Dad, it will be the death of him.’

  Reading between the lines of a newspaper interview Gwen gave at the time of the Express story, one has difficulty differentiating between suspicion and gross naivety: ‘Even now Tommy books a double room when he’s on tour just in case I turn up. We love each other so much. Mind you, I’m fifty-five and I know I couldn’t compete with beautiful twenty-year-old showgirls. Some are so star-struck they would do anything to get at men like Tommy. So what can I do? I’ve got to be wise. I’d realize he’d rather come home for a good steak anyway!’ What she did not realize is that her husband had fallen for a lady who was much closer to her own age and was prepared to travel around with a camping stove and kitchen utensils to cook him that steak at three o’clock in the morning in hotel suites and dressing rooms wherever they might be on the road. Mary was never an ego-boost. She was a pillar of support during some of the emptiest times of his life. Vicky has said, ‘The thing is my dad hated his own company and he was an insomniac. My mother simply got fed up with the hours he kept and eventually stopped going on tour with him. But he desperately needed someone to look after him.’ Following the emotional neglect of his mother at an early age, he had always needed love and attention. Mary now provided that all over again, as Dove had once done.

  As seems inevitable when Cooper is concerned, farce intrudes. According to Peter Hudson, one morning Tommy was sitting up in bed when Gwen entered the room angrily brandishing a hotel invoice just delivered by the postman. It was made out to Mr and Mrs Cooper. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ she demanded. ‘What’s what?’ asked Tommy. ‘This bill.’ ‘I was on my own.’ ‘You bastard!’ ‘I was on my own. They’ve got it wrong.’ Gwen slammed the door and Tommy thought quickly. He pulled on his street clothes over his pyjamas and leaving the house by the side door made a dash to the nearest phone box. He called the manager of the hotel and asked him to resend the bill, even better to phone his home in half an hour and apologize for the mistake they had made. Nobody denied Tommy Cooper a favour. He rushed back home and back to bed. A short while later the phone rang. Dove answered. A few minutes later she came back upstairs all smiles. They had sent Tommy the wrong bill. There had been a Mr and Mrs Cooper staying at the hotel at the same time and there had been a mix-up in accounts. She told Tommy she had explained to the manager on the phone, ‘That’s just like him not to pay it!’

  He would never have dreamed of trading the one woman in his life for the other. His constant love for Gwen and the need to protect his public image as a family entertainer at a time when such things mattered –witness the pudding stirring again –drew him into a nightmare of deceit of which the hotel bill incident was a petty detail. If you worked with Cooper, the paranoia was obvious. Everyone was taken into his confidence as added security: ‘Promise you’ll never mention Mary when Dove’s around.’ In his daughter’s opinion the pressure of hiding the relationship must have been relentless: ‘He was a traditional man and didn’t want to hurt Dove. Personally I thought it fairly harmless, although keeping it a secret was a strain.’ Drink was one way of dealing with the guilt of the situation.

  Although his performances on screen offered no clue of a tortured soul, it is not difficult to imagine the maelstrom stirring within Cooper’s mind as the affair accelerated. Apart from the pressures of having to shield his infidelity, there was the accumulated stress caused by the spate of impersonators threatening to devalue the impact of his act, the uncertainty of the new direction in which British show business was heading for an entertainer of his kind, the constant emotional tug-of-war that constituted his relationship with his agent and manager, the encroachment of advancing years – on his fiftieth birthday he bemoaned to Mary Kay, ‘I’m dying slowly now. It’s all downhill from here’– the strain of stardom on a man who genuinely did not appreciate how big a star he was and the perplexity of why people found him funny at times when he had no intention of being so. Jimmy Tarbuck tells of the occasion they were at the nineteenth hole at Sudbury: ‘He said, “I’ll have a gin and tonic,” and the fellow behind the bar started to laugh. Tommy went, “What are you laughing at? Don’t you laugh at me!” I said, “Tom, he loves you.” “I’ll bloody love him, laughing at me.” He was genuinely upset.’ The lack of sympathy that came his way when he broke a toe or an ankle – as happened when he fell upstairs on a visit to a submarine on holiday in Gibraltar in 1976 – did not help matters: whenever he had to hobble about it looked like part of the act and people laughed even more. Of the latter incident he did have the caution to comment: ‘And that was before I even got to the bar.’ In fact, drink was the inevitable escape from a ghost train ride along which all these pressures constituted individual horrors.

  When his daughter discovered her father was having an affair, she confronted him with it. After a first denial, his subsequent admission put into perspective much that she would otherwise have found strange about his subsequent lifestyle under the influence of Mary Kay. He became more and more depressed at home, distracted by things like biorhythms. Vicky explains that ‘he bought this compass and I would read it for him. “This week you are feeling good,” I would say. “Oh, am I? That’s good,” he’d reply.’ There was a spell when he would pay her five pounds a month to chart out his moods. Like golf and the idea of installing a sauna at home – to save on slimming tablets – it appears to have been a passing phase. She still finds it hard to accept that he believed in fairies and goblins ‘for heaven’s sake!’ but it was always difficult to know when he was being serious or not. In a radio interview in Bahrain the year before he died he professed to a conviction in astrology: ‘I read the horoscopes and I pick the best one – always my own – from different papers.’ In the same interview he even professed to a ghost in the house: ‘Sometimes when I look through the hatch I can see a shadow go past and many times when I’m sitting in the lounge I hear someone coming down the stairs in one of those dresses that ruffle. Chiffon?’ ‘Taffeta.’‘Yes – and I can hear it coming down the stairs right to the last door and sometimes I say, “Come in,” and there’s no one there.’ ‘Are you frightened?’ ‘No, not at all.’ None of this behaviour is too far removed from the irrational
superstition of a man who always made sure he put his fez down with the open side upwards –‘to let the bad air out’– and demanded that anyone who whistled in his dressing room leave, turn round three times in the corridor and then knock three times before coming back in. In fairness it was done only to protect the performance and ensure the working of a magic that not even he could understand.

  Tommy used to joke of his wife that she always stood by his side: ‘Well, we have only one chair in the house!’ The unassailable fact of his life is that he needed her. In domestic violence the perpetrator is as much the victim as the one who suffers physically, the casualty not least of the resulting loss of self-esteem. Perhaps Gwen sensed this intuitively. Dove was both suburban housewife and Mother Courage. Bob Monk-house knew them both well: ‘I think Dove was probably a lady who had to endure much. Tommy was a child with an infant’s rage, as many waiters will tell you. But he was fundamentally a lovely man. And he just adored tricks and jokes. He never tired of being funny, though I think he never understood why he was funny.’ Had he done so, life might have been easier and eventually less reliant on alcohol. There can be no doubt that she responded to the child as much as to the adult in him. Nor can there be any doubt that he cared for her. Anyone who witnessed, as I did, his tearful anguish and concern at the time when Dove herself was critically ill, would have recognized that love, although it would come as no surprise to learn that the flowers he sent her on that occasion squirted water in her face when she went to take in their perfume.

  TWELVE

  The Days Dwindle Down

  Professionally Cooper embarked on the Seventies with every assurance in the world. Give or take the odd royal and the occasional politician he was arguably the most recognizable figure in the land. The London Palladium beckoned, the clubs promised a cornucopia of riches that had been unimaginable a few years before and he was the comedian who most readily found himself on the tips of people’s tongues when jokes and catchphrases entered the conversation. In September 1975 the Sunday Mirror received ten thousand entries for its Tommy Cooper joke competition. Peter Black wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘If you conducted a really thorough nationwide enquiry you might find somebody who doesn’t like him. I never have and would be interested to hear from one. It must be pleasant to be the best-liked man in Britain.’ The word ‘pleasant’ strikes a discordant note. Such a reputation presented its own additional strain on top of those already catalogued. In reality the ill-discipline that became a by-product of his health problems as the Seventies progressed gave more than a handful of people cause not to like him at all, his manner and conduct making life more than a little difficult for those who tended the golden goose that was the club circuit.

  From February 1974 drinking began sadly to make occasional inroads on his professionalism. Cooper’s only defence was out-and-out denial, spinning a web of distrust between him and Miff Ferrie that only exacerbated the strained relations between them. One club-owner complained of his behaviour backstage: ‘He is not the easiest fellow in the world to get along with. He was complaining about the heater in his dressing room, but he would not let the electrician into the room to switch it on. He stayed at the club till 7.00 a.m. drinking, and it’s been like that most nights of the week.’ Cooper put the flu that kept him from working the following evening down to the lack of heating; the doctor claimed he’d be able to go on the night after that if only he’d get some rest. Tommy reported the situation to Gwen and used her as the messenger to Ferrie: ‘Tommy denies he was up till seven o’clock. He thinks it is a diabolical lie and she is going to sue them.’ Solicitors representing the club – Allinson’s in Lither-land on Merseyside – pre-empted her, complaining of Cooper’s inability to appear on time in addition to the night he did not appear at all. Eventually the matter was resolved without matters reaching the courts, Cooper foregoing a quarter of his £5,000.00 fee for the full week. He would not play Allinson’s again.

  He did no more to endear himself to the management at his next engagement, the Talk of the South in Southend. The report to Ferrie by telephone wasted no words. Miff recorded, ‘Drunk, etc. One night did only five minutes and walked off.’ Three hours later the performer came on the line himself in an attempt to explain. Miff recalls that he was clearly intoxicated: ‘Could hardly speak. Wanted to tell me there was a bit of trouble at the Talk of the South and that I may be hearing from the manager. I asked him which night and he said he was not sure whether it was Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. He did not remember. I said, “You know where you are tomorrow?” He said, “Birmingham”. I said, “No. It’s Sheffield Fiesta.”’

  The following October, the day after his opening at the Cavendish Club, Blackburn, Tommy beat the management to the phone. The tone of the message hints at the tail he was hiding between his legs: ‘Bit of a mishap – lack of props – cabaret at 10.30 – he was ready to go on – they said 11.00 – went on at 11.30. Manager came round and said there had been complaints that he didn’t do long enough.’ Less than an hour later his dresser rang Miff, presumably on Cooper’s instructions, to stress that he had gone on at 11.30 and did not come off until 12.15. Before the afternoon was out, Eve Colling, the booking agent for the Cavendish had followed through with the official line, so surreal it has to be true: ‘T.C. arrived at 10.20 and was not ready to go on because of some lack of props. Eventually went on at 11.30 for 10 minutes – came off – then on again for five minutes – then off for five more minutes – then on and finished his act – in all a total of approximately thirty-five minutes.’ She added that some people had complained and were given free tickets for the next show.

  Miff wasted little time in dashing off an admonitory note to his client: ‘I should just like to reiterate here that it is most important that you adhere strictly to the times of performance as per contract so as not to give any would-be “knockers” the slightest opportunity to open their mouths.’ He would never cure Cooper’s latterly unpunctual ways and it is fortunate that more than a few managements were prepared to be tolerant, ready to take the unpredictability in their stride. Bob Potter of Lakeside Country Club remembers Tommy as the hardest of all performers to get on stage, recalling how he would lock himself into the dressing room before a show and not come out until he was ready, sometimes leaving the band to fill in for three quarters of an hour before he appeared. When he did emerge he’d say, ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it!’ as if they had been holding him up. As Potter said, ‘He gets away with it – just because he’s so popular.’ Years before Al Jolson had toyed with his audience’s patience in a similar way, sometimes deliberately leaving them waiting for an hour before he arrived on stage, often giving an unfinished meal as his excuse. But in his case the ploy was a calculated sounding board for his own ego; he would proceed to make-up on stage and invariably had them shouting for more two hours later. At an earlier stage of his career Cooper would have applauded the entertainer’s bravado while decrying his lack of professionalism. Had he been able to see himself objectively at these times when he let down so many people – himself included – he would have been appalled that in his own case bravado, a quality that he had in greater abundance than any British comic, had no part in the equation.

  It is hard to reconcile such behaviour on Cooper’s part with this period of his greatest prestige and visibility in television terms, given the high profile that accompanied his return to Thames only the previous year after the prolonged absence following the Paradine episode. Mercifully, the club circuit was a provincial phenomenon that did not attract attention in the national press and Fleet Street failed to pick up on local copy that could have made headlines for them had it been so disposed. Occasional mention was made of audiences chanting ‘Why are we waiting?’, their slow hand clap to usher him on stage and his loss of timing once he arrived there. The reporter for the Blackburn Times in October 1974 expressed what unfortunately was fast becoming a consensus on the live circuit: ‘One felt that for many people some o
f the glitter surrounding their idol had disappeared.’ The most hurtful review of them all appeared in the Thurrock Gazette in July 1975: ‘Virtually every impressionist in the country “does” Tommy Cooper and after seeing Cooper at the Circus Tavern last week it’s my bet that nine out of ten of them do a better job … I for one wish I hadn’t seen him, for the same reasons that I would avoid seeing Jimmy Greaves play football now. I would rather remember the greats how they really were – and Tommy Cooper on this showing is great no longer.’ There can hardly be a more judicious argument for staying away. None of the reports that I have read mentioned, even hinted, why things were as they were. In that one regard they kept faith with the man. In fairness, he was still capable of turning on the magic, as his television shows proved. In truth, the lethal combination of failing health and excessive alcohol was writing the bad reviews for him.

  Ferrie’s patience was continually strained to the limit. For example, on 11 May 1975, Cooper called the office. Miff reported the exchange: ‘T.C. rather drunk sounding – rude – re next week’s change of venue, why don’t I call him to remind him of dates? More rudeness till I said he should hang up and speak to me again when he was more rational.’ The following day Ferrie put pen to paper in a letter to clarify matters: ‘Further to the flap on the telephone yesterday, I must place on record the facts re the switch of venue from Slough to Ilford. You were first advised of the switch in my letter of 27 March, which contained a copy of the letter from the Management for your signature, and which you duly signed and returned here. I also reminded you personally on the telephone on 22 April, whilst a letter was sent to you on 7 May further reminding you. What more can one do???’ Those last five words with their hat trick of question marks express the impossibility of Ferrie’s position, underlined by the revelation spelled out in the subsequent paragraph that a year had passed since performer and manager had been in each other’s company, a quite remarkable state of affairs. Miff adds, with what seems like diplomatic understatement in the circumstances, ‘This is far too long.’ There is nothing to indicate that they came face to face with each other again until the Coopers entertained him to lunch at Chiswick in January 1976.