by John Fisher
For legal and medical reasons Cooper’s body could be removed only by paramedics or the police, leaving Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, as well as Howard Keel to present their acts in the middle section of the show in the limited space before the front cloth, made even more restricted by the bulge in the curtain caused by Tommy’s body in the centre of the stage. For a long time a rumour circulated that his outsize feet protruded in vision from beneath the tabs. If at any stage this was the case, it was not observed by the home audience: so sensitive was the direction that it kept any such moments in a mid-shot on the two young comedians or the veteran Hollywood singing star. According to Peter Prichard, Tarbuck’s manager and coincidentally a fully qualified Officer of the Order of St John ambulance brigade, he managed with the help of others to ease him back some way through the curtains: ‘We couldn’t pull his whole body, as he was too heavy. I started to hit his chest and give him the kiss of life, but got no response.’ Meanwhile his client was inches away the other side of the curtain, summoning up every ounce of his professionalism to keep the live television show rolling.
Joe Kerr, a painter attached to the production and a recently qualified first-aider, grasped the initiative and took over the resuscitation attempt. Matters were not made easier by the darkness backstage. With the help of one of the stage riggers, another first-aider, he applied the bag mask technique, desperately anxious against all the odds to pump the air around inside his lungs: ‘Tommy was not breathing and we commenced CPR, taking turns on the chest compressions. After a delay the company nurse arrived from the front of the house and we all worked together. The scene backstage was a nightmare.’ It was not until the second commercial break that Tommy could be moved by ambulance men and transported in the company of Mary Kay and his son, Thomas to Westminster Hospital. Kerr valiantly kept up the compressions as they moved him out of the theatre and into the ambulance, until the paramedics had sorted out their equipment. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. One of the ambulance men is said to have remarked that they knew he was dead as soon as they set eyes upon him. A short while before the performance Tommy had asked Prichard to look after a carrier bag holding several cans of lager. When Peter returned to the bag he saw the cans contained Kaliber, the alcohol-free lager. Maybe Brian Rogers’ earlier assumption had been wrong. It provided an ironic footnote to a life of excess.
A few days later Kerr received a formal letter from the LWT management thanking him for his ‘initiative and efforts in trying to revive Tommy Cooper after his collapse on stage’. It added, ‘The nurse has also asked to pass on her admiration and sincere thanks for your assistance and support.’ For Tarbuck, to see the life wrenched from the man he loved and admired so much was a traumatic experience. In 1964 on the occasion of the Royal Variety Performance the upstart young comic from Liverpool had been encouraged by the support he had received from the older performer. How he survived the ordeal on camera without betraying emotion as the show continued was remarkable and part of the legacy people like Cooper and Eric Morecambe, another mentor, had entrusted to him. On the following week’s show Jimmy waited until the finale to acknowledge the tragedy and in the process revealed a dignity that surprised many. As he later recalled, ‘At the end of the show I said on behalf of Mrs Cooper and all the family, thank you all very much. Because the response to his death had been like Churchill or royalty – a truly great person dying – and she thanked me for that, did Dove.’
The consensus was that this was the way he would have wanted to have died, surfing the void of life’s emptiness with the sound of laughter in his ears. It was as if he had willed his destiny to follow this course ever since witnessing the death of Bert Lahr’s character in Always Leave Them Laughing thirty-five years before. The view was endorsed by his son, Thomas, who two days after his death said, ‘If I had said to him, “You are going to drop dead on stage tonight in front of millions of people,” he would have replied, “I’ll settle for that.” I always knew he would drop dead on stage. I had a premonition of me pulling off his bow tie and ripping open his shirt … and that’s exactly what happened.’ The day had been uneventful, although a doctor was called to tend to Tommy’s voice in the afternoon – a not uncommon occurrence with performers, especially opera stars and song stylists, so there was little cause for alarm. Thomas had been tending to his father throughout the day, helping to set his props and keeping him from the cigars that were a constant temptation. His hardest job came much later when he had to call his mother from the hospital. She had been watching at home, having last been with her husband when she sent him on his way that morning with his flask of coffee and his packet of lamb and egg mayonnaise sandwiches: ‘I didn’t go because I wanted to see how it looked on the box, but when he didn’t go into the cloak routine, I knew … I knew …’ Besides, only a few days before she had timed the act for him at their dining room table as she had always done. Thomas later revealed the joke that his father had intended to use between the cloak routine and the commercial break: ‘Is there a Mr Smith in the house? Could you please remove your Jaguar from the car park? It’s already bitten a policeman and we’re a bit worried what it’s going to do next.’
Tommy was not the first funny man to suffer such a visible death. Doyen of comedy actors, Sidney James had collapsed on stage while appearing in a farce called The Mating Game in Sunderland eight years previously and died en route to hospital. Kenneth Horne, radio stalwart of Much Binding in the Marsh and Round the Horne had died soon after keeling over while hosting a television awards ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel in 1969: the BBC transmitted the programme later that evening with the tragedy edited out. The press went to town in using Cooper’s death to highlight the precariousness of his profession, oblivious of the fact that before the year was over both Eric Morecambe and Leonard Rossiter would also have succumbed to heart attacks. People close to Morecambe have surmised that Eric’s own demise was accelerated by the shock of the departure of his longtime friend. In fact, he died only six weeks later, having collapsed on stage at the end of an evening being interviewed at a theatre in Tewkesbury by another Welsh wizard of laughter, his – and Tommy’s – friend, Stan Stennett.
The funeral of Tommy Cooper took place at Mortlake Crematorium the following Friday, 20 April. At times it appeared as if the entire British comedy establishment was in attendance. Crowds lined the route and a two feet high model of a fez found itself among the floral tributes. The cause of death on his death certificate was given as ‘coronary occlusion due to atheroma’. This time there could be no hiding the fact that he had a coronary condition, but, as his daughter has admitted, ‘It was the booze, cigars and the late nights that killed him.’ Although he was far too young to die at the age of sixty-two, in retrospect his death could not have been far away; his body, if not his spirit, devastated by the frailties and excesses of the preceding years. However, David Ball, a close friend of the family as well as Tommy’s bank manager, has provided an insight into the specific circumstances of his exit. After the death Gwen admitted to him how especially anxious Tommy had been in advance of this particular transmission, constantly agitated throughout their stay in Las Palmas by the fact that it was a live show. By a strange paradox a live broadcast appears to exert an additional strain on performers whose core role is the entertainment of live audiences in nightclubs and theatres. The pre-recorded programme with its potential for editing and sound dubbing has about it a sense of security that is bound to appeal to intrinsically nervous performers like Cooper. Nothing could alter the fact that on that April evening at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s Haymarket the vulnerability of the performer – not for the first or the last time in history – turned pallbearer.
After the funeral Thomas sprinkled his father’s ashes among the daffodils – Tommy’s favourite flower – in the garden at Chiswick. According to his will he left an estate of £327,272.00 gross, £326,686.00 net. This was a surprise to many of those close to him who thought he had spent most
of the money he made. As is so often the case, his true wealth was partly assigned to his widow through assets they shared and which passed to her sole ownership on his death. The larger part of his magical and stage properties were sorted and put into auction at Christie’s where they raised £7,500.00 later in the year. Gwen stayed away from the sale. For her time had no meaning. Before long she found herself writing a note of apology to Miff and Beatrice: ‘I am not sending Christmas cards this year. Tommy always ticked the bird catalogue and I’m sure you understand. We all wish you a happy Christmas and good health in 1985.’ The card was dated 17 August.
Few people were drawn closer to the tragedy than Eric Sykes, who recalls receiving a telephone call from Tommy on the morning of the show, begging him to watch later in the day to check out a new gag he thought he would like. As Eric explains, in all their long association Cooper had not alerted him to an upcoming appearance in that way before. It was not something pros did. You took your work in its stride and moved from one job to the next without fuss, not least because you had no idea how good you were going to be. If the gesture could be interpreted as a presentiment of death, maybe another harbinger of something untoward could be discerned in the behaviour – or lack of it – of Miff Ferrie. It is significant that the preceding October Miff, foregoing the habit of a career, did not go through the usual rigid routine of submitting to Tommy the formal notice extending the Sole Agency Agreement that had existed between them for so long.
Technically speaking in those last few months of his life Tommy could have been out of contract with Miff without realizing it. But if Miff did reveal his value and astuteness as an agent and manager, he did so now. I have always found it disconcerting that on that final television show he had not taken a stand for Tommy on the matter of billing: once Cooper had established himself in the medium, whenever he appeared on a show other than his own, top billing among the guests had always been a sine qua non. Perhaps this was another sign that something was amiss in the Cooper world order. Nevertheless, the fee negotiated by Miff was outstanding for an eight minute spot, namely £6,000.00. More remarkably, as Tommy embarked on a new financial year, Miff, without compromising the pattern that favoured rest days over working ones, had already negotiated contracts signed by his client that amounted to an income of £99,000.00 in the first six months through to mid-October, including an advertising campaign for Bassett’s Wine Gums for Saatchi and Saatchi in Holland and a new high of £8,500.00 a week for a couple of return visits to Bailey’s in Watford and the Night Out in Birmingham.
Not included in the reckoning of potential earnings were the fees he would have achieved for a BBC situation comedy that showed every possibility of becoming a reality in the months ahead. Co-starring Tommy and Eric Sykes, it was to be written by Johnny Speight, who knew both men well. True to type, Cooper was to play the owner of a joke shop who rents the room above to Eric, cast against type as an Arthur Daley-style wheeler-dealer whose talent agency acts as the front for an assortment of crooked business opportunities, from which the show derived its working title, Harry Moon Conglomerates. Eric described the intended relationship between the two men: ‘I’m a schemer and Tommy is the innocent. But it turns out that I’m really an idiot and Tommy is an even bigger one.’ The pilot episode had been scheduled for recording on 24 March, but industrial action intervened. The holiday in the Canaries filled the gap nicely. With Tommy’s death, the project stood no chance of revival. Only one person could have played the joke shop owner, although Miff in an echo of times past had always been against the idea.
Whatever their artistic differences and the legal formalities that tied them together, it is debatable whether any other representative in British show business could have achieved as much for Tommy over such an extended period. For all the rows and insults and rudely aborted telephones calls, the emotional wear and tear experienced by both parties, the business arrangement could only have survived based on an undertow of respect and – dare one say – affection. When Miff himself was hospitalized for a short while at the beginning of 1979, the Coopers individually and together were more than solicitous in enquiring after his health. Equally concerned was the last letter the agent wrote to the comedian on 14 March 1984. In it he educated Tommy to the work plan for the half year ahead: ‘Bearing in mind the health situation I do not think much more should be negotiated during this period, with the possible exception of any suitable commercials which would only mean a minimum amount of time in a studio. I hope you both have an enjoyable time in Las Palmas, but it can be windy there!’ It is good that it ended on a smile. They could not have prospered without each other. Tommy’s death meant semi-retirement for Ferrie. Tommy had been his sole client for several years. He continued to look after residuals for the estate on behalf of Gwen until his own death from bronchopneumonia in 1994.
Relations between Tommy’s widow and the Ferries would remain cordial, in spite of an initial upset when Miff with his trademark lack of tact instructed Gwen that for business and legal documentation she was no longer technically-speaking Mrs Tommy Cooper. He was punctiliously correct, as usual, although he could have tackled the procedure in a gentler way. Dove was devastated, admitting, ‘I am nothing without Tommy. I don’t know what my life will be now. He was my life. I’ve never wanted a Rolls Royce or a yacht. I only ever wanted him.’ No writer of melodrama could have prepared her for the series of ordeals that this large-hearted lady still had to face. The public humiliation when her husband’s affair with Mary Kay became tabloid fodder paled into insignificance when on 13 August 1988 her son, Thomas died of haemophilia following complications caused by liver failure. After he collapsed at home, doctors pumped seventy pints of new blood into him. He was kept alive on a life-support machine for three days, but when the new blood failed to clot, Gwen had to make the decision to turn off the machine. He was thirty-two years old and left a son, Tam, of six years; his 1981 marriage had fallen apart only six weeks beforehand.
Having experienced the living death that is watching your own child die, this bounteous, big-bosomed soul never fully regained her former resilience. But the second tragedy did provide the one moment she was glad Tommy was no longer around: ‘He could not have coped. He’d have fallen to pieces. You can never, ever recover from the death of a child.’ She was stating the obvious, but melancholy invested her words with dignity, although as she progressed through her seventies there was one thing she could never understand, ‘Why didn’t they take me instead?’ Nor were things destined to get better the following year when on 19 October her brother-in-law, David, a successful businessman in the area of magic and party supplies also died, a victim of cancer of the bronchial tubes. He was fifty-nine, ironically three years younger than his brother at the time of his death.
I came to know Gwen properly only in the years after Tommy died, united as we were in wishing to preserve his reputation for future generations. It was gratifying when two series packaged under my remit at Thames Television, The Best of Tommy Cooper and Classic Cooper attracted audiences in the Nineties commensurate with those he had secured twenty years previously. On the back of a further television project – a profile of Tommy within my documentary strand, Heroes of Comedy, for which Dove graciously agreed to be interviewed for the first and only time before the cameras – I received a call from the actor and theatre producer, Patrick Ryecart. Within days I had accepted his challenge to revive the magic of Tommy Cooper as a stage project. The thought had long simmered in my mind whether Tommy, had he lived longer and had his health allowed, would have taken to the stage like Frankie Howerd and Max Wall in a swan song evening of combined reminiscence and performance. The two other great comedy veterans had crowned their careers with such presentations. I wasted no time in putting pen to paper and with Gwen’s encouragement produced an imaginary transcript of what such an evening might have entailed.
Lee Menzies was invited to participate as co-producer and when Alan Ayckbourn, so keen to direct, had to back
down through the pressure of his other commitments, Simon Callow – in direct line of descent from memorable names like Emlyn Williams and Michael MacLiammoir – brought his vast personal experience of the one-man theatre show to the task. His passion and commitment to the ethos of the vaudevillian was all consuming and energized the project from the moment he came on board. Magician and erstwhile actor Geoffrey Durham had always been my first choice as the person to mastermind the technical side of the magic, not least the conjuring tuition of whoever found himself playing the legendary performer. That casting presented the greatest challenge of the whole enterprise.
An uneasy shadow had always lurked at the back of my mind. Who could possibly play this most singular of clowns? Encouraged by Maureen Lipman’s spellbinding interpretation of unique comedienne Joyce Grenfell, we began the quest to find the actor to play Tommy. But we were not looking for yet another Tommy Cooper impersonator. We were searching for more than that, for an actor who could interpret the essential spirit of his comedy in a personalized way. If anyone at the time had asked us what we meant by this we would not have been able to answer satisfactorily. We would only recognise what we were looking for when we saw it. We turned a corner when we heard that Jerome Flynn, in spite of his standing on television, wanted to audition. At an obviously emotional time in his life, his father – the actor Eric Flynn – having died a few days before, Jerome was the first to step onto the audition stage. We sensed we had found our Tommy the moment he produced in one hand a small black bag that a friend had hurriedly sewn for him and in the other an egg. He had no inkling of how the classic trick worked, but set about putting the familiar words to the actions, in the course of which the egg – he had not thought of using a prop one – was smashed unintentionally in the pocket of his extremely expensive velvet jacket. The audition process henceforth became a courtesy exercise for those queuing to follow him.