by John Fisher
On stage he never took the rise out of anybody, always turning the comedy on himself. It is therefore not difficult to understand the therapy incidents like these provided, not least because his privacy was so important to him. While he always had time for his public – he once said to his daughter, ‘The time to worry is when they stop coming up to you’– it had to be at the right time and in the right place. On one occasion he was enjoying a meal with the comedian Bobby Knoxall when a woman in her eighties approached him with a request for him to sign her book. ‘Of course, but after my meal,’ Tommy said politely, but firmly. ‘But, Mr Cooper, my coach is waiting for me outside.’ Not best pleased, he slammed down his knife and fork, took the book and signed it. He later confided to Bobby what he had written. It must have caused quite a shock when she returned to the coach and shared the inscription with the other old dears. At times like these he stands revealed as the British equivalent of W.C. Fields, although had the behaviour been broadcast it would not have enhanced his public image; in the case of the sometime juggler with the chip on his shoulder, it would only have boosted his popularity rating. Michael Black once spent a couple of anxious hours stuck in a lift with the magician. When the fire brigade arrived to release them, it wasn’t long before one of them saw who they were rescuing: ‘Here, Bert, I don’t believe it. It’s Tommy Cooper.’ As he walked away, Tommy responded with an abruptness that those close to him would recognize as a sign he was under pressure: ‘I know who I am. Who the hell are you?’ Fortunately there were times when laughter had a way of excusing what would have been construed as rudeness in others.
Mary Kay was a constant witness to his strange behaviour patterns, not least the temper tantrums with waiters and officials who failed to pass his personal efficiency standard, outbursts that quickly gave way to laughter in the way that sun follows the passing cloud. Bob Monkhouse, we know, dismissed his petulance as that of a child, never better displayed than in the episode recounted by Mary in which they needed to borrow a tin jug from a hotel kitchen in which to heat milk. They were requested to leave it outside the bedroom door each evening, since it appeared to be the only utensil of its kind in the establishment, in spite of the fact that the hotel, near Manchester, had over three hundred bedrooms. One night they forgot, with the result that early next morning they were woken by a knock on the door from a member of staff requesting its return. To Tommy this represented the proverbial red rag. Simmering with rage, he stomped down the corridor in his pyjamas, clinging to the cord with one hand to stop them falling down and clutching the jug in the other. “‘Here’s the damn thing!” he roared to the receptionist, banging it down so that the remaining contents splashed all over the desk. He then made a dignified exit, cord still intact, face livid with displeasure.’ On that occasion the sun did not come round so quickly. It took him three hours to recover.
During the times I shared his company I observed his bad temper on only one occasion. We had agreed to meet at the Corn Exchange in Brighton one afternoon during the mid Seventies at the magical trade fair staged under the auspices of the annual magic convention held every September by the British branch – or Ring, as it is known – of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. He had asked me to accompany him around the stands and point him in the direction of any new tricks that I felt might be suitable for his act. I was half way through a preliminary recce when I heard the raised angry tones of his famous voice in the distance. Upon investigation it transpired that Tommy was expecting to enter the proceedings gratis, while the official on the door was adamant that Tommy should pay like everybody else. They were both out of order. Tommy, arguably the wealthiest magician in the land as well as the most famous, should never have made the assumption that he should be so privileged, while the official should never have allowed small-mindedness to cross the path of the public relations potential that the star’s presence would have bestowed on the event. Besides, as Tommy explained, he only wanted to go round the dealers’ stalls, having no time to attend any of the lectures and shows that justified the high registration fee. In the end common sense prevailed and he was admitted without harm to his bank balance. But the incident had proved to be a waste of energy on his part and a cause of unnecessary unpleasantness for those caught up in the swell. He went and sat on a chair at the stand of his friends, Edwin and Ian from the Supreme Magic Company, where he semi-sulked the rest of the afternoon away, leaving Mary and myself to go the rounds for him, picking out what I thought would fit his style. I remember one prop especially, a colourful item involving cut-outs of various animals that gave him ample scope for characteristic confusion en route to the climax, but after the earlier kerfuffle he was by now unreceptive to any ideas and I don’t think he ever performed the item. However, I do remember that he paid me what he owed me – or maybe Mary did.
He had a pathological dread of reaching into his pocket if it could at all be avoided. Peter Hudson recalls the many afternoons on tour when the pair of them would present themselves at a cinema box office, ask for the manager and then without so much as a flash of their Equity card be waived inside on the back of Tommy’s fame: ‘Oh, that’s very nice of you.’ They hadn’t reckoned with the Classic, Coventry. The manager wasn’t in and the ferocious old biddy behind the glass was having no truck with free admission, at which Cooper turned to Peter and said, ‘You’ve got to pay this time, Peter.’ Almost as frequent were the occasions at motorway service stations when the old Fifties ploy of ‘You get the teas – I’ll get the chairs’ was given a different twist. Invariably it was half past two in the morning and there was a line that seemed half a mile long. Tommy walked to the head of the queue and announced ‘We’ve got a plane to catch in Luton,’ before turning to Hudson to add, ‘You pay, Peter. I’m just going to the toilet.’
The number of people in magic who have said he went to his grave owing them this sum or that for some prop or other would probably extend beyond the length of any cafeteria queue. People like David Hemingway who claimed Cooper always paid him ‘promptly on the nail’ are the exception. When he was appearing in Blackpool he spent much of his spare time in the shabby magic shop run by Murray, the old-time variety magician who had once enjoyed top of the bill status but to whom life had been more of a struggle in recent years. Tommy spent nothing there all season. The nearest he came to a transaction was when he picked up a handful of second-hand magazines and asked if he could borrow them. There was no way Murray could refuse. It never occurred to Cooper that for a pittance, a sum he would never have missed in a thousand years, he would have been doing the old man a favour.
It became something of a joke how he would lock his liquor away under padlock and chain in dressing rooms across the land, even his telephone the time all the Royal Variety comics had to share his room at the Palladium. As he explained to Tarbuck, ‘You’ve got to watch these people. I’ll be out there and they’ll be phoning New York.’ Barry Cryer remembers that when he walked into a pub he would never go straight to the bar, holding back as if in suspended animation, always long enough for someone to volunteer, ‘What you gonna have?’ ‘Oh, that’s very kind,’ became a private catchphrase. Writer John Muir remembers another refrain, ‘I’m just looking for my cigars,’ as the excuse to keep his distance until rescued by the generosity of others. More subtle, if more distasteful was the ruse, again remembered by John, whereby he would ask the barmaid to keep back for him an unfinished glass of wine until later in the afternoon. This meant one of two things. Either the girl would throw it away and pour him a new one when the time came, or she would keep it and run the risk of his anger when he complained he had left a full glass.
Royston Mayoh also recalls the way his drinking would interact both with his thriftiness and his magician’s cunning, marvelling at his capacity for looking a complete stranger in the eye and almost hypnotising him into offering to buy him a drink. It was all done by little nods and eye gestures, in total silence until the fall guy walked over. The dialogue that follow
ed was invariably the same. Tommy would say, ‘Yes?’ ‘Well, can I get you a drink?’ ‘What are you drinking?’ replied Cooper. Thinking Tommy had taken the initiative, the guy visibly relaxed: ‘A gin and tonic’. In an instant Cooper turned the tables, ‘I’ll have one as well then!’ It was a routine Mayoh saw him perform time and again, executed with all the psychological skills of a great magician. By the end of the evening the table in front of him was littered with drinks of every description that he had cadged in this way.
At the end of a season he has been known to confront stage doormen and stage managers with a word of thanks and the offer of an envelope. Instead of handing over a conventional tip, he had three envelopes, one of which contained the money. ‘Pick an envelope’ became a familiar phrase backstage on closing night. No one knew that this was an old magician’s ploy known variously as ‘Just Chance’ or ‘Bank Night,’ and that they had absolutely no chance of choosing the money for themselves. As he opened the envelope with the ten bob inside, he’d exercise his nervous laugh, give an apology of sorts, ‘Oh well! Bad luck. Better luck next time,’ and ride off into the sunset. Of course the teabag stunt was a much better ploy, as there was no hiatus for excuses and he left people with something tangible to keep. In that one magnificent joke the spendthrift, the child, and the jester all came together as one.
Quite simply he was acknowledged as the tightest man in the business, with little of the secret kindness and philanthropy at work behind the scenes to belie that reputation in later years, as in the case of his heroes, Max Miller and Jack Benny. It might be possible to devise a graph that showed how a comic’s stinginess in later life equated with his poverty at the beginning, but as his magician colleague, Patrick Page tried to reason with me, ‘Nobody was poorer than my family. All of us lived in a Scottish tenement, my father was disabled from the First World War and there were only two men employed in the whole community. And none of us turned out like that. But it didn’t alter the fact that he was the funniest man in the country.’ Pat, Bobby Bernard, and Val Andrews knew him well enough to be able to joke with him about not buying his round. He stood up for himself: ‘Hold on. It’s all very well, but one day I might walk out on stage and no one will laugh. Who’ll buy the drinks then?’ Harry Secombe, whose bounteous generosity was his own way of dealing unwittingly with the basic insecurity of being a comic, once summed it up for them all: ‘You live in constant fear that one morning the phone will ring and a voice at the other end will say, “Mr Secombe, we’d like it all back now please.”’
I can personally understand the meanness, even if I cannot condone it. Aside from the reasons discussed, it is feasible that at one stage it might have been calculated as a deliberate comic ploy. Maybe he was taking the personas of Benny and Miller too literally. The trait never obtruded into his stage act, but it is interesting that among his early papers was a parody of ‘The Sheik of Araby’ that he – or someone for him – had written for stage use:
I’m the Freak of Araby
As crazy as can be
Maybe you think I’m tight
Or say I’m not quite right
As things turned out he had no need to go beyond the character assessment of the second line to become a success.
Cooper’s attitude to money was curious. In many ways it was unimportant, a barometer of his success, capable of funding holidays, private education for his kids, copious presents for Dove and a cornucopia of magic tricks for his own pleasure that he would never use professionally. It certainly never changed the size of his head. David Ball, his friend and bank manager for the last five years of his life, admits that Gwen essentially controlled the Cooper exchequer, although beyond the fact of its existence she knew little about the safe deposit box that Tommy kept in the branch of the National Westminster Bank in Eastbourne. Upon his death, Gwen asked for it to be transferred to the Chiswick branch that came under David’s remit. No one knew what was inside. One Monday morning they gathered in his office and opened it with no little anticipation. It contained £36,000.00 in readies. If people had wondered what he did with his spare cash, now they knew. One is tempted to say that it represented all the money he had saved from all the drinks he never bought.
It always puzzled me how Mary was paid. Nothing appears to have gone through the Ferrie office and this was of course one aspect of the finances that could not be processed by Gwen. In a press interview in 1986 she admitted, ‘Apart from the odd one hundred pound cheque to cover the rent, all I lived on for those seventeen years was the loose change out of Tommy’s pocket. He’d give me some money to go out and buy food and even if it was two items I’d have to come back with a bill for Tommy to check. “Tommy,” I’d say, “what am I supposed to live on?” “Don’t you worry, Mary,” he’d reply, “when I’m dead you won’t have to worry about money ever again.”’ Of course, it seldom works out that way, although thankfully Gwen herself was well-provided for.
The one area of Cooper’s behaviour with which I have the greatest problem is not his meanness, but his ingratitude. Gratitude costs not a penny, making those moments marked by the lack of it in someone as generally charming and friendly as Tommy all the more disconcerting. Val Andrews will never forget the occasion in their early days when he went out of his way to repaint a prop that Cooper needed urgently for a show. A distinctive brand of quick drying enamel was the answer and the item made the curtain in time. When he met up with his friend the following Saturday, he flung a parcel down in front of Val with the complaint, ‘Call that a paint job!’ Andrews remembers, ‘He was really nasty – arguing that the smell had given him a headache. I had done the best I could for him in the circumstances and all he could do was complain.’ Alan Alan can recite a litany of tried and tested Cooper classics that found their way into his act through his initial recommendation – not least the signature trick with the goldfish bowl that proved too big to go back into the tube from which it emerged until he squeezed it smaller – with no acknowledgement whatsoever. It was not that Alan was seeking open recognition. His own reputation in magical circles as an escapologist was almost as high as Cooper’s. But it amazes him, as it does me, that even at the incidental level of passing the time of day thanks were verboten.
The recollections of Andrews and Alan pale into insignificance besides the experience of Billy Mayo, an old time variety pro who had seen better days and was living in retirement in a flat above an Italian restaurant in Soho. He was a Saturday afternoon regular at the magic studio run by Harry Stanley in Brewer Street in the Sixties. This particular Saturday afternoon in 1964 was an especially anxious one for Tommy. He had given in to pressure from impresario Bernard Delfont and producer Robert Nesbitt to open the Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium in a week’s time. The first act after the dancers was the worst possible spot. Moreover, he had nothing with which he could confidently begin the act that the audience hadn’t already seen many times before. Billy said he would put on his thinking cap and contact Tommy if anything came to mind. It did. A couple of days later a memory from the Forties comedy movie, Hellzapoppin’, sent him scurrying to the nearest hardware store where he purchased a paraffin oil heater. He then made his way by public transport to Chiswick and explained to Tommy what he had to do: ‘Just walk on at the beginning with this, put it down beside you and explain, “They told me to go out there and warm them all up.” It cannot fail.’ Cooper took both the advice and the prop to heart. On the big night everything Mayo had said came true. From that opening gag Cooper could do no wrong. He stole the show. The following Saturday the gang were together again at Brewer Street. Compliments were thrown in Tommy’s direction from left, right and centre, but not a word of thanks or acknowledgement did he offer Billy. It then came time to go. Mayo stood up and asked the younger pro a favour: ‘My legs are not so good at the moment. Would it be possible for your driver to drop me off at the flat?’ Tommy surveyed his benefactor with querulousness, pronounced, ‘I’m not a fucking taxi service. You can make you
r own way home,’ and walked out. Feasibly it might have been said as a joke. Bobby Bernard, who told me the story, insists not. We shall never know. Max Miller once put his car and chauffeur at the full disposal of a similarly straitened old-timer to visit his ailing wife in a hospital two hundred miles away.
The novelist, John Le Carré was once described by film critic, Anthony Lane as inventing the idea that any person will on closer inspection turn out to be ‘not so much a solid body as a dance of seven veils’. The image is especially apt for Cooper. With a teasing nod to Marqueez, his old nightclub co-star, one imagines the bizarre spectacle of Cooper peeling away gauze after gauze to divulge one layer after another of character evidence that cut against the grain of his popular image. And yet at the final reckoning nobody – certainly none of those who have shared their memories with me – disliked him, his quirks, moods and foibles feeding the general picture of his eccentricity rather than detracting from the warmth generated by him. Murray recalled the cheer he brought into his dingy emporium, Andrews loved his company and Alan found him nothing if not ‘an approachable sort of guy’. As for Bobby Bernard, he expressed surprise that I should question his attendance at Tommy’s funeral in view of the rancour with which he described the anti-social tendencies he witnessed on occasion. The justification was simple: ‘He was a terrible sod, but he was my friend.’