Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The rows among the cast came to a head in December when Myra de Groot vanished without trace, returning in the New Year only to be fired on the spot. It did not seem to matter. The public loved it, and Pieces of Eight ran for 429 performances. Among the delighted crowd were Alec and Margaret Cook and Sarah, who was thrilled to bits to be taken backstage to meet the stars. Peter went to see the show in London with Robin Voelcker, and left the theatre on a high. In the street outside they were accosted by a prostitute; Voelcker hurried on, but Peter stopped with a flourish and said ‘Good evening my dear! I do think I have had the pleasure.’ He received a torrent of abuse in return.

  Peter returned to Cambridge a hero, and a well-paid hero at that, as he was now on a retainer of £100 per week; ‘but he was never big-headed about it in the slightest,’ says Michael Wild. He was now expected to divide his time between London and Cambridge, which was strictly illegal under university law. He was not even supposed to spend a night outside the city without special permission, and a promise to make up the extra night at a later date. So he went to see Anthony Garrett and asked if he could take over his Clarendon Street digs, which were sufficiently far out of the centre to escape the bulldogs’ scrutiny. He also slipped the landlord a few quid for good measure. His tutor, Tony Camps, a kind man whose speech impediment wasto crop up in one or two future Cook characters, was tolerant enough to impose nothing more than a small cash fine when he found out. Consequently many of Peter’s spare afternoons were spent wandering the area of Soho behind the theatre, perusing the strip show displays and dirty bookshops, of which he became rather a connoisseur.

  If anyone thought that Presidency of the Footlights Club would invest Peter with an air of responsibility, they were sadly mistaken. Bamber Gascoigne attended the first Footlights dinner of the new term, when the President proposed a loyal toast. ‘The Queen, we all intoned, the Queen, the Queen. But the President was not done. He mumbled on, with the dreadful deadpan intensity which would later be known as the trade mark of E. L. Wisty, “. . . and all who sail in her.”’23 Peter always somehow made time for practical jokes, and kept up long-running correspondences with people who put notices in the personal column of The Times. One woman, who announced that she was exporting ballerinas (a type of dress) to South America, was accused by Peter of being part of the white slave trade, a correspondence that batted back and forth for eight weeks.

  Peter Bellwood, a new friend from the cast of The Last Laugh, recounts a visit to the cinema to see Olivier’s Richard III. Arriving just after the start Bellwood went in first, and whispered to the usherette ‘Excuse me, but have I missed the nude bathing scene?’ The confused lady replied that, as far as she knew, there wasn’t one. Bellwood took his seat, whereupon Peter came in. ‘Excuse me, but have I missed the nude bathing scene?’ he whispered to the same usherette. Later that evening they glanced behind them to see all three usherettes standing at the back transfixed by the film, not daring to take their eyes off the screen for a minute. Peter delighted Bellwood with his extraordinary off-the-cuff improvisations: ‘The Phantom Bee-Fang Gluer, a lunatic on the loose in Amsterdam going round gluing sets of fangs onto dead bees . . . A man who was convinced the Soviets had planted a camera in his bath . . . Another who bought a walking stick because “I thought I saw it move” . . . And a man who’d managed against all odds to purchase a heap of rotting grass, only to learn that the bottom had just dropped out of the rotting grass market.’24 Peter the showman was at it again.

  By now money was coming in so fast Peter barely knew what to do with it. He bought a white Sunbeam sports car with some of it, and put some of the rest on the horses. After a big win he treated his friends to fillet steak and beluga caviar at the Garden House Hotel. A lot more cash disappeared when his room was burgled. Chris Smith recalls: ‘The loot included some cheques, and Peter said, with humility rather surprising in an undergraduate in his early twenties, that he should have taken the advice of his father, who always told him to pay cheques into the bank as quickly as possible.’ Another purchase was a Ferrograph tape recorder, then regarded as the Rolls Royce of its ilk, so he could stride up and down improvising sketches into it.

  Despite his West End success, Peter was as prolific as ever at student level, and still found time to appear in the Pembroke outdoor revue on Poppy Day, a parody of The Mummy called The Daddy. There were smokers and cabarets aplenty, one of which was visited by Jonathan Miller. Peter was on stage performing Science – Fact or Fiction, a sketch he had written with David Frost. Miller recalls that ‘There was this astonishing, strange, glazed, handsome creature, producing weird stuff the like of which I’d never heard before. I remember his first line when I was shot upright in my seat by him. He was playing some person in a suburban kitchen concealed behind a newspaper. He didn’t say a word. But all eyes were drawn to him. Then he rustled the newspaper and simply said, “Hello, hello. I see the Titanic’s sunk again.” One knew one was in the presence of comedy at right angles to all the comedy we’d heard.25 Peter went on to perform a new Grole routine, in which the character was cast as a miner who had always wanted to be a Judge but who kept failing the exams, because he’d ‘never had the Latin’. After the show Miller approached Cook, introduced himself, and asked him – with reference to the sketch – whether he had ever worked with schizophrenics. Peter asked why: ‘And Jonathan said, “Well you’ve perfectly reproduced the schizophrenic speech pattern.” I wasn’t aware of it at all. It came from me, it doesn’t make me a schizophrenic. It just means Jonathan’s wrong, as he so often is, bless his heart.’26 It was to be on Miller’s recommendation that Peter was included in Beyond the Fringe.

  On 8 October Harold Macmillan had been re-elected, to the disbelieving fury of the student left, and Peter now elevated his impression of the Prime Minister to become a regular part of his routine. In a senile patrician drawl, he spoke of Britain’s position as an honest broker (‘No nation could be more honest . . . and no nation could be broker’) and replied to a letter of complaint he had received from an OAP in Fife:

  Well, let me say right away Mrs McFarlane – as one Scottish old-age-pensioner to another – be of good cheer. There are many people in this country today who are far worse off than yourself. And it is the policy of the Conservative Party to see that this position is maintained.

  Impressions of Prime Ministers are of course commonplace today, but in 1959 they were rather shocking. When the Macmillan monologue (entitled TVPM) became the centrepiece of Beyond the Fringe in the West End two years later, Michael Frayn was sitting behind a young couple who were ‘neighing away like demented horses, until the middle of Peter Cook’s lampoon on Macmillan, when the man turned to the girl and said in an appalled whisper, “I say! This is supposed to be the Prime Minister!” after which they sat in silence for the rest of the evening.’27 Christopher Booker believes that this piece was the key moment in the birth of what was to become known as the satire movement: ‘I remember seeing the first performance of Peter imitating Macmillan as the old, world-weary elder statesman out of touch. The point was that Macmillan had just won an enormous election victory. He was SuperMac. He seemed to be absolutely in command of the British political stage in 1959. Two years later he suddenly seemed to be a totally out-of-touch old fuddy-duddy who just didn’t have a clue. And Peter was the first to pick up that change of mood, which actually characterised the onset of the sixties and a totally new world.’ Except of course that Peter had been doing the Prime Minister for three years, not two; he may have made it seem like the first performance, but the studets of Pembroke had already been enjoying his Macmillan performance for the best part of a year.

  There is no question that Peter’s impression was, as Booker suggests, seismic in satirical terms. It is equally true that the public outrage at the Prime Minister’s performance that the impression eventually came to reflect was no part of its inspiration. According to Jonathan Miller, ‘I don’t think he was struck by the unfairness of Macmillan-led C
onservatism, he was simply amused by the particular sort of patrician charm that someone of that sort had. I don’t think he wrote that joke that begins “As one Scottish old-age-pensioner to another . . .” out of any sense of indignation about the patrician complacency of Harold Macmillan. I think he found him rather adorable really.’ Peter himself concurred with this view: ‘My impersonation of Macmillan was in fact extremely affectionate. I was a great Macmillan fan.’28 For Peter, Macmillan was just another marvellous, overconfident old buffer in the Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling mould – the sort who would come and give out the prizes at Radley speech day. Peter’s comedy was in one respect a glorious wide-ranging parody of his life, and everybody and everything he came across. He was not afraid to be satirical, but moral indignation was never his prime motivation.

  Peter spent Christmas in Cambridge, with the exception of a few days over New Year with the Bawtrees, much of the time in agonised indecision over his career. Should he go for the security of the Foreign Office as planned, or risk upsetting his father by gambling on a career in comedy? He confided his problem to Aunt Joan: ‘Time whips by much too quickly and all the time the fearful task of choosing a job gets closer and closer. I really am no nearer reaching a decision. Pieces of Eight has merely served to cloud the issue even more. I saw the show again last week and all seemed well, with an enthusiastic and full house. The LP came out last week and I have heard quite a few turns from it on Housewives’ Choice.’ As if to give him a further nudge away from the Civil Service, Anglia TV gave the entire Christmas edition of their Cambridge-based magazine show Town and Gown over to Peter, to produce a parody version of their programme. Sadly all copies of his television debut have long since been destroyed, but records show that Peter actually linked the programme, while most of the comic characters were played by David Frost and Peter Bellwood. Items included a football sketch and a version of the Polar Bores sketch from the Footlights. The list of characters shows the obvious influence of Spike Milligan in Peter’s work: F. Nidgcombe, Professor Nain, Lionel Sope, Ron Plindell, Colonel Mountebank-Fowler, Larry Splutt, Mr Saffron, Colonel Nagger, W. Rupp, P. L. Wedge and Arthur Frad.

  That Christmas, with most of his friends at home with their families, Peter hung around Cambridge with Jack Altman. Wendy Snowden, who had modelled for the May Ball photograph with him six months earlier, had secured a holiday job as a waitress in the trendy new Kenya Coffee Bar. ‘And there I was waitressing, which I did with a bit of gusto I think despite the black nylon overall, and suddenly there was Peter, tall and debonair, in a rather beautiful wool overcoat which he was obviously very proud of wearing. And Jack was with him, who was short and swarthy, large ears and beady little jet black eyes. They were such an amazing couple. Peter had this tension around him – it was part of his magnetism, he was one of the most unrelaxed people that I’ve ever met. And in that kind of atmosphere it was very exciting, a creative tension. So anyway, the first thing he said was, ‘Will you buy me a coffee?’ He asked me whether I would buy him a coffee. And I thought this was kind of quite interesting really – because I had lots of chaps running after me at that time – this was a bit of a different approach. I paid for his coffee out of my wages. And then as he was leaving he said ‘How about taking me out to the movies tomorrow?’ It was going to be Sunday, my day off, and I thought ‘This is novel.’ I was awful, because I stood up my ‘true love’ to go on this date. And really that was it, because he just had me laughing all the time. I’m a rather serious, intense person – I was a bit of a religious maniac in my teens – so it was just very healing in a way, just to be able to laugh at everything.’

  Despite her Christianity, Wendy was in fact of partly Jewish extraction, although her parents did not tell her this until she was an adult, to spare her the social ostracisation they feared. She was the daughter of a low-paid, intellectually frustrated civil servant from rural Bedfordshire, a philanthropist who frequently gave away his wages to the poor and wanted to change the world, but never had sufficient impetus to escape the confines of his routine life. She identified with anti-authority types and had always been the naughtiest girl’s sidekick at school. Her mother was practical and independent, and her parents quarrelled frequently. Wendy herself had suffered a sickly childhood, spending months at a stretch in bed with bronchitis and TB, where drawing and painting had been her only solace. Eventually she had blossomed into a notable beauty, whereupon her father – fearful for her future financial wellbeing – had secured her a drab job as a GPO Accounts Clerk in Cambridge. She had broken free with her mother’s assistance and enrolled in the local art school, where she made her own clothes and modelled herself on Brigitte Bardot, posing round Cambridge in gingham skirts, or perched on a bicycle in big tulle petticoats and a waspy waist belt. Boys adored her.

  One of her first boyfriends was the huge, bear-like Roger Law: ‘We called him the Tiger from the Fens or something,’ she recalls. ‘He’d bring whole pork chops in and munch them like Desperate Dan.’ Law used to hang around with Peter Fluck – ‘gangly, all nose and elbows and always sat as close as he could to the nude model’ – and together the pair would go on to found Spitting Image. Law remembers Wendy as going through a rebellious phase: ‘She was very girly, very, very lively and a bunch of trouble. She was a laugh and lots of stocking top. You’d go out with her but you wouldn’t fuckin’ marry her! I wouldn’t, anyway. She’d spend your week’s wages in one night, and expect to. Peter liked girls that were lively or tarty, and she was a flirt, a tremendous flirt, and he seemed to like all that.’ Peter was certainly attracted to the apparent dichotomy between Wendy’s straight-laced, spiritual side and her unabashed sexuality. His first, daring, present to her was a black nylon frilly nightie.

  When she got to know Peter, Wendy found him him ‘very tense, but brilliant – and that brilliance was magnetic.’29 His childhood asthma and her bedridden youth represented a common bond: ‘We both shared this incredible dark experience of illness and not being able to breathe. To both of us, I think, the night was full of fear.’ By day they made an incredibly glamorous couple, and Wendy swiftly remodelled him on art school-fashible lines. Out went the woollen jackets and ties and sensible pullovers and the college scarf. ‘Peter wasn’t very confident about his looks to begin with – partly because of the acne problem. He was quite sheepish with me when we were alone together.’ Peter soon became a high-fashion dandy every bit as dazzling as his girlfriend, and took to gazing admiringly at himself in mirrors.

  Soon he had all but abandoned his digs, and moved into the Prince of Wales, a defunct pub in Norfolk Street where Wendy lived with a crowd of friends. The bar was still operational, and the resulting parties were riotous. Unconscious bodies were invariably found curled up in corners the following morning. Wendy revealed herself to be an expert cook and natural entertainer, and Peter’s non-stop monologues were the centre of attention at an innumerable series of hilarious dinner parties. It was on one of these occasions that he was eventually introduced to Roger Law, who remembers: ‘Of course I realised I’d finally met the originator of the funny voices I’d heard. And of course the original was much more entertaining. He rarely spoke in his proper voice. He was very well-tailored, very good-looking, like a Regency buck. He had Italian-style clothes, box jackets with very dark designer shirts, the forerunner of that sort of snappy dressing the Beatles did. He had money coming in, and so he always had form-books falling out of his pocket – he always used to be on his way to the betting shop. He seemed very worldly and cynical. You’d say something with gushing enthusiasm, which he would then undercut with probably something nearer the truth. I mean, I really thought things could be changed a bit – a lot of people made that mistake in my generation. But I don’t think Peter was fooled for a minute.’

  Cynical he may have been about Law’s radical politics, but he was also entertained by his radical antics. On one occasion Law had organised a raid on the Labour Party Conference, and had come up with the bright idea of
sustaining the raiding party for a week by taking along a milk churn filled to the brim with cabbage-and-pig’s-trotter stew. It had taken so long to cook and decant the stew into the churn that by the time the last panload had gone in, the stew at the bottom had gone off, infecting the whole brew. Law had created for himself the problem of disposing of eighty pints of stinking pig’s trotter broth, and had broken into someone’s garden at dead of night and buried it there.

  Peter had finally found something worthwhile to do with his money. Fluck and Law moved into a property Peter owned in Park Street, and there set up the forerunner of Spitting Image, entitled ‘East Anglian Artists’ (it was just a few doors down from the grocer’s shop owned by Fluck’s father, from which the ‘l’ went missing on a regular basis). Law wanted a contract with his new landlord: ‘But of course we couldn’t afford a lawyer, so I went off and wrote one up as I thought lawyers did – you know, “heretofore” and all that bollocks. And of course Peter thought that was fucking hilarious.’ The landlord signed it at once, but never asked for a penny in rent.