Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  It was not a problem that the Establishment Club was ever able to solve; if, indeed, it was a problem. There is always a danger that when a group of middle-class people from good homes puts on a revue, other middle-class people from good homes will want to come and see it. One might argue that it is a sign of a healthy society for its rich and powerful citizens to laugh loudly at themselves. In the radical climate of 1961, though, it was always likely to be perceived as a drawback. Peter was not entirely grateful for Can English Satire Draw Blood?: ‘That article was very flattering, but in a way it wound up as being a disservice. The only blood drawn was from my mouth when somebody hit me round the head with a handbag.’9

  One problem that really should have been foreseen and dealt with was that all 7,000 members would attempt to turn up on the opening night. The possibility only dawned on Peter when it was too late to stop it occurring: ‘I hope we’ve attracted the sort of members who’ll be small enough to be stacked in tiers,’ he said hopefully on the eve of the opening night, before adding wearily: ‘I always wanted to be my own boss, but now I’d like nothing better than to work for a large firm for £25 a week.’10

  On the night of the 5th, Greek Street was jammed with sleek Bentleys and every other kind of car. A crowd of angry members jostled and shoved on the pavement without making any headway. The club’s telephone system collapsed. Television lights blazed white and reporters pushed for quotes. Five hundred people managed to get into the performance area, which had been designed to hold ninety. Four of them were policemen. One newspaper critic, needing to leave early, had to be passed over the heads of the crowd. Among the famous who managed to gain entry were Trevor Howard, J. P. Donleavy and James Butler, the son of the Home Secretary, who arrived in black tie, laughed uproariously at a film of his father and Macmillan as nineteenth-century prizefighters,nd promised to buy his father membership of the club as a present. Among those who couldn’t get in were Geoffrey Johnson-Smith, MP and Jocelyn Stevens, the proprietor of Queen magazine; although as the harassed commissionaire was later instructed to let them both in on the grounds of their status, Jonathan Miller’s worst fears appear to have been realised on the very first night. Targets for the evening included Lord Home, the Bow Group, the Trade Unions, Jomo Kenyatta (impersonated by John Bird), John Betjeman (impersonated by John Wells) and Jocelyn Stevens, lending a shred of virtue to the decision to let him in. Sarah Cook, heartbroken, hadn’t been allowed a day off school to attend, but John Bassett somehow managed to get through on the phone to give her a running commentary. It was all utter chaos; but the important thing was, Peter had done it.

  Over the months that followed, as the Establishment settled into what might be called a normal routine, the club really did become the place to be seen in London society. John Bird remembers: ‘Socialites, cabinet ministers, fashion models, intellectuals fought to get in. Doormen were bribed. We performed twice a night, six nights a week. In May 1962, I remember walking through the audience for the second show on a Monday night and seeing two empty seats: I was appalled. It turned out that somebody had just had a heart attack and had been compelled, presumably reluctantly, to give up his place. It was filled by the time the show began.’11 At the centre of it all shone Peter, floating between the tables, exchanging a witticism here and a word of greeting there, graciously enquiring if his guests were enjoying themselves, seeming to know everyone in the room intimately, always leaving excited faces at the tables he had just visited, like a serene yacht trailing a phosphorescent wake. ‘I don’t think there’s ever been anybody on the London scene who had that immense glamour,’ says Michael Parkinson, an Establishment regular. ‘In the middle of all these long-haired girls and bright abrasive young men, he was this youthful, clever, talented, witty central figure.’

  In his autobiography, Barry Humphries describes his first night at the club: ‘There was a long room which had been redecorated by Sean Kenny in a kind of heavily-timbered, Tudor-Constructivist style. There was a bar at the front at which young satire groupies loitered; pale-faced girls with fringes, pearlized lips and eyes like black darns. They said “Yah” and “Soopah” a great deal and they all seemed to know Dudley Moore quite well. Late at night when the club was packed I watched the show. Eleanor Bron and John Fortune did a very funny sketch about middle-class pretentiousness, like a sort of Hampstead Nichols and May, and John Bird impersonated Harold Macmillan to a convulsed audience. I sat at the bar drinking until the late, late show when they tried out new acts, usually wags from the Great Universities. One unprepossessing fellow seemed to get a lot of laughs with a none-too-hilarious monologue about the Royal Barge accidentally sinking in the Thames. “He looks like a Methodist minister’s son” I thought uncharitably, as the birds around me hooted and soopahed. How was I to know then that David Frost was a Methodist minister’s son?’12

  Once again Peter had held out a charitable hand to Frost, allowing him to hang about the club and appear on stage when one of the regulars was off sick. ‘Frostie’ learned all John Bird’s lines and understudied him a few times, his performance always keenly enthusiastic one occasion he bounced up and down so much he broke the stage. ‘He wasn’t very popular,’ explains one of the girls who worked in the club. ‘He was so dull and uninteresting.’ Pushy and eager to please he may have been, but as far as Peter was concerned, he was OK.

  There was a genuine feeling at the Establishment Club that something interesting was always liable to happen. Two little-known Cockney actors, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, propped up the bar and spoke of their future plans. Tom Driberg, the extravagantly homosexual Labour MP and double agent, gave Roger Law gossip for the wall cartoon in return for being allowed to give the impression that they were having a relationship; ‘Peter always had a problem with that – he didn’t like it at all,’ says Law. Christine Keeler came in to have her photograph taken by Lewis Morley, now ensconced on the top floor. The resulting pose – naked and splay-legged across the back of a chair – was flashed around the world after the Profumo scandal. One night Randolph Churchill, son of Sir Winston, forced his way on to the stage and fashioned an impromptu sketch on journalism and the nature of death. Many of the female visitors headed for the basement, and Dudley Moore’s jazz sessions, which usually went on until four or five in the morning. ‘We paid him a ludicrously small wage,’ grinned Peter, ‘but he was surrounded by the best-looking birds in London.’ ‘It was a great scene,’ says Moore. ‘They came down in droves, bless their hearts.’ After the show, he would usually take one of his female fans home with him, to his threadbare flat in the Kilburn High Road, where the only place to sleep was on the sofa, under a single blanket and an old winter coat. This series of inevitably short-term arrangements lasted until he seduced the model Celia Hammond over the piano keys, and began a permanent relationship.

  The best evenings at the Establishment, everyone agreed, were when Peter himself decided to take to the stage. It was often an impromptu performance: an idea would occur to him while reading that day’s newspaper, or he would be seized with the desire to parody someone he’d met, maybe a fashion designer, maybe a chartered accountant. Nick Luard recalls: ‘I used to watch him studying them as he talked to them. There wasn’t in fact a hint that he was studying them. He leant forward from his considerable height, smiling courteously, slightly stooped like a heron, his bright candid eyes never leaving their faces. Afterwards, in swift, incisive and achingly funny sketches, he’d recreate them.’13 Politically, Peter liked to attack both left and right in equal measure, the desire to shock as ever obliterating any thought of aspiring to correctness: ‘What really annoyed people were attacks on the liberal left. If there were sacred cows at that time, they weren’t Macmillan, or the Church. The real sacred cows were ladies like Pat Arrowsmith.’14 When Peter did attack Pat Arrowsmith, a woman in the audience stood up and shouted, ‘That’s not what you’re here for!’ before clouting him – as earlier reported – with her handbag.

  As Peter was an
inadvertent rather than a deliberate satirist, satire rather lost out to bad taste in the long run. His material contained such characters as the lecturer on diarrhoea who walked on to the stage, opened his mouth to begin his talk, hesitated, said ‘Excuse me’ and rushed off again. There was also an extremely well-observed monologue about the male practice, when urinating, of trying to wash away brown traces of the previous occupant from the sides of the lavatory bowl. He devised the character of a Conservative wife for Eleanor Bron called ‘Lady Pamela Stitty’ (Lady Pamela’s titty). During another sketch a member of the audience stood up and shouted angrily, ‘I didn’t drive my wife thirty miles to hear that word!’ before stalking out, never to reveal exactly which word he had driven his wife thirty miles not to hear. When Peter’s parents came to see the show though, the urination monologue would disappear from his act and all traces of risqué material would be cut. The contrast between the caution he exercised in selecting material for Beyond the Fringe and the licence he allowed himself at the Establishment appears to have derived as much from a respect for his parents’ tastes as from solid commercial considerations.

  As in Beyond the Fringe, the lack of any specific political commitment underpinning Peter’s material did not mean that it was not informed by an equivalent moral commitment. After his Cambridge flirtation with tobacco he had taken stoutly against cigarette smoking, and devised a sketch that included the imprecation to ‘Smoke 50,000 cigarettes and win an iron lung!’ The day the government decided that Hanratty was to hang, Peter was deeply affected. ‘I remember we were in a cab, where I was trying to get my Observer copy off him,’ says Roger Law, ‘and we’d just heard about Hanratty’s sentence. And I’ve always remembered this, Peter was as cross as I’ve ever seen him. He wasn’t being witty about it, he was very angry, and he said, “I don’t think I’m going to go on tonight, as a protest.”’

  Ken Tynan came to review the Establishment cabaret, and commented on its position of non-party political ‘radical anarchism’. He praised the three male protagonists: ‘Jeremy Geidt, who specialises in sweaty brutes and insensitive rogues, begging for the extension of the death penalty, since it once deterred him from assaulting a Negro bus-conductor; John Fortune, a mop-shaped young man with tremulous lips (who specialises in) officious junior executives, edgy bureaucrats and nervous smarties, explaining in the role of a NATO instructor that the function of World War Two (“carried out”, as he puts it, “with all the precision of a military operation”) was to build up the economy of Western Europe in readiness for the struggle with Communism; and John Bird, a plump presence with a monkish crop of sandy hair, the most gifted of the Establishmentarians, who specialises in complacency, in smiles knowingly smiled and pipes portentously sucked.’ Tynan was not, however, entirely convinced by what he had seen. ‘Despite the excellence of the cast, despite the astuteness of the anonymous author and his anonymous director, something essential is lacking: a gripping, outgoing central personality for whose every entrance one waits and one on whose every word one devotedly hangs.’15 Peter the proprietor simply could not be in two places at once.

  Despite Tynan’s reservations, the show at the Establishment was considered a huge success. Peter was as happy as he’d ever been. A reluctant but secretly committed nostalgist, he later described the club as ‘A great place, which I still look back on with tremendous fondness. Those were tremendous times.’16 He certainly didn’t care if the real Establishment came to watch the show, as long as they paid to get in; and if the individual targets of the sketches dnerepared to fork out to see themselves lampooned, so much the better. The essential criterion was that they came to him; he turned down invitations for private Establishment Club performances before the Queen and before the senior ranks of the Labour Party. For the most part, the rich and powerful did indeed come to him. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in the New Statesman that ‘One is struck, at the Establishment, by the general air of affluence. One looks around instinctively for Princess Margaret, or at any rate the Duke of Bedford.’ Peter didn’t care. ‘I never suspected that workers would be coming down from Darlington saying “This is the place where the Government will be overthrown.”’17

  Beyond the Fringe excepted, Peter spent almost all his waking hours at the club, so it made sense to base his social life around it. His relationship with Wendy became strained as a result; they spent most of their evenings there, always surrounded by others. Gaye Brown, Judy Huxtable’s then best friend, joined the club as an all-purpose barmaid/ticket seller/lighting operator, and Sundays were spent either in Battersea or at Gaye’s little flat in Fulham, in a series of impromptu parties where Peter held court and frequently knocked over bottles of red wine with his gesticulating hands. Eventually, whenever he turned up at Gaye’s, he would bring a bottle of red wine and a packet of Saxo salt with him for the clean-up operation. In January 1962 Nicholas Garland, a lifelong friend of Jonathan Miller’s, was taken on as the club’s theatrical director, and he and his wife Harriet were added to the Establishment Club crowd. Harriet, and Peter’s secretary Judy Scott-Fox, who was always keen to join in socially if she could, were put in charge of the club’s door policy.

  Although they had been confused initially by the new venture, and by the family atmosphere that seem to surround its jolly young protagonists, it slowly began to dawn on the local Soho gangsters that there was money being made in their midst. Thickset gentlemen began to pay courtesy calls, pointing out the immense structural vulnerability of a satirical nightclub to accidental damage. There was no help to be had from the (genuine) Establishment; not for any vengeful reasons, but because Soho’s police force was riddled through and through with corruption, which would not be rooted out until a decade later. The local police chief, later jailed for planting a brick on a demonstrator, seemed mysteriously unable to help.

  When the club didn’t pay the protection money requested, the thickset gentlemen would return and start brawls, as an excuse to begin smashing the place up. Fortunately, there was always Roger Law, bigger than any local thug: ‘There were always fights. I remember one wonderful punch-up like a Western. As soon as any fight started, I just went and beat the living shit out of whoever it was that started it. Peter was always crying out, “Just ignore them, Roger, don’t take any notice,” but I’d just fucking belt them.’ Peter’s tactics, naturally, were diametrically opposed, but could be just as effective. When two heavies came into the office one morning and started destroying the typewriters, Peter simply engaged them in conversation. So fast was his mind, darting ahead and charting out the path of the dialogue before they had even formulated their next remarks, that before long they found themselves outwitted, out-argued and out on the pavement. There is a famous story that two other visiting heavies met a more substantial fate: Peter ushered them into the bar while it was in the process of redecoration, and oNew Romtarpaulin that concealed a hole in the floor, whereupon they disappeared through to the basement. It is almost certainly an apocryphal tale, but indicative of Peter’s style in dealing with threats: the criminal element simply didn’t know how to go about leaning on this most unusual of victims.

  Like a frontier saloon deep in Indian territory, the Establishment partied on. Serious drama was introduced, in March, with Sean Kenny directing. In April Peter gave the cast a holiday, and imported the pioneering American comedian Lenny Bruce to fill the gap. Bruce had developed a serious heroin addiction after being given heroin-based painkillers when wounded during World War Two, which he made no bones about. His set was peppered with expletives and explicit sexual details. In short, he provided perfect copy for a newspaper campaign, and Fleet Street was soon clamouring for this disgusting individual to be kept out of Britain. Peter managed to persuade the Home Office, entirely untruthfully, that Bruce’s drug-taking days were over, and a work permit was arranged.

  Peter later revealed the events of Bruce’s first few days in this country: ‘I’d heard his records. He was obviously a very good draw. But I had no idea wh
at he was like. I thought – big American star arriving – so I hired a large car, Rolls Royce or something, and went out to the airport to meet him. And out came this wreck. An absolute, shambling wreck. I thought Jesus, what have I got on my hands?’ A day or so later, Bruce was evicted from his hotel after a number of prostitutes had been found in his room and a number of used syringes had been discovered in his lavatory; he fetched up at Peter’s Battersea flat instead. ‘One of my first assignments was to go and get him some drugs, which I knew nothing about. He had this terrible phoney prescription, signed by “Dr Ziglovitz” for a heroin derivative. I thought, drugs . . . jazz. Do I know any jazz musicians? So I rang Dudley. And he only had a junior aspirin, which I didn’t think would satisfy Lenny’s craving.’ Eventually, Peter obtained a list of supposedly crooked medical men. ‘I went traipsing round London ’til about three in the morning with this tatty piece of paper, wandering round to these doctors in the middle of the night, all of whom said “piss off” in medical language. By now I had a very fixed picture in my mind that Lenny Bruce would be climbing up the wall, having the most appalling withdrawal symptoms, and screaming and yelling like in the movies. And when I got back he was sat there quietly. And I said “Well Lenny, I’m terribly sorry, I couldn’t get hold of any heroin.” And he said, “Oh, that’s cool . . . I’d like some chocolate cake.” And I got quite cross, and said “I’m willing to traipse all over London at three in the morning to look for heroin, but chocolate cake is out of the question.” This of course was in 1962, when chocolate cake was not so freely available.’18