Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter rather grew to like Lenny Bruce over the following weeks, and found him to be a gentle person, but thereafter made sure that the hapless Judy Scott-Fox was detailed to go out looking for Bruce’s drugs instead. He and Nick Luard shared the job of housekeeper–minder to Bruce for the duration of the engagement, and they and their friends received a considerable narcotic education in the process. Roger Law, for one, had no idea why Bruce kept making patterns on a little mirror with a pile of white powder. Part of Bruce’s act was to tell the audience to hang on for a moment while he went off to get a heroin fix.ondony would scream with laughter while he left the stage and returned in a state of woozy delight, little realising that it was not an act. Sometimes he would be too doped up to perform, or would simply go missing. On one occasion Peter took the microphone to apologise to the audience and to explain that the performance had been cancelled, owing to the fact that Mr Bruce was indisposed; instead he ended up improvising a wildly successful two-hour set himself.

  Bruce, whose performances were always packed out, proffered some valuable advice to John Bird and the regular Establishment cast when he saw them perform: that they should cease their obvious hostility to their well-heeled audience. ‘You’ve got to believe that everybody in the room is sharing your opinion,’ he said. ‘It may be true that they don’t but if you play it as if you’re all in agreement, you’ll come over better.’ Good advice, but it did not always save Bruce from riling his own audience to the point of open hostility. Laying violently into the Catholic religion one May evening, he enraged the Irish actress, forty-year-old Siobhan McKenna, into shouting back at him, in front of her nineteen-year-old boyfriend Johnny Hippisley. When she had finished, Bruce said, ‘Well if you don’t like it, you must leave. And take your son with you.’ Peter tried to usher them out. ‘I’m glad you’re going. Can I show you the way?’ he said to Ms McKenna, his manners slipping slightly; whereupon Hippisley punched him in the mouth, splitting his lip, and was thrown out. Siobhan McKenna followed, flailing at Peter as she was removed. Peter pointed out that she had just scratched his face. ‘These hands are clean,’ she yelled. ‘These are Irish hands and they are clean.’ ‘Well this is a British face,’ replied Peter smoothly, ‘and it’s bleeding.’ Like Peter and many others, Bruce fell heavily for Judy Huxtable, and told her she was the only girl he’d ever loved. He was no more successful than Peter in this endeavour, although he gave her some helpful advice too, on the importance of saving her virginity for the right man. When he left, everyone was sad to see him go, and promised to see him back at the club the following spring. The last any of them heard of him was when, high on drugs, he jumped from the window of his American apartment shouting, ‘I am SUPERJEW!’ and broke both his ankles. He died a year or two later from a drugs overdose.

  The second ‘holiday relief’ of the year was an altogether more relaxed booking than Bruce, but no less novel. At the Evening Standard Drama Awards in January to pick up an award for Beyond the Fringe, Peter had witnessed Frankie Howerd doing the cabaret. It had been a cut-price booking for the Standard: Howerd’s career was in the doldrums, brought down by the low-radius cycle of fashionability that has always governed British entertainment. He had not appeared in central London for many years. Peter was so impressed by his neglected talent that he booked him for a month’s solo slot, starting in September, his act to be predicated on the extreme unlikelihood of his presence on the fashionable Establishment stage. It was a masterstroke, and thoroughly revitalised Howerd’s career for a further fifteen years.

  Having conquered West End theatre and the London club scene inside a year, Peter was keen to diversify. Soon after opening the Establishment, he had turned his attention to the magazine business, with the idea of starting a satirical publication. He had subsequently suffered rather a rude shock, when Christopher Booker, his old Cambridge friend, had turned up in the bar one eEventh the first issue of Private Eye, a cheaply-produced satirical magazine he had put together with his old Shrewsbury friend, Willie Rushton. ‘He was incredibly nice about it, far more than was justified,’ says Booker. ‘The one thing he immediately said was, why didn’t I take a look at an American magazine, which had photo cover bubbles. He said, “Why don’t you take that idea and use it on the front of Private Eye?”’ Booker accepted the suggestion, which is still going strong today. According to Peter, ‘I was actually very annoyed when the Eye had come out. I’d wanted to start a practically identical magazine – then bloody Private Eye came out and I was really pissed off.’

  The Eye crowd, like most of the other ex-public school satirists following in Peter’s wake, admired him and the rest of the Beyond the Fringe quartet to distraction. According to the magazine’s owner, Andrew Osmond, ‘These people were Gods. An image I’ll carry to my grave is of Dudley and his trio at an Oxford ball – it was dawn and he was jamming away, absolutely lost in it, and he had mist, real mist, rising off the ground all around his feet, so you could only see the three of them from the waist up. They were Gods really, and of the four, Peter was the most glamorous.’ However much they admired him though, they also shared his desire to shock and to go against the fashionable grain. In one of its early issues Private Eye confidently attacked Peter himself, satirising him as ‘Jonathan Crake’. The Rushton-Booker cartoon strip Aesop Revisited showed Crake’s triumphant passage through school and Cambridge University, to impersonating the Prime Minister in a revue called Short Back and Sides, before eventually opening a satirical nightclub in Fulham with stools designed by Sean Kenny. Before long, ‘Crake could not open his mouth without everyone collapsing at his brilliant satirical comment.’ Crowds of people fell about with laughter as he asked the way to the gents. ‘Go away you ugly bone-headed bastards!’ shouted Crake, but those around him simply laughed even more. He sought solace in the bottle, depressed and bereft of inspiration, unable to hold a serious conversation of even the shortest duration, before resorting to copying old jokes out of an 1890 issue of Punch. With the exception of the old Punch jokes, it was to prove a horribly accurate prediction.

  Deprived of the opportunity to run a satirical magazine, Peter was persuaded instead – by Nick Luard and Colin Bell – to develop a publication based on the Establishment’s flourishing cinema club, an expensive full-colour glossy called Scene. The project was announced in May, an office was rented off Fleet Street, and a series of impressive-looking dummies were produced. The first issue proper came out in September 1962, with Harriet Garland and the young Tom Stoppard among its staff. Entertainingly, Stoppard had applied for the job of theatre critic in the guise of William Boot from the novel Scoop. Luard, who could obviously be a bit slow on the uptake at times, had completely missed the allusion when hiring him. Scene represented something of a gamble for Cook & Luard Productions, and would have to do extremely well to repay its investment, but confidence was burgeoning.

  In the summer of 1962, news reached the Establishment that Andrew Osmond wished to sell Private Eye. Ironically in the light of Peter’s own background, Osmond was experiencing pressure from his parents to abandon life as a fledgling comic entrepreneur and resume his intended career path withthe Foreign Office. His original investment of £450 – furnished merely because he was the only one of the Eye crowd with any money – had yielded precious little profit on a circulation of 18,000; so when Colin Bell got in touch and told him that Cook & Luard Productions would be prepared to offer £1,500 for 75 of his 99 shares, he leaped at the chance. Peter was somewhat sceptical about the deal, but told Luard to go ahead anyway, which led to a misunderstanding that would have awkward future consequences. Peter – and the grateful Private Eye staff – assumed that he was their new joint owner. In fact Luard had personally registered all the shares in his own name.

  Blissfully unaware, Peter met the staff. ‘I remember him saying, “Good evening” all the time,’ says Richard Ingrams. ‘It was ridiculous. Everybody went round saying “Good evening,” and after a bit you thought, what a silly thing it is t
o say “Good evening”.’19 All were impressed by the time and charm he was prepared to lavish even on the humblest staffer. He moved the Eye’s offices into the Establishment Club itself – a building that was now beginning to bulge at the seams – and installed them in the waiters’ changing room, a not entirely satisfactory arrangement on account of the number of waiters wanting to change. The only way out of the room was across the stage, so it had to be vacated by 6 p.m. The Eye’s editor, Christopher Booker, was a night owl who kept erratic hours, so the system was clearly doomed from the start.

  Apart from such physical inconveniences, there was the broader problem that the Eye lot didn’t actually like the Establishment Club. According to Andrew Osmond, ‘They hated it because it was very fashionable, because everybody went there to be seen or to see who else was there.’ Willie Rushton reckoned that ‘It was an awful place. If you went to the lavatories you were crunching over hypodermics and heaven knows what. Most of the waiters were lifting all the money. It was usually full of the very people it was targeting, all these people roaring with laughter and saying, “That’s damn true about old Cyril.”’

  Peter’s idea was to merge the Eye crowd and the Establishment’s cabaret regulars to form a kind of ‘school of satire’. He arranged a weekly brainstorming lunch at which the two groups were supposed to spark each other off. In fact, the atmosphere was queasy with mutual suspicion. Rushton remembers that ‘We’d sit at opposite ends of this room in almost total silence. John Bird and John Fortune on one side used to wear black shirts and look very heavily left wing, whereas we were sort of in jolly tweeds, Viyella shirts and corduroys. We were meant to be the leading satirical wags of our time and nothing was happening at all, absolutely nothing. Then Peter would give up, and just stand up and say: “The Bee of Ephesus”. And he’d set off into this thing about this holy bee, and we’d all roar with laughter and cheer up a lot.’20 Peter reckoned that ‘The Eye people felt the Eye was theirs, you know, they’d started it, so why suddenly co-operate with these other people?’ The experiment was declared a failure and the Eye was shunted two doors down, to a cramped first floor at no. 22 Greek Street. The accounts department was left behind in the person of Elisabeth Longmore, who later fell in love with and married Nick Luard. She shared the backstage office with two beautiful and glamorous secretaries, ‘both of whom Peter had decided should don pebble-glasses and answer to the name of Miss Rigby when outsiders came to visit. It was a game, all of it.’21

  The hiccup over and done with, Private Eye started to go from strength to strength under its new regime. The circulation shot up to 50,000 over the summer. Peter supplied material to the magazine, including a vicious attack on the Home Secretary which accused him of being a ‘flabby-faced coward’; he also found himself fascinated by the magazine’s investigative side, and encouraged its expansion. Shortly afterwards the Eye uncovered the Profumo scandal, which did as much as anything to bring down the Macmillan government. A number of rumours had been flying around London about the Russian spy Vladimir Ivanov and Christine Keeler, who was the mistress of both Ivanov and the Conservative Minister John Profumo. Firing blind, without having the faintest idea what they were writing about, the Eye satirists caricatured Ivanov as ‘Vladimir Bolokhov’ and Keeler as ‘Gaye Funloving’. Timothy Birdsall added a cartoon entitled The Last Days of Macmillan, showing nude girls cavorting with cabinet ministers by the pool at Cliveden, the press as a flock of geese and a sign on a pillow reading ‘Per Wardua ad Astor’ (a reference to two other figures involved, Cliveden’s owner Lord Astor and the society osteopath who’d introduced Keeler to Profumo, Stephen Ward). George Wigg MP raised the Eye article in the House of Commons. Stephen Ward was so horrified at the thought that the cat was out of the bag that he turned up at the Eye office and confessed all he knew. ‘He thought we knew everything,’ said Rushton, who received him. ‘So he came and spilled the beans entirely, which was wonderful.’ The government tottered, fatally wounded. The Eye’s circulation doubled.

  With satirical publishing now firmly under its belt, the Cook empire turned its attention to television. This would be the toughest nut to crack: the BBC still refused to show any interest in Peter Cook or his myriad works. Their only concession to the satire craze had been to import the American comedian Mort Sahl for a one-off special, a quite remarkable botch job in which the Light Entertainment department had surrounded Sahl with old-style glossy dancing girls. Peter and John Bird knew enough to approach Donald Baverstock of the Current Affairs Department instead, one of the men behind the highly successful Tonight show. Baverstock showed interest, and invited the pair for discussions with himself and Stuart Hood, the Controller of Programmes. The negotiations were long and tortuous, but seemed to be getting somewhere: sample scripts were written and formats were drawn up. Then, out of the blue, the Establishment Show was suddenly and inexplicably dropped.

  What had happened, although Peter and John Bird were as yet unaware of it, was that one of the young producers in the Current Affairs Department, Ned Sherrin, had quite independently visited the Establishment Club himself and had proposed his own satire show, along similar lines. As far as Baverstock and Hood were concerned, this gave them the moral green light to ditch the Cook–Bird proposal and go with the option that gave them greater control and fewer expenses. Sherrin was never told of the existing idea. Peter’s discussions with the BBC were abruptly and completely terminated, with no reason given.

  It was at this point, with Peter’s plans irrevocably stalled for once in his young fe, that the offer arrived to tour America. The restless desire to conquer new fields still blazed within him. The solution to the fact that he was apparently anchored to a London club was breathtakingly straightforward: he would simply take the Establishment with him to the States, as well as appearing in Beyond the Fringe on Broadway. He would decamp his entire lifestyle to New York. He’d get a decent salary from the American Fringe, too: the cast all clubbed together and put their signatures to a letter demanding a pay rise from £75 per week to £750 plus 6 per cent of the gross box office receipts, as a precondition for accepting the offer. Their demands were met, and the deal was done.

  The quartet’s first instincts were to shut down the London Fringe altogether in their absence. Peter told the Mail that ‘This is not the kind of show which even the most experienced professional could step into. It’s an amateur revue, moulded around our own personalities.’22 The promise of residual fees changed all four minds however, and within a fortnight Peter was in Cambridge, hunting replacements among the new Footlights generation; he watched a smoker, and was unable to resist the temptation to get on stage and perform his Grole-as-miner monologue. None of the Cambridge students actually made it to the final shortlist, all of whom received an invitation to come and audition at the Fortune while Peter and co. sat in the darkened stalls. Willie Donaldson had already formulated a provisional cast of his own, consisting of Richard Ingrams, John Wells, Joe Melia and in the role of Peter Cook, David Frost; but the idea of Frost becoming him every night filled Peter with awestruck horror. ‘Frost desperately wanted to take over from Peter,’ explains Donaldson, ‘but Peter said, over his dead body. That would have been the end of Frost. If I’d stood up to Peter, we would never have heard another word from Frost.’23 A doubtful notion, but it is true that the engagement, which lasted four years, did no favours for the careers of the victorious auditioners.

  Each of the four originals had their favoured candidates, and each was keen to use his power of veto. Peter didn’t want Ingrams diverting his energies from Private Eye, nor Wells, who was also starting to contribute to the magazine; he was keen for Barry Humphries to get the job. Jonathan Miller had already independently approached Bill Wallis in a Covent Garden street. According to Wallis, ‘I heard a terrible noise, and it was a Vespa or a Lambretta – one of those awful little motorcycles – and on it was this enormous figure with its knees up beside its ears, and its elbows sticking out and this great goatish fac
e, and it hailed me and said, “Bill! Bill! I’d recognise your bottom anywhere!” And it was Jonathan Miller, who said, would I like to be in the replacement cast of Beyond the Fringe? Since I’d been told a matter of minutes before by Peter Hall at the RSC that my services were no longer required, I said yes.’ Wallis got the Alan Bennett part, Willie Donaldson pushed Joe Melia successfully into the Miller role, and Robin Ray moved up from understudying Dudley Moore to playing him full time. Barry Humphries won the Peter Cook role, but despite having promised to release him from his Oliver! contract if a good job came up, Donald Albery refused to do so when the crunch came; the part was given to Terence Brady instead.

  While Beyond the Fringe was booked for a brief American city tour prior to its New York run, the Establishment cast would doa straight swap with the cabaret at Chicago’s Second City, the venue that had produced Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Alan Arkin, before going on to the Hungry I in San Francisco, then the most famous comedy club in the US. After that there were no plans: Peter wrote to George Melly, asking him to take over as MC at the London Establishment in due course, but Melly was smart enough to realise that Peter Cook would be an impossible act to follow. Instead the fate of the Establishment would be left in the hands of Nick Luard.

  All was signed and sealed, when out of the blue John Bird was contacted by Ned Sherrin. How would he like to be the presenter of a new late-night satire show for BBC Television? The two met for lunch at Bertorelli’s. Bird was discomfited: he could not help but connect the proposal with the Establishment Show suggested by Peter and himself. There seemed an indecent haste about the BBC’s apparent volte-face, and he did not relish the disloyalty that would be involved were he to pull out of the American tour. The US certainly provided an acceptably glamorous alternative. He refused Sherrin’s offer, but agreed to help him out by appearing in the pilot show. Otherwise, his only contribution – according to Sherrin – was to think of the title, That Was the Week That Was. Bird contacted Peter to tell him of the offer, and they cautiously agreed to appear on the pilot together, in an improvisation slot with Eleanor Bron.