Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The other three Fringers lived more or less separate existences. Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miwha were still haunted by their academic former lives: the former spent his days studying the life of Richard III on microfilms of medieval manuscripts he’d brought from England, while the latter researched into neuropsychiatry at the Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan. Dudley Moore, as Bennett explains, ‘would spend much of the day in bed with one or other (and perhaps both) of his current girlfriends.’ Moore and Bennett developed a friendship, and would often meet at Barbetta’s Italian restaurant for an unchanging supper of gazpacho, fetuccini and chocolate mousse. The doorman, who couldn’t speak English properly and hadn’t fully got the hang of which cast member was which, would invariably greet them in his thick accent with a cry of ‘Mr Moore! Mr Cook! Behind the Fridge!’ This was to become the title of Peter and Dudley’s hit stage show of the early seventies. Jonathan Miller, meanwhile, had a number of friends in New York already and so enjoyed a separate social life: ‘Something he tended to rather overemphasise,’ says Bennett, ‘which Peter would take the piss out of, as he did my medieval history.’

  Peter and Wendy’s social lives were centred on the evenings, after the shows. They would go out on the town with the Garlands. Peter Ustinov would come over for a late meal. They would go and watch Woody Allen perform, or he would come over to the Establishment. They would be invited to parties to meet Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Vivien Leigh. Joseph Heller, who was also being feted around New York in the wake of the publication of Catch-22, bumped into Peter at innumerable celebrity parties: ‘You want to know what being “lionised” means? It means being invited to parties by people you don’t know. Peter and I both found it funny when we discovered that neither of us knew the host or hostess.’8 Funny maybe, but they still went. Being lionised clearly had its attractions.

  By day, Wendy and Harriet Garland had nothing to do but go shopping, and spend as much money on clothes as they possibly could. Wendy kitted Peter out in the latest American fashions, including jeans, trainers and baseball T-shirts. Not only were the two women slightly bored, but they suspected that their men were slightly bored with them, so plentiful were the competing attractions. Eventually, in the cold of the New York winter, Peter and Nick Garland packed the two women off to Puerto Rico to lie about in the sun. It was a nice gesture, but it served only to paper over the emerging cracks.

  Peter did not have the time to be bothered by tiny cracks in his relationship. The news from home was catastrophic. Not only had That Was the Week That Was been rescued from the scrapheap and re-piloted – bizarrely, at the insistence of the Tory ladies interrogated by Bernard Levin, who had wanted their case to be heard – but it had gone on to be a storming success. The entire British nation, it seemed, was now glued to its TV sets every Saturday night. David Frost had become a national institution, the new king of satire. Worse still, he had done so using a proportion of Peter’s ideas. Frankie Howerd had been signed up from the Establishment, to perform exactly the same act. Frost had also been liberal in his inclusion of old sketches that he had once contributed the odd joke to, or perhaps appeared in: the first episode of TW3, for instance, contained Peter’s discarded Fringe sketch Jim’s Inn. The writing and performing element of the show had in large measure been poached from Private Eye: Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton, John Wells and Timothy Birdsall had all but abandoned the magazine. Richard Ingrams was practically the only person left at the Greek Street offices – and that was only because he had resigned in disgust, after Frost had ordered the Eye man to stand and compose sketches in front of an open lavatory door, while he sat defecating. Peter angrily coined the title ‘The Bubonic Plagiarist’ to describe his usurper. He also became fond of quoting Kitty Muggeridge’s summary of Frost’s career, that he had ‘risen without trace’. Ned Sherrin, the producer of TW3, comments drily: ‘Peter Cook was John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, and then Frost with his fifteen million viewers came on as Jesus Christ. But John the Baptist always had a great deal more charisma.’

  Christopher Booker, who had become the programme’s chief writer, claimed later that ‘In his genial fashion, Peter bore no obvious resentment that David Frost had turned overnight into the most famous satirist of them all.’9 Perhaps his resentment was not so obvious at three-and-a-half thousand miles distance, but viewed from up close, Peter’s famous good manners had entirely evaporated. Alan Bennett recalls: ‘A regular feature of Saturday nights when we were playing on Broadway was that with the five hour time difference, TW3 went out and had finished just before the curtain went up on our second performance; and one would find Peter in the corridor, on the phone, irate because he thought some sketch of his had been plagiarised in That Was the Week That Was. That was a regular occurrence. He was bothered by the money, but he was furious that Frost should be rising on his back.’ Jonathan Miller reckons that ‘Peter was appalled by the opportunistic – what he regarded as – theft of the idea of a satirical weekly magazine on television. I think he was shocked and dismayed, and I think that was one of the reasons why he subsequently developed a life-long antagonism to David Frost, whom I think he quite rightly regarded as simply a late-pressing of something which was vintage and really belonged to him.’ In an interview for Vanity Fair magazine, Miller himself later referred to Frost by the slightly extended title of ‘fucking David Frost’.10

  John Bird remembers that ‘Peter was beside himself with rage the whole time we were in America. By the summer of 1963 he had built up a fearful head of steam about Frost – he absolutely fed on this long-distance resentment of him. It got down to really biological things. You only had to mention the word “Frost” and he would go off into long paroxysms of vituperation. And that summer, after the first series of TW3 had finished, David rang me in New York and said, “I’m coming out. It would be nice, wonderful to see you and it would be great, super to see Peter.”’ At that time Peter and the rest of the Fringe cast, together with Wendy and Michael Bawtree, were taking a few days’ holiday at a rented country house in Fairfield, Connecticut. ‘I rang Peter and he said, “Oh yes, bring him down, bring him down.” So when Frost arrived I drove him down, and I thought, there’s going to be a homicide.’

  Everybody in the house was licking their lips and keenly anticipating the death of Frost; but it did not happen. When Frost entered the room where Peter sat coldly waiting for him, the Cook code of manners reasserted itself, with a steely correctness drummed in through years of training. Peter bit his tongue and enquired politely whether Frost had had a pleasant journey; he wasas Bird commented, ‘an extremely well brought up lad’. He also suggested that, as it was a hot day, Frost might like a dip in the pool. Frost assented, changed into his trunks and plunged manfully into the deep end. The fact of the matter was that Frost could not swim, but he did not want to admit this in front of Peter, so he quietly started to drown instead. Realising what had happened, Peter, who was a good swimmer, dived headlong after him as he went down for the third time, and saved his life. John Bird, hearing the commotion, came through and jumped to the conclusion that Peter was actually murdering Frost in the swimming pool. Frost’s first utterance on being brought to the surface and rescued was: ‘Super!’ Peter subsequently told The Sunday Times that he had assumed Frost to have been ‘making a satirical attack on drowning.’11 He later insisted that taking the decision to save David Frost was the one sincere regret of his entire life.

  Soon afterwards, Kennedy’s assassination brought the entire TW3 team to the States, to present an oleaginous tribute to the late President. Comedy and satire were suspended as Frost intoned a solemn eulogy from a large volume, a performance that wowed New York society rather as Peter had done. Willie Rushton, who claimed to have gritted his teeth through the whole thing, remembered that Peter ‘was particularly vicious about the Kennedy tribute. He thought it was the most appalling thing he’d seen in all his life. He used to do impersonations of Frost doing his perorations, in the middle of restau
rants. Actually the funny thing was, I’d taken over the Macmillan impersonations so to speak, but there was no resentment there.’ And if there had been, Rushton would have been the last to know of it. Peter’s official attitude, as expressed in quotes given to journalists and in letters to his parents, was a polite scepticism that TW3 would last. He told a student reporter from Varsity: ‘I would have liked to see the programme – there was a lot of my material in it. But I should have thought everyone would get tired of satire every week for thirty weeks.’12

  The success of TW3 strengthened Peter’s determination to get into television, in America if not in Britain. In his first months in the States he had contented himself with sporadic appearances on What’s My Line and other game shows, but in the spring of 1963 he, John Bird and Jonathan Miller accepted an offer from WNEW-Channel Five to put together a one-off satirical show. Miller directed and the other two wrote it; the rest of the cast were American, consisting of two old-time radio comics called Bob and Ray, and some of the Second City comedians from Chicago. Entitled What’s Going On Here?, it broadcast on 10 May in America, and on 12 July on Associated-Rediffusion, London’s local ITV station, and was generally well received. All trace of it, sadly, is lost.

  Encouraged by the success of What’s Going On Here?, Peter aimed straight for the top: the Ed Sullivan Show, America’s biggest light entertainment programme, with sixty million viewers. He formed another company with two American partners, Clay Felker and Jay Vandenheuvel, and in the space of a few weeks had persuaded CBS to give him thirteen minutes of Sullivan’s show every week. Again, Miller would direct, and he and Bird would write and star in the segments. The fly in the ointment turned out to be Sullivan himself: a burly, extremely conservative, Irish Catholic sports columnist, he had never been o see Beyond the Fringe or visited the New York Establishment, and had agreed to the newfangled satire section of his show without having a clue what it entailed. Despite the fact that the script had been – as far as Peter and John Bird were concerned – entirely sanitised by its authors, Sullivan watched the first rehearsal open-mouthed. The first sketch referred to a local news item from Maryland. ‘You can’t say “Maryland”!’ said Sullivan, horrified.

  Peter would probably have done his best to acquiesce, in order to give the show a fighting chance; but Miller was having no truck with any interference, and a series of terrific rows ensued. According to John Bird, ‘Sullivan’s view was that our material required cuts, starting with the first words of the script and ending with the last. My memory of Peter was that he was well aware of the impossibility of the enterprise which he had launched and rather enjoyed watching the fall-out.’13 Miller walked out repeatedly rather than make swingeing cuts, and the satire segment was axed after two weeks. Sullivan, who was not used to being contradicted, said: ‘You young men are the most discourteous people with whom I have ever worked.’ Miller replied that ‘You are the stupidest man with whom I have ever worked, and it is a pleasure to part company with you.’

  Still Peter tore on, dreaming up new schemes, making new contacts, putting together new projects. He was, in Wendy’s perceptive description, like a tightly coiled spring unwinding at great speed. He collected political gossip for Private Eye, and followed up a rumour that Kennedy had been married twice. Whenever he spotted someone whose act he felt would grace the London Establishment, he signed them up and sent them over to Luard. One such was Barry Humphries, who gave Peter a copy of a comedy record he had cut in Australia, in between appearing in the London and New York versions of Oliver! Peter, who by now knew Humphries extremely well (they attended Supremes concerts at the Harlem Apollo together), was sufficiently impressed to offer him £100 a week to appear in Soho. The engagement was not a success. London audiences looking for rumbustious satire were not sure how to take a nervous, skinny boy with long dark hair, dressed all in brown, in the part of a Melbourne housewife called Mrs Edna Everage. The newspapers said he ‘lacked anger’. Luard released him before the end of the run.

  Lenny Bruce’s return performance, booked for April 1963, was even more of a disaster, in that it never took place. The newspapers had continued to campaign against him, and when he arrived at Heathrow on 8 April he was arrested by Immigration officers acting on the orders of the Home Office, strip searched and deported on the next homeward flight. Home Secretary Henry Brooke announced that it was ‘not in the public interest’ to admit Bruce into the country, on account of his ‘sick jokes and lavatory humour’, a phrase subsequently adopted by Private Eye on its masthead. Peter, who had been invited to Joseph Heller’s that evening, spent the whole of the dinner party on the phone, frantically trying to arrange for Bruce to be smuggled back into Britain via Dun Laoghaire. It was not to be. ‘I felt terrible for many reasons,’ said Peter later, ‘largely financial, as he had been advanced most of his money.’14 The affair also cost Cook & Luard Productions a fortune in legal fees.

  Jonathan Miller once describ Beyond the Fringe quartet as the Beatles of comedy, in that they appeared with the same timing and challenged similar conventions. By the same token, the Establishment Club was their equivalent of the Apple Corps – an idealistic business venture based as much upon the charisma of its founder as upon any sound management sense, and prone to consistent financial abuse by its employees. By the spring of 1963, money was beginning to haemorrhage out of the London operation. Most of the waiters had their hands in the till. There were few accounting checks. Says Luard: ‘Fifty crates of wine would be delivered. Forty-nine of the crates would “walk” straight out of the cellar door. We never noticed but we paid.’15

  The local gangsters, too, were gaining the upper hand. The removal of Peter’s disarming presence had robbed the club of an invaluable bulwark against the surrounding fiefdoms. When a considerable mob invaded the building, Roger Law and the others were overwhelmed: ‘I landed a few on the main protagonists – there was a little table at the top of the stairs that took tickets for the jazz club, and the table just fitted the sides of the stairwell. So I ran down the stairs with the table in front of me, and of course they all piled on top of each other like in East End Cop. They chased us out of the club; the guy that was driving me was an ex-racing car driver, so we got away. I got home at about three in the morning and the coat I was wearing was like a Chinese lantern. This guy had been swiping at me with a razor. I hadn’t seen the razor, but when I got home I could see what he’d done. It looked all right when I was wearing it, but when I took it off it turned into one of those things you used to make at school at Christmas, with holes in the sides. I never went in to the Establishment after that. I got someone else to take my strip.’

  Creatively, too, the Establishment wasn’t working without Peter. Something vital was missing. The swap with the Second City performers had earned respectful reviews, but the American cast had seemed earnest and lacking in the joie-de-vivre of their British counterparts. Scene magazine had been the worst disaster of the lot, devouring cash at a frightening rate. ‘The problem there was really my greed,’ said Peter politely. ‘Nick could either have done it as Cook & Luard, or he could have done it on his own, but I thought, well, it might just work.’ It didn’t. So little money was left in the kitty that Elisabeth Luard’s jewels had to be pawned to pay Private Eye’s wages bill. With frightening and unexpected suddenness, Nicholas Luard Associates, the sub-company that owned Scene magazine, was declared bankrupt on 28 June. Three months later, Cook & Luard Productions – including the Establishment Club – folded in its wake. ‘I thought I’d be a millionaire at thirty,’ said Peter ruefully. ‘Then I just picked up the paper one day in New York and found that the business had failed and was £75,000 in debt.’16

  At the bankruptcy hearings, their solicitor, Mr J. A. Rose, called them ‘utter fools’. Stuart Young, the chartered accountant examining the books, went further. ‘The directors have acted in a stupid, foolhardy way. In fact, just think of any similar adjectives and they will apply to them.’17 It transpired that Nicholas L
uard Associates had lost £75,658, of which £39,767 had been transferred by Luard from the Cook & Luard Productions account, iin a stattempt to prop it up. This left Cook & Luard productions itself £65,957 in debt. Peter and Nick Luard had lost £26,957 of their own money in the crash. Rose declared that the club had been ‘very badly managed’ and that Luard was a man with ‘no idea’ of how to run a company. The Establishment Club (London) went into voluntary liquidation on 23 September leaving 127 small supply businesses out of pocket to the tune of £24,192.

  In private, Peter was absolutely furious with Luard, as well as being extremely upset. In the space of just nine months the Establishment had gone from being the most successful venue in London to the financial equivalent of the Titanic. The papers were laying the blame for the disaster substantially at Peter’s door, even though he had been abroad since September. On brand new ‘Peter Cook’ headed notepaper, he wrote to his parents: ‘As you seem to have gathered from the papers, Nicholas Luard has contrived to get our affairs into something of a mess. I have some very good lawyers and accountants working for me in London, who are in the process of sorting things out. The probable result will be my severing my connection with Nick. It is he who has really lost all the money, personally.’ Not only was Peter out of pocket for an amount that would take several years to pay off, but he had also made a deeply unpleasant discovery: he was not, as he thought, the co-owner of Private Eye. This news made him ‘very cross indeed. I sent over a famous New York lawyer called Sidney Cohn. I thought if anything should emerge from the shambles, I should like to retain the Eye. And somehow or other he did it. The Eye never knew how close it got to going down the tubes.’ The magazine’s new accountant, David Cash, remembers considerable animosity on Peter’s part: ‘He didn’t want the Eye dragged down with Luard’.