Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter later claimed that on his return to London from America he had simply ‘sat about for a while’;31 a course of action which in actual fact would have been anathema to him. The truth of the matter was that his brain was still working on overdrive, trying to convert a flood of ideas into concrete reality; but the public were more interested in David Frost than Peter Cook. As Peter was quite prepared to admit, ‘I came back expecting to be enormously well-known, and of course nobody knew me from Adam.’32 In fact, the only thing left to him was Private Eye magazine. Like a tiny rodent hiding in the cracks and crevices while the great dinosaurs were brought down in massive conflagration, it had survived. It was broke, the staff were demoralised, the content wasn’t very funny and nobody was buying it, but it was, at least, still there.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Seductive Brethren

  Private Eye, 1964–70

  One day in 1964, Peter Cook walked into the shabby Eye offices in Greek Street; it was the first time any of them had seen him for two years. One of the two cramped rooms was given over to the editorial side, and contained just Richard Ingrams, the tall, stiff, faintly dishevelled Old Salopian editor, and Barry Fantoni, a cheerful Italian-Jewish cartoonist from South London with a Beatle haircut and a big nose. On occasions, John Wells and Willie Rushton would push the quota up to four.

  Peter’s arrival galvanised the weary office like a bolt of electricity. Every day he would stride up and down, embarking upon impromptu lectures about enormous snakes, ‘many of them millions of miles long’, or he would impersonate a zoo-keeper attempting to recapture a very rare type of bee which had become intractably lodged in a lady’s undergarments. He invented catchphrases: ‘This man is a proven lawyer’, and ‘My lady wife, whose name for a moment escapes me’, as uttered by the blustering writer of letters to the Daily Telegraph, Sir Herbert Gussett. He dreamed up topical jokes: in the wake of the collapse of the John Bloom package tour company, he put ‘The Raft of Medusa’ on the cover, with one of the cannibal survivors saying, ‘This is the last time I go on a John Bloom holiday.’ Bewildered, laughing, all Ingrams could do was write it all down as quickly as possible.

  ‘Cook saved the day,’ says Ingrams simply. ‘I was very uncertain about what to do until he arrived.’ Barry Fantoni adds: ‘I don’t think I’m being unfair, but if it wasn’t for Peter Cook arriving from America and introducing all the brilliant, brilliant ideas he had at that time, we would simply have gone under.’ Willie Rushton went further: ‘He brought itk from the dead.’ Peter introduced two series into the magazine: the Memoirs of Rhandi Phurr, a bogus Hindu mystic who anticipated the Beatles’ antics with the Maharishi by two years; and – from Christmas 1964 onwards – Tales of the Seductive Brethren. The Brethren were a homegrown sect, somewhat restricted in size:

  The exact number of the Brethren at any given time is always hard to calculate but it can be safely said that a figure of two would be exact; it is our proud claim that we are far more exclusive than our religious competitors.

  The two officers of the Brethren were the Holy Dragger, Sir Arthur Starborgling, and the Chief Rammer, Sir Basil Nardly-Stoads. As those titles would suggest, the purpose of the sect was ‘to seize hold of young women and clamber hotly all over their bodies’:

  To say that the BODILY SEIZING OF YOUNG WOMEN is at least part and parcel of our belief would be no exaggeration.

  The brethren were unquestionably the spiritual descendants of the sect that had sat atop a mountain in Beyond the Fringe, waiting for the end of the world. Peter actually typed their adventures every week himself, with one finger. As it dawned upon him that his new colleagues were prepared to write down more or less everything that he said, he eventually confined himself to dictating his material instead.

  Peter’s almost biological requirement to devour the newspapers in search of raw material was an invaluable asset on a topically humorous magazine. According to John Wells, ‘His jokes, like John Bird’s, were fuelled with an immense amount of reading. He read all the newspapers and political weeklies and, unlike John Bird, allowed his researches to carry him into Rubberwear News, The Budgerigar Fancier and Frilly Knickers. He took a particular delight in misprints, sub-editors’ cliche’s and Fleet Street journalese, creasing up with laughter at Swoops, Grabs and Probes.’1 Two stories in particular filled him with such delight that he would relate them again and again to anyone who would listen, improvising in a series of minute variations the possible consequences of each. One concerned the accidental drowning of a circus elephant in a swimming pool at Butlin’s, immediately prior to a royal visit by the Queen Mother: Peter wanted to know what assurances Butlin’s could provide that a similar fate would not befall Her Majesty. The second dated from as early as February 1962, when it had been announced that the actress Jayne Mansfield had been shipwrecked in a skimpy bikini on a desert island off the Bahamas. Her boat had supposedly capsized on a waterskiing trip, and she had been pulled unconscious from an ocean teeming with dangerous marine life by her PR man – his presence being suspiciously convenient, given that her new film was due to open that week. Peter speculated endlessly on the lobsters and other crustaceans that might have become lodged in her various orifices, an obsession that continued to grip him until 1973, when it became the basis for the first ever Derek and Clive sketch.

  Peter was also hugely amused by a picture of the Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Home that had appeared in the Aberdeen Evening Express shortly before the election, that had been incorrectly captioned ‘Baillie Vass’. Sir Alec was known thereafter as the Baillie, and Peter insisted on organising a ‘Mass for Vass’ protest march, which proceeded from the Eye offices to Number Ten Downing Street to present an ironic petition begging the PM to stay in office. On the Sunday morning of the march Richard Ingrams raised the sash of the Greek Street window to discover, with a tinge of horror, that not only had Cook’s appeal actually succeeded in raising a small army of Eye readers, but that most of them appeared to be sporting beards and sandals. Peter, on the other hand, received them all with enthusiasm. Confined at this stage to a wheelchair with his broken ankle, he was pushed to Downing Street at the head of the parade bearing his own placard, which read ‘The Baillie will no fail ye!’

  Not all Peter’s jokes were for the benefit of the readers. The Tonight programme once featured an African dance group comprising a troupe of near-naked women who jiggled around in time to music. The next day Peter rang the BBC from the Eye claiming to be Sydney Darlow of the Sydney Darlow Dance Ensemble, and insisted that his own troupe of white ladies be allowed to jiggle topless on the BBC as well, to the same sort of music. The Producer tried manfully to explain why it would be acceptable for black women to do so and not white women, but ‘Darlow’ would not let him off the hook. Peter was also fond of tormenting the Foreign Office, another organisation he had nearly joined, and would telephone to claim that the Russians were spying on him through his domestic drainage system.

  As well as galvanising the humorous side of the magazine, Peter set about energetically rejuvenating its finances. He injected £2,000 of his own money, and persuaded various celebrities to lend him £100 each. Peter Sellers, Dirk Bogarde, Jane Asher, Bryan Forbes and Bernard Braden all gave generously, as did Lord Faringdon, Britain’s only gay communist peer, a man who once began a speech in Parliament not with the words ‘My Lords’, but with ‘My Dears’. Some, like Sellers, were ultimately repaid; the remainder became ‘shareholders’ in the magazine, in return for a case of wine every Christmas. In October 1966 Peter took Richard Ingrams on a promotional tour of Hull, York, Middlesbrough, Darlington, Sunderland, Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to raise support from wholesalers and distributors.

  While in America Peter had already made a special trip to Chicago to try and raise finance for the Eye from Playboy magazine. He had written offering them a concession on Eye articles written by himself and ‘Willie Rushton, our fat cartoonist’. ‘Hugh Hefner told me to piss off’, said Peter, but not bef
ore introducing him to Victor Lownes, Hefner’s British-born lieutenant. As a courtesy, Lownes was given the job of showing Peter round the Playboy Club, a five-storey private members’ establishment packed with Playboy Bunnies. Members were known as ‘keyholders’, explained Lownes as they toured the building, and had to hand in their key to the bunny at the desk in order to book a table. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the keyholder,’ mused Peter. At this point a party of Chicago businessmen attempted to jump the long line of keyholders queuing for a table, and were told by the desk ‘Bunny’ that they would have to wait. ‘Do you know who I am?’ growled the lead businessman, and an angry scene was poised to erupt.

  Peter seized the PA microphone and addressed the room with the straightest of faces: ‘We have a problem here in the front lobby which perhaps someone can help us with. We have a gentleman here who doesn’t seem to know who he is. If anyone recognises this man, will they please come down to reception and help us respond to his query?’ Not daring to fence verbally with Peter himself, the irate businessman turned to the Bunny Girl and said ‘Fuck You!’ Whereupon, as he turned to go, Peter added: ‘You’ll have to wait in line for that too, I’m afraid.’ He was not wrong, as the grateful girl – this was Kitty Nisty – took him to her bed that night. ‘I wanted this guy for a friend,’ said Lownes, gobsmacked.2 Given Lownes’s large circle of Playboy Bunny acquaintances, it was an offer Peter accepted with alacrity.

  Besides the money and the jokes, high-quality contributors also flowed into Private Eye in Peter’s wake. He encouraged Ingrams to give a regular berth to Claud Cockburn, the veteran Irish radical journalist. Cartoonists arrived, such as Ralph Steadman, Michael Heath, Bill Tidy, Larry and Hector Breeze. Barry Humphries and Nick Garland were put together, to collaborate on The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, a regular cartoon strip about an Australian living in Earl’s Court, an idea which contributed more than anything else to the about-turn in the Eye’s circulation figures. ‘I thought an Australian Candide would be a good idea,’ said Peter. ‘Sort of “An Arsehole Abroad”.’

  The character of Barry McKenzie was born on a summer holiday in Northern Brittany in 1964, where Peter and Wendy had gone with the Garlands. The LP record that Barry Humphries had presented Peter with in New York had contained a similar expat named Buster Thompson, whose entire life had been simplified into a quest for cold lager; Thompson metamorphosed into McKenzie, taking Barry Humphries’s Christian name with him, and both Peter and Nick Garland spent the entire holiday in the McKenzie persona. On their return to England they contacted Humphries, and the three created the character which became such a cult figure that he eventually starred in two feature films, and heavily influenced the creation of Crocodile Dundee.

  Despite Humphries’s uncomfortable experiences with parochial material at the Establishment Club, Peter was keen to incorporate as much obscure Australian terminology as possible. Thus Eye readers were introduced to such colourful new phrases as ‘splashing the boots’, ‘shaking hands with the wife’s best friend’, ‘pointing Percy at the porcelain’ and ‘draining the dragon’ (urinating), and such useful expressions as ‘chunder’, ‘liquid laugh’, ‘technicolour yawn’ and ‘parking the tiger’ (vomit). McKenzie’s favourite lager was a deliberately obscure choice, too: a totally unheard of Australian beer called Foster’s. The Eye readership was initially bemused, but Peter and Richard Ingrams were prepared to be patient. The Australian government was horrified, and banned Private Eye as degrading to the country’s image; their action made the strip, if anything, more of a cult success in Australia than in Britain, and effectively launched Humphries’s international career. ‘Thinking about it now,’ he says, ‘Peter was extraordinarily generous in his encouragement of me. He must have known that I was rather downhearted in London.’

  Another new recruit to the Eye ranks was the investigative journalist Paul Foot, an old schoolfriend of Ingrams and Rushton’s. In 1964 he had just joined the Sun and had come for lunch at the Coach and Horses, the pub where the Eye staff tended to write the magazine over several pints of beer on account of the dismal state of their offices. ‘There was this rather shy man at the table,’ recalls Foot. “‘This is Peter Cook,” Richard Ingrams was saying, and we shook hands. The conversation was stilted, almost formal, until suddenly something quite mundane seemed to click in Peter’s mind and he said something ridiculous. We all laughed. The laughter seemed to jolt him out of his reverie. His eyes sparkled, his face broke into a mighty grin and he was off, leaping from one glorious fantasy to another – it was something about bees. He started to talk about bees and within about thirty seconds the entire table and not just the table, but also all the pub around, clustered about and started to laugh. Every morning after that I scuttled through my work in the hope that I might inhale another gale of that infectious laughter.’3 Foot joined the Eye full time in 1967, and remembers that ‘The joy of working there was the tremendous amount of laughter, genuine laughter, that went on all the time. To be in the next office and hear the laughter of Cook, Fantoni and Ingrams . . . Peter and Richard, improvising together, were brilliant.’

  Peter had immediately hit it off with his two co-writers, who nicknamed him Cookie. Almost uniquely in a world populated by highbrow Oxbridge satirists, the working-class Fantoni shared his interest in sex, football and pop music, and later went on to present a TV pop show called There’s a Whole Scene Going On. Together he and Peter created Spiggy Topes and the Turds, a satire on the Beatles, and the adventures of Neasden FC, the world’s worst football team, the obsession with Neasden arising from the fact that the Eye’s printers were located near there. Fantoni proved to be a fine comic collaborator, a foil for Peter’s originality and ingenuity, and his genial enthusiasm masked a determined ability to be accepted as such. Peter’s sense of mischief – presumably – subsequently led to a bizarre confusion about the nature of the Cook–Fantoni relationship. Nick Luard wrote that ‘One of Peter’s proudest claims, a story he loved telling, was of finding a young Italian waiter called Fantoni, who was attending art school. Peter taught him, not very successfully, how to play cricket and encouraged him to go on drawing. Who else but Peter would have shown a balding Italian waiter how to bowl and helped him to become a successful artist?’4 Fantoni had in fact been a successful satirical pop artist before he had joined the Eye of his own accord; not only had he exhibited at the Woodstock Gallery, but he had never been a waiter, never played cricket with Peter, and was the proud owner of a full head of hair.

  Peter’s close relationship with Richard Ingrams was hardly surprising given the similarities in their background – Ingrams’s father had been abroad for years on end, and he had been unhappily sent away to West Downs and Shrewsbury. They shared a similar amused cynicism about the world. Both men had a regard for the other’s powers of perception when it came to debunking pretension or dishonesty. Peter had, for instance, cancelled an art exhibition at the Establishment at the eleventh hour when he had discovered that the artist William Morris’ worke relatisisted of paint-splattered sheets of paper that had been driven over in a car. ‘Cook had a very searching awareness of humbug,’ says Ingrams. ‘I almost always agreed with his interpretation of people’s motives. We latched onto the slightest inconsistencies. We would almost always get a consensus about whether someone was genuine or not.’ Peter was very much one of the founding fathers of the magazine’s philosophy of debunking ‘pseuds’, or pseudo-intellectuals.

  Where the Editor and his proprietor differed were on matters of sex, bad language and jokes about religion. Peter considered Private Eye’s readership to be a restricted members’ club in the manner of the Establishment, and gave his desire to shock free rein. In October 1964 a plastic flimsy disc was appended to the Eye’s cover for the first time, in which Peter appeared with Dudley Moore, Richard Ingrams, John Wells and Willie Rushton. A decade before Derek and Clive, Peter contributed lines like: ‘As a trade unionist, people often ask me why I am voting Conservative. The answer is beca
use I am a stupid cunt.’ Ingrams complained that Peter was ‘too sex-orientated. He sees wage restraint in terms of masturbation.’5 Years later, Ingrams was to scrap the Barry McKenzie strip after he objected to an explicit lesbian sex scene in a dentist’s chair, an action which Peter described as ‘puritanical’.

  The most significant attitude shared by the two men was an utter lack of interest in the administrative and financial side of the magazine. Ingrams had always espoused a patrician distaste for money-making, whereas Peter had simply had his fingers burned: ‘I lost interest in business as soon as I went out of business,’ he said.6 As a consequence, Peter made himself unique among magazine proprietors by never trying to take a penny in profit or wages from his publication. ‘The purpose of the magazine is to keep going, rather than to make money’, he explained.7 A company policy was implemented that advertising revenue, which accounted for 60 per cent of the income of most magazines, should be kept to a maximum of 10 per cent. If more people wished to advertise than there was space, the rates were simply increased until the 10 per cent figure was arrived at. Advertisements were always kept well away from the copy. David Cash, the quiet, dome-headed accountant who now became the Eye’s Business Manager, recalls that Peter’s idea of a finance meeting was a hysterical lunch at his local restaurant. ‘But he was a very astute man, Cook, you know, he did have a business nose.’