Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The other item of note in the sixth show was a filmed version of Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter, which by some unexplained anomaly has survived. It was a low budget and prosaic treatment for such a surreal verse: the oysters were real and Dudley’s only concession to walrushood was a droopy moustache and some stomach padding. It was also stylishly shot, intelligent and rather eerie, with only a solo violin accompaniment, and very much prefigured Jonathan Miller’s acclaimed version of Alice in Wonderland of December 1966.

  The final show of the series mercifully survives, mercifully because it contains Superthunderstingcar, Peter and Dudley’s wickedly accurate parody of Thunderbirds. Hanging from obvious strings and sporting giant false eyebrows, Peter and Dudley played a variety of badly-operated puppets: father and son Jeff and Johnny Jupiter, with their flat catchphrase ‘This is terrible’ for every disaster; Teutonic villain Masterbrawn and his assistant Kraut; and finally, Hovis the butler and Lady Dorothy, a masterpiece of knockabout physical acting by Dudley, who poked his eye out with his cigarette holder and cleared a table of drinks with his swinging feet. Elsewhere the programme contained Bo Duddley, a sketch that later reappeared on the first Derek and Clive album, in which Peter and Dudley analysed a blues number line-by-line in earnest BBC tones, missing the point at every turn. ‘You don’t think any of these lyrics could be in any way connected with making love or sex?’ queried Peter towards the end, fighting desperately not to laugh. The final Pete and Dud dialogue took them to heaven in white plastic macs and cloth caps, and contained the only joke that Dudley can directly remember contributing to the series:

  Dud:

  Is this it then? Is this heaven?

  Pete:

  Bloody hell.

  ‘I came up with so few jokes that when I invented one I thought, “Son of a gun,”’40 says Dudley modestly, without discussing what he thought of Peter’s decision to appropriate it. Heaven, said Peter, looked ‘like Liberace’s bedroom’, and suffered from a predictable drawback:

  Dud:

  I’m rather bored already.

  Pete:

  It’s a very boring place. You’ll find that over the millions of years.

  The reaction of the press and public to the series was more ecstatic than ever before. The BBC begged the pair for more programmes. Peter stalled. ‘We don’t want to become the national bores of 1966,’41 he offered implausibly. The truth was that cracking the cinema was more important to him than carrying on with something he had already shown he could do. Finally, on the strength of the second series, he and Dudley secured what they really wanted: a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to write and star in their very own film. It was to be an updating of the Faust legend that Peter had once studied, entitled Bedazzled. This was a critical moment for the balance of power within their partnership. Dudley wanted to get going on the script immediately. Again, Peter seemed strangely unwilling to start work. He suggested that Dudley and Suzy, together with the entire Cook family, go to Grenada in the West Indies; the film script could be written there. Dudley, who had other holiday plans, reluctantly fell into line, and they flew out at the end of March. The party stayed in a pair of adjacent self-catering beach cottages, with Wendy doing the cooking as usual, and the cost was met – in return for a set of Hello!-style photographs – by the Daily Mirror and Woman magazine. This photo deal was something Peter later sincerely regretted: ‘As soon as I saw the pictures, they looked to me as though I was trying to assert how happy I was and how gorgeous my daughters were,’42 he complained. He resolved never to air his family, and particularly his children, in public ever again.

  From the start of the trip, it was clear to Dudley that something was wrong. ‘The more we stayed, the more he didn’t want to work. He said, “I can’t work today because of so and so,” or “because of my wi” so I waited for a week and nothing ever happened, nothing ever happened. So I lost my temper with him – I said “You brought us out here for no good reason. What the fuck is going on? I don’t understand it, you come out here ostensibly to work with me, we changed our holiday plans from somewhere to Grenada to fit in with you.” And he just said “Right.” So things got a little wound up.’ What had happened was that despite the joint contract, Peter had decided to write the film without his partner. Dudley was being edged out. As Peter saw it, this project was his single make-or-break chance to crack the film world. He intended to get the script absolutely, scrupulously right, however long it took to write (in the event, it was to take him more than a year). He was terrified of making a mistake. He did not want to have to make allowances for anyone else’s comedy judgment. He wanted that solo screen writing credit. Since his death there has been a tendency to canonise Peter Cook, who was indeed, for most of his life, extremely generous to most other performers; but he was also subject to regular human vices such as pride, envy and a highly competitive desire to be the best.

  Dudley went off in a huff, took no further part in the scripting of Bedazzled, and wrote and starred in a film of his own: Thirty is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia. Co-scripted by John Wells and Joe McGrath, who also directed, and incorporating Wells and John Bird in the cast, the film was the apogee of Dudley’s autobiographical tendency. He portrayed a musician named Rupert Street, who played jazz in a nightclub like he did. His onscreen Belper-born girlfriend, played by his real-life Belper-born girlfriend Suzy Kendall, was named Louise Hammond, after his sadly missed ex-girlfriend Celia Hammond and his first love Louise McDermott. The Cynthia of the title was a reference to another sorely missed ex, Cynthia Cassidy. Mrs Woolley, who cropped up in innumerable Pete and Dud dialogues, was played by Patricia Routledge. Dudley admitted that ‘My mother always sent me my laundry though the mail – just like Rupert’s does in the film. And like Rupert’s she always included a sack of lemon drops and some bread pudding in the package.’ The film flopped, which hurt Dudley bitterly.

  Bedazzled, meanwhile, was also proving to be Peter’s most autobiographical work. The story of a Wimpy bar chef named Stanley Moon (Dudley), who sells his soul to the devil (Peter) in return for seven chances at winning the affections of waitress Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron), it was an incisive and barely disguised take on Peter and Dudley’s own relationship. Peter later freely admitted that Stanley Moon was Dudley, or at least an ‘exaggeration’ of him, shorn of his musical talents and his annoying attractiveness to women. Moon was portrayed as utterly good-hearted, but acutely insecure and lacking in self-confidence, unable to assert himself when faced with Peter’s smooth-talking Satan; desperate for acceptance, he resorts to tagging along hopefully and submissively behind, and is constantly cast down when the Devil is randomly horrible to him. George Spiggott (as Peter decided to name the Evil One, after the monoped in One Leg Too Few), was if anything even closer to his real-life equivalent, being charming, good-looking, intelligent, perceptive, witty, and the owner of a failing nightclub with Barry Humphries in it. On the surface, he seems a decent enough sort, but he is after all the Devil, and is therefore compelled to perform constant petty, spiteful and uncharitable acts. In particular he is unable to prevent himself being nasty to Dudley’s character, despite the fact that he really likes him, and despite the constant hurt look on Dudley’s upe="Td little face. Peter’s Devil is a man consumed with boredom by everyday life, something he has had to endure for millions of years; he wishes desperately to be good, to ascend ultimately to heaven, but he knows in his heart that the myriad little sins he must commit to make his daily life palatable have formed an addictive pattern that he will never escape. Worst of all, he has been condemned by God to play jokes and tricks on those around him for ever.

  The script was packed full of theological debate of the most entertaining kind – evidence, believes Peter’s daughter Lucy, of a degree of spiritual curiosity: ‘That’s not to say he had some great faith or great belief, but he pondered the question. He may have taken the piss out of it, but I think there were queries. It wasn’t just dismissed out of hand absolutely.
’ At one point George sits atop a pillar box to explain his downfall to Stanley:

  George:

  Now then – I’m God. This is my throne, see. All around me are the cherubim, seraphim, continually crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ – the Angels, Archangels, that sort of thing. Now, you be me, Lucifer, the loveliest angel of them all.

  Stanley:

  What do I do?

  George:

  Well, sort of dance around praising me, mostly.

  Stanley:

  . . . Immortal, invisible, you’re handsome, you’re, er, you’re glorious, you’re the most beautiful person in the world. Here – I’m getting a bit bored with this. Can’t we change places?

  George:

  That’s exactly how I felt.

  Stanley’s ordeal begins when he is stalked by George (in full cloak and fashionable sixties sunglasses), who saves him from committing suicide in return for his soul. He is given a trial wish, and asks for a Frobisher and Gleason raspberry ice lolly, which George rather upressively buys from a newsagent’s. Patting his pockets as Peter occasionally did, George utters the immortal line: ‘Have you got sixpence? I’ve only got a million pound note.’ George takes him to the Rendezvous Club, an enterprise which is collapsing because his business partners (each representing one of the seven deadly sins) are so terminally useless. Here Stanley signs away his soul, and the contract is filed in the ‘M’ drawer:

  George:

  Let’s see, er, Machiavelli, McCarthy, Miller, Moses . . .

  Stanley:

  Moses?

  George:

  Irving Moses, the fruiterer.

  George explains that Stanley can end any wish by blowing a raspberry, and sends him on his way. His first desire is to become articulate and educated, an intellectual: this was the cue for a reworking of the old Establishment sketch where the couple grope verbally towards sex, although in the finished version Dudley based his performance on a Welsh neighbour called Griffiths. The ploy does not work: Margaret Spencer cries rape as Stanley pounces.

  His first raspberry blown, Stanley returns to George’s side, and receives a piece of extremely valuable (and presumably autobiographical) advice about seducing women:

  George:

  As far as sex is concerned, patience is a virtue. In the words of Marcel Proust, and this applies to any woman in the world, if you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is, that they come out with, ’til ten past four in the morning – you’re in.

  Armed with this information, Stanley decides he will be Margaret’s husband, a powerful, rich and influential man, with a country estate, yachts, servants and a phone in the lav; but again, the fantasy goes awry. A delightfully ingenious feature of the script is that every picture painted by Stanley contains a loophole that is exploited by a character played by Peter. It is never entir clear whether the Devil himself is destroying Stanley’s dreams, or whether, as George puts it, ‘there’s a lot of me in everyone’. In this instance, Margaret largely ignores her husband for the attentions of a handsome music teacher; Stanley bemoans the fact that ‘I often wish I’d been forced to take up an instrument myself when I was young.’ Eventually she ends up in the bath with Stanley’s business associate, an arms dealer played by (and indeed named) Peter.

  That night, Stanley is tempted in bed by Lust, played by Raquel Welch, who thrusts his head into her cleavage. In fact Peter wanted to call the film Raquel Welch, so that the posters would read ‘Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Raquel Welch’, but the distributors were not impressed by the idea. Dudley eventually wore three pairs of pants to film the scene, in the (unfulfilled) hope that they would hamper his inevitable erection.

  Stanley’s fourth wish – to be someone women yearn after, a pop star, sexy, young and dynamic – is destroyed in the most delicious manner possible, in a scene which demonstrates that even if Peter couldn’t sing, he understood the psychology of pop music absolutely. Attired in Tom Jones-style lamé, Stanley belts out a number on a TV pop show, enshrining sentiments that entirely matched Dudley’s own outlook on the female sex:

  Stanley:

  I’m on my knees, won’t you please come and love me

  I need you so, please don’t go, stay and love me

  Tell me you’re full of yearning for me

  Touch me and say that you can’t live without me

  Tell me you need me, touch me and say, oh

  love me!

  But the next song up is by the latest pop sensation, Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations – Peter, that is – performing a psychedelic number in a flat, uninterested monotone:

  Chorus Girls:

  You turn me on

  Drimble Wedge:

  I don’t love you

  Chorus Girls:

  You plug me in

  Drimble Wedge:

  Leave me alone

  Chorus Girls:

  You switch me on

  Drimble Wedge:

  I’m self-contained

  Chorus Girls:

  You light me up

  Drimble Wedge:

  Just go away.

  Turning to onof the adoring girls in the front row, he sneers: ‘You fill me with inertia.’ The audience immediately deserts the despairing Stanley en masse.

  Stanley returns defeated to George’s side, in a scene which perfectly displays the mixture of charm and wickedness that Peter had invested in his Satan. Turning up at a pretty country cottage as ‘the Frunigreen Eyewash Men’, they offer the little old lady who lives there – Mrs Wisby – a chance to win a beautiful silver tea service and a night out with Alfred Hitchcock if she can only answer a simple question. The drawback is, she must have ten bottles of Frunigreen eyewash in her house to qualify; as she does not, George lets her bend the rules by bicycling down to the village to buy them. While she is away they mind the kitchen. George eats all her raspberries with a pound of sugar and a pint of cream, proffering Stanley a wooden spoon from inside his overall, a reference to medieval art that demonstrated a healthy variety of cultural reference points. Finally, the old lady returns to hear her ‘simple question’:

  George:

  How tall is the Duke of Edinburgh?

  Mrs Wisby:

  Ooh, I’ve read it somewhere . . . six foot one?

  George:

  Alas no, it’s six foot two, and this means you’ve lost ten pounds.

  Despicably, he extracts the money from a pot on her mantelpiece and they depart, Mrs Wisby waving sweetly over the garden fence. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for her, and at the same time impossible not to be secretly delighted at George’s trick.

  After an experimental animation sequence that ultimately fails to work – Stanley’s fifth wish being a desire to become a fly on the wall – the last two fantasies are wonderfully funny. The first one seems watertight enough: George offers warmth and love, a cottage in the country, two beautiful children playing in a sunlit garden, and Margaret overcome with excitement as the car bearing Stanley bowls up the drive. The drawback is that Margaret and Stanley are actually having an affair, and that her husband Peter is in the car with him. He is Stanley’s Oxford tutor, and everything in the fantasy, the house and the children, are his. He is also impossibly nice: he has bought her a present, he doesn’t mind that she has forgotten their wedding anniversary, he is innocently happy to let them drive into town together while he does all the housework. Consumed by mutual guilt, Stanley and Margaret are forced to try and consummate their relationship in the car while singing Peter’s praises and saying ‘I love him’, an enterprise which is of course doomed to tear-sodden failure. How it must have galled Dudley to film that scene, especially given the fact that during the shoot he had developed a genuine crush on Eleanor Bron.

  Stanley’s last chance – although he does not know it, as he has forgotten the trial wish at the start – is carefully specified. He wishes to meet Margaret for the first time, he says, and to fall in love with her – f
or ever. Both of them are to be young, in perfect health, and white; the surroundings are to be beautiful and peaceful; and most important of all, there are to be absolutely no other men in her life. George, apparently impressed, snaps his fingers and – hey presto! – Stanley is transformed into a lesbian Trappist nun at the convent of the Leaping Order of St Beryl. His luggage is burned by other nuns. He is shown to his cell, which has a wooden pillow and a large picture of the Mother Superior (Peter) on the wall, with the legend ‘Big Sister is watching you’. The scenes which follow, with Dudley desperately trying to blow a surreptitious raspberry without attracting the attention of Peter’s serene Mother Superior, are among the funniest in the history of the cinema. Stanley Donen, who eventually directed the picture, recollects that ‘I had trouble not ruining the take because I kept having to laugh off camera during that scene. I was actually bleeding from biting my lip, it was so absolutely wonderful.’

  Donen, whose most famous screen credit was Singin’ in the Rain, came on board early in the scripting stage. He had been wowed by Not Only . . . But Also, while Peter and Wendy had been impressed by his direction of the film Charade, and the two sides had groped towards each other. So delighted was Donen to get the chance of working with Peter that he turned down Hello Dolly, for which he would have been paid more than the entire budget of Bedazzled. He, like Peter and Dudley, took no advance wages from Bedazzled, preferring to spend the limited budget of $600,000 on screen instead. It was at Donen’s insistence that Peter inserted the leaping nun sequence from the TV series wholesale into the film, on the grounds that nobody outside Britain would ever have seen it. He considered that Peter’s script was an absolute masterpiece, and he was right. It was episodic, which is always a weakness in a feature film, and pointed to a lack of development from Peter’s origins as a sketch writer; but it was also intelligent, thought-provoking, touching and marvellously funny. The filming was set for the summer of 1967. The question was, could Donen translate Peter’s first-rate script into a first-rate feature film?