Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter took very little part in all this redecoration. ‘Anything you like, I chose it. Anything you don’t, Wendy did it,’2 he informed a visiting reporter. In fact, his pièce de résistance was situated in the spacious paved garden, under the pear tree: an amazing, detailed, multi-storeyed Wendy House he had commissioned for his adored daughters from a carpenter friend of Harriet Garland’s. There the children would sit for hours and play bankers, using autumn leaves to represent huge sums of money. It was an opulent, stylish lifestyle, that Peter would have been unlikely to have emulated at the Foreign Office. It did not, however, give callers a feeling of ostentation: ‘The only extravagance,’ according to family friend Sid Gottlieb, ‘was this beautiful Tiffany lampshade they had brought from the States.’ Everyone who visited the house remarked on the lamp’s loveliness. The idyll was complete, the only fly in the ointment being the fact that the telephone number closely resembled that of the local cinema. Anyone who called enquiring if they had got through to the box office was answered in the affirmative by Peter, using his E. L. Wisty voice. When they went on to ask for programme information, he would reply: ‘Mind your own business.’

  The basement kitchen became the setting for a series of huge dinner parties, hosted by Wendy with almost military precision. As often as three times a week, every week, up to twenty guests would gather round the big dining table, which literally creaked under the weight of ratatouilles, moussakas and quiches lorraines. Peter, a self-confessedly awful cook, would take no part in the preparation of the feast; instead he would sit and hold court at one end of the table, ensconced in a large Windsor chair. Wendy would sit at the opposite end, on a slightly smaller seat. Lined up between them on either side of the table were London’s famous, celebrities of all shapes and sizes assembled in a deliberately eclectic mix. Regular guests included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Charlotte Rampling, Peter Sellers, Cat Stevens, Peter Ustinov, Ken Tynan, John Cleese, Paul Jones, John Bird, Eleanor Bron, Willie Rushton, Michael Foot, Bernard Levin, Jay and Fran Landesman, Malcolm Muggeridge, Victor Lownes, and of course Dudley and Suzy Kendall. Most of the guests were purposely selected for their fame and interest value, but they were almost all distinguished by the fact that they had sought Peter’s friendship, rather than he theirs. As Barry Fantoni points out, ‘Peter was the sixties icon. Pop stars were presented to him at parties, not the other way round.’

  Harriet Garland remembers ‘Wonderful, happy, happy evenings at Church Row, with John and Cynthia Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lennon was there a great deal. Wendy would do this wonderful spread – she was incredibly ambitious – she’d think nothing of roasting a whole boar for instance, and putting it on the table; and it was all wonderfully decorated, with fantastic puddings. I’ve never laughed so much in my whole life – Peter and Lennon were just frightfully funny together. The two of them would do an act: Peter was always becoming somebody, Barry McKenzie or E. L. Wisty or whoever.’ John Lennon, in fact, told Peter and Wendy that he had written the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds for their daughter. Wendy herself remembers the dinner parties as a source of ‘non-stop, freewheeling hilarity’. She was even approached by The Observer to write a hostess page for them, detailing the secret of her success.

  Most of Peter’s old school and university friends had long since fallen by the wayside, unless they had gone on to become involved in the entertainment industry. There were a few unfamous guests, though, in the shape of the cleaning lady and Reverend Hall, the local vicar. Wendy explains that ‘I’ve always been – and still am – fascinated with putting people together who don’t normally meet each other, whether it’s a Majorcan peasant or somebody who’s written an opera, just to see the alchemical reactions.’ The pronouncedly cockney world middleweight Champion Terry Downes, for instance, found himself seated next to Bernard Levin. Downes insisted that ‘Peter gives the finest parties I’ve ever been to. It might be Michael Caine or John Lennon, or one of these top people you see on TV, but everybody’s mixin’. It boils up to a great evening. Peter never makes himself too busy, never makes himself Jack the Lad. He looks after everybody, especially the women, gives them that little bit of extra attention. My bird’s knocked out by Peter. He’s a real hundred per cent diamond person.’3

  Downes was present at an evening described by Nick Luard in a recent book, Something Like Fire: ‘For one of Peter’s birthdays, Wendy gave one of the finest dinner parties I’ve ever been to.’ Luard recounted how he and his wife sat down with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the columnist Bernard Levin, the actors Peter O’Toole and Tom Courtenay, the poet Christophe Logue, the designer Mary Quant, Terry Downes, and half a dozen more. ‘We sat up into the early hours playing music and talking – about politics and prize-fighting, painting and poetry, theatre, de Gaulle and President Kennedy, the Chelsea Flower Show and the summer sun in Spain. Peter, in an ancient wooden rocking-chair, presided . . . I and my wife Elisabeth were living in Hyde Park Square near Marble Arch. Normally we’d have taken a taxi to get back. That warm summer night we strolled home together beneath the stars, arriving as dawn was breaking. It seemed the only fitting end to a bewitching evening which belonged partly to the mood of the times. When since has a brilliant acerbic Jewish intellectual broken bread and discussed the meaning of life with a couple of Beatles and a flattened-nosed Bow Bells-born pugilist, to the equal enchantment of all four?’4 Hopefully never, one is tempted to respond, but there is no doubt that Peter and Wendy’s dinner parties warmed the memories of all those who attended them for years afterwards. No doubt it was this effect that kept the Luards so cosy on their dawn stroll home, rather than the summer weather, as Peter’s birthday generally tended to fall on 17 November.

  Not all the dinner guests shared the Luards’ unabashed enthusiasm. While acknowledging that it was ‘the party invitation to receive’, the American satirists Jay and Fran Landesman, twenty years older than their fellow guests, were initially curious as to why they had been invited. Eventually it dawned on Jay Landesman that ‘the reason why Peter and his wife were attracted to middle-aged people like Fran and myself, was because we were the sort of niggers of showbusiness, we were very exotic to England in those days, being from America and having the background that we had. I didn’t have a particularly good time.’ Paul McCartney was present at the first dinner party the Landesmans attended, and he had been tracked to the house by a gaggle of fans. ‘The scene was reminiscent of pre-French revolution days when the hungry masses beat on the windows of the rich, demanding food.’5 Wendy showed McCartney a copy of the Landesman LP, with its Jules Feiffer illustration on the cover. ‘That’s . . . that’s, er, a nice drawing,’ the Beatle offered uncomprehendingly. The party then repaired to a disco in St James’s Place, where McCartney recited a few lines of a song he was working on, about a girl named Eleanor Rigby.

  A few weeks later John Lennon was the star guest at an even less relaxed occasion attended by the Landesmans. Wendy insisted that Lennon try her Salade Niçoise, but he became embarrassed and refused to touch the dish, because he had never heard of it and couldn’t pronounce its name. Then Christopher Logue criticised him for turning down Peter’s request for the Beatles to play at the Private Eye benefit Rustle of Spring. The party had no recourse but to repair to the same disco in St James’s Place. ‘I got the impression,’ says Landesman, ‘that Wendy would have liked a little more privacy. But that was Swinging London, that was what you did in those days. You had a lot of people over, you got drunk and had a lot of good times. But in general it fucked Wendy and Peter up, all that, no doubt about it.’

  Jonathan Miller’s comparison between the Fringe quartet and the Beatles still held true to some extent: Peter and John Lennon had become drawn to each other because of their profound similarities, both being sharp, cynical, witty and the brains of their respective writi partnerships. Dudley and Paul McCartney were in each case the housewives’ choice of the duo, their wholesome, sympathetic, and in some ways greater mainstream appeal providi
ng a slight source of irritation for their more caustic and dominant partners. In each case, however, the relationship was symbiotic; both Peter and John Lennon knew, deep down, that they performed better with their sidekicks than without. It is interesting too that both men, unaccustomed to deferring to others in public, did so in each other’s company, giving each other space in which to perform. The Cook–Lennon dinner party double act gave Lennon more room than Peter ever afforded Dudley. A further similarity, of course, was that by the mid-1960s both Peter and John Lennon’s marriages were, although they were unaware of it, on course for disaster.

  For a few years from 1965, though, Peter and Wendy were as glamorous as any couple in England. They both looked terrific. One journalist described Peter as resembling ‘a dandified giraffe’, always kitted out in the latest Carnaby Street fashions. According to Sid Gottlieb, Wendy was ‘entirely responsible for his beautiful clothes at that time. She was very very insistent, forever driving him on. Wendy herself was incredibly exotic in those days. She had the most wonderful hair, which she grew down to her hips, and she was always very, very exotically dressed – a lot of long Indian skirts. She was always very carefully presented, but her dress was never ostentatious and never synthetic.’ Her hair was by Vidal Sassoon; there barely seemed to be an item Mary Quant had designed that was not in her wardrobe; her shoe cupboard included zip-up platform boots, direct from New York. She was even said to have worn false eyelashes when she gave birth.

  The Cooks were right at the top of the ‘A’ list for parties and premieres, as much for Peter’s entertainment value as for their social prestige. Journalist Bill Calthrop remembers Peter turning up for Terry-Thomas’s party, lounging indolently in the back of an open-topped prewar MG driven by a producer friend, cigarette in one hand and unspilt drink in the other. At the premiere of Peter Hall’s US, an avant-garde anti-Vietnam play devised for the RSC by Peter Brook, the cast put brown paper bags on their heads and descended into the auditorium, silencing the audience hubbub; the hush was broken by Peter, sitting in the circle, who provoked a laugh by shouting, ‘Are you waiting for us, or are we waiting for you?’ Peter was the driving force behind an Oxfam charity concert at the Albert Hall, with Wendy and Elisabeth Luard in charge of the post-show catering; among the guests were Tom Wolfe, David Hockney and the Rolling Stones. When not attending functions, he would relax at his local pub the Flask, and entertain the regulars, who happened to include John Hurt, Robert Powell, Patrick Wymark, Ronald Fraser and James Villiers. ‘It was not that Peter had a nose for the centre of things,’ explains Elisabeth Luard, ‘he was the centre of things.’6

  Behind the glamorous public lifestyle, Wendy laboured tirelessly to keep the whole show on the road. The wild girl of Cambridge had revealed a talent as something of a domestic drill-sergeant. Even the children were pressed into service, contributing half a day’s house-cleaning a week when they were old enough, in return for their pocket money. Peter, according to Dudley Moore, was treated with housewifely ‘disdain’ in private. Barry Humphries, who felt that Peter was ‘henpecked’ by his wife, recalls that ‘It was always quite a surprise, when one rather idoised him, to hear someone speaking to him as though he were a kind of fool.’7 Wendy was still capable of romantic gestures: she commissioned a life-sized model of Spotty Muldoon for his Christmas present in 1965, and once hired a skywriter aeroplane to emblazon the words ‘I love you P. Cook’ across the Hampstead sky, although that idea was vetoed by the Board of Trade. Some of their friends, though, believed that she felt out of place in the world she had created; that she had given herself the role of supporting her husband and organising every detail of his life to perfection, and was probably working too hard at it. A slight resentment of Peter’s languid and lazy ease had begun to build inside her.

  Peter’s only escape from the twenty-four-hour showbiz lifestyle was to go and watch Tottenham Hotspur, which he did every time there was a home game, in the company of Sid Gottlieb. A doctor specialising in problems of drink and drug addiction whom Peter had met at a party, Gottlieb occupied the curious position of official doctor to Ronnie Scott’s nightclub. A man with many friends in the entertainment world, he instinctively recognised Peter’s need for approval and reassurance, and freely gave it. Soon the two became best friends. ‘You couldn’t have a straight conversation with Peter, but you could have a very illuminating conversation. He knew his stuff, he read masses of newspapers, and was able to tell you what was going on in his particular way. There were one or two voices he used to speak in. A cockney would always creep in, and a totally effete aristocrat, like Streeb-Greebling but more pathetic. That was the one that always creased me.’ Like an eager child, Sid Gottlieb would urge Peter to repeat his finest moments, slices of old sketches or former conversations, performed for Sid alone in the car on the way to the game.

  Peter had adopted Tottenham partly because they were John Bird’s team and partly because they shared their first two letters with Torquay, for whom his support gradually waned into a weekly result check. Sid Gottlieb didn’t actually care much for football, but Peter was not going to attend football matches alone when he could have his best friend by his side. ‘I went along because it was immense fun to travel to and from the game,’ explains Gottlieb. ‘This was an hour or more’s entertainment in itself, and what entertainment – passing comments about people in the street, names of streets and all that stuff – he just took off. On arrival at the ground Peter’s conduct would be completely different from that of all the other stars who supported Spurs: most of those guys sat in the Directors’ Box, and went into the Directors’ Office for tea at half time, and had a parking lot. No way did Peter have any of these privileges, nor did he seek them. I would pressurise him for my own comfort. “Oh, we’ll sort all that out,” he’d say – but in fact we never did, and Peter and I would drive Christ knows where to park the car, and invariably he’d say, “I haven’t got any money, can you . . .” Then he’d be hailed all the way from the car park to the ground, by supporters and antagonists alike – of course everybody recognised him – and he’d be besieged by autograph hunters. He did it beautifully, graciously actually. The extraordinary thing about Peter, which impressed me most of all, was his genius for identifying with whoever he was talking to, down to the merest local kid.’

  Peter sat in the old stand, where he trained a group of some ten or twelve local kids to embarrass the officials of the aeam, who sat below them. The rest of the time he spent shouting and screaming at the players and the referee at the top of his voice, with fervent sincerity. Northern sides, especially, were dismissed as peasants and barbarians. Dudley Moore, who hated football, came along once or twice and was stunned by Peter’s behaviour: ‘We were at that end of the goal field [sic] and he shouted continually. I had to stop up my ears because he was so vociferous.’ The only time Peter didn’t muck in with the rest of the supporters was when a really big game was on: for the 1967 Cup Final, he and Sid Gottlieb hired a Rolls, and after Tottenham won 2–1, drove round the West End hooting the car horn. Similar celebrations followed the 1966 World Cup Final, at which he had been sitting next to a northern fan; with England leading 2–1 shortly before the end of normal time, the man opened a bottle of champagne and announced, half an hour ahead of Kenneth Wolstenholme, ‘It’s all over.’ When the Germans equalised, Peter turned to him and said, ‘If you open your fucking mouth in extra time I’ll kill you.’ Peter was a truly passionate fan. ‘He would go into a very serious depression for hours after a defeat,’ recalls Sid Gottlieb. ‘We would always go to my home after the game where tea and cake was laid on, and Peter would go straight to the television and turn it on, just to see confirmation that we really had been beaten. Then he’d go home.’

  For big away games the pair would travel up in the early morning and sit in the home end of the ground, at Peter’s insistence, where Peter would continue to scream abuse at the home team at the top of his voice. He seemed to lead a charmed life, probably because ev
ery adult football fan in Britain knew who he was, knew that it was Peter and that he didn’t really mean it. ‘I saw it hundreds of times,’ says Sid Gottlieb. ‘He could never accept that the opposition fans could really dislike him.’ Peter’s run of good fortune came to an end on 27 January 1968, at a third-round FA Cup tie at Old Trafford, when Spurs equalised late in the game. He, Sid, Sid’s son Peter and Frank Cvitanovich, a Canadian film-maker, had been standing in the Stretford End, where Peter had kept up a ceaseless barracking of the ‘northern brutes’ who made up the home team. On their way out Peter and Cvitanovich, who had become separated from the other two, were surrounded by a group of some fifteen to twenty adolescents, aged about thirteen or fourteen, one of whom stepped forward to ask for Peter’s autograph. As he obliged he was kicked in the groin and fell to the floor; he curled into a hedgehog ball while they kicked him, splitting his forehead and booting his front teeth clean out. Cvitanovich, who was a huge former American football player, six foot six and sixteen stone, fought furiously and was even more badly beaten. Youngsters, it seemed, were not party to the national consensus of affection for Peter Cook. Eventually the pair were rescued by the police and escorted to the station, where the boys in blue rather needlessly cleared the platform of all non-Londoners by means of a baton charge. Sid Gottlieb was surprised to note that Peter, ‘as a sort of upper-class public school character, totally identified with all this action.’ His missing teeth, no doubt, were helping to inform his opinions.