Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  After the first night, Dudley demanded a summit meeting to discuss Peter’s drink problem. The result was a deal whereby Peter promised to limit himself to just a couple of glasses of wine before going on stage. To enable him to keep his word, Judy was taken on as the show’s dresser from January, with the specific job of measuring out Peter’s drinks by hand. Peter enjoyed having his wife as his dresser: ‘He used to swap his trousers for Dudley’s as a joke. Anything that made life difficult for Dudley would crease Peter up.’ The arrangement seemed to work: for the rest of the London run Peter was sober on stage, and if he wanted to hit the bottle he had to do so after the show. The show was deemed a great success, and Peter and Dudley were considered sufficiently famous to be asked to switch on the Christmas lights. Peter even dreamed up a new sketch, although he didn’t put it in, about a nervous comedian who keeps suicidally changing his punchlines at the last minute. The BBC televised the show one night, although Joe McGrath – who as a mere ex-employee was not allowed to produce it – was annoyed by the cack-handed editing.

  In the long run, though, Peter and Dudley gradually became more and more bored, both with each other, and with the material, which was now almost two ye old. With a degree of control restored, Peter resumed his old habit of trying to make life difficult for Dudley onstage. ‘Peter had the ability to wing it,’ says Judy, ‘while Dudley had to stick to the script. Peter loved to have the audience in the palm of his hand giggling, Dudley wriggling, as if to say, “Look, I’ve cut the little bugger right up.” Sometimes that could be very cruel – if Dudley didn’t want it to happen – and sometimes Dudley laughed his head off. It went full circle between the two.’ In one sketch where Peter’s character smoked a cigarette, he would often deliberately annoy Dudley by blowing smoke into his face. When he succeeded in making Dudley cross, Peter said that his partner’s eyes took on the appearance of ‘hen’s arses’. Judy believes that ‘Ultimately, the antagonism between them was inevitable given the circumstances. Peter’s drinking gave Dudley ammunition, but if Peter hadn’t got drunk the arguments would have been about something else.’ Once the show was finished for the evening, the pair would go their separate ways. There was no socialising together, as there had been during the Not Only . . . But Also days. Curiously, the more strained their relationship became offstage, the more giggling and corpsing occurred onstage, rather as in the dying days of Beyond the Fringe. This was hysteria, rather than genuine enjoyment. ‘Dudley’s hysterical laughter became an act,’ admits McGrath.

  In 1973, Peter and Dudley were interviewed for daytime television by Mavis Nicholson. It was one of those remarkable occasions when, for whatever reason, Peter lowered his defences and both men spoke quite openly about their true feelings – about the lack of communication between them, for instance:

  Dudley:

  I think we are terribly opposite, actually, opposite to the point where it becomes difficult to communicate I think at times, wouldn’t you say?

  Peter:

  Sometimes when we’re working it is disastrous. It’s like the worst kind of polite marriage. You sort of sit round, and neither of us is really very good at coming out with what we really think.

  Peter confessed to having been ‘arrogant’ and ‘cruel’ to his colleague. On the subject of alcohol, he added:

  Peter:

  I tend to drink too much.

  Mavis:

  Why?

  Peter:

  I don’t know. I think it’s a symptom of boredom really. And my mind can drift off. And Dudley won’t actually speak to me.

  Dudley:

  So why do you do it? Why do you in fact not concentrate for two performances in a row? Why do you make me get into this state?

  Peter:

  I don’t ‘make you get into this state’.

  Dudley:

  Yes you do. I think you’re playing at it.

  Peter:

  I’m not at all. It’s just, I’m aware afterwards that at a certain moment, my mind has wandered off onto something else.

  Nicholson asked Peter what he did during the daytime:

  Peter:

  I get bored very easily. I tend to get up late, I read the newspapers, I sort of hang around the house. I sometimes – very occasionally – go out shopping with my girlfriend. I do very little during the day, and I’m very much aware that I’m doing nothing, which annoys me. Yet so far I haven’t actually done anything positive about it.

  Mavis:

  Can you live alone?

  Peter:

  I don’t want to try.

  Dudley admitted that he, too, had been affected by ennui to the point where he sat in his flat doing nothing; he had even given up playing his beloved piano.

  Mavis:

  How happy are you both?

  Dudley:

  I’m OK these days, I think, I’m gradually getting calmer, I’m getting to myself, getting to know what I want (gradually Dudley has been putting on the voice of an American psychiatrist).

  Peter:

  You see, this is what you’re doing the whole time, you’re evading it. You’re putting on a funny voice.

  Dudley:

  I’m not evading it! You know that the truth is there. I’m not evading it, I’m saying it, but in a funny voice. (Dudley repeats his earlier sentence laboriously, in his normal voice.)

  Peter, meanwhile, had successfully managed to evade the question by concentrating on Dudley’s struggles to answer it.

  It was clear that they were coming to the end of the road as a double act, but also that they would be completely locked into the partnership, unable to get out, until it finally hit the rocks. What they probably needed was an enforced break from each other’s company. What they got was another, more forceful, more lucrative offer from Alexander Cohen, to shut down the London production and take the whole show to New York. Peter was keen: he was bored with London, bored with Denbigh Terrace, bored with fighting with Wendy, bored with life. New York offered a nostalgic, sentimental attraction, stirring happy memorie of the golden days of 1962. Dudley was wary, convinced that it could end up becoming ‘hell on wheels’. The offer of $7,000 a week each, plus a percentage of the box office, swayed him; he was still recovering, financially, from the decision to give Bentham House, their Hampstead mansion, to Suzy. He and Peter agreed to fly out in September 1973.

  There would have to be compromises: Alexander Cohen didn’t like the Behind the Fridge joke, and wanted to revert to the title of the abortive 1968 tour, Good Evening. Idi Amin and Ted Heath had to go. ‘We started getting all this “Gee guys, could you change this, they’re never gonna understand it” stuff,’ recalls Joe McGrath. ‘Of course they’re gonna fucking understand it! It’s English, and Peter and Dudley had been there before with Beyond the Fringe and succeeded on their own terms!’ But Peter was in no mood to resist this time, and made all the changes that had been demanded. The resultant gaps were filled with four old sketches, One Leg Too Few, Frog and Peach, the miner monologue from Beyond the Fringe, and Six of the Best, the TV sketch in which Dudley’s headmaster tries to cane Peter’s cocky schoolboy.

  Before leaving, Peter and Judy sold the house in Denbigh Terrace to Richard Branson, and bought a large property in Hampstead. Peter had also been feeling nostalgic for the old days in Church Row, and wanted to move back there. Eventually, after much searching, Judy came across a spacious, discreet, comfortable, three-storey mews house in the next street along. It had gothic, lattice-worked windows, like Peter’s old college room. He wrote excitedly to his parents to tell them the news:

  I’ve bought a super Queen Anne Coach House in Perrin’s Walk, which is a lovely cobbled mews at the back of Church Row. I just know you’ll love it. It has a big garden at the back with a fishpond, 3 bedrooms, a huge living room, a garage, 2 bathrooms and 2 loos. It really is great and I’m very pleased and excited about it. I hope I never have to move again. I’ve had enough of upheaval. I hope you won’t tell Wendy, who’ll immediately turn gree
n with envy and start screaming for more money. She’s done very well, what with Kenwood Cottage plus her farm in Majorca, but I’m sure that won’t stop her being outraged.

  Judy wanted to write affectionate messages all over the walls, as she had done at Ruston Mews, but Peter was feeling too houseproud to have any of that sort of thing.

  Peter discovered a further, unexpected attraction in the shape of one of his new neighbours, George Weiss, an ageing hippy who was gradually working through the money his father had amassed during years in the diamond trade. ‘Rainbow George’ kept open house (not that he owned his house – he had no idea who did and had certainly never paid any rent), and suffered a constant haemorrhage of belongings as a result. He was always full of wild schemes and plans, very few of which ever came to fruition. Although theirs was a brief acquaintance at this stage, Peter was to form one of the most entertaining friendships of his life with his eternally, hopelessly optimistic neighbour.

  After a farewell visit to his parents, Peter jetted off to America with Dudley on 25 September, leaving Judy behind to complete the purchase and oversee the redecoration of Perrin’s Walk. She had suggested putting William Morris wallpaper in the bathroom, but Peter had been stirred for once to express a decorating option: ‘Absolutely not! I never want to see another piece of William Morris wallpaper as long as I live.’ Judy gave pride of place to the Tiffany lamp, and planted a fig tree in the garden to symbolise their love.

  On the plane over, Dudley tried to have an earnest talk about the importance of not drinking in the United States, but Peter was inconsolable at the thought that he would hardly see his children for another two years. By the time they touched down in New York he was hopelessly drunk again, and Dudley had to fill in both their entry forms at immigration while Peter sat in the corner, crying. ‘I don’t know why he was crying this time,’ says Dudley. ‘He had a lot of angst but he didn’t talk about it. Just like I didn’t talk about mine to him. His was an anxiety that was inexpressible.’14

  America – and particularly American society – was delighted to welcome back the dazzling young men who had so enlivened New York in the early sixties. Jackie Kennedy – now Jackie Onassis – was overjoyed to see Peter again, and brought her sister Lee Radziwill along to meet him. Alone, inebriated and craving female companionship, Peter was in no mood to resist, and immediately began an affair with Radziwill. Tuesday Weld, meanwhile, was keen to renew her acquaintance with Dudley Moore, and telephoned their hotel. Peter intercepted the call, got talking, and soon began an affair with her as well. Not that Dudley was short of female company; when his current girlfriend Lysie Hastings (who also happened to be his best friend’s wife) flew out to join him, she promptly flew home again upon discovering quite how many girlfriends Dudley had already managed to accumulate.

  By the time Judy arrived, Peter’s love life was in a hopeless tangle. He immediately gave his two girlfriends up and told Judy all about it – theirs was a painfully honest relationship – but he had proved himself utterly incapable of being alone. Judy says that ‘Women responded to him off stage like audiences responded onstage. But I knew I was the one who was with him in the end.’ Judy offered Peter uncomplicated love without reproach, which was difficult given his ways; whether it was beneficial to him or not is perhaps open to debate.

  On stage, Good Evening was a colossal triumph, outstripping even the reception it had been accorded in Australia. Peter and Dudley opened with a preview stint in Boston on 12 October 1973; the house was packed with a raucous, knowledgeable, anglophile audience. When Peter launched into his miner monologue, they applauded the first line and joined in with some of the subsequent ones. Even when Peter fell off the stage into the orchestra pit, severely bruising his leg, they laughed heartily because they thought it was part of the act. On 10 November the show moved to New York’s Plymouth Theater, on 45th Street, west of Broadway, where the reception was equally huge. The critics raved. The New York Daily News thought the show ‘immense’; the New York Post called Peter and Dudley ‘two of the funniest and most inventive men in the world’; while the much-feared Clive Barnes of the New York Times thought them ‘mad, funny and truthful’. The US correspondent of the Daily Mail reported that ‘New York has gone bananas over them and one of the more absurd sounds to be heard round the town is that of Brooklyn gentlemen trying to do a Pete and Dud impersonation.’15

  The only sour notes came from the veteran British radical film maker Lindsay Anderson, who publicly bemoaned the absence of satire; from a woman called Jane who wrote in to complain about the Tarzan sketch; and from the religious lobby, who objected to the nativity sketch. The Anti-Blasphemy Movement credited Peter and Dudley with ‘opening the floodgates of satanism’, but nobody turned up to their demonstration outside the theatre. Celebrities queued up to go backstage and meet the two stars, including Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Walter Matthau, Tennessee Williams, Henry Kissinger and Groucho Marx, who invited Peter and Dudley back home with him. It transpired that he was deaf, hadn’t heard a word of the show and wanted a private, extra-loud performance of the material at his house. He later pronounced them ‘two of the funniest performers he had ever seen’.

  Peter eschewed the round of late-night dinners and parties that had characterised his last visit to New York, and the roster of schemes and projects that had occupied his days. He rented a quiet apartment from Tony Walton, the Old Radleian stage designer, as well as a large, three-storied clapboard house in Nutmeg Drive in the Connecticut suburbs, with wide grounds and a swimming pool. The children came out for a holiday in the summer of 1974, which was when Peter was at his happiest. ‘It was a fabulous house, with peacocks roaming round the gardens,’ remembers Daisy. ‘We had a really lovely holiday – we went to the circus and Dad was very good at barbecuing chicken. I just remember lovely languid summer days, and him being at the barbecue and making us laugh all the time.’ Peter played pool with Lucy, gave his daughters money to place on horse-races and organised world record attempt frisbee-throwing competitions.

  The rest of the time, he sat and did very little, the boredom eating slowly away at him. He wrote to his mother and father:

  I think both Judy and I find New York rather dull and exhausting. We both miss England a lot. I wish I could persuade you both to fly out here for a week or so. I have forgotten both your birthdays again but I have a feeling that one of them is imminent so please let me know – so your uncommunicative son may remember for once. I’m on a ghastly diet (I’ve put on about a stone and none of my trousers fit). It does seem to be working but I can’t say it does much for my temper. What’s worse – instead of melting away from my waist I think all the weight must be coming off my feet and knees. I haven’t really seen much of the people I used to know here and we are leading a very quiet life. Sorry to have so little news, but apart from doing the show nothing much happens. I miss you both very much and will write again soon.

  But things were happening; things were gradually beginning to go wrong. Joe McGrath became very upset after Peter gave a TV interview describing the London shows as ‘rather lazy’, the American shows as ‘much, much better’ on account of Alexander Cohen’s input, and claiming that they had needed ‘a stronger director’ all along. Dudley told McGrath not to worry, enough was enough, and the director flew home. He was replaced by Jerry Adler, the stage manager. Judy, meanwhile, had fallen ill with a serious internal infection, and had to spend increasing amounts of time in London for treatment. She had been intending to fly back to New York for Christmas 1973 with Gaye Brown, but was too unwell to make the trip. Gaye – whose ticket had been paid for by Judy – decided to travel without her and spent Christmas with Peter; they went to the Russian Tea Room with Woody Allen on Christmas Day. She and Judy never spoke to each other again. In fact, says Gaye, ‘Peter couldn’t bear it without her. He was going slightly crazy – very different, rather manic, rather strange, and very very possessive of his friends. I spent a day with Dudley, just wittering, and
Peter was absolutely furious. I got an extraordinary call from him, very drunk . . . I’ve never heard so much abuse. Looking back now I realise that he was incredibly unhappy.’ Peter didn’t like to be himself, and would keep his stage make-up on all day, his deep, dark eyes lined with thick black mascara.

  He was now more firmly in the grip of drink and drugs than ever. One dinner invitation that he and Judy did accept was from Joseph Heller, who recalls that ‘Peter was terrified all the time that he was going to run out of pills. He had brought a supply of uppers and downers from London, but he only knew what they were called on his London prescription. He didn’t know the generic name or how to replenish his supply. I would say that he was in terror about them.’16 In a bizarre reversal of Lenny Bruce’s visit to London, it was now Heller’s turn to spend the night hours trying to find a doctor flexible enough to assuage his guest’s craving. A few days later, Heller brought Dustin Hoffman to see Good Evening and to meet Peter afterwards. Peter occupied the entire conversation, as was his wont, while the taciturn Hoffman said next to nothing. As soon as he arrived home, Heller got a call from Peter. ‘It was late and this was about one hour after we had parted at the entrance. He was very distraught. Not only had Hoffman not talked at all. He had never said that he liked the show.’17