Biography Of Peter Cook
Page 48
It was in Los Angeles that Peter finally attempted to realise one of his lifelong ambitions, by making a pop record. Keith Moon, drummer of The Who, had remarked to him that ‘Anyone can sing.’ Peter had replied that ‘there’s one person in the world who can’t.’ The debacles of Where Do I Sit? still hung heavy in his memory. Moon, however, had been insistent: ‘No. Ringo can’t sing, I can’t sing, but we all have hits.’ Moon had just released a quite dreadful solo LP, Two Sides of the Moon, and he was determined that Peter could emulate his achievement. ‘So Keith and I went along to where there were some demo discs, and picked out one called Rubber Ring. Quite a nice tune. Come the night, Clover Studios are booked, along comes a fleet of Cadillacs containing LA’s best musicians – The Band, Ricky Nelson as vocal adviser, Keith as drummer and producer, about twenty musicians, every drug in the world available. You only had to loosen your throat and something would go down. All we got done in twelve hours was a three-chord backing track, because the musicians were all going off shooting up in the toilets, and I conclusively demonstrated that I could not hit a note. If I’d tried each individual word and put them together, it still would not have come out.’26 Peter never attempted to sing in public again.
Around the same time, Tuesday Weld presented Dudley with a double surprise: not only did she confess the story of her April abortion to him, but she informed him that she was pregnant again – and that this time she intended to keep the baby. For months, their relationship had been shuddering like a tall building in a high wind, on account of Dudley’s serial infidelities and his girlfriend’s volatile, childlike behaviour. They were clearly on the verge of splitting up. Now, Dudley felt he had no option but to do the decent thing – something he’d sworn to himself he’d never do again – and get married to Tuesday. At the end of the tour they drove to Las Vegas without telling anyone, and were wed in a quiet, impromptu ceremony. Peter was not invited.
When the curtain came down on the last performance, and the last eager standing ovation had dispersed, Peter did not have the faintest idea what to do next. He looked to Dudley for a lead; but Dudley, to his horror, wasn’t interested: Dudley had reached the end of the road. It was all over, he told Peter. The partnership was finished. He was going to stay on in Hollywood, settle down with Tuesday and the baby and try to make it as a film star. Peter was stunned, aghast. Deep down, he must have been afraid of such a development – after some of his more wretched episodes of onstage drunkenness, he’d muttered ‘I suppose you won’t want to work with me any more’ – but he’d always rather hoped that Dudley would continue to cling to him as he clung to his partner. Dudley, however, had reached the point of no return.
In fact, Dudley did have some extremely presentable reasons for splitting up: he did indeed want to make it in Hollywood (‘I didn’t want to do sketch material any more, I wanted to do material where I could act’27); he did feel a responsibility to his wife and unborn child (the version Peter gave out to the press); and unlike Peter, he’d never felt truly at home in the predominantly middle-class world of British TV comedy. ‘Peter misses London,’ explained Dudley. ‘Hampstead, the corner paper shop, his mates. I don’t. Not at all. I’ve spent the past seven months in hotel rooms, and really rather enjoyed it. The anonymity of life like that appeals to me. I suppose I am rather like some cheap old whore, being seduced by hotel after hotel.’28 America, he thought, ‘had a certain friendliness that I couldn’t get hold of in Britain.’29 Ultimately, however, these were all attempts to rationalise Dudley’s unhappiness with the partnership. Peter, refusing to believe what had happened, insisted on telling journalists that they were merely ‘having a bit of a rest from each other’30 and that they’d be ‘back working together by the following summer’. But when Jimmy Gilbert, at the instigation of a BBC encouraged by such pronouncements, flew out to the USA to persuade Dudley to come and do another series of Not Only . . . But Also, Dudley’s response was blunt. ‘I’m not working with that man again,’ he said emphatically.
In later years, Peter admitted that the split had left him ‘bereft . . . It produced a gap in my life which is probably still there today. When people asked, “What are you going to do now?”, I really didn’t know. Still don’t really. I’ve written with many other comics, but I couldn’t imagine doing four series with them.’31 Barry Humphries believes that ‘Peter had too much of a sense of cosmic joke to ever reveal self-pity. But I got the feeling of sorrow – sorrow about the end of the Dudley Moore alliance. Peter felt enormous frustration. I think rage is not an exaggeration.’32 Dudley later acknowledged that Peter felt ‘betrayed’. Wendy believes now that ‘Splitting up with Dudley was more painful than any of his divorces.’ ‘The impact of Dudley’s refusal to work with him was massive,’ confirms Judy. ‘Peter was devastated when Dudley turned him down. He felt misery, resentment, anger and hurt pride. He had to face the fact that he needed Dudley more than Dudley needed him.’
It was perhaps the sense of frightening directionlessness that gripped Peter most acutely. Judy recalls that ‘I wanted Peter to be offered jobs in LA to widen his horizon, but I also wanted him to come home and lead a normal life and get away from the craziness of LA. He had desperately wanted the show to come to an end, but he had been frightened of it ending too. When it finally came to a close it was difficult for him to get back into a normal life again. He said “Judes, I just want to sit in a bar and drink. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to go back to London. I just want to sit here and drink.” He had no one to debrief him. He was burnt-out, lonely and addicted.’
Judy took Peter home to Perrin’s Walk, where two years’ mail was waiting for him. He refused to open any of it – in fact, he refused to open any mail ever again. In the 1990s, his third wife found letters in his house containing royalty cheques that were twenty years old. It was only when he got himself another agent (he signed up with David Wilkinson Associates soon afterwards) that he managed to sort out his income. There were other unpleasant surprises waiting for him back in London: Wendy had taken the children away from Kenwood Cottage, to the very edge of the area allowed under the terms of Peter’s injunction, to the village of Forest Row in rural Sussex, three hours from Hampstead by car. Through her interest in macrobiotics she had been persuaded of the benefits of the Rudolf Steiner method of education, and had enrolled Lucy and Daisy in the Michael Hall Steiner School there. ‘It was very painful when we went to Sussex,’ recalls Daisy. ‘Dad was very sad about that, I don’t think he wanted us to leave town.’ To make matters worse, a burly criminal, wanted for GBH and on the run from the police, had broken into Kenwood Cottage; posing as a respectable householder, he had had the electricity supply transferred to his name. He made it clear to Peter that if anyone called the police, he would torch the house before he could be arrested, whereas if Peter did nothing, he would leave of his own accord eventually. Defeated, Peter chose the latter option.
Peter tried taking himself off on holiday. He went to see Claud Cockburn, the veteran Eye columnist, at his home in Cork. On the way back he stopped off in Dublin, where his neighbour Rainbow George had moved for a while in pursuit of a girlfriend. ‘We went to a club together,’ says George, ‘but they wouldn’t let him in because he was so drunk he was staggering about. I said, “This is Peter Cook the famous comedian,” but it didn’t make any difference. He was meant to be staying in Dublin for a few days, but the following morning he was woken up by a phone call. Judy was in hospital.’ Finally, the health problems that had plagued her for so many years had come to a head. The cause, it seemed, was that a contraceptive device, inserted after the embarrassing unwanted pregnancy of their extra-marital affair, had caused a serious and persistent infection. The result was that Judy would never be able to have children. George remembers that when Peter discovered the news, ‘He was very distressed, crying. He threw his things into his case and raced to the airport. I knew he desperately wanted to have a family with Judy because she was so special to him.’33
CHAPTER 13
I Don’t Want to See Plays About Rape, Sodomy and Drug Addiction – I Can Get All That at Home
Derek and Clive, 1973–79
In the autumn of 1973, shortly after arriving in New York, when boredom had already set in but daily drunkenness hadn’t, Peter had turned up on Dudley’s doorstep with a proposition: he wanted to go into a recording studio ‘just for fun’ and improvise a sketch. When they used to sit ad libbing together as Pete and Dud on long car journeys or in hotel bars, the conversation often took a scatological turn; it was something of this kind that Peter wanted to improvise now. He had already booked the Bell Sound Studios, he explained, so Dudley obliged. They drove down to the studios, two microphones were switched on, the tapes were set rolling, and with no warning at all Peter launched into a routine:
Peter:
I tell you the worst job I ever had.
Dudley:
What was that?
Peter:
The worst job I ever had was with Jayne Mansfield. Y’know, she’s a fantastic bird, y’know, big tits and huge bum and everything like that, but I had the terrible job of retrieving lobsters from her bum.
The lobsters, Peter went on, had ‘shot up there when she went bathing in Malibu’. Dudley was taken completely by surprise. ‘I was just stunned,’ he recalls. ‘It came out of nowhere. I had to do a very hasty, improvised response – it was all about the worst job I ever had, which was picking up Winston Churchill’s bogeys. It was out of desperation, it was somewhere to go.’1 And that, Dudley discovered, was that. ‘That was all he wanted to do, the first and only item.’
The Jayne Mansfield sketch had not been improvised on the spot, of course. It was an old routine that Peter had been doing around the Private Eye office since 1962, although Dudley was not to know that. Because it was unbroadcastable, Peter had not been able to find an outlet for it in the eleven years since first devising it. He had simply decided to commit it to posterity in the form of a private tape, kept in his possession, and had taken the now indispensable Dudley along as his foil. In fact at one point in the recording, when Dudley had attempted to divert from the preplanned path, Peter had told him to ‘shut up’. Nonetheless both men had rather enjoyed their day out, and subsequently decided to take the experiment a little further. The two characters were given names and identities, distinguish them from Pete and Dud, their more wholesome alter egos. They became Derek and Clive, a pair of toilet cleaners at the British Trade Centre in New York.
It was not the first time that Peter and Dudley had gone into a recording studio to amuse themselves by taping unbroadcastable material. In 1963, when the US tour of Beyond the Fringe had begun to pall, they had produced The Dead Sea Tapes, a series of quite unusable interviews with people who had known Jesus. This time they went one further, hired the Bottom Line, a small club in Greenwich Village, and invited an audience of friends to witness the performance. Some of the material was old stuff: Bo Duddley from Not Only . . . But Also and the Appeal on Behalf of the Blond from the US Establishment cropped up, while Dudley performed two risqué traditional ditties. But there were also a number of new Derek and Clive dialogues, some of which later had to be wiped, because they contained libellous references to such luminaries as Harold Wilson and Kirk Douglas. Six routines survived: Top Rank, a surreal ramble in which Derek visits the Top Rank ballroom to find his wife being ‘fucked by a gorilla’ and complains to the manager, who is having oral sex with an ant; Squatter and the Ant, in which a second ant is hunted down by a military type; Cancer, a maudlin list of Derek and Clive’s acquaintances suffering from the disease; Winky Wanky Woo, in which a pervert who has been in prison fory-four times for offences against Anna Neagle tries to persuade another man to play with his ‘doodah’; This Bloke Came up to Me, a list of strong expletives uttered in meaningless aggression by two complete strangers; and the self-explanatory In the Lav. It was all fairly harmless stuff, largely inoffensive in intent and also – for those who had no problems with the swearwords – in execution. Peter and Dudley subsequently recorded a second version of the same material at the Electric Lady Studios, without an audience. Soon afterwards, though, ennui and depression overcame Peter, and his enthusiasm for the Derek and Clive project dwindled to zero.
There it would have ended, but for the fact that the recording technicians had bootlegged a selection of various live and studio sketches, a tape of which did the rounds of New York’s other recording studios and quietly began to breed. At some point, an unknown tape editor added it to a compilation bootleg, featuring the famous studio argument between the members of the Troggs, Orson Welles’s audition for the part of a frozen pea in a commercial and an out-take of Harold Wilson shouting at David Dimbleby, ‘You wouldn’t ask Edward Heath about his yacht!’ Word of the tape got around the rock fraternity, and before long bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who and the Rolling Stones had scrounged copies. As Peter and Dudley toured America in 1975, it dawned on them from chance contacts in hotels and airports that they had become the rock world’s favourite entertainers. In LA they met and became friends with numerous rock stars as a result.
On one occasion Peter was drinking on board a plane with the members of Led Zeppelin, when the stewardess decided to close the bar. ‘Now miss,’ said one of the band, ‘you wouldn’t want us to start behaving like a fucking pop group, would you?’ The cabin staff decided instead to leave the bar open. Unfortunately, on landing, the band did behave in exactly the manner described: the actor Telly Savalas, who had been on the same plane and had been playing cards with Peter at one point, was surrounded by camera crews on the tarmac, whereupon Led Zeppelin started shouting ribald abuse and pointing out that they were just as famous as that bald git. A fracas ensued before the assembled press, with Peter caught in the middle. It was a testament to his popularity in opposite camps of the entertainment world that both parties came out of the scrap fully convinced that he had been firmly on their side.
By the summer of 1976 the Derek and Clive tape was so widely available that it was being offered for sale in the personal columns of Private Eye. In previous years that wouldn’t have mattered very much – it would have been no more than an irrelevant splinter from Peter’s usual raft of projects – but at the end of a year in which he felt directionless and shorn of inspiration, Derek and Clive represented a useful stopgap, a ready-made, off-the-shelf entertainment that could be released without undue exertion on his part. A deal was done with Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who issued Derek and Clive (Live) – the original title had been Derek and Clive (Dead) – in August.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the record was a huge worldwide hit, albeit mainly among adolescent boys. In Britain and America it far outstripped sales of any of Peter and Dudley’s previous LPs, thanks in no small measure to the number of radio stations – the BBC included – that banned it. In the UK alone it sold 100,000 copies. Peter made some solo promotional appearances, tried to interest Jonathan Miller in mounting a stage version, and attempted to sell the LP to Polygram in Canada, in the person of his old Pembroke College friend Tim Harrold. Harrold’s principal reaction to meeting Peter again was sadness at the changes wrought by the previous fifteen years: ‘I was really shocked to see the comparison of his physical condition. He’d put on weight, his hair was going grey, he was very grey in the face and ashen. I really was am
azed at how he’d transformed.’
There remained the problem of what his mother and father would think of Derek and Clive (Live), a difficulty that Peter sidestepped by ordering them not to listen to it under any circumstances; cloistered in their new retirement home in Milford-on-Sea they remained blissfully unaware of its content. Wendy, on the other hand, made her displeasure known: ‘I just felt that it was completely not what he was about – just couldn’t get it. Being the mother of young, impressionable children at a Steiner school where it became a cult, I just found it incredibly distasteful.’ The LP carried a disclaimer instructing adults not to play it in the presence of children, but Peter himself reported that he had been surrounded, at a football match, by eager nine-year-old Derek and Clive fans: ‘Instead of saying, as usual, “Where’s your mate, Pete?”, they were saying, “Here Clive, you’re a cunt.” So all these kids not allowed to hear the record have obviously been getting hold of it.’2
Peter remained cool and amused by the ripple of synthetic journalistic outrage that followed. The record, he explained, was about ‘inarticulate frustration: Dud and Pete hadn’t met anyone, but these two have, and they take offence at everyone. They are always angry. It’s Dud and Pete on speed.’3 He agreed heartily with a Sunday Times journalist who suggested that the record was actually satirical of people who swear every other word; an argument which certainly held water in the case of This Bloke Came up to Me, but which could only be tenuously appliedto any of the other sketches. ‘I don’t find it shocking,’4 Peter stressed, although he almost certainly enjoyed the fact that others did.