Peter’s comic contributions to Private Eye had been taking on an increasingly savage tone; his visits were as welcome as ever but it was clear that Richard Ingrams disapproved of the indiscriminate drinking and casual sex that seemed to constitute Peter’s social life. Martin Tomkinson was working on a series of articles about casinos, and as part of his researches travelled to interview the British head of the Playboy Club, Victor Lownes, at his country mansion Stocks. Peter, who was keen to renew the friendship that had begun in Chicago in 1962 and the company of the Bunny girls that came with it, accompanied Tomkinson on the trip. Lownes’s hospitality was lavish and the two men swiftly became regular visitors. Peter often went on his own, and Tomkinson remembers that ‘He would regale me with the sexual goings-on he had either witnessed or participated in.’ Judy, whom Tomkinson remembers as ‘fluttering nervously’ when he visited their house, came to dislike and distrust Peter’s visits to Lownes’s mansion.
It was Stocks that was to mark the end of the friendship between the two men. At three o’clock in the morning at an especially licentious party, Tomkinson was frolicking in the jacuzzi with three bunny girls. Peter suddenly appeared with an Instamatic and gleefully snapped the proceedings. ‘Ha ha, wait ’til Ingrams sees this!’ he crowed. Later on, when Peter had passed out from drink, Tomkinson searched his pockets, found the offending film and destroyed it. ‘I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what interior demons drove him to such behaviour,’ says the journalist. ‘Certainly they were intimately tied up with his brilliant humour. He was at his happiest making people laugh, and he could be side-splittingly funny. But in the long watches of the night I think he had to confront a deep and truly terrifying emptiness, which vodka could assuage but never permanently dispel.’
Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam, a record which came with a free sickbag, was scheduled for recording over three days from 8 September 1978 at the Town House Studios: it was the day of Keith Moon’s death, which cast a pall over the proceedings, not that any pall was required. The LP was even more of a primal scream of rage than its predecessor, if such a thing were possible: at one point Peter did an impression of Moon’s death throes, crawling across the floor and pretending to vomit. Moon had been one of his closest friends. Richard Branson, in his undergraduate enthusiasm for the whole project, had proposed making a film of the recording session. Peter had readily agreed; he knew that The Hound of the Baskervilles was due to be released any day, and wanted to counter it by having a celluloid alternative ready as soon as possible. Dudley, who still had hopes of a mainstream film career in Hollywood, was annoyed to find on the second day that Peter had hired three cameras and the director Russell Mulcahy without obtaining his prior approval. ‘That was a very bad night for us,’ said Peter, ‘because I was rather cross that Dudley wasn’t eager and he was being moody in return.&squo;22 Peter was also, of course, hopelessly drunk on whisky. There was only one sketch prepared, a vaguely amusing horse race commentary in which most of the horses were named after sexual organs and took up humorous positions in relation to each other. The remaining two days’ worth of material (Dudley failed to turn up on the third day) contained almost nothing of merit, the supposed highlights of which were boiled down to make an hour-long LP, a ninety-minute film entitled Derek and Clive Get the Horn, and a few bonus tracks which were later added to the reissued second album. There was surprisingly little material common to both the film and LP versions. The content of the film seemed nastier, perhaps because the accompanying visuals matched the soundtrack for unpleasantness, but the LP was not without its share of items that would have benefited from being quietly jettisoned. The Horn, for instance:
Clive:
You know that big nigger that lives down the road . . . the black cunt, Ephraim . . . I said, ‘You like cannibalism, don’t you, you like eating people alive in a frying pan.’ I said, ‘Go round to the BBC with some of your mates, dressed up in your loincloths and that, and paint yourselves up in different colours, whatever you cunts do back in Africa, go berserk, tear the fucking place down, spunk all over the Director-General.’ Y’know, he got about forty of these coons gathered together to rush round to the BBC.
Clive then related with disappointment how ‘the cunt black nigger black poof’ had failed in his task. On the subject of Dudley/Derek, Clive claimed that ‘I’ve never seen anything more stupid in my life than you’ and explained that ‘It would amuse the world to see you burnt to fucking death for a fucking laugh.’ Other recorded items included an endorsement of rape, and a sketch about cutting your wife’s hymen out with an electric carving knife.
Peter’s aggression towards Dudley seemed even more pronounced in the sketches chosen for the film version. When Dudley, in the character of Peter’s mother but in the voice of his own mother, asked his little boy to get his penis out, Peter refused, ‘because, Mother, you’re being very stupid. You’re a stupid old fucking cunt. Why don’t you shut your FUCKING face and DIE. Best thing you could FUCKING DO.’ Later on Peter produced an inflatable woman, which served to represent Clive’s wife Dolly, who he said had interrupted his attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records by creating the world’s longest uninterrupted trail of snot. He related the ensuing conversation:
Clive:
‘Shall I tell you what I’m going to do now? I’m going to get the Guinness Book of Recrds to recognise me as the No.1 cunt kicker-in in the world.’ And I spread her legs apart. And I kicked her and I kicked her in the cunt for half a fucking hour ’til I was exhausted. And then I said ‘Dolly – will you get a Polaroid of THAT!’ And the cunt wouldn’t even get up!
Peter went on to illustrate his ‘cunt-kicking’ abilities with a vicious assault on the inflatable woman.
Dudley today is deeply embarrassed by the whole project, which he says he loathed taking part in. ‘That film is so hostile to women that I shudder at times – my head obviously drops a few times during the filming. I think his hatred for women was fairly apparent there. He had a very garbled attitude towards them. He could be very hostile, like in the bit where he’s kissing a woman and he’s kissing her with a cigarette end. It’s terrible.’23 Judy, who was present in the studio throughout the filming, says: ‘I couldn’t stand it, especially the bit with the blow-up doll. The Derek and Clive film was a complete nightmare session. But Peter’s apparent misogyny on show wasn’t a hatred of women – he was just afraid of women.’ He hated himself, rather, for his dependence on women. ‘Also, he was flailing at women because he was flailing at everybody in sight. Nothing was safe from his bitter rage. He was very pissed indeed when he made the film. He’d come out of that initial deep depression over Dudley leaving him, but now he was going at Dudley out of bitterness at that rejection. He was flailing at him like a wounded animal. Dudley was still holding himself up as a twinkling little star who could get the girls; “I’ll get you this time you little cunt” was the feeling I got from Peter when we got home. He was trying to drain his soul of the hate and loathing and anger he felt at everything. Afterwards he just passed out, totally drained. Dudley probably went off and played the piano in a bar.’
Looking back with a clearer head many years later, Peter described the film as ‘A document about two people who are at the end of their rope with each other. I saw the whole of it recently. God, it gave me nightmares. A friend of mine said it was just a wonderful evening of excess – I’m not sure that’s the whole story. I think we were scraping the bottom of several barrels. It’s only when I saw it all through again that I realised what a bully I was. I know I’m impatient, but it gave me no pleasure to see that I was that much of a bully. When you see yourself being yourself, it’s like seeing my golf swing on video: I had no idea I was so dreadful.’24 Dudley told Barbra Paskin that ‘Everyone thought we’d taken something, but we hadn’t – we just got very belligerent with each other. Peter’s rage was quite bitter and seemed directed at me a bit. He always appeared to be trying to get a rise out of me. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t
confront him.’25
At the time, and for about a decade afterwards, Peter’s public attitude to the LP was extremely protective and defensive in the face of generally hostile questioning: ‘Maybe people resent that we aren’t seen to labour over these albums. But I think if we worked any harder at it, they wouldn’t get any better. If we were recording for four months, it w harder uo;t make the album any better. But people say, “Oh, Ron and me in the pub do better stuff than that.” But we aren’t stopping Ron and anybody from doing it . . . As for making money out of something that’s usually dismissed as smut, well, there are countless comedians and entertainers who do filth. They just don’t put it out . . . You get all these complaints about language on television – and there, at 10.30, which is reasonably early, you have all these fucks and shits. And because it’s Pinter coupled with two very distinguished knights of the theatre it’s somehow tolerable. “An arsehole is acceptable in Richardson’s mouth.” Or, “Sir John can handle a prick with delicacy and taste.” Well I think that’s bullshit.’26 This latter argument mirrored one put forward in a sketch on the LP, but like the others in Peter’s defence it was flawed and largely irrelevant to the reality of Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam.
Bizarrely, Peter sought in all seriousness to blame Dudley for many of the record’s excesses: ‘Dudley, especially, is incapable of preventing himself from filling everything with swearing and farting noises. He’s dreadful.’27 Dudley, who had indeed tried hard to match Peter for shock value, put the blame squarely on Peter. In so doing they reduced themselves to the status of two small boys caught writing obscenities on a wall. Dudley was the one saying, ‘He told me to do it, sir,’ a statement which rarely serves as an acceptable defence but which is nonetheless usually accurate. In the film itself, their exchanges had been rather less evasive. Dudley had asked Peter, ‘You know what’s going to happen when you get to heaven? You’re going to have this tape played endlessly as you burn.’ ‘You don’t burn in heaven,’ Peter had replied. ‘We will, mate,’ Dudley had asserted. ‘Breaking up is so easy to do,’ he had muttered elsewhere.
Two practical jokes played by Richard Branson punctuated the recording session, both of which appear in the film. He hired a strippagram, whose only interesting act was to remark confidentially to Dudley, ‘You’re my favourite. He’s horrible’; and rather more successfully, he staged a bogus police raid, with two Virgin Records accountants posing as plain-clothes men from the Drug Squad. Judy and Dudley were totally taken in, and Dudley pushed the still-smouldering joint he had been smoking down his boot. Silent and crushed, he could see his Hollywood film career going up in flames. Peter was incredulous, his mind clearly working at high speed, examining all the angles, trying to decide if it was a hoax or not, buying time with jokes (‘That’s the last time I do the police ball’). Someone asked Dudley to play a tune at the piano while he waited to be interviewed. ‘Nah, nah,’ he replied disconsolately. When Branson leaped out like a grinning Jeremy Beadle, Judy admitted that she had been ‘quaking’, while Dudley confessed: ‘I’d shit myself.’ It said something for the quality of the rest of the film that a practical joke devised by Richard Branson should be its most fascinating moment.
Today Peter’s friends, fans and colleagues are divided into two distinct camps on the Derek and Clive question. Tellingly Adrian Edmondson, the purveyor of Bottom, found the film offensive. All the Private Eye writers, with the exception of Barry Fantoni, find Derek and Clive regrettable. According to Ian Hislop, ‘Peter was much more nted than that. It did nothing for me, and I don’t buy the interpretation of it as breaking down cultural norms and being a forerunner of punk and that sort of thing. It was rubbish, it was Peter and Dudley swearing at each other in a studio.’ Reviewers at the time agreed: the Daily Telegraph condemned its ‘unpleasant moments of nasty nonsense’ and ‘violently misogynistic outbursts’; Stephen Pile in The Sunday Times said that ‘It goes beyond humour or satire into abuse and cruelty’; Brian Case in the Melody Maker spoke of ‘Fine minds at the end of their tether . . . Pete and Dud are settling for out-takes.’
In the opposite camp, comedian David Baddiel says that ‘I loved the sheer unadulterated, graphic ugliness of it, and when Peter Cook died I was angry that Derek and Clive were glossed over in the hit list of his achievements.’28 Barry Humphries claims that Peter ‘elevated scatology to a lyrical plane’29 and that Derek and Clive ‘are among the funniest of Cook and Moore’s virtuoso turns’.30 The writer John Hind describes the three albums and video as ‘arguably Cook and Moore’s finest captured moments’, while one of his interviewees in the book Comic Inquisition, the comedian Gerry Sadowitz, assesses their dialogues as ‘the poetry of comedy. It’s like beautiful music really, like Lennon and McCartney in tandem – Peter Cook plays rhythm and Dudley Moore harmonises, adds melodies.’ A more profound and pretentious misunderstanding of the furious, barely articulate outpourings of a man at the bottom of a black trough of depression would be hard to imagine. Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam’s only real virtue was its honesty; but while most good comedy contains an element of honesty, that does not make unadulterated honesty funny.
This time round Dudley made it clear to Peter that he definitely wasn’t going to work with him again, and this time round he definitely meant it. ‘I just didn’t like where Peter was going. I couldn’t do those sort of sketches any more,’ he says. Furthermore, he told Peter that he didn’t want Derek and Clive Get the Horn to be released under any circumstances. The British Board of Film Censors agreed with Dudley, pointing out to Peter that the film would be liable to prosecution under both the obscenity and blasphemy laws, and refusing it even an ‘18’ certificate. Peter moved instead to have it released on the relatively new home video format; Dudley fought him successfully in America, but in Britain Peter finally won the battle (and exacted a measure of revenge) by releasing it on the eve of the British premiere of 10, Dudley’s first major Hollywood film, in February 1980. It was to be a short-lived triumph, as the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester James Anderton – the infamous ‘God’s Copper’ – impounded all eight hundred copies due for sale in his area under the obscenity laws. ‘He never returned them, the cunt31 said Peter afterwards. The film’s release was rapidly halted while the legal position was clarified, and very few copies made it as far as the public. The delay put too much of a strain on the cashflow of the fledgling video company handling the distribution, which quickly went bankrupt. All remaining copies of Derek and Clive Get the Horn were impounded as assets, and the film did not see the light of day again for a further thirteen years. Peter Cook, the man who had been famous during the 1960s for being able to surmount virtually any obstacle, had been soundly defeated in the 1970s yet again.
Dudley stayed in England until November 1978, long enough to publicise the British release of The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Fortunately for his US career the American distributors were to wait a further two years before showing it.) He and Peter appeared on Parkinson together, Dudley stealing the scene, Peter subdued in formal attire, his hair dyed a virulent blond. It was his third image overhaul in six months. ‘Peter dyed his hair because he was hitting his forties – he was quite open about it,’ recalls Judy. ‘He had it permed to look like a footballer soon afterwards. He kept changing it in search of youth. He would discuss his image in detail and wasn’t at all embarrassed to do so, but he wasn’t actually very good at maintaining any image. So after a while his roots would show.’ Michael Parkinson asked Peter and Dudley about the status of their relationship:
Peter:
There are storms, there are tantrums.
Dudley:
It’s like a marriage.
Parkinson:
How is it like a marriage?
Peter:
We’re getting divorced.
The pair then performed Goodbyee together, without anyone present realising that they were watching a genuine farewell.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was released in November, sent to its d
oom like a reluctant soldier at the Somme ordered over the top into the machine-gun fire. It was slaughtered by the critics and by the public alike. Kenneth Williams recorded in his diary that Peter ‘sat smoking fags and gleefully relating the worst notices he’d read.’ This was trench humour indeed. ‘Peter was putting on a front to cover his defeat,’ confirms Judy. ‘He couldn’t accept defeat, and he was bitterly hurt and wounded by the rejection. I could see the man I loved disintegrating, and I didn’t know what to do about it or who to ask for help. Of course there were doctors – Peter saw lots of different doctors and tried different drying out schemes, but with no success.’
Throughout the tail end of 1978 and the early part of 1979 Peter made a series of valiant but entirely unsuccessful attempts to kick the booze. At one point he booked himself into a hotel in Park Lane to dry out, and Judy hired a suitably fat nurse to look after him. Peter had the nurse replaced by a pretty Australian girl, with whom he promptly began an affair. After he had checked out of the hotel, he started sneaking her into Perrin’s Walk when Judy wasn’t there. Becoming suspicious, Judy announced one night that she was going out, but hid in an upstairs room until Peter in turn left the house. Then she concealed herself in a large suitcase in the living room and waited for him to return. Sure enough, he arrived in due course with the Australian nurse and Judy’s worst suspicions were confirmed. Unfortunately, having decided against a theatrical eruption from the case, she had to remain there until Peter took the girl up to bed several hours later. Emerging, cramped and stiff, she startled Wiggins the cat, who turned tail and fled, straight into a paper bag. The panic-stricken cat then began to charge about the house with the paper bag stuck on its head. While Judy let herself swiftly and silently out of the front door, Peter became convinced that he was being burgled, and got up to search the house. He found only two empty coffee cups that Judy had drunk earlier, in the upstairs room where she had waited, and came to the conclusion that someone had broken into the house solely for a cup of coffee. ‘As always, it was impossible to be angry with him, because we ended up in tears of laughter about it,’ she says.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 52
