Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Such instances of laughter were getting fewer and further between. In a haze of depression and alcohol, Peter accepted just the occasional day’s work over the next few months. He presented the Melody Maker readers’ poll awards with Janet Street-Porter, for which he had the excellent idea of arriving dressed as Janet Street-Porter, only to find that Bob Marley refused to accept any award from a man dressed as a woman. He also appeared as ‘Prince Disgusting’ in a radio pantomime for former Cambridge Footlights performers, entitled Black Cinderella 2 Goes East. This was devised and produced by Douglas Adams, later to become the author of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and written (largely at the last minute) by Clive Anderson and Rory McGrath. Also in the cast was David Hatch, the Head of BBC Radio Comedy, who continually demanded that innuendoes and double entendres – of which there were many – be removed from the script. ‘Peter was such an ally,’ recalls McGrath. ‘He’d say, “No, I think this is the funniest bit in the whole show, and unless it’s left in I’m going to walk out.” So good for you, Peter.’

  Early in 1979, Peter’s behaviour became somewhat erratic. Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren telephoned him to see if he wished to take part in their film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, and subsequently paid a visit to Perrin’s Walk. Rotten recalls that ‘When we went round to his house, he was so deeply insane. And just taking the piss out of the whole idea, it never got off the ground with him. He would do things, like, if we walked in the door, he had a big basket full of sweeties. And you put your hand in, and there was all these syringes underneath, and he’d go, “Yes, we’re all into heroin in this house.” Absolutely threw Malcolm for six.’32 Judy explains that ‘Peter’s manic depression was making him so high and so low by turns, and uppers, downers and drink just exacerbatedhe condition – taking them was the worst thing he could have done. When Peter was down he just wouldn’t speak at all. Age was making his depression harder and harder to tolerate. His weight was shooting up and down, governed by his mood. I understood his pain, but I know now that I was too passive. I didn’t fight his self-destruction enough.’

  The rage that had spilled out into Derek and Clive began to infect Peter’s personal life. ‘Most people didn’t know how bad he could be,’ says Judy, ‘what rages he could fly into, his furious anger at the world. Being an actor and a funny comedian, he could almost always put a good face on things in public. He could be in the process of destroying me, then the phone would go and he would be civilised beyond belief. Also, Peter’s career could have been ended if the truth had got out. I was never able to admit anything to anybody. These days it would be easier to get help, but then it was all a huge secret, which made it more of a strain. In the end I could cope with the other women but not with the bottle. I lost that battle because Peter didn’t want to win it. He made it clear that he wanted to drink and nothing would stop him, even though he knew it would kill him – it was a vicious circle. That knowledge was so awful it just made him want another drink.’33 In March 1979, Judy moved to a separate part of the house, but Peter’s violent rages pursued her there. On the 24th, she was granted an injunction restraining Peter from molesting her, and he was ordered by the court to stay away from his wife within their marital home. She put in train the first steps to sue him for divorce in the High Court before the end of the month. Peter had already driven away Dudley for good. Now it seemed that his wife was about to suffer the same fate.

  CHAPTER 14

  You Are to Be a Stud, Dud

  Dudley’s Hollywood Success, 1979–83

  Judy’s injunction could have destroyed Peter, but it didn’t. Instead, it jolted him to his senses, and forced him to realise what had become of him. In one of his sporadic outbursts of frank public confession, he told the world: ‘I’ve made many, many mistakes. I know I’ve been destructive. What I do reflects the idiocy and chaos within myself. I don’t think I fit in anywhere comfortably. From time to time I’m contented, but that’s the best I’ve ever achieved. That well-known saying “If only I had my life over again I wouldn’t change anything” is rubbish. Lies. I do a lot of “if only”. Maybe that’s me – the “if only” man. I suppose one of my “If onlys” is that if only my personal life had worked better . . .’ The last thing he wanted, he explained, was to return to bachelorhood: ‘I need people near me. I don’t like being alone. I’ve nearly always been with someone. I enjoy that kind of lifestyle. Why meddle with a losing formula?’ On the subject of Derek and Clive, he added: ‘I do worry about what people think. I don’t want to be disliked. It’s just that sometimes I put my foot in it. On every level. I make a couple of records and suddenly I’m supposed to swear wherever I go. It’s got to the stage where people comeup to me and say, “Peter Cook isn’t it? You’re the one who goes f–– this and f–– that”. It really isn’t me at all. I suppose I find humour a protection against unpleasantness. In a way I reflect my own confusion and ignorance. I’m very ignorant. Everything seems muddled up.’1

  Judy never went ahead with the divorce hearing. The details of the injunction, which were meant to be confidential, were sold to the Sun newspaper by one of the courtroom clerks within minutes of the end of the hearing. For a fortnight afterwards a small troop of press photographers camped out in Perrin’s Walk, and Peter and Judy had to come and go through a neighbour’s house over the garden wall. Judy felt sorry for what she had done: ‘I felt as though I’d created a nightmare. It had backfired in the most terrible way,’ she admits. Peter was even more profusely apologetic, and resolved to make a new start there and then. They were to stay in separate parts of the house, however, for another three months. A Daily Mirror journalist who came to interview Peter found him ‘deeply sad and lonely’,2 surrounded by comforting pictures of his wife. Eventually, in June, they came to an agreement: Judy would give him one last chance, while Peter would stop drinking for good and enrol in Alcoholics Anonymous. Furthermore, they would give some thought to moving away from London, to a house in the country. Judy wanted to get him away from the sex clubs and the ready supply of drugs and drink available in the capital, to a place where they could be alone together and rekindle their romance, where she could keep a protective eye on her husband’s progress.

  Peter swallowed his pride and signed up with the Hampstead AA clinic run by Max Glatt, throwing himself wholeheartedly and unashamedly into their day-to-day work. Past history suggested that it wouldn’t succeed. According to Alan Bennett, ‘I remember hearing he’d gone to Alcoholics Anonymous and thinking, well it won’t work, simply because his sense of the ridiculous is so strong that he won’t be able to get through the meetings.’ The spiritual aspect of the AA recovery programme must have proved an especially difficult hurdle for Peter’s cynicism; but he surmounted it. ‘In the past,’ remembers Judy, ‘he’d always been so charming and one step ahead of the doctors, so he was always able to hide the truth from them. But this was the year he finally admitted it to himself.’

  Not only did Peter attend AA meetings, he also became an exceptionally able and kind counsellor of others. He would invite his fellow victims back to Perrin’s Walk for tea and coffee afterwards. He also perfected an extremely accurate and hilarious imitation of Max Glatt’s accent, with which he would regale Sid Gottlieb. Judy was delighted to have her ‘wonderful, passionate, funny, insanely good-looking guy’ back. She explains that ‘He found it impossible not to take anything – he didn’t stop taking drugs – but he looked better and was much more hopeful. There was a childish glee to him and he seemed happier with life.’ Judy herself joined Al Anon, the sister organisation for the partners of alcoholics. ‘They asked me what I missed about Peter being drunk, if anything. I said it was seeing him trying to get out of his trousers.’ Peter never once became censorious, and was happy to furnish his guests with drink without touching any himself. He liked to conceal his ups and downs from his family, but his parents, who were vy fond of Judy and who kept in regular touch, were delighted that an obvious difficulty had been
resolved.

  The immediate effect on Peter’s work was electrifying. The first job of his new regime was the 1979 Amnesty International show The Secret Policeman’s Ball performed over four nights from 27 June at Her Majesty’s Theatre. It was to become one of the highlights of his career. He was slated to perform three items: the E. L. Wisty/Mr Grole Interesting Facts routine, with John Cleese appearing as the straight man; Pregnancy Test, a John Fortune sketch with Eleanor Bron playing an eccentric wife (believed by Wendy to be a pointed reference to herself) who puts a balloon up her jumper; and the old Fringe sketch The End of the World, with a celebrity-packed supporting cast including Cleese, Bron, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Rowan Atkinson and Billy Connolly. After the first night, however, one or two newspaper critics suggested that the show was too cosy and unsatirical. Peter responded the very next evening, by arriving with a newly composed piece he wanted to try out: a parody of the Judge’s summing-up in the recent trial of Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy to murder, that he had been working on that day at Private Eye.

  The story of the Thorpe conspiracy was a bizarre one that had been running in the Eye for four years. A professional hitman, Andrew Newton, had been arrested after trying to execute a male model named Norman Scott on Exmoor; he had shot Scott’s Great Dane as it tried to defend its master, whereupon his gun had jammed, enabling Scott to flee and raise the alarm. Scott subsequently claimed to the police that he had recently ended a homosexual affair with the leader of the Liberal Party Jeremy Thorpe (he was able to produce Thorpe’s love letters), and that Thorpe had hired Newton to kill him in order to prevent him from going public. Newton confirmed the story, and a senior Liberal, Peter Bessell, added details of how Liberal Party funds had been used to finance the plot. The police wanted a prosecution, but the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Anthony Hetherington did not seem to want to rock the Establishment’s boat. So the police had leaked all their information to Private Eye, until the weight of public interest forced the DPP’s hand.

  Thorpe’s trial – at which he was acquitted – was a celebrated farce. Thorpe, after all, was a prominent Oxford-educated politician whereas Scott was an avowed homosexual and Newton – who deliberately sabotaged his own testimony in court – was a criminal. The matter of whether or not Thorpe had paid out Liberal funds for a contract killing was skated over in a judicial summing up that instructed the jury not to believe a word that any prosecution witness had said. Scott, concluded Mr Justice Cantley, was no more than ‘a crook, a fraud and a sponger’. Cantley’s summing up had been published just a day or two before the Amnesty Concert, and in one of the finest satirical attacks in the history of British comedy, Peter tore it to pieces. He took his title, Entirely A Matter For You, from the constant disclaimers that peppered the judge’s assaults on the characters of Bessell, Scott and Newton:

  We have heard for example from Mr Bex Bissell, a man who by his own admission is a liar, a humbug, a hypocrite, a vagabond, a loathsome spotted reptile and a self-confessed chicken strangler. You may choose if you wish to believe the transparent tissue of odious lies which streamed on and on from his disgusting, reedy, slavering lips. That is entirely a matter for you . . . We have been forced to listen to the whinings of Mr Norman St John Scott, a scrounger, a parasite, a pervert, a worm, a self-confessed player of the pink oboe. A man who, by his own admission, chews pillows . . . On the evidence of the so-called hitman, Mr Olivia Newton John, I would prefer to draw a discreet veil. He is a piece of slimy refuse, unable to carry out the simplest murder plot . . . You are now to retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of Not Guilty.

  Michael Palin remembers that ‘Peter was still honing it in the wings as he waited to go on. I remember him desperately asking around for an original euphemism for a homosexual. Eventually Billy Connolly, with the air of a scholar remembering some medieval Latin, ventured that he’d heard someone in Glasgow use the phrase “player of the pink oboe”. Two minutes later Peter was on stage as the judge, adding his own twist to Billy’s contribution by referring to the witness as a “self-confessed player of the pink oboe”. It was the “self-confessed” that made me laugh most of all.’3

  The audience roared throughout, and cheered Peter to the rafters at the end. His sister Sarah found him in his dressing room afterwards, beaming with delight: ‘He was smoking the biggest joint you ever saw and was on tremendous form. I only had a puff or two but laughed uncontrollably all the way home.’ So successful was Peter’s performance that it was released as a mini-LP of its own, entitled Here Comes the Judge, together with some hastily-improvised sketches co-performed and produced by the young Not the Nine O’clock News producer John Lloyd. ITV had already negotiated a deal to televise the concert as a Christmas special, but amazingly decided to drop Peter’s judicial summing-up from the edited version. Their pompous programme buyer Leslie Halliwell ruled that ‘It is quite obvious who this sketch is about. It is not suitable for television.’4 The uncut version did, however, go on to be released in British cinemas the following year, where it achieved good reviews and respectable ratings, largely on the strength of Peter’s performance. Incredibly, it was the first time he had managed to achieve such a thing in fifteen years of trying.

  A much healthier Peter started throwing himself energetically into sport. He played tennis – describing his game as ‘contentious . . . like Nastase’s without the shots’ – charity football – ‘I was kicking the players not only after the ball had gone, but long after the game had finished’ – and televised celebrity golf. The BBC2 series Pro-Celebrity Golf invited him up to Gleneagles, where nerves overcame his desire to do well on his first outing: he made the green in one stroke, then took six putts to reach the hole. He soon relaxed, though, and became a regular and enthusiastic participant in the show. The racing driver James Hunt, for instance, insisted on being accompanied by his alsatian Oscar, so Peter brought along his own pet, a goldfish called Abe Ginsberg; he would place Ginsberg’s bowl alongside the tee and instruct the fish to watch for infringements. During one series he found himself on the same programme as Ted Dexter, the first time they had encountered each other since Radley. Peter exacted the best possible revenge for his miserable childhood by insisting upon being match referee for Dexter’s round. Whenever Dexter – who was a superb golfer and knew it – played a shot, there would be Peter on camera behind him, dressed in knee-length boots, jodhpurs, leather jacket, scarf and gloves with a First World War flying helmet and a riding crop, his cheeks rouged, his mouth lipsticked and his eyes mascara’d from a nearby pensioner’s make-up bag, announcing another erratic refereeing decision. Some people chose to question the apparent incongruity of the Amnesty International satirist involving himself in so mainstream an activity as celebrity golf: ‘What you must remember,’ explained Peter, ‘is that Swift was an extremely keen golfer who kept the fact carefully concealed from his public.’5

  Peter’s ability to make himself at home at either end of the showbiz spectrum was never more graphically illustrated than by his role at a giant party given by Victor Lownes on 7 July 1979, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Playboy magazine. This was one event that Judy was definitely not invited to, new start or no new start. Peter was one of the meeters and greeters – along with Ingrid Seward and Dai Llewellyn – at a twenty-five-hour extravaganza in which Stocks was crammed to capacity with a thousand guests. Eight thousand bottles of champagne and five hundred bottles of whisky had been ordered, but when the champagne ran out Ingrid Seward simply sent a Rolls Royce to the Clermont Club in London and told them to fill it to the roof with Lanson Black Label. There was a fairground, a roller disco, a fashion show, aerobatic displays, horse riding and a giant jacuzzi filled with Bunny girls. ‘Peter was wonderful,’ says Ingrid Seward, ‘bouncing around with his funny voice, in a huge checked cap, shouting into his microphone.’6 The celebrities he had been asked to corral were distinctly B-list: Kenny Lynch, Nicky Henson, Michael Winner, Reggie Bosanquet, Bernie Wint
ers, Jonathan Aitken MP and Gary Glitter, four years after his last top ten hit. One wonders what some of Peter’s more radical friends, such as Malcolm McLaren or the Sex Pistols, would have made of it had they known. His charm and social versatility were admirable qualities,as perhaps was his loyalty to his host, but Lownes’s party was a grimly tacky occasion, which – if one is not to be too judgmental – was well beneath his dignity. In fact, so successful was Peter as an MC that he was employed soon afterwards to host the Disco International Awards at the Bond Street Embassy Club, thereby proving that dignity was the last thing on his mind.

  Most of Peter’s work in the first half of 1979 had been fragmented and directionless. Before his reconciliation with Judy he had taken part in Why Vote, It Only Encourages Them, a Radio Four election night special, and had appeared as ‘Count Yourchickens’ in Tales from the Crypt, a failed radio pilot put together by Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath. ‘He had been very crabby and uncommunicative,’ recalls McGrath, ‘and worried that people were trying to rip him off. He spent most of the time on the phone to his agent saying “What if this thing takes off – should I be on a merchandising deal?”’ In the summer, when things had begun to look up, he had agreed to take part in Person to Person, a series of full-length individual interviews hosted by David Dimbleby. The programme contained one hostile exchange, much commented upon, which was to prove a turning point for Peter. Dimbleby attacked Derek and Clive Ad Nauseum as ‘disgusting’, and suggested that he and Dudley had run out of material; Peter denied it, and hinted strongly that another series of Not Only . . . But Also was in the offing.