Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Dimbleby:

  But that’s all come to an end, your relationship with Dudley.

  Peter:

  No, no, his number one priority at the moment is to make films, but there is no actual end to the partnership. We’d both like to do a series over here. We will fairly soon, I hope.

  Dimbleby:

  But haven’t you been left high and dry, in a sense?

  Peter:

  It’s a remarkably comfortable relationship, because it all comes so naturally.

  Dimbleby:

  But that’s not what I mean.

  An argument ensued as to whether or not Peter had been left ‘high and dry’.

  Peter:

  . . . It doesn’t leave me high and dry, in that I can write a series for myself.

  Dimbleby:

  But you haven’t.

  Peter:

  I haven’t done it yet, no. I’ve written fifteen minutes of the first thirty minutes, with E. L. Wisty as the central character.

  Peter was stung by Dimbleby’s accusations, particularly the fact that they were all true (unlike many of his answers). He vowed there and then to create something worthwhile, to knuckle down and turn The Wonderful World of Wisty into a viable and successful TV show without Dudley’s help. ‘It was a sort of challenge to prove I could still do family entertainment,’ he told the Daily Express. ‘I thought, I’ll show you, David Dimbleby.’7

  In the autumn of 1979 Humphrey Barclay at London Weekend Television received a call from David Wilkinson, Peter’s agent. ‘He said, “Peter would like to come and talk to you about doing a special for London Weekend.” So I thought, “Oh, how lovely, hurray,” you know. I didn’t know Peter at the time. It was when he’d suddenly become acceptable again after The Secret Policeman’s Ball, and he’d been reclaimed as an object of worship by all the up-and-coming people, so he was able to bring in various performers as new as Rowan Atkinson, for example. He came in to see me, and I felt I was on trial a little bit, because he would be saying some of his stream-of-consciousness nonsense in that laconic way, with his lips curling into a smile, and always looking at me to see whether I was picking up on it. I gathered that the show was rather important to him, that he was trying to re-establish himself.’

  Dimbleby’s goading was of course not the only factor inspiring Peter to revitalise his career. Dudley himself, after three years of trying, had made a small but significant breakthrough in Hollywood in the summer of 1978, which ironically enough had owed something to the revival of interest inspired by the first Derek and Clive album. Chevy Chase was making his screen debut opposite Goldie Hawn in the comedy thriller Foul Play, a film that included a cameo written for Tom Conway about a diminutive sex-mad orchestral conductor who attempts to seduce the heroine. When Conway turned the role down, Chase – who had met Peter and Dudley on Saturday Night Live in 1976 – suggested that the success of Derek and Clive made Dudley a commercially worthwhile risk once again, especially as the role was such a small one. Dudley accepted the offer only reluctantly – ‘I didn’t want to play another oversexed undersized twit,’ he explains – but a job was a job, and he did well in the role. The film was immensely successful, and suddenly Dudley was bankable again.

  In December 1978 Blake Edwards, who had met Dudley in psychoanalysis, was writing and directing a comedy about another libidinous musician, 10. The film’s star, George Segal, walked out on the first day of shooting in protest at the amount of artistic input Edwards was conceding to his wife, the film’s co-star Julie Andrews. Dudley, who had just returned to the USA from recording Derek and Clive Ad Nauseum, jumped at the chance of another substitute appearance. So closely did the role mirror his own life that he was able to play the part straight, and effectively appear as himself. 10 was a massive worldwide hit, making 1000 per cent profit on its $6 million production costs. Dudley’s abortive seduction of Bo Derek to the sound of Ravel’s Bolero made his reputation as a vulnerable sex symbo offrompting the Hollywood Women’s Press Club to present him with the Golden Apple award as ‘Male Discovery of 1979’. In the space of a year, he had gone from being a virtually unemployable English comedian whose best days were presumed to be behind him, to a millionaire film star with countless female fans. Peter’s 1965 prediction that Dudley would enter middle age as the ‘cuddly funster at the piano of the Edmonton Empire’ had gone hugely awry.

  Peter was, not unnaturally, stunned. There were similarities with the case of David Frost, seventeen years before: both Frost and Dudley had used comic characters and voices devised by Peter as a launching pad to go on to bigger things. Significantly, however, both men had made their quantum leap by abandoning Peter’s comic voices and appearing as themselves. In both cases, Peter’s attitude was ambivalent: he felt affection tempered with disbelief and an enormous frustration that they and not him had been catapulted to such seemingly uncritical acclaim. It was not that he wanted to be the star of 10, or indeed that he could ever have made a success of the part – that was not the point. He was angry that after all those years of trying and failing to carve out an equivalent success for himself and Dudley, his subordinate partner should have had fame, fortune and female attention seemingly handed to him on a plate for taking part in what was frankly a mediocre film.

  At this early stage of Dudley’s Hollywood career, Peter contented himself with one or two mildly sarcastic jokes when journalists quizzed him about 10 – as they did, endlessly and irritatingly. He suggested that Dudley must have slept with Blake Edwards to have got the part. He dismissed his ex-partner as ‘A power-crazed ego-maniac, a kind of Hitler without the charm,’ and explained that ‘Women want to mother him in some way. But I’m not envious.’8 Asked to review the film he groaned, ‘Does that mean I’ll have to see it again?’ With reference to Dudley’s glamorous new six-foot girlfriend Susan Anton, he expressed sardonic surprise ‘that Dudley should choose a girlfriend who sings country and western, when I know for a fact he can’t stand that type of music.’9 (Peter’s next door neighbour Rainbow George points out, incidentally, that after the pair went their separate ways, all Dudley’s girlfriends were at least six foot tall, while most of Peter’s measured approximately five feet two.)

  Even now, Peter’s friends disagree profoundly with each other about the true nature of his reaction to Dudley’s success. Stephen Fry, for instance, states that ‘When Dudley Moore became a film star there were many who believed Peter was jealous, and that must have been deeply hurtful, for nothing could have been further from the truth. He was sorry not to have his great collaborator around for more fun, but jealous, never.’10 John Lloyd begs to differ. ‘Was Peter Cook unhappy, was Peter Cook jealous? Well, inevitably – you know, your best friend becomes one of the biggest stars in the Hollywood universe. For most people it’s very difficult to feel very jolly about your friends being enormously successful. I think Peter’s thing was, he thought that Dudley wasn’t a sex symbol. By all that is just, it was a ludicrous idea.’

  The reason for the apparent discrepancy is that Peter lived his life in a series of pockets:re omyriad friends and acquaintances did not all see the same side of him. He liked to please the person he was with, so if a friend like Stephen Fry or Sid Gottlieb offered him almost unqualified admiration, he would try to live up to their proud picture of him. ‘He was so incapable of the least snide remark about Dudley, or any one of the Fringe cast for that matter,’ insists Gottlieb. In the privacy of the Private Eye office, though, he behaved differently. Willie Rushton remembered Peter being ‘faintly furious’ about Dudley’s film success, and his remarking bitterly that ‘It doesn’t matter how much therapy Dudley goes to, how many psychiatrists he sees, he’ll still be short and thick.’ Richard Ingrams concurs: ‘He was cut up about Dudley’s success. He started talking about him in a disparaging way – calling him a deformed dwarf. There’s no doubt that one of Peter’s fantasies was to have been a Hollywood film star. It must have been very galling to him when Dudley succeeded. He was supposed t
o be the glamorous one of the two, and Dudley was this comic figure from Dagenham. If you’d said, which of these two men is going to be a Hollywood sex symbol, we’d all have said Peter – and it didn’t turn out like that. I always thought there was a strong similarity between the Cook–Moore relationship and the Milligan-Sellers one – Spike experienced that same kind of resentment. I’ve experienced this with John Wells too: you’re resentful of the fact that you rely on this other person, so you resent their individual success. You can see what’s missing that you would have put in, and you’re annoyed that people are raving about something they’ve done which is actually slightly less good than what you’ve done together.’ It is in such circumstances that the partner who has been left behind rationalises the success of his departed colleague as a form of ‘betrayal’.

  The almost schizophrenic mixture of pleasure and displeasure that Peter felt with regard to Dudley’s achievement must also have contributed to the surprising disparity between different assessments of his state of mind, deriving from apparently similar sources. Alan Bennett, for instance, maintains that ‘Peter didn’t resent the fact that Dudley had taken off,’11 while Jonathan Miller is sure that ‘Peter wanted to be a movie star, and envied Dudley that particular success.’12 Perhaps the definitive answer, if there can be one, is that offered by Michael Parkinson: ‘I think he was slightly peeved, because I think Peter would have loved to have been that Hollywood superstar if only to have knocked it. He would have loved it because it would have appealed to his sense of style, but he would have needed to have been a maverick within that.’ As Peter himself said, ‘There’s two kinds of fame. There’s fame like Charles Manson and there’s fame like Dudley. There has to be something between the two.’13

  It is undoubtedly significant that before the release of 10, Peter had missed Dudley so much that he had even taken to telephoning his partner’s mother. He had also written frequently to Dudley to tell him that he was sober and happy again: ‘I do think that when we manage to do another series, your mother should become a regular along with Dud and Pete. I don’t want to press you when things are obviously going so well for you in the States. I like to think that when you become “hot” and “enormous” it will make it easier for us to do a decent movie together wour choice of director.’ Rather hopefully, he had assured Dudley that Derek and Clive Get the Horn ‘works really well visually . . . some of the stuff is hilarious.’ After the release and massive success of 10 however, Peter never once contacted Dudley to congratulate him, nor made any comment to him, adverse or otherwise, about that film. When Dudley was paid a considerable sum to fly to Britain in October 1979 to appear as a guest on The Muppet Show, there was no contact between the two.

  What is also significant is that Peter’s next step, in February 1980, was to fly to Hollywood in search of work. He had been invited by CBS to take part in a charity show for Cambodian refugees, but stayed in Los Angeles for a month, locked in discussion with various major studios. His explanation was that he was short of money, but he was already in the middle of his perfectly lucrative project for London Weekend back home, which showed every sign of having the potential to become a long-running success. He admitted to reporters in LA: ‘Yes, I would like to be a sex symbol – who wouldn’t? Someone here said today’s male stars are the non-macho types who don’t present any threat. Well, I always used to think Dudley didn’t present a hint. So there should be hope for me.’14 The trip had not begun in the most auspicious manner: boarding a taxi at the airport, he had found himself trapped in a terrible traffic jam as he entered the centre of town. After his cab hadn’t moved for some minutes, the driver had got out and walked along the line of cars to see if he could find out what was causing the hold-up. Eventually he had returned in a state of high excitement. ‘Hey, you’ll never believe this,’ he had shouted at Peter. ‘It’s Dudley Moore up there! DUDLEY MOORE!’ Peter slumped back into his seat, lost for words for once in his life.

  Thereafter, things started to look up. After sifting his way through some ‘lousy’ film scripts, he was offered the starring role in a CBS-TV version of Two’s Company, the successful British series about an American woman and her English butler (originally portrayed by Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden). The show had been retitled The Two of Us, had been relocated to New York, and the middle-aged Stritch character had been recast as a pretty young talk show hostess with a precocious daughter. Peter later nonchalantly claimed that he had got the job ‘almost by accident . . . I was on holiday in Los Angeles when I was asked to do it.’15

  This was disingenuous to say the least. The actress Brenda Vaccaro, who threw a ‘Derek and Clive’ party in Peter’s honour, reports that Peter was very excited to have landed The Two of Us: ‘He had been a bit sad that his career wasn’t taking off, and he felt a strong competitive strain with Dudley. He very much wanted to work here and be successful, even though he always said he didn’t, and now he was getting his shot at it. He was in the best shape ever, and Dudley was happy and proud to see him in such great condition.’16

  Before he left for home Peter took part in a successful pilot of The Two of Us. He made a curiously camp and aggressive butler, and the sartorial elegance of his youth was clearly on the wane, but as far as the American TV executives were concerned, he was the very essence of Englishness. They were happy, to believe, in fact, that an English bu might be called ‘Brentwood’, and that upon being asked to go into the kitchen to prepare a meal, he might reply, ‘I’ll just go check your utensils’. In the name of gravitas Peter was required to abandon the hair dye he had favoured for the past three-and-a-half years; he never wore it again. He claimed to find the role of a sardonic butler easy enough: ‘This is not acting. I’m just being English. I don’t have to dredge deep within my resources to be sardonic. In a way I find many things in America ridiculous and say so. So it is nice to be playing somebody who is a slightly more ridiculous version of myself.’17 CBS had yet to decide on a suitable co-star, so Peter agreed to return to LA later in the year to record further pilots.

  Back in London Peter set to work enthusiastically on his Wisty special, now renamed Peter Cook & Co., which he recorded at London Weekend in June 1980. ‘There is a whole generation now who can only identify me with the “foul-mouthed” Derek and Clive records. I want to put that right,’18 he told the Daily Mirror. His competitive instincts were faintly cheered by the disastrous reception accorded to Dudley’s new film, the biblical comedy Wholly Moses. Asked for the thousandth time if he envied his former partner, he replied: ‘I’m not envious of Dudley. I certainly wouldn’t like to have made Wholly Moses, which nobody has ever heard of.’ Peter was now writing sketches with the experienced Bernard McKenna, and described the process as ‘easier and more enjoyable without Dudley. He was so pernickety. I’d want to start a sketch with two blokes sitting in a railway carriage and Dudley would say, “How did they get there?”’19 The absence of Dudley’s restraining hand was considered less of a boon by Humphrey Barclay, who had become executive producer on the programme: ‘The difficulty as always with Peter’s writing was finding a punchline. You wander down this wonderful meandering path taking whatever route takes your fancy, and then you suddenly think, “We’ve been going for five-and-a-half minutes, we’ve got to get out of this somehow.”’

  This lack of discipline apart, Peter Cook & Co. turned out to be a funny, interesting and original programme which comfortably sustained an hour’s viewing. Rather than attempt to replace Dudley on screen with a single performer, the producer Paul Smith had persuaded John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Terry Jones, Beryl Reid and Paula Wilcox to partner Peter in turn. There was no last-minute script panic as there had been on Not Only . . . But Also. Cook and McKenna prepared everything meticulously, well in advance. Their linking device was an American cabbie, a character based directly on Peter’s experiences in the USA in February, with whom the viewer was trapped as he enthused hoarsely about ‘wet blouses’ and ‘big gazonkers’. The first item w
as a solo piece too, a parody of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected entitled Tales of the Much As We Expected, with Peter in the part of Dahl delivering a confidential fireside chat:

  Dahl:

  Ronald was a pretty ordinary name, and until I dropped the ‘n’ nobody took a blind bit of notice. But ‘Roald’ makes me sound mysterious and important. If Ronald Biggs had called himself ‘Roald’, like me he could have got away with daylight robbery.

  As he spoke, the crackling log fire slowly spread across the carpet beneath his armchair.

  The second item was a perfect example of a good idea being allowed to meander too far from its original premise. Beryl Reid appeared as Elka Starborgling, a twenty-four-hour emergency plumber who arrives for a job dressed as a huge bee: ‘I know. You weren’t expecting a woman. Or a bee.’ What began as a very funny satire on expectations then turned into long monologue about her life on an Arctic trawler, before wandering into a sketch about control of the country being seized by thousands of bee-people. The closing item in part one was tighter, a Not Only-style father and son sketch with John Cleese as an upper-class gentleman trying to initiate his son into the mysteries of girlfriends; the twist being that his son, played by Peter, is forty-two.