Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Dudley felt that Peter’s dislike of his surroundings had affected his performance: ‘The trouble was, Peter was apologising the time for being here and it showed in his work.’29 It did not help matters that Dudley was now enjoying another massive success with Arthur, his portrayal of a drunk whom he admitted basing – in part – on ‘this man out there who’s an alcoholic whom I know’. Arthur was rich and successful enough to have his own butler, which made Peter’s failure in the part of a butler all the more embarrassing. In November 1981 Peter had endured another galling humiliation, when he generously agreed to appear live by satellite in a London Weekend special tribute to Dudley’s success, made while Dudley was on a visit to England. The announcer trumpeted: ‘Hollywood’s newest screen sensation . . . from humble beginnings in his home town of Dagenham he’s stepped out to conquer the world of entertainment. Musician, composer, comedian and now international superstar, will you please welcome: Mr Dudley . . . MOORE!’ This was the cue for Peter to do his bit, and he appeared on a large screen describing Jayne Mansfield’s affair with a starfish; but there was a cock-up on the studio floor, and someone cued the Dagenham Girl Pipers to begin their ‘Tribute to Dudley Moore’ before Peter could finish. The resultant round of applause drowned him out, so the director cut his losses and switched Peter’s feed off in mid-sentence.

  Everywhere he went, Dudley’s success was gleefully rubbed in. More often than not Peter smiled, and said nice things. ‘I’m delighted for Dud. He’s a brilliantly funny man and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,’30 he told the Sunday Express. He informed the viewers of Parkinson that he was ‘delighted – very pleased. And Dudley’s revelling in it, having the thoroughly good time he deserves.’ Dudley, he told the Evening News, was his ‘best and oldest friend’. At other times, his patience would snap. Brutally, he informed the Sun: ‘Perhaps if I had been born with a club foot and a height problem I might have been as desperate as Dudley to become a star. That’s all he ever wanted. I’m not trying to copy Dud because I don’t have the same need to prove myself. We’re totally different people and we have very little in common. I don’t know how we ever agreed on anything like writing scripts together. I’ve not bothered to go and see Arthur. I thought I’d wait until it came on television in America, but when it did I watched a football game on another channel. I appeared on The Night of a Hundred Stars show recently – and do you know who got the loudest cheers from the crowds? Television stars like Larry Hagman and Linda Gray. Movie stars like Gregory Peck went almost unnoticed, but the people went bananas every time a telly star walked in.’31 Later on, Peter told the same paper that ‘Dudley hasn’t changed a bit in more than twenty years – he’s still selfish, vain and greedy. At one time he wanted to be a pop star you know. He did once complain to me that he is surrounded in Hollywood by fools and sycophants who laugh at everything he says. I reminded him that when he was living here he was surrounded by intelligent people who kept telling him what a little toad he was.’32

  Dudley was suitably hurt by all these negative remarks. ‘I don’t understand why Peter constantly vilified me in the press, and said unnecessary things about me,’ he complains. When he telephoned Peter to discuss it, he got no reply, and his messages were not returned. A feyears later, Peter told him he had not enjoyed Arthur, but that he had rather liked Arthur 2. ‘Now why exactly he liked my character in Arthur 2 I can’t imagine,’ ponders Dudley, ‘because they were the same.’33 Arthur 2, in fact, differed from its predecessor in that it was a failure at the box office. Most of Peter’s own failures at the box office had been shared with his partner, or at least paralleled by a simultaneous Dudley flop. Their chagrin and their determination to do better next time had been an experience shared between two friends. Now, for the first time, Peter was shouldering the burden of failure entirely alone.

  Dudley, of course, could be just as cutting in his assessments: ‘He wasn’t as good from the time that we broke up. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but that’s what it coincided with.’34 Outwardly, at least, Peter was still determined to prove that this was not the case, and that he still possessed the ability to show Hollywood a thing or two. He still had Yellowbeard, and he had a host of other plans. Asked about his career in 1982, he replied defensively: ‘You mean the things I do when I’m not playing golf or breathing in the fresh country air at our place in Exmoor?’ After discussing Yellowbeard, he continued, perversely: ‘There’s talk about a TV series called Cook for 45 Minutes, and I’m also busy working on a screenplay set in the States. Ideally it should be filmed over there.’35

  In truth, though, Peter was spent. He did not do a stroke of work in the six months until October 1982, when Yellowbeard was due to be filmed. Instead, he made a brave attempt to move to Exmoor, and to go for long walks in the country. He joined Minehead golf club and opened local bazaars. He made frequent visits to see his parents, and they to see him and Judy. He named all Judy’s animals after the main protagonists in the Falklands War. ‘He talked to the cats and dogs as if they were people and made up stories about them,’ recalls Judy fondly. ‘He was very whimsical. Peter was a very loving, affectionate man who was desperately in need of love and affection himself. When my animals had to be put down he’d cry more than me. Once we sat up all night with a dying lamb, night after night. I had a grouchy alsatian, which I’d actually saved from being put down, and the dog always sat on the sofa between us. Peter was scared of alsatians, but he never once objected to its presence – in fact he eventually became friendly with it.’

  But it was not to be. After two months, Peter knew that he had to move back to London. ‘He needed to be near his fixes, and the bright lights of the city,’ says Judy regretfully. She refused to allow alcohol in the house, which made him extra miserable, his mind transfixed by the prospect of his next drink. He found Blagdon Close cold and lonely, and urged her to buy somewhere prettier, with a stream, like the one he and his father used to fish in when he was a child. He begged her, also, to divide her time between Exmoor and London, but she was determined never to return to the city. He continued to visit her for a few weeks at a time here and there, but for the most part she lived alone. Emotionally, Peter and Judy were still dependent on each other, and spoke at length on the telephone almost every evening; but in terms of living together as a couple, their marriage was effectively at an end. Many years later, Peter explained that it had failed because ‘I didno;t want to live in the country and she did. Prosaic, but very important. I’m not really much good at talking about farm subsidies with someone who lives twenty miles away, however delightful their labradors.’36 The reality had been so, so much more complicated than that.

  Peter didn’t tell his daughters that Judy had gone; they had to work out for themselves why she and her belongings had just vanished. ‘I remember arriving at Dad’s and she wasn’t there,’ says Daisy. ‘He didn’t offer much of an explanation. There were some subjects it didn’t occur to you to broach, and that was one of them.’ Lucy remembers that ‘He kept a message on his answering machine saying “Peter and Judy aren’t here at the moment” for about seven years afterwards. We never dared talk about it because we thought he was so devastated by it.’ Richard Ingrams recalls that ‘If you went to the house she just wasn’t around, like Mrs Mainwaring. He said she’d become agoraphobic, which was his excuse as to why she would never come to Private Eye parties.’ Peter could not bring himself to discuss what had happened with anyone but Sid Gottlieb: ‘He would have given God knows what to get her back. He realised he’d lost someone he loved very much. In his mind I think the feeling was “I lost her, and I bloody well deserved it yet again.”’ Perrin’s Walk became something of a shrine, with a huge picture of Judy taking up one wall. A second wall was plastered with a selection of family photographs devoted to Lucy and Daisy’s growing up.

  Fate then delivered a cruel blow, one which was especially harsh given how much Peter’s family meant to him and how difficult he found it to cope with emotio
nal setbacks. In the summer of 1982 his father fell ill with Parkinson’s disease; it was, effectively, a death sentence. The local G.P. decided that his mother was not in a position to cope with such a progressively disabling condition unaided, and committed Alec Cook to St George’s Hospital in Milford-on-Sea. Peter immediately rode to the rescue on his white charger: he drove down to the hospital, discharged his father, brought him home, hired private nurses to look after him and cheered everyone up into the bargain. He, Sarah and Liz stayed at the house on a rota basis, sometimes in pairs; there were giggly occasions when Peter and Sarah tried to give their father a bath, Alec still correctly attired in soaking pyjamas. Peter invented a character, an imaginary Auntie Flo, who could be held responsible for any mishap. ‘Peter was tremendous,’ says Sarah. ‘He just became completely involved.’ Later, in his father’s distressing final days, when his condition worsened to the extent that home care became impossible, Alec Cook was so heavily sedated by hospital staff that his mind wandered erratically; Peter argued with the doctors about what drugs they were giving him and how much of it was necessary. Always, throughout, he was a pillar of strength, and always he was of good cheer; but back home in Hampstead, George the next door neighbour would find him sitting alone, sobbing helplessly about his father’s impending death.

  In October, when he really wanted to be at his father’s side, he had to go to Mexico to film Yellowbeard. There too, he managed to be the life and soul of the party, standing in the hotel swimming pool, philosophising as E. L. Wisty about the speed of darkness relative to the speed of light. He was sufficiently determined to turn in a good performance that he managed to give up alcohol for the duration, but as a consequhe sought consolation in marijuana instead. Eric Idle volunteered to go with him on a grass-buying expedition: ‘Where to look? ‘No problem,’ said Peter, ‘we shall find the nearest bordello.’ My wife gave me an old-fashioned look, which Peter intercepted, reassuring her with his incredible charm that I should come to no harm. So off we drove to the local Mexican bordello. A small door in a white-walled street led into a cantina, a square open to the sky with a band and a bar and lovely girls who were happy just to dance, or there was a low cabaña with discreet rooms if you wished to dance horizontally. There were tables for drinking and strings of coloured lights and when we entered it had the air of a private party where the guests had yet to arrive.

  Peter was an instant hit. He ran in shouting loudly in cod Spanish, shook the hand of the barman, seized a beautiful tall girl in a shiny red bathing suit and stormed onto the deserted dance-floor where he began the most unimaginable shaking jitterbug boogie. The girls went nuts. They danced around him and he boogied with them all, flinging his arms around, his hair wild, occasionally sinking to his knees or exaggeratedly twisting low. I sat quietly by myself in a corner sipping beer and cursing my inability to cut loose and join him. Everywhere he went he brought joy with him. One minute it was a slow night in a naughty night-club and the next it was a one-man fiesta . . . My last sight was Peter leading a line of ecstatic ladies in a conga line. He waved cheerily, tapped his nose and yelled, ‘No problem, Eric, we’re in . . .’37

  On screen, Peter played Lord Lambourn, a bumbling aristocrat, to Graham Chapman’s Yellowbeard, pirate and serial rapist. Lambourn has unwittingly brought up Yellowbeard’s son Dan as his own, training him to be a far-from-ruthless landscape gardener, little suspecting that Yellowbeard’s treasure map is tattooed on the boy’s scalp. After twenty years in prison the pirate escapes, makes contact, and together the three set sail for the Caribbean aboard the Lady Edith (actually the Bounty from the Marlon Brando epic). There were some very funny scenes, notably when the crew attempt to smuggle women on board in defiance of the Lady Edith’s captain, played by James Mason. The Captain has failed to notice that one of the ship’s officers obviously is a woman in disguise, named Mr Prostitute; although when a sailor laughs at the mention of the name, he has the man’s foot nailed to the deck. There were also a smattering of old Not Only . . . But Also jokes and some dismal puns, for instance:

  Blind Pew:

  I may be blind, but I ’ave acute ’earing.

  Sailor:

  I’m not interested in your jewellery.

  The main faults of Yellowbeard, however, were structural ones. Peter and his writing colleagues still had not mastered the creation of dramatic tension to counterbalance the comedy, and the attempt to create a sympathetic love interest echoed the failure of The Wrong Box, by introducing a thoroughly insipid and uninvolving hero and heroine in Dan and his girlfriend. Peter was wasted in his one-joke supporting role, while Graham Chapman mugged furiously. The rest of the cast, predictably, was top-heavy with competing celebrity cameos: apart from Eric Idle and James Mason, there were John Cleese, Spike Milligan, Kenneth Mars, Nigel Planer, Beryl Reid, Susannah York, David Bowie, Cheech and Chong, Madeline Kahn (a quite disastrous Cockney accent), Michael Hordern and Marty Feldman, in his last role. Yellowbeard was a collection of unlearned lessons, a project doomed to failure from the first sentence of its first draft. Peter later described it, unconvincingly, as ‘A great script, which was damaged . . . by the director I suppose.’38 But he had cried wolf once too often. Yellowbeard was both competently and indeed lavishly directed by Mel Damski. Peter must have realised in his head, finally, that his particular genius was simply not suited to the cinematic format. His humour was too immediate, too instinctive, too indisciplined to be harnessed to the big screen. It was part of his tragedy that the cinema is regarded by most people – Peter among them, for a long while – as the peak of the entertainer’s profession. While that is certainly the case financially, the notion of a creative progression towards Hollywood is one that has needlessly constrained and damaged the development of many artists, Peter included.

  By 1983, as a result, his career had utterly stalled again. John Wells bumped into him in the reception of BBC Broadcasting House: ‘He dropped into a louche BBC tobacco-throated drawl to tell me, with real warmth and affection and delight in the shared joke, that the Light Entertainment Department was “tremendously excited, really tremendously excited” by a little idea for a programme in which he would appear, and that “With any luck, we should be able to put it out at something like four in the morning with a view to reaching a really substantial audience.” He never heard any more about it, and scheme after scheme collapsed in the same way.’39 Peter actually didn’t mind any more. He knew that as far as the industry was concerned Yellowbeard had been his last chance at writing a film script, and that nothing remained professionally but to drag his tired frame back to television or the stage – areas where he had triumphed conclusively again and again, and which he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by revisiting. Frankly, there was no point. He didn’t have the energy or the inclination to do it all again. He had not so much run out of ambition as run out of room to expand, but the effect was much the same. He was like a much-decorated General who has advanced as far as he can and realises that it would be futile to remain in the front line. His last big push was over. Work, henceforth, would either be small and interesting or irrelevant but extremely well paid.

  Work, furthermore, had to take second place to helping his father die with dignity. When he was not with his family, Peter was now very much alone. There would be no more joyous weekends entertaining the children to look forward to: for the children had grown up. Lucy was 18 and Daisy was 17, and Wendy had encouraged both girls to enrol in cookery school in Alfriston. Thereafter Daisy travelled the world before going on to art college, while L18 ecame a chef at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth. Inevitably they saw less of their father. Judy, of course, had gone too. Dudley, naturally, was never coming back. Even Stocks had ceased to be one long party: the Playboy Organisation had fired Victor Lownes while Peter was away in America, and the endless supply of money had dried up. There was just Peter, and the booze, and Rainbow George next door for company.

  CHAPTER 15

  Whereupon I Immedia
tely Did Nothing

  The Single Life, 1983–89

  One afternoon in 1983 Peter came bounding up the stairs of Post House Productions, a film editing company in D’Arblay Street in Soho, carrying with him a can of unedited 16mm film. The young office assistant Ciara Parkes showed him to one of their suites, where an editor loaded the reel on to a viewing machine. It contained a sketch, shot a year previously in Venice Beach California, in which E. L. Wisty sat on a park bench extolling the virtues of the What? Party, a new force in politics not dissimilar to his World Domination League of two decades before. ‘It was just him rambling, but it was very funny,’ remembers Ciara. Like Derek and Clive or The Dead Sea Tapes, this was just a private joke, intended for Peter’s own amusement. Unlike Derek and Clive, it would never see the light of day. Peter’s professional frustration had receded, like a great wind abating, and he was happy that his best work should now be entertaining a film editor and an office junior rather than millions of American cinema goers.