Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter and Dudley appeared in a reunion interview with Mavis Nicholson on ITV that summer, filmed at the Villa Bianca restaurant, and spoke amusingly but ruefully of their ‘acrimonious divorce’. They also did an interview for the December issue of Harpers & Queen in which Peter made Dudley roar with laughter as he imitated a retired colonel:

  I don’t mind telling you the Japs were jolly stern taskmasters. When I started the war I was 93 stone and by the time I finished that bridge I was down to 31bs 4oz. Looked lovely in a swimming costume.

  Not long afterwards Dudley returned to London to film a series of Tesco ads, and this time Brogan agreed to join Lin, Peter and her husband for dinner. Lin said that ‘It filled my heart with joy when I listened to the two of them, because they always said just the right thing to each other and it would be so funny. They were both incredibly clever with words. I’ve never met two people who were quite like that, the way they talked to each other. They came out with the funniest things, and it sounded so natural even though it was so crazy.’ Brogan, however, detected ‘an awkwardness between the two . . . they seemed uncomfortable with each other.’65

  Peter’s family were initially delighted that he had found a partner so obviously devoted to him. In 1988 Lin ‘came out’ in public as Peter’s consort – the papers reported seeing him around town with a ‘dusky beauty’ – and he took her down to Milford-on-Sea to meet his mother three times that year. ‘Lin wanted to become part of the family’, says Lucy, ‘and she did things for us in Dad’s name: like, on my birthday, she bought tickets for a musical in the West End, the best seats. It was obviously her, not Dad, because Dad was totally disorganised, never remembered to send a birthday card. And then there’d be invitations to go out to dinner or to lunch with them. I think it probably felt to her like we excluded her when we met, because we were just starving to spend time with him. It’s not that we didn’t like her or were uninterested in her, but we so wanted to spend time with him that it might have appeared that we were excluding her. Then she seemed to hold that as a grudge, and our family seemed to become her enemy. It created a conflict for Dad, because he would have liked to spend time with us, but I should think any time he did, he probably went home to a sour face. I think she thought we shouldn’t have let him get into that condition, that we’d always just waltzed in, had a good time and left, and that we’d always left the place looking like a tip when we came and went. In fact whenever we’d got in we’d done a massive rally round with dustbin liners, doing the washing up and trying to make it look a bit more respectable.’

  Lin never returned to Milford-on-Sea; Peter explained to his mother that s was allergic to cats.

  Some of Peter’s old friends also found relations with Lin less natural and easy-going than with his previous wives. Claude Harz, for instance, remembers that ‘We had dinner a couple of times with Peter and Lin but it wasn’t like the old days. She made it clear that she was taking care of him now, and he was falling into that psychology. We felt very excluded.’ Neither did Lin entirely approve of Rainbow George and his circle. For every old friend who felt excluded, though, there was a new one, encouraged by Lin, to take their place. She helped Peter to reconstruct his social life, and telephoned people she liked the look of, like Stephen Fry, to encourage them to invite him out. She persuaded Peter to start holding parties again, for instance on his fiftieth birthday in 1987. For the first time since the 1960s Peter’s life was filled with celebrities, and he saw a lot more of people like John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Harry Enfield, David Baddiel and Jonathan Ross. This is not to say that Peter consorted with celebrities for celebrity’s sake. Famously, David Frost (now Sir David) telephoned him to announce: ‘Peter, I’m having a little dinner party on behalf of Prince Andrew and his new bride-to-be Sarah Ferguson. I know they’d love to meet you, big fans. Be super if you could make it, Wednesday the twelfth.’ ‘Hang on,’ Peter replied, ‘I’ll just check my diary’; and then, after a few rustles, ‘Oh dear. I find I’m watching television that night.’

  Nonetheless, the number of famous people in Peter’s social circle at the end of the 1980s significantly outweighed the number present at the start of the decade. Harry Enfield remembers him being nervous before one birthday party, ‘because Julian Clary was coming. He admired Clary, and hoped that Clary would admire him.’66 Clary was coming to Peter’s birthday party – he was one of about twenty guests – and Peter had never even met him. Peter Fincham, the Managing Director of the TV company TalkBack, recalls meeting a ‘bizarre’ selection of celebrities at these parties, from Eric Idle to Soraya Khashoggi. There would also be a smattering of everyday locals – the video store owner, the chemist – to provide a faintly self-congratulatory social mix. Peter, at least, would chat to such people as openly and at length as he would to the famous (Graham Chapman, who had similarly impressed his celebrity acquaintances by inviting the local baker – an elderly lady – to one of his parties, was extremely relieved when Peter, alone of his guests, was prepared to talk to her for an hour). The echoes of the highly organised Church Row dinner parties of the 1960s were plain. The court of King Peter was being reconstituted.

  Peter’s fellow celebrities were all too happy to pay homage. As Clive James put it, ‘His superiority was easier to take after he ceased to exercise it. In his last years, when he sat at home reading newspapers while defying alcohol to dull his brilliant mind, he was a cinch to love. Early on, when we were all struggling to get started and he was effortlessly up there dominating the whole picture, to feel affection for him took self-discipline. Admiration was too total. You couldn’t write a line without imagining him looking over your shoulder, not very impressed.’67

  Sadly, however much he enjoyed the company of his revived social circle, deep down they were no substitute for his familyLin’s had been a remarkable achievement, to have rescued Peter, to have recognised his craving for love and support and to have fulfilled it; but one of his principal problems, that of being unable to communicate his love to his family successfully, had not been solved (if indeed it could ever have been solved), merely brushed aside. After Peter had failed to return Daisy’s calls for some while, a family friend arranged to take her round to Perrin’s Walk and hammered on the door until he opened it. A few moments of stilted conversation ensued, until finally the ice began to melt, and Peter and his daughter began to communicate. Daisy’s friend absented herself, and left Daisy to rebuild bridges. Then, she recalls hearing ‘an incredible noise from downstairs and the sound of breaking crockery and shouting. I gathered Lin had returned home; she told us to leave, telling Daisy that she had no right to make demands on her father. We left immediately.’ Peter found himself in an awful cleft stick. Brenda Vaccaro, who saw him soon afterwards, remembers that ‘He was very sad, and he broke down and cried, and there was nothing I could do. He said the people he loved the most would probably never see him again.’68 Slightly bewildered, she assumed that he was talking about Dudley.

  Lin wanted Peter to marry her. ‘I was happy for a while after he gave up the remaining two girlfriends,’ she says. ‘I never thought I would feel the need for us to be a conventional couple, but as our relationship grew, no matter how much he said he loved me, I wasn’t family. He said it didn’t matter. But it hurt. I was not Lin Cook but Lin Chong. At the end of the day, I was looking after someone else’s husband. He was anxious. He didn’t want to make another mistake. Eventually I said: “If you love me enough to want to be with me all the time, you have to accord me the dignity of being your wife.”’69 Lin urged Richard Ingrams’s girlfriend Deborah Bosley to persuade Ingrams into marriage as well: marriage, she said, conferred a status and respectability that might otherwise be lacking from their relationship. When Lin read in a newspaper that Mel Smith was to get married, ‘Tears just came to my eyes as I sat next to Peter on the sofa’, she says. ‘It wasn’t as though Lin was trying to take a piece of Peter’s life,’ says Mel Smith, ‘she just wanted to sort of stand guard over it really.’
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  ‘Peter never wanted to marry,’ claims George, no doubt blinded to Lin’s sincerity by his sadness at being edged out of her husband’s life.’ ‘He never wanted to get divorced from Judy, he held out for ages and ages. But Lin from day one set out her stall that she was going to marry Peter. I never thought he would, I really never thought that he would succumb. I used to tell her that on regular occasions – “he’ll never marry you”.’ Peter told Ian Hislop that he could only attend the Hislops’ wedding reception and not the church service beforehand, ‘in case it gave Lin ideas’. On the other hand, he was genuinely in love with Lin, and she had made her wishes clear. He had also become utterly dependent on her: when she went away for a week, both his gas and electricity were simultaneously cut off the day she left – he had been under the erroneous impression that she had arranged for the bills to be paid to prevent such an occurrence – and so he sat forlornly in the cold and dark, in too disorganised a state to organise reconnection. Eventually, he took the plunge and asked Judy for a divorce.

  In 1989, he booked a week’s stay at the Cedar Falls Health Centre near Taunton. Judy picked him up from the station, and when he got into the car he started to cry. He was obviously in a bad way. At the health centre, where he was supposed to be drying out, he circumvented the problem of restricted alcohol supplies by drinking the Listerine from the bathrooms. Eventually, he came out with it: he had come, he confessed, to get a divorce. ‘Do you actually want a divorce?’ Judy asked him. ‘No,’ he said, and wept; but he felt he no longer had any alternative.

  ‘The divorce from Judy threw him terribly,’ says Sid Gottlieb. ‘The fact that he’d finally lost her, there was no way he was going to get her back.’ Judy was equally upset. They had stayed in close contact throughout the 1980s, and Peter had sometimes visited her in the new house she had bought near Minehead, after selling Blagdon Close at his request; but just as his devotion to Judy had enabled him to part company with his children in the late 1960s, so his devotion to Lin enabled him to sever the last bonds with Judy. Again, there were doubts, recriminations and regrets, but Peter’s need for constant love, support and affection proved the stronger of the conflicting forces involved. ‘I’ve practically always been married and I really can’t imagine not being married,’70 he said. ‘I think he woke up and saw I was his wife,’71 explains Lin.

  In the autumn of 1988, Rainbow George fell prey to another of life’s little calamities. He obtained a hundred tabs of acid, and – in an attempt to raise the deposit for a Rainbow Party candidate at the Govan by-election – resold them for £150 to two men who turned out to be News of the World reporters. The paper splashed on the story, revealing George to be a millionaire drug mastermind with a haul of 200,000 LSD tablets hidden in his house, which he intended to sell for £5 each. George was promptly arrested, sent for trial, and in the summer of 1989, imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs. ‘I asked Peter if he would look after all my tapes for me,’ explains George, ‘so I stored them all in his garage.’ Peter, however, was at heart a thoroughly respectable citizen. ‘When I was in Wormwood Scrubs he panicked and got paranoid, and thought that I might after all have concealed a stash of acid in the tapes, so he called the police.’ The officers dismantled and reassembled every one of George’s myriad cassettes in search of the non-existent drugs. ‘He was really ashamed of himself for having done that afterwards,’ says George.

  By the time George was released from prison at Christmas, Peter had decided to marry Lin, written to his mother to inform her of the forthcoming event, and just eight weeks later had tied the knot at a small, impromptu family ceremony. Unconvincingly, George believes that his absence was crucial to the weakening of Peter’s previous resolve. Peter returned to his south-west roots for the wedding; just four people attended the Torquay registry office, where he and Lin were married by registrar Steven Lemming on 18 November 1989. The reception, for family only, took place at the Imperial Hotel, a large, undistinguished pile enjoying fine views across the bay. None of his friends even knew the wedding was taking place. Only Judy knew it was imminent, and even she was unaware of the exact date. Minutes after saying ‘I do,’ Peter phoned her. ‘I could hardly believe it,’ she says ruefully. ‘He said to me, “Judlled’ve just got married again.”’72 Lin insists, rather mysteriously, that ‘He was not being cruel. He didn’t want her to read it first in the papers.’73

  Lin was overjoyed: she had married the man she loved at last. She believed him to be ‘indestructible’. Sadly, they were to have just five years together.

  CHAPTER 16

  Now That the World Is In My Grasp, It Seems a Fitting Time To Go

  The Final Years, 1989–95

  Peter took Lin to the Ritz

  Hotel in Paris on a sort of honeymoon, but the trip was hardly any more romantic than his previous two efforts – David Cash, the dome-headed Managing Director of Private Eye came with them. He and Peter were already booked to go and see the Paris-based Eye shareholder Anthony Blond, to discuss his stake in the magazine. It was a nostalgic journey: on the plane over, Peter reminisced about his first girlfriend, whom he had courted in the city forty-two years before. The trip was also eventful. After a meal at a restaurant in the Sacre Coeur, Peter led the party to a sex club, where he misread the decimal point on the drinks menu and ordered several bottles at a thousand francs a time. When the time came to pay the bill, a huge bouncer stood over the three until they had emptied their pockets. The following day they became caught up in an armed robbery while walking down the street, and Peter had to push Lin into a doorway to avoid the flying bullets. There was also a faint disagreement between the newly married couple: ‘Over dinner, Lin suddenly started talking about the Eye,’ recalls Cash, ‘and saying that Peter, as proprietor, should be getting a lot more out of it, that the current set up was quite wrong and that he should be benefiting financially. He said to her, “You just don’t understand how the Eye works. It isn’t like an ordinary company.”’ The conversation moved on, but a few seeds of future discord had been sown.

  Such minor anomalies aside, there is no question that Peter and Lin made an extremely affectionate and devoted couple. When Roger Law visited Perrin’s Walk, he came across love notes from Peter scribbled on tiny pieces of paper and stuffed between the sofa cushions for her to find. On their wedding anniversary, Lin opened the front door to discover a blackboard in the hall with ‘Happy Anniversary darling wife’ chalked on it, a row of wobbly kisses scrawled below. Eleanor Bron spoke of the ‘great pride and astonished affection’1 with which Peter described his wife. In Something Like Fire, the book of essays Lin commissioned after his death, she herself spoke of their mutual love for the Perrin’s Walk garden in terms which amazed many of his long-term friends: ‘In one year it might be me, and in another Peter who said, “I saw the first ladybird today.” We left bread for the robin and cheerily greeted him with “Hello Robin” whenever he hopped into sight . . . Peter took boyish delight in netting the larger goldfishes from the pond to transfer them to his new pond. I said he might be separatinfamilies and we’d be having lovesick goldfishes, which made him call me a “daft sausage” and smile indulgently at me.’2 This image of Peter as a kind of pastoral Fotherington-Thomas sat ill with the picture many had of his garden as a venue for wild parties and experimental newt-breeding; but he had been emotionally bruised and battered over the years, and almost certainly did need to start again at the simplest level.

  ‘I think as far as Peter was concerned,’ says Mel Smith, ‘she was just very solid, a real unmovable centre to his life. She was never a very social animal, she was always quiet whatever the circumstances, she never pushed herself forward at all. They definitely had a relationship that was more important to them when they were alone. In public, Peter was still basically let loose at the front of the team with everybody else hanging on to the reins, and Lin was very quiet and supportive.’ Peter, in turn, became an affectionate stepfather to Lin’s handicapped daughter Nina. ‘I guessed that
Peter would not be able to cope with that at all,’ admits Sid Gottlieb, ‘but in fact he impressed and surprised me with his solicitude.’ He always held Nina’s hand when they went for walks around Hampstead. Peter and Lin chose to live apart, and although she moved a number of times during their relationship, they always maintained their separate houses; his untidiness and insomnia would certainly have been difficult to live with, although with his wife around to tidy up after him, some of the mess in his living room could latterly be attributed to contrariness. Despite this apparently divisive arrangement they saw each other nearly every night.

  It was generally agreed among Peter’s friends that Lin had changed him for the better. According to Eleanor Bron, ‘He was much mellower, talked about himself in ways he never had done, and even expressed one or two things I’d always wondered about: that partly because of his upbringing and schooling women had always been a bit of a mystery to him, and I suspect the source of quite a lot of grief. The way he talked about his wife suggested that she’d contributed a lot to the change.’3 According to Jonathan Miller, ‘I think he finally came to terms with the fact that for a long period he had not been approved of and applauded in the way that he had been when he was young, beautiful and wonderful to listen to.’ Barry Fantoni remembers that ‘He became, when intimate with you – if he felt confident enough to be intimate – absolutely open about his genuine feelings and genuine loves, and the funny voices would be a million miles away. The jokes of course never would be, though.’ At one point Fantoni became suicidal, and turned up on Peter’s doorstep announcing that he was going to kill himself. Peter took him through to the garden. ‘He said, “I must show you the pond. I’ve got these fish. They’re extraordinary. If they get too near the edge, they jump out of the water and commit suicide . . . Ah,” he paused, “that’s not a very tactful way to start.”’ Fantoni started laughing, and of course didn’t stop for the rest of the evening, all thoughts of self-destruction chased expertly from his mind.