Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  ‘On the day, he walked Daisy up the aisle and gave her away, then he made a speech which was moving in its simplicity. There were no absurdist voices, just the sentiments of a very proud father of both his daughters – something I think he’d rather denied himself in the past. Later I remember seeing him and Wendy sitting at the back of the marquee talking in a way I don’t suppose they had done for a very long time.’ Peter and his first wife had, indeed, been reconciled for the first time in a quarter of a century. ‘It was very nice – I’m so happy I saw him,’28 she says. Daisy herself remembers the occasion as ‘a great day – really good fun. Dad was very proud, and so good. I was worried about how it would all work out with him and Mum, but it was lovely’. Peter spent much of the afternoon dancing to a jazz band with a tiny child. Taking a breather from his exertions, he and Sarah sat in companionable silence on a tree stump in the Sussex drizzle. ‘He remarked that he was looking forward to dancing continuously until January,’29 she recalls. Then he returned alone to his hotel room, where he watched Midnight Cowboy on television, and depression stole over him once again.

  In November, Lin organised a party for Peter’s fifty-seventh birthday; the guests included Michael Palin and Stephen Fry, who gave Peter a green trilby hat that he described as ‘one of the nicest birthday presents I’ve ever had.’ It was to be Peter’s last birthday. In December, he failed to turn up for the Private Eye Christmas lunch, because he had been compelled to return to hospital for further treatment. Barry Fantoni believes that ‘He knew he was killing himself – although I think he thought that the end would come very much later. But he didn’t want to become an old man – he wanted to die intact.’ Sid Gottlieb, however, points out ‘There are tomes about death wish and so forth, saying that “This man really wanted to die and so he behaved in a particular way.” I say that’s bollocks. If we were able to offer a person who’s suffering from that sort of severity of intoxication a chemical therapy that would work, they’d grab it, of course they would. Peter was scared of dying – he was very scared. This was the case in his last days, and the last phase of his drinking was the worst, the longest-lasting and the most toxic.’ Peter was allowed home for Christmas, and Lucy paid him a short visit. ‘His voice was going, he’d obviously had a lot of tubes down his throat. He was on soft drinks and he was very scared. He was trying to put a brave face on it, but he was lost for words. And so was I.’

  On the evening of 3 January 1995, a sobbing Lin came running to George’s for help; Peter had collapsed, and she was trying to get him into her car. An ambulance was called, and Peter was lifted gently on to a stretcher. George came out into the street to see him go. Peter gripped his hand and breathed, ‘Will I be OK, George? Will I be all right?’ Without stopping to ponder his less than 100 per cent predictive record, George reassured him. ‘You’ll be fine Peter. Everything’s going to be just fine,’ he insisted. ‘Oh fuck,’ replied Peter, his fate sealed. It was his last joke. George watched the ambulance drive away. ‘I love you,’ he said, as it disappeared up the street.

  CHAPTER 17

  Zsa Zsa Man Dies

  Death and Aftermath, 1995–97

  Lin accompanied Peter to the Royal Free Hospital where he was admitted throwing up blood, h

  is liver dying. Soon, he fell into a coma. By the time his sisters and his daughters arrived, they were too late to say goodbye to him. ‘Things that happened in the hospital between Lin and Peter’s family were unbelievably upsetting,’ says Rainbow George. ‘Things that I was there to witness.’ Peter’s sister Sarah explains that ‘The staff made it clear that Lin had no right to forbid anyone to see him, but none of us were going to make anything more difficult given the dreadful circumstances.’ The family stayed in the relatives’ room; eventually, Lucy, Daisy, Sarah and Elizabeth were invited to sit with Peter’s unconscious form for a few brief minutes. The outside world was still labouring under the misapprehension that Peter was no more than ‘a bit poorly’. Ciara Parkes made him some special balloons, inscribed with secret satanic messages, and sent them to the ward. George told her, tactfully and untruthfully, that they had festooned Peter’s bed in his last days. In fact he was far too ill to receive any presents.

  Peter died on Monday 9 January 1995, after a week in Intensive Care. An official statement gave the cause of death as ‘gastro-intestinal haemorrhage’, a diplomatic attribution in that the haemorrhage was the direct result of severe liver damage. Elsewhere in North London, Spurs had just beaten Arsenal; Rory McGrath sat waiting for the gleeful telephone call that never came. ‘Of course,’ says McGrath, ‘he was dead, and so I can’t ever . . . Arsenal v. Spurs has a completely different meaning to me now.’ In Majorca, Wendy sensed something terrible had happened, when her watch inexplicably stopped. The man that she later confessed she still ‘loved very much’ was dead. At the Royal Free, Peter’s various distraught relatives thanked the medical staff and returned disconsolately to their homes. ‘I was beside myself,’ says Lin. ‘I couldn’t even speak normally. I kept talking in this very strange, high-pitched voice and I couldn’t stop. Then suddenly Michael Palin’s wife Helen was at my door. She found out where I was and she just turned up – she’d said “Lin mustn’t be on her own.”’1 Judy, who found out about Peter’s death only through the media, was equally devastated: ‘I always half-expected it, that something horrible would happen; and yet when it happened it was such a shock, I felt so sick, shivering and awful. There was a gaping hole that nothing would make right. And I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t been able to help him. I knew his fear of dying, I’d seen it so clearly, I knew the fear he would have died with.’

  The entertainment world greeted the sudden and unexpected news with something approaching horror. At Private Eye, Ian Hislop remembers that ‘It was Monday morning, it was press day, and Michael Heath came in and said “Cook’s dead.” And someone said, “Fuck.” I mean it was absolute disbelief. I don’t know why – no reason Cookie should have been immortal, you just assumed he was really.’ Richard Ingrams was in tears. Andrew Osmond recalls that ‘Everybody was truly grief-stricken, slightly to their own surprise I think – because obviously he wasn’t going to make old bones, you know. In a way people had expected him to conk out much sooner, but when he did everybody was shocked and horrified nd utterly dismayed.’ That week’s edition of the magazine was hastily transformed into a special tribute issue.

  The early sixties generation of Cambridge comedians found itself equally taken aback. ‘I just felt that a big chunk of myself had been taken out,’ says John Bird. ‘I hadn’t rung up Peter and said “What do you think about this?” for ten years, but the feeling of no longer being able to do so really affected me.’ Bill Wallis felt numb at first, then suffered delayed shock: ‘Two weeks after he died I became very emotional, and felt a great sense of loss, because of what he represented in my life.’ According to John Cleese, ‘It was the most painful death I’ve had, worse than Graham Chapman.’2 Even the Rolling Stones, in their idiosyncratic manner, found Peter’s death extremely difficult to come to terms with. Keith Richards tried to explain: ‘Peter? You never miss people like Peter, because they’re always around. See, he’s just not . . . you can’t call him up any more, but Peter’s always around. He saved our lives on the road many times by cracking us up when we really needed cracking up. Er . . . I’ll be seein’ ya Pete . . . one dark day.’3

  Of all Peter’s friends and former colleagues, Dudley – naturally – was hit hardest. ‘Oh God, the fucker’s dead. There’s a hole in the universe,’4 he howled when he heard the news. His first act was to pick up the phone and ring the answering machine in Peter’s empty house, thousands of miles away in the middle of the night, just to hear his partner’s laconic drawl once more. ‘Every now and again I sit up in bed at night, and I think, “God, he’s not here, he’s not here, he’s not here . . .” Then I tell myself, “It’s okay, it’s okay . . .” and then I go back to sleep. It’s been very difficult for me, to adjust to the whole
thing.’ Alone in his restaurant, his fourth marriage to Nicole Rothschild crumbling, Dudley spoke at length about Peter to the press. He was not entirely complimentary, likening his ex-colleague to a ‘beached whale’ and referring to the ‘law of diminishing returns’ that had regulated their work; he lamented his own fading memory and spoke of a time when he would one day forget that he had ever worked with Peter Cook. But Peter had also been his best friend, he declared, a best friend whose absence he felt so desperately keenly in his American exile. ‘Who would have thought I would end up going to die in Newport Beach?’ he mused, miserably, to the Daily Telegraph.

  The press apportioned column yards to Peter’s death with a kind of horrified relish. Television and radio followed suit. There were celebrity tributes by the bushel-load, offered up to the memory of a performer who was universally acclaimed as the funniest of his generation. Everyone, it seemed, had been Peter’s friend, or had awarded themselves that honour in retrospect out of a desperate desire not to be excluded from the general rush to honour his talent. Even Bernard Manning described him as ‘a really funny fellow and a great drinking pal’,5 presumably the same Bernard Manning that Peter had once described as ‘a fat heap of lard, extremely good at being nasty’.6 Five days of media mourning were declared by unspoken consent, sincere enough, although as Alo;Wennett remarked, ‘In the press coverage of his death one could detect a certain satisfaction, the feeling being that he had paid some sort of price for his gifts, had died in the way the press prefer funny men to die, like Hancock and Peter Sellers.’7 Come Sunday the inevitable backlash occurred, as a result of there being simply nothing left to write. Columnists such as Gilbert Adair confessed themselves ‘bemused’ by the extent of the coverage of Peter’s death, while A. A. Gill wrote obtusely in The Sunday Times that ‘He was just a bloke who told jokes’, arguing that ‘being able to make people laugh is a minor gift’ (quite where on the gift ladder this put journalists who compose self-consciously controversial newspaper columns was not made entirely clear).

  The funeral took place the day before, on Saturday 14 January. Peter had asked to be buried in his parking space, but instead he wound up in St-John-at-Hampstead Parish Churchyard, where he had once joyously taken his daughters skateboarding. The service was an old-fashioned Christian ceremony, based around the Lord’s Prayer and Jerusalem; a small choir sang Fauré’s Requiem. Peter’s blood relatives joined Lin at the church. Wendy and Judy were not invited, and made no defiant attempts to turn up.

  On 1 May 1995, the same church was the venue for a huge memorial service in Peter’s honour. Lin, who meticulously and devotedly organised the occasion, had originally wanted to hold it at Westminster Abbey, but finally settled for the cavernous spaces of his local church. A battery of celebrities was invited: Dudley of course, John Cleese, Barry Humphries, Michael Palin, David Frost, Spike Milligan, Willie Rushton, Ian Hislop, Paul Merton, Clive Anderson, Harry Enfield, Ben Elton, Hugh Laurie, Michael Winner, Henry Cooper, Melvyn Bragg, Dave Allen, Richard Ingrams, John Wells, Eleanor Bron, Barry Cryer, Barry Took, Frankie Vaughan, Terry Wogan, Bobby Charlton, Robert Powell, Richard Wilson, David Baddiel, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, Alan Bennett, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Ross, Auberon Waugh, Ned Sherrin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Kenny Lynch and many, many others. There were also tickets for the readers of Private Eye, and for various school and university acquaintances, their names taken from old programmes and handbills. Peter’s daughters Lucy and Daisy, his sisters Sarah and Elizabeth, and his two ex-wives were all pointedly not invited.

  Gradually it dawned upon Peter’s family, with a sense of mounting dismay, that their names had not been included on the guest list. Daisy approached Sid Gottlieb to see if he could intercede on their behalf, and long and tortuous negotiations followed. Harriet Garland, whose daughter was still close to Peter’s daughters, separately contacted Michael Palin to see if he could put in a word. Lin wrote to Sarah to say that ‘I am in no mood to give and take, be loving or charitable, or do anything other than as I wish.’ Eventually, however, she relented, and invited Lucy, Daisy, Sarah and Elizabeth; the invitations were not extended to Judy or Wendy. Nor were any of the family invitations extended beyond the memorial service itself; there was also a lunch for some sixty people at the Everyman Café afterwards, to which none of them was invited. They lunched instead at La Sorpresa, with Sid Gottlieb.

  The memorial service was a huge success, blessed with sunshine. There were readings by Auberon Waugh and Eleanor Bron, and from The Tibetan Book of Life and Death by John Clees There were personal tributes from Alan Bennett, Richard Ingrams and Sid Gottlieb. The Radley Clerkes, pupils from Peter’s old school, sung Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender, and Goodbyee, the latter with Dudley Moore at the piano. The hymns were To Be a Pilgrim and Lord of the Dance, and a recording of E. L. Wisty was played into the church. The order of service reproduced a tribute written by Stephen Fry (sadly unable to attend as he had just pulled off his famous vanishing act), and a potted biography of Peter. His marriages were summed up with the words: ‘Married 1964, 2 daughters. Married 1973. Married Lin, 18 Nov. 1989 (met 1982), 1 step daughter’. Both the dates given for his first two marriages were incorrect.

  All present agreed that the service had been a fitting tribute, although some scepticism was expressed as to whether Peter would have been able to take the extravagance seriously. ‘He’d have gone off halfway through this if he were here,’8 said Spike Milligan. ‘He would have left for the bookmakers,’ added Dave Allen. Dudley, who with some degree of irony was surrounded by a film star’s swarm of press and TV crews wherever he went, was asked what Peter would make of it all if he were looking down on Hampstead. ‘Or looking up,’ he snapped. ‘Actually, I think he would have been mildly embarrassed.’9 David Frost, dissenting, expressed the opinion that it was all ‘wonderful’.10 The tributes, especially Bennett’s, raised a number of laughs. Only Cleese’s Tibetan contribution came in for any specific criticism: Willie Rushton said that Cleese ‘seemed lost, and proved conclusively that this Care in the Community simply is not working’.11 Later, in the book Something Like Fire, Cleese described addressing the service as ‘emotionally speaking, a bit like going over the top at the Somme’, and quoted Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s statement that ‘there is no need to be afraid of death.’12 Peter’s sister Sarah, reviewing his efforts for the Guardian, responded by quoting E. L. Wisty: ‘Isn’t it funny how all the people who say death is nothing to worry about are all very much alive?’13 One person hurt by the memorial service was Rainbow George, who had hoped in vain to be asked to say a few words. He had only discovered the existence of the post-service lunch when he had strolled down to the Everyman Café to enquire about booking it for a similar event. ‘I felt such an idiot when they told me, and I realised I hadn’t been invited,’ he says. He resolved instead that when he finally made enough money to stage his Wembley Stadium concert, he would call it Liver Aid in Peter’s memory. ‘All sorts of people at the service claimed to have known Peter,’ he added. ‘I don’t think anybody knew him. I don’t think he knew himself.’

  Peter’s estate was valued at £908,229 net, £1,095,900 gross. Most of this was tied up in his London and Majorca properties; there was an overdraft of £130,000 on his current account. His will, dated 10 October 1991 and posted to the executors on 12 January 1995, left the bulk of his estate to Lin, with one or two significant exceptions. His Majorcan property interests went to Lucy and Daisy; his Lichtenstein-based company Aspera was divided between Judy, his daughters and his sisters; his majority shares in Private Eye were left not in the sole care of Lin, but divided three ways between Lin, Sarah and Elizabeth, giving no one overall control of the magazine; and his precious Tiffany lamp was bequeathed to Dudley. He had also taken the decision to appoint two executors, rather than one: Lin and Sarah were jointly named. Lin seemed to Sarah to be upset at one or two items in the will: the Tiffany lamp, she maintained, would have been better bequeathed to John Cleese,
who ‘hadn’t stopped crying for a week since Peter’s death.’

  Lin requested that Sarah maintain a seemly discretion about the division of Peter’s Eye shares, as she said she did not wish any publicity. She also asked her brother, Yin Chong, to talk to the magazine’s Managing Director. Despite its cheap appearance and £10 prizes to readers, the magazine was swimming with money. According to the most recent accounts at Companies House, the Eye had made a pre-tax profit in 1992 of £600,000. It also had £1.5 million on bank deposit, a £1.7 million surplus in the pension fund and a cash mountain in excess of £2.2 million. Peter’s original cash injection of £1,500 (about £16,000 in today’s money) had exploded in value. Lin and Yin were determined that she should continue to receive an income from the magazine. The Eye staff, knowing nothing of the three-way share split, assumed that Lin was their new owner, and proceeded to talk to her on that basis. She made no attempt to inform them of the actual distribution of the shares.

  Erroneously believing themselves to be at the beck and call of a new regime, the Eye staff acted defiantly. Ian Hislop threatened to resign if the new ‘owner’ tried to interfere: ‘She can try if she likes, but Private Eye will continue as before. There may be a change of ownership but it’s going to be run from here by the people who run it anyway. We won’t be under her.’14 David Cash added that ‘If anyone started messing around with the Eye, it could all sort of crumble. It’s one of the few totally independent publications around.’15 Richard Ingrams affixed a sign to the front door of the Carlisle Street offices bearing the words Private Eye in Chinese. It was only by sheer coincidence that the Eye staff discovered the truth. After Peter’s memorial service his sister Sarah was leaving the La Sorpresa restaurant when she spotted Ian Hislop and Paul Merton on the steps of the Everyman Café, on their way out of Lin’s post-service lunch. She went across and introduced herself to Hislop as one of Private Eye’s new major shareholders. He was both dumbfounded and delighted, and rushed off to phone David Cash with the ‘wonderful news’. He later informed the Daily Mail that ‘No one has control. Peter made sure there was no largest single shareholder, which was presumably deliberate since he wasn’t a fool by anyone’s imagination.’16