by John Fisher
There comes a moment when enthusiasm shifts to obsession, as Gwen and Mary found. But, while his brain may have been disconnected from reality if by that we mean politics, sport and the world at large, there is no evidence to show that Cooper ever allowed his passion to betray his professionalism. Bob Hayden, a respected semi-professional magician from Southampton, recalls spending an evening back stage with Tommy during the run of the 1957 London Palladium pantomime, Robinson Crusoe, a production that entailed many more entrances and exits than a conventional variety show. He is still impressed by the way in which throughout the evening Cooper would switch on and off between the professional job on the one hand and his total preoccupation with coin twiddling and the minutiae of magical technique the next. The pocket trick en vogue was one called the Okito Box, a small metal container along pillbox lines in which a coin could be made to vanish and reappear at will. While Tommy was fixated on learning from Bob how much dexterity was required to accomplish this without loss of face, he also knew to the nth degree how many footsteps were required to walk from dressing room to stage, the split second scheduling of this exchange with co-star Arthur Askey, or that with David Whitfield. The incident provides a valuable insight not only into his love of magic, but also into a surprisingly well ordered mind. In his case the line between love and lunacy, so often a by-product of obsessive behaviour, was kept distinct.
The fascination of magic, of course, is wrapped up in the secrets of the craft, on a level with the exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge that has driven scientists and explorers from ancient times. To that can be added the capacity to appear to be doing what is clearly impossible, providing not merely enjoyment for others, but a considerable feeling of personal one-upmanship in the process. But, as the Hayden encounter may intimate, the most fun magicians have is in the company of their fellow magicians. For one thing magicians love to fool each other. In addition to the magic shops and the magic clubs a magic convention attracting anything from between 100 to 3,000 predominantly amateur and semiprofessional registrants is probably staged in the United Kingdom on an almost weekly basis, in settings ranging from the magnificence of the Blackpool Opera House to the cosiness of the lowliest village hall. It always surprises lay people to learn that at an international level, there is a circuit on which it is possible for a magician to earn his livelihood through performing, lecturing and selling his merchandise to other magicians without encountering a member of the public. These occasions represent a strange hybrid world where the mysterious mingles with the commonplace. If the public were to be admitted to anything but the performances of the classier acts the image of the genre would plummet considerably, but redeeming the whole atmosphere is an extraordinary bond of fraternity and friendship, only occasionally undermined by the feuding that will exist in any tightly knit community.
Tommy had a hilarious skit that he used to act out at parties, often enhanced by wearing a bowler hat to represent the man who came through the door. It went like this: ‘Mind you, I could do without some of the visitors I get back stage. It’s Monday night. Knock, knock. “Come in.” “Good evening, Mr Cooper, I’m from the Doncaster Magicians’ Club.” “Oh yes?” “Yes, and I just want on behalf of the Doncaster Magicians’ Club to wish you welcome.” “Thank you very much.” He’d go out and the next night, the Tuesday night, he’d come back. Knock on the door. “Come in.” “Well, you remember me, Mr Cooper, from the Doncaster Magicians’ Club. I was in to see the show again tonight. Great fun, Tom. The way you did that trick with the silk handkerchief. Wonderful!” And on like that. Same the following night, the Wednesday, but no knock this time. Straight through the door. “Great again, Tom. But you didn’t have the handkerchief in tonight, did you Tom?” He’s got his wife with him now too. Thursday night, again, the door opens. You’ve guessed it! “Hang on a minute, Tom. Here, Gladys, Jim, Pete, come here. I want you all to meet Tom.” By the end of the week all his bleeding relatives are in here drinking my best whisky. It’s not on, is it?’ It was so funny that in June 1956 the comedian Digby Wolfe, who eventually went to America and became a writer for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, sought to recreate it for one of his own television shows. Needless to say Tommy did not grant permission. Had his name been attached to it, the airing would have lost him many friends within the brotherhood of magic. More importantly, he knew that as he toured the country, whatever the name of the provincial society, when it came back to the basics of the hobby they all shared, he was as bad as the worst of them.
He was totally accepted within this world. With one notorious exception, when an official attempted to refuse him entry to a major magic convention in Brighton in the mid-Seventies, his celebrity never stood in the way of the privacy he craved at such events. He never minded signing autographs, but for most of the time he was allowed to mingle in the crowd, sounding out items for his act among the ‘Dealers’ – the indispensable trade fair where you could buy anything from an ‘Atomic Vase’ to a ‘Confabulation Wallet’, from a ‘Nudist Deck’ to a ‘Nemo Card Castle’– and genuinely appreciating the subtleties of the performers in the stage and ‘close-up’ shows, envying their inventive acumen and advanced manipulative skills as much as they revered his comedic gifts. And then at the end of the day, when he had a chance to share and show tricks among his peers in an informal setting over a drink or two or three, he came alive.
In the Cooper mind the landscape of central London was defined not merely by nightclubs, theatres and the memories of sentry duty. As the Forties became the Fifties Tommy would spend every minute at his disposal rattling around the loop of the magic supply houses like a ball bearing on a bagatelle board. In addition to Davenport’s, there was Harry Stanley with his Unique Magic Studio in Wardour Street, Max Andrews in Archer Street, Oscar Oswald on Duke Street Hill and Jack Hughes a few stops along the Northern Line at Colindale, supplemented by the flagship magic departments within the larger stores like Hamleys, Gamages, and of course, Ellisdons. In due course Ron MacMillan would open his International Magic Studio near the top of Leather Lane, Alan Alan would be forever identified with his ‘Magic Spot’ in Southampton Row, and Ken Brooke would move into Wardour Street, by which time Harry Stanley had relocated via Frith Street to Brewer Street. They were not all glamorous abodes. Tommy kept up a perpetual trek up dingy flights of stairs and along drab corridors, but as his reputation grew the men who purveyed the magic became all the more pleased to see him, knowing that the inclusion of one of their items in his act could well result in increased sales, not least with television exposure. In the Sixties Tommy often dragged his friend, Eric Sykes along with him on these expeditions. As Eric has pointed out, they were so pleased to give him the latest novelty on their shelves that money seldom changed hands.
The most influential of these dealers was Harry Stanley. A sometime musician with the Jack Hylton band, he and Miff Ferrie shared a common ground that made him especially interested in the young entertainer’s progress. It was never Harry’s mission merely to sell the artefacts of the magician’s act. As an entrepreneur in his own right he promoted the craft in the eyes of the general public through West End shows and his involvement in the pioneering days of Commercial Television. More than any other individual, Stanley, through his publications and ability to spot a trend, shaped the British magical culture of the Fifties. One Sunday a month he would stage a small, intimate magic convention for magicians and their families at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, an event readily accepted by Cooper in his formative years as a platform upon which to try out new material without embarrassment. Harry certainly spotted the Cooper potential and was happy to spread the name by using Tommy’s endorsement of several of his lines in his early catalogues, the pages of which proclaim ‘Tommy Cooper enjoys using the Unique New Comedy Clock’ and à propos of ‘Playing Cards’ (a small harmonica concealed in a dummy pack of cards), ‘I sold the first one to Tommy Cooper and he has had plenty of fun using it.’
In time Tommy also s
truck up a rapport with Edwin Hooper. Known throughout the trade simply as ‘Edwin the Magician’, he kept a magic supply house in the unlikely venue of Bideford on the north coast of Devon. In a relatively short time this small time children’s entertainer built his business, ‘The Supreme Magic Company’, into the largest postal service for magicians in the world. No sooner had Tommy received the latest Supreme catalogue or sales sheet than he would phone Edwin, usually with the instruction, ‘Send one of each.’ Hooper would then point out to Cooper that he had already purchased some of these items and that besides some of them would not suit his form of presentation. He used to reply: ‘Never mind. Send them anyway. I’m just a big kid and it’s like Christmas when I receive your parcels!’ On one occasion Edwin even put pen to paper to spell out his dilemma: ‘You ask us to send the “Three Stroke Ball Production” – two sets. We are not sending these until we have your confirmation to do so … this is not an easy trick to do … so I thought we had better warn you first.’ However fair or unfair his assessment of Tommy’s digital skill, perhaps he had visions of his famous customer ruining the trick before the gaze of millions on live television and curtailing the prospect of further sales in the process. Edwin need not have worried. Tommy’s acquisitive tendencies never clouded his editorial judgement in knowing what was right for his act. The majority of his purchases were never performed in public, which not surprisingly – and perhaps mercifully – is the fate of most magic traded by catalogue, over the counter or, today, by means of the internet.
Cooper had an unerring instinct for the material that would suit him best. Into this category came the many variations of the so-called sucker trick, that genre in the magician’s repertoire that allowed him to tease our expectations like a monkey on a stick, only to reveal at the finish that we were no nearer the true explanation. For example, over many years he taught audiences how to change the colour of a green handkerchief to red by concealing a red one secretly in the hand beforehand. When you pushed in the green, the red one emerged. Then when he opened his hand, the green handkerchief, contrary to all expectation, had disappeared. In an item like this digital skill and the comic situation combined to make a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts. Otherwise Tommy was true to his Magic Circle code and remained firmly against exposure, conceding in his defence that the secret of the bottle and glass trick that he did give away had been disclosed by clowns for years. So called secret threads being pulled obviously from the wings fell into the same category. Otherwise, as he claimed to magical supplier, Derek Lever towards the end of his life, ‘I would never buy a trick from a dealer and then expose it because I know I am ruining that man’s living. I am against exposure.’
Orson Welles, speaking from a more artistic point of view, once described a magic trick exposed as being ‘as publicly attractive as an unmade bed’. Of course more magical secrets have been divulged through bad performance than in any other way, so in one respect Tommy, while anxious to stay on the side of the magic fraternity, could be said to have been acting against the grain of the burlesque ideal in adopting this attitude. On one occasion there was a hiccough in his relationship with Edwin Hooper when he revealed the working of a vanishing clock trick on one of his television shows. In the form sold by ‘Supreme Magic’ it was a lousy trick, something that probably attracted Tommy to it in the first place – clocks just do not resemble wooden cubes like dice with a two-dimensional face stuck on the front – but he conceded the error of his ways, agreed that the ‘accident’ should have been edited out of the show, and never made the same mistake again.
So many ‘Unique’ and ‘Supreme’ items found their way into the Cooper act that one might have been forgiven for thinking Tommy had shares in both businesses. He didn’t. Instead, he set up his own magic shop. The enterprise would appear to have been a meeting point for his own fantasies and the need to find something practical for Gwen to do. Premises, if that is what they could be called, were found in Shaftesbury Avenue: those who recall going there in the Sixties remember the shop as little wider than a corridor with a counter across and the only exit through the front door. ‘Magic and Fun Shop’ went up on the fascia and Alan Alan, yet to establish his own shop, was installed as manager, with Gwen looking after the business side behind the scenes. It never had serious pretensions to be anything but an outlet for selling jokes, masks, novelties and simple tricks to the public, but it did well. Gwen once confided in me that it was nothing for her to drive up on a Saturday afternoon and be handed five hundred pounds in readies for the week’s takings, and that was after Alan had taken his share. She consulted Miff whether they should put Tommy’s name above the shop. Miff demurred and she agreed, the venture being considered not prestigious enough at a time in his career when his star was rising high. That conversation in November 1961 ended with her expressing admiration for Eamonn Andrews and his involvement in Commercial Television in Ireland. Miff reported, ‘She would like to get some shares!’ In contrast, the shop appears to have been the only business opportunity in which Tommy became involved during his whole career. In time interest waned and Alan, who also happened to be the world’s top escape artist, moved on to other career opportunities.
Tommy’s personal popularity was sublime and magicians readily conceded their best bits to him – a form of ‘I surrender’ in the face of his prodigious talent. One such was Peter Newcombe, an insurance executive by day and sometime secretary of The Magic Circle, whose own act acted as the slipway for some of Tommy’s best. Magicians in the know always acknowledged Peter as Cooper set light to the ‘flash’ paper in the chromium prop known as the dove pan: ‘Just a flash in the pan!’ Or when he produced three coins and dropped them into a can, ‘One, two, three,’ at which point a jet of water squirted upwards and Cooper said with similar matter of fact-ness, ‘Three Coins in the Fountain!’ Ian Adair, a prolific ideas man and second lieutenant to Edwin Hooper at ‘Supreme’ in Bideford, kept Tommy supplied with a veritable stream of gags including ‘I’ve had a pain here all day’, ‘Bagpipes’, and ‘Light Ale’, words that only become funny when accompanied by Tommy taking a pane of glass from inside his jacket, throwing two pipes into a paper bag and causing the glass of beer in his hand to illuminate from inside. The current Magic Circle president, Alan Shaxon recalls the occasion at headquarters when member Len Blease demonstrated an effect in which his underpants ended up secured to a length of rope. The evening concluded with a session in the Gents with Len, Alan, and several others rigging up Tommy, his trousers round his ankles, for this extraordinary feat of topology. Len’s diminutive stature up against the Goliath Cooper only underlined the missed opportunity for a television sketch that should have materialized but never did.
His obsession fed his persistence if he saw a piece of business he had to have. In the early Seventies, Paul Daniels was appearing as a supporting act to Michael Bentine in Jersey. Tommy came to see his old friend from the Windmill days and in the process caught the Daniels act, a highlight of which featured a cardboard puppet frog that found cards chosen by the audience. Come the early hours of the following morning Tommy was still in Paul’s dressing room begging him to let him have the frog. The more Paul explained that it represented a good eight minutes in his act and couldn’t be replaced, the more Tommy kept at him: ‘Go on, give me the frog.’ Finally he said, ‘I tell you what. I’ll tell you a good joke.’ He did more than a joke. He walked out on to the empty stage and did a routine about a conjuror and his assistant in which he played both the parts, the magician constantly admonishing the girl, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ Paul was reduced to hysterics as Tommy rushed back and forth across the stage acting out this charade. He then walked back to his seat, sat down and said ‘Now, give me the frog.’ Paul, privileged to have been an audience of one at a special showing of a routine Tommy does not appear to have performed at any other time, gave him the frog.
It is no surprise that holidays were also focused on magic. Wherever he went in the world he wo
uld be drawn like a magnet to the nearest magic shop. There was the infamous occasion when the Coopers had no sooner arrived at their Manhattan hotel than Tommy went in search of his favourite New York magic emporium. By the time the session ended he had forgotten the name of the hotel and after several hours of tramping the streets of the Big Apple finally had to phone home to their housekeeper, Sheila to find out where he was staying. He arrived back in the room as though nothing had happened, with Gwen considerably agitated. It was 1980 and he had not long been out of hospital. Las Vegas with its overriding air of make-believe was his favourite destination. Even before it became the unofficial capital of stage magic on the back of the success of master resident illusionists, Siegfried and Roy, its surreal environs offered magic stores and demonstrations of close quarter wizardry galore. Gwen was content to stay by the pool.
His closest friend in America was the brilliant prestidigitator, the ‘Amusing and Confusing’ Johnny Paul. A pioneer of the interest in close-up magic from the time he performed regularly behind the bar of his Magic Lounge in his native Chicago, he moved in the Fifties to Las Vegas as the Entertainments Director of the Showboat Hotel and Casino, in which capacity he was also expected to perform for the patrons. In the artificial atmosphere of the neon neo-polis his presence proved as genuine and as engaging as the sunset over the Nevada Mountains. In many ways he could have been Tommy’s secret American sibling. A big burly man with large floppy hands, only the spectacles stood in the way of instant comparison. One of his standard lines was ‘Don’t applaud. Keep drinking. The more you drink, the better I get.’ In interviews Tommy used to use a line that may well have been personalized from the original: ‘I never drink before a show. If I did, my tricks might start to go right.’ Paul’s carnival sense of humour was exactly on Tommy’s wavelength, although he did not set out to burlesque magic, merely to cloak conventional magical mysteries in the funniest dressing possible. To this he brought a sheer technical brilliance that was awe-inspiring, the envy of Tommy and all his fellow professionals. When Johnny came into London, as he frequently did, to make an appearance on British television, he would invariably end up at the Cooper abode in Chiswick for a late night session. One of his signature tricks was the effect in which a signed and chosen card finds itself pinned to the wall or ceiling when thrown into the air. Tommy managed to get his guest to show him the basic workings of the miracle. His daughter, Vicky recalls the aftermath: ‘I remember Dad was really jealous about this trick. He spent the whole day practising and when I came home from school he produced a pack of cards and said “Pick one.” I did and he threw them against the wall. They all fell down. We looked at each other and just started to laugh hysterically.’
