Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Sadly Gwen did not live to see the production. Throughout the Nineties with support from her daughter and her close friends within the Grand Order of Lady Ratlings she had enjoyed some consolation in being able to relive the memories of happier times. On 27 August 1986, she wrote to Miff when he was unwell, revealing her intrinsically cheery and caring self and, between the lines, appearing to atone for so much of the unpleasantness over the years:

  Dear Miff

  We are all very sorry indeed that you are under the weather. One thing, you look after your self and are pretty fit. On the other hand, you’ve always been a ‘worry guts’ and you’ve got to pack it in. If you do what Terence, the Latin dramatist says, I know you are going to be fine: “If you cannot do what you wish, wish what you can do.”

  We all send our very, very sincere best wishes to you.

  As ever,

  Gwen

  She too died from bronchopneumonia on 27 October 2002, six months before Jus’ Like That! opened at London’s Garrick Theatre. Her will revealed the true extent of the estate she had built up with her husband over the years, namely £1,845,328.00 gross, £1,839,660.00 net. In an ironic footnote to all their lives, two years earlier Miff’s widow, Beatrice, had passed away leaving £330,384.00 gross, £315,803.00 net, close enough to fifteen per cent of their clients’ wealth for one to reflect, ‘In death, as in life.’

  Fortuitously Gwen was able to meet Jerome just two weeks before she passed away. Late and harassed from being a witness to a motor accident between his own home and Chiswick, Jerome came into her presence, imposing but shy, just a little distraught from the journey, just a trifle detached from the world. As he walked across the space where Tommy had rehearsed a thousand shows, she gave him the once–over, cast a glance at me, and then passed judgement, ‘He’ll do!’ To know Tommy’s Dove is to realize that no actor could have received a stronger endorsement.

  From the first morning of rehearsal we were fully conscious we were engaged in an act of resurrection, entrusted with the task of protecting the flame of the comic spirit held most dear in recent British memory. Every available archive tape of Cooper was perused and analysed. Slowly Jerome absorbed the man. And then I was able to play my trump card. I had never forgotten the video-cassette of his final appearance that I still had locked away at home among my personal papers. I suggested that Simon and Jerome and I should allow ourselves a single viewing. The experience proved to be as emotional as watching the programme the very first time around nineteen years before. Memory is selective. I certainly recalled the business with the bicycle handlebars and the shaving joke. I cannot pretend that I remembered the bit with the coins in the can. I had totally forgotten his hilarious use of a dummy hand attached to a black banner which he held in front of a bell on a table to make it supposedly ring by itself, while all the while his free hand was blatantly doing the job for him. His entrance with a giant tube of Tunes cough sweets stuck on his head carried a certain resonance. The memories, however, were as nothing compared with what we now heard. His exact opening words sent a respectful shiver down our spines: ‘Do you believe in reincarnation? Sometimes I think I’m Beethoven come back. I do really, because I’ve had tunes through my head all day.’ But that was not all. The giant packet of Tunes said so much more. There, spelt out for all to read, was the line, ‘Helps you breathe more easily.’ The unintentional black humour, not to mention the acknowledgement of the process of reincarnation we were undergoing on his behalf, left us speechless, suspended in a curious fez-coloured limbo between black sadness and rosy elation. It was as if Tommy was speaking to us across the years. The end of his act, because it was the end of his life, had been disturbing. Everyone had overlooked the fact that the beginning – in the way it addressed matters of life and death – had been quite as upsetting. It was hard to watch the sequence again without feeling that a chilling intimation of his own mortality must have lingered in the air that day.

  It came as a surprise to learn from his daughter that Tommy had a spiritual dimension that expressed itself in an actual belief in reincarnation. According to Vicky, her mother was more pragmatic, avowing that when you die you die, while her father pondered with considerable depth whether upon his death his soul would pass into somebody else: ‘He would say, “What happens to our minds when we die? What do we do with all that we’ve learnt on this earth? Where does the mind go?” He came to the conclusion that reincarnation was the answer. He believed in the magical things that the naked eye can’t see.’ He had once said to Mary Kay, ‘Just think of being burned. Ashes to ashes. Suppose you’re not quite gone. Not quite dead.’ It reads like a joke, but was contemplated with a profound seriousness that Mary feels played its own part in undermining his health. Perhaps surprisingly for a practising magician whose tricks were grounded in the pedestrian methods of the hocus pocus craft his personal position along the sliding scale between secular practicability and spiritual awareness was much closer to the latter.

  I would position myself towards the other end of that scale, but the experience of the production on its out-of-town tryout tour was overloaded with moments that challenged one’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual equilibrium. How else to account for the occasion when I drew to Simon’s attention that it was Tommy’s birthday, only to hear a few minutes later the strains of ‘Happy Birthday’ accompanying a cake on stage for Jerome, whose birthday had been a few days before while the production was in transit? There was the unsettling frequency with which I was besieged by fez imagery – in the lampshades that adorn the choir stalls in Malvern Priory; the single tarboosh discovered on the luggage rack on the train home from the West Country with not a member of the company in sight; the name and logo of the restaurant in Oxford where at total random my wife and I found ourselves taking Vicky for a meal before the show, ‘Tarbouch’, a variant spelling from the original Arabic. A substantial part of the first half of Jus’ Like That! takes place in Tommy’s dressing room. With this in mind, the weekend between Malvern and Oxford I took from my shelves the text of Ronald Harwood’s dressing room drama, The Dresser to check out somebody else’s take on presenting backstage onstage. The part of the veteran barnstorming actor in that play, supposedly based on Donald Wolfit, had been originated by the magnificent Freddie Jones. On Monday night in Oxford, who should appear in the auditorium but Jones himself? I have no explanation for these strange coincidences, other than to add that when Vicky after watching the show observed, ‘It is almost as if Jerome is reincarnating my father,’ she struck a chord that no open-minded soul could dismiss out of hand.

  Barry Cryer put it another way and, in the process, provided the answer to that unanswerable question we had set ourselves at the audition stage: ‘The point is that Jerome Flynn didn’t become Tommy Cooper – Tommy Cooper became Jerome Flynn. There was no sense of someone doing an impression. And at the end they were cheering for both of them.’ Jerome’s admiration for Cooper had been fired by that of his father, whose funeral took place the day after his audition. Jerome and his friends had held Tommy evenings, where you paid a forfeit if you lapsed out of the Cooper voice. He and television co-star, Robson Green had often conversed with each other on the telephone as Tommy. But stand-up comedy had at no point played a part in his career, making it all the more surprising that when he went on stage he found himself ad-libbing as Cooper would have done, as with this response to a heckler Vicky noted at Eastbourne: ‘I remember having my first drink too.’ You can learn the lines, practice the magic, enact the mannerisms, but how do you acquire a comic mind-set that has played no part in your life before? Jerome has no idea where lines like this came from. However mystical the process, he was able to recreate far more than the man. As Simon Callow pointed out, ‘If the play were just an impersonation there would be little point to it. The interplay between an audience and Tommy could be a really wonderful thing … we’re recreating the impact that person had.’ Ultimately, I think we all felt that somehow Tommy was behind us all, up
there pulling the strings like George Bernard Shaw on the My Fair Lady poster.

  Even Tommy would be impressed by the way his legend endures as part of the fabric of British cultural life. There can be no dispute that his reputation has survived his death more potently than that of any of his comedy contemporaries, and in a way unconnected with television re-runs, which have in fact been comparatively sparse when set against the saturation repeats of the Dad’s Army school of sitcom and the overblown promotion by the BBC of Morecambe and Wise after Eric’s death, oblivious of the fact that their freshest and greatest personal comedic hour had arguably been working for Lew Grade at ATV in the Sixties. Meanwhile Tommy Cooper has quietly entered the folklore of the country. His jokes and mannerisms and catchphrases will live on in the manner of nursery rhymes and playground chants, a vibrant part of the heritage of a nation at play. This is a far greater testimony to his greatness than the fact that on those interminable polls of ‘all time greatest comics’ that newspapers and television channels fling in our faces in the sad name of celebrity culture he invariably comes near the top of British funny men, if not – as with the case of the Readers’ Digest poll in 2004 and that conducted by the sponsors of Comic Relief in 2005 – at number one. Such surveys are necessarily driven by the memory span of those who participate in them. It is impressive that Cooper still holds his own today among fly-by-night names that will be forgotten in another twenty-five years. In truth, behind the wacky props and traditional theatrical setting, he was always more alternative – in the true subversive sense of the word – than any of the parvenu younger performers depressingly cultivated by the television production machine to fit a limited, laddish eighteen to thirty-two year old demographic.

  The world of stage magic that Cooper loved so much may be seen as a metaphor for the whole death and resurrection motif, as people are transported inexplicably through time and space and in the cause of entertainment brought back to existence from sawing, decapitation, dismemberment, and other fates beyond man’s worst imagining. Tommy would probably see it as his greatest achievement that his continuing fame is its own form of resurrection, even if he could never have envisaged that the first part of the big trick – one minute he was there, the next he was gone – would be paraded on live television in front of so many. But perhaps he did. I often wonder if the ghost of Bert Lahr’s alter ego flitted through his consciousness that sad April day. But I take heart from a comment overheard from a couple on the opening night on tour at the Malvern Festival Theatre: ‘He’ll never go away now.’ Freddie Jones at Oxford added, ‘It’sasifhe’s never been away.’ In London one reviewer said all we wanted to hear, ‘I laughed to the bottom of my soul.’ The resurrection was complete.

  FOURTEEN

  The Real Me

  There was a routine in which Tommy used to joke about his visit to the psychiatrist: ‘He said I wasn’t the real me. Or you. D’you know what I’m talking about? I don’t.’ All of us are far more complex creatures than we care to admit and there was no reason why Tommy Cooper should prove to be a special case, however uncomplicated his exterior might appear. In the growing area of comedy biography it has become a cliché to tender obeisance to the tortured soul that supposedly lurks beneath the comic persona. As we have seen, Tommy certainly had his demons, but I question whether he was more troubled than the rest of us. Always first in line to be amazed by the latest miracle to arrive on the magic scene, he maintained a child’s wonder to the end of his life. Like many a child he had an impulsive temper and a love of the spotlight. His main reason for living was making people laugh and sharing that wonder. In many ways he would have ceased to be the moment that gift was taken from him. But it is a fact of life that there is no such person as the great comedian who does not carry a cross for the responsibility that commits him to conjure laughter out of the crowd. The catalyst is fear and this can manifest itself in a number of ways – meanness, lateness, vagueness, quirkiness, rudeness, anger, sheer bloody mindedness. Cooper was no exception, but not content with a single failing would work his way through them all, much in the way he would obsessively try every patent medicine on the shelf.

  There can be no question that his whole career was pervaded by the insecurity of whether he deserved the accolades that the spotlight accorded him. This may provide a psychological clue to his increasing lack of punctuality in later years. Few entertainers have been guaranteed the waves of public affection that washed over him the moment he set foot on stage, and yet he would do everything –fixing his buttonhole, tweaking his hair, adjusting a prop for the umpteenth time – to prolong the moment when he had to step out of the dressing room door. That he should contrive a sequence, however expedient it might at times have been, where he appeared to be locked in the same room carries its own message. When he walked out on stage he was always genuinely taken aback by the reception he received, however many times it occurred during his career. This was the mark of a genuinely modest and humble man to whom the self-regarding swagger of the traditional star was alien, although he was the first to be impressed by the panache of others. When Liberace and Jerry Lewis – with both of whom he had established a dialogue in the past – gave his telephone calls the cold shoulder on a visit to America in the mid Seventies he was genuinely, if naively shocked, unable to come to terms with the more shallow side of show business, ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ one day and forgotten the next.

  The general consensus of those who knew him is that he was the most popular, most unassuming guy in the business. To be in his company in a crowd for just five minutes was to have this confirmed, not least because to be in his company was to laugh. Eric Morecambe said of him, ‘I never met anybody who disliked him as a man,’ adding, ‘if you didn’t like Tommy Cooper, you didn’t like comedy.’ As has been said, there was no side to him. For a comic whose act was for all its simplicity rooted in the fantastical, he was nothing if not down to earth, according to his son always happiest when treated like one of the lads in the local who stood his round and joined in a game of darts with the rest. With Gwen to help him keep those outsize feet on the ground, he was, in the words of his friend, Peter Hudson, a genuine case of ‘what you see is what you get’. David Hemingway, who built many of Tommy’s props in later years, recalls the impression he made on his family when he would drop by their stand at a magic convention to say ‘Hello’: ‘He was the most polite man of all the show people we met, with no “ego” whatsoever.’

  That modesty extended to the praise he would bestow on others at his own expense. As producer Royston Mayoh observed, ‘If you took him into a corner and told him he was the greatest comedian in the world – which he is – or that millions of people fell about laughing every time he walked on, he’d never believe you. He is totally unaware of the impact he has.’ According to Gwen, he contrived never to miss people like Morecambe and Wise or Frankie Howerd on television and wandered around the house, lost in praise, laughing for hours afterwards, unable to accept that he was up there in their class. Milligan was another personal hero. When Norma Farnes, Spike’s manager, rang to tell him that her client had included a short poem celebrating Cooper in a collection entitled ‘Goblins’ he was over the moon: ‘That’s one of the nicest things that’s happened to me,’ adding with humility, ‘You know, among all of us Spike’s the one with the original talent.’ Not surprisingly he had no time for ceremony of any kind. Jimmy Tarbuck recalls the Foyle’s literary lunch he attended with Tommy. Christina Foyle was addressing the assembled crowd. Halfway through her speech Tommy leaned over to Jimmy and sotto voce asked, ‘Could you pass the salt? This is boring the arse off me.’ At which point the grande dame of the book world turned to the younger comedian and enquired, ‘And what did Mr Cooper say?’ ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t really hear,’ at which the incorrigible pair became creased up with laughter like a couple of schoolboys.

  He might have refused to be the subject of This Is Your Life, but at Thames he received the far greater honour of ha
ving the chef make his favourite rice pudding whenever he was recording his show. Johnny Speight recalled him as the only star he ever knew who walked around with a carrier bag containing his own sandwiches and half a dozen cans of beer. On one occasion when they were at the BBC together there was a fire alarm. Tommy sensing – perhaps knowing – that it was not the real thing stayed inside eating his sandwiches and drinking his beer until bureaucracy finished playing its games and everyone returned. It would have been quite out of character to have played along with the exercise. Once Speight accompanied Cooper, television producer Dennis Main Wilson and their wives on a train journey to have lunch with Carl Giles, the cartoonist at his Essex home. He met up with the Coopers in the buffet at Liverpool Street Station, where he found them eating their sandwiches on British Rail plates and drinking their flask of coffee out of British Rail cups. When Johnny went to get his own cup, Tommy shouted out, ‘Don’t have one of theirs. It’s rubbish!’ and turned to the girl behind the counter and asked, ‘Have you got a cup and saucer for Mr Speight, please?’ Not for the only time, the laughter excused the impertinence. On the return trip Dennis was holding forth in his usual garrulous fashion, when Tommy excused himself to go the lavatory. After a while Gwen became worried that he had been away for so long and asked Johnny to investigate. Cooper was nowhere to be seen. Eventually he discovered a cubicle showing the engaged sign. He shouted out to Tommy or whoever was inside, but gained no response. He banged on the door and there was still no answer. Fearing the worse, he summoned the guard and prevailed upon him to break the door down. As the man put all his weight against the lock, the familiar head came round the door. Speight remembered, ‘There was Tommy sitting on the toilet with his big feet stretched out – he’s a big man and he filled it – and he said, “Has he stopped talking yet?”’