Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Many people might be surprised to learn that a character like this could ever be depressed. He was specific to journalist Alan Kennaugh, ‘Never associate with miserable people. They’ll drag you down to their own depression.’ Lynda Lee Potter once recalled the impact he made upon her and her father a few weeks after her mother died: ‘We laughed until our laughter turned to tears and we couldn’t stop crying. It was a tremendous release of grief … the truly great comics help people through despair in a way they probably never know.’ And yet Cooper was shrewd enough to recognize the responsibility on his shoulders: ‘For most people life is a bloody awful grind. They do jobs they hate, if they are lucky enough to have a job. So when someone comes along who makes them forget their troubles, it’s a relief for them.’ He meant the remark as a measure of his own relative happiness, but there can be no denying the burden he carried, constantly worried whether he was funny enough.

  Both Barry Cryer and I have shared the company of a more solemn Cooper, a quieter man searching for a private space, staring into the distance with nothing to say, in total contrast with the idea that he was ‘always on’. To his credit, Miff was always sensitive to these pressures. As he was quoted earlier, ‘I know only too well how you have to put the act “on and off”, and I fully realise that it is sometimes just not humanly possible for this effort to be maintained.’ Everyone deserves a chance to step back from the parade, not only to recharge one’s energy but to realign one’s emotional equilibrium. The requisite silence, loneliness even, is not only compensation for the giddy sociability that comes with success, but a condition of the closeness that friendship brings. At moments like these he surely reflected upon the tug of war between his private self and the public image. He never fully came to terms with the physical advantages in the name of comedy that birth had given him. This not only caused him distress when people laughed at him in unexpected, non-theatrical situations when he wasn’t supposed to be funny, but caused him to be more anxious about whether they would respond when a contract made their laughter binding. He never took the latter for granted. In time he came to an extent to deal with the former situation by giving in to it. Mary Kay is perceptive on this aspect of Cooper: ‘If the world was going to say that he was in any way grotesque, he would answer by saying the same before they could. He would act the part out in public – the awkward, bumbling, unhinged giant that the public seemed to expect.’ In this way he compensated by pre-empting the situation, but it undoubtedly imposed a strain. Here too she found some basis for his drinking: ‘It helped to dissolve the barrier that he felt between the real man and the stage figure.’

  David Hemingway was also allowed access to the doubts and deeper mental recesses of the man. On the occasion Tommy had his leg in plaster in Manchester, he reasoned quite seriously to his friend, ‘If I worked in an office, I wouldn’t have to work this week, would I? I’d be at home lying down and I’d be paid. But if I don’t go on stage, they won’t pay me. It’s the only way I can get the money. It’s not right.’ Those last three words became a private mantra with him. For all his star status he could not accept that the rules that applied to the less-advantaged man in the street did not apply to him. He then added, ‘Do you know what the worst thing about it is? When I walk out tonight they’ll laugh. They’ll laugh at my leg. It’s not right.’ On another occasion, in what amounted almost to a mirror image of the situation, David was waiting for him backstage at the Palladium during rehearsals that were placing him under considerable stress. He came in and said, ‘I wish I could go out in the street and fall down and break my leg.’ Naively Hemingway asked ‘Why?’‘I wouldn’t have to go on, would I? I could go to hospital instead.’ Peter Hudson recalls the occasion Tommy suffered a car accident on the way to the show. It was a matter of deadly seriousness, one of the few occasions when lateness was justified. No sooner had he arrived at the theatre than he launched into an explanation for cast and crew: ‘I was on the M2 and I accelerated a bit quickly and my head hit like this and I slid on the hard shoulder like that …’ By now everyone was in stitches, but the reality was that he could have killed himself. It hurt him that they should find it so funny.

  His frustration was palpable in another area. For all the success comedy brought him, he would almost certainly have swapped everything for the opportunity to step into the shoes of his idol, the suave American prestidigitator Channing Pollock, who in the Fifties redefined the image of the stage magician as he stood with aristocratic aloofness in the centre of the stage and sculpted doves out of the air with his sinuous fingers. Immaculate in white tie and tails, he was often referred to as ‘the most beautiful man in the world’ and was arguably the first magician to bring genuine sex appeal to the trade of the tricks. He epitomized both elegance and technical perfection in a magic act and went on to enjoy a successful career as a movie star in European cinema. Tommy was as jealous as the next humble hocus pocus worker. Henry Lewis, the Vice-President of The Magic Circle, who advised Tommy on many matters in a professional business capacity, is convinced that as long as the example of Pollock confused his ambition he never considered himself truly fulfilled. He saw himself as a magician by trade and, as long as Pollock was there, he felt he could never claim to have truly succeeded, even feeling guilty that through comedy he had taken what some might have perceived – misguidedly – as the easier route. Channing, who died in March 2006 as this book was nearing completion, became a friend of Cooper as they competed for attention in West End production shows in the Fifties. A deep, meditative man, he always acknowledged his admiration for the fellow in the fez for providing a platform for the popularization of magic that capitalized on his unique style. In that respect alone they had far more in common than their contrasting personas suggested.

  If Tommy fancied himself as Channing Pollock on stage, he did so again as Cary Grant off. Grant, himself a product of the music hall circuits of Great Britain, never lost his love of the variety scene and went out of his way to catch Cooper on his visits to Britain. The actor’s own passion for magic helped to cement a friendship: from its earliest days until his death he was a member of the board of Hollywood’s famous club, The Magic Castle and in his youth had worked with the legendary conjuror, David Devant. Grant and to a lesser extent another friend, Roger Moore provided the fashion plate image to which Tommy misguidedly aspired. Savile Row suits and handmade shoes were an indulgence that ran counter to the man of the people whose pockets were destined to bulge with tricks. His son once explained how all his life Tommy searched for a hat that would complement the image he craved, but the more they cost him, the more ridiculous he looked in them. Gwen recalled how in the mornings the taxi would be kept waiting as he tried on half a dozen ties only to revert to the one he had put on in the first place. Meanwhile the suits had a habit of hanging on him in mournful fashion, longing for Pollock, Grant or ‘007’ himself to come to their rescue and promote them to the style pages of Esquire where they belonged. The choice of wardrobe admits he expected to be on view all the time: he knew he was anything but unmissable.

  His daughter acknowledges that he had no wish to be performing all the time, but concedes that his best way of dealing with most social situations was by doing just that. It helped that he had discovered at an early age that laughter was a means of deflecting disapproval and unpleasantness as well as being the easiest way of relating to people. According to Vicky he was not a great fan of parties, preferring the quieter company of friends in small groups or on a one-to-one basis, but this did not deter him from being the life and soul of every social gathering he ever attended, not merely conjuring little miracles out of his pockets but revelling in stunts like the one where he picked up a foaming pint of beer, stuck his chin in the froth and declared, ‘You wouldn’t hit an old man like me, would you?’ or doing his celebrated impression of ‘an Eskimo taking a leak’ with a handful of ice cubes, a stunt that went round the business in no time. Backstage at any Royal Variety Show in which he took part the
tension among the other comics would be magicked away by his spontaneous dressing room performances, the likes of Bruce Forsyth, Dickie Henderson, Rolf Harris, and Tarby reduced to hysterics by the great man holding forth in his long baggy underpants, short socks, and suspenders.

  The roll call of the japes and jests he played in public places is celebrated. There were the teabags deposited in the top pockets of unsuspecting London cabbies with a reassuring, ‘Have a drink on me!’; the pens he gave away with ‘Stolen from Tommy Cooper’ engraved along the side; the occasions the table cloth trick went wrong in sedate restaurants, resulting in broken crockery everywhere: ‘I could never get that trick right!’; the short phase of wearing shoes with toecaps resembling pork pies, exact to the detail of the crusty indentations around the edges; the period when he went around with a roll of treasury notes stuck together with sellotape – whenever he went into a shop he would take delight in unrolling the requisite amount and cutting off what he owed with a pair of scissors. When he wanted it to be, all of life was a playground, a perennial nod to the joke shop culture of his childhood years. Even a routine letter to his mum was not exempt:

  Dear Mum

  How nice to hear you are getting on so well. Looking forward to seeing you in January. All day yesterday I heard a ringing in my ears. Then I picked up the phone and it stopped. I was going to see the doctor, but he’s not a very good doctor. All his patients are sick. Dove and I are on a new diet. We eat breakfast in the raw. Then we eat our lunch raw. For dinner we put on clothes. See you soon.

  All my love

  Tommy

  But for the marriage reference it is the letter of a child writing home from boarding school rather than that of a man in his forties.

  His sense of humour could be perverse in the extreme, displaying a childlike flair for mischievousness that was sometimes innocent, sometime irksome, sometimes cruel. According to agent Kenneth Earle, his colleague Peter Prichard was the proud if politically incorrect owner of a magnificent tiger skin rug. A few weeks after Prichard had shown this off to Tommy, he invited Peter over for a meal. Aside from casual social courtesy there appeared to be no agenda attached to the invitation. As the meal progressed, Peter could see that Tommy was becoming agitated. ‘Well, what do you think about it?’ asked the host. ‘About what?’ asked Peter. ‘Over there. On the floor. I so admired your tiger.’ Peter looked and there was a mangy cat skin spread out on the carpet. Paul Daniels recalls how he was notorious for phoning friends and acquaintances in the middle of the night after he returned from a show: ‘Hello, Paul. It’s Tommy here. I just thought you’d like to know I got back home okay.’ He would then hang up. It was four o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t even thought of going to bed. You didn’t even know he’d been away.

  His capacity for winding people up was infamous. Freddie Starr recalls the time he took him back home from a club where he had been working. As he drove into the road, Tommy asked Freddie to stop a few doors away from where he lived, explaining that he did not want to wake up Dove and that it was a very sedate neighbourhood where you never heard any noise after eleven o’clock. He then asked Freddie in for a nightcap, but begged him to tread quietly lest he wake any of the neighbours. The walk on tiptoe to the house, the opening of the gate, the turning of the key were all carried out with the meticulous hush of burglars on the prowl. Once inside the house Tommy offered his guest soup. That he had to rouse Dove from her slumbers rather than face the challenge of tin opener and gas stove in order to act upon the suggestion is an incidental footnote to the domestic sitcom husband and wife enacted between them. Ten minutes later, after much clattering of pots and pans in the direction of the kitchen, she brought in a tray with two bowls. With a face like thunder she banged it down without saying a word and retreated to bed. ‘If I were you,’ said Tommy, ‘I’d hurry up eating your soup!’ Freddie did not need the advice. Within a couple of minutes the two bowls were empty and Tommy saw his guest on his way, beseeching him in a whisper to remember what he had said about noise before they came in. Gingerly Freddie made his way down the neat, quiet suburban street and was about to get into his car when he looked back to see Tommy still standing at his front gate. At the top of his voice he shouted, ‘Now fuck off – and don’t fucking come back!’ He then slammed the front door with a resounding crash and disappeared inside. It could have been heard in Hammersmith a couple of miles away. Once, when waiting for Dove at Ken Brooke’s Magic Place, he had everyone promise that when she appeared there would be no swearing. When she came through the door, ostensibly late, he took one look at her and said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Gwen gave one of her prim, ‘Isn’the awful?’ looks and the room reverberated with laughter. It was a ploy she obviously became used to over the years.

  His school friend, Peter North recalls the time he saw Tommy after a long separation towards the end of the Second World War. He was on leave in Guards uniform waiting to catch the Hythe ferry to Southampton one Saturday morning. Peter approached his friend full of bonhomie, but Cooper feigned not to recognize the man whose answers he once cribbed in school. The pretence was kept up all the way across Southampton Water, while North used every endeavour to jog the other’s memory. They disembarked and walked up the High Street together. When they came to Bernard Street, one of their old haunts, Tommy sprinted away and jumped onto a passing tram. In Peter’s words, ‘He dashed up the stairs and sat in a back seat on the side, leaned against the window and thumbed his nose at me with a great big grin on his face. That was the last time I ever saw him.’ One presumes that Tommy set little store by the friendship.

  These stories show the deadpan skill with which he would ensnare an unsuspecting victim. As Norman Wisdom has said, ‘some days he could be so incredibly dry that you really thought he was being serious –that is, until he had suckered you in long enough for the pay-off line.’ Sometimes there was no pay-off line at all. Back when they shared a dressing room at the Cambridge Theatre for Sauce Piquante, they also shared a dresser, an old pro whose opinion of himself tended at times to go a little over the top for the two young comics. One day when they were all together Tommy asked Norman, ‘Who does Charlie remind you of?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘I know it’s a film star, but I can’t quite place it.’ The dresser beamed with curiosity at the teasing compliment. To his continuing frustration the guessing game continued all evening, the name of many a Hollywood movie star brought up for consideration only to be discarded as they scrutinized Charlie even more closely. ‘I’ll think of it,’ insisted Cooper. ‘Don’t you worry. It will come to me.’ But as Norman says, ‘It never did.’

  There were times when it was difficult to know whether he was having you on or not. Comedian Jim Davidson once overheard him quizzing the barman while on the telephone in the pub next to the Thames studios at Teddington: ‘Can you tell me whether this pub is called The Anglers, orisit The Anglers?’ ‘It’s The Anglers, Mr Cooper.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much.’ Once he came out of the Palladium with Roy Castle at four o’clock in the morning. There was one lone fan waiting in the cold for his autograph. As he signed the album, Tommy looked up and down Great Marlborough Street and commented, ‘Bit of a slight, isn’t it? Only one!’ The way he said it, he could have meant it. There was the occasion he was sitting with Bob Potter in the office at Lakeside and asked for fish and chips. They duly arrived and Tommy carried on talking. Eventually they got cold and he asked if they could be sent back to the kitchen to be warmed up. This went on three or four times until it was time to depart and he asked for them to be wrapped up to take back to the hotel. When he had a gathering of people in his dressing room, if somebody put their head round the door or got up to leave, he invariably followed through with, ‘Who’s that?’ The bewildered look gave little clue whether he meant it or not.

  Waiters were easy prey. Having tasted the wine, he would contort his face into an expression of absolute loathing and disgust, before relaxing into a beaming smile and a softly spoken ‘Very
nice. Thank you.’ Once he was with Mike Yarwood in a restaurant after the show in Blackpool. It was very late, most of the kitchen staff had gone home and they were lucky to be served. Mike ordered chips with his meal, but was served boiled potatoes. Yarwood did not want to make a fuss, but Tommy insisted on calling the waiter: ‘We’ll get them changed. We’ll get them changed. It shouldn’t be allowed.’ Eventually the waiter came over. When the situation was explained he was full of apologies, but there was nothing he could do as the chef had left for the evening. Tommy looked at Yarwood and said, ‘He’s quite right, you know, Mike. He’s quite right.’ It only then dawned that he had been set up by his friend, the man who had saved his impressionist act on so many occasions: ‘If ever I was struggling, all I had to do was put on the fez, go into his laugh and the audience was back with me.’

  There were moments when schadenfreude might have seemed to be his middle name, in a curious manner befitting someone who made comic capital out of the hilarious portrayal of a soldier half-English, half-German. Barry Cryer observed the cruel streak that ran counter to his image on more than one occasion. Once on location they were in a pub together in Hammersmith. He remembers it well because on this occasion Tommy bought him a drink. A man came up to Cooper and punched him in the arm: ‘Hello, Tom. I don’t suppose I can tell you a joke you don’t know?’ To begin with he played along, all ears and seriousness as the guy launched into the tale. No sooner had he started than Tommy asked for a piece of paper. The man went back to the beginning and Tommy asked for a pen. He started again, ‘There were these two men in a pub …’‘Is this pub important, or is it any old pub,’ interrupted Cooper. ‘Any old pub.’ Back to the beginning, only for another interruption: ‘Excuse me, who are these two men? What do they do?’ ‘No, just two men in a pub.’ By now the man was really embarrassed. To Barry it was obvious that Tommy knew the joke, but was not letting on. As the fellow approached the tag, the film crew filtered in. Tommy couldn’t resist it: ‘Harry, Pete, Joe, you’ve all got to hear this.’ Then turning to the man he said, ‘Do you mind?’ He made him start all over again and – the sting in the tail – made sure he had left before the guy even reached the punch line. People cornering you to share a joke is an occupational hazard for any star comedian, but on this occasion the man had taken advantage and crossed a barrier of propriety. He had punched Cooper in the arm in an unwanted display of over-familiarity and Tommy was getting back at him for that. There was another time when he was buttonholed in a similar situation by an amateur gagster standing round the corner of the bar: as he began to tell the joke, Tommy, only visible to the other fellow above the waist, let drop his trousers. Cryer will never forget the spectacle of the most famous man in Britain standing with his trousers round his ankles with everyone on his side of the bar weeping with mirth while the poor unsuspecting joker ploughed on regardless, confident that the laughter was for him.