Biography Of Peter Cook Read online

  Peter was almost certainly looking forward to spending the rest of the summer with his father, lazing on the flat grey stonesad tapper Bridge at Postbridge, flyfishing in the River Dart, or playing mixed doubles at the Charmouth tennis club, as they were wont to do in their few precious days together. Alec had been home less than a year now, but he was bothered by the financial implications of having no job, and unsettled by the decision to put an end to a lifetime of travelling. John Stow, a Nigerian contemporary of his whose memoirs were published, considered and rejected the option that Alec had chosen, that of taking early retirement: ‘When Sapper’s Jim Maitland returned from abroad he was always immediately hailed as an old friend by the hall porter at his club, but this did not seem to happen to me. Since I could not pick up the threads easily with my old acquaintances, I found myself relying more and more on the friendship of those who had some knowledge of West Africa or other colonial territories. Hard as I tried to convince myself that I really wanted to give up the Service and take a job in England, I knew that at this stage I had cast off the moorings.’25 At the beginning of June 1956, perhaps suffering from a similar rootlessness, Alec accepted an appointment to serve on the three-man British Caribbean Federal Capital Commission, charged with spending the summer touring the British Caribbean Federation in order to select a capital city. Eight days after Peter returned home from France, his father departed for the West Indies.

  Instead, Peter spent a miserable summer working as a waiter to raise money. ‘People are so stupid when they go into a restaurant. They always say things like “Is the fish any good?” As if you’re likely to say, working for the place, “No, the fish is terrible, the pork is worse and the beef is disgraceful.” I became so impatient. The legends about what they do when you send the soup back are true.’26 He felt stalled. When the time came to leave for Germany at the start of his year studying abroad, he was grateful to get the train back on the tracks. Just before he did so, his father returned, in mid-September. The British Caribbean Federal Capital Commission had made three recommendations, all of which were completely ignored by the government, but the various rejected islands had composed a number of entertaining calypsos, variants on Three Blind Mice and so forth, deriding the Commission’s choices. Alec brought a calypso record back for Peter, which became one of his favourites, along with Why Do Fools Fall In Love? by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley. The Elvis record actually belonged to his sister Sarah: ‘It was a 78, the first record I ever bought in my life, and for some unknown reason I kept it hidden,’ she recalls. Peter was obviously curious enough about the rest of his family to go on little searches: ‘One day at our house in Uplyme I heard it blasting out very loudly all over the house. Peter had found it, and thought it was a brilliant record, and so I felt very proud of my excellent taste.’

  In October 1956 Peter set out by train for Koblenz in Germany, as he put it later, ‘in an attempt to achieve sexual emancipation and to learn to speak fluent English.’27 It was a disastrous journey, in which he was mistakenly advised to change platforms at Ostend by the stationmaster, and as a result arrived at his destination many hours late, in the middle of the night. The reality of his new billet was a far cry from the excitement he had anticipated: six months in the Koblenz suburbs with the von Wilds, a pleasant but essentially unexciting German family who lived on a hill far above the town. ‘It is a very lonely viewuo; Peter wrote home. ‘Just below us is the prison.’ Every day he was taught German by an elderly lady, selected because she was charitable enough to teach him for nothing. After six months, he had negotiated an educational transfer to West Berlin.

  By the time he arrived in the former German capital, still strewn with the rubble of war, Peter was crying out for a little excitement. The story of how he accidentally strayed into the East, and was arrested and jailed by the Communist authorities, is one that he often told against himself: in fact the truth is that it was a deliberate plan, devised on his first day in the city to liven things up. His new berth was another suburban family home, about forty-five minutes from the centre by S-Bahn. He discovered while riding out with his new host Herr Theile that the subway system was operated by the East German Government, and ran not just under East Berlin, but out of the city altogether on the Eastern side. After unpacking his things, he returned to the city centre and went straight to the British Embassy, to enquire about the rules governing the border. He then sat down to write to his parents. ‘I asked whether it was alright to go into the East Sector of Berlin and they said yes, it was quite safe, provided I did not commit a crime, in which case, as we do not recognise the East German Government, they could do nothing for me. The Eastern ‘Zone’ is quite another thing; if I got into there I might well be clapped into a cell for a month or so. All the roads into the East Zone are, however, blocked, and the only way I could get there would be in the S-Bahn. I must be careful not to fall asleep and be carried on over the border.’ It was as if he wanted to tell them what he had in mind, but did not dare.

  A few days later, tanked up to the eyeballs on cheap booze, Peter ‘fell asleep’ on the S-Bahn, was carried into the Eastern Zone, was arrested by burly greatcoated soldiers and thrown into a dark cell. He was not cowed – the early days at Radley were finally coming in useful. In fact he glibly informed his interrogators that he wanted to defect to the East, because ‘In the West we couldn’t get these wonderful cardboard shoes and bits of string they were all queuing up for.’ Peter later tended to regard this as too foolhardy a prank. ‘I was such a prat. I was blind drunk and behaving like the archetypal football hooligan before it became fashionable,’ he said.28 Mercifully, after a brief imprisonment, a kindly East German not only released Peter but arranged for him to be driven to his digs in the West. He did not tell his parents where he had been, writing instead to ask if his peach trees had come up in the garden at Knollside.

  Peter stayed just three weeks in Berlin, before moving on to Hamburg. Before he left, he visited the ruins of the Reichstag, saw and disliked his first opera, attended a trial – forming a habit that was to last a lifetime – and on his last night in the city, 3 April 1957, went to see Berlin’s most famous political cabaret, the Porcupine Club. It was a trip that was to have momentous consequences for British comedy, for it was on that evening that he first had the idea for an equivalent British venue, that would one day become the Establishment Club. ‘I thought the show was terribly bad. I spoke reasonably good German, and I thought the humour was very juvenile – says he at the age of nineteen! – but I thought, very early on, “Why isn’t there the equivalent of this in London?” For a long time my major fear was that somebody would do the obvious and start it before me.’ own club would be more directly based, he explained later, on ‘those satirical Berlin clubs of the 1930s that had done so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler.’

  Hamburg finally held out faint promise of the sexual emancipation that was beginning to seem such a distant prospect: ‘With luck I should be able to meet some young people there, as the son of the family is about eighteen.’ A few weeks after his arrival, though, this turned out to be a dead end. ‘I have not really seen much of the son. I couldn’t enthuse wildly over him’, he wrote. Instead, he turned again to the theatre, and saw ‘a very good production of Faust, which should be a great help for my future studies of this impossibly difficult play.’ Peter later wrote the film Bedazzled for himself and Dudley Moore as a direct parody of Faust. His European trip, intended to provide linguistic ammunition for a career in the Foreign Office, was instead providing cultural reference points for a lifetime in comedy.

  Peter’s final port of call was Tours in France, and a course designed for English university students. It had already begun, on 11th April, but so desperate was he to acquire the company of some friends his own age that he was prepared to start late and catch up. It was an expensive course, so persuading his parents was a delicate matter. He pointed out that he could save them money in retur
n by hiring a room and eating in the subsidised student cafeteria, rather than continuing to pay for full board with the series of dull, worthy suburban families they had helped arrange for him. That this would provide him with an added dash of independence was, of course, merely a peripheral consideration. His parents agreed to his joining the course; unfortunately, they did not look upon the other idea so kindly.

  Peter arrived at Madame Bonnassin’s residence in Tours one afternoon in early May with a cold and a sore throat, after a journey of nearly twenty-four hours, eighteen of them spent continuously sat upright in a train seat. He was hoping for a cup of tea, but had no such luck. ‘Have you got some slippers?’ barked Mme. Bonnassin, ‘because we all go to bed very early and I don’t want to be disturbed!’ And then, without waiting for a reply, ‘No visitors after seven o’clock!’ ‘I hardly dared ask her for my supper after that, so I went out and ate a very ordinary meal for 600 francs’ wrote Peter dismally. No doubt mindful of the continued need for sexual emancipation, he went on to remind his parents how much cheaper the independent digs and subsidised student cafeteria option would be, should they ever consider it.

  In fact, he did finally get himself a girlfriend, and this time he wrote to his parents to tell them about her. ‘Lately I have been going out quite a lot with a very attractive Italian girl. She is very sweet and gay and what’s more refuses to be paid for.’ Money, it seems, was still a problem. ‘The other night we went dancing at the “Paix”. It was really very nice inside with a very good band, but the cabaret itself was not up to much.’ The Establishment Club still hovered tantalisingly in his mind. ‘We drank one glass of lemon each which cost us 600 francs apiece. Although 15% service was “compris” in the bill, the waiter looked absolutely furious when I failed to give him a further tip, and turned the empty plate upside down with a low hissing noise and a sullen expression.’ The object of Peter’s desire and enforced lack of generosity was called Floriana, ther aughter of a Milanese shoe-manufacturer. He admitted later that it was ‘a rather stilted one-way romance. One of my chatting-up techniques during that period was quoting Blaise Pascal to her. Pascal didn’t have too many hints for seducing eighteen-year-olds, but he did tell me a little about getting them drunk.’30

  Being starved of female company – and indeed of love and affection in general – for so long had created a craving that Peter was never really able to satisfy throughout his life. Being so starved of money for eighteen months, especially when he found some female company, was also to have a profound effect. Later, at the height of his fame, when he was married to or going out with some of the most desirable women imaginable, he always felt the urge to find yet more love and affection with other women; and when he became fabulously rich, he was as likely to splash out in a fit of generosity and buy dinner for all twenty people in an expensive restaurant as he was to studiously avoid paying for coffee for two people in a corner cafe.

  Peter’s course ended on 30 June. On 29 June he was evicted by Madame Bonnassin. History does not record why, although it is not altogether impossible that Floriana had succumbed to his advances after 7 p.m. On 1 July, he said goodbye to her for ever and flew home to England, where Paul Butters had reserved him a place in a punt at the Henley Regatta. While he was out messing about in boats, his sister Sarah, who was obviously curious enough about the rest of her family to go on little searches, found the programme for a risque´ show hidden in his room. ‘It was French. There was a line-up of showgirl lovelies. I don’t recall being shocked – they were so utterly, Amazonianly gorgeous and tall and sophisticated.’ So it hadn’t all been art and high culture then.

  Peter spent the summer as a beachfront photographer at West Bay, where his charming manner earned him the then colossal sum of £20 per week. He loved every minute of it. When summer was over, and he was left with a large collection of unsold photographs, he took out an advert in a less-than-salubrious publication offering a dozen untouched original photographs in plain brown envelopes at five bob a time. The recipients could hardly complain. They did indeed receive completely untouched, original photographs, albeit of unwilling grandmothers and scowling snot-nosed kids. The dashing young entrepreneur, flushed with success, was subsequently elected President of the Torquay United Junior Supporters’ Club for the forthcoming season.

  Soon afterwards, in October 1957, Peter set off for Pembroke College, Cambridge, to complete the final stage of his training for the Foreign Office. Except, of course, that other attractions lay enticingly in his path.

  CHAPTER 3

  I Could Have Been a Judge, But I Never Had The Latin

  Cambridge, 1957–60

  Cambridge University in 1957 was an Aladdin’s cave of opportunities, crammed with burgeoning young talents jostling for space with each other. In the field o drama, it was the generation that produced Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn. In the field of politics, the same generation spawned the likes of Leon Brittan, Michael Howard and Kenneth Clarke. In the field of comedy, there were John Bird and John Fortune to contend with. For Peter Cook, however, Cambridge appeared to be just another large impersonal educational institution of wooden benches, stone-flagged floors and rugby fields, of the kind he had spent his entire life shackled to. A place to be approached cautiously and respectfully, as he had approached Radley and St Bede’s. Although confident of his own abilities, he was always riddled with the fear that others might not be. He was still a shy boy at heart. In its Footlights Club, Cambridge was the only university in Britain to possess a purpose-built vehicle for staging comedy revues of the kind he had made his speciality, but Peter did not apply to join. ‘I didn’t do too much writing in my first year, because I felt the Footlights was a tremendously elite club. I was too bashful to even consider applying for it.’1 Such was his talent that Peter Cook could have conquered Cambridge inside twelve months, had he set himself to the task – and indeed, that is what he eventually did. But it would be a further six months before he was spurred into doing so, before he would even set foot – in creative terms – outside his college. He had been long enough in institutions to find them perversely comforting.

  His first year room – on ‘O’ staircase, on the ground floor of New Court – was classic Oxbridge: a tall, grimy, gloomy box with two windows hewn high through the thick wall, each a twin arch criss-crossed by leaded glass, and filled to the brim with the possessions of the previous occupant who had not bothered to move out yet. He wrote encouragingly to his parents to tell them that he had been given his own gas ring, and had managed to buy a second-hand gown for 17/6 as opposed to paying 52/6 for a new one. ‘I now see that I should have bought a few more pictures, as the walls seem a trifle bare – I had no idea that I would have such a large expanse to decorate,’ he added. It was a cold, wet, discouraging evening, and he fell in aimlessly with John Butcher, a new neighbour. ‘We trudged the streets together, rather nervous and wondering what we had let ourselves in for,’ recalls Butcher. For once, Peter did not even attempt to keep his companion amused.

  This reticence did not last long. That night he sat at his first dinner in Hall, amid a group of silent and directionless freshers who were clearly in need of a shepherd. Paul Sharpling sat opposite him. Peter knuckled down to the task in hand. ‘Within minutes,’ recounts Sharpling, ‘he had become the centre of attraction, and those of us within earshot were laughing. That was a pattern which persisted for the following three years. Wherever Peter was, people laughed. At dinner a better word would probably be “choked”, since listening to him and eating soon became impossible to achieve at the same time. He would seize on someone’s chance remark, or a current event, allow his imagination free rein and transpose everything to a different and usually inappropriate level. When a section of one of the motorways was opened, he transposed it to the world of agriculture and gave a brilliant commentary on the opening of a new “pigway”.’ On another occasion, he spent the entire evening extemporising on the subject of gravel. ‘His main thrust wa
s to ridicule pomp and ceremony, and people who were carried away with it. He hated pomposity and artificiality.’

  Within a few days the various political societies had come knocking on his door. As he explained to his parents, ‘The Conservative and Liberal Clubs based all their appeal on their social life. The Labour Party seems to be the only one which really cares about politics.’ Peter joined all of them, with the express intention of embarrassing visiting politicians, and subsequently made a fool of Lord Altrincham and Peter Thorneycroft with a judiciously constructed series of questions. ‘Word filtered along that he was of course planning to go into the Diplomatic Service,’ says Sir Peter Lloyd (a friend of his who became a Conservative MP), by way of explanation.

  Peter also joined the Cambridge Union debating society, but after one speech, the familiar reek of the desire for power given off by his fellow members proved too distasteful: ‘I remember people like Leon Brittan at 22, running around like a 44-year-old, making the same sort of debating points they’re still making. It’s a bit distressing when you find them running the country. They were all soself-important in their twenties that you would have thought they’d have grown out of it. I thought, I can do this, but I don’t want to do this.’2 Of course, one reason that Oxbridge has traditionally produced so many political satirists is that its undergraduates come face to face with their future political leaders at an early age, and realise then quite how many of them are social retards who join debating societies in order to find friends. Peter swiftly abandoned his foray into student politics and retreated into the insular society of Pembroke.