Biography Of Peter Cook Read online

  Never was there a better time for an aspiring comic to be joining the Footlights. Every June the Footlights Revue, comprising the wittiest material and performers to emerge from that year’s smokers, professionally mounted over two weeks at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Both the 1954 show Out of the Blue and the 1955 effort Between the Lines had transferred to the West End of London, largely on the back of contributions made by Jonathan Miller; while the 1957 show Share My Lettuce, mainly the work of Bamber Gascoigne, had been purchased by the young theatre producer Michael Codron and recast in the West End with Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith (which version Peter had been to see). Although still constrained, Radley marionette-style, by the format of rhyming couplets, Frederic Raphael in particular had contributed some biting moments to the earlier shows. The age of straw-hat-and-blazered song and dance was already coming to its end when Peter knocked on the door of Adrian Slade’s room.

  Peter wrote home excitedly about his first Footlights smoker, but was still sufficiently committed to the idea of becoming a diplomat to give up comedy for the duration of the summer term, when his exams were due. He spent most of May and June in a punt reading set texts, and did enough to score respectable if unspectacular grades in his first year exams, registering a 2:1 in French and a 2:2 in German. As the Pembroke first years relaxed in Hall after two grinding weeks bent over their Part 1 examination papers, Peter stood up and announced ironically: ‘I must rush now. I have to swot for Part II.’

  That summer saw his first ever big-screen role, as an extra in the Hardy Kruger film Bachelor of Hearts, which was partly set in Cambridge. Desperately short of cash, he and Anthony Garrett signed up at ten shillings a day to spend long hours hanging around in King’s Parade. Garrett even volunteered to jump into the River Cam at four o’clock in the morning for a further ten shillings. Peter can be clearly seen in one scene from the film, standing in the street alongside Christopher Booker, the future co-founder of Private Eye. Booker remembers Peter keeping the bored extras amused with a stream of jokes.

  In June, the Pembroke Players took a production of The Merchant of Venice on tour to Köln and Bielefeld. A letter had arrived the previous year addressed to ‘The Cambridge Players’, inviting them to perform to students in Germany, where Shakespeare was invariably to be found on the English syllabus. As there was no such organisation as the Cambridge Players, the postman put it through the letterbox at Pembroke, where the opportunity was seized and the German tour became a regular annual fixture. Each summer a production would be flung together hurriedly after the exams. The Merchant of Venice was a massive success, at least in the German sense of the word: each performance was packed out with earnest, academically-inclined students who hung straight-facedly on every word. ‘It was rather intimidating,’ recalls Tim Harrold. ‘They had a nun at the end of each row. And the audience would all have their books out, going along following every line.’ So popular was the production with public and press alike that two extra performances had to be mounted, and extracts were recorded for broadcast on German radio.

  Peter played Launcelot Gobbo, delivering his lines at breakneck speed in a nasal whine. ‘It was as if the part had been written for him,’ enthuses his fellow tourist Geoffrey Allibone. ‘His scene with Old Gobbo, played by Richard Imison [later Head of BBC Radio Drama], was a show-stopper.’ In fact, Peter had not learnt his part thoroughly, owing to the lack of time involved, but he made up in bravado what he lacked in accuracy. According to Peter Lloyd, who played Solanio, ‘I don’t think Launcelot Gobbo stuck closely to what Shakespeare had provided for him. He would chop the lines up differently. I remember him on stage looking extremely lanky and funny, giggling, head back, and occasionally dropping into the voice of Mr Boylett’ (Peter’s performance was, curiously enough, in keeping with the Elizabethan practice of giving the part to the company’s clown, who would improvise many of the lines). The Merchant of Venice, of course, was a delicate choice of text for a German audience just thirteen years after the end of the war, and perhaps it is no coincidence that the lines most likely to be ‘chopped up’ were the ones closest to the bone. The word ‘Judes’ was invariably delivered as ‘Jews’, elongated and emphasised for effect, with a leer at the audience. It was no doubt extremely lucky for international relations that the part of Shylock himself had been given, successfully, to Patrick Hardy. The earnest Teutonic audience, no doubt thinking they had misread the lines on their set texts, simply lapped it up.

  Listening to the performances today, they are – with the exception of Launcelot Gobbo – very much of their time, the kind of high-projectile, thigh-slapping Shakespeare destroyed for ever by Beyond the Fringe. Shakespeare parody in that show, So That’s the Way You Like It, although largely the work of Jonathan Miller, undoubtedly owed a little to the Pembroke Players: not least the fact that Peter, who always liked to vary a performance from one night to the next, had shown himself reasonably capable of improvising in the Shakespearean idiom. More significantly, he had proved to himself that he could pull off a stage triumph without actually learning all his lines. It was to be a discovery that prefigured a gradual decline in application. Peter could easily have brushed up a few lines here and there during the three-week trip, but not unnaturally he preferred to revel in the party atmosphere that prevailed in the spartan former prison where the Players had been billeted.

  Peter spent the rest of the summer in Uplyme, where he filled the house with music: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Coasters’ Yakety Yak, which was the latest thing that August. He also expanded his collection of loud rock ’n’ roll ties, pride of place going to a violent pale-blue silk kipper number with musical notes on it. Such attire, it should be stressed, only came out at night; for the most part Peter dressed extremely conservatively, in the sensible pullover and tie that marked him out as the Radley boy he still was. The football season was over, so the President of the Junior Supporters’ Club had missed his chance to travel down to Torquay to see United play. The 1957–58 season had been the last one to feature the old regional leagues. The brand new Division 4 had been created and Torquay were promptly relegated into it. ‘I was thought to be a Jonah, so I resigned,’ said Peter.8 His ties with the region were gradually loosening.

  The following October he resumed his temporarily suspended performing career at the Footlights smokers. Audiences, as before, found themselves laughing uproariously at the strange, obsessional world of Mr Boylett. Word spread quickly. Among those who came to see the much talked-about new star was John Bird, who found himself so impressed that he invited himself round to Pembroke College for tea. A Nottingham grammar school boy in his fourth year at King’s College, Bird was regarded as a serious heavyweight in undergraduate drama circles. His speciality was surrealist, absurdist comedy: he had alread mounted an Ionesco production at Cambridge, and was in the process of casting A Resounding Tinkle, the first work by N. F. Simpson. The play had already been put on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, but only in a truncated one-act form, because – after a failed earlier attempt – its director William Gaskill had become convinced that the piece was ‘unplayable’. Bird had other ideas, and was determined to put on the whole work. He had seen the two ‘unknowns’ he wanted to cast in the lead roles – Peter and a young Newnham College Modern Languages student named Eleanor Bron – and had decided to pay each of them a visit. ‘I wanted Peter not because he was one of the Cambridge actors – he wasn’t then or ever really an actor – but because I thought he would understand Simpson’s humour,’ he says.9

  Bird was quite astonished by his tea party with Peter Cook, who pulled out all the stops to entertain him. He found it difficult to believe the contrast between Peter’s ‘charming, gracious, almost courtly manners’ and the ceaseless flow of humour that made Bird laugh until the tears were running down his cheeks. He told Alan Bennett later that Peter ‘was utterly at the mercy of language. It was this unstoppable flow, John said, that made Peter almost to be pitied.’10 B
ird rushed straight round to his appointment with Eleanor Bron, and announced breathlessly that ‘he had just met the funniest man in England’. Both she and Peter accepted their roles on the spot.

  It seems bizarre to think of one student nervously regarding another student at the same university as a ‘heavyweight’, but such is the way college life, and particularly Oxbridge life in the late fifties, parodied the forty-year span of adult existence, compressing the transition from wide-eyed school-leaver to retiring theatrical grandee into just three or four years. Student journalists really did write about final-year actors and writers with the hushed reverence then usually reserved for national celebrities. Peter Raby and Jonathan Harlow, Peter’s Radleian friends who had gone off to do National Service, arrived at Cambridge now to find their former classmate on the verge of such stardom. Not that it affected his attitude in any way: the three of them went to lunch, which Peter spent in the persona of a religious eccentric who claimed to be carrying the Holy Bee of Ephesus in a cardboard box, an insect which he said had once buzzed about the true cross, a lunch which the Radley pair spent in fits of laughter. Raby subsequently entered and won a freshman’s poetry competition in Granta. His grand prize was to share a salad and paté lunch with the magazine’s student editors, and their guest of honour John Bird. Neither Bird nor the editors passed a word in his direction throughout the entire meal.

  Despite his newfound success, Peter did his best to maintain his Pembroke contacts. On Poppy Day he and Jack Altman devised that year’s fund-raising outdoor college revue, The Seventh Deadly Seal, a parody of Bergman’s Seventh Seal crossed with the seven deadly sins. It took the form of an extended sketch, performed four times in one afternoon on Mill Bridge, where Peter had parked a float on which a crowd of people flagellated themselves while proclaiming the end of the world. Peter himself played a Swedish subtitle. Rather mysteriously for the uninitiated, the handbills for the play consisted mainly of a list of bogus endorsements from Mr Boylett. At the end of November, he performed in The Alchemist once again fothe Pembroke Players, this time in the character of Dapper. The College Hall was packed out for each of the three nights, and it became the first show in the history of the Players to turn a financial profit. Press reviews were good (these were the days when national newspapers covered Oxbridge student plays), but Peter’s slightly camp overacted performance was one of the few not to be picked out by any reviewer.

  On 17 November 1958 Peter was twenty-one, and returned home to Uplyme for a weekend birthday party. He was given a typewriter to write sketches on and a cigarette lighter, as he was enjoying a flirtation with tobacco. It was an important occasion in one unusual respect: Peter and his two sisters had each been left about £2,000 by an elderly cousin some years previously, which was to be left in the Bridgewater and West of England Building Society until their twenty-first birthdays. Suddenly, Peter had become – by undergraduate standards – immensely rich. He would never need to worry about counting the pennies again (although of course he often did from habit). He invested most of it in property in Cambridge, but was careful to set a substantial sum aside, to spend on wild parties. From this date onwards, Peter became an inveterate partygiver. The first, five days after his official birthday party, was a joint twenty-first organised with Jack Altman and Nick Fleming. The invitation read ‘An Add Hock party: Social Intercourse in the Union cellars’, and was accredited (in Peter’s case) to ‘Mr Boylett’. There followed a series of Boylett parties, always subtitled with the legend ‘Social Intercourse’, ranging from lunchtime drinks on the college lawns to late-night revels in Peter’s digs on the Cherryhinton Road. Invitations were highly prized, as Peter’s parties tended to be exciting. John Mattock remembers Peter doing an impression of his landlady’s reaction to the scene of devastation in his room one morning after: ‘The first thing she said to him was (and you really have to hear Peter doing his Cambridge town voice), “Oooh, Mr Cook, if I’d known you’d got friends, I’d never have had you”.’

  With increasing fame and riches and wild parties came all the girlfriends Peter had been forlornly missing out on for so long. John Hunter remembers ‘happily bathing away in one of those bathroom cubicles in college, only to be “woken up” by a woman singing in the next door bath – unheard of in a strictly male college like Pembroke. She was Peter’s live-in girlfriend of the day, a very attractive Indian girl. Apparently, he liked to spin her out of her sari.’ According to John Butcher, ‘There were a few quite hectic female comings and goings in his digs. I think the rear window was normally kept open as an escape route.’ Peter was like a child who had finally been given the keys to the sweetshop. One girlfriend claimed to have become pregnant, and insisted that Peter – who was rather suspicious – should stump up part of his legacy to pay for an abortion. It would not be the first such payment.

  The female friend who aroused the most admiration among his fellows was undoubtedly Eleanor Bron. Clever and darkly pretty with heavy-lidded eyes and a rich, seductive voice, she in turn found him ‘incredibly, effortlessly charming, as well as being extremely dashing and good to look upon. He had the most beautiful blue eyes and enviably long lashes and would look down the side of his cheek at you . . . a sort of haughty, oblique, slightly distancing, testing look.’11 He delighted in her company, and the admiring glances it aroused amonghis male friends from Pembroke, who observed them as they sat beside each other at the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms. Peter had not had sufficient experience of female company to suppress a little masculine insecurity: his course-mate Chris Smith remembers that ‘There was a story, spread by Peter, about the use he made of her German literature notes. The only comment I can make is that if he did, it was with a bit less success than was sometimes suggested.’

  A Resounding Tinkle opened at the ADC Theatre in January 1959, with Peter as Bro Paradock and Eleanor Bron as Middie Paradock. The cast also included Timothy Birdsall, later to become a regular on That Was the Week That Was, Geoffrey Pattie, who went on to become a minister in the Thatcher government, and Bill Wallis, the future Weekending regular. Wallis took on the ‘strange but fairly palatable role’ of a man from the Home Counties who had to spend the entire play pretending to be a member of the audience, before jumping to his feet near the end and objecting vociferously to the proceedings.

  The Paradocks are a suburban couple who have an elephant delivered to their home, only to find it is bigger than the ones they have had delivered in the past:

  Middie:

  Tell them to come and collect it.

  Bro:

  And be without an elephant at all?

  Middie:

  We did without one the year we had a giraffe instead.

  The surreal and absurdist nature of Simpson’s material has led to frequent suggestions that Peter’s student work was influenced by A Resounding Tinkle, and also by the work of Eugene lonesco. John Bird is scornful of the idea, pointing out that Peter’s style was already fully developed when he first encountered the play. The principal case for lonesco as an influence rests on the production that Peter went to see in Paris in 1956. Bird is probably correct: not only was Peter’s style developed early in life, but his major comic themes as an undergraduate – boredom, obsession, bees, creepy crawlies in cardboard boxes and the fantasy world of Mr Boylett – had all seized his imagination as a schoolboy.

  The press were a lot kinder to the production than to N. F. Simpson himself. One reviewer complained that ‘A play, like every work of art, must be composed as a logical unit and not as a haphazard succession of clever ideas which have no organic relationshipwork as a whole. It was certainly not John Bird’s fault if we did not get satisfaction out of the play: if anything, his direction only added to the enjoyment of it. Still, Eleanor Bron and Peter Cook equally merit special praise for retaining fresh and alive the intentionally repetitive couple – in lesser hands they would have become tedious instead of gaining in vitality.’12 The Royal Court Theatre was considerably more impressed, taking the pr
oduction to London for a one-off performance and giving Bird the job of Assistant Director. Before leaving Cambridge to take up his post, the rising young star was prevailed upon to stay long enough to direct the 1959 Footlights Revue.

  Peter wrote to tell his parents of the London transfer, in the bland, affectionate, almost schoolboyish style that was becoming increasingly distanced from the dazzlingly witty carouser and entertainer his fellow undergraduates knew: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, I know it’s a long time since I’ve written but as you will have guessed I have been particularly busy. The play was a great success (many thanks for your nice telegram). We played to full and enthusiastic houses, quite an achievement with apathetic Cambridge audiences. The cast were all great fun and the producer too was an extremely pleasant person. At the party after the last performance I had a long talk with the author, N. F. Simpson, a very interesting person. Our producer John Bird’s flat is teeming with strange producers and writers from the Royal Court, and altogether I have been meeting some extremely interesting people.’ With the exception of the achievements contained therein it was a letter he could easily have written at the age of thirteen.