Knowing that he would be unable to get anyone connected with either Beyond the Fringe or the Establishment to present his show on a long-term basis, Sherrin went to see the new satirical cabaret at the Blue Angel nightclub, starring a young man who had developed a familiar-sounding impression of Harold Macmillan: it was, of course, David Frost. Sherrin signed Frost to co-present the pilot of That Was the Week That Was, along with Brian Redhead of Tonight. He also visited another new satirical cabaret, the Room at the Top, produced by Willie Donaldson in the rather bizarre setting of a chicken-in-the-basket restaurant atop an Ilford tower block. It starred Willie Rushton, John Wells, Richard Ingrams and – even more bizarrely – Barbara Windsor. So popular was satire becoming that even the Kray twins had been to watch a bit of Macmillan-bashing. As a result of his performance, Rushton too was signed up by Sherrin; and as a result of his performance, Wells was asked to leave his schoolmastering job by the Eton authorities.
Peter was furious with the BBC when he discovered that Frost was to present what he believed to be a thinly disguised version of his own proposal. He managed to bite his lip when Frost contacted him to ask if he’d mind their Granta piece, parodying the tabloid coverage of the Rome Olympics, being adapted into a sketch for the new show; but on the day of the pilot recording, Peter was too angry to turn up and do his bit. His mood was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that TW3 didn’t look as if it would ever make the screen anyway. The pilot lasted two-and-a-half hours, and the centrepiece – an argument between Bernard Levin and about forty Conservative ladies in floral dresses – was so acrimonious that Current Affairs executives subsequently decided to axe the project altogether.
The Beyond the Fringe cast slipped out of their roles in the West End gradually, handing over to their understudies one by one. Peter was the first to leave, and sailed for America on the SS France in September, confident in the thought that That Was the Week That Was would represent no more than a passing blip in his total domination of the British satire scene.
CHAPTER 6
Heaving Thighs Across Manhattan
America, 1962–64
‘We don’t want to turn this into a Dutch auction’ had been Donald Langdon’s considered advice, when two of America’s top theatrical producers, David Merrick and Alexander H. Cohen, had put in rival bids for Beyond the Fringe. Cohen had got the nod, and it had only dawned on the cast afterwards that a Dutch auction was precisely what they had wanted. So keen were both promoters, they’d have paid virtually anything to get their hands on the show, and would probably have put in insane opening bids. Peter parted company with Langdon soon afterwards.
The Fringe quartet sailed into New York on 28 September 1962, after a week of inactivity on the France that was close to torture for the restless, hot-wired Peter Cook. He had been ‘bored stiff,’ he told his parents, on a ‘vulgar floating hotel with wonderful food but no character.’ Cohen knew that he had a hot property on his hands, probably in need of pampering, and moved the four first into the Algonquin Hotel, then into his mansion in upstate Connecticut, where they sat by the pool in 80°, Peter still chafing at the bit. At last, on 6 October, they got their chance. When they took the stage in Washington, in front of a packed house of 1,670 people, they were greeted like long-lost rock stars. The critics were ecstatic, including the nationally influential Jay Carmody, and President Kennedy decided to come and see the show later in the week. Although JFK was later forced to postpone his visit, the reception was even more enthusiastic in Boston and Toronto, where the cast had to bawl their lines to an audience of 3,000. Finally, on 27 October, Beyond the Fringe received its official premiere at the John Golden Theater in New York, by which time the show’s American tour had already made Cohen a clear profit. A new Broadway institution had arrived.
The New York World-Telegram claimed that ‘Nothing so far this season on Broadway has made you laugh so hard or so often. If only American comedians could be so devastating.’ The New York Times assured readers that the show ‘will have you shaking so hard with laughter that you’ll forget momentarily to tremble with fear.’ Richard Watts, much-feared critic of the New York Post, called it ‘Immense’, ‘Hilarious’, and ‘A brilliant satirical revue’. The Herald Tribune credited it with being ‘calmly and ruthlessly funny’ on the most difficult of subjects. Summing up the American adulation for the Manchester Guardian, Alistair Cooke reported that ‘This tumult of acceptance is a puzzle to many shrewd theatre men here who deplored the quartet’s decision not to adapt their material to American themes, or their strangulated triphthongs to the ears of a people to whom a vowel is a vowel is a vowel. But they make no concessions, a British trick Oscar Wilde discovered before them. In a way their success is a nostalgic reprise of the old, and most popular, visiting lecturers, who pitied their audience, said so, and made a mint.’1
The four had indeed made few alterations for American ears. Jonathan Miller added an impression of Bertrand Russell, Peter changed a few lines in his miner and Macmillan monologues, and Alan Bennett made reference in his monologue to the Cuba crisis, which had rather unpleasantly threatened to kick off another World War on the opening night of the Fringe. (In fact Bennett was so scared that he spent the night cowering under the table in Dudley Moore and John Bassett’s apartment.) The cast had cited US influences aplenty in their humour – Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce of course, The Second City team and Phil Silvers – but the show was clearly as British as cricket and overcooked vegetables. ‘The fact that it was British and we hadn’t altered a word provided a sort of built-in snob merit,’2 Peter discovered.
By the time Beyond the Fringe arrived in New York, celebrities such as Bette Davis, Charles Boyer and Noel Coward were already queuing up to go backstage and meet the cast. Harriet Garland went to the opening night with the grave Burmese UN dignitary U Thant, and was introduced to Lauren Bacall into the bargain. President Kennedy was still too busy with the Cuban crisis to come, but his aides telephoned the show’s producer to request that a private performance be squeezed in at the White House. Like the Queen and the Labour Party leadership before him, he was crudely snubbed. ‘We’re not some fucking cabaret. He can come to the theatre,’ said Peter, who put it slightly differently in a letter to his mother and father: ‘It would have made us seem rather like performing seals.’ Alan Bennett later turned down two invitations to the White House for dinner as well. ‘Monstrous behaviour,’ he now reflects. It worked, at any rate. Kennedy duly booked seats for himself and several security guards at a showing early in February.
Rather than simply wallow in all the adulation, Peter moved quickly to benefit from it, and find the Establishment Club a permanent New York home. No more than a fortnight after the opening, he telephoned John Bird on the Chicago leg of the Establishment tour to say that he had found an American co-producer – John Krimsky – and a venue – the dilapidated El Morocco nightclub at 154 East 54th Street. Langdon had been elbowed out of the deal, which had been done by an American lawyer, Jerry Lurie of Cohen and Glickstein. Nick Garland, who was already in Boston directing Peter Ustinov in Photo Finish, had been signed up to direct the show. Gradually, the El Morocco was transformed into Strollers Theatre-Club, host to the London Establishment, and was ready to open its doors on 23 January 1963. Much more plush, comfortable and intimate than its London counterpart, Strollers managed – if that were possible – to create even more excitement among New York’s fashionable society than the Soho version had done back home.
David Merrick, the producer who had lost out in his bid to stage Beyond the Fringe, rubbished the new club’s chances of success to anyone who would listen. There was a newspaper strike, he pointed out, making it impossible to raise any publicity in New York; the Establishment’s opening had already been postponed for a month as a consequence. Merrick himself had sidestepped this problem for a show called Subways Are for Sleeping, by finding ordinary members of the public with the same names as famous newspaper critics, eliciting positive quotes from them and pri
nting them up on posters and handbills. Peter now struck back, by finding a shy, mddle-aged black postman in the Philadelphia phone directory who also happened to be called David Merrick, and taking him to a rehearsal of the new show at the Establishment. The postman pronounced it the finest show he’d ever seen as well as the only show he’d ever seen. Thousands of handbills were printed and distributed on the street, showing Merrick the postman looking solemn in trilby and gabardine raincoat, a speech bubble issuing from his mouth with the words ‘David Merrick raves about the Establishment: “I think the Establishment is the most brilliant show in New York. It is better than Tchin-Tchin, Stop the World and Oliver! all rolled into one. I wish I had a piece of it.”’
Copies of the handbill were affixed to helium balloons and floated up past Merrick’s office window. Wendy and Judy Scott-Fox paraded up and down outside theatres where the above Merrick hits were playing, wearing sandwich boards displaying postman Merrick’s eulogies. Radio commercials began with the words: ‘This is the real David Merrick speaking. Don’t be taken in by substitutes.’ A loudspeaker van drove up and down Broadway blaring the same message to fascinated crowds. The ‘real’ David Merrick, furious, threatened legal action. When he found such a course would be quite unworkable, he threatened instead to take out full-page advertisements when the newspapers returned, reprinting in large type all the bad reviews garnered by the Establishment cabaret. The trouble with this idea was, it didn’t get any.
According to the reviewer from the New York Daily News, ‘Most of the show is hilarious, all of it was outrageous; I enjoyed it thoroughly’. The Herald Tribune called it ‘Brash, bawdy and delightful’. The New York World-Telegram described it as ‘Both outrageous and outrageously funny’. The New York Times said that ‘The Establishment makes England’s early crop of angry young men sound as benevolent as Will Rogers. Its wit is biting and its actors and talent brilliant.’ Cue magazine, meanwhile, maintained that ‘It is limp praise indeed to say we have produced nothing like it in this country. Thank you Mr Peter Cook for leading this civilised expedition to our shores.’
Peter, John Bird and John Fortune had deliberately written a harder revue for American audiences, who had some experience of satirical club cabaret. The opening number was a version of the crucifixion, with Fortune as a reasonable middle-class Christ flanked by two common-as-muck thieves. Bird explains: ‘So much of the show was based on class, because class was still a defining feature of British life. We were trying to convey to American audiences the centrality of this – it was a good piece of shorthand for them.’
John Fortune and Eleanor Bron in particular specialised in English middle-class embarrassment, as in the sketch about a couple, both of whom want to go to bed with each other but neither of whom dare make the first move:
Fortune:
I mean, if two people are attracted to each other, I mean, why on earth can’t they just go up to each other say, you know – for example, ‘You’re an attractive girl, you know, and I’m – an attractive man, I suppose, you know, and why don’t we go to bed?’ I mean, that’s the . . .
Bron:
Well yes, of course – I mean, of course, that’s how it ought to be – but somehow it never is . . . Well – it’s so silly, really . . .
Fortune:
Stupid, yes . . .
Bron:
Although, in fact, what you’re saying isn’t strictly true . . .
Fortune:
Oh, go on yes . . .
Bron:
It’s just, in fact, a man can go up to a girl and say . . . that . . . but a girl, you know, poor thing, just has to sort of sit, and . . . sit, and . . . well, wait really.
Fortune:
Well, I suppose that’s true, up to a point, yes . . . (pause) Where are you going for your holidays this year – have you decided at all?
Bron:
Oh, well, I’m still sort of hovering between Portugal and Poland.
It was a routine that Peter was to re-use successfully in the film Bedazzled four years later, with Dudley Moore playing opposite Eleanor Bron. Another of Peter’s sketches that would have been too controversial for British audiences featured a blind man addressing the audience:
Good evening. I am blind. And yet I am reading this message. I am reading it on the wonderful system known as broille . . . I’m sorry, I’ll feel that again.
The punchline was a voice-over explaining that the audience had just heard an appeal on behalf of the blond. Some of them hissed, but a blind man who thought it hilarious asked to meet the author.
Moore’s place at the New York Establishment’s piano had been taken by the veteran jazz musician Teddy Wilson, but this did not appear to have hindered his romantic career, which pursued a course roughly opposite to the Bron–Fortune sketch. According to Alan Bennett, ‘Dudley’s performance on stage in Beyond the Fringe was often merely a perfunctory interruption of the more prolonged and energetic performance going on in his dressing room.’3 Although undoubtedly still madly in love with Celia Hammond, upon whom he lavished endless transatlantic letters and phonecalls, Moore was desperate for female attention, and even managed to seduce Tuesday Weld, twenty-year-old star of Sex Kittens Go to College, in a hired limousine on the way home from the show.
Peter’s personal life, remembers Bennett, ‘although never so volatile nor so highly charged as Dudley’s, did have its moments.’4 On a business trip to Chicago he had already seduced a playboy bunny whom he referred to as ‘Miss Kitty Nisty’, whose apartment he had been forced to flee from in his underwear, when her father had burst in brandishing a shotgun. Then, on 5 February 1963, at a dinner given by the Vice-President, he was introduced to Jackie Kennedy. He wrote to tell his parents about her, an uncharacteristic note of excitement creeping into his customarily devoted but reserved style: ‘She was very sweet and she spoke in a voice like Marilyn Monroe. Two days later she came without any warning at all to see the late show at the Establishment. I sat with her at the table, plied her with champagne. She loved it and told me that [the British Ambassador] in Washington had advised her not to bring it to the White House as it was “too anti-British”. She kept shrieking with delight, and saying how naughty it all was, and how Jack would never allow her up to New York again.’
Three days later JFK himself, no doubt at his wife’s instigation, backed down and came to New York to see Beyond the Fringe. The President’s red nuclear phone was installed backstage in case he needed to start World War III during the show, and the theatre was searched in advance by a phalanx of security guards. Peter left a replica pistol on his dressing room table as a test, which remained unnoticed. The security guards then attempted to blend into the auditorium during the performance, with faces of stone and bulging jackets. All eyes were on the President, which made for a slightly uneasy performance. Peter made reference to him during his Macmillan impersonation:
The President was kind enough to show me actual photographs of the Polaris. Until we have it, we shall rely on our own missiwith a range of 150 miles. This means we can just about hit Paris – and by God we will.
The audience roared. Kennedy, who had been laughing with the rest of them, slipped easily and professionally into an expressionless mask during the Macmillan item.
After the show the Kennedys came backstage where Jackie told JFK how worried the cast were at the prospect of having to pay inflated US taxes. ‘You’re so naughty with your taxes, Jack!’ she gushed. Bennett believes that Peter may have subsequently ‘seen something’ of Jackie Kennedy, who thereafter became a frequent visitor to Strollers: ‘I have a vision of the presidential party in the Green Room having drinks in the interval, with Mrs Kennedy absently stroking Peter’s hand as they chatted.’5 Wendy, meanwhile, did her bit to redress the balance for British sexuality by accidentally stepping on the hem of her strapless dress as she met the President, with inevitable consequences that given his reputation he no doubt appreciated.
Peter and Wendy’s relationship, which h
ad begun to stutter somewhat under the pressure of Peter’s club-owning commitments back home, underwent a revival when she joined him in America. He bought her a beautiful green Tiffany lamp as a token of his affection. It became the start of a collection, but none of the others matched the original for its sentimental attraction. It became the centrepiece of their sumptuous new apartment in the East Village, at 13 St Mark’s Place. Barry Humphries, who had finally been allowed to visit America after all with a touring version of Oliver!, describes the decor chez Cook: ‘Here and there in the rambling apartment were real Tiffany lamps, an abundance of rich textiles of crimson and mulberry silk and crushed velvet, which created an atmosphere of opulence – or so I apprehended, living as I was, only a few blocks away in an austere cold-water flat above a poodle parlour.’6 A journalist friend was slightly less elaborate, encapsulating it as being ‘decorated like a mediaeval tent’.7 A medieval tent, that is, with subdued jazz and an octagonal sofa.
Nick and Harriet Garland stayed in the flat for a while on their arrival from Boston. Judy Scott-Fox, the faithful aide-de-camp, moved in and never moved out. Wendy, after three years of keeping open house in Cambridge, Battersea and now New York, was getting rather sick of never being alone with Peter. ‘We had his secretary living with us. There were always other people around. I was actually rather scared to be on my own with Peter, because he didn’t know how to be relaxed, he found it incredibly difficult.’ Part of the problem was that Wendy had nothing to do in the day, other than keep house. As MC of the Establishment both in London and New York, Peter had developed a semi-nocturnal existence, sleeping in until lunchtime before dashing out to resume work on his various projects. He often had to provide his own entertainment in the middle of the night: sometimes he would phone TV stations, as when he called to complain that ‘what he could only describe as a mammary gland’ had just been seen on TV (at 3.30 in the morning) by his son Gary, aged seven, and his daughter Mary-Ann, aged five.