Biography Of Peter Cook

  In some respects Peter had probably been heading towards alcoholism all his life. An American expert, Gilman Ostrander, explains that: ‘Alcoholism is basically a disease of individualism. It afflicts people who from early childhood develop a strong sense of being psychologically alone and on their own in the world. This solitary outlook prevents them from gaining emotional release through associations with other people, but they find they can get this emotional release by drinking. So they become dependent on alcohol in the way other people are dependent on their social relationships with friends and relatives.’ The prevailing medical view is that factors in infancy or early childhood lay the foundation of a personality vulnerable to alcholism. Interestingly, the Encyclopaedia Britannica points to ‘inconsistency in rearing practices’ as a major factor, and suggests that the potential alcholic would begin to demonstrate ‘defiant exhibitionistic deviance’ from an early age.

  Sid Gottlieb tried putting Peter on Antabuse, a drug which makes the user horribly sick if it is combined with alcohol, but its side effects were awful to behold. ‘It made him slur his words as if he were dragging them up from the cellar,’14 recalls John Wells. As a result, Peter seemed drunker on the drug than he did when he was actually drunk. The inebriated – or apparently inebriated – figure of Peter Cook became a familiar sight shuffling down Hampstead High Street, often in his carpet slippers, always with a stack of newspapers under his arm, slurring his requests in shops. His lack of sartorial co-ordination was famous. One journalist described ‘a pair of multi-coloured surfing slacks only a madman or an Australian would wear, having a major argument with his shoes. He looked like a confused package-holiday tourist who’s lost his group in the arrivals lounge.’15 He did not, however, cut a pathetic figure – there always seemed to be a humorous twinkle in his dissipation, and his collection of loud hats, sunglasses and coloured sneakers were clearly deliberately mismatched.

  His antics were frequently eccentric. Once he went into his local off licence and demanded a bottle of wine which was not on the shelves. The assistant went into the storeroom to find it, leaving a steaming cup of fresh coffee on the counter. When he returned with the wine, Peter was gone and so was the coffee, the empty mug sitting forlornly in its saucer. Only once was Peter bested, by a member of the public in the local ironmonger’s. Taking the man, a Mr Bevan, to be a member of staff, Peter posed the one-word question ‘Secateurs?’ To which the man replied, instinctively rather than intentionally, ‘Non sequitur.’ Peter left the shop giggling.

  The house at Perrin’s Walk was as unkempt as its owner. Gone were the days when a houseproud Peter had forbidden Judy to write on the walls. Now he scribbled all over them himself – favourite words like ‘oxymoron’, for instance – and blu-tacked up vital documents like his passport and driving licence so that he could find them easily amid the chaos. Elsewhere he stuck up pictures of his childhood home and of himself as a brilliant young man, a photograph of John Lennon over the headline ‘I don’t feel 40 – I feel like a kid’, pictures of famous alcoholics like George Best and Jimmy Greaves, Pete and Dud photos, cuttings and memorabilia, and a tabloid double-page spread headed ‘The day Peter Cook became a drunk, by Dudley Moore’. A second-hand fruit machine stood next to the sofa, for in-house gambling. The floor was strewn with old newspapers. When Hello! magazine asked to do a photospread of his home life, Peter turned them down on principle; but principles hadn’t really been necessary to reach a decision. Ciara Parkes remembers that ‘When I first went to his house, there were huge piles of mail behind his door up to waist level – it was almost impossible to open. Old birthday cards, bills, going back months. He had a huge row with Sir Iain Vallance at BT after his phone was cut off.’ Peter told John Wells that his bureau had become completely filled with demands from the Inland Revenue, so he had simply bought another bureau. It was a joke, but not too far removed from the truth. Peter lived his life in a state of stunning financial disorganisation. Despite his having offshore funds, his credit card was sliced up in the supermarket.

  ‘On a few occasions the house was in such a mess, I’d just start tidying it up,’ remembers Ciara. ‘I came in one day and said, “Peter, what is all this white stuff?” There were mounds of white powder all over the carpet. He said he’d just sacked his Portuguese cleaner when she was halfway through putting Shake-’n’-Vac on the carpet, and he couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. Then on another occasion I was meant to feed the fish; Peter had rigged up this sound-and-light show for the fish, and had imported these expensive fish flakes from America. I said, “Where are all the fish flakes?” And he said, “I got so hungry last night I ate them.”’ It was probably another joke, but one that was also uncomfortably close to reality. Peter enjoyed cooking, and boasted an extremely limited but effective repertoire, but the sinkfuls of filthy crockery that characterised his kitchen in the early 1980s gradually gave way to an absolute reliance on takeaway food or eating out. ‘When Peter was lonely he used to go and sit in the Villa Bianca Restaurant, where Alan Clare played the piano, and hold court,’ remembers Barry Fantoni. His other favourite restaurant was the La Sorpresa, on the corner of Perrin’s Walk, where he also ate alone on many occasions. He always ordered a side plate of spinach, which he detested. ‘I hate spinach. I get my own back by leaving it,’ he explained.16

  Peter did not get much exercise. ‘I do fifty eyebrow-raises a day,’ he said sardonically when asked. In 1986, though, he sobered up sufficiently to partner Annabel Croft in a celebrity tennis tournament. ‘I’m a “touch” player,’ he explained. ‘Not for me the dull serve-and-volley game adopted by the Hoads and Lavers of this world. The greatest pleasure for me at least is to touch the ball, preferably with the racque.’ There was also golf of course, usually in competition with Lawrence Levy and Howard Baws, or with his agent David Wilkinson; or pro-celebrity golf, with adoring chums like Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsyth and Kenny Lynch. Peter was a member of the exceptionally straightlaced Highgate Golf Club, where he was not always popular with his fellow members, for both sartorial and protocol reasons. He was totally immune to club etiquette: when asked to remove his cap, he demurred on the grounds that he was an orthodox Jew. He hated losing, so his friends often lost to him deliberately. Once, when on the brink of defeat at the 18th, he set fire to the rough so that the game had to be abandoned.

  An occasional golfing companion was Michael Parkinson. ‘He was extraordinary. You used to dread waiting for him, he used to bring out all the worst things in a human being – ‘I hope this person doesn’t make me ashamed of him,’ you know. But you never knew how he was going to turn up at a golf club, and they’re very formal places. He turned up at my club at Temple with a pair of trainers, and this bloody big pink ‘Sloppy Joe’ shirt right down around his knees, and jeans. He broke three dress rules before he got out of the car. I had to go up to him and say ‘Peter, for Christ’s sake, you might think that dress rules are dozy but there are dress rules.’ He had to go to the pro shop and buy a pair of trousers, it was a kind of ritual we went through every time. Anyway, we got down to the second tee and he said, ‘Would you like a drink?’ And he opened this big clanking golf bag, and it was full of cans. I thought ‘Oh dear,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think so Peter.’ He pulled out this can which looked like a Coke can – it was white and blue and had identical markings – and I thought, ‘Oh that’s all right, it’s Coke.’ He had one every hole and after about four he was pissed. So when he picked a fifth one out, I said, ‘Can I have a look at that?’ And they were tins of Bacardi and Coke. I think we made it round to the tenth, by which time he didn’t know where he was, so we went back to the clubhouse, and he’d started sweating profusely. He had this huge dinner plate of sweat on his shirt, and I remember thinking to my eternal shame, ‘I hope to Christ the Captain doesn’t come in.’ It was like bloody school. Eventually he started talking about drugs in a loud voice, and there were several old ladies playing bridge, absolutely frozen. In fact the entire room
was absolutely enchanted by him. He was an amazing bugger, it was never easy to be with him. He challenged you all the time, he didn’t believe in rules or conventions.’

  Whether Peter’s friends appreciated him drunk or not varied considerably according to personal taste. ‘Drunks are usually bores,’ reckons Harry Enfield, ‘but Peter’s drinking affected his health more than his personality. He was never a bore.’17 Paul Foot disagrees: ‘He could be very dull, as people who drink too much often are, when he just wanted to have a chat about some trivial matter at two o’clock in the morning.’ Stephen Fry insists that ‘Peter never yielded to the dark side, never once turned aggressive or rude or loud or bullying or vain.’18 Rainbow George, on the other hand, contends that ‘Everybody who really loved Peter also on occasions really hated Peter. He could be very sharp.’19 It all depended on his mood, who he was with, and what he wanted them to think of him. Certainly he could be a frustrating person was ne when drunk: on the way to an England–Italy international at Wembley, he and Barry Fantoni abandoned their car in heavy traffic and set out to walk to the ground; Peter was waylaid by the first pub they came to, went in for a drink and didn’t emerge until closing time.

  Gradually, news of Peter’s condition filtered through the British television industry. Willie Donaldson, whose Henry Root books had been put forward for television adaptations, recalls that ‘We had lots of plans to do things together, but his name killed them stone dead. I wanted him in Root, but people in television just went white as a sheet and said “Over our dead bodies”. I had this TV sex comedy project called The Karma Chingford, devised with Geoff Atkinson, starring a thinly disguised Major Ron Ferguson figure played by Peter. BBC Light Entertainment asked for a pilot budget, then sent a letter rejecting it, on the grounds that Peter was in it – that collapsed it.’

  Instead Peter and Donaldson spent afternoons sitting on park benches like two E. L. Wistys. ‘He got me into Ecstasy,’ says Donaldson. ‘These two old arseholes, taking Ecstasy. The only difference was that I wasn’t drinking, whereas he was shaking whenever we met. He said, ‘You’d even like Richard Ingrams if you tried Ecstasy.’ I’d never heard of it, I didn’t even know what it was. In fact all we talked about were drugs and pornographic videos. He’d tell me about gay sex and scoring cocaine in New York at four in the morning. These two sad old addicts stumbling around, bored in the afternoon. I think I understood. I know all about boredom, and Peter was bored. He’d do anything rather than be bored. Drink, drugs and dirty sex was one answer. If you’re not bored yourself, I don’t think you’d understand that sort of despair. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and he couldn’t bear being alive, in his head, without taking drugs. If you cannot bear the fact that somehow you’ve got to exist for two-and-a-half hours until Neighbours starts at 5.30, hard drugs or alcohol snaps you out of it. Peter took cocaine, he tried everything, but I think the fact that he was an alcoholic basically saved him from being into much harder drugs.

  Once the drugs are on the way, the boredom goes. If you see a drug addict, they cannot bear the prospect of having to get through the next twenty minutes. But the second you tell them the drugs are on their way, they’re OK. It’s the same with porn, it’s a cure for the horror of getting through the next five minutes. Sex is the greatest instant anti-boredom treatment. You can’t be bored and have sex at the same time. Peter was actually sexually very attractive but insecure; I think he resented Dudley’s ‘sex thimble’ tag. I used to say to Peter, how can someone as talented as you be so bored with the idea of sitting down and writing? But that sort of pull-your-socks-up approach is no use. You can’t jack yourself up like that. The dream dies in your head. You get bored with your own brain. He wanted to scream. There was something he couldn’t express. He thought everything was ludicrous – that’s why he watched terrible television. We appeared on a Literary Review panel at the Cheltenham Festival, with Auberon Waugh, Willie Rushton, Anna Ford and Keith Waterhouse, where the audience were supposed to ask questions. He told me he had this overwhelming urge to swear at his polite questioners, to shout ‘You fucking cunt!’ at a middle-aged lady. It amused him, like all depressed people, the thought of doing something absolutely frightful to cheer himself up. I remember asking him about Judy, though, and that was the one thing he’d never talk about. He’d never say anything about her.’

  Peter did not like what he had become. If his daughters tried to telephone him when he was drunk or depressed, he would sit by the phone without answering. If they came to the door he was too ashamed to answer it, because he did not want them to see him in his distressed state. ‘He was obviously going through a difficult time, and feeling lonely,’ says Lucy. ‘In the mid-eighties he was doing a short stay at Champney’s, a bit of a health boost. I remember I’d done this long trip down, a 2-hour drive, and I hadn’t seen him in quite some time. When I arrived there, we had a cup of coffee in some quiet private little place. And we were just talking about this, that and the other, when his eyes started welling up with tears, and mine did too. Then he cut the conversation short, and said ‘Well, you’d better be going now.’ I’d only been there about half an hour, and I’d driven two hours to be with him. I think he just couldn’t bear it, he couldn’t bear feeling so emotional. He was such an incredibly vulnerable man. Most of the time he did quite a good job of covering it up and being very funny, but underneath he was hugely emotional and couldn’t deal with it. I wasn’t angry with him, I just felt so sad. I thought, ‘This is just love we feel for each other, it’s OK to be a bit sad, it’s OK to show vulnerability.’ But for him it was almost impossible. So I have a lot of regrets, a lot of things I suppose I wish I’d said.’

  Even though he was sometimes too embarrassed to face his family, Peter could always be relied upon to come to the rescue in a crisis. ‘Even if I hadn’t been able to get through for months,’ says his sister Elizabeth, ‘I always knew that if I was in trouble he would be there immediately. I could leave message after message saying “Hello, hope you’re OK, this is your sister”, and nothing would happen. But if I left a message and he could hear that I was near tears, he’d be there at once.’ When Lucy was about twenty-four, she suffered a terrible eczema attack. ‘I felt like a leper, it was all over my face. And I’d heard about a miracle cure that could help, but it was quite an expensive treatment.’ Peter came to the rescue at once, and the whole thing cleared up inside ten days. There were, however, limits to the emotional assistance he was capable of providing. When his daughter Daisy had a nervous illness in the mid-1980s, she went to stay with the Gottliebs for a few months. ‘Peter would come and see her very often,’ recalls Sid, ‘and you could see he was distressed. But he found it difficult to show affection. It would have been nice for Daisy if he could have put his arms around her and cuddled her, but he couldn’t bring that off. I think he would rather that he’d enjoyed a more conventional relationship with his daughters than he had, that it didn’t have to consist of way-out jokiness a lot of the time. He would cry about it – he was a very, very shy and lonely person.’

  Family life was not all gloom and despondency, of course. Peter still kept in close touch with his mother, who looked forward excitedly to his visits. Impractical as he was at home, he liked to perform odd jobs for her around the house, such as effecting the bi-annual switch between her summer and winter curtains (‘Curtains down, curtains up. Son exhausted’ ran the comment in her visitors’ book). He spent Christmases with the family. He also took holidays at the farm in Majorca Wendy had moved back to the island, although to a different house, while Lucy and Daisy had abandoned the catering trade and settled into adult life as an aromatherapist and an EFL teacher respectively. In 1985 Peter went to Majorca with John Gilbert, the manager of Dire Straits; one morning the pair got up at 5 a.m. and paid for every sunlounger on the beach, to forestall the German tourists who always got there at dawn. In 1988 he went there with Daisy and her boyfriend Simon Hardy, and met Wendy for the first time in almost two decades.
‘It was an awkward meeting in the town square, where we had all turned up to the regular Sunday morning market,’ recalls Hardy. ‘I think Peter would have avoided it if he’d possibly been able to. Wendy had started a project in the Majorcan hills where she, her partner and another couple were building up an alternative centre for agriculture and the crafts. I remember Peter saying he was thinking of going to take a look, but he was worried about being confronted by a gaggle of people waving vegetables at him.’

  When Peter was up, and in a relatively good mood, he would emerge from Perrin’s Walk and spread laughter and mild anarchy. When he was down, he would lock himself away in retreat from the world, sometimes for weeks. His mood swings were getting wider and wider, gaining momentum like a Newton’s cradle in reverse. Most of his friends simply assumed during his long unexplained absences that he was simply off seeing other friends. After all, he never discussed what he did or who he’d seen, preferring to talk about what was in the papers or on TV. As a result, he left some people with a false impression of constant jollity and happy drunkenness. Part of the problem was that Peter had set himself the lifetime task of cheering other people up: he was almost fated to entertain everyone he met. But there was no one to cheer him up, to lift his spirits when he was down. He always had to entertain himself.

  Gradually, it filtered through to the public and the press that Peter Cook was no longer attempting to produce any worthwhile work. He appeared, in the words of John Cleese, ‘to have lost it’. Peter himself repeatedly insisted that it was a matter of simple indolence. ‘Work is for grown-ups,’ he’d say; or, on the prospect of kick-starting his career again, ‘The idea that you should work like a maniac until you are sixty-five and then take time off is crazy – I’d much rather take time off along the way. Idleness comes naturally to me.’ He added that ‘It made me ill to hear them complaining at the Tory conference about shorter working hours and longer holidays on the continent, as though that’s something dreadful.’ When Jonathan Ross invited him to lunch to discuss the idea of collaborating on a new show, and suggested making a non-broadcast pilot, he replied: ‘I was rather hoping that we could make a non-broadcast series.’ The coiled spring had completely unwound.