Biography Of Peter Cook

  For Sarah herself, though, there were one or two unpleasant surprises. She had written to the solicitors requesting information about her Eye shareholding on 18 March, and had received no reply; subsequently, on 29 March, Yin Chong had attended the magazine’s AGM and had put forward his sister’s point of view. Neither Lin, nor Yin, nor the solicitor had informed Sarah or her sister that the meeting was taking place. Worse still, Hislop and Cash had the unpleasant task of explaining to Sarah and Elizabeth that they did not in fact own a third of their brothquo;s shares. Although his will had stipulated that ‘all his shares’ be divided three ways, the manner in which the document had been drawn up did not take into account a number of Eye shares transferred to Peter Cook Productions Ltd on 9 January 1992. This company, worth over a third of a million according to Companies House, was not mentioned in the will and therefore passed entirely to Lin as the major beneficiary. After Peter’s death, Lin had produced more documents transferring further Eye shares into the company, which were dated September 1994, but which were signed not by him but by herself on his behalf. Neither the 1992 nor 1994 transfer documents had been presented for registration by Peter. The combined effect of these transfers was to leave Lin with over 40 per cent of the shares, and Elizabeth and Sarah just 12 per cent each. Sarah took independent legal advice about the matter; but although she wished to contest the transfer that had not been signed or registered by Peter, neither she nor her sister felt that they had the funds to undergo a protracted legal battle, and so reluctantly bowed to the inevitable. Private Eye, at least, remained mathematically independent. ‘I would want to continue Peter’s policy,’ said Sarah, ‘which was hands off.’17 Relations between Private Eye and the Chong family remain watchful. Early in 1996 the journalist Tim Satchell founded The Insider, a rival to the Eye, with financial backing supplied in part by Yin Chong. When Private Eye parodied the Bruce Grobbelaar football bungs trial, the Malaysian businessman concerned was renamed ‘Yin Cock’.

  Further ructions occurred over the valuable Tiffany lamp, once Peter’s gift to Wendy, which had become the Maltese Falcon of his life. Sarah became worried about whether or not Dudley had received his bequest, and telephoned him in May 1995, four months after she and Lin had received copies of the will, to ask if it was in his possession; he said that it was not. In Autumn 1995 she wrote to the solicitor to enquire as to when, if ever, Dudley would receive the lamp; a reply came back saying that he would get it in due course ‘if it had not been gifted prior to Peter’s death’. Sarah replied that as far as she was aware, it had not been gifted in such a manner. This prompted a letter from Lin to her sister-in-law:

  Dear Sarah

  You are the most unpleasant person I have come across in a long time. Currently, you are full of self-importance. You were not particularly close to Peter, however you might like to deceive yourself on this score. You do injustice to his memory: being petty, mean-minded and thinking you are carrying out his wishes whilst doing the reverse by going through them with a toothcomb. He would have been thoroughly ashamed of your actions since his death . . . Please act with dignity. You might further find that people might begin to be drawn to you and you will have more friends in your life than you seem to have at the moment. I had always felt sorry for you because you were a lonely person but you are apparently more wretched than I had suspected . . . Whilst you should be grieving over a person, you are more concerned about things like the Tiffany lamp. Eat your heart out, Dudley gave it to me.

  Yours sincerely

  Lin.

  Lin subsequently spoke at length to Dudley Moore’s biographer, Barbra Paskin, about her husband’s decision to leave the lamp to his former partner:

  ‘If Dudley ever doubted Peter loved or cared for him, all his doubts evaporated when he learned this. He was immensely moved, and in a mild state of shock.’ Lin expected Dudley to take the lamp back with him to Los Angeles, but a few days later he told her he wanted her to have it. ‘In my mind,’ she says softly, ‘that was his way of showing how much he cared about Peter. Dudley realised how much Peter and I meant to each other, and it was his way of comforting me. There’s a wonderful, special continuity about it. The fact that Peter left this most treasured item to Dudley was beautiful. The fact that Dudley gave it back to Peter, through me, was doubly beautiful.’18

  Lin proved adept at putting her side of the story in public. A number of positive profiles appeared in the newspapers. Lynda Lee-Potter wrote in the Daily Mail that:

  Fifteen years ago, Peter Cook had a huge stroke of luck when wise, gentle, resolute Lin Chong came into his life . . . Sadly, Lin no longer speaks to her two sisters-in-law. She was bitterly hurt because they took legal advice about the will and the allocation of the Private Eye shares which Peter had left to them and Lin. ‘They knew that I loved their brother and looked after him and that he loved me very much,’ she says, ‘so I would have thought they would be caring towards me. I tried to comfort them and then it suddenly went wrong. I thought: “You’ve got no compassion, no consideration for me, you’re just thinking of yourselves”.’19

  The antagonistic division of Peter’s estate continued to drag on for well over two years. Sarah wrote to Lin asking for the return of her father’s CMG; Lin did not reply. Lin wrote to Margaret Cook’s solicitors requesting the return of one of Peter’s books that he had left in his mother’s house, a signed autobiography of David Frost; this was returned with humorous alacrity, for Peter had only left it there in the first place because he did not actually want it. It was not until May 1997 that Elizabeth and Sarah received their Private Eye shares. They, Judy, Lucy and Daisy, never saw anything of Aspera, Peter’s Lichtenstein-based company; it has been explained to them that there is no money in it and no accounts to inspect either. Lucy and Daisy decided to sell their Majorcan property, which had fallen into a state of dilapidation; ‘Peter had let it crumble over the years,’ explains Wendy, ‘but he wouldn’t ever sell it, as it was a rather nostalgic symbol. Peter wouldn’t admit feelings such as nostalgia easily, even to himself, but they were there.’ To admit nostalgia, of course, was to admit vulnerability; to disguise it under layers of performance was Peter’s normal way. His gesture, though, had unquestionably been a sentimental one.

  Adding to the confusion surrounding Peter’s legacy, shortly after his death his friend Lawrence Levy claimed to have discused with him the contents of a later will, less beneficial to Lin than the first, which he personally had witnessed. Unfortunately Levy died of cancer in April 1995, without providing any further details. The person identified by Levy as the other witness, a chartered accountant named Neil Benson, refuses to confirm or deny the story. If the later will existed, it seems that Peter had changed his mind and thrown it away.

  A further row subsequently developed between George and Lin over George’s cassette collection. He saw his hours of taped conversations with Peter as a means to raise the magic £30,000 that would enable him to launch the Rainbow Party as a national force, and interested BBC Radio 4 in the tapes via a company called Soundbite Productions Ltd. Lin, however, insisted that he had no right to exploit them commercially. A legal letter from Moorhead James, solicitors, landed on George’s doormat, insisting that the recordings had been made in ‘arrangements of confidence’, and threatening him with legal action if he did not give an undertaking to halt publication, and to deliver up the cassettes to Lin or Moorhead James forthwith. ‘It’s ironic what she’s doing,’ said George, ‘because Peter hated lawyers’ (Peter, in fact, kept a framed cheque on his wall because it was the only one he’d ever received from a lawyer). Questioned by journalists, George insisted that ‘Anyone who walked into my house was made aware the tapes were running. We’d joke about it and say they’d be worth a fortune one day. But it’s not good to get on the wrong side of Lin. She was very angry, and told me that Peter found me terribly boring.’20 George’s solicitor David Price wrote back to refute as ‘extraordinary’ the allegation that any obligations of confidence we
re involved, and to question Lin’s motives. The tennis rally of legal letters cost George £1,419.40, money that he simply did not possess. His telephone was cut off, and he had to resort to phoning LBC from call boxes. He was down to his last £100: optimistic to the last, he put the lot on himself at 500–1 to replace Kevin Keegan as the next manager of Newcastle United.

  Lin frequently used the law to defend her corner. She took action against the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times over inaccuracies in articles about her. She also raised the spectre of legal action against the impoverished obsessives who had unilaterally founded the Peter Cook Appreciation Society, shortly after her husband’s death. The PCAS had been born when a fan, John Wallis, had written to Private Eye enquiring if such a society existed; Ian Hislop had published the enquiry on the Eye’s letters page, and five people had written to Wallis asking to join. Feeling bound by this unexpected obligation, Wallis – under the name ‘Reg Futtock-Armitage’ – set himself the task of publishing a quarterly fanzine dedicated to Peter’s humour, for the benefit of all his fellow ‘Peterphiles’ (geddit). Wallis would undoubtedly have appealed to Peter as the perfect person to administer his fan club. A boisterous Bristolian punk with scarlet hair and a pair of huge pink plasters invariably criss-crossing some drunken wound on the bridge of his nose, he had been fired from his job as a BBC security guard for hurling his hat at his boss in a disrespectful moment. He fronted a rock band called the Pop Stars, so that he could truthfully inform women that he was a Pop Star. He adored every aspect of Peter’s humour, especially Not Only . . . But Also. His fanzine, Publish and Bedazzled, with a circulation of fifty copies, was a collection of photocopied sheets stapled together that jubilantly reflected the spirit of its author.

  Relations between Lin and the PCAS were relatively cordial to begin with. Wallis wrote to seek her approval, and after a few months she replied in the affirmative, the caveat being that there should be no personal financial gain involved for him. His fanzine, she thought, could perhaps be made less smutty. He subsequently organised the first annual meeting of the society at the Everyman Cinema, and hired Elvis Chan (‘The original Chinese Elvis’) as the star turn. Some eighty people attended, including Rainbow George and Peter’s sister Sarah, who drew the winning tickets in the society’s raffle. A huge number of famous people were invited, along the lines of the glut of celebrities that had attended Peter’s memorial service, but not one of them turned up.

  Following that event, relations between Lin and Wallis deteriorated. She telephoned him to point out that he was photocopying jokes, scripts and photographs without permission from the copyright holders, and that if any of them became aware of these infringements and chose to pursue the matter in court, it could cost him a fortune. Even the name Peter Cook, she pointed out, was copyright in certain circumstances. Wallis conceived the futile plan of drawing a wig and false breasts on every photograph in the magazine, and renaming his creation ‘The Rita Cook Appreciation Society’.

  On 16 July 1996 the brief blaze of John Wallis’s life came to an end, when he was found dead after seriously overindulging at a party the night before. He was just twenty-six years and two days old, and had departed life like his idol. Lin telephoned his colleague Paul Hamilton to suggest that it was an appropriate moment to close down the society. Hamilton, a central London postman, chose instead to keep the PCAS going in Wallis’s memory. At the time of writing an uneasy truce exists between Peter’s widow and the society. Lin briefly attended the 1997 meeting of the PCAS, a pleasantly ragged variety event at the ICA starring John Cooper Clarke and The Bastard Son of Tommy Cooper.

  Lin herself attempted to mount a more substantial memorial show, and asked Belinda Harley, Ned Sherrin and Neil Shand to help her out. The event was originally planned for the Royal Festival Hall in April 1996, on a date which was later found to coincide with that of the BAFTA awards; it was then rescheduled to take place in September 1996. Bizarrely, the show was advertised in the press without any information about how to purchase tickets. The proceeds were intended to go to the Cambridge Footlights, which body decided to name a room after Peter in return. Even more bizarrely, the Footlights committee telephoned Ian Hislop to ask him which room they should name; ‘The bar, of course,’ he replied. When she heard of the society’s alcoholic intentions Lin decided that the money should not go to them after all, and the project collapsed. America saw rather slicker memorial events: Dudley hosted Bedazzling!, a Hollywood tribute evening featuring a screening of Bedazzled, while the MetroStage Theater outside Washington, DC mounted a revival of Good Evening with a substitute cast. In the UK there was a further attempt to raise money in Peter’s name: Pembroke, his old Cambridge college, appointed Tim Harrold to try to collect £250,000 for a variety of charitable causes, and announced that Peter’s old room would be officially named after him.

  Perhaps Lin’s most successful commemorative achievement was Something Like Fire, a collection of mainly celebrity reminiscences about Peter edited by herself. It was packed with entertaining memories, although there was hardly any mention of Peter’s parents, his family, his first two marriages, his children or Private Eye magazine. Following Lin’s difficulties with the Eye, Richard Ingrams’s name was retrospectively edited out of the list of speakers at the memorial service printed in the book. In many respects Something Like Fire served as a manifesto for Peter’s third marriage, an affirmation of the strength of the bonds that tied him to Lin. As editor, Lin was proud rather than embarrassed to include unstinting praise of herself: ‘She was gentle but also resolute and strong. Lucky old Peter – but men like him merit the fortune and the fair following wind that carries a Lin to them’ (Nicholas Luard); ‘Lin did as much as any loving human being could have done’ (John Wells); ‘He was lucky enough to earn the love of a good, kind woman’ (Stephen Fry); ‘She was his wife and chief supporter’ (Adrian Slade); ‘When Peter introduced Lin to me, I was bowled over’ (Lewis Morley).

  Lin publicised the book proudly, defending her corner as ever, talking freely about Wendy (‘Peter told me that he didn’t love his first wife’) and Judy. ‘After Peter died,’ she informed the Daily Mail, ‘one of the wives said I was his nurse, another said I was his housekeeper. I was so hurt by that.’ In fact this was a double misunderstanding: Wendy had said that Lin had ‘nursed’ Peter through his illness, and Peter himself had lied to Judy that Lin was no more than his housekeeper. ‘If being a good wife and loving Peter means being a nursemaid and a housekeeper, then I’m proud of that,’ Lin continued. ‘I loved the guy. If his wives couldn’t cope with him then it’s to their discredit. They failed him as wives but were happy to take the alimony.’21 She noted that ‘The divorce judge awarded Judy £480,000 for leaving him four years before I even met him.’22 In fact, Judy had moved to Exmoor just one year before he had first encountered Lin at Stocks, and the judge had awarded her less than half that sum.

  By this time, Lin had sadly fallen out with most of those whom Peter had lived with throughout his life: her understandable emotional possessiveness, where it took the form of commercial possessiveness, had aroused a great many suspicions. There is no question, however, that her devotion to her late husband was fierce and unquestioning; this was no cunning plot to accumulate a large sum of money. Laboriously, she sprayed every piece of graffito on the living-room wall of Perrin’s Walk with fixative, in order to preserve it for posterity. A squashed fly, for instance, marked with the legend ‘Fly’; and the word ‘Virgin’, accompanied by a trail of arrows leading round the corner to the scrawled remark: ‘Not much chance here, mate. Try no. 23’. On one occasion, George emerged from his house to find Lin weeping in Perrin’s Walk. Peter’s favourite goldfish had died, and she was gripped by paroxysms of guilt and sorrow. ‘I managed to convince her, I think, that the goldfish had wanted to be with Peter,’ says George somewhat shamefacedly.

  Whenever she spoke to journalists about her late husband, Lin referred to Peter in the present tense, as if he was still
alive. It was extremely important to her, in all her dealings, to prove that she was the wife whose company Peter had neepound;48the most, that she was the one who could fathom him best. When she wrote in Something Like Fire that ‘Tottenham Hotspurs’ was ‘a team Peter was reputed to support’, it was out of a desperate desire to be included, to show that she understood his life. She alone, she felt, had been able to make him truly happy. She wrote also of ‘the private Peter Cook, my husband, calm, contented and happy in his home and especially his garden, whom no one, no journalist, no friend, no family member really knew. Only me, because I was his wife.’ Happiness, explained Lynda Lee-Potter of the Mail in her profile of Lin, had finally arrived on Peter’s doorstep in his last few years; his last Christmas on earth had been a happy one. ‘Peter was a contented person’, insisted Lin to the Hampstead and Highgate Express. Nicholas Luard, who had become one of Lin’s greatest allies, wrote in Something Like Fire that ‘Peter looked deep, deep and far and often sideways, and he saw and chuckled . . . Peter poured himself another vodka and laughed. The man died happy’. This was, by any stretch of the imagination, a quite extraordinary assertion. Peter may not have enjoyed discussing his personal happiness (one journalist wrote that ‘To talk to him about it is to see the feelers of a giant shellfish withdraw to the safety of their protective crust’), but the idea that his reticence concealed a boundless supply of the stuff is hard to swallow. Peter’s happiness level had its ups and downs like anyone else’s, but he found the downs desperately difficult to cope with, especially the one that held him in its vice-like grip in the last months of his life.