Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (44 page)

Throughout Gwen was happy to assume the role of long suffering spouse, her stoic attitude founded upon a love for her husband that entailed him coming home every Sunday wherever he might be appearing in the land. As long as she served him his favourite meals, kept his bed warm and ensured that his soup and tea were piping hot, all would be well with the world. Once when Freddie Starr observed, ‘She’s an angel,’ Cooper retorted, ‘She’s fucking gonna be, if this soup’s cold!’ When she was at a loose end there was the charity work for her Masonic lodge and for the Grand Order of Lady Ratlings to keep her occupied. For a short period she involved herself in the running of the magic and joke shop in Shaftesbury Avenue and in the late Fifties became responsible for displaying a most unusual exhibit at venues like the Festival Gardens at Battersea and the Schoolboys’ Own Exhibition at Olympia. This was a Victorian living room in which the furniture was entirely decorated with stamps, the pictures on the wall were made completely from stamps and all other ornaments and fittings were covered with them. It had been the life’s work of the musical clown, Albert Schaffer, for the benefit of whose widow the Coopers hoped to raise money. Gwen told the press, ‘The paintings look like oil paintings, they’re so lifelike. In one picture Mr Schaffer sent all over the world for a stamp to cast a shadow on a flower in a wood.’ Cooper
had started out wanting to buy some musical instruments that Schaffer had used in his act. His own schoolboy enthusiasm was carried away when he discovered what else was on offer. Pathé Pictorial had a field day: ‘Imagine having to lick all those stamps – you’d want a constant water supply.’ Cut to shot of comedian with tap stuck to his forehead! As the Coopers lined up together to publicize the eccentric venture for the press, all seemed right with the world.

However, there is always a price to pay for success and Tommy was eventually seduced by the affluence it brought him. Friends and relatives concede that Gwen always enjoyed her tipple. The same was not always true of her husband. His pals from the early days playing the nightclubs and variety houses in and around London testify that it was difficult to get him to succumb to half a pint of light ale between performances on a Friday night. However, he did once confide to Edwin Hooper, the boss of Supreme Magic, that his big ambition when he started in show business had always been to reach that stage where he could afford to sit back and relax after a show with a glass of champagne in one hand and a good cigar in the other. One wishes the money had been invested elsewhere. Eventually Cooper’s drinking habits would have devastating effects on his home life and came close at times to ruining his career and his sublime comical skills.

The comedian who takes refuge in drink to allay the pressures of his work has become a biographical cliché, with Tony Hancock, Marty Feldman, and Peter Cook providing cautionary tales among recent British comic heroes. No one can deny that Cooper himself did not face similar pressures. The uncertainty that an audience may or may not find you funny on any one night, in any one town is an occupational hazard for the stand up comedian. No one summed it up better than veteran comic, Ted Ray when he explained to magician, Patrick Page
what it meant to sign a contract as a comedian: ‘What you are doing, in effect, is saying to a future employer, that sometime next year, at a given date, time and place,
you will be funny
. It doesn’t matter what happens between now and then. You can be ill, broke, lose everything you have ever held dear. On that night you
have
to make them laugh, because you have signed a contract that says so.’

Tommy knew within his bones that no one ever forgave mediocrity in a comedian and faced up to the challenge of his own particular situation. He once confided to Eric Sykes, ‘People say I’ve only got to walk out on stage and they laugh. If only they knew what it takes to walk out on stage in the first place. One of these days I’ll just walk out and do nothing. Then they’ll know the difference.’ His daughter vouches for the fact that he was a nervous performer, becoming more and more hyper as the curtain call approached, terrified he wasn’t good enough, his stomach all knotted up inside. He once told her, ‘People don’t know real fear until they’ve stood in the wings night after night.’ Hard as it is to believe, there was one occasion towards the end of his career when he went five minutes before raising a decent laugh. The venue was the Walthamstow Assembly Hall. Peter Hudson had done a warm-up spot ahead of him and died the death. As he came off, Tommy asked what they were like. ‘A bit sticky’, Peter replied. As the silence persisted in Cooper’s own act, he walked towards Hudson in the wings and whispered, ‘Is it time to come off yet?’ He then ambled back to the centre and for Peter’s benefit muttered – with the trademark shrug that did service for a thousand words –‘Sticky?’ He brought them round in the end. He never took any audience for granted.

As Eric Sykes has said, ‘Comedy is a thing that everybody thinks they can do, but they can’t – any more than they can balance those twelve teacups on a cane.’ However, I refuse to
believe that in the beginning Cooper resorted to alcohol as Dutch courage to get him ‘onto that stage’. He drank because he was successful. He had not done so in the earlier years of his career simply because he could not afford to do so. Now – beyond his wildest expectations – he could. Sadly in due course what began as a well-earned luxury with which to wind down after a show became the crutch that helped him through the challenge not only of pitting his wits against the world but of reproducing the highs he knew he was capable of. Michael Parkinson recalls working with Tommy on board a dry ship where the strongest drink served was Coca-Cola. There was much agitation among the crew when Cooper requested a bottle of brandy. They asked Parkinson for his advice. He replied, ‘It’s not a problem. You give him the bottle or he doesn’t go on. It’s as simple as that. That’s how he works.’ It had come to that.

Aspects of his eventual dependency have farcical overtones. Vicky recalls his habit for hiding things: a general tendency to secrecy is a recognized trait of the alcoholic. After his death they found money and pills in the most unlikely places: ‘My mother once found a cheese sandwich under his pillow.’ According to Barry Cryer, there was the breakfast-time at a Bournemouth hotel when he demanded a large gin and tonic with his cornflakes. Television had produced a culture shock to his system with its early starts and this was the only way Tommy could face the day of location filming that loomed ahead of him. The poor waitress remonstrated, but Tommy pulled rank claiming the manager was a friend. He then poured the booze all over the cereal with the comment that it was far better for him: ‘Milk is full of cholesterol!’ One day Royston Mayoh had his film cameraman, Teddy Adcock, who was passing through Chiswick, deliver a script by hand to the house. Gwen answered the door and immediately went into
overdrive: ‘Right – bring him in, throw him on the couch and fuck off!’ She thought Adcock was a hire car driver deputed to bring home her husband the worse for wear. Thankfully, in view of his problem, Cooper was himself a reluctant driver, travelling by train whenever he could, occasionally with a chauffeur bringing up the rear with his props by road. A favourite joke went, ‘I was driving home the other week and a policeman stopped me. He said, “Is this car licensed?” I said, “Yes, constable. What would you like? A gin and tonic?” The gag concealed a daunting reality. Brandishing a bottle of brandy he was once overheard asking a Chatham taxi-driver, ‘Have I got enough to get me to Chiswick?’

And yet in the world of television I have yet to meet anyone who saw him drunk. Peter Reeves recalls that when making the series for Paradine at the beginning of 1970 he did manage to forego drinking on the day of the show. This had something of an adverse effect. As Peter perceived things, ‘He was starting to dry out during this time. He would sweat profusely and energy would be diverted from the performance itself.’ The only time Cooper fell out with Peter Hudson was on the matter. During one of their many seasons together the comedy impressionist tried desperately to lure Tommy onto lager. He thought he had succeeded, until he noticed that no sooner was his glass half empty than he was topping it up with gin. When he begged him to stop, he flew back at Peter with an uncharacteristic ‘I’m the star of this show. I’ll drink if I want.’ The eyes would be glazed, the energy lowered, but he never appeared inebriated as such.

I shall never forget the occasion one afternoon at Ken Brooke’s magic studio in Soho in the mid-Seventies when Tommy strolled in carrying a sturdy black leather pilot’s bag. He lowered himself into an armchair, opened the case and began to extract several small tot glasses followed by a series
of bottles of fascinatingly different colours. I recall green chartreuse, yellow advocaat, in addition to gin, scotch, brandy, and other liqueurs and spirits. Then with concentration and precision, for all the world as if he were performing a magic trick, he began to pour small measures into the glasses, mixing two at a time, then three, sipping them all the while. Several minutes went by before he volunteered any sort of explanation to those present: ‘You have to keep experimenting to get any sort of taste.’ One drew the conclusion that his taste buds had burst like bubbles long ago. He kept up the ritual, sipping first this concoction and then that, all afternoon. No one needed telling that the ‘taste’ was immaterial. The liquid had the same effect regardless. Even in the last years of his life, when he did try considerably to limit his alcohol intake – and with some success as his later television performances reveal – you always knew that the black coffee was likely to be laced with whisky and that the principal purpose of the bottle of milk in the dressing room was to line the stomach in preparation for the bottle of brandy lurking not far away in the recesses of yet another plastic career bag.

Tommy’s general health did not improve the situation. In many respects he was a hypochondriac, although Eric Sykes makes the fair point that had he been one he would have taken better care of himself. Nevertheless the fascination with doctor jokes might suggest otherwise and there wasn’t a patent medicine that he didn’t buy at some time or another. Gwen would joke that if she gave one of their dogs a worming tablet, Tommy would want one too. He did for a while become fixated about his weight and would leave home sheepishly clutching a carrier bag, according to his daughter the sign that he was on his way to Cass’s, the chemist’s shop in Brewer Street where in those days slimming pills could be acquired only under the counter. When he began mixing them with the
tablets he took for his insomnia – never mind the drink – you had a fairly lethal cocktail.

In reality most of his ailments were far from imaginary and at all levels where health was concerned he was his own worst enemy. He could never be persuaded to adjust the erratic demands of his working schedule to the need for eating and sleeping properly, staying up into the early hours practising his magic tricks even when he was not engaged in theatrical work. His daughter recalls how he would make a joke of his chronic indigestion, jumping up and down after a dose of milk of magnesia because he forgot to shake the bottle. His general sense of wellbeing was also clouded from the early Fifties by recurring bouts of lumbago and sciatica, a situation only relieved by acupuncture – a cure he kept from his doctor like a guilty secret – in the early Seventies. Bronchitis and a constantly recurring bad throat did not help matters. At the beginning of 1965 there was a minor heart scare, but Tommy insisted upon continuing with his pantomime at Golders Green, in spite of medical advice that intimated otherwise. It was a mark of his professionalism, though not necessarily his common sense, that he would always go on stage when he could. A short while later, his mother wrote to him from Southampton: ‘I hope this will find you much better. You are like me, Tommy. You haven’t time to be ill, but sometimes we have to find time.’

In 1968 surgery for his varicose veins, a problem left painfully dormant from his army days, was postponed from before his Blackpool season until afterwards, The reason for the delay was summed up by Gwen in a telephone call to Miff: ‘He’sa coward.’ Ferrie, who had to disentangle the arrangements and put them back together again, was not best pleased, although he always conceded the benefit of the doubt to Tommy on all health issues. ‘Your health is always the most important thing,’
was the constant mantra throughout the calls and letters that passed between them. When the matter of the veins was at last attended to, a period of convalescence was called for. Las Vegas beckoned; it was not the destination most conducive to a speedy recovery from such a procedure. The following year phlebitis set in and continued to cause him problems until the end of his days. When in 1970 a broken toe briefly incapacitated him while appearing in a summer show at Torquay, he did not endear himself to impresario Bernard Delfont by spending the evenings when he should have been resting attending the show at a rival theatre in Babbacombe, where he was mobbed by autograph hunters. Towards the end of his life he was visited in hospital by his friend, Peter Hudson. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Peter. ‘My blood pressure. It’s a little on the high side.’ It was actually a hundred and seventy-five degrees. Patient kept visitor entertained with magic tricks for two hours and had him crying with laughter throughout. As he departed, Tommy called after him, ‘You won’t forget my Guinness, will you?’ He discharged himself within a couple of days.

When it comes to lifting the spirit and alleviating pain, alcohol may be said to have its own medicinal properties. Cooper subscribed to the view and Mary Kay has admitted as such: ‘I did feel drink helped him to forget his physical problems and to sustain him.’ He used to joke in his act: ‘I drink only for medicinal purposes. I’m sick of being sober. Look – bottle, glass – glass, bottle!’ But it was a vicious spiral. The big tragedy of the latter half of his working career is that all his other ailments provided the misdirection for his alcoholism, the one predicament that was never properly diagnosed in isolation and therefore never treated. His doctor first explained to Miff that something might be amiss on 7 May 1969: ‘Dr Jacobs examined T.C. Sunday, but he still has to take urine
test. Says he thinks he is drinking too much.’ Gwen, for all her hysteria and the calls to Miff that he was unwell – often contradicted by Tommy who turned up for the show regardless – never received, and would never have recognized, a formal diagnosis of his actual condition. Miff, perhaps understandably in light of the fragile nature of his business relationship with the Coopers, never showed the insight, the courage or the sympathy to grasp the nettle of a cure. Barry Humphries towers above the international comedy scene today only because at a similar stage in his life he was told by the medical profession that if he continued drinking he had only six weeks to live.