Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (51 page)

It came as a surprise to learn from his daughter that Tommy had a spiritual dimension that expressed itself in an actual belief in reincarnation. According to Vicky, her mother was more pragmatic, avowing that when you die you die, while her father pondered with considerable depth whether upon his death his soul would pass into somebody else: ‘He would say, “What happens to our minds when we die? What do we do with all that we’ve learnt on this earth? Where does the mind go?” He came to the conclusion that reincarnation was the
answer. He believed in the magical things that the naked eye can’t see.’ He had once said to Mary Kay, ‘Just think of being burned. Ashes to ashes. Suppose you’re not quite gone. Not quite dead.’ It reads like a joke, but was contemplated with a profound seriousness that Mary feels played its own part in undermining his health. Perhaps surprisingly for a practising magician whose tricks were grounded in the pedestrian methods of the hocus pocus craft his personal position along the sliding scale between secular practicability and spiritual awareness was much closer to the latter.

I would position myself towards the other end of that scale, but the experience of the production on its out-of-town tryout tour was overloaded with moments that challenged one’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual equilibrium. How else to account for the occasion when I drew to Simon’s attention that it was Tommy’s birthday, only to hear a few minutes later the strains of ‘Happy Birthday’ accompanying a cake on stage for Jerome, whose birthday had been a few days before while the production was in transit? There was the unsettling frequency with which I was besieged by fez imagery – in the lampshades that adorn the choir stalls in Malvern Priory; the single tarboosh discovered on the luggage rack on the train home from the West Country with not a member of the company in sight; the name and logo of the restaurant in Oxford where at total random my wife and I found ourselves taking Vicky for a meal before the show, ‘Tarbouch’, a variant spelling from the original Arabic. A substantial part of the first half of
Jus’ Like That!
takes place in Tommy’s dressing room. With this in mind, the weekend between Malvern and Oxford I took from my shelves the text of Ronald Harwood’s dressing room drama,
The Dresser
to check out somebody else’s take on presenting backstage onstage. The part of the veteran barnstorming actor in that play, supposedly based on Donald
Wolfit, had been originated by the magnificent Freddie Jones. On Monday night in Oxford, who should appear in the auditorium but Jones himself? I have no explanation for these strange coincidences, other than to add that when Vicky after watching the show observed, ‘It is almost as if Jerome is reincarnating my father,’ she struck a chord that no open-minded soul could dismiss out of hand.

Barry Cryer put it another way and, in the process, provided the answer to that unanswerable question we had set ourselves at the audition stage: ‘The point is that Jerome Flynn didn’t become Tommy Cooper – Tommy Cooper became Jerome Flynn. There was no sense of someone doing an impression. And at the end they were cheering for both of them.’ Jerome’s admiration for Cooper had been fired by that of his father, whose funeral took place the day after his audition. Jerome and his friends had held Tommy evenings, where you paid a forfeit if you lapsed out of the Cooper voice. He and television co-star, Robson Green had often conversed with each other on the telephone as Tommy. But stand-up comedy had at no point played a part in his career, making it all the more surprising that when he went on stage he found himself ad-libbing as Cooper would have done, as with this response to a heckler Vicky noted at Eastbourne: ‘I remember having my first drink too.’ You can learn the lines, practice the magic, enact the mannerisms, but how do you acquire a comic mind-set that has played no part in your life before? Jerome has no idea where lines like this came from. However mystical the process, he was able to recreate far more than the man. As Simon Callow pointed out, ‘If the play were just an impersonation there would be little point to it. The interplay between an audience and Tommy could be a really wonderful thing … we’re recreating the impact that person had.’ Ultimately, I think we all felt that somehow Tommy was behind us all, up
there pulling the strings like George Bernard Shaw on the
My
Fair Lady
poster.

Even Tommy would be impressed by the way his legend endures as part of the fabric of British cultural life. There can be no dispute that his reputation has survived his death more potently than that of any of his comedy contemporaries, and in a way unconnected with television re-runs, which have in fact been comparatively sparse when set against the saturation repeats of the
Dad’s Army
school of sitcom and the overblown promotion by the BBC of Morecambe and Wise after Eric’s death, oblivious of the fact that their freshest and greatest personal comedic hour had arguably been working for Lew Grade at ATV in the Sixties. Meanwhile Tommy Cooper has quietly entered the folklore of the country. His jokes and mannerisms and catchphrases will live on in the manner of nursery rhymes and playground chants, a vibrant part of the heritage of a nation at play. This is a far greater testimony to his greatness than the fact that on those interminable polls of ‘all time greatest comics’ that newspapers and television channels fling in our faces in the sad name of celebrity culture he invariably comes near the top of British funny men, if not – as with the case of the
Readers’ Digest
poll in 2004 and that conducted by the sponsors of Comic Relief in 2005 – at number one. Such surveys are necessarily driven by the memory span of those who participate in them. It is impressive that Cooper still holds his own today among fly-by-night names that will be forgotten in another twenty-five years. In truth, behind the wacky props and traditional theatrical setting, he was always more alternative – in the true subversive sense of the word – than any of the parvenu younger performers depressingly cultivated by the television production machine to fit a limited, laddish eighteen to thirty-two year old demographic.

The world of stage magic that Cooper loved so much may be seen as a metaphor for the whole death and resurrection motif, as people are transported inexplicably through time and space and in the cause of entertainment brought back to existence from sawing, decapitation, dismemberment, and other fates beyond man’s worst imagining. Tommy would probably see it as his greatest achievement that his continuing fame is its own form of resurrection, even if he could never have envisaged that the first part of the big trick – one minute he was there, the next he was gone – would be paraded on live television in front of so many. But perhaps he did. I often wonder if the ghost of Bert Lahr’s
alter ego
flitted through his consciousness that sad April day. But I take heart from a comment overheard from a couple on the opening night on tour at the Malvern Festival Theatre: ‘He’ll never go away now.’ Freddie Jones at Oxford added, ‘It’sasifhe’s never been away.’ In London one reviewer said all we wanted to hear, ‘I laughed to the bottom of my soul.’ The resurrection was complete.

There was a routine in which Tommy used to joke about his visit to the psychiatrist: ‘He said I wasn’t the real me. Or you. D’you know what I’m talking about? I don’t.’ All of us are far more complex creatures than we care to admit and there was no reason why Tommy Cooper should prove to be a special case, however uncomplicated his exterior might appear. In the growing area of comedy biography it has become a cliché to tender obeisance to the tortured soul that supposedly lurks beneath the comic persona. As we have seen, Tommy certainly had his demons, but I question whether he was more troubled than the rest of us. Always first in line to be amazed by the latest miracle to arrive on the magic scene, he maintained a child’s wonder to the end of his life. Like many a child he had an impulsive temper and a love of the spotlight. His main reason for living was making people laugh and sharing that wonder. In many ways he would have ceased to be the moment that gift was taken from him. But it is a fact of life that there is no such person as the great comedian who does not carry a cross for the responsibility that commits him to conjure laughter out of the crowd. The catalyst is fear and this can manifest
itself in a number of ways – meanness, lateness, vagueness, quirkiness, rudeness, anger, sheer bloody mindedness. Cooper was no exception, but not content with a single failing would work his way through them all, much in the way he would obsessively try every patent medicine on the shelf.

There can be no question that his whole career was pervaded by the insecurity of whether he deserved the accolades that the spotlight accorded him. This may provide a psychological clue to his increasing lack of punctuality in later years. Few entertainers have been guaranteed the waves of public affection that washed over him the moment he set foot on stage, and yet he would do everything –fixing his buttonhole, tweaking his hair, adjusting a prop for the umpteenth time – to prolong the moment when he had to step out of the dressing room door. That he should contrive a sequence, however expedient it might at times have been, where he appeared to be locked in the same room carries its own message. When he walked out on stage he was always genuinely taken aback by the reception he received, however many times it occurred during his career. This was the mark of a genuinely modest and humble man to whom the self-regarding swagger of the traditional star was alien, although he was the first to be impressed by the panache of others. When Liberace and Jerry Lewis – with both of whom he had established a dialogue in the past – gave his telephone calls the cold shoulder on a visit to America in the mid Seventies he was genuinely, if naively shocked, unable to come to terms with the more shallow side of show business, ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ one day and forgotten the next.

The general consensus of those who knew him is that he was the most popular, most unassuming guy in the business. To be in his company in a crowd for just five minutes was to have this confirmed, not least because to be in his company
was to laugh. Eric Morecambe said of him, ‘I never met anybody who disliked him as a man,’ adding, ‘if you didn’t like Tommy Cooper, you didn’t like comedy.’ As has been said, there was no side to him. For a comic whose act was for all its simplicity rooted in the fantastical, he was nothing if not down to earth, according to his son always happiest when treated like one of the lads in the local who stood his round and joined in a game of darts with the rest. With Gwen to help him keep those outsize feet on the ground, he was, in the words of his friend, Peter Hudson, a genuine case of ‘what you see is what you get’. David Hemingway, who built many of Tommy’s props in later years, recalls the impression he made on his family when he would drop by their stand at a magic convention to say ‘Hello’: ‘He was the most polite man of all the show people we met, with no “ego” whatsoever.’

That modesty extended to the praise he would bestow on others at his own expense. As producer Royston Mayoh observed, ‘If you took him into a corner and told him he was the greatest comedian in the world – which he is – or that millions of people fell about laughing every time he walked on, he’d never believe you. He is totally unaware of the impact he has.’ According to Gwen, he contrived never to miss people like Morecambe and Wise or Frankie Howerd on television and wandered around the house, lost in praise, laughing for hours afterwards, unable to accept that he was up there in their class. Milligan was another personal hero. When Norma Farnes, Spike’s manager, rang to tell him that her client had included a short poem celebrating Cooper in a collection entitled ‘Goblins’ he was over the moon: ‘That’s one of the nicest things that’s happened to me,’ adding with humility, ‘You know, among all of us Spike’s the one with the original talent.’ Not surprisingly he had no time for ceremony of any kind. Jimmy Tarbuck recalls the Foyle’s literary lunch he
attended with Tommy. Christina Foyle was addressing the assembled crowd. Halfway through her speech Tommy leaned over to Jimmy and
sotto voce
asked, ‘Could you pass the salt? This is boring the arse off me.’ At which point the
grande
dame
of the book world turned to the younger comedian and enquired, ‘And what did Mr Cooper say?’ ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t really hear,’ at which the incorrigible pair became creased up with laughter like a couple of schoolboys.

He might have refused to be the subject of
This Is Your Life
, but at Thames he received the far greater honour of having the chef make his favourite rice pudding whenever he was recording his show. Johnny Speight recalled him as the only star he ever knew who walked around with a carrier bag containing his own sandwiches and half a dozen cans of beer. On one occasion when they were at the BBC together there was a fire alarm. Tommy sensing – perhaps knowing – that it was not the real thing stayed inside eating his sandwiches and drinking his beer until bureaucracy finished playing its games and everyone returned. It would have been quite out of character to have played along with the exercise. Once Speight accompanied Cooper, television producer Dennis Main Wilson and their wives on a train journey to have lunch with Carl Giles, the cartoonist at his Essex home. He met up with the Coopers in the buffet at Liverpool Street Station, where he found them eating their sandwiches on British Rail plates and drinking their flask of coffee out of British Rail cups. When Johnny went to get his own cup, Tommy shouted out, ‘Don’t have one of theirs. It’s rubbish!’ and turned to the girl behind the counter and asked, ‘Have you got a cup and saucer for Mr Speight, please?’ Not for the only time, the laughter excused the impertinence. On the return trip Dennis was holding forth in his usual garrulous fashion, when Tommy excused himself to go the lavatory. After a while Gwen became worried that
he had been away for so long and asked Johnny to investigate. Cooper was nowhere to be seen. Eventually he discovered a cubicle showing the engaged sign. He shouted out to Tommy or whoever was inside, but gained no response. He banged on the door and there was still no answer. Fearing the worse, he summoned the guard and prevailed upon him to break the door down. As the man put all his weight against the lock, the familiar head came round the door. Speight remembered, ‘There was Tommy sitting on the toilet with his big feet stretched out – he’s a big man and he filled it – and he said, “Has he stopped talking yet?”’

Many people might be surprised to learn that a character like this could ever be depressed. He was specific to journalist Alan Kennaugh, ‘Never associate with miserable people. They’ll drag you down to their own depression.’ Lynda Lee Potter once recalled the impact he made upon her and her father a few weeks after her mother died: ‘We laughed until our laughter turned to tears and we couldn’t stop crying. It was a tremendous release of grief … the truly great comics help people through despair in a way they probably never know.’ And yet Cooper was shrewd enough to recognize the responsibility on his shoulders: ‘For most people life is a bloody awful grind. They do jobs they hate, if they are lucky enough to have a job. So when someone comes along who makes them forget their troubles, it’s a relief for them.’ He meant the remark as a measure of his own relative happiness, but there can be no denying the burden he carried, constantly worried whether he was funny enough.

Both Barry Cryer and I have shared the company of a more solemn Cooper, a quieter man searching for a private space, staring into the distance with nothing to say, in total contrast with the idea that he was ‘always on’. To his credit, Miff was always sensitive to these pressures. As he was quoted earlier,
‘I know only too well how you have to put the act “on and off”, and I fully realise that it is sometimes just not humanly possible for this effort to be maintained.’ Everyone deserves a chance to step back from the parade, not only to recharge one’s energy but to realign one’s emotional equilibrium. The requisite silence, loneliness even, is not only compensation for the giddy sociability that comes with success, but a condition of the closeness that friendship brings. At moments like these he surely reflected upon the tug of war between his private self and the public image. He never fully came to terms with the physical advantages in the name of comedy that birth had given him. This not only caused him distress when people laughed at him in unexpected, non-theatrical situations when he wasn’t supposed to be funny, but caused him to be more anxious about whether they would respond when a contract made their laughter binding. He never took the latter for granted. In time he came to an extent to deal with the former situation by giving in to it. Mary Kay is perceptive on this aspect of Cooper: ‘If the world was going to say that he was in any way grotesque, he would answer by saying the same before they could. He would act the part out in public – the awkward, bumbling, unhinged giant that the public seemed to expect.’ In this way he compensated by pre-empting the situation, but it undoubtedly imposed a strain. Here too she found some basis for his drinking: ‘It helped to dissolve the barrier that he felt between the real man and the stage figure.’

David Hemingway was also allowed access to the doubts and deeper mental recesses of the man. On the occasion Tommy had his leg in plaster in Manchester, he reasoned quite seriously to his friend, ‘If I worked in an office, I wouldn’t have to work this week, would I? I’d be at home lying down and I’d be paid. But if I don’t go on stage, they won’t pay me. It’s the only way I can get the money. It’s not right.’ Those
last three words became a private mantra with him. For all his star status he could not accept that the rules that applied to the less-advantaged man in the street did not apply to him. He then added, ‘Do you know what the worst thing about it is? When I walk out tonight they’ll laugh. They’ll laugh at my leg. It’s not right.’ On another occasion, in what amounted almost to a mirror image of the situation, David was waiting for him backstage at the Palladium during rehearsals that were placing him under considerable stress. He came in and said, ‘I wish I could go out in the street and fall down and break my leg.’ Naively Hemingway asked ‘Why?’‘I wouldn’t have to go on, would I? I could go to hospital instead.’ Peter Hudson recalls the occasion Tommy suffered a car accident on the way to the show. It was a matter of deadly seriousness, one of the few occasions when lateness was justified. No sooner had he arrived at the theatre than he launched into an explanation for cast and crew: ‘I was on the M2 and I accelerated a bit quickly and my head hit like this and I slid on the hard shoulder like that …’ By now everyone was in stitches, but the reality was that he could have killed himself. It hurt him that they should find it so funny.

His frustration was palpable in another area. For all the success comedy brought him, he would almost certainly have swapped everything for the opportunity to step into the shoes of his idol, the suave American prestidigitator Channing Pollock, who in the Fifties redefined the image of the stage magician as he stood with aristocratic aloofness in the centre of the stage and sculpted doves out of the air with his sinuous fingers. Immaculate in white tie and tails, he was often referred to as ‘the most beautiful man in the world’ and was arguably the first magician to bring genuine sex appeal to the trade of the tricks. He epitomized both elegance and technical perfection in a magic act and went on to enjoy a successful career
as a movie star in European cinema. Tommy was as jealous as the next humble hocus pocus worker. Henry Lewis, the Vice-President of The Magic Circle, who advised Tommy on many matters in a professional business capacity, is convinced that as long as the example of Pollock confused his ambition he never considered himself truly fulfilled. He saw himself as a magician by trade and, as long as Pollock was there, he felt he could never claim to have truly succeeded, even feeling guilty that through comedy he had taken what some might have perceived – misguidedly – as the easier route. Channing, who died in March 2006 as this book was nearing completion, became a friend of Cooper as they competed for attention in West End production shows in the Fifties. A deep, meditative man, he always acknowledged his admiration for the fellow in the fez for providing a platform for the popularization of magic that capitalized on his unique style. In that respect alone they had far more in common than their contrasting personas suggested.

If Tommy fancied himself as Channing Pollock on stage, he did so again as Cary Grant off. Grant, himself a product of the music hall circuits of Great Britain, never lost his love of the variety scene and went out of his way to catch Cooper on his visits to Britain. The actor’s own passion for magic helped to cement a friendship: from its earliest days until his death he was a member of the board of Hollywood’s famous club, The Magic Castle and in his youth had worked with the legendary conjuror, David Devant. Grant and to a lesser extent another friend, Roger Moore provided the fashion plate image to which Tommy misguidedly aspired. Savile Row suits and handmade shoes were an indulgence that ran counter to the man of the people whose pockets were destined to bulge with tricks. His son once explained how all his life Tommy searched for a hat that would complement the image he craved, but the
more they cost him, the more ridiculous he looked in them. Gwen recalled how in the mornings the taxi would be kept waiting as he tried on half a dozen ties only to revert to the one he had put on in the first place. Meanwhile the suits had a habit of hanging on him in mournful fashion, longing for Pollock, Grant or ‘007’ himself to come to their rescue and promote them to the style pages of
Esquire
where they belonged. The choice of wardrobe admits he expected to be on view all the time: he knew he was anything but unmissable.