Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (13 page)

Cooper had an unerring instinct for the material that would suit him best. Into this category came the many variations of the so-called sucker trick, that genre in the magician’s repertoire that allowed him to tease our expectations like a monkey on a stick, only to reveal at the finish that we were no nearer the true explanation. For example, over many years he taught audiences how to change the colour of a green handkerchief to red by concealing a red one secretly in the hand beforehand. When you pushed in the green, the red one emerged. Then when he opened his hand, the green handkerchief, contrary to
all expectation, had disappeared. In an item like this digital skill and the comic situation combined to make a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts. Otherwise Tommy was true to his Magic Circle code and remained firmly against exposure, conceding in his defence that the secret of the bottle and glass trick that he did give away had been disclosed by clowns for years. So called secret threads being pulled obviously from the wings fell into the same category. Otherwise, as he claimed to magical supplier, Derek Lever towards the end of his life, ‘I would never buy a trick from a dealer and then expose it because I know I am ruining that man’s living. I am against exposure.’

Orson Welles, speaking from a more artistic point of view, once described a magic trick exposed as being ‘as publicly attractive as an unmade bed’. Of course more magical secrets have been divulged through bad performance than in any other way, so in one respect Tommy, while anxious to stay on the side of the magic fraternity, could be said to have been acting against the grain of the burlesque ideal in adopting this attitude. On one occasion there was a hiccough in his relationship with Edwin Hooper when he revealed the working of a vanishing clock trick on one of his television shows. In the form sold by ‘Supreme Magic’ it was a lousy trick, something that probably attracted Tommy to it in the first place – clocks just do not resemble wooden cubes like dice with a two-dimensional face stuck on the front – but he conceded the error of his ways, agreed that the ‘accident’ should have been edited out of the show, and never made the same mistake again.

So many ‘Unique’ and ‘Supreme’ items found their way into the Cooper act that one might have been forgiven for thinking Tommy had shares in both businesses. He didn’t. Instead, he set up his own magic shop. The enterprise would appear to
have been a meeting point for his own fantasies and the need to find something practical for Gwen to do. Premises, if that is what they could be called, were found in Shaftesbury Avenue: those who recall going there in the Sixties remember the shop as little wider than a corridor with a counter across and the only exit through the front door. ‘Magic and Fun Shop’ went up on the fascia and Alan Alan, yet to establish his own shop, was installed as manager, with Gwen looking after the business side behind the scenes. It never had serious pretensions to be anything but an outlet for selling jokes, masks, novelties and simple tricks to the public, but it did well. Gwen once confided in me that it was nothing for her to drive up on a Saturday afternoon and be handed five hundred pounds in readies for the week’s takings, and that was after Alan had taken his share. She consulted Miff whether they should put Tommy’s name above the shop. Miff demurred and she agreed, the venture being considered not prestigious enough at a time in his career when his star was rising high. That conversation in November 1961 ended with her expressing admiration for Eamonn Andrews and his involvement in Commercial Television in Ireland. Miff reported, ‘She would like to get some shares!’ In contrast, the shop appears to have been the only business opportunity in which Tommy became involved during his whole career. In time interest waned and Alan, who also happened to be the world’s top escape artist, moved on to other career opportunities.

Tommy’s personal popularity was sublime and magicians readily conceded their best bits to him – a form of ‘I surrender’ in the face of his prodigious talent. One such was Peter Newcombe, an insurance executive by day and sometime secretary of The Magic Circle, whose own act acted as the slipway for some of Tommy’s best. Magicians in the know always acknowledged Peter as Cooper set light to the ‘flash’ paper in
the chromium prop known as the dove pan: ‘Just a flash in the pan!’ Or when he produced three coins and dropped them into a can, ‘One, two, three,’ at which point a jet of water squirted upwards and Cooper said with similar matter of fact-ness, ‘Three Coins in the Fountain!’ Ian Adair, a prolific ideas man and second lieutenant to Edwin Hooper at ‘Supreme’ in Bideford, kept Tommy supplied with a veritable stream of gags including ‘I’ve had a pain here all day’, ‘Bagpipes’, and ‘Light Ale’, words that only become funny when accompanied by Tommy taking a pane of glass from inside his jacket, throwing two pipes into a paper bag and causing the glass of beer in his hand to illuminate from inside. The current Magic Circle president, Alan Shaxon recalls the occasion at headquarters when member Len Blease demonstrated an effect in which his underpants ended up secured to a length of rope. The evening concluded with a session in the Gents with Len, Alan, and several others rigging up Tommy, his trousers round his ankles, for this extraordinary feat of topology. Len’s diminutive stature up against the Goliath Cooper only underlined the missed opportunity for a television sketch that should have materialized but never did.

His obsession fed his persistence if he saw a piece of business he had to have. In the early Seventies, Paul Daniels was appearing as a supporting act to Michael Bentine in Jersey. Tommy came to see his old friend from the Windmill days and in the process caught the Daniels act, a highlight of which featured a cardboard puppet frog that found cards chosen by the audience. Come the early hours of the following morning Tommy was still in Paul’s dressing room begging him to let him have the frog. The more Paul explained that it represented a good eight minutes in his act and couldn’t be replaced, the more Tommy kept at him: ‘Go on, give me the frog.’ Finally he said, ‘I tell you what. I’ll tell you a good joke.’ He did more than a
joke. He walked out on to the empty stage and did a routine about a conjuror and his assistant in which he played both the parts, the magician constantly admonishing the girl, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ Paul was reduced to hysterics as Tommy rushed back and forth across the stage acting out this charade. He then walked back to his seat, sat down and said ‘Now, give me the frog.’ Paul, privileged to have been an audience of one at a special showing of a routine Tommy does not appear to have performed at any other time, gave him the frog.

It is no surprise that holidays were also focused on magic. Wherever he went in the world he would be drawn like a magnet to the nearest magic shop. There was the infamous occasion when the Coopers had no sooner arrived at their Manhattan hotel than Tommy went in search of his favourite New York magic emporium. By the time the session ended he had forgotten the name of the hotel and after several hours of tramping the streets of the Big Apple finally had to phone home to their housekeeper, Sheila to find out where he was staying. He arrived back in the room as though nothing had happened, with Gwen considerably agitated. It was 1980 and he had not long been out of hospital. Las Vegas with its overriding air of make-believe was his favourite destination. Even before it became the unofficial capital of stage magic on the back of the success of master resident illusionists, Siegfried and Roy, its surreal environs offered magic stores and demonstrations of close quarter wizardry galore. Gwen was content to stay by the pool.

His closest friend in America was the brilliant prestidigitator, the ‘Amusing and Confusing’ Johnny Paul. A pioneer of the interest in close-up magic from the time he performed regularly behind the bar of his Magic Lounge in his native Chicago, he moved in the Fifties to Las Vegas as the Entertainments Director of the Showboat Hotel and Casino, in which
capacity he was also expected to perform for the patrons. In the artificial atmosphere of the neon neo-polis his presence proved as genuine and as engaging as the sunset over the Nevada Mountains. In many ways he could have been Tommy’s secret American sibling. A big burly man with large floppy hands, only the spectacles stood in the way of instant comparison. One of his standard lines was ‘Don’t applaud. Keep drinking. The more you drink, the better I get.’ In interviews Tommy used to use a line that may well have been personalized from the original: ‘I never drink before a show. If I did, my tricks might start to go right.’ Paul’s carnival sense of humour was exactly on Tommy’s wavelength, although he did not set out to burlesque magic, merely to cloak conventional magical mysteries in the funniest dressing possible. To this he brought a sheer technical brilliance that was awe-inspiring, the envy of Tommy and all his fellow professionals. When Johnny came into London, as he frequently did, to make an appearance on British television, he would invariably end up at the Cooper abode in Chiswick for a late night session. One of his signature tricks was the effect in which a signed and chosen card finds itself pinned to the wall or ceiling when thrown into the air. Tommy managed to get his guest to show him the basic workings of the miracle. His daughter, Vicky recalls the aftermath: ‘I remember Dad was really jealous about this trick. He spent the whole day practising and when I came home from school he produced a pack of cards and said “Pick one.” I did and he threw them against the wall. They
all
fell down. We looked at each other and just started to laugh hysterically.’

When members of the public discover you knew Tommy Cooper, the one question they always ask relates to his magical ability: ‘Was he any good as a magician?’ It is not an easy question to answer for a layman. His technical competence –
if by that we mean manipulative skill – certainly lagged behind the likes of Johnny Paul and could probably be placed on a par with Woody Allen’s self-assessment when it comes to playing jazz clarinet: ‘no more seriously than a Hollywood star hacking at a golf ball in a pro-am match’. However, there is no doubt that he was far more committed to the skills of his craft than most members of the ‘buy it off the shelf’ brigade. The come-on lines used by dealers to sell their wares in the catalogues reveal how essentially lazy the average conjuror is – ‘No Sleights … Easy To Do … Ready To Work Right Away!’ – although what satisfaction could accrue in such a situation is probably more baffling than the trick on offer could ever hope to be. Because a routine did require serious practice did not rule it out of the Cooper repertoire. In the Sixties Harry Stanley brought out an item called ‘The Indiana Rope Trick’. It enabled the magician to tie a knot in a length of rope under impossible conditions and then to slide the knot along the rope and off the end to throw it into the audience. Without giving too much away it involved considerable dexterity to get the knot to appear in the first place and then a deft handling of a complex little gadget named a ‘locking finger reel’ to send it on its way into the crowd. From the catalogue pages it looked just the kind of trick that dealers like to sell to amateurs, a fleeting novelty to be played with until another little miracle comes along. No one would ever have imagined it as an item in a top professional act, not least because there were almost certainly other simpler, more practical methods with which to achieve a similar effect. And yet within a few weeks of the trick being advertised Tommy Cooper was performing it with total assurance on the
Sunday Night at the
London Palladium
television show.

But there is another level at which quite simply Tommy may be seen to be the greatest magician of them all. As top
contemporary British wizard, Geoffrey Durham has pointed out, if the
sine qua non
of being a magician is the ability to express your personality through your magic, then no one expressed himself better through the medium than Tommy Cooper. There was no one to touch him because there was no one who had a personality more all-conquering than Cooper, no one who radiated until the end of his days a greater personal sense of wonder or of fun, as tissue papers changed into flowers in his hands, a wooden duck attempted to find a chosen card – ‘You may have seen a duck do that before,’ he would screech, ‘but, to be fair, blindfolded?’ – and, in later years, bottles of Martini reproduced like rabbits as an unexpected conclusion to the bottle and glass trick. No one left a Tommy Cooper performance not liking magic: his enthusiasm was contagious. When you establish communication with an audience as the criterion of greatness, matters of technical difficulty take on a different aspect. It no longer matters whether the trick has just been bought off the shelf, because in the hands of a great performer the presentation wrapped around it renders any hint of method irrelevant anyhow. Tommy himself once said, ‘You can buy a simple trick from a magic shop and you can know how it’s done. Yet a great magician can work on that particular trick and make something out of it and you’ll think it’s not the same trick you’ve got.’ Tommy proved this every night of his working life when he made a small silk handkerchief disappear in his bare hands using the most elementary of methods that has been exposed to the public thousands of times; but always the audience burst into wild applause.

During the Thirties, Murray the Escapologist was a headline act throughout the world. He used to tell an anecdote about a special escape he performed on board ship in Cape Town with George Bernard Shaw on hand as a member of the supervisory 
committee to see fair play. When interviewed by reporters later, Shaw said, ‘I found the man more interesting than the trick.’ That is how it should be. Writing from the perspective of another performing discipline, the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov summed up matters thus: ‘When a dancer comes on stage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life … Each time he has chosen, and in what he is onstage you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be … Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality.’ The same is true for all the legendary magicians in magic’s history, the roll call that includes Houdini, Cardini, Dante, John Calvert, Robert Harbin, Channing Pollock, Siegfried and Roy, and Tommy Cooper.