Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (49 page)

As far as health and career were concerned, the mood surrounding Cooper was more buoyant than it had been for a long time. Before the year ended, the only false note came with the acceptance of possibly the most misguided booking he – or Miff, on his behalf – ever accepted. On 21 and 22 December he was subjected to the challenge of opening for the rock group, Police in a concert staged in a tent on the muddy outer reaches of Tooting Bec Common. Maybe Miff had been misled by the earlier success of comedy veteran Max Wall, who during that lull in his career when he passed out of media recognition had gone on tour with the band, Mott the Hoople. Wall, however, was always allowed to parade a more virulent streak within his public persona. When the raucous mob that often
passed for an audience threw beer cans at him, he just slung them back. Four letter words were flung about in the same way. Invariably Max won over the crowd and walked off in triumph. But this was not Cooper’s style. He fitted into the South London extravaganza as comfortably as Harry Corbett’s Sooty at a stag night. Moreover, for all its emotional ups and downs, his career had not really dipped in public perception. Wall had nothing to lose in such circumstances; Cooper’s situation was the reverse. In 1975 Ferrie had already rejected a similar enquiry for Tommy to appear alongside The Who. He should have abided by his original instinct.

Tommy was clearly out of his element, even though for a fleeting moment the audience was enthusiastic. According to the reviewer in the music newspaper,
Sounds
, ‘He’s so popular that you could sense a thrill going through the crowd when his name was mentioned, even though they were literally aching to see Police. Tommy took about five minutes to translate his initial welcome into booing, catcalls, and a minor bombardment of plastic cups. For one thing he seemed terrified of the fine mess he’d got himself into and for another he’d forgotten how to project himself beyond the living-room close-up of television. In sum he died the death.’ He had not been helped by the totalitarian efforts at crowd control that were taking place while he was on stage. The audience, pushed and shoved this way and that, turned tense and irritable. The Red Cross received a seemingly unending chain of casualties while the familiar strains of the Cooper repertoire sounded in the background. Tommy never minced words about the disaster: ‘Police were great – they were sensational – I wasn’t, but they were great.’ It may have been the most embarrassing engagement of his career. In his own words, ‘It was the most terrifying night of my life.’ The experience does not appear to have had any specific side-effects on his health. No sooner
was Christmas Day over than he was heading south for the comparative comfort and safety of a short festive season at the Winter Gardens, Bournemouth. If ever an auditorium had been devised to test his ability to project himself beyond the more intimate dimensions of the television screen, this was the one. He had conquered there many times in the past and would now do so again. Psychologically it was the ideal venue for him to play to regain any confidence he may have lost in the South London debacle.

As 1981 began his health continued to hold steady. In July the doctor who now regularly examined him for appearance insurance purposes was pleased to write: ‘Mr Cooper told me that his alcohol consumption had diminished considerably. He admitted to drinking about four glasses of wine a day … He is obviously more of a risk than average for his appearance in view of his past history. However, I found him to be in a better state of health than when I last saw him a year ago.’ If one aspect of his physical condition did now begin to cause even greater concern it was his legs. For a while bookings were accepted with a view to as little travelling as possible. This inevitably had an effect on his income. During the last six months of 1981 he managed to fulfil forty-two appearances in cabaret and theatre; between the beginning of the New Year and a guest appearance for Eric Sykes at Thames at the end of March 1982 he made only six, a single week at Blazer’s for Savva at Windsor.

Things were noticeably winding down, although he still found the stamina to work with Sykes again in his latest semi-silent film,
It’s Your Move
in June 1982 and to travel to the Netherlands to appear on the
Willem Ruis Lotto Show
the following month. His mobility was not helped when on the latter trip he was rammed in the shin by a luggage trolley at Heathrow. In great pain he went straight to a two week
theatre season at Sandown in the Isle of Wight. The engagement had to be curtailed after a week. Tommy would walk out onto a stage or cabaret floor no more than seven more times before the year closed. The irony is that as other aspects of his general health appeared to improve – or at least hold steady – his mobility let him down.

Whatever he might achieve in the remaining two years of his life was a bonus. The indomitability of his spirit was shown by the decision – one Miff allowed him to veto had he so chosen – to tour the Middle East the following year. A reasonably lucrative contract for
£
17,000.00 saw him playing exotic locations like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Bahrain over a three week period in February 1983. During this time he had to work for only nine days, although considerable travelling was involved. Doubtless the appeal of the dry desert heat exerted its pull. He returned to something resembling a normal routine, although soon a recurring cough, the result of his chronic bronchitis, developed into pleurisy, which kept him out of action for most of May and June. In July he recorded a successful special for the BBC within the Saturday evening series strand,
The Main Attraction
, but the resumption of his standard touring pattern was disrupted again, by ‘post-pleuritic complications’, for most of August and September. He ventured back into a television studio for what would be the last time when he recorded, again for the BBC, his appearance on
The Bob Monkhouse Show
on 4 October 1983. He had been discharged from the Esperance Private Hospital in Eastbourne only three days before, having had no less than seven pints of fluid drained from his lungs, ultimately the result not merely of smoking what George Brightwell had once referred to as ‘his wretched cigars’, but chain-smoking them at the rate, according to his son, of forty a day. ‘His breathing got so bad,’ said Gwen, ‘he sounded like a train.’ His friends were
becoming increasingly anxious. Eric Morecambe bumped into Peter Hudson at Thames around this time and asked, ‘How’s the big fellow doing?’ Peter explained about the fluid. Eric replied, ‘I’ve heard of people trying to smuggle spirits through customs, but this is ridiculous.’

In spite of his frailty, his entrance on the Monkhouse talk show may have been the most memorable he ever made. From the moment he spotted an absurd chicken costume left over from another production on a wardrobe rail in another part of the rehearsal rooms he was determined that he would make his entrance wearing those grotesque feathered legs with their ungainly claws, however painful it might be to thrust his own legs, ulcerated and permanently swathed in surgical bandages by this time, into them. Again I was the producer involved and he swore me to secrecy as far as Bob and the crew were concerned. Indeed only the wardrobe supervisor, director Geoff Miles, Mary Kay and I were alert to his plans, which once he arrived on set were not surprisingly accompanied by an avalanche of chicken jokes: ‘What have I done? I’ve fouled it all up. That’s what I’ve done … I’ve been silly haven’t I? I’ve gone off half-cocked …I’ve spoiled a big entrance, I have really. I mean was it something big I did or was it something paltry?’ I doubt if there was a chicken joke from all the American gag sheets he had filed away in Chiswick that wasn’t buzzing through his brain that evening.

Monkhouse was on the floor, bent up with laughter at the entrance of this strange hybrid, a man from the waist up, a chicken from the waist down, not content merely to walk on, but strutting like the genuine article as he pecked his passage this way and that towards the host to the uproar of the house. No one could have written the idea into a script for him, let alone for anybody else. Only Cooper could have grasped the initiative of such a mad device and carried it off for all
the physical discomfort it entailed, as if he were a kid again revelling in riding his bumpy bicycle down the lane while reading a newspaper at the same time. The appearance also showed that he had lost none of his boyish enthusiasm for the latest joke shop gizmos, as he used a suction pad to plug an electric razor to his forehead for a shave and revealed his prized family heirloom of a genuine milking stool. As Tommy exerted pressure on one of the traditional three legs, milk squirted from the end. Again he was on such good form that even Miff was encouraged to write: ‘Your stint on
The Bob
Monkhouse Show
was excellent. Even made me laugh. How about that?’

Away from his form on camera, the reality was less encouraging. Within six days of the Monkhouse taping Tommy was back in hospital. He appears to have recovered sufficiently to perform for four nights at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet at the end of October, but had scarcely completed that engagement when he was back in hospital with severe chest pains. Tests indicated the possibility of a heart attack. That the diagnosis was not conclusive appears to have been because of a veritable cocktail of complications relating to all his past frailties. He resumed his theatrical routine in February, but would fulfil only three engagements before embarking with Gwen on a ten day holiday to Las Palmas on 21 March. Common sense had prevailed when his favoured location of Las Vegas was embargoed by his wife. Photographs from the spell in the sun show Tommy beaming with happiness and ostensibly at peace with the world. He returned to fulfil a four night engagement at the Circus Tavern. It brought him back to performance pitch for his commitment to appear on the television show
Live from
Her Majesty’s
on 15 April. A few days before going to Spain he had spent some time taping tracks for a possible commercial recording. The title had a prophetic irony all of its own. It was
the cover of an old Cliff Richard single, ‘Just Enough to Keep Me Hanging On’. Sadly fate decreed he was unable to hang on much longer.

Surveying the last few years of his life, his family could take comfort from the fact that the cliché of the clown who in a trough of despair seeks alcoholic refuge from which he will never return did not apply to him. Although far too late, he did rally to the cause of his general well being. In this regard he represented a total contrast with Tony Hancock, perhaps not surprisingly given the drift of their respective comic personas, the one morose and lugubrious, the other a jester to the twinkling tips of his magical fingers. I am convinced that Cooper never really understood the problem that drink posed, namely that constant treatment and total abstinence were a
sine qua non
of recovery. To Tommy there was no such thing as total abstinence. When he came to rehearsals for his appearance on
The Bob Monkhouse Show
, he explained he
had
given up alcohol and tobacco. He then wasted no time in popping open a can of lager and lighting up a Panatella. Bob said, ‘I thought you’d given up smoking and given up drinking?’ He replied, ‘I have – but you can’t call this smoking and you can’t call this drinking, can you?’ The response was serious. The man was unstoppable. It never occurred to any of those present that the end was not far away. The paradox is that Hancock, a more intellectual man, probably did realize only too well what was happening to him. Ultimately his own hand signed the end of his life. Cooper had no idea he was on course so soon for an exit of a different kind. The very contrast in setting is chilling and characteristic at the same time, the one demise consigned to the privacy of a seedy Sydney apartment on the other side of the world, the other paraded sixteen years later under the happy gaze of millions of admirers. That is where we must join him now.

The convoluted way in which the tragedy of Tommy’s death interacted with the routine of my own life on the evening of 15 April 1984 will remain stamped on my mind forever. The recent possessor of a video-recording machine, I decided not to watch his scheduled appearance on the LWT show,
Live
from Her Majesty’s
when it aired at 7.45 p.m., preferring to tape it for enjoyment later in the evening when the chores of the day had been set aside. However, as the clock indicated that the programme must be coming to a close, I could not resist the temptation of switching on to sneak a preview of the finale for the sheer pleasure of savouring at first hand the accolade he was bound to achieve. A star studded cast including Howard Keel, Donny Osmond, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, Adrian Walsh, The Flying Pickets, and the Brian Rogers Dancers joined host Jimmy Tarbuck for a final goodbye, but Tommy was nowhere to be seen. As I switched off the set, various explanations began to bombard my brain – the listings magazines had the week of his appearance wrong; the producer, David Bell had jumped the gun in including his name in a billing required by the press two or three weeks previously;
there had been some disagreement at Miff’s end that scuppered the contract at the last minute; he had even imbibed a little too freely after performing his act earlier in the show. Denial kept at bay the possibility that his health might have been somehow responsible for the puzzling turn of events. And then, before I even began to think about playing back the tape to check on his presence, the telephone went berserk, a succession of calls releasing within me a capacity for tears I never knew I possessed: ‘Had I heard the news? Tommy Cooper was dead.’ Within minutes of the end of the show, Trevor MacDonald had resolved the mystery on the ITV mid-evening news bulletin.

At the end of the day I braced myself to watch the act that had been witnessed by twelve and a half million viewers a few hours before. He appeared to be as much on form as he had been on the Monkhouse show six months earlier, his complexion healthier, his smile as relaxed as at any time in his career, even if his legs betrayed the real truth of his condition. According to Tarbuck a special room with all creature comforts was improvised for him at the side of the stage so that he would not have to negotiate the tortuous backstage staircases that led to the dressing rooms proper. Jimmy’s introduction was loving and auspicious: ‘If you asked one hundred comedians who their favourite comic is, they would all say – the one and only – Tommy Cooper!’ The last person to speak to him was choreographer Brian Rogers, who remembers wishing him well in the wings as he got off the stool on which he was perched in the prompt corner to walk on stage. Brian remembers him handing a long clear glass to someone at his side. He assumed it contained vodka, but cannot be sure.

In the eight minutes that followed viewers were treated to a whistle stop tour of many of the gambits that had stood this
favourite funny man in good stead for almost forty years. Here were wife jokes –‘My wife’s just phoned me. She said, “I’ve got water in the carburettor.” I said, “Where’s the car?” She said, “In the river.”’ And conceptual jokes, “My memory’s going. I cut myself shaving this morning and forgot to bleed.’ Here was the furtive preparation of a magic prop that the audience wasn’t supposed to see, but could not possibly avoid – as he secreted coins in a tin can from which he was going to produce them – and the surreal use of a prop that bordered on lunacy – as he aimlessly guided a pair of bicycle handlebars around the stage: ‘I can’t ride it. I’ve got a flat tyre.’ Here were the casual asides – as he addressed the orchestra, ‘I want you to play tonight like you’ve never played before. Together!’– and the familiar props – the table that developed female legs, the three metal rings that refused to unlink and his ever-present tribute to Gwen, the dove that turned out to be made of rubber.

He was in complete control of the theatre as dancer, Sandy Lawrence came forward to help him into a voluminous scarlet cloak. The last words he spoke as she fastened it down the front were an affectionate ‘Thanks, love.’ He then clutched his chest – something he had done in mock panic for comic effect thousands of times before – and without any ceremony or histrionics appeared to crumple to the ground, slowly sinking into himself as if the air was being sucked out of him. As the dancer departed, his body rolled gently back against the curtains. The fez stayed on his head, if slightly askew. People had always said he’d die with his fez on, but, as he used to joke, ‘I never took it literally. I mean the doctor said it would be the last thing I’d do.’ It all now happened so quickly. Freddie Starr, who was watching at home and is not an obviously sentimental person, wrote in his autobiography, ‘It probably doesn’t mean a lot to most people, but I’ve never forgotten
that Tommy Cooper’s last word was “love”.’ At the same time Tarbuck, another comic from a younger generation who loved him quite as much as Starr, was watching the tragedy unfold on the monitor in the wings.

The theatre audience could not stop laughing, believing it to be part of the act. Meanwhile the radio microphone he was wearing only enhanced the sound of the death rattle, interpreted by the audience as a bizarre extension of the distinctive rasping cough-cum-guffaw that hallmarked every Cooper performance they had ever seen. For David Bell and director, Alasdair Macmillan time was standing still. Les Dennis recalls being in the wings with Bell and Tommy’s son: ‘When Tommy collapsed, David said, “Is that a joke?” His son said, “No, my dad has a bad back and wouldn’t be able to do that.”’ All Mary Kay remembers are four other words from Thomas: ‘This is for real.’ Macmillan cued the orchestra to play the music for the commercial break, the first of two in the three-part show. At that point on playback I stopped the machine, took out the video cassette, placed it in its box, wrote ‘Tommy RIP’ on the spine and consciously placed it not among the fast growing mound of cassettes a television producer and comedy aficionado automatically acquires in the combined line of duty and pleasure, but separately in a filing cabinet reserved for personal documents and papers of importance. It stayed there, not to be watched again, until circumstances of an exceptional kind prompted its playback almost twenty years later.

Those familiar with his repertoire – and of course the whole production team – knew from rehearsals that putting on the cloak was merely the prelude to a sequence that had constituted one of his funniest routines since the early Seventies. Stamping the floor with great self-importance to emphasize that there were no trap doors, he would stand with his back
against the join in the curtains and proceed to extract from the garment a ludicrous assortment of objects that included a bucket, a long pole, a nylon stocking display leg, a beer crate, and a ten foot ladder. The comedy derived as much from the semi-silent asides between Cooper and the obvious back stage confederate who was feeding the things between his legs – ‘Hold it! Put it down a bit!’– as from the incongruity of the items produced. On this occasion viewers were deprived the bonus of Jimmy Tarbuck as the accomplice, invisible to the end until he appeared in the gap to protest he couldn’t pass anything more through.

For legal and medical reasons Cooper’s body could be removed only by paramedics or the police, leaving Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, as well as Howard Keel to present their acts in the middle section of the show in the limited space before the front cloth, made even more restricted by the bulge in the curtain caused by Tommy’s body in the centre of the stage. For a long time a rumour circulated that his outsize feet protruded in vision from beneath the tabs. If at any stage this was the case, it was not observed by the home audience: so sensitive was the direction that it kept any such moments in a mid-shot on the two young comedians or the veteran Hollywood singing star. According to Peter Prichard, Tarbuck’s manager and coincidentally a fully qualified Officer of the Order of St John ambulance brigade, he managed with the help of others to ease him back some way through the curtains: ‘We couldn’t pull his whole body, as he was too heavy. I started to hit his chest and give him the kiss of life, but got no response.’ Meanwhile his client was inches away the other side of the curtain, summoning up every ounce of his professionalism to keep the live television show rolling.

Joe Kerr, a painter attached to the production and a recently qualified first-aider, grasped the initiative and took over the
resuscitation attempt. Matters were not made easier by the darkness backstage. With the help of one of the stage riggers, another first-aider, he applied the bag mask technique, desperately anxious against all the odds to pump the air around inside his lungs: ‘Tommy was not breathing and we commenced CPR, taking turns on the chest compressions. After a delay the company nurse arrived from the front of the house and we all worked together. The scene backstage was a nightmare.’ It was not until the second commercial break that Tommy could be moved by ambulance men and transported in the company of Mary Kay and his son, Thomas to Westminster Hospital. Kerr valiantly kept up the compressions as they moved him out of the theatre and into the ambulance, until the paramedics had sorted out their equipment. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. One of the ambulance men is said to have remarked that they knew he was dead as soon as they set eyes upon him. A short while before the performance Tommy had asked Prichard to look after a carrier bag holding several cans of lager. When Peter returned to the bag he saw the cans contained Kaliber, the alcohol-free lager. Maybe Brian Rogers’ earlier assumption had been wrong. It provided an ironic footnote to a life of excess.

A few days later Kerr received a formal letter from the LWT management thanking him for his ‘initiative and efforts in trying to revive Tommy Cooper after his collapse on stage’. It added, ‘The nurse has also asked to pass on her admiration and sincere thanks for your assistance and support.’ For Tarbuck, to see the life wrenched from the man he loved and admired so much was a traumatic experience. In 1964 on the occasion of the Royal Variety Performance the upstart young comic from Liverpool had been encouraged by the support he had received from the older performer. How he survived the
ordeal on camera without betraying emotion as the show continued was remarkable and part of the legacy people like Cooper and Eric Morecambe, another mentor, had entrusted to him. On the following week’s show Jimmy waited until the finale to acknowledge the tragedy and in the process revealed a dignity that surprised many. As he later recalled, ‘At the end of the show I said on behalf of Mrs Cooper and all the family, thank you all very much. Because the response to his death had been like Churchill or royalty – a truly great person dying – and she thanked me for that, did Dove.’

The consensus was that this was the way he would have wanted to have died, surfing the void of life’s emptiness with the sound of laughter in his ears. It was as if he had willed his destiny to follow this course ever since witnessing the death of Bert Lahr’s character in
Always Leave Them Laughing
thirty-five years before. The view was endorsed by his son, Thomas, who two days after his death said, ‘If I had said to him, “You are going to drop dead on stage tonight in front of millions of people,” he would have replied, “I’ll settle for that.” I always knew he would drop dead on stage. I had a premonition of me pulling off his bow tie and ripping open his shirt … and that’s exactly what happened.’ The day had been uneventful, although a doctor was called to tend to Tommy’s voice in the afternoon – a not uncommon occurrence with performers, especially opera stars and song stylists, so there was little cause for alarm. Thomas had been tending to his father throughout the day, helping to set his props and keeping him from the cigars that were a constant temptation. His hardest job came much later when he had to call his mother from the hospital. She had been watching at home, having last been with her husband when she sent him on his way that morning with his flask of coffee and his packet of lamb and egg mayonnaise sandwiches: ‘I didn’t go because I wanted to see how it looked
on the box, but when he didn’t go into the cloak routine, I knew … I knew …’ Besides, only a few days before she had timed the act for him at their dining room table as she had always done. Thomas later revealed the joke that his father had intended to use between the cloak routine and the commercial break: ‘Is there a Mr Smith in the house? Could you please remove your Jaguar from the car park? It’s already bitten a policeman and we’re a bit worried what it’s going to do next.’

Tommy was not the first funny man to suffer such a visible death. Doyen of comedy actors, Sidney James had collapsed on stage while appearing in a farce called
The Mating Game
in Sunderland eight years previously and died
en route
to hospital. Kenneth Horne, radio stalwart of
Much Binding in
the Marsh
and
Round the Horne
had died soon after keeling over while hosting a television awards ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel in 1969: the BBC transmitted the programme later that evening with the tragedy edited out. The press went to town in using Cooper’s death to highlight the precariousness of his profession, oblivious of the fact that before the year was over both Eric Morecambe and Leonard Rossiter would also have succumbed to heart attacks. People close to Morecambe have surmised that Eric’s own demise was accelerated by the shock of the departure of his longtime friend. In fact, he died only six weeks later, having collapsed on stage at the end of an evening being interviewed at a theatre in Tewkesbury by another Welsh wizard of laughter, his – and Tommy’s – friend, Stan Stennett.

The funeral of Tommy Cooper took place at Mortlake Crematorium the following Friday, 20 April. At times it appeared as if the entire British comedy establishment was in attendance. Crowds lined the route and a two feet high model of a fez found itself among the floral tributes. The cause of
death on his death certificate was given as ‘coronary occlusion due to atheroma’. This time there could be no hiding the fact that he had a coronary condition, but, as his daughter has admitted, ‘It was the booze, cigars and the late nights that killed him.’ Although he was far too young to die at the age of sixty-two, in retrospect his death could not have been far away; his body, if not his spirit, devastated by the frailties and excesses of the preceding years. However, David Ball, a close friend of the family as well as Tommy’s bank manager, has provided an insight into the specific circumstances of his exit. After the death Gwen admitted to him how especially anxious Tommy had been in advance of this particular transmission, constantly agitated throughout their stay in Las Palmas by the fact that it was a live show. By a strange paradox a live broadcast appears to exert an additional strain on performers whose core role is the entertainment of live audiences in nightclubs and theatres. The pre-recorded programme with its potential for editing and sound dubbing has about it a sense of security that is bound to appeal to intrinsically nervous performers like Cooper. Nothing could alter the fact that on that April evening at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s Haymarket the vulnerability of the performer – not for the first or the last time in history – turned pallbearer.