Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (52 page)

His daughter acknowledges that he had no wish to be performing all the time, but concedes that his best way of dealing with most social situations was by doing just that. It helped that he had discovered at an early age that laughter was a means of deflecting disapproval and unpleasantness as well as being the easiest way of relating to people. According to Vicky he was not a great fan of parties, preferring the quieter company of friends in small groups or on a one-to-one basis, but this did not deter him from being the life and soul of every social gathering he ever attended, not merely conjuring little miracles out of his pockets but revelling in stunts like the one where he picked up a foaming pint of beer, stuck his chin in the froth and declared, ‘You wouldn’t hit an old man like me, would you?’ or doing his celebrated impression of ‘an Eskimo taking a leak’ with a handful of ice cubes, a stunt that went round the business in no time. Backstage at any Royal Variety Show in which he took part the tension among the other comics would be magicked away by his spontaneous dressing room performances, the likes of Bruce Forsyth, Dickie Henderson, Rolf Harris, and Tarby reduced to hysterics by the great man holding forth in his long baggy underpants, short socks, and suspenders.

The roll call of the japes and jests he played in public places is celebrated. There were the teabags deposited in the top
pockets of unsuspecting London cabbies with a reassuring, ‘Have a drink on me!’; the pens he gave away with ‘Stolen from Tommy Cooper’ engraved along the side; the occasions the table cloth trick went wrong in sedate restaurants, resulting in broken crockery everywhere: ‘I could never get that trick right!’; the short phase of wearing shoes with toecaps resembling pork pies, exact to the detail of the crusty indentations around the edges; the period when he went around with a roll of treasury notes stuck together with sellotape – whenever he went into a shop he would take delight in unrolling the requisite amount and cutting off what he owed with a pair of scissors. When he wanted it to be, all of life was a playground, a perennial nod to the joke shop culture of his childhood years. Even a routine letter to his mum was not exempt:

But for the marriage reference it is the letter of a child writing home from boarding school rather than that of a man in his forties.

His sense of humour could be perverse in the extreme, displaying a childlike flair for mischievousness that was sometimes innocent, sometime irksome, sometimes cruel. According
to agent Kenneth Earle, his colleague Peter Prichard was the proud if politically incorrect owner of a magnificent tiger skin rug. A few weeks after Prichard had shown this off to Tommy, he invited Peter over for a meal. Aside from casual social courtesy there appeared to be no agenda attached to the invitation. As the meal progressed, Peter could see that Tommy was becoming agitated. ‘Well, what do you think about it?’ asked the host. ‘About what?’ asked Peter. ‘Over there. On the floor. I so admired your tiger.’ Peter looked and there was a mangy cat skin spread out on the carpet. Paul Daniels recalls how he was notorious for phoning friends and acquaintances in the middle of the night after he returned from a show: ‘Hello, Paul. It’s Tommy here. I just thought you’d like to know I got back home okay.’ He would then hang up. It was four o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t even thought of going to bed. You didn’t even know he’d been away.

His capacity for winding people up was infamous. Freddie Starr recalls the time he took him back home from a club where he had been working. As he drove into the road, Tommy asked Freddie to stop a few doors away from where he lived, explaining that he did not want to wake up Dove and that it was a very sedate neighbourhood where you never heard any noise after eleven o’clock. He then asked Freddie in for a nightcap, but begged him to tread quietly lest he wake any of the neighbours. The walk on tiptoe to the house, the opening of the gate, the turning of the key were all carried out with the meticulous hush of burglars on the prowl. Once inside the house Tommy offered his guest soup. That he had to rouse Dove from her slumbers rather than face the challenge of tin opener and gas stove in order to act upon the suggestion is an incidental footnote to the domestic sitcom husband and wife enacted between them. Ten minutes later, after much clattering of pots and pans in the direction of the kitchen, she brought
in a tray with two bowls. With a face like thunder she banged it down without saying a word and retreated to bed. ‘If I were you,’ said Tommy, ‘I’d hurry up eating your soup!’ Freddie did not need the advice. Within a couple of minutes the two bowls were empty and Tommy saw his guest on his way, beseeching him in a whisper to remember what he had said about noise before they came in. Gingerly Freddie made his way down the neat, quiet suburban street and was about to get into his car when he looked back to see Tommy still standing at his front gate. At the top of his voice he shouted, ‘Now fuck off – and don’t fucking come back!’ He then slammed the front door with a resounding crash and disappeared inside. It could have been heard in Hammersmith a couple of miles away. Once, when waiting for Dove at Ken Brooke’s Magic Place, he had everyone promise that when she appeared there would be no swearing. When she came through the door, ostensibly late, he took one look at her and said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Gwen gave one of her prim, ‘Isn’the awful?’ looks and the room reverberated with laughter. It was a ploy she obviously became used to over the years.

His school friend, Peter North recalls the time he saw Tommy after a long separation towards the end of the Second World War. He was on leave in Guards uniform waiting to catch the Hythe ferry to Southampton one Saturday morning. Peter approached his friend full of bonhomie, but Cooper feigned not to recognize the man whose answers he once cribbed in school. The pretence was kept up all the way across Southampton Water, while North used every endeavour to jog the other’s memory. They disembarked and walked up the High Street together. When they came to Bernard Street, one of their old haunts, Tommy sprinted away and jumped onto a passing tram. In Peter’s words, ‘He dashed up the stairs and sat in a back seat on the side, leaned against the window and
thumbed his nose at me with a great big grin on his face. That was the last time I ever saw him.’ One presumes that Tommy set little store by the friendship.

These stories show the deadpan skill with which he would ensnare an unsuspecting victim. As Norman Wisdom has said, ‘some days he could be so incredibly dry that you really thought he was being serious –that is, until he had suckered you in long enough for the pay-off line.’ Sometimes there was no pay-off line at all. Back when they shared a dressing room at the Cambridge Theatre for
Sauce Piquante
, they also shared a dresser, an old pro whose opinion of himself tended at times to go a little over the top for the two young comics. One day when they were all together Tommy asked Norman, ‘Who does Charlie remind you of?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘I know it’s a film star, but I can’t quite place it.’ The dresser beamed with curiosity at the teasing compliment. To his continuing frustration the guessing game continued all evening, the name of many a Hollywood movie star brought up for consideration only to be discarded as they scrutinized Charlie even more closely. ‘I’ll think of it,’ insisted Cooper. ‘Don’t you worry. It will come to me.’ But as Norman says, ‘It never did.’

There were times when it was difficult to know whether he was having you on or not. Comedian Jim Davidson once overheard him quizzing the barman while on the telephone in the pub next to the Thames studios at Teddington: ‘Can you tell me whether this pub is called
The Anglers
, orisit
The
Anglers
?’ ‘It’s
The Anglers
, Mr Cooper.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much.’ Once he came out of the Palladium with Roy Castle at four o’clock in the morning. There was one lone fan waiting in the cold for his autograph. As he signed the album, Tommy looked up and down Great Marlborough Street and commented, ‘Bit of a slight, isn’t it? Only one!’ The way he said it, he could have meant it. There was the occasion he was
sitting with Bob Potter in the office at Lakeside and asked for fish and chips. They duly arrived and Tommy carried on talking. Eventually they got cold and he asked if they could be sent back to the kitchen to be warmed up. This went on three or four times until it was time to depart and he asked for them to be wrapped up to take back to the hotel. When he had a gathering of people in his dressing room, if somebody put their head round the door or got up to leave, he invariably followed through with, ‘Who’s that?’ The bewildered look gave little clue whether he meant it or not.

Waiters were easy prey. Having tasted the wine, he would contort his face into an expression of absolute loathing and disgust, before relaxing into a beaming smile and a softly spoken ‘Very nice. Thank you.’ Once he was with Mike Yarwood in a restaurant after the show in Blackpool. It was very late, most of the kitchen staff had gone home and they were lucky to be served. Mike ordered chips with his meal, but was served boiled potatoes. Yarwood did not want to make a fuss, but Tommy insisted on calling the waiter: ‘We’ll get them changed. We’ll get them changed. It shouldn’t be allowed.’ Eventually the waiter came over. When the situation was explained he was full of apologies, but there was nothing he could do as the chef had left for the evening. Tommy looked at Yarwood and said, ‘He’s quite right, you know, Mike. He’s quite right.’ It only then dawned that he had been set up by his friend, the man who had saved his impressionist act on so many occasions: ‘If ever I was struggling, all I had to do was put on the fez, go into his laugh and the audience was back with me.’

There were moments when
schadenfreude
might have seemed to be his middle name, in a curious manner befitting someone who made comic capital out of the hilarious portrayal of a soldier half-English, half-German. Barry Cryer
observed the cruel streak that ran counter to his image on more than one occasion. Once on location they were in a pub together in Hammersmith. He remembers it well because on this occasion Tommy bought him a drink. A man came up to Cooper and punched
him
in the arm: ‘Hello, Tom. I don’t suppose I can tell you a joke you don’t know?’ To begin with he played along, all ears and seriousness as the guy launched into the tale. No sooner had he started than Tommy asked for a piece of paper. The man went back to the beginning and Tommy asked for a pen. He started again, ‘There were these two men in a pub …’‘Is this pub important, or is it any old pub,’ interrupted Cooper. ‘Any old pub.’ Back to the beginning, only for another interruption: ‘Excuse me, who are these two men? What do they do?’ ‘No, just two men in a pub.’ By now the man was really embarrassed. To Barry it was obvious that Tommy knew the joke, but was not letting on. As the fellow approached the tag, the film crew filtered in. Tommy couldn’t resist it: ‘Harry, Pete, Joe, you’ve all got to hear this.’ Then turning to the man he said, ‘Do you mind?’ He made him start all over again and – the sting in the tail – made sure he had left before the guy even reached the punch line. People cornering you to share a joke is an occupational hazard for any star comedian, but on this occasion the man had taken advantage and crossed a barrier of propriety. He had punched Cooper in the arm in an unwanted display of over-familiarity and Tommy was getting back at him for that. There was another time when he was buttonholed in a similar situation by an amateur gagster standing round the corner of the bar: as he began to tell the joke, Tommy, only visible to the other fellow above the waist, let drop his trousers. Cryer will never forget the spectacle of the most famous man in Britain standing with his trousers round his ankles with everyone on his side of the bar weeping with mirth while the poor unsuspecting
joker ploughed on regardless, confident that the laughter was for him.

On stage he never took the rise out of anybody, always turning the comedy on himself. It is therefore not difficult to understand the therapy incidents like these provided, not least because his privacy was so important to him. While he always had time for his public – he once said to his daughter, ‘The time to worry is when they stop coming up to you’– it had to be at the right time and in the right place. On one occasion he was enjoying a meal with the comedian Bobby Knoxall when a woman in her eighties approached him with a request for him to sign her book. ‘Of course, but after my meal,’ Tommy said politely, but firmly. ‘But, Mr Cooper, my coach is waiting for me outside.’ Not best pleased, he slammed down his knife and fork, took the book and signed it. He later confided to Bobby what he had written. It must have caused quite a shock when she returned to the coach and shared the inscription with the other old dears. At times like these he stands revealed as the British equivalent of W.C. Fields, although had the behaviour been broadcast it would not have enhanced his public image; in the case of the sometime juggler with the chip on his shoulder, it would only have boosted his popularity rating. Michael Black once spent a couple of anxious hours stuck in a lift with the magician. When the fire brigade arrived to release them, it wasn’t long before one of them saw who they were rescuing: ‘Here, Bert, I don’t believe it. It’s Tommy Cooper.’ As he walked away, Tommy responded with an abruptness that those close to him would recognize as a sign he was under pressure: ‘I know who I am. Who the hell are you?’ Fortunately there were times when laughter had a way of excusing what would have been construed as rudeness in others.

Mary Kay was a constant witness to his strange behaviour
patterns, not least the temper tantrums with waiters and officials who failed to pass his personal efficiency standard, outbursts that quickly gave way to laughter in the way that sun follows the passing cloud. Bob Monkhouse, we know, dismissed his petulance as that of a child, never better displayed than in the episode recounted by Mary in which they needed to borrow a tin jug from a hotel kitchen in which to heat milk. They were requested to leave it outside the bedroom door each evening, since it appeared to be the only utensil of its kind in the establishment, in spite of the fact that the hotel, near Manchester, had over three hundred bedrooms. One night they forgot, with the result that early next morning they were woken by a knock on the door from a member of staff requesting its return. To Tommy this represented the proverbial red rag. Simmering with rage, he stomped down the corridor in his pyjamas, clinging to the cord with one hand to stop them falling down and clutching the jug in the other. “‘Here’s the damn thing!” he roared to the receptionist, banging it down so that the remaining contents splashed all over the desk. He then made a dignified exit, cord still intact, face livid with displeasure.’ On that occasion the sun did not come round so quickly. It took him three hours to recover.