Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (7 page)

Tommy told the story a zillion times of how this night he mislaid the helmet and happened to pinch the fez from the head of a passing waiter. It is unlikely that the move was premeditated and it paid instant dividends, adding even further inches to his height. In the company of the Guards he would have become less self-conscious about his size anyhow. As he stood there, this gangling giant of good humour, he had no idea that before long his new headwear would, as a badge of recognition, rival the bowler and trilby to which comics as diverse as Chaplin, George Robey, Max Miller and Tommy Trinder held allegiance. In addition, Arthur Askey had his forage cap and Bud Flanagan his battered straw hat. Cooper would now forever be associated with the fez. The kind he wore was originally burgundy coloured and much taller. Some time around the Sixties Tommy came to favour a brighter, more compact version. In her years with Tommy, one of Mary Kay’s unofficial duties was to serve as Mistress of the Fez. In a letter to me she wrote: ‘The shorter ones were his favourites and the colour of the early ones was too dark. I must have made a dozen nice bright fezzes over the years, but they weren’t easy to make and if you notice some are taller on one side than the other! I always secured the tassel into the top of the fez so that it didn’t fling about when he bent down. Also the felt had to be a nice, pinky red.’

Different versions of how it all came about have been
recorded. In some early interviews he let slip that he got the idea when he was in Port Said: ‘I bought one for ten piastres – about two bob then – and when I came home and needed a new one I had to pay thirty-five shillings.’ Down the years more than a few reminiscing servicemen have claimed that they gave him theirs. None of this is necessarily untrue. He would eventually have bought his own and acquired others, while Port Said may have been the scene of his decision to run with the idea as a permanent fixture. What surprises so many is that he was far from the first magician to wear one, a detail of which he would have been well aware.

A conversation on this very theme at The Magic Circle one evening resulted in an impromptu competition to see who could come up with the most names to have beaten Cooper to the fez. In fact there was a time when it became an unofficial part of the uniform for every other small time magician and children’s party entertainer. There were also more than a few acts with fezzes prominent on the variety circuits of the Thirties and Forties, although Tommy would not necessarily have known of them all. Among those who could have given his fez a run for its money from those early days was Eddie Songest – ‘With a Couple of Tricks and Colossal Nerve’– who used to boast that his was ‘a trophy won in a competition in which he consumed twenty-five boxes of Turkish delight in the world record time of thirty-seven and five eighths of a second’. Tommy would certainly have been familiar with Sirdani, with his ‘Don’t be fright!’ catchphrase and a stage identity that was a strange hybrid of Arab and Jewish. He made a name for himself on radio during the war explaining simple magic tricks and puzzles as a regular feature on the programme,
Navy
Mixture
; every publicity photo I have seen of him reveals the squat purple flowerpot hat. Len Gazeka from the Midlands had an unusual gimmick to go with his fez. He would enter
with his magic carpet under his arm, which he then proceeded to unroll on stage. Whenever he stood on the rug the tricks worked; whenever he failed to do so he found himself in Cooper territory. Possibly predating them all was Ben Said who had played at Maskelyne’s as a comedy magician in the early Twenties. He had known better days as an illusionist in the grand manner, under the name of Amasis. In the files of Tommy’s manager, Miff Ferrie was a poignant letter from Said from the Fifties with a brochure attached asking for work. ‘There is only one Funjuror’, the publicity proclaims. Miff must have noted the fez in the photograph. Ali (of Ali and Yolanda), Alex Bowsher, Johnny Geddes, Chris Van Bern, Percy Press; all have their place in the roll call of fez honour.

As British magical stalwart, Pat Page has explained, ‘Everyone had a fez.’ By coincidence, at about the same time as Tommy came home from the war in 1947, the magician Roy Baker was starting to market his original version of the egg and bag trick in which a fez was substituted for the bag. It was named ‘Abdul’s Fez’ and hundreds must have been sold over magic shop counters down the years, but there is no record of Tommy ever performing it or adapting his own fez for the clever variation of one of his favourite tricks, although in due course he did rise to the comic possibilities the hat offered him. There was the time he took it off and white chocolate drops cascaded over his shoulders: ‘I’ve got terrible dandruff’; the occasion at a Royal Performance when he came on with a weather vane attached: ‘I’ve been struck by lightning!’

Conceivably it would be harder for a young performer to come out on stage wearing a fez now had Cooper and the others not done so. In our politically sensitive world, football fans travelling to Turkey in recent years have been asked to leave their Tommy Cooper impressions at home. Apparently
Turks have regarded the fez as insulting since the wearing of such hats was banned by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in 1925. Bizarrely there was even one occasion in June 1967 when the organizer of a private function where Tommy was booked to appear requested that he leave his trademark headgear at home for fear of upsetting the largely Jewish clientele. Others have adopted a more practical attitude to it. Val Andrews told him early in his career that he should take the fez off at the end of his act: ‘People will think you’re bald and you have a great head of hair and this is an asset and when you reveal it, it’s a surprise.’ To Val’s delight, he always did.

The Middle East also provided a milestone in his personal life. It was there that he met Gwen. They first came together on a troopship travelling from Port Said to Alexandria, or maybe from Naples. Her accounts vary, but the romantic detail remained precise: ‘The very first time I saw him I didn’t speak to him. I had a shocking attack of flu and I was sitting in a deckchair all wrapped up in blankets and I saw this big man in battledress – he was a sergeant by now – standing against the ship’s rail with his back to the sea. The first thing I noticed was that the blue of the sea caught the blue of his eyes. He had the most magnificent physique I had ever seen. He was terrifically attractive in an ugly-attractive sort of way.’ When she asked someone who he was, she was told, ‘His name’s Tommy Cooper and he’s doing a show on board.’ Because of the flu, Gwen watched the performance from outside through a glass door. She couldn’t hear a word, but she saw enough to formulate an opinion: ‘I thought he was the funniest man I’d ever seen. This man’s got star talent, I told myself. One day he’ll be a big name.’ Upon arrival in Egypt Dove went her separate way to Cairo, not realizing that within days their paths would cross again. Gwen was a civilian entertainer
attached to CSE and on Christmas Eve 1946 she found herself having to accompany Tommy on the piano at a concert in Alexandria: ‘I said to him, “Let me see your dots.” He didn’t know what I meant. I said “Your music.” He said, “Just play the first few bars of ‘The Sheik of Araby’.”’

On their way back in the army bus he sat next to her. ‘Can I put my head on your shoulder?’ he asked. ‘Certainly not,’ she declared. The relationship began at that point and two weeks later he proposed: ‘I don’t suppose you’d marry me, would you?’ ‘I suppose I will,’ was the response. There is no reason to suppose that Tommy had been party to such a deep attachment before, but the affair was not without its emotional complications. Gwen had recently been engaged to a pilot killed during the air raids on Cologne. When asked what she would have done had he survived, she replied, ‘I’d have broken off the engagement. I really fell for Tommy.’ They married in Nicosia, Cyprus on 24 February 1947. Tommy was so poor she had to buy her own wedding ring, although he made up for it later with a diamond eternity ring. Their honeymoon was a single night snatched at the Savoy Hotel, Famagusta. When they walked through the door the man at reception called out, ‘Ah, Brigadier Cooper!’ Their friends in the concert party had booked them in as Brigadier and Mrs Cooper as a joke. Without an inkling of embarrassment she would admit they had not slept together before that night, which with characteristic frankness she always described as ‘bloody wonderful’.

Throughout their life together he called her ‘Dove’. With her full-bodied figure she used to joke, ‘Anything less like a dove!’ Their daughter thinks the term of affection came about after a few drinks when ‘love’ turned to ‘dove’ and stuck. Maybe it came out of ‘lovey-dovey’. Whatever the derivation, there is unlikely to be any deep magical significance to the word, since Channing Pollock, the suave American deceptionist
who popularized the manipulation of the birds in his brilliant stage act, did not arrive on the theatrical scene until the early Fifties.

Gwen was five months older than her husband. She had been born in Eastbourne on 14 October 1920, the daughter of Thomas William Henty, a blacksmith’s assistant. The gift of a piano from her parents at the age of eleven was the defining ‘box of tricks’ moment in her own life. All who came to know her would identify with the irrepressible joie-de-vivre and sense of purpose that could have led her to personal stardom in her own right – a performer in the Tessie O’Shea mould with piano in lieu of banjulele – had she chosen that path. On her travels in the Middle East she had fast been gaining a reputation as an entertainer. Ragged press cuttings pasted in her scrapbook before she met Tommy reveal that she had a far wider range of talents than her known skills as an accompanist would suggest. Working under the ENSA banner in the touring show,
Sunrise
in 1945, she is reported: ‘The girl of many faces is something of a phenomenon. As the moth-eaten old charlady, she rocks the audience with laughter. As herself a few minutes later, she provokes that peculiar whistle which troops reserve for what they usually describe as “a bit of all right”. She more or less runs riot through the show.’ Another review, from Beirut, tells us, ‘She gets right to the hearts of the audience. She has a Gracie Fields personality, her character sketches have 100 per cent entertainment value, and her vivacious singing at the piano of a charming satire entitled, “Men – men – men!” produced roars of laughter.’ In Baghdad she is described as putting over ‘her own sophisticated Mae West-ish solo act, but she isn’t afraid to discard the glamour and paint her nose red in real slapstick stuff.’

In the concert party she had been partnered in the ‘slapstick stuff’ by one Jimmy Murray, ‘an extremely good young comedian
with a smooth and pleasant style.’ Upon marrying Tommy it was inevitable that they would contemplate a double act together. A large buff regulation notebook – emblazoned with a crown and ‘GR Supplied for the Public Service’– that Tommy kept up around this time provides some intriguing glimpses of their brief partnership on stage:

One routine they worked on was a pastiche on American Broadcasting with its leaning towards product placement:

 It was obviously an act in progress. Gwen recalled in later years that they were once rehearsing in a room in Cairo. The slanging match was so convincing, the caretaker wanted to call the police. Later they tried a softer, kindlier, less negative approach: