My Life in Pieces (66 page)

In Australia to shoot a television series, he gave a dazzling read-through of the first episode, then retired to his dressing room to tank himself up on vodka and pills, and after that ‘he didn’t know who or what he was’. Finally, he did sober up, but one day he went down to get something from his neighbour, who was also his producer, only to find him out. That sudden reminder of his aloneness was enough, it seems, to have tipped him over the edge. ‘Things seem to have gone wrong just too many times,’ he wrote, and then administered a lethal dose of the vodka and pills that had been his constant companions for so many years. He had often talked of suicide; as early as 1957 he had suggested a mutual suicide pact to Charlie Drake, who declined, observing that ‘Hancock wanted out of the game, even then. He was totally lonely, even with people.’

The roots of this epic loneliness are hard to deduce from Fisher’s pages. In them you will find a brilliant and much-needed account of Hancock’s extensive theatre work and its originality, just as he celebrates the audacity of the television work, with its formal inventiveness and its constantly Pirandellian playing with the frame, and a kind of voyage round the comedian’s mind and the nature of his comic enterprise. But he fails to probe his crucial relationships, especially with his mother, Lily, to whom he was immensely close. She supported him financially in his early years in the business; she was the go-between when his marriages broke down; she was the last person in his mind when he killed himself. Fisher lets slip the astonishing fact that two weeks after he finally did for himself, Lily
took a pleasure cruise to Turkey. There’s something very very complex in that relationship which remains for future Hancock biographers to probe. Meanwhile, Fisher has written an indispensable book about what he rightly calls ‘the most expansively idiosyncratic of recent British comic heroes’.

I never met Hancock or Tommy Cooper, but I did encounter one of my
comic heroes, which proved to be a little alarming, as I reported in the
Guardian
in 2004, in a review of
Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic
by
Graham McCann.

Conversation with Frankie Howerd was peculiarly disorientating. There he stood, in his usual stage uniform of brown suit and crumpled shirt, his toupee (as Barry Cryer memorably remarked) going up and down like a pedal bin, his eyebrows soaring up to join it, the face getting longer, the eyes looking wildly askance in horror or disbelief, the vowels extending and distending – being, in fact, in every particular, the Frankie Howerd we all knew and loved. Except that he was not at all, not even remotely, for a single second, funny. What he was saying was almost identical to what he had said on stage the night before and the night before that to such side-splitting effect – a list of complaints, paranoias and resentments – but for some reason, while on stage it was the acme of hilarity, off it the laughter froze on your lips.

We had a little bit of an
histoire
, Frankie and I. One night, after the Olivier Awards, where he had made his traditional superb speech – ‘This afternoon I spoke to my agent, who thinks I’m dead,’ it had begun – I was chatting to someone in the foyer and suddenly there he was, gloomily alone, half-listening to us. He said: ‘Are you going to this party?’ and of course I laughed, because to hear him was to laugh. He didn’t laugh back, so I quickly said that I was, with my partner Aziz. He said, ‘D’you want a lift?’ I said that would be lovely, and off we went. He sensed we were a couple. ‘Do you love each other?’ he asked, without preamble. ‘Yes, sir,’ said Aziz. ‘Very much,’ said I. ‘That must be nice,’ he said sourly. ‘Give me your hands.’ In the dark of the back of his car he peered at our respective palms and rattled off some somewhat sobering – and not entirely inaccurate – observations about our personalities and what we had to
offer each other. By now we were at the party, which consisted predominantly of playwrights. Having downed most of a bottle of vodka in about ten minutes, he announced: ‘Why don’t any of you lot write something for me?’ Out of the babel of writers’ voices offering their services, one dominated, that of Peter Nichols. ‘But I have, Frankie. You turned it down.’ ‘What play was that, then?’ ‘
The National Health
.’ ‘Oh, that. That was an awful play, a terrible play. It was all about death. You don’t make fun of death. Write me a proper play, a funny play.’

Soon afterwards he said: ‘Let’s get out of here. I’ll give you a lift. Where do you live?’ When we arrived, he said: ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ I was thrilled, of course, at the idea of having Frankie Howerd on my sofa. The same thought had obviously occurred to him, but in a slightly more literal sense, because after a few minutes of rather strained chat, he said: ‘Why don’t we have an orgy? Just the three of us.’ I laughed, but it was terribly, terribly clear that he wasn’t joking. ‘Well?’ he said, implacably. ‘I don’t think so, Frankie,’ I said, ‘I mean, it’d be so embarrassing afterwards.’ ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘We’re so tired. It’d be hopeless.’ ‘I’m not fussy.’ ‘No, Frankie, no, really, I have an early call tomorrow.’ ‘All right, all right, I get the message.’ He headed crossly for the door, then paused for a moment. ‘Not a word about this to anyone,’ he said. ‘There’s a Person Back Home who would be very upset.’

The Person Back Home was Dennis Heymer, who now, in Graham McCann’s fine new study, emerges from the shadows – but only just. Heymer is described as the love of his life, whom Howerd met when he was beginning to despair about his career and his physical attractiveness. Heymer had unshakable faith in Howerd’s talent, and spent his life extending his support in every way imaginable, most importantly by providing a domestic framework that reproduced the cosy and nurturing environment of his childhood home. Beyond these bare facts, however, we learn nothing of him. In fact, we learn little about Howerd, the man, either.

There are occasional tantalising glimpses of his friendships (with, for example, Rebecca West), but for all McCann’s memorably ghastly anecdotes about him descending on chums such as Cilla Black and Barry Took with his sister and a bag of supermarket food, demanding that his reluctant hosts cook it for them while the visitors watched television, the sense of what he was actually like remains elusive. In a chapter entitled ‘The Closeted Life’, McCann gamely attempts to sketch the broad outlines of
Howerd’s sex life, but beyond giving examples of the unattractive impatience of the sexual late-starter – Frankie bellowing ‘You don’t know what you’re missing!’ at the rapidly escaping object of his unwanted advances – he refuses to add to what he considers to be the prurient and unfounded speculations of the tabloid press; sensibly, he regards Howerd’s homosexuality as extrinsic to his comic persona, which, camp though it was, was no more gay than that of his deeply heterosexual and equally effete hero, Jack Benny.

Filth was, of course, at the heart of his comedy, part of the same great British tradition as the Carry On series, which enabled him occasionally to join the team. But unlike Sid and Ken and Babs and co., he was a great comic innovator, and it is in describing the evolution of young Frank Howard from Eltham into ‘Frankie Howerd’ that McCann comes into his own, guided by his subject, whose brilliantly titled autobiography,
On the
Way I Lost It
, reveals an exceptionally acute and articulate self-awareness. This is partially the result of his many encounters with psychiatrists and analysts – including one who used LSD extensively – in his continuing struggle to find meaning in his life. McCann describes his agonisingly slow start (he was twenty-nine before he got his first professional job), followed by his commensurately quick rise, which made him a national star within ten weeks of that first job. ‘A completely new art form,’ his first producer told him after his successful audition for radio’s
Variety
Bandbox
. Thanks largely to his performances, the show had a radio audience of nearly half of the total adult population. This was achieved not without enormous effort, accompanied by tension, rows and dread.

His initially successful style of ‘anti-patter’ had soon begun to stagnate; thinking hard, he realised that he was giving a stage and not a radio performance. He taught himself mastery of the microphone, painstakingly acquiring his characteristically wide vocal range, squeezing hilarious nuance out of a vast array of intonations. He discovered in Eric Sykes the first of many fine writers, commissioning from him the scripts which, building on his persona, invented the ‘one-man situational comedy’ (‘I’ve had a shocking day’) that stood him in such good stead for the rest of his career. He thought about every detail of his act, even changing the spelling of his name to make people look twice, thinking it must be a misprint.

Ordinariness was the key. He eschewed the flashiness of Max Miller or Tommy Cooper’s exotic troglodytism, creating the impression that ‘I
wasn’t one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street…’ He had turned his perceived disadvantages as a performer – the unconventional appearance, the stammering, the forgetfulness – into comedic triumph, the stand-up comic as a paradigm of the oppressed little man. ‘I played against the show,’ Howerd wrote, ‘as though its faults were all part of a deliberate conspiracy against me: I was being sabotaged by
them
– the cast, scriptwriters, management – and was striving to rise above it all.’ Michael Billington, writing in this paper, was moved to describe him as ‘arguably the most Brechtian actor in Britain’, though Pirandello would surely have been equally delighted by the act.

His restless intellect (Aristotle and Aquinas were bedtime reading), and a profound conviction that the public could never be satisfied for long with what he was giving them, drew him to explore new forms and even new
métiers
, resulting in extreme vicissitudes in his popularity. Audiences were no longer sure who or what he was; for a while he was convinced that his real destiny was as an actor, a view shared by neither critics nor public.

Peter Cook rescued him when he persuaded him to appear at the Establishment club, which resulted in appearances on
That Was the Week That
Was
, and a wholly unexpected new reputation as a satirist. The last few years were a sort of golden summer, in which he was finally reassured of the public’s love. ‘Can you believe I’ve been doing the same old rubbish for years?’ he cheerfully asked Barbara Windsor during his last tour.

He was not easy to work with, and he seems only rarely to have experienced what most of us would call happiness, except when performing. McCann records Howerd’s own (otherwise unsubstantiated) conviction that he was physically and sexually abused by his father, which would certainly be consistent with his eternal sense of self-rejection. The book’s extensive transcripts from the act, with every um, yes, ah, liss-en, you see and no missus! in place, instantly evoke his unique comic creation, making one laugh out loud. However unloved Frank Howard may have felt, Frankie Howerd, this book clearly demonstrates, remains for ever ensconced in British hearts, a quintessential part of us, in the presence of whom it remains impossible to be titterless.    

Even more than Frankie Howerd, Mrs Shufflewick played dangerously on
the edge of what was acceptable to a heterosexual audience. I reviewed
Patrick Newley’s monograph
The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick
for the
Guardian
in 2007.

By the time I started going to the theatre, the music hall had long gone, except in the wretchedly bastardised form of television’s
The Good Old
Days
, absurdly recreating the externals of the halls with an audience in fancy dress acting and performers ghoulishly attempting to exhume the great acts of the past. But every now and then someone would attempt to put together a bill of acts, which, if not technically of the music hall, were in the spirit of the thing. By amazing luck one evening in the early Seventies I caught one such programme at the Greenwich Theatre, seeing among others Max Wall, and the then to me totally unknown Mrs Shufflewick. Wall was a great grotesque, a cross between an ape and a concert pianist, and his comedy was surreally sublime, but Shufflewick was funnier, this tiny little man dragged up into the semblance of a faux-genteel cockney charlady, sitting at a slight angle to the table with her drink in front of her, generating and swelling and perfectly controlling laughter such as I have never heard before or since. The man next to me eventually tipped out of his seat and into the aisle, still roaring.

It was absolute filth, but delivered with the utmost delicacy and a mastery of
entendres
,
doubles
,
triples et quadruples
, that created mayhem in one’s mind. ‘Do you like this fur, girls? It cost two hundred pounds. I didn’t pay for it meself; I met two hundred fellas with a pound each,’ starts one of the riffs usefully quoted in Patrick Newley’s deeply enjoyable little memoir/profile. ‘This is very rare, this fur,’ Shuff continues. ‘This is known in the trade as “untouched pussy” – which as you know is unobtainable in the West End of London at the moment. And I don’t think there’s much knocking around here tonight.’ That little sequence would last up to five minutes, the laughter teased out more and more by his comic genius, until you felt almost literally sick, throat aching from the delirium he provoked. It wasn’t just the timing. Shufflewick was one of those comic creations that are so complete that they seem always to have existed, to have sprung from that timeless place from which all deep comedy springs.

In what he would certainly not have thought of as real life, the man who was Shufflewick was a foundling dumped on the steps of Trinity College
Hospital in Greenwich, and adopted by a well-off couple from Southend called Coster, whose name he took. He had no particular ambition or talent, until, drafted into the RAF at the age of eighteen, young Rex Coster joined the famous Gang Show (at the same time as Tony Hancock) and proved an immediate hit. Where he learned his skills, as comic and singer, we are left to guess. Rex felt he had arrived in heaven, but not especially because of the job. ‘This is marvellous, this life,’ he said to himself, according to an interview, ‘getting pissed all the time and not having to turn up for work in the morning.’ Alcohol was already mother’s milk to him, so much so that when he had to change his name because of the success of the singer Sam Costa, he chose to rechristen himself after a famous brand of whiskey. After the war, he was discovered by the Bryan Michie
Happy
Hour Show
which toured Granada Cinemas (part of the vanished world of post-war show business lovingly described by Newley) and swiftly prospered. He invented Shufflewick on the spur of the moment for BBC radio, whose moral guardians had rejected his vicar sketch the moment they heard its first line (‘Ah good evening to you my flock, and now you can flock off.’) Mrs Shufflewick’s much greater lewdness was less explicit, and she became a star, the interesting distinction of being radio’s first drag artist, or at any rate the first to drag up for the microphones.