Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (10 page)

 Down through the years Miff religiously exercised his renewal option and the large stack of registered envelopes gathered in Cooper’s files are their own testimony not only to the hold Miff undeniably held over him, but to the successful way in which he managed Cooper’s career from a financial standpoint. From the moment Tommy signed with Miff his whole career represented a constant upward curve – helped not a little by the meteoric rise in fees triggered by the northern club boom – until the last few years when it became eroded by ill health. On this score the client never had reason to complain. Between the time of their first meeting and the end of the financial year in April 1948, Miff had secured Tommy work worth
£
223.00. The following twelve months, during which the agreement came into operation, saw him earning
£
738.00. By the time he reached April 1950 his earnings had more than doubled to
£
1,586.00, and by April 1951 almost doubled again to
£
2,987.00.

Tommy commenced his first week for Miff at the Windermere on 8 December 1947 and was held over for a fortnight.
Almost twelve months passed before the agreement was signed. Miff appears not to have been in a hurry. On 12 February 1948 Tommy, by now living in a flat at 105 Warwick Avenue in Maida Vale, wrote to Miff: ‘I wish to thank you for all the engagements you have procured for me in the past, and would be happy if you would conduct my future business.’ While Miff continued to find bookings for him, nothing was formalized until the end of the year. On 25 November, having moved yet again to a flat at 13 Canfield Gardens off the Finchley Road, he wrote to Miff a second time. After expressing again his gratitude ‘for the help and care with which you have conducted my business in the past,’ he continues: ‘I would be very grateful if you would accept fifteen per cent commission, continuing to look after my interests in the future as personal manager unless this agreement should be terminated by mutual agreement. Hoping this is quite satisfactory and thanking you again, Yours faithfully, Tommy Cooper.’ Two days later Miff wrote to Tommy expressing his satisfaction with this arrangement and the following day the situation was formalized. On the same day he dropped Miff a note, doubtless at the manager’s suggestion, which stated, ‘I hereby give you the authority to sign all or any contracts on my behalf.’ Gwen claimed that Tommy told her he was shaking when he signed on the dotted line. There is no reason to suppose that this was anything more than the nerves of inexperience we all feel at formal turning points in our lives. It had not been a shotgun marriage.

Why he should have misrepresented the case against Miff so vocally in the years to come is a complex matter. He certainly came to dislike the man in other respects, feeling he treated him like a schoolboy and it is not difficult to imagine this prim Scots Presbyterian in the guise of some male Jean Brodie figure, although Mary Kay described him in a letter as
possessing an additional dash of Uriah Heep: ‘I recall the ghastly meetings with Miff in darkened doorways where he would pay his fees in old pound notes. He used to beckon Tommy with the first finger of his right hand and expect him to come running. He even expected Tommy to come over to him at parties where, perhaps, he was having a chat with the Duke of Edinburgh. Miff really thought he was the original Svengali and nothing pleased Tommy more than to totally ignore him.’ Ferrie may have been insensitive, even loathsome to the performing temperament – surprising since he had been a performer himself – and he may at times have been editorially wrong, but in business matters he appears never to have been ethically incorrect. Whatever Gwen may have thought in the early days, his fifteen per cent was a fair enhancement on an agent’s typical return if management duties were involved as well, and in a realistic moment towards the end of her life even she had to concede that Miff was as straight as a die.

Two of Cooper’s early conjuring friends, Alan Alan and Bobby Bernard share a theory that Tommy spread the rumour about his contractual plight as cover for his own innate parsimony. It also explains why he never challenged Miff in the law courts as Bruce Forsyth eventually did. To do so would have exposed the lie of his own behaviour. Bruce never claimed he had been held to a punitive and restricted wage, only that his arrangement tied him unfairly to Miff for life. In the end nothing was found against Ferrie and Bruce paid
£
20,000.00 for the privilege of extricating himself from his clutches. Tommy would have thought twice about such expenditure. But the agent situation had its lighter side. The whole idea of paying commission to anyone preyed both on his mind and on his sense of humour. Enjoying a meal with Tommy in the late Forties after a Magic Circle show at, of all places, the Chislehurst Cricket Club, Michael Bailey saw that he was
separating the cherry stones around the edge of his dessert plate. ‘What are those for?’ queried the future president of The Magic Circle, pointing towards the few set aside from the others. ‘Oh, those are for my agent!’ was the unexpected reply. It would appear that everything was viewed through the commission prism, even matters of life and death: ‘I’ve got a clause in my contract that says I have to be cremated. That way my agent can get fifteen per cent of my ashes.’ It matters little that Groucho had done the line before him.

Initially dates were sporadic. The Coconut Grove, the Panama and the Blue Lagoon were regular haunts, in addition to the Windermere. The names sound glamorous, but today alongside countless similar venues that he would play in due course, like the Bagatelle, Churchill’s, the Embassy, the Colony, the Astor, Quaglino’s, Kempinski’s, they represent for the most part a litany of shallow sophistication and B-movie glamour, a world of Max Factor make-up, Lucie Clayton poise and Freddie Mills machismo brought down to earth by Soho smog. In contrast, August 1948 saw Miff dispatching Tommy on a five week CSE tour of Europe at fifteen pounds a week. The signing of the contract between them was celebrated by a drop in pay. The week commencing 29 November saw him working his first fully fledged week in an English variety theatre, bottom of the bill at the old Collins’ Music Hall on Islington Green for a basic salary of ten pounds. Gwen, Dennis Rawlins and his wife, Betty, dutifully acted as unofficial claque in the tiny suburban hall. Tommy needed theatre experience and 1949 saw Miff targeting the provinces as the next step in his client’s climb to stardom. It must have been dispiriting trudging around the country for a year playing the infamous Number Twos for a year at twenty pounds a week. Variety was on its last legs and these would be the first to go. To a travelling performer provincial theatre is still a world of
smelly, Spartan digs and cold, grimy dressing rooms in strange, ostensibly colourless places. Away from the more glamorous Stoll and Moss circuits, the despair descending over acts who until now had regarded the halls as a modest, but constant source of livelihood must have added to the shabbiness. Food rationing would not have helped.

Tommy admitted many times that in those early days some audiences did not fully realize that his magic was supposed to go wrong: ‘I remember one dreadful week. Top of the bill was the singer, Steve Conway, and I was second spot on. I went all through my act and there was not a titter from the audience. Nobody made a sound except me. I was laughing on the outside but crying on the inside. That happened every night. People said, “There’s a big feller up on the stage and he should be working down the pit. Our little Charlie can do tricks better than him.” It got so bad I couldn’t go out in the daylight in case somebody who’d seen the show recognized me. Even my landlady turned against me. It really unnerved me.’ This could have happened at the Workington Opera House, the Barrow Coliseum, the Tonypandy Empire, the Maesteg New or one of a score of other less than glittering palaces of entertainment. But however depressing the venue, the experience was to prove invaluable and he soon developed the resilience to cope.

In November 1952, he had graduated to the Moss Empires circuit and was playing the dreaded Glasgow Empire, feared throughout the business as the ‘Comics’ Graveyard’. They didn’t care for him at the first house. By the second open warfare had been declared. With a nonchalance he could not have mustered three years earlier Tommy simply came down to the footlights and told them all to ‘fuck off’. He went straight to the dressing room, packed his bags and caught the first train back to London. Next morning, Cissie Williams, the highly respected booker for the Moss circuit, made her routine
call to the theatre to see how the acts had fared the night before. The manager was forced to tell her that Cooper had returned to London. ‘What happened?’ she asked. He gave her the gist of the situation but was too embarrassed to use the exact words. Cissie Williams insisted: ‘He must have said something that upset them. He couldn’t have just walked off.’ The manager bit the bullet and told it to her straight. ‘Great,’ she replied, ‘it’s about time someone told those bastards to fuck off!’ One can hear every comic she ever consigned to failure on that stage cheering Tommy in unison whenever that story is told.

It is arguable that the nightclubs of the metropolis were no less difficult, not least because of the additional challenge of having to keep oneself and one’s audience awake at two o’clock in the morning. What passed as conventional stand up comedy was out of the question if one was going to grab the attention of the crowd above the clink of glasses, the chatter of waitresses, the come-on of high-class call girls. A heady brew of alcohol, sex, and violence hung in the air. It was a heavy drinking environment with many clubs encouraging the consumption of liquor by promoting what were known as ‘bottle parties’. Customers were served whole bottles of spirits which had a gauge fitted on the side. At the end of the night this showed how much had been consumed and their bill was worked out accordingly. The same bottle could also be kept in reserve for a customer on a future evening. To forestall violence among a partly gangster clientele some clubs, notoriously the Blue Lagoon in Carnaby Street, insisted that the bouncers on the door remove all guns on the way in.

He possibly came closest to his ‘Glasgow Empire’ experience in nightclub terms when he was playing the Bag of Nails in Kingly Street. Happily in that company he was more wisely restrained. The venue had a reputation for harbouring the real
hard men of London. Most of the audience would have had a police record, or were coming close to acquiring one. One night no sooner had he stepped on stage than the heavy mob started to pelt him with bread rolls. His fez became an instant target. He was scared out of his mind, but had to say something and came back with a weak, ‘Stop that.’ As he described the occasion, ‘The place came over all strange. “Stop what?” shouted this geezer. I said, “Why, stop throwing all these bread rolls at me.” “And why should I stop?” he shouted back. “Well, because I haven’t got an ad lib for people throwing bread rolls at me.”’ The audience were immediately on his side. As he said, things were never quite so hard after that, but you were never completely home and dry.

One advantage of the smaller clubs was the intimacy they allowed the performer to develop with his or her audience. The great American comedienne, Fanny Brice once summed up her relationship with a supportive crowd as ‘much like sensing the presence of a friend in the dark’. The truly great British performers of the day like Max Miller and Gracie Fields had learned how to achieve this rapport however large the venue. Gracie herself referred to it as weaving a silver thread between herself and her audience. In time Tommy would join their company, although strangely, even at the height of his fame, he always refused to play a cabaret date in the vast Great Room of the Grosvenor House. For the moment though, every date played, every audience mood judged, every joke timed brought him a step closer to his own distinctive style, his unique tempo and the confidence required to drive him to the top.

Doubling clubs was not unusual, the Colony and the Astor being a frequent combination. One night in the spring of 1948 on his way between the Blue Lagoon and the Panama he was stopped in Regent Street by a policeman suspicious of someone walking through the West End of London with a couple of
suitcases at such an ungainly hour. When he asked what he had in the cases, Tommy told him, ‘Magic!’ The officer was not satisfied and demanded he open them there and then. Slowly the sparkling spoils of his conjuror’s routine spilled out onto the pavement: ‘When he saw all the vases and rings sparkling under the lights he was still suspicious. He thought I was a burglar who had just done a job. At that moment, another copper came along and he happened to be an amateur conjuror, so to prove I was the real thing he made me perform one of the tricks. There I was in the middle of Regent Street at half past midnight doing “Glass, bottle. Bottle, glass.”’ Meanwhile Max Bygraves, with whom he was sharing the cabaret that week, was covering for him like crazy back at the Panama. By the time he walked on to do his act he appeared even more flustered than usual. He walked off shattered, turned to his friend and said, ‘Max, I’ve had a frustrating day. Let’s get pissed!’ According to Max, they did.

His apprenticeship took a special turn and the provincial trek a welcome break at the beginning of October 1949. His dream of a Windmill audition had been brought to reality by Miff and at the fifth attempt he joined the distinguished roll call of contemporaries who had jumped this hurdle ahead of him, including Jimmy Edwards, Harry Secombe, Alfred Marks, Michael Bentine, and Peter Sellers. Tommy stayed for six weeks at this legendary temple of static nudity in the seedy shadow of Eros, earning thirty pounds a week. Disreputable and innocent at once, the venue had a reputation as ‘The Comic’s Dunkirk’. No one pretended that the predominantly male audience came for the jokes; they came for the girls. Johnnie Gale, the theatre’s resident stage director, recalled how nervous the comic conjuror was: ‘Occasionally we wondered whether the nervousness was entirely genuine. One afternoon he dashed into the property room in a state of agitation,
grabbed a pudding basin and put it on his head instead of a fez. Then he went to take his cue. The basin was whipped off him before he got very far, but the stage staff laughed – and that seemed to please him.’