Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (23 page)

 The repetitions, the curious cadences are italicized. With a lesser comic they would have impeded the flow considerably. With Cooper they enhanced it.

As he wreaked havoc on the art of magic in his attempt to emulate the great illusionists of his youth, so he turned comedy on its head in his attempt to mirror the slick professionalism of the likes of Miller, Askey, Benny and Hope. Both the magicians and the mirth makers were representative of an ideal he knew, subconsciously at least, that he could not attain. The greatest paradox of his achievement is that he drew level with them. In so doing he was able to defy all the conventions, like repeating a piece of business – catching the ball in the cone, for example – several times in his act, when the rule book made clear that, unless it was intended as a running gag, you left well alone after securing the initial laugh. He would get sidetracked by talking to people in the wings. Miller had
acknowledged their presence with conspiratorial glances as part of a conversational flow with the audience. To Cooper, the distraction was more real: ‘What do you mean come off? I’ve only just come on.’ Or, thinking the audience wouldn’t notice, he would look down under his table and mutter, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have been under there in the first place.’ There were also the echoes of Bob Hope’s own insecurity; the cough that was never cured, unashamed punctuation pause to cover all inadequacies; and the jokes that maybe were old and substandard – ‘Here’s another one you may not like!’– giving an added fillip to Barry Cryer’s audience conspiracy theory. ‘Funny enough – is it funny enough?’ he would ask. He was even prepared to repeat a joke if he felt it had let him down first time around: ‘I’ve got a cigarette lighter that won’t go out. (Pause) I’ve got a cigarette lighter that won’t go out.’ Like Frankie Howerd’s whole act, it was of course perfectly calculated: this was the only line he used in this way.

The unorthodox approach led to him taking calculated risks that none of his contemporaries would have dared. One night he walked on stage and said, ‘It’s lovely to be here.’ He paused, moved a few paces sideways and said, ‘It’s lovely to be here as well!’ On one occasion I saw him take the same device to even braver lengths. The venue was the Bournemouth Winter Gardens, the permanent home of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. For three months of high summer the classical musicians moved out to make way for the star entertainers of the day. In this profit-maximizing process many performers found themselves playing a stage not best suited to their talents, one which, New York’s Radio City Music Hall excepted, qualifies as the widest I have ever seen. I can visualize Tommy’s entrance now. Looking as if he had just been pushed on, he came from upstage to the centre of the apron, paused, looked to one side and then the other. He hardly said a word.
His doubting expression told all. Fancy putting a comic on a stage like this! He then turned and taking all the time in the world – he might have been walking the dog – strolled to one end of the vast orchestral platform. He fired a salvo of one-liners at the audience on that side of the theatre. For about three minutes the laughter swelled. He then turned again and walked all the way to the far end of the stage on the other side where he embarked upon exactly the same sequence. The audience now laughed even louder. You knew it was coming, which made it all the funnier.

In time the audience came to expect something out of the ordinary from him. It reached its zenith with the device where he found himself locked in his dressing room, which may have had its origins in the earlier one where only his feet appeared beneath the curtain. As the tabs were flown with the spotlight centred on his shoes, his bewildered cry for help told all: ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ In later years a working off-stage stand microphone became a requirement demanded of all club and theatre managements. No sooner than his name was announced, the audience could sense something was wrong. First a sigh was heard over the loudspeakers. As Lenny Henry once remarked, ‘If you can get a good laugh just by breathing out, that’s serious comedy.’ Then the words followed: ‘Oh dear! What’s going on now? I can’t get out. I’m locked in. I’m still in the dressing room. Now all the lights have gone out. Where’s the door?’ When he does get out, ‘It’s darker out there than it was in here. What’s this? It’s my suit. It’s another suit. Huh huh. You’ll laugh at this. I’m in the wardrobe!’ Eventually he does find his way to the stage – ‘Right, can we go?’ But when the tabs are drawn we see him facing away from the audience, talking to the wall. The laughter eventually provides him with his bearings and the act proper begins.

Television producer, Royston Mayoh swears that he was
once present at a Birmingham club where Tommy kept up this invisible pretence for forty-one minutes, by which time he had lost and found his trousers and probably done a circuit of the Bullring in the attempt. I think it is likely that somewhere down the line a set of tabs jammed and he improvised the entrance from there. In time the device also became magnificent cover for his late arrival at a venue, the get-out with many an exasperated stage manager: ‘You’re late, Mr Cooper.’ ‘It’s alright. Don’t worry about it.’ ‘Look, we’ve only got five minutes.’ ‘It’s alright. Start the band.’ Lee Evans recalls witnessing Tommy extemporizing into the microphone as he dressed and set up his props on one such occasion, only going on stage when he was ready.

It is no wonder that when he died the way he did, people thought it was a joke. It is no wonder also that he was the object of awe and admiration in his fellow comics whose routines were meant to show the results of rigid discipline, careful rehearsal and accurate timing. Not that this excluded Tommy from their company. Only a performer with strong technique and immense confidence could successfully enter the forbidden territory he appeared to tread. On one occasion he was featured at the Shakespeare Club, a converted theatre in Liverpool. One night the hydraulic stage played up as Tommy was rising into view. Comedian Pete Price remembers that it stuck halfway and wouldn’t budge an inch: ‘In fact the audience could see only Tommy’s head and fez, yet he went right through his forty-five minute act and held them all the time.’ One speculates that had hydraulic stages been more commonplace, he would have been tempted to repeat the circumstances.

It must come back to self-belief. He once discussed telling the corniest joke in the world: ‘You have to have such innocent faith in it that the audience just
has
to laugh.’ Perhaps this
was the most important thing he acquired at the college of Milton Berle, class of 1949. Bob Monkhouse once described to me an impromptu lesson in comedy he had been given by the American. Berle asked Bob to cite any joke he had ever heard him tell, also to give him an unrelated phrase consisting of a couple of words. His claim was that he could go on that night and substitute the two new words for the established punch line. In this way, ‘This suit is made from virgin wool. It comes from the sheep that runs the fastest,’ became ‘This suit is made from virgin wool. It came from a sheep last Thursday.’ At the end of a string of progressively shorter one-liners, Uncle Miltie, as he was known to the American public, did the new version. According to Bob, the audience roared: ‘He was completely the master. He had them hypnotized.’ He could have been dangling a tap on a length of elastic. With both men the power of suggestion was helped by eyes that lit up to signal a joke; with Cooper it was aided further by an intrinsic physical funniness that not even Berle possessed. Eric Morecambe once asked Barry Cryer, ‘Why is it that he goes on stage and they start laughing immediately and when I go on stage I have to start working?’ He said it with great love. But with Cooper there was always a high level of the art that conceals art. Deep inside he was working as hard as the magnificent Morecambe ever worked.

Tommy once spent an afternoon with Eric and Ernie during which they got around to discussing and trading ad-libs and heckler stoppers. A few nights later Eric was present at a cabaret club where many other influential show business people were in the audience. Cooper was halfway through his routine when the unforgivable happened; a waiter right in front of him dropped a tray of drinks. All the pros looked at each other expectantly, not least Morecambe. Of all the lines that had been thrown around among the three of them, which,
he wondered, would Tommy consider most worthy of the occasion. After a suitable pause during which his eyes took in a grand tour of audience, culprit, tray and audience again, Cooper stared at the offender and said ‘That’s nice!’ He then continued with his act as if nothing had happened. The simplicity of the response was more powerful than anything from Orben or Glason that might have been tucked away in the innermost recesses of his mind. But about the incident I have a theory. The anecdote has been told by more high profile Cooper aficionados than any other. They all remember where they were and who they were with at the time. And it is always a different venue. Taking into account the clause Tommy invariably had built into his contract when he was playing a club, that waiter service would be suspended for the duration of his act, I wonder whether the incident wasn’t repeated on more than one occasion to Tommy’s specific mandate. We are back to the art that conceals art and an artist as great as Eric Morecambe didn’t spot it. Moreover, Cooper’s response was the right one for a man whose humour was never judgmental or cruel. If my theory is true, one wonders whether the idea was his own. To return briefly to matters of authorship, the Broadway composer, Harold Arlen refused to draw a dividing line between composer and lyricist. ‘It’s the collaboration,’ he would stress. Perhaps that is what counts with Cooper. Scarcely any of his material was original, but the thousand secret collaborations he engendered with this original writer here, that pioneer ideas man there achieved something alchemical. He made their often pedestrian creations his own. And he always left them laughing.

Encore des Folies
brought Tommy more than recognition. It revealed the patronage, in association with Moss Empires, of one of the more important new impresarios on the West End scene. As a speciality dancer Bernard Delfont had once been part of an act himself and had an affinity for backing distinctive variety talent, as well as a love of all that was spectacular in show business. At this time, Norman Wisdom was on the verge of a major career breakthrough as a result of Bernie’s ability to spot a rising star, while thanks to his affectionate promotion Laurel and Hardy and the legendary Danish– American illusionist, Dante, had been enjoying great success in Britain during the swansong stage of their careers. The combination of comedy
and
magic, in a more vigorous mix than ever before, made Cooper a natural in his eyes. With the exposure from the television series,
It’s Magic
in the spring and early summer of 1952, it was inevitable that before long Tommy would progress to a better class of provincial booking. Following a two week debut appearance at the London Palladium in July, low down on a bill topped by forgotten American comedy team, Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy,
he embarked in the autumn on his first tour of the prestigious Moss Empires circuit. He received a weekly salary of eighty pounds for the Palladium booking; with an assist from Delfont, Miff was able to command £125.00 a week in the country, as his client zigzagged his way from Liverpool to Glasgow, Birmingham to Brighton, Newcastle to Finsbury Park and all points beyond, with a few weeks in town for Christmas to take advantage of the lucrative cabaret season.

He would formally arrive back in the West End for the week commencing 25 May 1953, compromising at ninety pounds a week to take part in the two week bill at the Palladium that coincided with the Coronation of Her Majesty the Queen. American comic, Danny Thomas, who was in some ways the poor man’s Milton Berle, was top of an otherwise lack-lustre bill. Where was Bob Hope when birthright, if not citizenship, called? It was then back to the provincial grindstone, until the beginning of December when Tommy found himself deputizing at the Adelphi Theatre for Tony Hancock, previously – and incongruously – committed to pantomime duty, during the last two months of the revue,
London Laughs
, in which he appeared alongside Jimmy Edwards and Vera Lynn. The weekly salary of £150.00 was more in line with Tommy’s new co-star status. Delfont could not have been happy to look on as Cooper made an impact in a revue presented by three of his main rivals, Jack Hylton and George and Alfred Black. He became determined that in little more than a year he would have the mad magician back in the West End working under his banner. However, before Tommy opened in his new
Folies
production,
Paris by Night
at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 9 April 1955, for a run that would extend for seventy-four weeks through to September 1956, Delfont kept him under his wing with summer season at Southport and pantomime at Dudley. In both shows he co-starred with radio comic, Derek
Roy and ‘Sugar Bush’ vocalist, Eve Boswell. In the latter, Humpty
Dumpty, he played King Yoke of Eggville, presumably finding renewed opportunity for egg tricks and poultry jokes.

Any gaps were mostly taken up by single weeks in variety under the herald,
Bernard Delfont Presents
, although a more significant opportunity presented itself in the immediate wake of the Adelphi engagement in the form of a further opportunity to appear with Vera Lynn. In a press statement issued during the previous year, Ferrie had stated that ‘So far no fewer than eight offers to appear in the United States have been refused.’ It was now time to accept. Miff zealously collected the eight affidavits required by the authorities, rallying among others Ronnie Waldman, Val Parnell, and Delfont to the cause. On 31 March 1954 they set sail on the Queen Elizabeth
en route
to Las Vegas, where Tommy was booked to appear with the singing star and a predominantly British company in the revue, Piccadilly
Revels
at the Flamingo Hotel. In the desert resort show business was fast asserting itself as something more substantial than the fly-by-night accompaniment to so many jangling slot machines, the Flamingo – built by mobster ‘Bugsy’ Siegel – regarded as one of the classiest venues in town. The trip would provide a major challenge for all concerned, even if Tommy seemed a natural for a nation described by James Thurber as one ‘that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the belly laugh and the dozen other labels for the roll-’em-in-the-aisles of gagerissimo.’

In its review
Variety
asked of the show, ‘Whether it can sustain itself at the turnstiles satisfactorily for the five weeks booked may be open to question. Although fairly diverting, opus moves somewhat heavily. Tightening should improve it.’ Of one thing the newspaper was certain, ‘Tommy Cooper proves high spot of the revue,’ to which Tommy joked, ‘No
wonder. I’m six feet four, the rest of the cast are three feet six!’
Variety
added, ‘The unexpected climaxes to his tricks are smooth prestidigitations tailored for laughs.’ Miff wrote home to his wife, ‘Jack Benny was in last night, and it was not until Cooper came on that he applauded.’ The show folded after two weeks and a night. According to Gwen, who did not accompany her husband, the Americans couldn’t fathom the appeal of our so called ‘Forces Sweetheart’: ‘They thought she looked like a horse eating an apple through barbed wire and, besides, the war had been over for almost a decade.’ Kay Starr, a singer they could understand, was rushed in to replace the package show. In the
Daily Express
an aggrieved Miss Lynn was reported as saying a little ungraciously, ‘I just felt my colleagues weren’t up to my standard.’

Tommy never lost his love of America, the vitality of this Land of Hope, Milt and Benny. Not a gambling man himself, he could not stop laughing at the garage that advertised ‘Petrol, free aspirin and sympathy!’ for those that were. However, the debacle of the show left him a wiser man. He told Val Andrews how before the opening night everyone was ‘all over’ the company, nothing too much trouble for the crew backstage. However, when the singing star failed to register, attitudes changed. When he came off on the closing night he discovered the whole stage plunged into darkness: ‘As far as they were concerned we were over and done. They didn’t even say “goodbye”.’

On his return via New York Tommy was offered a season at Radio City Music Hall. Miff has always been made the scapegoat for the fact that he did not accept, but in simple language to have done so would have been to have fallen out with Delfont. Prior to their departure
The Performer
had announced, ‘He goes with the happy knowledge that on his return he will be solidly booked for the next two years. This, of course, is part of a carefully thought-out plan of campaign
by Miff Ferrie who has so successfully helped to steer the lanky comedian to his present enviable position.’ That Tommy was in such a strong situation is actually because of Delfont’s commitment to them both. The two solid years of bookings constituted a contract between them by which the impresario guaranteed the performer
£
150.00 a week (for a two year period) for a minimum of forty weeks in any one year. It is conceivable that the myth of Tommy being shackled to a set weekly salary hatched out of the shell of this agreement, even if he was now guaranteed
£
150.00 a week – according to the retail price index the equivalent in today’s terms of almost £3,000.00 – far removed from the pittance that he claimed was his dole from Miff in the early years. For the record the Vegas deal had guaranteed him $1,250.00 a week in a contract that also carried the clause, ‘It is a condition of this Agreement that the Artiste is to be accompanied by his personal manger, Mr Miff Ferrie.’ It added that all transportation and living expenses for the two were the responsibility of the performer. It may read like a ‘freebie’ for Miff, but was an arrangement that was totally justifiable in light of the relative inexperience of the performer. On the collapse of the show, Miff, on behalf of his client, settled for a total of $5,000.00 as joint payment for work done and compensation, the equivalent of £1,750.00 in sterling. The process, although disappointing, was relatively straightforward, unlike the situation that had been brewing between artist and agent.

On 4 January 1954 Tommy had instructed his solicitor to question Miff’s right to a fifteen per cent commission. Miff wrote up the situation, thus giving us an insight into his client’s somewhat roundabout way of confronting a problem: ‘At midday Tommy Cooper telephoned me and said he was going to see his solicitor that afternoon as he was having trouble with his income tax. I asked him why on earth he was going to a
solicitor about his income tax, as this was surely a matter for his accountant. He then said his accountant was in Malta, but that his solicitor wanted to know why he was paying fifteen per cent commission. I asked him what his commission had to do with income tax and he said that his solicitor wanted to see his agreement with me. I said I still did not get the reason for this and asked him if he was unhappy about anything. He said he was perfectly happy about paying fifteen per cent and then asked me what I thought he should do. I said that as he was perfectly happy paying fifteen per cent the obvious thing was to tell his solicitor so and once again told him that I could see no reason why his commission had anything to do with his income tax. He then asked me once more what I thought he should do, as he was going to see his solicitor that afternoon. I told him to do whatever he wanted to do, but that I could see no useful purpose being served, as the Agreement was perfectly in order as he well knew, having taken it to Equity and another party, namely, his accountant in the past.’

After a terse telephone conversation between Miff and Cooper’s solicitor, Tommy later in the day summoned up the courage to tell Miff that he did regard the fifteen per cent as too high and that whilst he had not objected to paying this in the early days, when he was earning only twenty pounds a week, he thought that now he was earning hundreds, Miff was getting too much. The situation unleashed a profitable series of exchanges for the legal profession with demands to survey the Agreement and Miff’s letter of extension exercising his right to continue handling Cooper’s affairs from the first date of renewal, 28 November 1953. Miff was only too happy to provide not only these, but the correspondence from more than five years earlier in which Cooper had expressly stated his wish that Ferrie look after his interests as Personal Manager for the agreed commission.

When Miff’s solicitor got to the root of the immediate problem, it hinged on Tommy’s unhappiness with a situation whereby he found himself responsible for paying his manager’s expenses on the American trip. In his naive eyes, dragging up the old commission ploy provided a possible route to discrediting Ferrie and cutting him out of the trip altogether. At the same time there was an opportunity to rake over old ground and Cooper’s growing dissatisfaction with the 1948 agreement. Tommy went behind Miff’s back and took the issue to Leslie MacDonnell, a director of Foster’s Agency, which was packaging the Vegas show. MacDonnell subsequently confided in Miff that he told Tommy’s solicitor ‘that he thought Cooper’s case rather dubious, and that Mr Ferrie had done very well for Tommy Cooper.’ On 23 February, Cooper’s solicitors wrote to Miff’s representatives, giving notice ‘terminating your client’s agency six months from the date hereof. Our client, of course, cannot restrain your client from going to America, but we are instructed to inform you that if your client does go it will certainly be at his own expense.’ As cold comfort the letter ended with the information that Cooper was prepared to enter into a sole agency agreement on a ten per cent basis, ‘which is the usual commission payable on this type of contract and determinable thereafter by either side giving to the other three months notice in writing.’ There was no case against Miff whatsoever. Eventually his solicitors advised Ferrie to adopt a policy of no further comment and for the time being life went on as usual.

Having put his signature to the original Las Vegas contract with Foster’s Agency dated 4 December 1953, Cooper subsequently signed again what in essence was the same agreement with Foster’s American partners, the William Morris Agency on 10 March 1954. On 30 March, the day before they sailed, a letter from Ferrie’s solicitor to Cooper’s suggests that Cooper
was threatening to take the matter to arbitration. The response was that if Cooper persisted in his claim that there was no binding contract, it could only be decided in a Court of Law. There the matter was allowed to rest for the time being. The conjuror did not have a leg to stand on, but he was an optimist. The following day they set sail together. The episode had not provided the best of climates for such an odd couple to contemplate a trip together of such high professional significance, whoever was paying. Tommy, of course, had one trick up his sleeve. He could always withhold his commission, something he did callously from February 1954, until Miff was forced to initiate legal proceedings against him on 21 July 1954. Cooper was forced into a corner. Instructions were written up for Council, but forestalled by payment from Cooper for all amounts outstanding by the end of the Southport summer season. The title of the show,
Happy and Glorious
, must have sounded a hollow note to them both.

Meanwhile it was back to work for Delfont. In
Paris by
Night
he was given second billing to a rising television comic named Benny Hill. There was no doubt who stole the show. For all his ingenuity and charm Hill was not a natural stage performer. Every night he would walk down in the finale to less applause than the performer who preceded him, an experience that would have done nothing to boost his theatrical morale. To make matters worse,
The Times
declared Tommy’s contribution to be ‘the evening’s one first-rate thing.’ In
The
Observer
, Tynan wrote that Hill’s comic technique was not yet assured enough for the theatre, before adding that the revue was saved by Cooper, adding this telling description of him, ‘picking his way through the debris of fumbled conjuring tricks like a giant stork pecking for sustenance in a morass.’ More down to earth was David Marsden, a business associate of Miff, who phoned during the run with his assessment:
‘Tommy stole it, but Benny was bad and blue, looked effeminate and clothes bad!’