Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (47 page)

In retrospect the rumours of Cooper’s unreliability that spread through Clubland in the mid Seventies stand as their own metaphor for the decline that had beset the club industry. Before it went into almost total meltdown, it would establish a new more economically viable level on a reduced scale, but for a while agents like Ferrie, who had come to rely on the medium as the chief source of income for their clients, were deeply worried men. During the first few months of 1976 Cooper lost engagements scheduled for the Showboat Club in Cardiff, the Fiesta in Sheffield, the Talk of the Midlands in Derby, as one by one they were declared bankrupt. As the year progressed contracts for Skegness and Chester would be similarly affected. The clubs that did stay in business were becoming slower in paying up, with the result that agents insisted more and more that fees should be paid in advance of the engagement. The precarious spiral this created was not helped by the principal cause of the recession outside of general economic factors, namely the unrealistically high fees being
demanded by performers, in some cases out of all proportion to their drawing power. In many ways the clubs had only themselves to blame, having dangled what were tantamount to open cheques to enlist the services of several international headliners in the early days.

Iris Mitchell, the respected booking agent for the Circus Tavern at Purfleet, set forth what amounted to a plea for reality on behalf of the entire industry in a letter to Miff on 3 September 1976: ‘May I take this opportunity of saying that I find it impossible to understand the reason artistes put up their fees by such considerable amounts from one engagement to the next when the economic situation in our business is so precarious. Even at existing fees clubs are unable to make a profit. No doubt artistes think when they see clubs reasonably full, they are responsible for attracting in paying customers. I wish that this was the case, but in actual fact yet another amount of money has to be spent on promotions to encourage patrons to visit our clubs on a complimentary ticket basis. Therefore with the high fees some of the artistes, including Tommy Cooper, are demanding, it is no wonder clubs are losing two thousand pounds plus a week. I feel that if all clubs gave stars a true picture of their actual value and drawing capacity, they would hesitate and think again before putting up their fees.’ Cooper was not exactly blameless as far as this situation was concerned. But there was always the matter of supply and demand. In June 1976 Tommy received
£
6,000.00 for his week’s engagement at the Tavern. When he next appeared there – one year and one major health scare later – in September 1977, his contract was for
£
7,000.00. There were hundreds of mohair-suited, joke-telling stand-up comedians, but there was only one Cooper.

It was not all gloom. In June 1976 the London Palladium expressed interest in Cooper’s services for an eight week
variety season during July and August of the following year. Looking even further ahead, in March 1977 impresario Harold Davidson enquired about the possibility of Tommy opening for Frank Sinatra at the Royal Festival Hall in September 1978. Eventually this fell through, almost certainly when Sinatra came to realize that even he would have a hard job to follow the great comedian on his home ground. The excuse was fudged. Davidson had originally asked for thirty minutes. Sinatra’s people then explained that they wanted a shorter act. When Miff pointed out that Cooper was more than amenable to doing less time, the official line came back: ‘They do not want anything as elaborate as Tommy Cooper.’ A starring season at the Palladium, the natural home of a performer of his kind, would have been more than consolation, but by then other events had, tragically, intervened.

Whatever the excesses of his behaviour on the road, Cooper was well aware that his body was slowing down. In March 1976 he volunteered to Miff that their existing arrangement whereby he worked for two weeks and then had a third in which to recharge his batteries should be commuted to one week on and two weeks out. Eventually a compromise was reached and the pattern established whereby Miff would endeavour to book him for two weeks on and two weeks out, with an added provision for two holiday periods of three weeks during any one year. With such an arrangement no one could genuinely complain that Miff was the hard taskmaster many – Tommy’s wife included – have made him out to be. Unfortunately the new pattern had little chance to establish itself before in August a cardiograph revealed a further blip in Cooper’s health. Dismissed by Gwen as ‘nothing to worry about,’ nevertheless it was serious enough for the doctors to stipulate that he had to take things easy and ‘should only work 3 nights a week.’ The medical report came through in the same week that
an embarrassed Iris Mitchell rang Miff to find out what she should do about Tommy’s outstanding bar bill from his recent engagement at the Circus Tavern. It amounted to
£
250.00.

Miff began to listen more carefully to lucrative one-night offers for his client. One such was an invitation to perform in Rome for booking agent Michael Black before a gathering of 950 delegates at an IBM conference at the Rome Hilton on 22 April 1977. Almost twenty years later Michael still agonizes whether – in defiance of the look that said, ‘You’re not serious, are you?’– he did the right thing by keeping the booze at arm’s length from the star before the performance, promise as he did that once the show was over they would go and get pissed on behalf of all the gladiators who had ever stared a lion in the face in the Coliseum. Tommy had complained of feeling unwell earlier in the day and as they stood in the wings the typical agent’s humour asserted itself: ‘Tommy, you’re on in a minute. All you have to do is to walk out there to constitute a contract.’ Just as he was about to go on stage, he collapsed in the arms of a stagehand. Michael recalls the scene: ‘Suddenly his right leg started to shake and a tremor ran up his body. At first I thought he was doing one of his funny acts and actually laughed, but not for long. He collapsed and began rolling over in agony, fighting for breath. His dentures fell out and he was bleeding from the mouth.’ Within ten minutes an Italian doctor arrived who saved his life with a cardiac injection. He was admitted to a private clinic and IBM rushed Gwen to his side by special plane.

The press reported that he had suffered a heart attack. Gwen protested that he had been working far too hard lately, implying that Ferrie had a responsibility in the matter. This became a constant refrain on her part when she was under stress due to her husband’s ill health. In actuality, as a result of doctors’ advice and the new working pattern, before
departing for Italy he had given a mere thirty-one performances in the 110 days that had passed since the beginning of the year. No sooner was she installed in the nursing home than she rang Miff in the early hours to assure him: ‘Everyone was telling her T.C. was dying. Well he is
not
!’ Michael Black reported to the agent more realistically: ‘T.C. nearly died. The doctor said he must not smoke or drink or even smell it.’ In due course the doctor attending him wrote to Ferrie, diagnosing ‘a cardio-circulatory attack due to overwork.’ Almost certainly – and not unreasonably – he had been listening to Gwen. The fuller thirty-three page medical report that Cooper forbade Miff to see specifies chronic alcoholism and bronchitis as attendant causes. He was discharged from the clinic on 4 May, when he returned to London with Gwen half a stone lighter and with strict instructions not to resume work for a month.

The special material he had prepared for the delegates was never delivered: ‘They say all roads lead to Rome. I think with all the traffic you’ve got here, they must do! I’ve had a quick tour – saw the Coliseum – it will be nice when it’s finished.’ However, no sooner had he recovered than Tommy had the heart attack routine all ready for any member of the press who wanted to use it: ‘When I came round the doctor was slapping my wrists, which isn’t easy when they’re in the praying position. Anyway, they pumped me full of drugs. I said, “Do I really have to have all this lot?” “You should be so lucky,” he said. “Those drugs will make you the most popular man in Rome. Every time you sneeze you’ll cure someone.”’

The reality was beyond levity. For a considerable time Cooper had become increasingly difficult to insure. When he was up and about again, Tommy went out of his way to deny that he had suffered anything as serious as a heart attack. Dennis Kirkland admitted, ‘He had his own interpretation of
what happened and blamed it on blood pressure. He denied the heart attack strenuously and had a piece of paper to that effect which he waved around. I think it cost him a thousand pounds.’ Kirkland must have been referring to a letter from the Cardiac Department of the Charing Cross Hospital dated as late as 30 December, in which the consultant cardiologist informed the interested parties that in his opinion ‘it was unlikely that Mr Cooper had had a heart attack when he was in Rome. He certainly had a mild abnormality of his electrocardiogram which is of no special significance and I believe a presumptive diagnosis was made of a heart attack on the basis of a transient loss of consciousness and the finding of a minor abnormality on the electrocardiogram.’ To a layman it reads like a medical version of ‘Now, you see it – now you don’t!’ In the absence of ‘any evidence of myocardial damage,’ it concludes, ‘he should not be rated for insurance purposes on the grounds that he has had a past history of myocardial infarction since I think there is considerable doubt that this ever occurred.’ Mr Cooper got his insurance.

In the wake of Rome he promised his doctor to give up smoking and to compromise on drinking, later admitting with poignancy bordering on the macabre, ‘I never did drink for drinking’s sake. It’s just to give my hands something to do – like shake!’ The trade-off had entailed the abandonment of all spirits in favour of white wine, implying a dereliction of duty by members of the medical profession or the admission that his condition had already teetered over the precipice of non-recovery. A short while after his return he met up with Kirkland in a bar on the King’s Road to discuss an appearance on the Thames television show,
London Night Out
. He explained to his friend that he was now allowed a glass of Dubonnet. Three bottles later Dennis commented, ‘I thought you were only allowed one glass?’ He replied, ‘I’ve only used one glass!’
Kirkland may have been the first person to be given an intimation that something ominous was looming when he called Miff’s office a few days before the Rome incident to convey a message from Mary Kay: ‘T.C. cannot remember ‘Hats’ routine.’ With grotesque irony on the day of the attack Miff was posting a copy of the original script to Chiswick. It is hard not to see this as a warning sign that something was amiss.

Within a few weeks it was apparently back to business as usual. Cooper recorded the
London Night Out
show for Kirkland on 19 June without incident and the new more lenient working pattern continued. Soon, however, the old drinking habits reasserted themselves, alongside the fractiousness that invariably accompanied them. At the beginning of July Miff took the blame when the transportation of Cooper’s props to Ireland for a week’s cabaret in Dublin appeared to hit a bureaucratic snag. Ultimately his manager’s understanding of procedure proved to be correct, while the hearsay version picked up by Tommy and Gwen in a local pub turned out to be a total fiction. In September Ferrie must have felt a sense of
déjà vu
when he found himself recording a conversation: ‘T.C. sounded drunk. Heard his wife say, “Must you always have a glass in your hand?”’

Fortunately, his appearance in the special Royal Variety Gala Performance in honour of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in November was, as we have witnessed, a personal triumph. Maybe this instilled a new sense of confidence and self-respect, enough for Gwen to inform Miff on 23 January 1978 that he had not had a drink since New Year. She may have been correct. In that period Tommy had been resting at home, but for a single cabaret at the London Hilton and another in Leeds. He might have been shocked into abstinence – however temporary – by the clause in his new Non-Appearance Insurance cover that came through in early January, carrying
as it did an exclusion clause relating to his being ‘in a state of intoxication or whilst suffering from alcoholism directly or indirectly attributable thereto.’

Any attempt at a revised lifestyle did nothing to keep at bay the old spectre of unreliability. According to the management, he kept the audience at the London Hilton waiting for forty minutes, prompting solicitors for the organizers to demand compensation for the loss of ‘the pace and atmosphere of a very successful evening to that point,’ adding that ‘we had the impression, with great regret, that Mr Cooper did not approach the preparation for his performance with sufficient care both as regards his props and, more importantly, timeliness.’ Similar complaints followed an engagement at the Holiday Inn, Heathrow a month later. After that Cooper appears to have made an extra effort as far as punctuality was concerned, taking wicked delight in calling Miff late in the evening on arrival at a venue, but more often than not sounding drunk when he did so. By the end of the year his health had suffered further setbacks. In an absurd twist of
volte-face
on behalf of his client, Ferrie found himself writing to all the managements for whom Tommy was booked into the foreseeable future, requesting that his performance time actually be brought forward to 10 o’clock ‘on medical grounds’.

An all time professional low was reached during the late summer months of 1978 with the recording for Thames of the television series,
Cooper – Just Like That
from the New London Theatre. As we have seen, the performer transmitted into people’s homes was a sad, sluggish shadow of his former self. Kenneth Tynan observed that towards the end of his life the once dynamic Phil Silvers had been so ‘slowed down by infirmity that he might have been performing underwater’. At times one longed for Cooper to emerge with snorkel and flippers to make the analogy, which now applied equally to
the man in the fez, funny rather than sad. Any viewer would have been surprised at the suggestion that he would ever be offered a series again, let alone bounce back on television with something approaching a new spring in his step. However, there was a moment between the nadir of the New London fiasco and his last series for Thames in 1980,
Cooper’s Half
Hour
, when he genuinely did start to pull himself together, even if the long-term damage to his health was now done. The tolerance and affection extended to him by the public – give or take those let down at a few of his live shows – were far stronger than the damage one sub-standard series could inflict.