Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (50 page)

After the funeral Thomas sprinkled his father’s ashes among the daffodils – Tommy’s favourite flower – in the garden at Chiswick. According to his will he left an estate of
£
327,272.00 gross,
£
326,686.00 net. This was a surprise to many of those close to him who thought he had spent most of the money he made. As is so often the case, his true wealth was partly assigned to his widow through assets they shared and which passed to her sole ownership on his death. The larger part of his magical and stage properties were sorted and put into auction at Christie’s where they raised
£
7,500.00 later in the
year. Gwen stayed away from the sale. For her time had no meaning. Before long she found herself writing a note of apology to Miff and Beatrice: ‘I am not sending Christmas cards this year. Tommy always ticked the bird catalogue and I’m sure you understand. We all wish you a happy Christmas and good health in 1985.’ The card was dated 17 August.

Few people were drawn closer to the tragedy than Eric Sykes, who recalls receiving a telephone call from Tommy on the morning of the show, begging him to watch later in the day to check out a new gag he thought he would like. As Eric explains, in all their long association Cooper had not alerted him to an upcoming appearance in that way before. It was not something pros did. You took your work in its stride and moved from one job to the next without fuss, not least because you had no idea how good you were going to be. If the gesture could be interpreted as a presentiment of death, maybe another harbinger of something untoward could be discerned in the behaviour – or lack of it – of Miff Ferrie. It is significant that the preceding October Miff, foregoing the habit of a career, did not go through the usual rigid routine of submitting to Tommy the formal notice extending the Sole Agency Agreement that had existed between them for so long.

Technically speaking in those last few months of his life Tommy could have been out of contract with Miff without realizing it. But if Miff did reveal his value and astuteness as an agent and manager, he did so now. I have always found it disconcerting that on that final television show he had not taken a stand for Tommy on the matter of billing: once Cooper had established himself in the medium, whenever he appeared on a show other than his own, top billing among the guests had always been a
sine qua non
. Perhaps this was another sign that something was amiss in the Cooper world order. Nevertheless, the fee negotiated by Miff was outstanding for
an eight minute spot, namely
£
6,000.00. More remarkably, as Tommy embarked on a new financial year, Miff, without compromising the pattern that favoured rest days over working ones, had already negotiated contracts signed by his client that amounted to an income of
£
99,000.00 in the first six months through to mid-October, including an advertising campaign for Bassett’s Wine Gums for Saatchi and Saatchi in Holland and a new high of
£
8,500.00 a week for a couple of return visits to Bailey’s in Watford and the Night Out in Birmingham.

Not included in the reckoning of potential earnings were the fees he would have achieved for a BBC situation comedy that showed every possibility of becoming a reality in the months ahead. Co-starring Tommy and Eric Sykes, it was to be written by Johnny Speight, who knew both men well. True to type, Cooper was to play the owner of a joke shop who rents the room above to Eric, cast against type as an Arthur Daley-style wheeler-dealer whose talent agency acts as the front for an assortment of crooked business opportunities, from which the show derived its working title,
Harry Moon
Conglomerates
. Eric described the intended relationship between the two men: ‘I’m a schemer and Tommy is the innocent. But it turns out that I’m really an idiot and Tommy is an even bigger one.’ The pilot episode had been scheduled for recording on 24 March, but industrial action intervened. The holiday in the Canaries filled the gap nicely. With Tommy’s death, the project stood no chance of revival. Only one person could have played the joke shop owner, although Miff in an echo of times past had always been against the idea.

Whatever their artistic differences and the legal formalities that tied them together, it is debatable whether any other representative in British show business could have achieved as much for Tommy over such an extended period. For all the rows and insults and rudely aborted telephones calls, the emotional
wear and tear experienced by both parties, the business arrangement could only have survived based on an undertow of respect and – dare one say – affection. When Miff himself was hospitalized for a short while at the beginning of 1979, the Coopers individually and together were more than solicitous in enquiring after his health. Equally concerned was the last letter the agent wrote to the comedian on 14 March 1984. In it he educated Tommy to the work plan for the half year ahead: ‘Bearing in mind the health situation I do not think much more should be negotiated during this period, with the possible exception of any suitable commercials which would only mean a minimum amount of time in a studio. I hope you both have an enjoyable time in Las Palmas, but it can be windy there!’ It is good that it ended on a smile. They could not have prospered without each other. Tommy’s death meant semi-retirement for Ferrie. Tommy had been his sole client for several years. He continued to look after residuals for the estate on behalf of Gwen until his own death from bronchopneumonia in 1994.

Relations between Tommy’s widow and the Ferries would remain cordial, in spite of an initial upset when Miff with his trademark lack of tact instructed Gwen that for business and legal documentation she was no longer technically-speaking Mrs Tommy Cooper. He was punctiliously correct, as usual, although he could have tackled the procedure in a gentler way. Dove was devastated, admitting, ‘I am nothing without Tommy. I don’t know what my life will be now. He was my life. I’ve never wanted a Rolls Royce or a yacht. I only ever wanted him.’ No writer of melodrama could have prepared her for the series of ordeals that this large-hearted lady still had to face. The public humiliation when her husband’s affair with Mary Kay became tabloid fodder paled into insignificance when on 13 August 1988 her son, Thomas died of haemophilia following complications caused by liver failure. After he collapsed
at home, doctors pumped seventy pints of new blood into him. He was kept alive on a life-support machine for three days, but when the new blood failed to clot, Gwen had to make the decision to turn off the machine. He was thirty-two years old and left a son, Tam, of six years; his 1981 marriage had fallen apart only six weeks beforehand.

Having experienced the living death that is watching your own child die, this bounteous, big-bosomed soul never fully regained her former resilience. But the second tragedy did provide the one moment she was glad Tommy was no longer around: ‘He could not have coped. He’d have fallen to pieces. You can never, ever recover from the death of a child.’ She was stating the obvious, but melancholy invested her words with dignity, although as she progressed through her seventies there was one thing she could never understand, ‘Why didn’t they take me instead?’ Nor were things destined to get better the following year when on 19 October her brother-in-law, David, a successful businessman in the area of magic and party supplies also died, a victim of cancer of the bronchial tubes. He was fifty-nine, ironically three years younger than his brother at the time of his death.

I came to know Gwen properly only in the years after Tommy died, united as we were in wishing to preserve his reputation for future generations. It was gratifying when two series packaged under my remit at Thames Television,
The
Best of Tommy Cooper
and
Classic Cooper
attracted audiences in the Nineties commensurate with those he had secured twenty years previously. On the back of a further television project – a profile of Tommy within my documentary strand,
Heroes of Comedy
, for which Dove graciously agreed to be interviewed for the first and only time before the cameras – I received a call from the actor and theatre producer, Patrick Ryecart. Within days I had accepted his challenge to revive
the magic of Tommy Cooper as a stage project. The thought had long simmered in my mind whether Tommy, had he lived longer and had his health allowed, would have taken to the stage like Frankie Howerd and Max Wall in a swan song evening of combined reminiscence and performance. The two other great comedy veterans had crowned their careers with such presentations. I wasted no time in putting pen to paper and with Gwen’s encouragement produced an imaginary transcript of what such an evening might have entailed.

Lee Menzies was invited to participate as co-producer and when Alan Ayckbourn, so keen to direct, had to back down through the pressure of his other commitments, Simon Callow – in direct line of descent from memorable names like Emlyn Williams and Michael MacLiammoir – brought his vast personal experience of the one-man theatre show to the task. His passion and commitment to the ethos of the vaudevillian was all consuming and energized the project from the moment he came on board. Magician and erstwhile actor Geoffrey Durham had always been my first choice as the person to mastermind the technical side of the magic, not least the conjuring tuition of whoever found himself playing the legendary performer. That casting presented the greatest challenge of the whole enterprise.

An uneasy shadow had always lurked at the back of my mind. Who could possibly play this most singular of clowns? Encouraged by Maureen Lipman’s spellbinding interpretation of unique comedienne Joyce Grenfell, we began the quest to find the actor to play Tommy. But we were not looking for yet another Tommy Cooper impersonator. We were searching for more than that, for an actor who could interpret the essential spirit of his comedy in a personalized way. If anyone at the time had asked us what we meant by this we would not have been able to answer satisfactorily. We would only recognise
what we were looking for when we saw it. We turned a corner when we heard that Jerome Flynn, in spite of his standing on television, wanted to audition. At an obviously emotional time in his life, his father – the actor Eric Flynn – having died a few days before, Jerome was the first to step onto the audition stage. We sensed we had found our Tommy the moment he produced in one hand a small black bag that a friend had hurriedly sewn for him and in the other an egg. He had no inkling of how the classic trick worked, but set about putting the familiar words to the actions, in the course of which the egg – he had not thought of using a prop one – was smashed unintentionally in the pocket of his extremely expensive velvet jacket. The audition process henceforth became a courtesy exercise for those queuing to follow him.

Sadly Gwen did not live to see the production. Throughout the Nineties with support from her daughter and her close friends within the Grand Order of Lady Ratlings she had enjoyed some consolation in being able to relive the memories of happier times. On 27 August 1986, she wrote to Miff when he was unwell, revealing her intrinsically cheery and caring self and, between the lines, appearing to atone for so much of the unpleasantness over the years:

She too died from bronchopneumonia on 27 October 2002, six months before
Jus’ Like That!
opened at London’s Garrick Theatre. Her will revealed the true extent of the estate she had built up with her husband over the years, namely
£
1,845,328.00 gross,
£
1,839,660.00 net. In an ironic footnote to all their lives, two years earlier Miff’s widow, Beatrice, had passed away leaving
£
330,384.00 gross,
£
315,803.00 net, close enough to fifteen per cent of their clients’ wealth for one to reflect, ‘In death, as in life.’

Fortuitously Gwen was able to meet Jerome just two weeks before she passed away. Late and harassed from being a witness to a motor accident between his own home and Chiswick, Jerome came into her presence, imposing but shy, just a little distraught from the journey, just a trifle detached from the world. As he walked across the space where Tommy had rehearsed a thousand shows, she gave him the once–over, cast a glance at me, and then passed judgement, ‘He’ll do!’ To know Tommy’s Dove is to realize that no actor could have received a stronger endorsement.

From the first morning of rehearsal we were fully conscious we were engaged in an act of resurrection, entrusted with the task of protecting the flame of the comic spirit held most dear in recent British memory. Every available archive tape of Cooper was perused and analysed. Slowly Jerome absorbed the man. And then I was able to play my trump card. I had never forgotten the video-cassette of his final appearance that I still had locked away at home among my personal papers. I suggested that Simon and Jerome and I should allow ourselves a single viewing. The experience proved to be as emotional as watching the programme the very first time around nineteen years before. Memory is selective. I certainly recalled the business with the bicycle handlebars and the shaving joke. I cannot pretend that I remembered the bit with the coins in the
can. I had totally forgotten his hilarious use of a dummy hand attached to a black banner which he held in front of a bell on a table to make it supposedly ring by itself, while all the while his free hand was blatantly doing the job for him. His entrance with a giant tube of Tunes cough sweets stuck on his head carried a certain resonance. The memories, however, were as nothing compared with what we now heard. His exact opening words sent a respectful shiver down our spines: ‘Do you believe in reincarnation? Sometimes I think I’m Beethoven come back. I do really, because I’ve had tunes through my head all day.’ But that was not all. The giant packet of Tunes said so much more. There, spelt out for all to read, was the line, ‘Helps you breathe more easily.’ The unintentional black humour, not to mention the acknowledgement of the process of reincarnation we were undergoing on his behalf, left us speechless, suspended in a curious fez-coloured limbo between black sadness and rosy elation. It was as if Tommy was speaking to us across the years. The end of his act, because it was the end of his life, had been disturbing. Everyone had overlooked the fact that the beginning – in the way it addressed matters of life and death – had been quite as upsetting. It was hard to watch the sequence again without feeling that a chilling intimation of his own mortality must have lingered in the air that day.