Being the story of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's brilliant, doomed partnership. Originally published in Empire Magazine, April, 2011
Dudley Moore: It's like a marriage
Michael Parkinson: How is it like a marriage?
Peter Cook: Well, we're getting a divorce.
An empty house in Hampstead, it is the middle of the night. The room is in a state of moderate disrepair. A few empty bottles, vodka, wine, champagne, lie on the tables. An expensive Tiffany lamp sits in the corner. Through the gloom it is possible to see that the walls are, perhaps unusually for a Hampstead home, decorated with swathes of graffiti. A squashed fly has been circled with black marker pen. "Virgin fly" is scrawled next to the insect's earthly remains and a dotted trail leads to another legend penned on the wall. "Not much chance here mate. Try Number 23."
The telephone rings. After a few moments the answer-phone picks up the call. Peter Cook's voice, laconic and slightly nasal, fills the room, makes a joke, requests a message. But there is only silence. The tape runs for a minute or so. And then whoever is at the other end of the line hangs up. The machine clicks, beeps and resets itself.
September 1978, Richard Branson's Townhouse Studios, London. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are in the middle of a recording session for their final Derek And Clive album Derek And Clive Ad Nauseam (the sessions were filmed by Russell Mulcahy, later to helm Highlander, and released as Derek and Clive Get The Horn). Taking a break from their attenuated discussions of bogey length, cunt-kicking, fucking coons, Margaret Thatcher's tits and Derek's (Moore) fervent desire not to be nobbed to death by a hamster Peter produces a large bag of crisps which he enthusiastically crumbles and scatters repeatedly over Dudley's head shouting about awful dandruff – despite Dudley's not unserious suggestions that he just fuck off. Peter, having by now abandoned the modish Savile Row suits of his early years for what had become his familiar attire of t-shirt, frayed jacket and aviator shades grins and addresses the camera directly.
"It's no wonder we're splitting up," he says.
It wasn't. They were. And the wonder was that they had got together in the first place.
If you wanted a schematic of the disparities of the social structure in England in the mid-1930s you could do much worse than cast a glance over the differing circumstances into which Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were born. Cook arrived, on the 17th of November 1937, into the formality of the resolutely upper middle classes. Dad, Alec, was a civil servant in the Colonial Office who, by the time Peter was at prep school, was running various bits of Africa. His mother stayed at the family home in Torquay or on occasions she quietly hated, accompanying her husband on his tours of duty leaving Peter with his grandmother. The separation was lengthened by the intervention of the war, during which his parents worked abroad, and then by the inevitable public school education at Radley where he occupied himself gently undermining the authorities, campaigning against prefects' caning the younger boys and, as he remembered it, "avoiding buggery". (He may not have been entirely successful. According to biographer Harry Thompson when later asked at what age he lost his virginity he replied "at which end?")
Subsequently, he roared through Cambridge like a one-man Fast Show leaving behind a litany of catchphrases, punchlines and funny voices bad imitations of which echoed through the town's pubs for months after he had departed for the big time. (According to Clive James who arrived at Pembroke College three years later people were still doing E.L. Wisty, Cook's odd old man with a holy bee in a matchbox routine.)
Things were somewhat different for Moore. When Dudley Stuart John Moore was born in Charing Cross Hospital in 1935, two years earlier than Cook, his mother took one look at the infant and said "This isn't my baby. I don't want it. Take it away." She had caught sight of her son's legs, one of which was deformed by a congenital condition called Talipes – commonly known as club-foot – in which the foot is twisted out of its normal position and the leg is withered. Later she told him that when she had seen him, at first she had wanted to kill him. "She had wanted to produce something perfect, but instead she produced this . . . leg," Moore later said. A childhood dominated by a series of complex, painful corrective operations – with limited prospects of significant improvement – lay ahead. It was one which was further complicated by his mother's inability to disguise her own fear, shame and revulsion at her son's disability who embarked on a programme of child-rearing in the Philip Larkin style. "She told me I would suffer unbearably," Moore later said. "But it was the pain she was going to suffer. She felt she was on trial for producing a hunchback." She would rarely visit her six-year-old son in the hospital where he would spend weeks at a time, leaving him to the care of the doctors and nurses, many of whom were kind (on one occasion the hospital wrote to her to advise her to visit more often – to no effect). But the sense of isolation, fear and guilt, of being unloved and unlovable, that this grim period instilled in him never left. While Peter Cook's early memories were of following the gardener, who he had adopted as a father figure, around, catching insects and playing under the monkey puzzle tree in the garden, Moore's were of a wounded soldier screaming in a curtained cubical opposite him, of trying to imagine what might be happening behind it; of once being abandoned, forgotten in a darkened operating theatre for over two hours; and of one surgeon's well-intentioned but unfortunate attempts to lighten the mood. "So it's the right leg to come off is it," he joked as Dudley looked up, yet again, from the operating table. The tears and wailing took a while to subside.
He became so used to being exactly six feet away from other people – the standard gap between hospital beds at the time – that when strangers approached any closer he became anxious. The net result was a Gordian knot of neuroses that would put ample focaccia on the tables of Beverly Hills' priciest shrinks in the decades to come – though you don't need a couch and a diploma to find the source of Moore's later neurotic need for love and affection from women, and his immediate anxiety and distrust when it was given. Music became his main consolation. From an early age he showed a prodigious talent, spending hours at the family piano and using a Heath Robinsoneque contraption constructed from one of his mother's old shoes to work the pedals.
For him, then, Oxbridge (on a music scholarship) was not merely the normal course of adolescence as it was for Cook, the next chapter in life's great game. It was an escape.
"We instantly disliked each other and we decided that it might be a profitable enterprise," remembered Jonathan Miller of the first meeting of the foursome (the last of which was Alan Bennett) that would become Beyond The Fringe and, in the following few years, change British comedy forever. The pow-wow was at the behest of the assistant director of the Edinburgh Festival John Bassett who, in 1960, was becoming increasingly alarmed at the burgeoning success of the fringe revues which were getting more attention than the official shows. Determined to fight fire with fire he scouted for recent Oxbridge graduates with a rep for the funny and invited them to meet. Beyond The Fringe was a spoiler then, and a comedic cut-and-shunt – the comedy equivalent of The Monkees. Later Moore remembered the awkwardness of that first meeting – no one would venture a joke in case the others sniffed at it. He eventually broke the ice with some Groucho Marx shtick which, like many of Dudley's other contributions (apart from his musical parodies) was, Cook remembered, treated with "benign contempt."
But if relations between the four were sometimes chilly the revue they delivered was anything but. The show was a revelation to audiences who were used to silly sketches punctuated by some inoffensive song-and-dance numbers. Beyond The Fringe had bite. Out went dumb costumes and in came modish roll-neck sweaters and suits. Not everyone was delighted by the new radicalism; this was after all still the era of the Lord Chamberlain, plays had to be vetted and censored before public performance. The very idea of impersonating the prime minister – which Cook did to a tee – would often set off a loud clattering of seats as shocked audience members loudly made for the exits. The net result was a satire revolution – everything subsequently, Spitting Image to Saturday Night Live to Rory Bremner has its roots in that foursome.
By the mid-60s Cook and co. had seemingly conquered the comedy world. Versions of the revue ran in London and New York; there was Cook's private members' club in Soho, The Establishment, where the cream of London's new comedy scene performed to those members of the glitterati lucky enough to gain membership while the laughing waiters robbed the place blind (leading finally to its abrupt closure and a minor financial crisis for Cook). There was his satirical magazine, Private Eye and the BBC TV series with Dudley, Not Only . . . But Also in which they had perfected the whimsical Dagenham Dialogues – freewheeling conversations in which Reubens' bottoms would follow them around the room and Greta Garbo would annoy Pete by persistently tapping on his bedroom window – for which they are probably best remembered. The only comedy medium he and Dudley did not dominate was the movies. That, Cook decided, was about to change.
Cook And Moore's first attempt at film comedy was an unmitigated disaster. The Wrong Box (1966), an insipidly written farce with a Victorian setting, revealed Cook's utter inability to confidently deliver a line he hadn't himself written. The fact was that Cook couldn't act, he was able only to play brilliant facets of himself, facets that only he could discover. Neither Cook nor Moore got on with the director, Bryan Forbes, who they deemed to have no idea how to work with comedians, micro-directing every gesture and comedy beat. To make matters worse Cook was foolhardy enough to appear in a key scene with Peter Sellers, who played a cat-obsessed dodgy doctor, who – apparently completely ignoring Bryan Forbes – effortlessly obliterated him, delivering the movie's only genuinely funny moments. Cook determined that the next time he would appear before a film camera he would have written the script himself. The result was his and Dudley's finest film together, and a minor British comic classic, 1967's Bedazzled.
Written by Cook over a year (during which a peeved Dudley, booted off planned co-scriptwriting duties by Cook, who spied credit and intended to hog it, co-wrote in his own film the forgettable 30 Is A Dangerous Age Cynthia) Bedazzled is in essence a series of sketches that riffs on Cook and Moore's complex, almost sadomasochistic, relationship. Moore plays Stanley Moon a lovestruck short-order cook at a Wimpy Bar who pines for sexy waitress Margaret (Eleanor Bron) and whose failed suicide attempt conjures up Pete as "George Spiggott" aka Mephistopheles. In return for his soul Stanley is offered seven wishes, each of which the Devil grants, but each in a way designed to frustrate Stanley. Thus his desire to be a pop star takes the form of his appearance on a Top Of The Pops style show, in which he enthusiastically bounds around singing "Love Me!" like a dwarfish Tom Jones to the screams of the female audience only to be abandoned when The Devil turns up as the eponymous lead singer of Drimble Wedge And The Vegetations whose catatonic, emotionless, performance (oddly reminiscent of The Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant at his immobile best) – "I don't need you/I don't love you/Go away" – drives the gyrating herd even wilder.
But in real life over the years Cook and Moore's partnership was beginning to fissure. Cook's repeated jeremiads against Moore were out of control – "It doesn't matter how many psychiatrists Dudley sees, he'll still be short and thick"; "I don't think it's possible to belittle a club-footed dwarf whose only talent is to play Chopsticks in the style of Debussy". Fuelled by his increasing alcohol consumption he was also becoming less and less reliable. On one famous occasion he missed a cue and was found sobbing hysterically in the wings. By the mid-70s Moore had had enough and announced that he would not appear on stage with Cook again. All that was left of one of the great partnerships of British comedy history were the scatological ravings of two lavatory attendants. And they were about to end too. The recording of Ad Nauseam had been scheduled for thee days. On the third day Dudley didn't show up. When it came to working with Peter Cook, he would never show up again.
The best revenge, it is said, is to live well. If this is so, then Dudley Moore showed no mercy when it came to Peter Cook. There was Dudley's restaurant for starters – 72 Market Street, a chichi joint in Venice Beach that served meatloaf and mashed potato that the locals said was almost as expensive as the caviar and had a grand piano at which Dudley would sit and entertain the starry clientele. By 1982 Hollywood's film mags were running gushing profiles with headlines like "The Fantasy Life Of Dudley Moore!" marvelling at the astonishing rise of the self-declared British "sex-thimble". He was, according to one hyper-ventilating admirer, "Britain's cuddliest export since Shetland wool!". In 1981 the Quigley List, a directory of Hollywood's most influential and bankable talent, had the Dagenham railway electrician's son at number three; Clint Eastwood ahead of him, Harrison Ford behind. And there were the women: Raquel Welch, Susan George, Julie Christie and Faye Dunaway had at various points succumbed to his diminutive charms as did a host of more anonymous but no less pulchritudinous female flesh, usually leggy, almost always blonde. There was the house on the beach in Venice, with the twin grand pianos that spooned in the living room which opened right onto the sand. There were cozy dinners with the Sinatras, John Huston, David Hockney, and Michael Caine.
Oddly it wasn't the success of Beyond The Fringe on Broadway that had given Moore his break in Hollywood, but the apparently limitless appeal of Derek and Clive. One of the albums' most ardent admirers was Chevy Chase, the Saturday Night Live alumnus who was about to launch himself on his own moderately short-lived film career with sex comedy Foul Play. Also a devotee of Bedazzled, he lobbied for Dudley to be given a small role. Quite inadvertently Moore stole the film from under the noses of Chase and co-star Goldie Horn. This brought him to the attention of Blake Edwards – well that and the fact that they shared a modish Hollywood accoutrement, group therapy – who was in a bind. George Segal had just walked out on Edwards's latest movie over a spat about his editor wife's credit. Edwards had had some success with British comics before in the shape of Peter Sellers who he had transformed into the American audience-friendly Pink Panther and spotted in Moore a chance to repeat the lucrative trick. (In fact, he would later write a Panther-like vehicle for Moore – The Ferret – which finally came to nothing.) Moore was a hard sell to the studio, who pushed names such as Burt Reynolds and Ryan O'Neal, but on the back of good reviews for Foul Play and Edwards reluctantly sacrificing part of his upfront fee for net points – a humiliating inconvenience that would subsequently make him millions – they finally gave way. Dudley Moore would play George Webber in Blake Edwards' "10".
"10" belongs in that category of movies along with Easy Rider and St Elmo's Fire that are so achingly of the moment they've begun to date as the final credits roll at the premiere. It bolted the 70s-minted 'frankness' about sex and relationships that had been explored in films such as Five Easy Pieces and drizzled it with a proto-80s Californian permasun sheen, flattering its audience, many who had really come in order to marvel at the fleshy architectural wonders of co-star Bo Derek, with its faux sophisticated musings about the nature of relationships; tedious conversations conducted the most part while relaxing in outrageously expensive beachfront real-estate. It was nevertheless the breakout hit of 1979, Moore apparently satisfying the occasional American thirst for diffident Englishmen with good teeth later slaked by the likes of Hugh Grant. And he is undoubtedly the best thing in it, his warmth and comic timing at least partially leavening the relentless navel-gazing. Quite unexpectedly Dudley Moore was becoming a Hollywood star.
Given his newfound status, everyone was delighted with Dudley's casting in Arthur. Everyone apart, that is, from Steve Gordon who happened to have written and be about to direct it. Tall, neurotic, described by Liza Minelli as being "very Jewish" in a town where that is an achievement, he had had some success as a TV comedy writer and had one produced film screenplay – 1978's The One And Only, a Henry Winkler vehicle directed by Carl Reiner. The news that the role of the drunken but lovable plutocrat, which had been written with an American actor in mind, was to be played by Hollywood's latest hot middle-aged-and-very-English thing didn't sit well with him at all. He pleaded with Moore to play the role with an American accent right up to the first day of shooting, pleas that Moore wisely ignored.
On the evidence of Arthur, Gordon, who sadly died of a heart attack aged 43 the following year (and thus at least avoided the indignities of Arthur 2: On The Rocks), was a much better screenwriter than he was director. His dialogue is full of quality zingers, (Hobson to Linda: "Usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature.") for the most part delivered with comic precision. Moore pulls off the miraculous feat of making a dyspeptic playboy with a $750 million inheritance and a penchant for prostitutes actually likeable. But his direction is neutral at best. Gordon also vacillated in the edit, uncertain about which relationship to stress – the friendship between Arthur and Hobson or the burgeoning romance between Arthur and Linda. Moore, on seeing one of Gordon's cuts was pessimistic. "Who wants to see this drunken idiot for an hour and a half," was his verdict.
Everybody, it turned out. Arthur broke the then stratospheric $100 million mark and landed Dudley in the million-dollar a movie pay bracket. Even John Gielgud, who might have been initially despondent at the film's outrageous success – he had accepted a flat fee – was no doubt cheered up when role brought him to the attention of the manufacturers of Paul Masson California Wines, who elbowed a no doubt less cheery Orson Welles as the star of their commercials in favour of Gielgud as a snooty butler. It made him millions, enough money to buy a new country house.
For Moore, Arthur's success must have seemed to deliver the final decisive break not only with his working-class Dagenham background but with his being the lesser half of a double act. Unlikely as it was he had become a Hollywood film star and international playboy. As Arthur would put it, "I race cars, I play tennis, I fondle women, but I have weekends off and I am my own boss." Life, then, was good.
It wouldn't last.
While Moore had made millions out of playing a boozy Brit with a nifty line in bons mots back in Hampstead Peter Cook had been busying himself becoming one. In fact, Peter's movie career had begun to stall pretty much immediately after Bedazzled. Its relative box-office and critical failure had put the kibosh on any big, solo, Cook-penned future film projects, though in 1970 he co-wrote advertising satire The Rise And Rise of Michael Rimmer with Monty Python's John Cleese and Graham Chapman. His subsequent, and last film with Moore, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, had been a debacle. Director Paul Morrissey – a graduate of Andy Warhol's Studio and director of among other counter-cultural classics Trash and Flesh For Frankenstein – was even less suited to Cook's comedy style than Bryan Forbes had been. Even the presence of the late, inestimably great Irene Handl couldn't save it. There was an ill-advised turn in Supergirl alongside Faye Dunaway and in 1983 co-scripting duties on the disastrous pirate yarn Yellowbeard (which good friend John Cleese declared to be the single worst screenplay he had ever read), but for the most part Cook stayed away from the big screen.
What's more without Dudley television was an increasingly tricky prospect. There were appearances on chat shows, the electronic echoes of the literary salons of a century earlier in which he might have flourished. There were smaller roles in films; feted by the new alternative crowd who had grown up on Not Only . . . he turned up one of Channel Four's better Comic Strip movies, Mr Jolly lives Next Door, in which he played the titular serial killer (with the enthusiastically delivered catchphrase "does anyone know you're 'ere?"). But slowly Cook settled into a kind of semi-retirement. His drinking continued its upwards glide, sometimes sort of in control, sort of sometimes not. He became an aficionado of bad television. Ian Hislop, by now editor of Private Eye – still Cook's clubhouse – remembered that if they had any queries about the newly invented daytime television, or anything on in the small hours, Peter would invariably have the answer. And, during those long nights of the soul, if there wasn't anything sufficiently bad on to distract him, Cook would embark on telephonic odysseys: duty officers at the BBC would receive baffling complaints from confused members of the public; listeners to Clive Bull's late-night phone-in show on LBC would be treated to the musings of Sven, a lonely Norwegian fisherman pining for his wife Jutta.
All the while he watched with incredulity at his former partner's stratospheric rise to Hollywood superstardom. "If I'd been a club-footed dwarf from Dagenham I suppose I'd have been bloody ambitious too," he once said; a remark just witty enough to disguise, almost, its undertow of genuine bitterness. Though they were by then at least talking – Moore having turned up in Hampstead asking if Cook would "care to have his doorstep darkened" – Cook's hopes that they would reunite for another series of Not Only . . . But Also, or even a movie, were frustrated. Moore had no intention of exposing himself to Cook's ferocious attentions again.
On one final unsuccessful trip to Los Angeles to tout for work, Cook's taxi became snarled in traffic outside LAX. After a few minutes the driver got out to see what was holding everybody up. A bit later the cabbie returned visibly excited. "You'll never guess who's up there," he said to his passenger, gesturing to the traffic queue. "It's Dudley Moore, Dudley Moore!"
Cook's response goes, perhaps thankfully, unrecorded.
But by the mid-1980s in Hollywood Dudley's dream lifestyle was slowly souring too. It's difficult to find a cause for his professional decline, apart possibly from the vicissitudes of movie audiences, but his choices didn't help. Having spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on therapy, he imported the talking cure to his career with Six Weeks, a seriocomic romance about a shrink's love life that failed to catch fire, as did bigamy comedy Micki + Maude (1984), an attempt to recapture the success of 10 with Blake Edwards. Like Father Like Son (1987) doesn't quite deserve the drubbing it got – true Kirk Cameron is no Michael J. Fox – which is what this Vice Versa style tale really needs (director Rod Daniel had helmed Teen Wolf a couple of years earlier) – but Moore's performance as a American teen trapped inside a 50-year-old surgeon's body has a few moments of surprising subtlety, and one sequence – in which he attempts to chew gum and smoke a cigarette simultaneously – is a masterclass in sustained high-level clowning. But like almost everything else Moore now touched, it flopped.
The tin lid was probably applied by Jaws 2 director Jeannot Szwarc – who ironically was also partly responsible for driving the final nail into Peter Cook's film career with 1984's Supergirl. Santa Claus: The Movie was a charmless farrago that even Moore's high-octane cutery as Patch the elf couldn't salvage. If the slow death of his film career wasn't bad enough his personal life erupted onto the front pages of the tabloids. His third marriage, to Nicole Rothschild – which had almost not taken place after police were called to the Venice Beach house twice, the first time by Rothschild, who alleged that Moore had tried to throttle her and a second time by Moore who told them that she had assaulted him – detonated into a garish spectacle that horrified Moore's friends. A flavour of their relationship can be had simply by looking to the index of Barbra Paskin's authorised biography: "DM's arrest for assault of" and "divorce and bigamous marriage of" are pithily followed by "drug addiction", "sexual perversion" and, simply, "fights". Dudley's discovery and enthusiastic use of speed and "Disco Biscuits" (ecstasy) can't have done anything to calm the troubled waters.
Taking refuge in his music as he had as a child Moore toured America playing classical piano to moderate acclaim; he hosted a couple of British TV series Orchestra! and Concerto!. But the idea of returning to films slowly faded. His last credited appearance on the big screen was Blame It On The Bellboy in 1992, an appropriately soggy Venetian farce. "You're lucky to get five years at the top," he remarked to one journalist. He had had two.
Thus there was already a sense of winding down, of the best being over when, one Monday just after Christmas in 1995, Moore answered the phone. He listened to the voice on the other end for a few moments. His face drained of colour. "Oh God, the fucker's dead," he said. And then, "There's a hole in the universe."
Sometime later on he dialled the number of Peter Cook's Hampstead home.
Postscript: Peter Cook's funeral took place on Saturday the 14th of January 1995. His death had been caused by an intestinal haemorrhage, the result of his decades of drinking. He was buried in St-John-at-Hampstead Parish Churchyard. His film career over Dudley Moore became famous to a new generation of young Britons as the star of a popular series of adverts for Tesco, in which he scoured Europe for elusive free-range chickens. Around 2000 he was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare degenerative neurological condition which slowly robbed him of muscle control, and therefore of his ability to play the piano. He died on March 27th 2002. His last words were reported to have been "I can hear music all around me."
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