Good evening.
There is really only one thing wrong with Peter Cook: so farewell then (the untold life of Peter C00k), and it is the title.
This should really be called My Life With Peter Cook. Because it is the autobiography of his first wife, though focusing on the years of their marriage, not a biography of Cook. As a result, he is a huge presence in the book, but not the centre of it. Wendy is the centre. This is not a bad thing, except that it may not meet readers’ expectations, and I think this is reflected in reviews on GoodReads and places like it. Hence my comments about the title (though it’s easy enough to see why the title was chosen — Peter is why you buy the book).
It is actually a quite interesting book.
Why?
Exactly because Peter is why you buy the book. It is a fascinating glimpse of being at the edge of great fame. Wendy met an incredible range of people (I won’t bother to mention all the names), but few were there specifically to see her. She chose (or convinced herself) to be the support person, cooking amazing food, decorating houses, raising children. But all the time she was aware that Peter was why she was there. Peter paid the bills, Peter opened the doors, and Peter shut the doors and sometimes refused the pay the bills..
One thing it does I think better than other material I’ve read about Cook is evoke the way it was to live, rather than perform or build a career. The book is not about acting and writing, it’s about dinner parties and finding houses and trying to find meaning in a life built around someone else — someone who often had other things, including women, on his mind. We get stories of infidelity on both sides, a lot of pages trying to work out what made Cook the way he was, and quite a bit of gardening and at least one useful recipe. Dudley Moore comes out quite well, if equally unsure about what he wanted from life, and it’s hard not to think that he would have liked to keep working with Cook, but simply could not and was smart enough to get out.
Wendy wonders what she could have done differently, tries to justify affairs, paints thumbnail portraits of their many acquaintances, and generally does a very nice job of placing Cook’s work as a comic in the context of the times and of his family.
He comes across as unmoored — as a man who did not really know how to be happy. Restlessness was a strength early on, but once security and fame had been achieved, the restlessness remained but the goals that directed it vanished, one suspects. Now and again in later years, when he was moved — directed — he could do great work. The impetus might come from criticism (he famously wrote ‘Entirely a matter for you’ in response to a comment that the show he was doing was tired and lacked bite), or a simple desire to exert himself, to prove something. But that did not happen regularly; for example, he at one time desperately hoped he would be employed to do an advertising campaign because then he would not have to work for a year — his ambition was to not have to work. I guess it’s a fine line between being able to do just what you want, and doing nothing. Constraints are essential, I think. And he had few, either coming from outside or from inside.
The book includes her opinion that Cook chose darkness. That is one I largely agree with. Derek and Clive (which she does not mention, it happening after their timer together) is not two men hilariously busting through stilted conventions, as some have written. It’s two men mumbling rude words and hunting around in the filth, largely unsuccessfully, for jokes. I mean, it did break barriers (and it is remarkable just how far from the upright 50s Cook had come by the mid-70s), but for what? I don’t mind that that stuff is rude; I mind that it is mostly not funny. Cook was smart enough he could have become a Swift for our times. He chose otherwise, and I hope he had fun.
Don’t read this book if you want Peter at the centre. If you’re interested in fame as a thing, the 60s as a time, Beyond the Fringe and the satire boom as a phenomenon, and how people cope or fail to cope when their lives are entwined with such things, then it’s worth a look.
It is essentially Wendy’s life with Peter Cook, not a life of Peter Cook.
Oh, and I wish it had more dates. Often I was wondering what year we were up to, then the book would mention the John or Bobby Kennedy assassination, say, or the Cuban missile crisis, and that would locate it in time for a few pages.
DSPACE 