Cook, his wife, her lovers and memories

Peter Cook’s first wife’s biography reveals how he fought his inner demons, writes William Hall

PETER COOK: SO FAREWELL THEN by Wendy E Cook, published by HarperCollins Entertainment, £18.99 order this book

HAVING spent a hilarious day with Pete and Dud in an upstairs room at the Sir Richard Steele pub on Haverstock Hill, haunt of actors, writers and reprobates, I found the biography of Peter Cook by his ex-wife Wendy this week particularly intriguing.
The place was being used as a rehearsal room for the film Bedazzled, which explained the presence of Raquel Welch in the far corner. It was 1967, and Hampstead’s favourite son of the 1960s along with his mate Dudley Moore was rich and running.
Dud played short-order cook Stanley Moon, a born loser given seven wishes by the devil to win his girlfriend’s heart. Raquel was Lust (who else?). Peter himself, all in black, and sporting shades, was Lucifer.
Wendy reveals her discomfort when seeing the rushes, to discover that her husband had been “drawing on our marital circumstances for material, and even then I wasn’t prepared for some of the portrayals”. “Although funny, they were pretty close to the bone,” she added.
Such a devilish trick to play, even in the guise of make-believe!
But in that room above the Steeles, few of us suspected the dark ripples below the buoyant surface as Pete and Dud swapped gags, went into paroxysm of laughter at their own in-jokes, and kept the atmosphere as lively as a kids’ outing to the seaside.
Forty years on, Wendy reveals at last how Peter was fighting his own devils, the ones that drove him to ever more strenuous creative efforts.
The unlikely pair teamed again together in The Wrong Box, and Peter was eager to make his mark on the big screen.
Then came the road comedy Monte Carlo or Bust, followed by a satirical comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. Again, a film that sank with only a few bubbles in its wake. The message was loud and clear. Peter Cook would never make a movie star.
But today the public still holds Pete dear to its heart with lingering memories of the shows, sketches and the characters that filled them. Not Only … But Also on BBC TV.
The four musketeers of Pete, Dud, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe. And of course the legendary EL Wisty, the excruciating bore from the park bench.
Wendy met Cook at Cambridge in 1958 when she was 18 and studying art. He was 20. She fell for the tall, lanky undergraduate – “his wit was dry and cruel, but he had a crooked smile and a sparkle in his eye that was irresistible,” she says.
They married in 1963, and laughed and fought their way in a tempestuous relationship through the free-wheeling, free-loving 1960s.
The decade saw Cook not only fulfil himself as a comic genius but also open the Establishment Club at 18 Greek Street, Soho, which became a magnet for the show-biz cognoscenti. Peter himself led the cabaret, often ad-libbing in his 15-minute monologue.
“Everyone seemed to be living at a tremendous pace and, for me, Peter’s sudden fame gave it a surreal quality,” she remembers.
The couple, with daughters Lucy and Daisy, moved into the five-storey house in Church Row, Hampstead, that had once been occupied by HG Wells, and for a few precious years found blissful happiness, full of dinner parties and the social whirl.
But for Wendy, the glitter and glamour of the swinging 1960s was wearing off. She began to feel left out – the “…and also” in Peter’s heady and hedonistic lifestyle.
She had already had one love affair, with actor Simon Gough. Now she took off for Mexico, where she had a fling with actor Ben Carruthers. Shortly after, her marriage was in meltdown.
As she puts it: “I had begun to wonder whether I had any intrinsic personal value other than as the wife and satellite of Peter Cook.  It was a deep and unspoken fear. The only antidote to fear is love, and this was my justification for doing what I was doing.”
What Wendy was doing now was another fling, this time with a Dutch painter she met in Majorca, where she had created a second home in a converted farmhouse – though she insists the affair was “nothing serious”. Her marriage would end in divorce several fraught years later.
Peter himself was no angel. He drank heavily, womanised regularly, and ended up marrying actress Judy Huxtable before he finally remarried a Chinese woman, Lin Chong, who can’t escape Wendy’s claws in the final pages. “First she was tidying up his house, and next his life,” she writes.
On his death in 1995 at the too-young age of 58, Wendy was banned from attending the funeral.
It was left to Dudley Moore to pay his own tribute to his old friend. “He’s gone. There’s a hole in the universe!”
A lot of us will second that.