Peter Cook
Brilliant and beautiful, Peter Cook was idolized by the comedy generation of the 60s and 70s. Before Monty Python, he and Dudley Moore were a team, and they were brilliant. You can find their work all over the internet. Peter agreed to star in a sitcom that was an American revamp of a British show about a woman and her butler. The day I auditioned to be the woman in the show, I read with Peter, as it was down to a few choices. It was thrilling to act with him—you could feel the electricity in the room, and that isn’t always the case with a bunch of network executives and nervous casting directors. They forgot they were judging and just laughed.
When I left, I kissed Peter on the cheek and left a huge, shiny glob of lip gloss (still my favorite lip make-up). He put his hand to his cheek to wipe it away and deadpanned to the crowd, “All natural, are we?” I loved the year we shot that show, The Two Of Us. Norman Lear once said, “If it had been one of my shows, it would never have gone off the air.” Bob Newhart said that seeing it on CBS’s 1981 season convinced him to go back to TV in the new Bob Newhart Show because, he said, “It looked like a return to grown-up comedy.”
Dana Hill played my daughter. I hadn’t yet had a child, but she was wonderful—at age seventeen, she played thirteen. She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and died very young from complications. Peter died of alcoholism. I didn’t know how bad it was in 1981-82, but it was bad even then. Every time I drive on Sunset Blvd. and pass Gil Turner’s Liquors, I remember Peter telling me he thought his business kept the store open—but it’s still there. His then-wife wouldn’t come to LA and be with him. Liquor kept him able to endure Hollywood, which he didn’t much like. He lived at the Chateau Marmont, a place with sorrowful associations for me (John Belushi) and Gil Turner’s was within walking distance.
I will always wish I’d known more about the disease then, but I was young and concentrating on my own life and fairly-new marriage—and wanting to have a first child. By the end of the show’s first season, and it only lasted a year, I was pregnant and Peter was thoroughly in his cups and ready to go home. Marble Arch Productions, our producer, had just sunk financially by putting all its money into a documentary: Raise the Titanic, which involved putting all its money into the job of actually raising the actual Titanic! The idea that people would be interested in knowing about that tragic ocean liner was sound—as the movie with Kate Winslet and Leo proved much later. But the approach was too ambitious, and The Two of Us sank with the husk of the ship that Marble Arch never managed to lift.