FIVE

       Mad About Magic

      With typical self-deprecating charm, the American magician and humorist, Jay Marshall once told of the time a small child came up to him and said, ‘When I grow up, Mr Marshall, I want to be a magician too.’ In his quiet, kindly way he looked at the child and explained, ‘Well, you can’t be both.’ In that sense Tommy, like Jay, never grew up. There was a sense that his act was a constant attempt to recreate the world of his childhood. Certainly without the magic Tommy would have been a dull man. To enter the consciousness of Cooper one needs to understand implicitly the world of the magician to which he gained admittance the moment he received his first box of tricks and where he remained happy, content and intrigued for the rest of his days. Patrick Page, who served for a spell behind the counter of Davenport’s magic shop, recalls how he was like a child transformed, glowing with joy as he surveyed shelf after shelf of the glittering prizes that were the traditional magician’s tools of his trade. Equally diverting was the vast array of practical jokes that would have taken him back to those comic paper advertisements of his youth: pencils that won’t write, cigarettes that won’t light, matches that won’t strike, cigars that explode, teaspoons that leap into the air, and sugar cubes that won’t dissolve. Most important of all was something not obviously visible, the promise – conveyed so brilliantly by H. G. Wells in his short story, ‘The Magic Shop’ – that somewhere within these dusty walls must be the latest miracle, the ultimate marvel that will stamp your reputation as the ‘wizardest’ wonder worker in the whole wide world.

      Tommy’s innocence was witnessed on one occasion by the actor Richard Briers. Cooper blew a stream of bubbles towards the audience and reached out to catch one in his hand. It did not burst. He had secretly palmed an imitation glass bubble in the hand and created the illusion of picking one out of the air: ‘The look on his face that he had done something that every child would like to do but never could, was exactly the look of my daughter, who was then three years of age, when she was blowing bubbles all about the place.’ It never occurred to Richard that Tommy might have been acting, but, if this had been the case, he could only have achieved the effect through his own inner reserve of childlike naivety. Leslie Press, the Punch and Judy man was once booked by Tommy to entertain at the birthday party of one of his children. Cocooned within his booth he was puzzled why the audience laughter was dwindling away as the show progressed. When he emerged he discovered why. All the kids had given up on Punch’s shenanigans, with the exception of Tommy, beaming like a lighthouse, and – it should be added in fairness – fellow comedian, Dickie Henderson.

      I shall never forget an afternoon spent in his company at Ken Brooke’s Magic Place. In the Seventies this informal studio, on the second floor at 145 Wardour Street, was the Mecca for the elite of the magic world. With its cocktail bar, capacious sofas and plush carpeting, it was, for Cooper, home from home. Ken Brooke was a brash but endearing purveyor of material to professionals, highly respected as probably the best demonstrator of magic there has ever been. At the time one of his best sellers was a streamlined method for tearing up and then restoring a complete newspaper, devised by the American magician, Gene Anderson and popularized on Broadway by the top magic star of the day, Doug Henning. There was no way Tommy was going to pass by the opportunity of learning how to perform this latest sensation. The preparations for the trick embraced something akin to an advanced course in origami and Boy Scout proficiency with scissors, paste and brush. That is before you even came to apply the dexterity necessary to put the effect into practice. On this occasion I entered the studio to discover a floor that resembled a cross between an explosion in a newsagent’s and one in a glue factory. It was difficult to know who was teaching who, Ken’s high-pitched Yorkshire tones vying with Tommy’s agitated West Country burr, as the latter made this point, queried that. Even allowing for the fact that they were notorious sparring partners, my most important memory is that Tommy was quite simply having the time of his life, matched only by the pleasure with which he would go home to perform the trick for Gwen at their dining room table that evening.

      When Mary Kay first asked him what his hobbies were, she never expected him to reply, ‘Magic’. Golf, photography, or fast cars maybe, but not magic. ‘It was like watching a child play with a toy,’ adds Mary, qualifying her statement immediately with ‘but a very clever child.’ Her idea of relaxation was to head off into the country with a well-stocked hamper for a picnic in some secluded rural backwater, but Tommy had no such idea of bliss: ‘For him, the perfect picnic would be a small table in the corner of a magic shop, heaped up with an hors d’oeuvre of new tricks and washed down with a magic potion of unheard-of-power.’ Magic was with him at every waking moment. According to his wife he even practised card tricks on the lavatory. He probably had a pack of cards under his pillow as well. He used to say that he carried so many tricks and props around with him – far in excess of what he really needed for his standard act – that it resembled ‘a bloody circus’. At one count there were seventeen bags and cases full of magic and tricks on tour with him. He made no excuses: ‘That’s why I always have two rooms in a hotel. I use the sitting room as the practice room. I love what I’m doing, so when I try something new and it goes well, that’s a great tonic for me. It’s what I’m most concerned about.’

      There comes a moment when enthusiasm shifts to obsession, as Gwen and Mary found. But, while his brain may have been disconnected from reality if by that we mean politics, sport and the world at large, there is no evidence to show that Cooper ever allowed his passion to betray his professionalism. Bob Hayden, a respected semi-professional magician from Southampton, recalls spending an evening back stage with Tommy during the run of the 1957 London Palladium pantomime, Robinson Crusoe, a production that entailed many more entrances and exits than a conventional variety show. He is still impressed by the way in which throughout the evening Cooper would switch on and off between the professional job on the one hand and his total preoccupation with coin twiddling and the minutiae of magical technique the next. The pocket trick en vogue was one called the Okito Box, a small metal container along pillbox lines in which a coin could be made to vanish and reappear at will. While Tommy was fixated on learning from Bob how much dexterity was required to accomplish this without loss of face, he also knew to the nth degree how many footsteps were required to walk from dressing room to stage, the split second scheduling of this exchange with co-star Arthur Askey, or that with David Whitfield. The incident provides a valuable insight not only into his love of magic, but also into a surprisingly well ordered mind. In his case the line between love and lunacy, so often a by-product of obsessive behaviour, was kept distinct.

      The fascination of magic,