The spring of 1965 found Tony Hancock attempting to relax at the lavish Beverly Wiltshire Hotel, located in an historic suburb of Los Angeles southwest of the Hollywood Hills. He was staying there as the guest of Walt Disney Productions, preparing for the role of Quintin Bartlett, a Shakespearean actor caught up in the California Gold Rush, for a wild west comedy entitled The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin. Although Roddy McDowall had been cast in the titular lead, a pugilistic butler, he and Hancock would share plenty of screen time as their characters recover a stolen map and become partners in a lucrative gold mine which later underwrites the restoration of San Francisco after the cataclysmic fire of 1851.
On the face of it, Tony should have been riding high – after lukewarm reviews for The Rebel (1961) and The Punch and Judy Man (1963), he was finally on the verge of long-sought-after international recognition, the same desire which led in 1960 to the end of his on-screen partnership with Sid James and a shift from the hugely success sitcom format Hancock had increasingly viewed as parochial and restrictive – but instead he was an emotional mess. Initially, he’d been accompanied in Los Angeles by Bernie Lang, one of his American representatives, but Lang had to return to the East Coast and Tony was left feeling lonely and isolated. His British television career was effectively dead following the short-lived and critically-panned switch to ITV in 1963 (virtually nothing survives of the six episodes of Hancock’s broadcast in 1967, in which he played a nightclub compère), and all those instrumental in Hancock’s BBC success – his writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and his agent, Beryl Vertue – had been ditched at a meeting one Sunday morning in October 1961, the same month The Rebel opened in New York under the arguably off-putting title Call Me Genius (the New York Times’ Bosley Crowley was typical in his dismissal: “Norman Wisdom can move over. The British have found a low comedian who is every bit as low as he is and even less comical.”). Meanwhile, lawyers were nailing the lid down on Tony’s fifteen-year marriage to first wife Cicily Romanis, a former catwalk model. East Cheam must have seemed five thousand miles and a lifetime away.
Not for the first time, Hancock reached for the bottle (champagne, “less fattening than vodka”) as he struggled with learning the complicated mock-Shakespearean dialogue, knowing all too well be wouldn’t have access to his trusty cue cards on the Disney set. There was even a rather pitiful drunken infatuation with the wife of a fellow hotel guest, word of which may have reached the oversized ears of the House of Mouse.
Buoyed by the timely arrival of Freddie Ross, Tony’s current agent and long-time mistress (they would marry that December, once his divorce was final), and relocation to the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City, he swore off the booze and focussed on his script. Just one week later, the cameras were rolling, although Roddy McDowall would recall his co-star seemed “weighted by some obscure responsibility” and Hermione Baddeley suspected Disney was looking for an excuse to fire him, following reported run-ins over the quality of his lines. When, on 27 May, the on-set temperature soared and Tony (wearing, at the studio’s insistence, a heavy coat and hat similar to those from his BBC heyday) collapsed, most likely with heat prostration, the die was cast: by the time he emerged from hospital two days later, the part had already been recast with Richard Haydn, fresh from his success in The Sound of Music.
Above: Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Bill Kerr, Sid James.
Although this was far from Tony Hancock’s first professional setback – and, like so many before, at least partially at his own instigation – one cannot help wondering if it was in the actor’s mind when he wrote “Things seemed to go too wrong too many times”, part of a note found near his body just three years later, whilst staying at a Sydney flat immediately below the new family home of Eddie Joffe, hired by Australia’s Channel 7 to produce Tony’s would-be comeback series.
Both his professional and personal life lay in chaos. Other than a small role in the 1965 period comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which had already been filmed before Tony’s ill-fated trip to Hollywood, and a brief appearance in the closing section of The Wrong Box (1966), his movie career had failed to ignite, possibly dampened by rumours of his erratic behaviour during the Disney shoot. Closer to home, Freddie had finally lost patience with Tony’s drinking and filed for divorce, the strain having driven her to make several suicide attempts (“Our marriage broke up our friendship,” she later admitted). To add to the turmoil, Freddie’s departure had led Tony’s close friend John le Mesurier to invite him to stay at the Barons Court flat he shared with Joan, his wife of six months; within weeks, Tony and Joan had begun an affair, a blaze of passion and heartfelt betrayal which was still smouldering when he departed for Australia in early April 1968, having obtained Joan’s promise to leave John and marry Hancock if he could manage to stay sober for one year. However, his luggage, according to actress and confident Damaris Hayman, contained “enough pills to kill him several times over”.
“My best is yet to come,” Tony had bragged to the British press, but sadly, the writing on Hancock Down Under felt tired and derivative – and, to be frank, so did its star’s performance. Only three episodes were completed before he penned his farewell notes (ironically, or perhaps pointedly, on the back of his latest script), and his brother Roger Hancock fortunately persuaded both the BBC and ITV to deny a British airing to the “comedy special” Channel 7 subsequently cobbled together from that footage.
Tony’s old co-star Sid James was one of many friends and colleagues who later wondered if a word or action at the right moment might have altered events. The previous summer, he’d been driving through Piccadilly when he spotted Hancock on a traffic island, swaying and clearly drunk, but Tony had disappeared by the time Sid had parked and returned on foot; their paths would never cross again. “I wish to God I had been able to catch him that day,” he admitted later, “it’s the little things that can change people’s lives.”
Four months after Tony’s death, J.B. Priestley’s novel London End introduced readers to Lon Bracton, a popular but paranoid comic modelled on Hancock: “A comedian with a touch of genius, who had no enemy, except himself.”
[A version of this article appeared in Yours Retro #75, June 2024]