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Moore became famous in 1961 when he teamed with three other Oxbridge grads—Cook, Miller and Alan Bennett—in the satirical review Beyond the Fringe. Moore's most brilliant contributions were at the keyboard, in a lampoon of Myra Hess playing the "Moonlight"Sonata and in a hilarious, dizzy bit about a pianist who is unable to conclude a coda to a florid piece. The show played for four years to packed houses, first in London, then in New York. When it ended, Moore and Cook went on to do a television series and five movies, including Bedazzled, their zany version of the Faust legend. Their style was blithe, bizarre humor that turned logic upside down. In Bedazzled, for instance, they invented an order of leaping nuns who would jump on trampolines to get closer to God. In their knockabout revue Good Evening, which ran almost continuously for five years, they constructed an imaginary restaurant buried deep in the Yorkshire moors. It was called the Frog and the Peach, and there were only two entrées on the menu: Frog à la pêche and Pêche à la frog.
Cook, who calls Moore "the Wee Wonder" and "the Megamidget," probably became as close to Moore as anyone ever has, but their relationship was sometimes stormy. "We always got along well together when we were alone," says Moore, "but sometimes when other people were around, there was a competition. One of us was always trying to get the better of the other and, in public, we each adopted a superior attitude. He was bored by my desire to please, and I scorned his relentless and perverse cynicism."
In 1977 they split up. Cook worked in London while Moore tried his luck in Hollywood. The following year he co-starred with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn as a sex-crazed swinger in the movie Foul Play. Since then he has never been idle, and rarely lonely.
Moore's height, or lack of it, has not hampered his relations with, in his words, what can only be described as the opposite sex. He is, in two words, girl crazy. He enjoys sex immensely and, given an opportunity, talks about it endlessly, with innocent self-absorption, as if he were describing the movements of the stars and planets. In a recent Playboy interview, almost the entire conversation is devoted to that one subject, and he recounts his love life, graphically and all too vividly, without inhibitions or constraints. "I have been talking about those things for years," he notes. "It's just that nobody likes to print them usually."
Moore has been married twice, to British Actress Suzy Kendall and to American Actress Tuesday Weld, with whom he has a son, Patrick, 6. Now divorced and living alone in Marina del Rey in Los Angeles County, he spends most of his time with Singer Susan Anton, 32, who is blond, toothy and very, very tall (5 ft. 11 in.). "Susan and I have been thrown together in the night for the past three years," he says, "and our relationship has been lingering on very pleasantly. I am relatively monogamous, but I don't believe in monogamy unless it happens to fall on one like a Russian satellite out of the sky. I don't want to be married again. It makes me feel that I have joined a club I don't want to be in."