The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  Darling Stoj,

  I loved your loving my joke. I read your piece and really you do know a lot! Much more I am sure than Mary Baker Eddy. You are also very lucid. Oh dear, I do wish we saw each other more often. Let's have a try when spring breaks through again! Isn't it peculiar about me being a promising young classic and the Pride of the National Theatre? Dame Edie [Edith Evans, also a Christian Scientist] is a hundred years too old for the part [of Judith in Hay Fever] but certainly doesn't look it. I suspect our old friend Mary B E is at it again! Love, love, Poj (Don't be put off by this elegance. It's all a hideous mockery. I still pick my nose!)

  There is only one more (recorded) example of their correspondence. When Noël received his long-overdue knighthood in the 1970 New Year's Honours List, Esme sent her congratulations, and Noël promptly replied:

  LES AVANTS

  January 19th 1970

  My Darling Stoj,

  I have now had two sweet letters from you so here's one sweet letter from me. I am of course delighted to have the knighthood but what moved me most was the manner in which the Queen offered it to me. It was in the middle of a birthday lunch given for me by the beloved Queen Mother. (You know dear old democratic me—lunch with the Queen one day and Norah Howard the next). She gave me the impression (the Queen, not Norah Howard), that it was / who was conferring the honour on her instead of the other way around—how's that for Royal Grace! So from now on I shall expect a great deal more deference from you than I have received in the past. You must never sit in my presence—unless I happen to have thrown you onto the sofa and you must always address me as Sir Poj. I hope all this is clear in your dizzy mind.

  All loving love, my darling old pal

  Your devoted old Sir Poj

  Norah Howard was the child actress who had appeared with them both in Charley's Aunt,

  And that effectively was that. Esme died in 1972.

  By the time of this last letter, they had not met for several decades, and they were now two quite different people. Nonetheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that if Poj and Stoj had never met and shared their personal lives for a while, there might never have been a Private hives,

  •

  THAT SUMMER, Noël made his first appearance in a film—D. W. Griffith's antiwar film, Hearts of the World, starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish. It was a small part, consisting entirely in pushing a wheelbarrow along a “French village” street. Originally Griffith had Noël walking away from the camera, but Noël's stage experience told him that characters with their backs to the audience might as well not be on the stage. Would it not be more effective, he asked the director, if he were to push the barrow toward the camera? Not caring either way, Griffith agreed, and gave us our first view of Noël Coward on camera.

  There was something about the young boy that appealed to the Gish sisters, who proceeded to take him under their wing for the duration of the shoot, and remained friends with him for the rest of their lives. As late as 1964, Lillian is writing to Noël and recollecting the experience.

  There am I, waving, as you chart your course on the small river in 1917 to float down to the great seas of the world, while I remain moored to the little raft !!!

  Bless that day that took us to Broadway in England to meet our dearest genius.

  •

  IN AUGUST Noël found himself in the company of Wild Heather for a three-week booking in Manchester. The booking did not start auspiciously. The country was still at war, and Noël, having witnessed several zeppelin raids, was concerned for Violet back in London. He wrote a rather dejected letter to her from the Midland Hotel:

  Wednesday

  Darling,

  The play is going very well, I come back to Town on Sunday week. I have been very ill the last few days, it started off with a sore throat and me losing my voice…Manchester always affects me like this, it is a beastly hole. Most of the company are in the same boat…Aren't the air raids awful, please wire me if they go anywhere near our delectable residence, because I shall probably hear that Clapham has been raised to the ground.

  Farewell now, my lamb

  Ever your ownest

  Snag

  Noël's World War I attempt to out-Novello Novello and “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” It did not succeed.

  Once again we see Noël's predilection for pet names. “Poj” and “Stoj,” christening his personal possessions like galoshes, stick, and typewriter, and now—in his correspondence with Violet the two of them became “Snig” and “Snag” (later “Snoop”). Promising material for a psychological dissertation?

  It was in Manchester that Noël first met one of his idols, Ivor Novello. Six years older than Noël, Novello was already successful as playwright, composer, actor, and profile, and in the first three respects, at least, Noël was anxious to emulate him.

  The meeting was momentous—the two of them were to work together more than once in the following decade—but it was overshadowed for Noël in that particular week by two other events:

  Gaiety Theatre

  Manchester

  Thursday

  My Darling,

  at the moment I am nearly mad with excitement, it is awful not having you here to tell about it all! My Dear, I am collaborating with Max Darewski in a new song, I wrote the lyric yesterday after breakfast, I hummed it to him in the Midland lounge at 120c, we at once rushed up to his private room and he put harmonies to it, there were some other people there, when they had sung it over once or twice, Max leapt off the piano stool and danced for joy and said it was going to take London by storm! We are putting the verse to music this morning it is to be published next week and probably sung by Lee White or Phyllis Dare! I am arranging the business part of it today. I shall probably make a lot of money out of it. It is called “When You Come Home On Leave,” written and composed by Noël Coward and Max Darewski. He also says he may be able to place “Bertha from Balham” [another Coward song] with Margaret Cooper. You see he is one of the most influential men in town. He owns three theatres. At last I am beginning to make my way, really Manchester has been astonishingly lucky for me. Goodbye now, my Snig. I am too mad to write about anything else. Your Baby, Snag (Dramatist and Composer)

  And as if that were not enough excitement….

  Gaiety Theatre

  Darling,

  I felt I must write and tell you my news, I was sent for to see Gilbert Miller at the Midland. My Dear, he had come down specially to see me in Wild Heather and he said I was really splendid and that I hadn't half enough to do! Also that it would be all right about the extra week now that he had seen me play, he felt absolutely certain that I should make my name in The Saving Grace, He says it is a terrific part and I have to play with Marie Lohr! Isn't it gorgeous. He is going back to Hawtrey today to say that he had perfect confidence in me and that I am thoroughly natural and unaffected etc. Oh, I am a star!

  Your ownest, Noël.

  Gilbert Miller, a successful American impresario, was co-producing The Saving Grace with Charles Hawtrey later that year. In years to come he would be a key influence on Noël as a playwright, warning him that he must concentrate on plot construction—see Noël's advice to Esme— before he indulged himself in the process of writing. The point went home, and Noël became duly conscious of “my dangerous facility for dialogue, which I must beware of. Gilbert Miller warned me about it years ago.”

  Darewski gave him a three-year contract to write lyrics, but few were published and none of them became a hit. Noël took the money until the three years were up and then moved on. Darewski also moved on—into bankruptcy, a situation Noël always claimed he foresaw.

  The Saving Grace was a different matter altogether. Hawtrey and the press alike recognized Noël for the first time as an actor of stature. Violet went so far as to record that Hawtrey was

  always so very much interested in Noël, and appreciated his charms and humour, and often repeated his remarks…Noël was now a tall, well set up young man, very, very
popular. He was always witty and amusing and made wonderful friends, who always wanted him to be with them…He was wrapped up in the theatre, and everything connected with it, and when people used to be so shocked to think he had had no real education, I always said and felt that he was having his education from his career.

  •

  AT THE BEGINNING of 1918, Violet had finally had enough of living in the cramped Clapham flat. She took over the lease of a boardinghouse at in Ebury Street, and the whole family, including Aunt Vida, moved into the narrow Georgian town house, with Noël ensconced in a tiny room just under the eaves.

  No sooner had they settled in than he was summoned to an army medical exam. An earlier one had rejected him pro tern on account of his tubercular history; this one decided that he could serve some useful purpose, and he was immediately inducted into Company C of the Artists’ Rifles. The name did nothing to placate him. What was he doing in uniform when a new fifteen-pound-a-week part awaited this rising star?

  He was the first to admit in later years that his part in World War I was, to say the least, inglorious. Even Violet had to admit that “I'm afraid he was more trouble than he was worth in the Army and did not help the War along very much.” He was a soldier in name only for a mere eight months, and his service involved a psychosomatic breakdown and an accident that confined him to hospital for much of the time. His official record paints a pathetic picture: “Cannot stand any noise and complains of constant headaches. Tremors of both hands plus superficial reflexes. Emotional and unstable. Family history bad.”

  In August he was invalided out. This anticlimactic ending to his military “career” pleased and relieved him at the time but it also haunted him, making him determined—when it became clear that “the war to end wars” had been nothing but a prelude to a yet bigger conflict—that the next time his contribution would be a significant one.

  •

  BY THE TIME of Peace Day, in the spring of 1919, London was alive again, full of bright lights and even brighter young things, for whom the old social taboos were a thing of the past.

  Noël was a guest of actress Fay Compton at the Victory Ball in her box at the Albert Hall. The rest of the party consisted of Beatrice Lillie, who was to become a major character in Noël's life, and Billie Carleton, a perky young actress whose looks outshone her acting ability. That evening all over the country joy was considerably unconfined, and the following morning Lillie decided to check up on her young friend Billie. On arrival at the girl's hotel, the Savoy, she was told that Miss Carleton had been found dead of a cocaine overdose.

  Although he did not know her well, the young woman's pointless death haunted Noël for years to come, and he spoke about it frequently. At the time it must have seemed like a portent of what the following decade might hold. War was not the only way people could destroy themselves.

  “Dance, dance, dance, little lady,” he would write in a song lyric, “leave tomorrow behind.” The way Billie Carleton had left her own tomorrow behind would continue to bother him until it found expression in The Vortex,

  I know this word is wrongly spelt but I have an Italian typewriter.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I LIKE AMERICA”

  (1919-1921)

  I like America

  Its Society

  Offers infinite variety….

  “I LIKE AMERICA,” FROM ACE OF CLUBS

  Oh, my America! My new found land.

  JOHN DONNE

  ON MAY 14, 1921, Noël sailed on the SS Aquitania on his first visit to New York. His traveling companion was Jeffrey Holmes-dale (later Lord Amherst), a young officer in the Coldstream Guards he had met a couple of months earlier and the man who would accompany him to various far-flung parts of the world for the next decade or so and remain his friend for life.

  A lot had happened in the last two years, and several of the people he had met would also become lifelong friends. In 1919, at the home of an acting colleague, Betty Chester, he met Lorn MacNaughtan. She seemed “unremarkable in manner and personality, but there was authority in her quietness.” As the widowed Lorn Loraine, “Lornie” became the secretary and confidante who would anchor his existence and the Coward “family” until her death in 1967.

  It was time to develop social skills that were not naturally inbred in those brought up in Teddington, Clapham, or even Ebury Street. For example, there were gaucheries to be ruthlessly removed, such as those displayed when, invited to a country weekend party at the Dawson-Scotts, he announced his imminent arrival with the cable:

  “I Like America,” Noël said, and he was to like it even more as the years went by. Drawing by William Auerbach-Levy. (Reproduced by permission of The Players Club, New York.)

  ARRIVING PADSTOW 5-30 STOP TALL AND DIVINELY HANDSOME IN GREY.

  The Dawson-Scotts were not amused, and kept a close eye on their fourteen-year-old-son, Toby.

  Fortunately, Mrs. Astley Cooper, an old friend of Philip Streatfeild's, took Noël under her wing, realizing that here was a young man who did not need to be taught but simply had to be given the opportunity to learn.

  In January of 1920, Noël made his first trip abroad—a one-week visit to Paris that triggered his love of the city that was to play such a large part in his later life. He even managed one night at the Ritz, and that hotel and the social values it represented would also stay with him and crop up time and again in his work. (“I have a Ritz mind and always have had”—Diaries, April 22, 1960.) A month later he is in Alassio, as the guest of Mrs. Astley Cooper.

  In May he had his first play produced. It was called 77/ Leave It to You and it was—as Noël would say in another context—“ jagged with sophistication.” After an encouraging opening in Manchester, it moved to London's New Theatre, where audiences took the advice of the play's title and decided to leave it alone after a five-week run. Nonetheless, it was a start, and his name was becoming known.

  While waiting for a new acting engagement to start, he took himself back to Italy and finished up again in Alassio, where Mrs. Astley Cooper was once more in residence at the Grand Hotel. This time she had another friend along, who was also to become a founding member of the Coward “family.”

  Asked to perform at a concert at the English Club, Noël found himself distracted by “a smartly dressed young woman in the front row, who appeared to be fighting an attack of convulsive giggles with singular lack of success.” Her name was Gladys Calthrop and, as a designer as well as a friend, she was to become “intimately concerned with all my best work, and so intrinsically part of my failures and successes.”

  Back in London Noël appeared in a run-of-the-mill imported American farce, Polly with a Past, but his interest lay elsewhere. He felt himself to be a creative cornucopia, with songs, sketches, and plays waiting to pour out. It was exciting but dangerously facile.

  One of the plays waiting in the wings was The Young Idea, based all too closely—as Noël was the first to admit—on Shaw's You Never Can Tell, which had been revived in 1919. The script was sent to Shaw, who took the trouble to read it carefully and return it with detailed comments such as “No you don't, young author!”

  June 27th 1921

  Dear Mr. Coward,

  I gather from Mr. Vedrenne that he turned the play down because he had some misgivings about trying to repeat the old success of the twins in You Never Can Tell, and was not quite sure that you had pulled off the final scene which I suggested. But when once a manager has entertained a play at all, his reasons for discarding it are pretty sure to be business and circumstantial ones. When you put impudent people on the stage they are very amusing when the actor or actress has sufficient charm to make the audience forgive the impudence: in my youth Charles Mathews lived on impudent parts; and every comedy had a stage cynic in it. Hawtrey has kept up the tradition to some extent; but impudence has been long out of fashion; your twins will take some casting to make them pardonable. I daresay Vedrenne did not know where to lay his hands on the right pair. I ha
ve no doubt that you will succeed if you persevere, and take care never to fall into a breach of essential good manners and above all, never to see or read my plays. Unless you can get clean away from me you will begin as a back number, and be hopelessly out of it when you are forty.

  Faithfully,

  G. BERNARD SHAW

  Interestingly, from the outset, established writers were prepared to take Noël almost as seriously as he took himself. Novelist Hugh Walpole (1884—1941)—to whom Philip Streatfeild had introduced him during the war—read several of Noël's early efforts and responded to one of them: “You're quite right, your punctuation is vastly better! Also the adjectives, though some of your verbs are still too complicated.” As praise went it may not have been exactly effusive, but at least it was attention!

  •

  SHAW'S LETTER was certainly instrumental in focusing Noël's future, but rather more immediate was the news he had received in August 1919. Gilbert Miller had finally delivered on the commitment he made at the time of Wild Heather, up in Manchester. Noël was able to cable Violet on August 29:

  PLAY [THE LAST TRICK] ACCEPTED FOR AMERICA ADVANCE OF

  FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS PASSING PEACEFULLY AWAY LOVE

  NOËL.

  America…that was where the future lay. All it needed was—Noël Coward.

  •

  HE HAD A one-way ticket, a case full of manuscripts, and precisely seventeen pounds between him and starvation in a country about which he knew absolutely nothing. Had he done his homework, he might have realized that New York in June during a heat wave can be an uncomfortable place to be, which meant that many of the people he hoped to meet had left the city for the duration.

  He spent the first night at the Algonquin, where the witty elite of the Round Table liked to meet and greet. Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott—many of them would become close friends over the years, but for now they were just names Noël wanted to be able to add to his list of acquaintances.