by Noel Coward
By July, Noël had several plays completed and going the rounds of London managements—Hay Fever, Fallen Angels, and The Vortex—with a marked lack of apparent interest. To keep his hand in, he wrote a fourth, Easy Virtue, before taking himself off for a holiday in Deauville.
Violet was not well pleased to be left alone again so soon and must have said as much:
Royal Hotel
Deauville
Saturday 23 rd
You poor embittered woman!
I left my address with Daddy, Curtis Brown, Chariot, Laurillard [the producer], Gladys [Calthrop] and the Daily Graphic and Auntie Vida sent me my bathing dress to me—so there! I enclose a couple of smart snapshots—I'm enjoying myself—I think it's going to prove a very lucky trip—but I'll explain why later—I'm full of quite surprisingly dashing plans which look like materializing.
I expect you've had your leg amputated by this time like Sarah Bernhardt but never mind.
Good night, my poor sad old cow. Put a lamp in the window for me.
Snoop
At summer's end he was in an upbeat mood. It was, he felt, “a definite end to a chapter…the closing of a phase.”
•
IN MANY WAYS Noël was a creative conduit, a sensor of the times he lived through. And this was never truer than in the 1920s and 1930s. Without intellectualizing it, he seemed to be able to sense the mood of the moment and to express it.
He had never forgotten the Victory Day death of actress Billie Carleton by an accidental drug overdose, and it seemed to him symbolic of the hysterical hedonism that threatened to engulf the twenties. In the 1925 song “Poor Little Rich Girl” he would speculate:
Cocktails and laughter
But what comes after?
Nobody knows.
You're weaving life into a mad jazz pattern,
Ironically, it was a way of life he was perfectly happy to embrace himself for much of the time, while sensing its aimless danger. The Vortex, in retrospect, was his personal exorcism of this postwar superficiality.
Florence Lancaster is a middle-age woman clinging tenaciously to youth by a series of affairs with men young enough to be her son. Her real son, Nicky, returns home and is appalled by what he finds. In a final confrontation he reveals that he has become a drug addict. The two of them vow to give up their self-destructive ways, but the audience is left with a strong feeling that this is not likely to happen. Both of them— and by extension their whole generation—are trapped in “a vortex of beastliness.”
If I'll leave It to You owed a debt to Shaw, then The Vortex could trace its ancestry to Shakespeare. The lord chamberlain's office had to license every play before it could be produced, and the lord chamberlain's reader reported, “If we ban this, we shall have to ban Hamlet,” But ban it they almost did. It was only when Noël appeared in person and argued to the lord chamberlain, Lord Cromer, that the play was, in fact, a moral tract, an indictment of the drug culture, that it was allowed to be staged—on November 25, 1924, at the tiny Everyman Theatre, Hampstead.
The audience reception on the first night was enthusiastic—but, then, it had been equally enthusiastic for I'll heave It to You and The Young Idea, Even so, Noël felt an electric difference in their response. “Do you think we are all right?” asked Lilian Braithwaite, who was playing Florence. In Present Indicative Noël gave his retrospective verdict: “We were all right, more than all right. We were a smash hit.”
•
PUTTING ON THE play introduced Noël to a new friend: Lilian's actress daughter, Joyce Carey (1898—1993). After the play's success, she became one of the trio of women—the other two being Gladys Calthrop and Lorn—who would form the nucleus of Noël's family. Ladylike in appearance but, like the other two, with a wicked sense of iconoclastic humor, Joyce would become a fixture in just about every Coward play or film from the 1930s onward.
When The Vortex transferred to the West End, a twenty-year-old actor called John Gielgud was hired as Noël's understudy. The two became good friends for the rest of their lives, though it might have given Noël pause had he known that Gielgud's program notes for the opening night of the play read, “Coward himself lacked charm and personality and played the piano too loudly, though he acted sincerely and forcefully as far as he could.” A second visit, however, convinced Gielgud that Noël's performance at the end of the second act was “one of the most effective things I have ever seen in the theatre.”
Gielgud would also write later to Noël that “In a way I have always thought that my success in the theatre only began after The Vortex time.”.”
•
A THREAD RUNNING through Noël's stage productions of the 1920s was Basil Dean (1888—1978). Dean had known Noël first as a child actor and had found him “a pimply, knobbly-kneed youngster with an assured manner.” By the time of The Vortex, the balance of power had changed significantly, though Noël claimed he “knew Basil well and admired his work.” They met up again on the SS Majestic to New York, after Noël had left the cast of London Calling!, and were to work together again almost continually for the next three or four years as writer/actor and director.
Seeing The Vortex convinced Dean that here was a rising star in the theatrical firmament and quite possibly an entire galaxy. On December 16— Noël's twenty-fifth birthday—Dean was writing to him:
Basil Dean (1888-1978) gave Noël his first serious acting role when he directed him in Hannele (1913). In the 1920s their professional paths and personal wills would cross several times—with varying results.
December 8th 1924
My dear Coward,
With reference to our chat on Saturday when you agreed to make a contract with {Joseph} Bickerton and myself for the production of the above play in America….
With the contracts safely signed, sealed, and delivered, the debate turned to casting the New York production:
111 Ebury Street
S.W.I.
February 28th
My dear Dean,
I really don't know what to suggest about the cast of The Vortex. I think an English cast is extremely valuable to the play—and on the other hand I see your point about it being expensive. If we don't have an all English cast, I think it should be entirely American with the exception of myself. What do you really think about this?….
I've got a quite splendid idea for the new play, which I shall be starting in a week or two.
Will you cable me your opinion of Still Life {later Hay Fever], as I have had a tentative offer for it.
The revue [On With the Dance] is driving me mad, but I expect it will be a success.
Act 3 of The Vortex was an Oedipal confrontation that caused the lord chamberlain's reader— who had to license productions—to declare, “If we ban this, we shall have to ban HamletV
On Monday week we all rush enthusiastically into the arms of Sir Alfred Butt [the theatrical impresario] at the Comedy, who will fondle us lovingly until our receipts drop below £2,000 a week.
Yours ever
Noël Coward
The debate continued. Dean wrote that “Madge Titheradge … is quite prepared to come and discuss with me the possibility of the new part … I have heard nothing further yet from America with regard to Laura Hope Crews…Can you arrange for the Globe Theatre to send me two seats for your first night next week, as I am very anxious not to miss it?”
Noël's West End calendar was filling up rapidly. On With the Dance—his first revue for Cochran, for which he had provided book, music, and lyrics—had enjoyed a successful try out in Manchester. It would open at Cochran's home theater, the London Pavilion, on April 30 and run for 229 performances. There was Fallen Angels, with Tallulah Bankhead and Edna Best—the start of a long association for Noël with both of those very different ladies. The scandalous (for its time) story of two married women anxiously awaiting the return of a French lover they had shared years before would also succeed, and rack up 158 performances.
On With the Dance. Noël firs
t saw his name in lights at the London Pavilion, Cochran's “home” theater.
But perhaps most satisfying, to Noël at least, was Marie Tempest's change of heart about Hay Fever, At the time she was, by general acclaim, London's leading actress, and Noël had had her firmly in mind when writing the part of Judith Bliss. Miss Tempest and her director husband, Willie Graham Browne, had found it lacking in plot and too inconsequential, and had politely turned it down. A year—and The Vortex—later, Tempest could now see great potential in it and was happy to be what she always referred to as “Judith's creatrke.” The play would open its 337-performance run at the Ambassadors on June 8, and give Noël the record of having four shows running in the West End simultaneously.
In 1936 he would recall the experience of working with his idol in a letter to her biographer, Hector Bolitho:
Having been for so many years, in fact since she first began, a star in every sense of the word, she wastes no time on personal inhibitions or inferiority complexes. In fact, she takes off her coat and gets down to the job of the moment with less shi-shi than any actress I have ever met; she is more than amenable to direction. In fact, she begs for it. But there is a proviso in this. The suggestions must be intelligently and carefully phrased and she must have complete faith in the person giving them.
So many people have written about her acting, I will content myself with mentioning only one facet and this, to me, is the strangest of all. Despite the fact that for fifty years she has performed a multitude of plays to multitudes of people, she has always contrived to remain the mistress of her tradition rather than allow any tradition to become the mistress of her.
This rather pompous epigram means that in the year 1936 she can walk on to a stage with a company of young people, experienced only in the modern, realistic school of acting, and play them off the stage with her own methods. Marie Tempest can tie up a parcel of books, speak with her back to the audience, light cigarettes, pour out drinks, do a hundred and one things with her hands and body and never lose a laugh, or mis-time a witticism. She is old-fashioned in that there is no traditional trick of the theatre that she does not know completely, and she is modern in the finest sense of the word because she has adapted and constantly readjusted her technique with the years, so that there is no staleness, no bravura posturing of another age perceptible in her performance. One never says of her, “She must have been wonderful when she was young,” because that would be under-rating her. Of course she was wonderful when she was young. But to my mind, she is supremely wonderful now.
•
with hay fever successfully launched, Noël took himself off to Spain for a holiday.
Calle Boticario
Genova
Palma de Mallorca
Spain
June 16th 1925
Dear Basil [no longer “Dean”]
I feel as if I had been in Spain for seventy years. There is nothing I don't know about the Spanish character—each minute inhibition has become as an open book to me. I have a very grand house here on a mountain and I walk about in sand shoes and a large straw hat fanning myself like any old world grandee.
In Barcelona on Sunday I went to my first and last bull fight. I was fortunate enough to secure a seat in the front row—and it was all too lovely. I saw fine horses gored to death and three Bulls baited and finally murdered all in the course of a half an hour, after which I left charmed and awed by the sportsmanship and refinement of the Spanish Nation.
I do hope all your funny little productions are going along all right—your office where I have enjoyed so many cups of overdrawn tea seems immeasurably remote. If you have a moment to turn from Galsworthy [The Silver Spoon] to Coward, you might drop me a line.
I'm awfully glad you liked Hay Fever, I'm very surprised it hasn't irritated the Press more—some of them seem actually to have been amused by it.
I must go and have a siesta now as it is getting too hot to do anything at all for a few hours. I am sitting on the patio of my hacienda. It is on the side of a mountain with miles of olive trees stretching down to the sea and there are coloured houses dotted about like pieces of sugar in a green cake and Palm trees and Bourganvillias vivid purple—passion flowers and lemons and then this very deep sea blue edged with Jade where it washes over the rocks.
Oh dear, I do hate being a successful dramatist—and why, oh why do I write unpleasant plays … it seems so unfair that all the good, sincere and honest failures should have to stay in London! I must think of something really lascivious to get me a longer holiday next year!
Best love,
NOËL
There was a small but distinctive barb in the reference to Hay Fever, since Dean had originally also turned it down. It was being staged now by a different management.
24th June 1925
My dear Noël,
Delighted to have a letter from you. It is very decent of you to send me news. I envy you your holiday. London has been terribly hot until yesterday, when it suddenly cooled off; as a result, theatrical business has improved at once….
I had a hearty laugh or two over some of the remarks in your letter. Of course, you are a demon because you promised to send me a letter that I could reprint in our News-Sheet. I am afraid the one you sent me might involve poor old Reandean [his production company] in a long and continued series of libel suits beginning with the Housekeeper who would—naturally and quite rightly—resent your animadversions upon the St. Martin's Theatre tea-making industry. Anyway, it is better to have one's tea overdrawn than underproduced, ha! ha!
You are kindly requested to write a play in the near future which would enable both partners of Reandean to have an even longer holiday than the author, than whom nobody deserves it less.
Please write me a dear, darling, seductive letter, full of polite Daily Express-isms and Noëlisms fit for the gentle and seductive eyes of the young ladies known to frequent the St. Martin's theatre pit.
When are you coming back? The plane trees in Piccadilly are shedding their bark in grief because of you.
Yours ever,
Basil
While continuing to work toward the American production of The Vortex, Dean had not been idle on other Coward fronts. He had sent the script of Easy Virtue—that other product of Dockenfield—to Broadway producer Charles Dillingham, who was to produce The Vortex in partnership with the Napoleonic and notoriously eccentric producer “Little Abe” Erlanger.
Dillingham was quick to reply:
Charles Dillingham
Globe Theatre
Broadway & 46th Street, N.Y.
July 24th 1925
Dear Basil:
I have not wasted any time on Easy Virtue, but Miss Ina Claire has taken until now to decide that she is going in Lonsdale's play. I then tried to arrange with Miss [Lenore] Ulric but she has gone in pictures. Mme. [Alia] Nazimova read the play, thinks it is wonderful and says the first two acts are the best she has ever read. She knows Noël Coward. He sent her one of his first plays, and if he will strengthen the third act a little bit on suggestions on which they shall mutually agree, she will be glad to do it, and she is a big draw. Will you see Coward and send me a cable on the subject as she is waiting to hear from me before going elsewhere?
Yours sincerely,
C. B. DILLINGHAM
The play would be produced that December.
In August, the Coward entourage took passage on the SS Majestic. In addition to Noël and Basil Dean, the party included Violet, Gladys Calthrop, and Lilian Braithwaite (who was, after all, to repeat her role as Florence). Also on board, en route home from Paris, were playwright Mercedes de Acosta and her current inamorata, actress Eva Le Gallienne, who had shocked even the Parisians by appearing naked in de Acosta's play Sandro Botticelli, It was, said Noël, “a gay, nervous voyage and far from peaceful.”
Miss de Acosta liked to boast that she could seduce anyone—man or woman—she set her mind on. And, indeed, it was rumored that she had had affairs with bo
th Garbo and Dietrich. Although they kept in touch over the years—or, rather, de Acosta made a point of keeping in touch with him—Noël had distinct reservations about the lady.
She must have wondered how to take letters such as the following:
9/4/29
My dear Mercedes,
I do hope you are getting nicely secure with your [dental] plate and come to review even your own tragedies with a more detached eye…I'm terribly rushed at the moment, otherwise I'd write a longer letter.
All love,
NOËL
•
IF THE JOURNEY was not peaceful, there was little peace to be found on Broadway when they arrived and began to discuss the production of The Vortex, The plan was for it to start with a short tour and then “come in” to an Erlanger theater, but at this point the unpredictable Abe decreed that the play would most certainly not come to New York until Noël had rewritten the last act and eliminated “the spectacle of a son so vilely abusing the woman who gave him birth.” But Noël was not to worry, Abe insisted. He (Erlanger) would come to rehearsals and tell him what to do.
The explosion that ensued removed both Erlanger and Dillingham from the production credits. The management of the show was taken over by Sam Harris and Irving Berlin.
New York was an even greater success for Noël than London had been—probably because of advance word of mouth that here was a startling new play by a startling new playwright. The company was greeted with standing ovations and rave reviews. “That night,” wrote Noël of the play's opening night, “is set apart in my memory, supreme and unspoilt, gratefully and forever.”
The post—New York tour, though, was not without incident, and reduced heads to an appropriate size. If Washington had been as hot as hell, Chicago was simply hell. Years later Clifton Webb, playing in the same Selwyn Theatre, saw a legend scrawled on his dressing room wall where a despairing young actor had expressed his frustrations through graffiti: NOëL COWARD DIED HERE. Since the Chicago audience had been persuaded by the badinage in the first act that they were there to watch a comedy, they laughed determinedly throughout, finding the melodramatic final act particularly hilarious.