The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  We met some enchanting people in Shanghai. Two twins of 22, both lovely looking with a Spanish mother. They all speak six languages each and have terrible rows in all of them! Very Sanger's Circus and highly enjoyable. Our trip alternates between complete Ambassadorial grandeur and utter squalor. We are arriving in Indo-China armed with flattering letters to the Governor, and I hope the fact that we are riddled with crabs and lice won't put him off!

  We've had to talk a great deal of French here and there, which is very good for us, particularly in Shanghai where all the nicest people are French.

  The other night we were nearly wrecked in HK harbour on our way to dine on the ship. Our motor sampan broke down and there we were tossing around in a howling storm, got up in our tails and diamonds, and finally reached the ship soaked. THAT was a special moment when I should have loved you to be there.

  Probably Noël's most popular song. When he sang it Cole Porter swore it was the only song he'd ever heard sung in one breath.

  And oh dear, all the Chinese tarts in cages! And riding along up hills in chairs! Bumping so much that your teeth rattle and your hat falls off! It's all very slapstick.

  Well, old trout, I'll close now. Jeff sends love and kisses and we're wishing very, very dreadfully that you were here and oh dear, I haven't told you ANYTHING. I can't wait for our reunion in May. We've taken some really grand films and cut them and joined them ourselves. They're really pretty exciting and they will give you some idea of what we've seen.

  Goodnight, old stinks

  Love love love

  PERSEUS

  Apart from Private Lives—which he wrote during the four days he was laid up with flu in Shanghai's Cathay Hotel—at least one other “really dandy” thing happened before Noël was through. On the long drive, he composed in his head the complex lyric for “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” When they reached the guest house that evening he sang it triumphantly to Jeffrey. “The gekko lizards and the tree frogs gave every vocal indication of enthusiasm.”

  To Violet:

  Phya Thai Palace

  Bangkok

  March 13 th

  Darlingest,

  We're having almost the best time of our whole trip here. To start with it is the most beautiful city imaginable. The Temples and Pagodas and Palaces are vivid white with curly spires and minarets and sometimes towers made entirely of inlaid porcelain in the most lovely colours and designs. There is a Buddha in the Royal Pagoda made entirely of one emerald! It's about the size of a large football and it sits up very high on a gold throne! Perfectly glorious. Jeffrey happened to be at Eton with the King, so we had a private audience with him the second day we were there. He was very sweet and had read all my plays, if you please!

  We conducted ourselves becomingly except that just before we went into the presence The Grand Vizier gave us glasses of soda water, we took them thinking probably it was some strange delicious Siamese nectar and had to restrain our hiccups and belches with great fortitude during the afternoon. We had to back out of the room when the Audience was over, and I saved myself in the nick of time from putting my bottom through a glass cabinet filled with china. I cast a hurried glance over my shoulder to see if I was going straight. Thank God, otherwise there would have been a slight social error!

  We have been entertained lavishly by all the Siamese Grandees and we went to a special performance in the King's private Theatre, given in honour of some Danish Royalties. It was very lovely and the colours of the dresses quite indescribable. We've also been taken into all the secret shrines and temples where no Europeans are allowed, one in particular had a floor made entirely of silver!

  Last night Prince Pidya gave a Siamese dinner for us. Oh Dear! We sat on the balcony under a full moon and ate and ate for hours with strange music wailing behind us. The food was very nasty and dreadfully spiced but we rose above it…Your affectionate but regal

  SNOOPIE

  In Singapore, Jeffrey was struck down with his second bout of amoebic dysentery and confined to hospital. With time on his hands and Private Lives safely committed to paper, Noël was at something of a loose end. One evening he attended a performance of a touring English theatrical company quaintly called The Quaints. Hearing that they were about to do R. C. Sherriff's antiwar play, Journey's End, Noël allowed himself to be persuaded to play the hero, Stanhope. Also in the company was the young John Mills, who played Raleigh.

  Even Noël admitted that he misjudged his performance and was overly emotional. On one occasion he misjudged something else, and Mills would remind him of this in a letter nearly forty years later:

  9/9/67

  Darling Noëly,

  …If you know anything about the theatre proper, you will be aware of two facts—that I discovered Noël Coward in Singapore, way back in 1930, and I am sure that he will agree, it is through that chance meeting—he insisted on playing Stanhope to my Raleigh—and, I thought, for a young man of his age, he gave a more than intelligent reading—in fact I saw flashes of pure magic—especially when, owing to a new piece of business which his fertile brain had invented, his tin hat fell with a nasty dull thud on my cobblers—and to be quite frank, they have never been quite the same since.

  Playing Stanhope created a small diplomatic incident of its own. Dining with the British governor and his wife, Noël was attacked by Lady Clementi for appearing in a play that, she believed, criticized the behavior of British soldiers in time of war. This was a lady who also urged the banning of the works of W. Somerset Maugham on the grounds of immorality. When Noël and Jeffrey were safely out of her social clutches, Noël composed a verse about her:

  Oh, Lady Clenienti, you've read a lot of G, A, Henty

  You've not read’ Bertrand Russell and you've not read Dr. Freud,

  Which perhaps is the reason you look so unenjoyed.

  You're anti-sex in any form, or so I've heard it said,

  You're just the sort who would prefer a cup of tea instead

  You must have been a riot in the matrimonial bed

  Whoops—Lady Clementi!

  Noël couldn't resist sending the play program to Woollcott:

  Alec dear,

  I thought your elfin heart might be touched by this. “The Quaints” are just a band of pierrots who have developed during the last 25 years into a staunch dramatic company, unfortunately having to keep their original title owing to business reasons. I gave three performances of “Stanhope” with them and they were excellent and I was good in spots.

  All my love,

  The quaintest of the quaints.

  •

  KUALA LUMPUR.…PENANG.…where they sent a rhyming postcard to Woollcott:

  Think kindly of your little friends

  And when their weary journey ends

  They'll come to you and clap their hands,

  A-brim with tales of foreign lands.

  So cheer high in the treble cleff

  For Pretty Noël and Dainty Jeff,

  Colombo (where Noël saw Erik briefly)…and then on to Marseilles and home. Withjourney's End still on his mind, he dashed off his own antiwar play on the boat, Post-Mortem. It, too, was overemotional and has still to be professionally staged.

  He did, however, show it to one or two close friends whose opinion he valued. One of them was George (later Lord) Lloyd, who wrote:

  30 Portman Square, W.I.

  22nd June, 1931

  My dear Noël,

  I have been spending three sun-baked days in the South of France and come unwillingly back to work. I must apologise to you for my candour over the telephone but having once seen you take a bad curtain call and witnessed your contempt for lay criticism, I felt no fear that the blunt shafts of my brutality could do more than glance harmlessly off your professional armour. You have said one or two very true things. You have discerned why most men hanker after war—for the sake of its utter freedom—you remember what William James wrote—“ The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow, for its
elf, and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life's fireworks.” You say some of that on page 71 and again on 76 but you say a lot of foolish things which you don't believe and you say them in order to shock, to epater and, may be, to sell. What I want to see you do is to get away from the dull orthodoxy of today's atheism, and to free yourself from cheap bourgeois blasphemy and to put the real case as brilliantly as you know how to do—the Calvary that people daren't climb today for fear of being thought stupid—the religion they daren't write lest they be thought to rant—the love of country you daren't preach lest, forsooth, Bernard Shaw or Hannen Swaffer—the people you writers are so afraid of—should class you as patriotic.

  Hong Kong, 1968. Noël finally gets to fire off that “noonday gun” he immortalized in “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” (“To reprimand each inmate / Who's in late.”)

  Some day I believe you will dare do all these things, and then you will do them so finely that you will convert even a Celt to see the soul in a Saxon!

  Yours ever

  GEORGE L.

  P.S. I have tried to be as unkind as I could be, but have not, I fear, been very successful. May I try again at supper?

  By May he was back in England to prepare Private Lives for production that fall. Whatever vicissitudes he'd met and conquered on the Road to Mandalay would provide ideal toughening for his next great challenge— working with Miss Gertrude Lawrence.

  INTERMISSION

  GERTRUDE LAWRENCE

  “A STAR DANCED”

  A star danced…and under it you were born.

  THE MESSAGE DELIVERED BY A FORTUNE TELLING MACHINE IN BRIGHTON TO THE YOUNG GERTRUDE LAWRENCE

  THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT women in NoeTs life were undoubtedly his mother, Violet (who gave him his drive), Esme Wynne (who inspired him to write), and Gertrude Lawrence (who was often his Muse and always his perfect complement as an actor).

  Noël and Gertie first met in 1913 on the train to Liverpool. With ten other children, they had been hired by director/producer Basil Dean to appear for a three-week run of Hauptmann's Hannele.

  She was, Noël recalled, “a vivacious child with ringlets…her face was far from pretty, but tremendously alive…She confided to me that her name was Gertrude Lawrence, but that I was to call her Gert because everyone else did … I loved her from then onwards.”

  Caricatures by Tony Walton.

  1924- Gertrude Lawrence and Bea Lillie starring in Andre Chariot's new revue.

  It would be ten years before they performed together again—in his 1923 revue for producer Andre Chariot, London Calling!—and then only briefly. She introduced the song “Parisian Pierrot,” which Cecil Beaton considered “the signature tune of the…1920s.” The show seemed set for a long run when, to Noël's horror, Chariot decided to put together a compilation of highlights from several of his previous revues and take it to Broadway as Andre Chariot's Revue of 1924. The stars were to be Jack Buchanan, Beatrice Lillie (whom Gertie had several times understudied), and Gertrude Lawrence.

  Dissolve to 1929…Both of them are well-established now in their own right. Leaving revue behind her, Gertie opens in a straight play, Candle Light. Noël sends her one of what would be a string of teasing cables:

  LEGITIMATE AT LAST WON'T MOTHER BE PLEASED?

  Then, that same year, on a tour of the Far East, Noël found himself waiting in the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, for his friend and traveling companion, Jeffrey Amherst. On the night before Jeffrey was due to arrive, Noël went to bed early, but as soon as he had turned off the light, the idea for Private Lives came to him. By the turn of the year he was in Shanghai and, when a bout of fever confined him to bed at the Cathay Hotel, he used the time to actually write the play

  “Sometimes I would look across the stage at Gertie and she would take my breath away.” The definitive portrait of Gertie and Noël that had pride of place on his piano at Chalet Coward.

  That turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was pinning down Gertie's butterfly mind. Noël cabled her immediately he put his pen down:

  HAVE WRITTEN DELIGHTFUL NEW COMEDY STOP GOOD PART

  FOR YOU STOP WONDERFUL ONE FOR ME STOP KEEP YOURSELF

  FREE FOR AUTUMN PRODUCTION.

  He then sent her a copy and she replied:

  HAVE READ NEW PLAY STOP NOTHING WRONG THAT CAN'T BE

  fixed stop gertie

  the only thing that will need to be fixed is your

  PERFORMANCE STOP NOëL

  There then followed an avalanche of cables in which confusion soon became worse confounded. She'd committed herself to Andre Chariot for a new revue. Could they open in the following January instead of this September? Why didn't Noël appear in the revue with her to fill in the time? Why didn't Noël cable and ask Chariot to release her from the contract? Well, actually it wasn't so much of a contract as a moral obligation…Come to think of it, it probably was a contract of a sort and her lawyers were trying to get her out of it…She'd rather do Private hives than anything…No, she couldn't do it at all….

  Noël had finally had enough. When—forty pounds’ worth of telegrams later—she finally remembered to give him her cable address, he wired her that he now planned to do the play with someone else anyway. He heard nothing more until he arrived back in England in May, by which time Gertie's lawyer, the redoubtable Fanny Holtzmann, had pried her free of the Chariot contract.

  La Capponcina

  Cap d'Ail

  Alpes Maritimes

  Thursday or Friday?

  Darling!

  Am I wrong or did I hear you mention something about a play we were going to do in London first then in America after?

  Please let me know, because at present me ‘ouse is full as a pig— and I would like to do something about putting up with you— sorry—I mean—well, you know—should you wish to visit me here to discuss ways and means.

  Love Gert

  Dear Miss Lawrence,

  With regard to your illiterate scrawl of 14th inst., Mr. Coward asks me to say that there was talk of you playing a small part in a play of his on condition that you tour and find your own clothes (same to be of reasonable quality) and understudy Jessie Matthews whom you have always imitated. [In fact, it was Matthews who had understudied and carbon-copied Gertie in the New York production of the 1924 Chariot Revue.} Mr. Coward will be visiting some rather important people in the South of France in mid-July and he will appear at Cap d'Ail [the location of Edward Molyneux's house, which Gertie was renting], whether you like it or not, with Mr. Wilson, on the 20th. If by chance there is no room in the rather squalid lodgings you have taken, would you be so kind as to engage several suites for Mr. W [Jack Wilson] and Mr. C [Noël] at the Hotel Mont Fleury, which will enable same Mr. W and Mr. C. to have every conceivable meal with you and use all your toilets for their own advantage. Several complicated contracts are being sent to you by Mr. C. on the terms you agreed upon—i.e., £6.ios. a week and understudy.

  With Private Lives, “Noël and Gertie” were to become a single entity in the public mind, creating an impression that—like the Lunts—they invariably acted together. In point of fact, they co-starred in only three original productions, of which Private Lives was the second and the one that defined the partnership.

  Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne are a divorced couple who meet up at the same hotel in Deauville while each is on honeymoon with a second spouse, only to discover that they are fated to be together, no matter the emotional cost to themselves or the people around them. The fictional relationship in many respects mirrored the real-life relationship between Noël and Gertie, two people deeply fond of each other but constantly bickering and testing the limits of that friendship in the certain knowledge that it is unbreakable.

  Noël was both challenged and frustrated by Gertie's mercurial nature, quite opposite but somehow complementary to his own more ordered approach.

  “On stage,” he wrote a few years later, “she is potentially capable of anyth
ing and everything. She can be gay, sad, witty, tragic, funny and touching…She has, in abundance, every theatrical essential but one; critical faculty…But for this tantalizing lack of discrimination she could, I believe, be the greatest actress alive in the theatre today.”

  •

  ON OCTOBER 13, 1931, Cavalcade opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Gertie was in the first-night audience.

  Theatre Royal

  Haymarket

  S.W.I.

  Noël, my darling,

  Here I am down on my knees to you in humble admiration and complete adoration.

  I didn't wire you last night because I felt too near you to mix my stupid pence worth of good wishes with those many who couldn't have been feeling as deeply as I was; but please believe me when I tell you that I spent the whole evening from eight ‘til eleven with my hand tightly clasped in yours—anything just to feel that I might perhaps be of some subconscious support to you. As you say it's “pretty exciting to be English.” But also it's pretty exciting to love you as I do!

  It's horrid how I miss you but deep down it's rather grand; though not awfully satisfying!!

  This you may be surprised to see is from

  “Ole Gert”

  Dear old Gert,

  Among all the outpourings from the great and the good and the Would-Be-Goods (as my beloved E. Nesbit might put it) nothing pleased me more than your barely decipherable scrawl!