by Noel Coward
SOME YEARS LATER, Noël and Daphne du Maurier met at a party, and naturally the conversation came round to Gertie. Daphne recalled how Gertie had so often regretted that she had never had the opportunity to sing the theme from Bitter Sweet, “I'll See You Again.”
Noël went over to the piano, sat down, and sang the song through, but when he came to the end of it, he changed the words:
Though the years my tears may dry,
And I never said goodbye,
I shall love you till I die….
CHAPTER 9
PRIVATE LIVES
(1930-1931)
I think very few people are completely normal, really, deep down in their private lives … If all the various cosmic thingummies fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one might do.
AMANDA, IN PRIVATE LIVES (1950)
REHEARSALS FOR Private Lives began in July, and a few weeks later Noël's friend George Lloyd brought along a visitor, who confided in a letter to his sister that he found Noël “not deep but remarkable. A hasty kind of genius.”
The visitor was one Aircraftman T. E. Shaw—trying without undue success to pretend that he was not better known as T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia” (1888—1935). After the rehearsal the three of them lunched and there was a clear and immediate rapport between the hasty genius and the shy one.
Their go-between was well pleased with what he had achieved: (“He [Lawrence] is an odd creature but I am very fond of him and he has genius.”)
The bond T E. Lawrence and Noël had was regarding their respective writing. Lawrence was intrigued by the workings of the theater, and Noël, equally impressed by Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). Lawrence mentioned that he was working on writing about his experiences in the Royal Air Force—published posthumously as The Mint—and Noël asked if he could see the work in progress. This led to an exchange of letters and the occasional meeting in the months ahead.
338171 A/c Shaw
R.A.F. Mount Batten
Plymouth
15.VIII.30
DearN.C.
Here are your R.A.F. notes. After looking at them you will agree with me that such tense and twisted prose cannot be admirable. It lacks health. Obscenity is vieux jeu, too: but in 1922 I was not copying the fashion!
Don't be too hard on them, though. They were meant, not for reading, but to afford me raw material for an introductory chapter to my mag.op. [magnum opus] on an airman's life. Unluckily I survived the Depot only to be sacked when on the point of being posted to a Squadron, the real flying unit. There followed a long spell of army life, wasting the novelty of barracks, till I broadened out into the present common-place and lasting contentment.
Obviously these notes libel our general R.A.F. life by being too violently true to an odd and insignificant part of it. So out of my head and with no formal notes I attempted a Part III to show the happiness that came after the bullying. Only happiness is such a beast to put on paper.
Meeting you was such a surprise and pleasure to me. I had often (and quite inadequately) wondered what you were like. Now I'll try to work the rehearsal you suggested into some later raid upon London. The going-round of wheels fascinates me. So I found Wednesday wholly delightful.
Yours,
T E. Shaw
Please do not keep them longer than you can help—or I shall forget where they are, and be troubled!
111, Ebury Street
S.W.I.
Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool [where
Private Lives had opened on tour]
Dear 338171,
(May I call you 338?) I am tremendously grateful to you for letting me read your R.A.F. notes. I found them even better than I expected, which is honestly saying a good deal. Now I'm faced with the problem of expressing to you my genuine and very deep admiration of your writing without treading on your over tender, hero worship, Lawrence of Arabia corns! Really, it had nothing to do with all that. I think you're a very thrilling writer indeed because you make pictures with such superb simplicity and no cliches at all, and I disagree flatly with you when you say you're photographic. Your descriptive powers far exceed flat photography. Cameras are unable to make people live in the mind as your prose succeeds in doing. China and Taffy and Skiffy and Corporal Abner are grandly written with heart and blood and bones. I found so many things I want to talk to you about which in writing would sound over effusive and pompous, so please come to London one Saturday if you possibly can.
My play was a great success in Edinburgh and we're opening here tonight in a theatre the size of Olympia, which will be very disconcerting. I am terribly glad you thought it good. I owe you a great deal for the things you said about my writing. Valuable praise is very rare and beyond words stimulating. Please come to London and see some more wheels going round, if it interests you. I am enormously pleased that we've met.
Yours, Noël
Coward
338171 A/c Shaw
R.A.F. Mount Batten
Plymouth
6.1X.30
Dear N.C.
It is very good to laugh: and I laughed so much, and made so many people laugh over your “May I call you 338” that I became too busy and happy to acknowledge your letter.
I hope Liverpool went off well. Edinburgh—so the press said, but how they lie—went into fits over your mixed grill. I fancied you were coming thence direct to London, but clearly not. It must be very hard and uphill work winning province after province before attacking the headquarters: and London is likely to be your easiest conquest, too. The bits I saw went so swingingly.
Your praise of my R.A.F. notes pleases me, of course, more than it puzzles me. I'm damned if I can see any good in them. Some artifice— yes: some skill—yes: they even come off, here and there: but the general impression on me is dry bones. Your work is like sword-play; as quick as light. Mine a slow painful mosaic of hard words stiffly cemented together. However, it is usually opposites that fall in love. At any rate I propose to go on looking forward, keenly, to seeing more of your works and work, and perhaps of yourself, if a kind fate lets me run into you when you are not better engaged.
I'm hoping to get to London some time in October, for a week-end perhaps.
Yours,
T. E. Shaw
5.X.30
DearN.C.
I was at the second night, and wondered to see how perfectly the finished product went. Just once it slipped, when she drew the curtains and the daylight took 20 seconds to come! Yet I'm not sure that the bare works you showed me that afternoon were not better. For one thing, I could not tell always when you were acting and when talking to one another. So I would suggest my coming to another rehearsal, only there seems nothing to prevent these plays of yours running for ever, and so you probably will never write any more.
Gertrude Lawrence is amazing. She acts nearly as well as yourself. I was sorry for the other two [Laurence Olivier and Adrianne Allen]. They were out of it.
The play reads astonishingly well. It gets thicker, in print, and has bones and muscles. On the stage you played with it and puffed your fancies up and about like swansdown. And one can't help laughing all the time: whereas over the book one does not do worse than chuckle or smile. For fun I took some pages and tried to strike redundant words out of your phrases. Only there were none. That's what I felt when I told you it was superb prose.
You'll be sick of letters about it, so I'll shut up. Yet I had to tell you how much delight it gave me.
Yours,
T E. SHAW
111, Ebury Street
S.W.I.
10.10.30
Dear 338,
I was enormously pleased with your letter and so very much encouraged by what you say about my writing that I shall probably inflict upon you the script of a new play I've written, which will not be produced in England, only published [Post-Mortem}. I'd value your opinion on it very deeply, but please, if it's a bore to you to read plays, say so and I won't send it. If
you have a minute in your flying visits to London, do let us meet again. There is a good deal I should like to talk to you about.
We could have supper, lunch, breakfast, dinner or tea quietly in my studio.
So please telegraph me a few days in advance when you feel like appearing.
Yours,
Noël Coward
Plymouth 10.vi.31
Dear N.C.
I have read your play (which? Why your war one, of course) twice and want to admire you. It's a fine effort, a really fine effort.
You know better than anyone what sort of a play it is; I fancied it hadn't the roots of a great success. You had something far more important to say than usual, and I fancy that in saying it you let the box-office and the stalls go hang. As argument it is first rate. As imagination magnificent: and it does you great honour as a human being. It's for that reason that I liked it so much. Mrs. Humphry [sic] Ward (before your time) once asked Matthew Arnold (also before your time) why he was not wholly serious. People won't like you better for being quite so serious as you are in this: but it does you honour, as I said, and gave me a thrill to read it.
Incidentally the press-man-magnate-son scene was horrifying. That would “act,” surely? Only most of the rest was far above playing to any gallery.
I think it was very good of you to have done this so plainly and well. I needn't say that it's written with your usual spare exactness and skill. You deny yourself every unnecessary word.
Yours,
T E. SHAW
No answer. It isn't a letter: I'd wanted to say how much I liked the thing, and filed to say anything worth reading: and so just report progress, gratefully.
Goldenhurst Farm
Aldington, Kent
19.6.31
Dear 338,
It's no use you writing me a letter like that and expecting no answer. It gave me tremendous pleasure and my gratitude must be expressed, particularly as I would rather you liked “Poet Noctem” [Post-Mortem] than most people. This may sound a trifle effusive but actually it's perfectly true.
I know all about my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head and I thought the time had come to break new ground a little. (Oh dear, self-conscious metaphors are fairly flying from my pen), but anyhow I'm deeply happy that you thought it good. I would very much like to see you again some time.
Yours,
N.C.
I'm doing a very fancy Production [Cavalcade] at Drury Lane in September, so if you want to see real wheels going round, let me know.
338171 A/c Shaw
R.A.F. Mount Batten
Plymouth
30.1X.31
Dear N.C.
Last week there wasn't a chance of my getting up to London for months. Today I've been warned for duty in Kent instantly, and I may be able to pass homeward via London about Monday next. It is not certain, and even if it happened, your rehearsals might have ended before then; but on the chance of it's being any use I will try and get word to you if I do arrive.
If you can gather any plain sense from that last sentence, then you are good at puzzles; but the moral is that you do nothing concerning me except sit still: If I can I will. It is very good of you to give me the chance. I have heard that it is a most unusually difficult piece of stage-tactics.
Yours,
T E. SHAW
And there the correspondence apparently petered out. In 1935, on a deserted stretch of country road, Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident. However, he continued to fascinate Noël, as both a man and a dramatic phenomenon. When Terence Rattigan's play about Lawrence, Ross—taken from another Lawrence pseudonym—opened in 1960, Bever-ley Nichols recalls that after the first night:
Noël was striding up and down a side-street in an almost too well-cut dinner jacket, bubbling with enthusiasm about the play—he is very generous about other men's work if it is good, and quite shattering if it is not. “Wasn't it wonderful,” he said “to see a play in which, for once in a way, the hero was not a juvenile delinquent and the stage not cluttered up with dustbins?”
•
TWO OTHER THINGS of significance happened that summer of 1930.
Noël completed his domestic arrangements by buying 17 Gerald Road, near fashionable Eaton Square. It was the upper part of a large house, which was immediately christened “The Studio.” Soon after, he would buy a small house that backed on to it in Burton Mews, put in a connecting door, and turn that into Lorn's office. This would become his London home until 1956, and its topography is clearly echoed in Garry Essendine's flat in Present Laughter,
The second significant occurrence that year was more of a happy happenstance. Browsing through a tray of old books at Foyle's Charing Cross Road bookshop, Noël happened to leaf through some bound volumes of the Illustrated London News and his eye was caught by a photograph of British troops embarking on a troopship en route for the Boer War. Just as the sounds of Die Fledermaus had conjured up Old Vienna, the illustration he saw brought back childhood memories of the sights and particularly the sounds of the early part of the century.
“Extraordinary how potent cheap music can be” was a line he gave to Amanda in Private Lives, He might well have added “Extraordinary how emotive patriotic songs can be.” He bought the set of books and went home with the martial strains of “Goodbye, Dolly Gray” and “Soldiers of the Queen” playing insistently in his head and a montage of the historic moments he and his fellow countrymen had lived through replaying in his mind.
At home later, he happened to be entertaining an old friend, writer G. B. Stern, and together they talked the idea through, each striking memories off the other. The form of the play was already taking shape. It would be a series of dramatic theatrical snapshots linked by a simple story line—but what to call it? It was to be a sort of procession of history. One of the pictures showed a troop of soldiers on horseback. CAVALCADEl
And that was the “very fancy production at Drury Lane” Noël was in the process of devising in that last letter to Lawrence. But first there was Private Lives.
•
THE SUCCESS OF Private Lives was immediate and absolute. The story is of a couple, Elyot (Noël) and Amanda (Gertie), who can't live with or without one another. They're divorced and remarried—Elyot to Sybil (Adrianne Allen) and Amanda to Victor (Laurence Olivier)—and now, on their second honeymoons, they find themselves at the same hotel and in adjacent suites. The hotel balcony on which Gertie appeared to Noël that night in Tokyo has now been moved to Deauville (not the Riviera), so that Elyot and Amanda can conveniently decamp for Paris once they realize the ghastly mistake they have made. Nice would have taken a day and a half! The critics predictably found the play “thin,” “brittle,” “tenuous,” but the public adored it and many of the people whose opinion Noël valued saw it for the breakthrough it was. It was at this point that British novelist Arnold Bennett dubbed Noël “the Congreve of our day.”
G. B. Stern wrote (September 25):
Doubtless you heard my peals of silvery laughter ringing over the footlights with that individual note of pure childish delight which long ago cuddled its way down into your heart. Several times I was amused when nobody else was. Once or twice everybody else was when I wasn't….
It's delightful comedy—but I don't believe a word of it! Not that that matters. The third act pleased me, specially. I love your treatment of embarrassing situations. Yet, for the moment I'm more dazzled by your gifts as an actor than as a dramatist…what a perfectly finished exquisitely controlled deliriously fastidious and finally satisfying actor! Your love scene in Act 1—your silent behaviour during the breakfast scene at the end were the most excellent.
The scenes on leaving the theatre were appalling…the worst atrocities of the French Revolution cannot compare with them … a crowding fighting surging mob festering in the vortex of the maelstrom between foyer, steps and street…Each man for himself and women and children emphatically not
first…The watching scum of the vast metropolis howled with delight at the ugly passions of the ladies and gentlemen in evening dress cavorting nakedly in the act of self-preservation…With my own eyes I saw H. G. Wells pick up Mrs. Arnold Bennett and hurl her thrice under the wheels of a stampeding automobile. (I can't be quite sure if this is accurate, so you'd better not hand it out to the Press.)
Marie Tempest wrote to say “the play was charming, so was Miss Lawrence. Dear little Adrianne was delightful and looked lovely.” And there were many more letters in the same vein.
Most people took the play as an entertaining exercise in the flippant wit they had come to expect from Noël Coward, but one or two saw beyond that. One correspondent, for instance, wrote: “It struck me as the most brilliant and ingenious thing I'd seen for years—and (but I didn't really get this till later for I was too busy laughing at it)—that the study of the two chief characters went deeper than anything I'd seen of yours.”
Only in recent years have some revivals of the play shown this darker side of Elyot and Amanda. Beneath the sophisticated repartee are two accidental assassins—destined to be destructive of each other and of anyone who comes emotionally close to them.
Private hives was the opening production at London's new Phoenix Theatre on September 24, and its 101-performance run would have been substantially longer if Noël had not insisted that he would no longer appear for more than three months in the same show. In any case he was anxious to take the play to Broadway and consolidate the recent success of This Year of Grace!
•
JANUARY 193 i FOUND him back in New York and writing to Violet:
The Wyndham
42 West 58th Street
Thursday
Darling,
Well, here I am again, and I can say I'm very pleased to see the dear old place again. Oh dear, everybody is always so thrilled to see me here. I'd no idea I was so popular. I've taken a dear little apartment on the roof of a skyscraper in West 58th St. It has the most superb view and is always filled with sun. I've also got my “Town Car,” which is the smartest thing you've ever seen and only about fourpence halfpenny. I've been to several plays and feel very ashamed of the English Theatre.