The Letters of Noel Coward
Page 23
Green Pastures, the negro play, is so heartbreakingly beautiful that it wrecked me, and Lynn Fontanne's performance of Queen Elizabeth in Elizabeth the Queen [Maxwell Anderson] is the most superb individual performance I've ever seen in the Theatre. She looks so like all the pictures of Q.E. it takes her an hour and a half to make up every night. Alfred is lovely as Essex. I've also seen Clifton's show [Three's a Crowd}, which is marvelous and Bart [Herbert] Marshall, who opened last night in a new play [Tomorrow and Tomorrow] with Gilbert Miller.
Oh dearie me, everyone is giving parties for me and I'm just the old fashioned Bell [sic] of New York.
Incidentally I remain
Yours sincerely
Noël Pierce Coward
The “Pierce” is silent as in Bathing [and also misspelled by Noël!]. Give a nod to Mr. Coward and Miss Veitch
The New York cast of Private Lives had three out of the four original principals. Adrianne Allen had a prior commitment in the United Kingdom, and Sybil was played by Jill Esmond, Laurence Olivier's then wife. The play opened at the Times Square Theatre on January 27 and ran for 256 performances. After the contractual three months, Noël and Gertie were replaced by Otto Kruger and Madge Kennedy.
Noël's Sunday letter home was religiously observed:
[Undated—? April 1931]
Friday
Hello Darling,
I've had several letters from you and enjoyed them all tip top….
My present plans are that when the play closes on April 25th I'm going to Bermuda with Jack for two weeks to lie in the sun and then I shall sail home about May 19th. I'm not very keen on Hollywood. I'd rather have a nice cup of cocoa, really.
The Paramount People want to equip me with a camera etc., when I go to South America in the Autumn with Jeffrey, and I think it would be fun to do a travel film on my own, I must say. And then I shall write a sort of lecture and have it recorded and synchronised with the picture afterwards.
I shall spend most of the summer bouncing backwards and forwards between Goldenhurst and London, so you'll see a lot of me. I may go to Finland in June for two weeks with Lynn and Alfred but who knows? Nothing particularly exciting is happening. I'm enjoying myself, and the play's going on exactly the same.
All love and hugs until next week.
SNOOPIE
[Undated—late April]
Darlingest,
Great excitement! Gertie was taken ill on Thursday so I have had to play five performances with the understudy who was very good but still it was agony. So we're closing for two weeks and I'm taking a holiday now instead of later. Jack and I are leaving for Havana tonight.
I'm going to play the play until May 9th instead of April the 25 th to make up the 12 weeks. It's really rather a good plan because we shall be closed for Holy Week when business is always bad, and a nice fortnight in the sun will be lovely.
I'm sailing home probably in the Europa May 19th, so you won't have to wait very much longer before your rheumy old eyes are gladdened by the sight of your ewe lamb. Probably there will be a slight hiatus in my letters to you owing to postage difficulties but I will write regularly as ever. I'll also cable when I arrive. We're going around with Film Cameras so there'll be a new programme for the family when I return.
All love to all and particular hugs to yourself.
SNOOPIE
S.S. Evangeline
[Undated—late April/early May]
Well Darling,
Here I am writing my usual Sunday letter to you from a smallish boat in the middle of the sunny Caribbean Sea. We left Cuba this morning and we're finishing our fortnight in Nassau, where we arrive tomorrow. Havana is very, very beautiful and filled with lovely old buildings, but it's also very gay and smart and the bathing opportunities aren't so good, so we decided to return to our old favourite where we can hire a boat and go swimming around between the Islands. We are already pretty sunburnt and by the time we get back to New York I fully intend to be black.
We re-open the play tomorrow week. It feels funny having a holiday in the middle like this, and very enjoyable. My Spanish came in very useful in Havana, I was surprised to find out how much I knew. It really is a beautiful place. Heavenly drives in the country through Sugar Cane and Banana plantations and masses of every conceivable kind of flower.
We dined out in restaurants outside the town, with trees hung with lights and Spanish orchestras playing very softly. The Oliviers are in Nassau and are meeting us tomorrow. I am sorry to see Arnold Bennett is dead.
Well, not very long now before I shall be back at the Farm. I expect to sail home about May 19th. All love to all and particular hugs.
SNOOPIE
May 8th
Sunday
Darling,
Well, here I am back again, I found several letters from you to welcome me….
I had a letter from Erik asking for some money for his teeth which I am sending him. We spent the first few days of our holiday in Havana and then on to Nassau…Nassau was lovelier than ever. We spent all our time fishing and coasting around the islands in a motor boat. It's the best sort of holiday for me, nothing but sun and sea. The garden sounds lovely with the Daffodils coming out. I'm glad Father is fighting for dear old England. If you start getting Political I should think there'd be hell to pay in the dear old country!
All love Darlingest,
SNOOPIE
I'm very amused about Bitter Sweet re-opening again. George [Georges] Metaxa dined with me last night and told me all the news.
Metaxa had played Carl Linden in the original London production of Bitter Sweet and was later the subject of a Coward verse:
Have you heard about Georgie Metaxa?
His conduct grows laxer and laxer.
His poor little wife is afraid of her life
For he whacks her and whacks her and whacks her,
[Undated—May ?]
Sunday night
Hellow Darling,
How's everything?…Gertie is very well now and everything is going on much as usual … I went to the Circus for the second time tonight and went back and talked to all the animals who were very sweet and sent you their love, particularly the seals who flapped their flappers at the very mention of your name! It's a very magnificent Circus with three rings all going on at once, rather bewildering but highly enjoyable.
I'm longing to get home, if Cochran gets Drury Lane for me I shall sail about the 12 th in order to start work on Cavalcade for September. This is secret so don't say anything except to Sasha [Violet's dachshund]. I should really rather have had the Coliseum but that's impossible. I think anyhow Drury Lane is a little more dignified and traditional.
Goodnight, my darling, until next week. Love to all
SNOOPIE
[Undated—May ?]
Thursday
Darlingest,
I've been very bad and weecked and missed writing to you on Sunday, so I shall send you a cable on or about the day you should have received the letter so that you will be comforted! Everything has descended upon me during these last three weeks and I'm rushing madly about trying to crowd everything in.
I have managed to sell the Cochran Revue [Cochran's 1931 Revue] songs. Three are going into the new Little Show [“Half-Caste Woman” and “Any Little Fish”]. Beatrice Lillie is doing two of them, and a couple more are going into the Ziegfeld Follies, and I have to rehearse them all, added to which Madge Kennedy and Otto Kruger are rehearsing Private Lives and need help. They're playing on here for a few weeks when we stop, and then go on tour for ages. I spend hours at the Dentist having all my teeth well seen to, so you see my life is full. I sail on the Bremen May 12th! I have fixed to open Cavalcade at Drury Lane on September 7th, and as it is not written yet, it looks like being a busy summer. It's all very exciting and enjoyable. I shall do most of the work at Goldenhurst, so keep the house free for me! I'm longing to get home. We're still playing to capacity and everyone thinks I'm crazy!
Love to all and vi
olent hugs to you.
SNOOPIE
•
AFTER THE FINAL PERFORMANCE Noël sailed for home to prepare for what was to be, if anything, an even bigger triumph for him. He had consolidated his theatrical position on both sides of the Atlantic and was now—according to the Daily Express—the world's highest-paid writer, with an annual income of fifty thousand pounds.
But perhaps the biggest legacy he left in both places was the image of “Noël and Gertie.” They would play together once more, and the legend would persist until her premature death, but this was where the magic took imperishable shape. “Sometimes in Private hives,” Noël wrote, “I would look across the stage at Gertie and she would simply take my breath away.”
INTERMISSION
PLAY PARADE
“A TEMPLE OF DREAMS”
The Theatre … is a house of strange enchantment, a temple of dreams.
NOËL COWARD
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950) was the first major playwright to take serious notice of the young Noël, but other contemporaries soon followed suit, and it was not long before Noël himself felt able to offer professional advice to his own contemporaries—as he had to Esme.
He learned one of his early lessons in 1917, from American producer Gilbert Miller, who urged him to concentrate on plot construction before allowing himself the license to begin writing the dialogue that always came so easily to him.
Miller said that “the construction of a play was as important as the foundations of a house, whereas dialogue, however good, could only, at best, be considered as interior decoration. No mood, however exquisite, is likely to hold the attention of an audience for two hours and a half unless it is based on a solid structure.”
It was a lesson Noël was to learn the hard way in the late 1920s, when after a string of successes—The Vortex, Easy Virtue, Hay Fever, and Fallen Angels—he took out of his metaphorical suitcase a play he had tossed off on that first crowded visit to America in 1921.
He sent the play to Sir James Barrie (1860—1937), who had made encouraging noises about some of Noël's earlier work. Barrie was professionally perceptive about this one, Sirocco:
Adelphi Terrace House Strand
W.C.2.
February 18th 1928
Dear Coward,
I have read Sirocco which you kindly sent me and in many ways I think it a brilliant piece of work. In construction and the flow of it it is probably the best of your things, as far as I know them, but I don't think it really is worthwhile doing. There is nothing special of yourself in it— in structure or in thought—to give me at least the idea that I got from The Vortex that a real live new dramatist was appearing. (Of course it is live to the point of violence but that is not the kind of life I mean.) Change the scene to England (leaving out Sirocco, which has nothing vital to do with the play)…This may be all wrong—at any rate it is the view of one who has a warm belief in you.
Yours sincerely,
J. M. Barrie
Don't think I am wanting you to “conceive” like your predecessors. No good in that. You belong to your time—they to theirs. Give us yourself or nothing, but your best self. (This is a little too solemn. Be gay also while you can.)
This aspect of Noël's belonging to his own time was one that was repeated by many.
•
ALTHOUGH THE THOUGHT might not have pleased Shaw, the greatest influence on the early Coward was undoubtedly W. Somerset Maugham (1874—1965). Maugham and Coward chose the basic drawing room drama genre and then proceeded to go beyond its traditionally accepted boundaries. For a while Coward and Maugham were professional contemporaries, then—when Maugham literally quit the stage—they remained wary friends, pacing around each other, as someone described it, like a couple of panthers.
Noël, “Willie” Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), and Leonard Lyons at the Villa Mauresque. From the late 1920s Noël was increasingly viewed as “the new Somerset Maugham.” Maugham cheerfully admitted that Noël would probably “be responsible for the manner in which plays will be written during the next thirty years.”
From the late 1920s comparisons between the two men were made more and more often, and at a point Maugham himself accepted the situation with good grace. For the first published collection of three of Noël's plays, he accepted Noël's invitation to write a preface in which he said:
For us English dramatists the young generation has assumed the brisk but determined form of Mr. Noël Coward. He knocked at the door with impatient knuckles, and then he rattled the handle, and then he burst in. After a moment's stupor the older playwrights welcomed him affably enough and retired with what dignity they could muster to the shelf which with a spritely gesture he indicated to them as their proper place…and, since there is no one now writing who has more obviously a gift for the theatre than Mr. Noël Coward, nor more influence with young writers, it is probably his inclination and practice that will be responsible for the manner in which plays will be written during the next thirty years.
As the years went by Maugham became increasingly disenchanted with the medium and his own ability to contribute to it further. In 1933 he showed the script of what turned out to be his last play, Sheppey, to Noël, who made a number of suggestions.
Maugham replied:
Ormonde House
St. James's Street
S.W.i.
Friday
Noël my pet,
Thank you for your nice wire. I hope you will enjoy the play…You will notice that I took a good deal of your advice, but left some of the things you objected to. Either because I thought they sounded all right or else because the cast implored me not to make the suggested changes. This I tell you because I know it is exasperating to have one's advice asked and not taken.
Bless you
Willie.
After the opening night Noël wrote Maugham a polite but critical letter:
Goldenhurst Farm
Friday
Dearest Willie,
Well, I went to the play and I really am thankful that I read it beforehand because it seemed quite a different shape. I thought Angela Baddely [sic], Cicely Oates, the manicuriste and the little sneak-thief excellent and authentic but I thought most of the others false and theatrical. [Ralph] Richardson, I think, has a quality but it didn't seem the right one for Sheppey. I almost bowed in acknowledgment when he occasionally condescended to drop an aitch just to show he was of humblish origin. Up against the brilliantly sustained cockney of Oates and Baddely, his ringing, beautifully modulated voice was so dreadfully incongruous that it sent me off into a great Shakespearean rage!
I would like permanently to draw a veil over Laura Cowie but I fear no veil would be thick enough to cover such vintage theatrical-ism. Oh Willie, Willie, how very naughty of you to write a play filled with subtle implications and exquisite satire and then cheerfully allow dull witted lunatics to cast it!
I wouldn't be so violent about it except that I really do mind.
I thought the production adequate and the lighting appalling.
Do forgive me, Willie dear, for being so beastly but I do love your work so much better than anyone else's and please, please, if you do write another play, let me see it early and cast it for you!
All my love,
NOËL
To which Maugham replied:
Ormonde House
St. James's Street
S.W.I.
September 25 th
Noël my pet,
I am sorry you were disappointed in the performance of Sheppey, I was a little, but I do not really care. I sat in my box at the first night feeling like a disembodied spirit. I have done with playwriting. I know now that I made a mistake in writing plays and then washing my hands of them. But it is too late to regret that I did not do something that I disliked and probably should not have done any better than the people in whose hands I left it. I cannot tell you how I loathe the theatre. It is all very well for you, you are author, actor and producer
. What you give an audience is all your own; the rest of us have to content ourselves with at the best an approximation of what we see in the mind's eye. After one has got over the glamour of the stage and the excitement, I do not myself think the theatre has much to offer the writer compared with the other mediums in which he has complete independence and need consider no one.
Bless you,
Willie
Maugham, nonetheless, continued to be a role model for Noël, both as a writer and as a man. In Point Valaine (1935) Noël creates in the character of the writer Mortimer Quinn, a hybrid version of himself and Maugham, with a romantically exaggerated philosophy of life: “I always affect to despise human nature. My role in life is so clearly marked: cynical, detached, unscrupulous, an ironic observer and recorder of other people's passions. It is a nice facade to sit behind, but a trifle bleak.”
Noël and Maugham's intermittent friendship continued after the war. Maugham was every bit as playful as Noël when it came to signing his letters. It was invariably “Uncle William” or “Willie,” but on one occasion he felt the need to explain: “When I was in the show business I used to call myself ‘Somerset’, but now that I have retired…I've dropped it because I can't abide swank and besides I don't need it.”
In 1945 Maugham saw Noël's revue Sigh No More and was amused by the character called “Willy” in a song of that name who is tugged between good angels and bad:
Willy— Willy— Willy
Don't waste your time with wrongs and rights,
There can be more exciting lights,
Stroll down Piccadilly,
Never mind, never mind what they say,
Gather rosebuds while you may,
What are you afraid of,
Purity can be overdone,
hearn to be gay and have some fun,
That's what boys are made for.