The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  Yours ever,

  John

  Twenty years later Noël was to do just that.

  •

  ON NOVEMBER 24 Tonight at 8:3o opened at New York's National Theatre, and Noël wrote to Violet:

  450 East 52nd Street

  November 27 th

  Well, the first lot have opened and were a triumph—we begin the second bill tonight and the third on Monday. The excitement is terrific. The critics—as in London—are slightly grudging. I think they are all irritated by the tremendous fuss that goes on over everything I do. When Gertie and I came on on the first night the audience went on applauding for nearly three minutes and there we stood just mouthing at each other! We are sold out for twelve weeks and I may have to play an extra month.

  I am, however, very worried about you and Father. It seems to me to be a thoroughly horrid situation … Oh dear, I wish I were there to be a comfort to you. I really am deeply angry over Father's behaviour—it seems to me to be common, unkind, unnecessary and supremely ridiculous.

  (Mr. Coward, now approaching senility, believed himself to be in love with a lady who lived locally and had a certain “reputation.”)

  December 8th

  We are absolutely the smash success of the town … I think I'm going to do an hour on the radio once a week, it is frightfully well paying and I want to make as much as I can this season so that I can lay off for a year and have no contracts at all! I'm happy and well and as bright as a button!

  December 16th

  Well darling,

  Thirty-seven years ago today I popped out and oh dear, look at me now!

  I must say everything is more than satisfactory here. We are apparently the biggest box office success that New York has known for years. We turn away an average of 200 people every performance.

  I'm glad the Yorks are King and Queen. They will be steady and gracious and dignified which, after all, is all that is required. I am now more than a little tired of the dear Duke of Windsor and I don't care if he marries Mrs. Wallis Simpson or Nellie Wallace [a famous British music hall star]. The whole thing has been very unpleasant and quite unnecessary. I'm dreadfully sorry for poor Queen Mary.

  I've known for years that he had a common mind and liked second rate people and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.

  I hope you're not still worried and irritated too much about Father and that ass of a woman … The whole thing is too ridiculous to do anything but laugh at!

  December 30th

  They did Cavalcade on the air the night before last and I broadcasted a speech from my dressing room in between plays! It really was fantastic. Cecil B. de Mille spoke to me from Hollywood where the thing was being done and I answered from my dressing room and then listened to the applause three thousand miles away! We certainly live in a remarkable age.

  January 15th 1937

  The other day I saw a private showing of Garbo in Camille, She has never looked so lovely or acted so well, the only disadvantage is that it makes you cry dreadfully.

  January 29th

  I am learning German in bits out of a book because I think it will be useful and Joyce and Alan are going to the Berlitz to learn Spanish! So the conversation in the theatre is distinctly cosmopolitan.

  February 12th

  I couldn't be more exhausted. I was up until six this morning running this enormous Benefit for the Flood Relief at Radio City Music Hall. The show started at 12:30 and finished at 5:00 a.m! I was Master of Ceremonies and had to introduce all the stars as well as do “Dance, Little Lady” myself with an orchestra of 70. The whole thing was incredible. There were 11 thousand people in the place itself and 100,000,000 listening in as the whole thing was broadcast all over the country. I had to make a series of tactful speeches and it was great fun although tiring.

  Every star in New York appeared including Stravinsky, Helen Hayes, the Russian Ballet—Beatrice Lillie—Gladys Cooper—Luise Rainer—Gertie. Oh Dear, really. Everybody (even Sir Cedric!). (He refused to appear unless I introduced his idiotic wife too whom no one had ever heard of. So I introduced “Sir Cedric and Lady Hard-wicke” and then, immediately afterwards—”Miss Beatrice Lillie and Lady Peel!” There was a nice big laugh!)

  Of course I don't mind [Aunt] Ida being at Goldenhurst, she will at least keep the de Pomeroy wolf [Father's local inamorata] from the door … Poor Father—it is very agitating about him, isn't it? I think he really started to get a bit “ga-ga” a long time ago. I am afraid that eventually he will have to be stopped driving his car, because he is putting other people to considerable danger.

  We're still jogging along. I'm now counting the days as really it has become boring. However, I'm taking a year off so my patience will be well rewarded … I'm going to devote most of my time to Europe and the near East.

  As it turned out, the days dwindled down to a precious few.

  March 11th

  Well, I'm free at last—I've had a beastly eight weeks because I knew I was getting tireder and tireder. Ten days ago, on a Saturday night I started to cry during Shadow Play, Alan [Webb, his current lover] and Joyce [Carey] came down to Fairfield [Jack Wilson's home] with me after the show and Jack was frightfully sweet and said I was to lay off for a week, which I did, returning last Monday for the last three weeks. However, the flesh wasn't willing enough and on Tuesday night I began forgetting my lines and feeling simply awful. I barely got through the show and we realized it wasn't any good, so all the advance booking was returned the next day and we closed for good [after 118 performances]. I am actually in myself quite well but so tired I can't see straight.

  I leave tomorrow for Nassau with Alan and Joyce in the sun— then back here for a week—then Bermuda for two weeks and then home …

  On April 28 the SS Normandie duly took Noël back to England in time for the Coronation. Here was one thing, Noël felt, that showed that England was back on the right track. But there were other, more disquieting straws in the political wind.

  CHAPTER 15

  OPERETTE … AND STRAWS IN THE WIND

  (1937-1938)

  Where are the songs we sung

  When hove in our hearts was young?

  Where, in the limbo of the swiftly passing years,

  hie all our hopes and dreams and fears?

  Where have they gone—words that rang so true

  When hove in our hearts was new?

  Where in the shadows that we have to pass among,

  Lie those songs that once we sung?

  “WHERE ARE THE SONGS WE SUNG,” OPERETTE (1958)

  Schloss Kammer-am-Attersee in Austria.

  Eleanora von Mendelssohn (1899-1951). During a visit to her home in 1937, Noël dreamed up the idea that would become Operette (1938). Mendelssohn moved to New York and they remained close friends until her tragic suicide (1935).

  THE NEXT TWO YEARS had something of a jigsaw quality to them and not all the pieces seemed to quite fit. And, in fact, for much of Noël's life the enormous successes were likely to be followed by a lull in which he would tackle a number of projects without being sure on which of them he should concentrate.

  There were a number of positive things to be celebrated. The Coronation was certainly one. The success of his autobiography, Present Indicative, on both sides of the Atlantic, was another. And now he treated himself to another holiday—once again with his friends in the Royal Navy on HMS Arethusa. From the Arethusa he wrote to Lorn:

  When I visit Venice Italy

  Lorn's before me pouting prettily

  Then again vast Yugo Slavia

  Reeks of horn's divine behavia

  Fishes in the Adriatic

  Gasp for horn, become ecstatic,

  Dive and swoop and dive again

  Bubbling “Viva, horn horaine!”

  In Albania every peasant

  Makes a really most unpleasant

  Rude grimace if I refuse

  To tell them

  Lornie's latest news


  Serbians and Slavs and Croats

  Make strange noises in their throats

  When they sight the Arethusa

  Crying “horn! You mustn't lose her”

  Everywhere, now here, now there

  In the water, in the air,

  On the mountain, on the plain

  Comes again and yet again

  That persistent fierce refrain—

  “Viva, Viva, horn horaine!”

  But this time the sailing was not entirely plain. The Mediterranean cruise stopped short at Valencia and Gibraltar. The Spanish Civil War was under way, an out-of-town tryout for what was soon to come—though few wished to see it in that light.

  •

  IN JULY Noël went to spend some time with Eleonora von Mendelssohn (1899—1951) at her Schloss Kammer-am-Attersee, in Austria. She would become a close friend in years to come and, when she moved to New York, one of the inner circle, until her tragic suicide.

  “This place is absolutely lovely,” Noël wrote to Violet. “It is an nth century castle on a lake and dead quiet. There is nothing to do but ride and swim and read and in the evening we go and sit in the garden of the local inn and drink beer and listen to the village band, which is very brassy and plays ‘The Blue Danube’ while the sun sets over the lake … I'm staying here a week to ten days.”

  Here he met another of his musical theater idols from his first visit to Berlin in the early 1920s, Fritzi Massary (1882—1969), the Viennese Yvonne Printemps. Recently widowed, she was now semiretired and, being Jewish, anxious to leave Hitler's Germany. Once again the presence of a particular talent inspired Noël to create a setting for it.

  He concocted a story line there and then—a “play with music,” as he had done with Conversation Piece, (“I am writing Fritzi as herself,” he wrote to Eleonora, “giving her three good songs, one in each act. The play is quite mad … It isn't strictly Kammer but a sort of exaggerated theatrical version of it.”)

  He then set it aside in favor of another treatment that featured a “play within a play,” a format he had experimented with in a key sequence in Cavalcade, Of one thing, though, he was certain. Fritzi Massary would star. Back home in England he wrote to her offering her the lead, and sight unseen, she replied:

  Fritzi Massary (1882—1969), star ofOperette. “I promise I won't be kakanaiv.”

  Kammer

  11 August 1937

  My dear Noël,

  Happiness—excitement—gratitude were the feelings released in me when I read your letter. I will sing like mad—learn English till I burst and—as I told you—come when you send for me—so— October in London!

  One thing I can promise you—I won't be kaknaiv fas naive as shit]—I won't be klugscheisserisch fa smart-ass].

  Have a lovely time in America with luck in everything and I hope to meet you in London as charming as only you can be!!! There is one more thing I meant to tell you—I never thought any one would ever be able to stir up so much in me again and if nothing comes of it— I am and always will be your

  FRITZI

  On September 12, Arthur Coward died and put several people out of their misery. Two days later, Noël—now staying with the Lunts at Gene-see Depot—wrote:

  Darlingest,

  I am so terribly sorry not to be with you through all this. My only comfort is my complete faith in your common sense, but however sensible you are you are bound to have some horrid hours and I do wish I was near to comfort you.

  I am so relieved that he died peacefully and without any struggle. I am also really relieved that he died when he did. It would have been awful both for him and for us if he had dragged on indefinitely …

  Jack and Alan broke the news to me after the afternoon rehearsal just before the first night and it was lucky they did, as it came over the radio a half an hour later … The Press were after me pell mell so I hopped into a train and came straight here that night.

  •

  OPERETTE never sEEMED to flow as his earlier shows had—neither in conception nor in execution. The story is of an Edwardian musical comedy star (Massary) who refuses to marry a British aristocrat, since he will lose his army commission if she does. Then, for some reason, there is a pastiche musical (“The Model Maid”) inside the main show. While there were some charming songs, the totality was slight and more than distinctly deja-vu—an obvious attempt to recapture Bitter Sweet, The line between the play and the play-within-a-play became so blurred that Noël recalled “peering from my box … and watching bewildered playgoers rustling their programmes and furtively striking matches in a frantic effort to discover where they were and what was going on.”

  He came to consider it “the least successful musical play I have ever done.” It opened at His Majesty's Theatre on March 16 and ran for 133 performances. It is never revived.

  Noël made the occasional desultory attempt to persuade himself and others that all was well. He wrote to Woollcott:

  March 21st

  Darling Weeza,

  This is just to let you know that my Operette has opened (not the one I read to you at all) and is a smash success and anyhow very charming …

  Everybody is very well though slightly depressed by the activities of Mr. Hitler. I am now going off to join the Navy for two months.

  The summer of 1938 was spent in Europe, mostly traveling with the Mediterranean Fleet. Venice, Cyprus, Albania, Yugoslavia—wherever they went and however sybaritic the experience, there was no escaping the reality that the world he knew was seething with discontent. You could turn a myopic eye to it but not a blind one.

  In early April he was in Cairo and writing to Gladys Calthrop from the British embassy:

  Here I am in a gay social whirl feeling a little mizzy about Operette but rising above it as there is obviously nothing else to do—maybe the grosses will pick up after the political unrest has abated a bit and when Christ has once more risen like a rocket on Easter Sunday.

  Life here is a fever of gay cosmopolitan junketing and at every party you hear very small dark Italians muttering “Grand Bretagne” and “Penible” [painful, troublesome] under their breaths.

  I've been taken up by the Egyptians in a big way and they show me endless mosques and monasteries and mosaics and I am very very gracious about everything and drink a great deal of fucking awful coffee.

  On the fourteenth he is writing from Government House, Jerusalem:

  Well Cock,

  I flew here yesterday and it's a fair fucker except for the Arabs and Jews fighting and me having to faire the gentil promenade surrounded by armed guards on account of being shot in the fork. Really, the way everyone's gone on to me about the Holy Land. There isn't anything to see except places where Jesus might have done whatever it was but no one is sure because Jerusalem the G[olden] having been razed to the ground n times and no nonsense everything has been built over and over again on everything else and there are far too many churches. The Wailing Wall's a bit of all right tho’ with a lot of Bertie Meyers really wailing like anything.

  This afternoon I bathed in the Dead Sea or rather sat in it because you can't do anything else and it feels most silly.

  Love and kisses,

  Pontius

  In Venice he ran into Ivor Novello and reported to Gladys:

  He is being very sweet, I need scarcely say, and quite idiotic. He wears a pair of terra cotta rompers on the beach and has already alluded twice to the King and Queen as ‘Our dear little couple’. I am waiting for the third time …

  Valentina [the dress designer] is floating about looking the acme of something or other … She's wonderful with the Navy and makes lovely conversations about souls being like colours and the Piazza being a vast baroque room. There are millions of queens here all in Lanvin shorts and when Lady Pound (my late hostess in the Aberdeen), who is concerned at my inviting some of my “fine friends” on board, I said—”Take care of the Pansies and the Pounds will take care of themselves!” Wasn't it a lovely joke and nobody under
stood it but the Captain and he only dimly! Oh la la la, comme la vie est fucking drole and no error …

  The Italians are ever so friendly to the English and I have a shrewd suspicion that the Rome-Berlin entente underneath is all my eye and Betty Pollock.

  Love and tisses

  Whistler

  Once more into the Breach. Oh Christ!

  From Yugoslavia he reports further on Ivor's exploits with the Navy:

  He wore a Panama hat and saluted with it upon arriving on board which was pretty fine. The Captain said afterwards with a gleam in his eye. “Nice fellow, thoroughly feminine without being effeminate!”

  I'm so pleased you've finally finished your Book! And I take back all I said about you being an indolent bitch and now say you're as nippy and clever as paint, so there! Your telegram was flown dramatically alongside by the ship's plane and an able seaman swam with it in his mouth! Wasn't it lovely? I drink to it silently in some very nasty wine indeed made of distilled monk's blood and ammonia but it's the thought that counts.

  This place [Rab] is heaven—nothing to do but bathe starko (I say!!!) and read Milton to improve my spirit and more Milton to discourage my crabs. I have been water skiing without conspicuous success owing to the joints of the skis going up my nose and the backs of them up my arse but I'm pressing on. I think life is absolutely ripping if only you live true—what do you think?

  SHELLEY

  By way of incidental entertainment he stopped off in Rome and attended a Fascist rally, where he thought Mussolini “looked like an overripe plum squeezed into a white uniform and laughed so dreadfully and had a seat so close I had to leave for fear of being flung into jug.” In retrospect, though, it would seem comedie noire.

  Joke as he might, it was hard not to notice the widening gap between European angst and the determined hedonism of the United States when he received letters like Woollcott's: