by Noel Coward
Neshobe Island
August first
Lamb of God:
I am sending this word of affection and inquiry and am moved to do so by the notion that you might be susceptible to a suggestion that you come over and sample life on the island. I will be here until October and then intermittently through October while I make brief angry visits to New York for broadcasting purposes. The island is loveliest in October, gayest in August. In the latter part of August, Neysa and the Lunts and God knows who else will be here.
I am glad Neysa is coming back. She was here in July and left a trifle the worse for wear. In one ill-starred Badminton game, I was her zealous but unwieldy partner. In one behemothian lunge at a quill, my racket struck Neysa instead—hitting her on the head and laying her out stiffer than a plank. After she had been revived and the game resumed, I flung myself into the contest with all the old ardor, leaping about like a well-nourished gazelle and coming down with all my weight, such as it is, on the little lady's foot. Later I upset her out of the canoe into the cool, sweet waters of the lake. But only once. So she left in good humor and will be back on these shores on the 21st inst.
I think there's very little chance of your responding to this suggestion, but it did seem to me there was a possibility of your being— Good God, there's a “very” in this sentence!—of your being fed up with whomever you're with at the moment of its arrival. I wish you could have come in at breakfast-time yesterday. I was having mine alone—no one else was up yet—partaking in consoling quantities of the thick, whitish honey from the Riviera which the Otis Skinners had brought over the day before from Woodstock and weeping softly because once again I had reached that final chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, which always lays me low. It fills me with brotherly love which wears off about noon.
Anyway, write me and tell me how you are. And how Jeff [Amherst], whom I love, is. Come to think of it, I'd rather have Jeff come over to the island than you. So please send this letter on to him without reading it. And don't think I'll listen to any of this nonsense about your both coming. I can't have this pine-scented nook crawling with Englishmen.
My obeisances to Ladi Vi.
A. WOOLLCOTT
On November 5 Noël is sending Violet “a line to say au revoir—auf wiedersehen and Abyssinia,” as he boards the SS Normandie once more, heading for New York. This time it was to stage a Broadway revue, Set to Musk, a revised version of the 1932 Words and Musk, The star was to be his old sparring partner Beatrice Lillie, generally accepted as being one of the funniest ladies around but one who—as Noël knew to his past chagrin—was known as someone who tended not to remember the lines as written.
As she was making her own eccentric way to New York, he cabled her:
OCTOBER 1938
LADY PEEL
QUEEN MARY
PRETTY WITTY LADY PEEL
never mind how sick you feel
never mind your broken heart
CONCENTRATE AND LEARN YOUR PART
To which she replied:
THANKS MUSTY DUSTY NOËL C
FOR BEASTLY WIRE
TO LADY P TO CONCENTRATE IS HARD I FEAR
SO NOW SHES CRYING IN HER BEER
For Gladys Calthrop, who was on the same ship as Lillie, Noël had a word of cabled advice—perhaps remembering her earlier fateful Atlantic experience with Eva Le Gallienne:
LOCK YOUR CABIN DOOR MY DARLING
LOCK YOUR CABIN DOOR
OTHER THINGS THAN WAR MY DARLING
THINGS WE ALL ABHOR MY DARLING
THREATEN YOU ONCE MORE MY DARLING
WHEN AWAY FROM SHORE MY DARLING
LOCK YOUR CABIN DOOR
Other correspondence on the show had a more ominous tone. Jack cabled:
SUGGEST YOU ENGAGE EIGHT REALLY BEAUTIFUL SHOWGIRLS
MORE OR LESS SAME HEIGHT STOP NO PARTICULAR TALENT
REQUIRED STOP ALSO NEED CLOSE HARMONY TRIO
But then Jack was in New York and felt none of the tensions of Munich that were hard to ignore if one was in London. Noël replied:
GRAVE POSSIBILITY OF WAR WITHIN NEXT FEW WEEKS OR DAYS
STOP IF THIS HAPPENS POSTPONEMENT REVUE INEVITABLE AND
ANNIHILATION ALL OF US PROBABLE
As it happened, it was the inevitable that was postponed, and preparations for the show continued. In his November n letter to Violet he reports not only theatrical progress:
Rehearsals now getting to the hectic stage but going marvelously. Beattie is funnier than ever … Gladys [who was doing the sets and costumes] is practically a stretcher case, running between the revue and Dear Octopus [for which she was also doing sets] but I think she'll survive. I think my birthday treat is going to turn out to be a lighting rehearsal. Goody, goody, what fun!
But another piece of world theater was also being staged in parallel. On September 29 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, supposedly guaranteeing “Peace with Honour.” Skeptics saw this as further evidence of appeasement toward the Nazis and Fascists, but the government was anxious to explain and justify its stance to other major powers and dispatched one of its most senior statesmen to do just that, Anthony Eden:
We've had the most terrific excitement owing to the arrival of the Edens. The ship was late so the wretched Anthony had to be met by a special cutter and brought roaring down the river in order to be in time to make his speech. He had the most terrific reception and his speech was marvelous. I need hardly say I was sitting practically in his lap. He is tremendously popular here and I think his visit has been most useful. No more news now, darlingest. I've got to take the Edens and the Gary Coopers out to dinner.
(Ironically, Eden—who was then secretary of state for foreign affairs— resigned shortly afterward as a result of Munich.)
But politics soon took up their proper place as Set to Musk went into rehearsal.
I must say the show girls in this town are lovely looking and there are thousands of them, so all one has to do is just choose. We've already chosen twelve of the loveliest I've ever seen and all the same height and all different types and able to move well.
Bea Lillie. (Hand and cigarette by— guess who.)
Jack is nearly going mad, what with casting the revue and Dear Octopus I need hardly say he's having much more trouble with the latter because Glen Byam Shaw who's directing it hasn't got quite my determination, and so people keep on saying they will play a part and then they won't—and it's all very enjoyable!
What was less enjoyable:
There was a terrific blizzard last night and I fell on my face getting out of a taxi into a snow drift. I'm sure the driver thought I was drunk, which was unfair as I'd only had an onion sandwich and a glass of milk!
December 6th
Everything is going beautifully so far and Beattie has never been so funny in her life. I have written a new Persian song for her in which she sings as she works at her tapestry, which she has been working on for years, stitching her dream-lover—unfortunately at the end she gets so carried away by her singing that she catches the wool on her foot without noticing and unravels the whole thing! She is very happy with her material and there haven't been any squalls yet.
Cap d'Antibes, 1931. Bea Lillie and Noël about to go to “a marvelous party” thrown by American socialite Elsa Maxwell— only to find that they were the “entertainment.”
December 29
Boston
The revue opened on Monday night and went through without a hitch. Beattie was marvelous and it really was a smash success! Of course New York may be a bit more difficult to please but I really think we're all right judging from what the audiences feel. We rehearse a little every day just to polish up bits and pieces. We are all feeling very pleased with ourselves and it certainly is a comfort after Operette to come into the theatre and see five rows of standees and everyone cheering and yelling!
Set to Musk opened at New York's Music Box Theatre on January 18, 193
9, and ran for a modest 129 performances. As soon as it was safely launched, Noël wrote to Violet, who was undergoing treatment in Switzerland for her chronic deafness:
January 21st
I'm off I'm off I'm off! Isn't it lovely—particularly when I can leave a smash hit behind me!
“Off” was to spend a couple of days with Alfred and Lynn, then on to Hollywood for a week to stay with Cary Grant and then … “a nice comfortable suite on a nice comfortable ship and, I hope, a nice lot of sunshine!”
His original plan had been to go to Pago-Pago, but when he got to Hollywood, he changed his mind, sent Coley a cryptic cable—”BUTTERING NO PARSNIPS”—and went to his beloved Honolulu instead. (The line from Proverbs is “Fine words butter no parsnips,” presumably meaning that empty words get one nowhere. Noël was saying that the offers he had received in Hollywood fell firmly into that category.)
1018 Ocean
Front Santa Monica, California
February 1st
Darlingest,
I've had a lovely week here staying with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott in a little house right on the edge of the sea. I've been whirling about from studio to studio and party to party hobnobbing with all the glamour boys and girls. I was photographed upside down and inside out with Shirley Temple whom I must say is sweet. I did an hour's broadcast on Sunday with Ronnie Coleman [sic], Carole Lombard, Cary and the Marx Brothers for which I was paid a thousand pounds! Of course I shan't see much of it owing to the income tax but it was a nice thought!
Norma Shearer gave a party for me last night. Everyone was there—Claudette Colbert, Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, etc., etc., etc., and they're all coming in a mass to see me off at the boat tonight.
I'm going to Honolulu to stay with the Dillinghams for a few days and then find some quiet little house by the sea and just relax for a month …
On February 7 he found Honolulu “such a beautiful island at this time of the year when there is a certain amount of rain every day. It looks newly washed and all the flowers and trees look as tho’ they had been varnished.” There was “a curving sandy beach fringed with palms and soft feathery ironwood trees and a great headland of mountains in the distance. I have actually two little shacks—one to live in and one to sleep in and a little verandah on each with a rocking chair.” His only company was “a fat old Japanese woman who comes in and cooks very badly.”
“I'm having my one weekly outing tonight and going to a LUAU which is an Hawaiian open air dinner where they roast pigs and eat them with bread fruit and Taro, etc. Then I shall drive off to my little hideout in the moonlight!”
Then it was back to Hollywood … Cary Grant (again) … Alfred and Lynn … and finally home on April i on the Normandie,
•
THE EARLY SUMMER was spent writing at Goldenhurst. At the end of May he was bringing Woollcott up to date:
I Burton Mews
South Eaton Place, London S.W.i.
31st May 1939
Dearest pretty Aweeza,
With any luck I may come flying into your arms, burrowing my head on your shoulder, sometime during the summer. In the meantime my news is this:
A. I have written a new comedy, very gay I think, which I am going to play here in the autumn.
B. I have finished my book of short stories. There are seven of them and I can guarantee that one at least you will like.
C. We are going mad at the moment over the Actors’ Orphanage because our Theatrical Garden Party is next week and I am spending every night of this week rushing madly through all the West End theatres making impassioned appeals. I am looking astonishingly pretty considering everything. You would be the first to admit this, however bitterly.
London is calming down. Nobody expects a war now for a month or two. The Prime Minister is fishing. Sybil Colefax is entertaining but not very. The bluebells are out and I sometimes throw myself down among them laughing. Peggy Wood has sailed away in a blaze of Baby talk and there is no more news whatsoever. By reading between the lines in the papers I suspect that the King and Queen are visiting Canada and America. If you should knock up against them try and behave and carry the whole thing off with what remains of your tattered dignity.
All my love, dear Aweeza
NOLIE POELIE
In fact, Noël wrote two plays that summer—This Happy Breed (a semi-sequel to Cavalcade, taking events up to the present) and Such Sweet Sorrow, which became Present Laughter, the new comedy he refers to. Both were intended for September production but, in the event, neither achieved it for reasons totally nontheatrical.
Noël's life was about to enter an entirely new phase, and it began that July.
PART THREE
NOËL'S WAR
PERSONAL NOTE
Creative impulse, whether fine, austere,
Or light in texture, great in scope, or small,
Owes to its owner, if it's true at all,
Some moments of release. In this dark year,
When all the world is shadowed, when the time
Essential to the clear process of thought
Is so accelerated, I have sought
Relief by these excursions into rhyme.
I must explain I have no mind just now
To write light operettes, revues or plays,
Nor leisure, for these swiftly moving days
Have set my hand to quite a different plough.
I feel my spirit battered, bludgeoned, sore,
All my ideas seem pale, oppressed by doom,
Like frightened children in a burning room,
Scurrying back and forth to find the door.
LEFT: Caricature by Vicky. RIGHT: Noël's personal philosophy as he contemplated the coming war.
CHAPTER 16
WORLD WAR II: ‘TWENTIETH CENTURY BLUES”
(1938-1940)
Why is it that civilized humanity
Must make the world so wrong?
In this hurly-burly of insanity
Our dreams cannot last long.
“TWENTIETH CENTURY BLUES,” FROM CAVALCADE (1951)
THE IMPRESSION one gets of “Noël's War,” as he himself recounts it in his 1954 autobiography, Future Indefinite, is that it began with a mysterious out-of-the-blue phone call from a Sir Campbell Stuart demanding a midnight meeting with Noël at Coward's Gerald Road house.
The naivete of Noël's account was both false and forced—by the exigencies of the Official Secrets Act, which bound to silence for many years anyone even slightly involved in government intelligence. In fact, it was only in 1973, in the month before his death, that Noël felt able to give any real account of his wartime activities. As his interviewer remarked afterward, “It was as though he felt the need to get it on the record.”
It's necessary to recall the prevailing political climate of the late 1930s. Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, and by 1938 it was clear he had ambitions to dominate at least Europe. In that year he annexed Austria and was laying claim to part of Czechoslovakia. In England, Neville Chamberlain was prime minister, leading a Conservative Party that was largely in favor of “appeasement.” What Hitler was doing was none of Britain's business, and perhaps he was entitled to unify the German-speaking peoples. In any case, another world war was a ludicrous idea. We were only just getting over the last one.
As early as November 1932, many of Noël's friends were taking sides.
Noël went wherever he was asked to go to entertain the armed forces … The Antipodes or the Middle East … South Africa or Burma.
Some were taking a violent point of view for disarmament—if that isn't a contradiction in terms. Beverley Nichols invited Noël to a meeting at the Albert Hall. Noël sent his regrets and added:
I'm certainly all for disarmament, providing that every other country is all for disarmament too. As now everything seems so chaotic in this delicious civilisation I should think that the really best thing to do is for all of us to slay each other as swiftly and
efficiently as possible. I'd love to see you before I go.
On September 29, 1938, Chamberlain was a signatory—along with Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier for France—to the Munich Agreement, supposedly a nonaggression pact. Chamberlain returned to London and was photographed on the steps of his aeroplane waving a piece of paper. For Noël, “the pre-war past died on the day when Mr. Neville Chamberlain returned with such gay insouciance.” Noël hated very few people, but “that bloody conceited old sod” (whose neck, he claimed, was too thin for his collar) was near the top of his personal list.
Although the “appeasers” were in power, a strong countermovement was building and rallying around the controversial Winston Churchill, back in the Conservative Party but out of cabinet office. In the Civil Service— a body that maintains continuity, no matter which political party is in office—the same unofficial role was being played by Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart (1881—1957), permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1937 and now a powerful Whitehall “mandarin” waiting in the wings, so to speak. Vansittart took it upon himself to build the case for rearmament, and to do that he had to piece together evidence of what Hitler was really planning and what the opinion was among Britain's European neighbors. To do that he set up a network of unofficial “agents,” made up of businessmen and celebrities who had legitimate business in European cities and now a private “brief” to report back to Vansittart.
Robert (later Lord) Vansittart (1881-1957). A senior diplomat at the Foreign Office, he became alarmed by the government's policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany and recruited Noël, among others, to sound out foreign opinion on Hitler's intentions.
Noël was recruited as one of Vansittart's men. Precisely when is impossible to say, but early 1938 would seem likely. What Noël saw concerned him deeply, since it was in direct opposition to what many of his friends were choosing to see.