by Noel Coward
I will write you immediately I arrive in England.
I do hope that the talk to the “Bright Young Things” went down all right.
With all my very best wishes to you always and again so many thanks.
Yours sincerely,
Noël Coward In a draft he edited before sending the final letter he wrote:
I must admit that when I arrived in America I was decidedly unsure of what I should find and, to be sure, I have encountered a number of people who appear sceptical both of Britain's resolve and her ability to face and overcome the extreme challenges we presently face.
In my humble actor's way I have tried to convince them that, though we may inhabit a small island, we never have been or ever shall be a small people. Many years ago in a very different world in a curtain speech after one of my plays I heard myself saying that it was still pretty exciting to be English. I feel that today more than ever.
He would recall Roosevelt as being a man “who knew everything. He was right up to date on everything and full of candour, advice and honesty. And, of course, that immense personal charm. I'd have done anything he asked me to do.”
On Sunday he took the clipper for England.
•
WHEN HE ARRIVED at Lisbon on June 9 the news he received literally stopped him in his tracks. The British ambassador, embarrassed but firm, forbade him to continue his journey to Paris and offered him a direct flight to London. Italy had entered the war, and the German tanks were rolling toward Paris. Noël tried to persuade the ambassador that it was his duty at least to go back and help evacuate the office there, but in the end he had little option but to cancel his reservation. Had he used it, he would have arrived in Paris just hours before the Germans. Since by this time he was on the Nazi blacklist, his stay there might have been terminally short.
Back in England he unashamedly pulled every string he could in an effort to land himself a real wartime job—but to no avail. He busied himself arranging for children from the Actors Orphanage to be sent to the safety of America, and for Violet and Aunt Vida to leave the bombs of London for the safe boredom of North Devon.
•
LYNN AND ALEC continued to send their “Letters from America”:
Alvin Theatre, New York
June 28th
Lawrence Langer [Longner, head of the Theatre Guild] is the instigator of this wonderful idea that so nearly concerns us; the Government have accepted it and it is going through at once. I have a secret to tell you about it. They already have three of our greatest inventors and one of them is working on an invention at the moment, which he told Lawrence, if perfected, will render useless all further inventions in airoplane [sic] warfare. My own guess is that it possibly is something like that ray of light that stops the engines and has not yet been found efficacious, but that's just a guess. However, I have made Lawrence promise to tell me at once, although of course, it will be published right away if they get anything. [In fact, the “invention” was the splitting of the atom.]
We are very pleased over the [Wendell] Wilkie nomination and if Roosevelt doesn't run [which he did], we shall probably vote for him, unless the Democrat is better, but our vote goes to the nominee whose platform most passionately helps England.
Love from us both,
LYNNIE
And from Woollcott:
The Connor Hotel
Laramie, Wyoming
January 4th 1940
Dear Noël,
You must have long since discovered (and probably could yourself have foreseen) the peculiar paralysis which, since the third of September, has numbed any American with English friends to whom he might wish to write. I find, if I try writing about the war, which is now on our minds all the time, that what comes out on paper is either stale or pretentious or offensive. Or all three. When, on the other hand, I try reporting on our own doings, the most innocent and casual preoccupations suddenly sound as fatuous and shallow as a bit of iron merriment got up by Elsa Maxwell for Mrs. Hearst. Perhaps they are. In early September I thought by this time to be up to my ass in the war and I suppose that before long it may yet take such a pattern that an unneutral American can see where his job is. In the meantime I traipse somnambulistically about the country.
•
THERE WAS TALK of a fact-finding tour to South America. On July 4 Noël's friend Lord Lloyd at the Colonial Office writes: “Please do not worry too much. All is going to be well, I am confident. Meanwhile, I have not had a line from the D.M.I. (Ministry of Information).”
On July 9 the War Office writes to Lord Lloyd at the Colonial Office to inform him that while Mr. Noël Coward is touring South America under the auspices of the British Council, he may be carrying out a few little jobs for them. Naturally, they reassure their colleagues that this must not be construed as the purpose of the trip:
MOST SECRET
In the course of his projected tour of South America on behalf of the British Council, Mr. Noël Coward will have opportunities of carrying out certain incidental work for this Directorate. This he has undertaken to do on the clearest understanding that such work will neither interfere with his programme nor be regarded as forming in any sense the purpose of his tour, which will be undertaken solely on behalf of the British Council.
In consideration, however, of the work Mr. Coward may be able to do for this Directorate, I am prepared to contribute £200 towards the expenses of the tour, and I shall be glad to hear if this suggestion meets with your approval.
Yours sincerely,
F. Beaumont Nesbit
Clearly it did not. It would, in any case, have been illegal for a government to pay someone engaged in covert activity in what were neutral countries. Wires became tangled, and on July 15 Lloyd broke the bad news:
I am very unhappy to hear that the South American trip has broken down. I stuck to my side of the bargain, but understand that the War Office would not take sufficiently the initiative to enable us to operate. Do give me a ring some time and tell me what you are intending to do.
It is perhaps not coincidental that on the fourteenth Winston Churchill's secretary had handed him a memo:
PRIME MINISTER
Mr. Noël Coward rang up. He has just come back from America. He would like to see you tonight if you can spare the time, as he has been staying with the President.
It must be assumed that the meeting took place and the likelihood is that Churchill—who had yet to make his own strong personal relationship with Roosevelt—was not best pleased to see the man he had told to go off and sing his little songs in the cannon's roar appeared to be doing the very opposite. Did this cause Churchill to intervene in Noël's future plans?
Their relationship was always an edgy one. “I had a gnawing suspicion,”
On the British battleship Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, August 17, 1941. “Little Bill” can be seen ducking as he sees the cameraman about to snap a picture. It is the only known photograph of him taken during World War II.
Noël wrote, “that there was something about me that he didn't like.” It may have been as simple as a clash of mighty egos with a touch of homophobia thrown in on Churchill's side. There was a good deal of walking on eggshells to be done in the years ahead.
The answer to Lord Lloyd's question was not long in coming. According to Noël's account in Future Indefinite, Noël took Duff Cooper's advice, which had remained consistent throughout: he would be of more use in America than in England at this particular juncture, helping to assess and perhaps shape American opinion in favor of the British side.
On July 21 he found himself making the return trip on the SS Brittank with a Ministry of Information ticket and a private letter from Cooper to Lord Lothian, the British ambassador.
However, somewhere in that English hiatus another meeting had taken place that Noël never referred to until the month of his death—his first meeting with William “Little Bill” Stephenson (1896—1989).
•
STEPHENSON, THE QUIET CANADIAN, was never seen or heard from by the general public, either during the war or after, but he was probably one of the men most influential in the winning of it.
An air ace from World War I, he had also been involved in intelligence and had become convinced that information—or even disinformation— was one of the most significant weapons in modern warfare. Between the wars, he became an inventor and a multimillionaire industrialist with wide-ranging interests. When the second war loomed, he was ideally placed, both emotionally and geographically, to be a conduit between Britain and the United States.
A physically small but compact man, Stephenson gained the sobriquet “Little Bill” to distinguish him from his friend and colleague “Big Bill” Donovan, a man he maneuvered into the role of head of the newly formed American OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—the forerunner of the modern CIA.
In ¥uture Indefinite, Noël relates that his first meeting with Stephenson was in New York on that second trip in 1940, but in a 1973 interview he tells a different story. He was asked to go to St. Ermin's Hotel in Caxton Street:
Very appropriately positioned between the House of Lords and Victoria Railway Station … I had to meet a contact in the foyer. I waited in this squalid place and eventually a man said, “Follow me” … he wheeled me round and into an elevator. It was only labelled to go up three floors. To my absolute astonishment it went to the fourth floor. An immense fellow guarded the place, all scrunched up inside a porter's uniform.
He was in one of a whole series of “safe houses” that had been instantly set up near Whitehall.
Well, this was the Special Operations Executive. What we later called the Baker Street Irregulars [the gang of street urchins occasionally employed by Sherlock Holmes, since they could pass unnoticed]. Some chap was saying that President Roosevelt wanted us to do his fighting. And Little Bill was there, very calm, with those sort of hooded eyes, watching everything. And all he said was—”We could have done with Roosevelt these past few years.”
Stephenson's demeanor was one that deeply impressed Noël, and he referred to it again:
When he was on the ball, his eyes changed. And I love watching people's personalities in action. Bill becomes someone quite different and you feel the steel. He doesn't have to raise his voice or alter his tone but he does change. He's a very deceptive man. He's so gentle but when he's cross, he's terrifying. But if Bill decided he was for you, he'd be with you right to the last shot.
Once he became prime minister, Churchill immediately appointed Stephenson head of BSC (British Security Coordination), the intelligence network in the United States. In effect, among his other duties, he would become the unofficial link between Roosevelt and Churchill, a sensitive position, since by acting for Britain in a neutral country, he was technically a spy. Churchill, a man not normally at a loss for words, sought one to describe the unique quality Stephenson would require to pull off his mission. Finally he found it: “You must be,” Churchill said, “intrepid,” Henceforth Little Bill was A Man Called Intrepid.
On his arrival in New York, Noël went to see Stephenson again at his office in Hampshire House, Central Park South. Whatever screening had been going on at the London meeting and subsequently must have proved satisfactory, for Little Bill matter-of-factly invited Noël to become one of his “boys”—a group that included people such as Ian Fleming, Leslie Howard, David Niven, Roald Dahl, Alexander and Zoltan Korda, and Cary Grant. Stephenson inclined to the belief that celebrity was its own disguise, which meshed completely with the feelings Noël had unsuccessfully tried to convey to Churchill.
Noël was to go about being, ostensibly, nothing more or less than Noël Coward.
I was to go as an entertainer with an accompanist and sing my songs and on the side do something rather hush-hush. I was to go all the way through the continent of South America, because at that time the Nazis were running all over South America. I spoke Spanish, so that was all right.
He saw where my celebrity value would be useful and he seemed to think I ought to be as flamboyant as possible, which was very smart of him. My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy. It was very disarming. Very clever of him …
I was the perfect silly ass. Nobody … considered I had a sensible thought in my head and they would say all kinds of things that I'd pass along to Bill. All my reports were written for him alone—nobody else. And whether anybody ever will see them or be anything but bored stiff, if they do, I doubt strongly.
He later reflected on the jigsaw puzzle nature of intelligence gathering.
Some of the things seemed trivial but what anyone who has anything to do with intelligence will tell you is that you learn that the smallest detail fits into the final picture and you must be very careful, even though it sounds redundant. A whole lot of tiny things are the stuff of intelligence. In talking to people I ridiculed the whole business of intelligence, because that's the best way to get on with it—ridicule and belittle ourselves, and say what an awful lot of duffers we are, can't get the facts straight and all that sort of thing.
When he accepted the job, to begin with
I was awfully bewildered. I thought it would be more Mata Hari—and then I told myself, “Well, hardly that. I couldn't wear a jewel in my navel, which I believe she was given to doing” … I was never much good as a spy, really … So many career intelligence officers went around looking terribly mysterious—long black boots and sinister smiles. Nobody ever issued me with a false beard. In fact, the hush-hush side of it was frankly disappointing. I never had to do any disguises. Except occasionally I had to look rather idiotic—but that wasn't all that difficult. I'm a splendid actotl
And invisible ink? I can't read my own writing when it's supposed to be visible, so to make it invisible would be going too far. I learned a lot from the technical people, became expert, could have made a career of espionage— except my life's been full enough of intrigue as it is.
Those were his recollections in age and tranquillity. How much was embroidery to make a good story is open to speculation. Certainly the working relationship with Little Bill lasted for the rest of the war—no matter where Noël found himself—and the respect and friendship, for the rest of his life.
It is almost impossible to render Little Bill and the magnitude of his contribution to World War II. On the one hand, he was certainly a James Bond—like “M,” a puppet master cannily twitching the strings, as his “boys” went about his business. But his real contribution was to lie in his domain of information—information on what the Germans intended to do next, so that it could be thwarted.
His was the initiative that set up the team at Bletchley to crack the German ULTRA code. That was complex enough, but it had to be done in such a way that the Nazis didn't realize it had been cracked or they would simply have changed it. In the process, Little Bill and Churchill—who had the power of final decision—were faced with horrific choices. They knew, for example, that Coventry was to be bombed on a certain night but to warn the citizens and attempt an evacuation would have been to tell the enemy how they knew. Coventry was bombed, with massive loss of life.
Perhaps even more devastating, since it was a personal loss, was the knowledge—gained from ULTRA—that the plane that one of Stephen-son's boys, Leslie Howard, was taking from Lisbon was to be shot down and that there was nothing to be done but let it happen.
It takes a remarkable man to live with decisions like these.
•
NOëL'S POSITION in America was once again tenuous, to say the least. He had no formal credentials to show what he was doing there. To add insult to injury, he was met at the docks by a man from the British Information Services who “implored me breathlessly to tell the Press I was arriving unofficially on my own theatrical business.”
Back home, too, things were going from bad to worse. The Daily Express declared that, whatever he was doing over there, “Mr. Coward is not the man for the job. His fl
ippant England—cocktails, countesses, caviar—is gone.” In the House of Commons, Harold Nicolson, parliamentary private secretary to Duff Cooper (minister of information), did what he could to come to Noël's defense: “His qualifications are that he possesses a contact with certain sources which are very difficult to reach through ordinary sources.”
The media reverberations echoed to and fro across the Atlantic. In the United States, the State Department had made official inquiries as to Noël's true status. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI opened a file on him, which has only recently been declassified. It makes fascinating, if frustrating, reading, since so much of it is heavily blacked out to protect the names of the Bureau's informants, even though all of them are certainly dead by now.
For instance, in June 1940, the American Legion in Illinois complained about pamphlets being dropped from a plane by the Communist Party, U.S.A., which read (in part):
Noël Coward is only one of a whole gang of British agents disguised as actors, novelists, writers, lecturers, etc., who are working to drag the United States into the war.
No newspaper raises the alarm about the “Fifth Column” agents.
Neither Martin Dies nor J. Edgar Hoover bursts into a sweat [they were wrong there!]. There are no midnight raids as they did against the boys of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who faced death to fight the Fascist invasion in Spain.
On the contrary, these war-making agents are adored, entertained, banqueted and welcomed by the “best society” everywhere.
College presidents are flattered to receive them. Editors give them front page publicity. The recent Allied Ball for “relief” was organized with Noël Coward as the chief attraction for the “suckers”.