The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  I see that Lord Lothian, aided successfully by a Christian Science practitioner, has joined the feathered choir. I am now waiting anxiously to see who is going to succeed him. [Lothian, British ambassador to the United States and a devout Christian Scientist, had died of an undetermined but determinedly untreated illness, thus confirming Noël's skepticism of the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy]

  I miss you all so terribly, and here, where everything is so tremendously English, it is sometimes very upsetting. You have literally no idea what they feel about the home country here, and I am most deeply impressed with it. I intend, if I do get back to England in the Spring, to have a great deal to say about all this, and also to lay about me good and proper. I do so hope you are all holding up alright and that your cheerful cables are not only designed to keep me from worrying. I am longing to get back, and yet rather dreading to see what has happened to London. I wonder if it is as bad as I imagine it to be. Take care of yourselves, my darlings, and I will write again soon.

  Love—love—love.

  MASTER

  THE AUSTRALIA HOTEL

  Sydney, N.S.W.

  27th December 1940

  Darling Lornie.

  The whole tour is over. It has been a real triumph from every angle. I have made a helluva lot of money for the war charities here and really got through to the real Australian public by my broadcasts.

  … I am longing to come home to England, and absolutely dreading it. If I find, when I get there, the same frustrating idiocy in high circles still going on in the same old way, I shall probably do something desperate and finish up in jug.

  Give all my love and let's hope that 1941 will be slightly brighter for all of us. This I doubt, but we must all be sweet and hopeful, mustn't we, and send loving thoughts through the air with such impetus that they crush the bloody skulls of the recipients.

  All love, darling, darling Lornie,

  MASTER

  GRAND HOTEL

  Auckland

  15 th January 1941

  Darling Lornie,

  All the cables were delayed and so I got into rather a frenzy, but by now they have all come trickling in and so all is well. I arrived here on Monday and had a tremendous welcome. This, thank God, is not going to be as strenuous as Australia. I leave here on February 1st on the Clipper and am going to stop off for a fortnight or a month on Canton Island, which is only three miles of coral reef and a hotel, in order to get all my impressions sorted and have a rest, which I shall badly need, and maybe write a little something. I had rather a nasty little collapse at the end of the Australian tour, but had a week entirely by myself in the country, and got myself right back again …

  I really do think I have a pretty clear outline of what I intend to do this year and next year. I think our financial situation is worrying, but after the war I shall just have to paint my face and prance off again acting like buggery in all directions. At any rate, I am absorbing a hell of a lot from all these strange experiences, so something is bound to come out.

  Love, love, love,

  MASTER

  With Violet he would share the concerns that were always at the back of his mind about his postwar world:

  Noël with his trusty traveling companion.

  It really would be rather nice to go back to London, covered with a fair amount of glory, and just tell a few home truths to those rats who have been saying beastly things about me in the press! I know you'll understand about this. Ultimately, after the war, I can't afford to have a few unanswered criticisms hanging about.

  Noël wrote, “1940, in immediate retrospect, seemed to me the most difficult, complicated year I had ever lived, so many adjustments and readjustments and changing circumstances.” But at least now it was over and he could take a short break before returning to see what London and the United States had in store for him.

  •

  IN LATE MARCH, after a couple of stopovers, Noël is heading back to London. A fellow passenger on the plane introduces himself and tells him that they had a mutual friend, Lord Lloyd. Noël is puzzled by the man's use of the past tense, and it is only then that he learns that his old ally, George Lloyd, died suddenly a few days earlier. The plane's first stop is Bermuda.

  CHAPTER 19

  WORLD WAR II: “IN WHICH WE SERVE”

  (1941-1942)

  Be pleased to receive into thy Almighty and most Gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the Fleet in which we serve.

  FORMS OF PRAYER TO BE USED AT SEA (FIRST PRAYER)

  The Torrin has been in one scrap after another—but even when we have had men killed the majority survived and brought the old ship back. Now she lies in fifteen hundred fathoms and with her more than half our shipmates. If they had to die, what a grand way to go, for now they lie all together with the ship we loved, and they are in very good company. We have lost her but they are still with her. There may be less than half the Torrin left but I feel that each of us will take up the battle with even stronger heart. Each of us knows twice as much about fighting and each of us has twice as good a reason to fight …

  CAPTAIN KINROSS ADDRESSING THE SURVIVORS AT THE END OF IN WHICH WE SERVE (1 942)

  If you had never done and never do anything else, you have not lived in vain.

  ADMIRAL HOLLAND (1942)

  THEN CAME the thunderclap. The famous telegram from London saying I wasn't to go. It was supposed to come from Winston Churchill. I don't really believe it did—but anyway, it was supposed to.

  Noël was recalling the incident in his 1973 interview and he was being remarkably benevolent toward his old sparring partner, because the “forbidance” (as Noël termed it) almost certainly did come from Churchill. The cable from Little Bill that was waiting for him in Bermuda reported that “A greater power than we could contradict has thwarted our intents.”

  The “intents” had been the significant job Stephenson was to have formally offered Noël on his return from the Antipodes, “a job which, in his opinion and in mine, would be of real value in the war effort.” While Noël was in transit back home, Stephenson had received a telegram in code with no signatory:

  APRIL 2ND.

  FOR NOËL COWARD (A) REGRETTABLE PUBLICITY GIVEN TO YOUR VISIT LONDON BY ENTIRE BRITISH PRESS WHICH WOULD INCREASE ON YOUR ARRIVAL UNFORTUNATELY MAKES ENTIRE SCHEME IMPRACTICABLE (B) COMPLETE SECRECY IS FOUNDATION OF OUR WORK AND IT WOULD NOW BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY OF OUR PEOPLE TO CONTACT YOU IN ENGLAND WITHOUT INCURRING PUBLICITY (c) WE ARE ALL VERY DISAPPOINTED AS WE HAD LOOKED FORWARD TO WORKING WITH YOU BUT THERE ARE NO FURTHER STEPS TO BE TAKEN.

  To Violet Noël put on his bravest face:

  While I was in Bermuda all the nice plans I had were dashed. There will be more explanation of this when I get to London. I was very upset at the time but with my natural resilience—to say nothing of my grim determination—has since asserted itself and I am gay as a lark, altho’ very very cross indeed! … With me everything always turns out for the best, because I am bloody well determined that it shall!!

  At the time he most definitely did suspect Churchill, egged on by press baron Max Beaverbrook (then minister of supply) whose Daily Express was—and would remain—a persistent thorn in the Coward flesh.

  So that appeared to be that—certainly in any formal sense. In the 1973 interview, Noël goes on to quote Little Bill's typical reaction. If one door is closed in your face, create another: “He told me to go off and do my stuff anyway. So I did.”

  He kept in direct touch with Stephenson for the rest of the war but said nothing about it for thirty years.

  •

  THE RETURN To London was far from triumphal. The job he had anticipated with such pleasure was gone, and the British press was still at his heels, anxious to portray his visits to Australia and New Zealand as frivolous holidays away from real responsibilities.

  Fortunately, for his morale—and even his sanity—true friends rallied to his defense. Rebecca West wrote:

  I can't quite see
what else you could do for your country, except strip yourself of all your clothes and sell them for War Weapons Week, after which your country would step in and prosecute you for indecent exposure. I can't do it. Can't adequately express my rage that you should have been treated in this way.

  Then, within days, two other blows fell. A German bomb badly damaged the house at Gerald Road and the army commandeered Goldenhurst. Noël was forced to evacuate himself to the Savoy Hotel until repairs could be made. He also took advantage of an invitation from Joyce Carey to join her for a short break in the Welsh resort of Portmeiron, where she was hoping to find the peace and quiet from London's bombs and write a play. Her play was never written, but Noël came back from that five-day quietus with Blithe Spirit,

  No sooner was it written than it was put into production by Binkie Beaumont. The play fulfilled part of the promise Noël had made to him-self on his return—to write the play, the film, and the song that would help his fellow countrymen get through the war. Blithe Spirit was the play.

  Charles Condomine (Cecil Parker), happily married for the second time to Ruth (Fay Compton), is visited by the ghost of his dead first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond), conjured up by the medium Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford). The play fulfilled Noël's ambition in every way—though he was not to know that at the time. It opened at the St. James's Theatre on July 2 and eventually racked up 1,997 performances, creating a West End record at the time. It ran longer than the war.

  Noël wrote to Jack Wilson:

  17 Gerald Road

  S.W.i.

  July 18th 1941

  Dearest Dab:

  We have been very remiss in not writing before to tell you all about everything. The first night was terrific … oddly enough a really good audience. At the end our old friend in the gallery shouted “It's rubbish—take it off,” which convulsed everybody and, of course, was used ad nauseam by my admirers in the Press, the Daily Mirror even going so far as to have “Noël Coward Booed” as a headline. The notices were marvellous on the whole and the business terrific even through heat waves. The performance is excellent. Fay is better than she has ever been and was lovely and easy to direct. I've cured her of all her bad mannerisms and she looks charming. Cecil is really first rate and very charming too in a pompous hen's bottom sort of way. The best performance is Kay Hammond, who is absolutely bewitching and a much finer actress than I suspected she was with a wonderful sense of timing. Edward [Molyneux] made her as simple and lovely a dress as I have ever seen and she looks a vision. She uses dead white make-up with a little green in it, green powder on face, hair and arms, scarlet lips and nails and ordinary dark eye make-up. She is covered from each side of the stage by a following green spot, almost imperceptible, wherever she goes. The great disappointment is Margaret Rutherford, whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge or resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvellous. I need hardly say she got a magnificent notice. So much for that.

  Well, not quite. His contemporary playwrights appreciated what he had achieved and said so. Thornton Wilder didn't see the play until a year into the run and then wrote:

  The Savoy

  October ioth 1942

  Dear Noël,

  First of all the title is genius: with spirit and blithe you already lay the ghost and shroud the death's head.

  And then the whole treatment of Madame Arcati. What is genius but combining the unexpected and the self-evident—so that at the same moment you are saying both: “How surprising!” and “How true that is!”

  And what a performance from Miss Rutherford—and then turning it all on Edith. By quarter to four I was saying: How the Hell can Noël get us out of this satisfactorily’”: And then you did—like that.

  Elvira—perfect. That voice.

  I wish you'd been Charles.

  I thought Fay Compton was hitting pretty hard.

  Tell the director how brilliant his work was. For instance, that moment when Elvira knows she has caused Ruth's death. Oooo!

  Only thing I didn't like was the last three minutes. Hard, I call it. And a little longeur in the early part of Act II.

  This play—and “London Pride”—and the Destroyer picture—all falling from one sleeve within two years, and such years. That's telling ‘em. That's England talking.

  God bless you

  THORNTON

  By that same July 18 post he wrote to Violet, who was still in New York:

  Well Darlingest,

  I've been absolutely beastly about not writing to you but so many things have been happening at once so you must forgive me. The play is a lovely smash hit and playing to marvellous business.

  There are lots of projects in the air about my future activities. There was talk about me being sent back to America more or less at once but I have said that I won't go if I have to be away from England for more than a month. You mustn't be sad about this—I know I am right. The only reason I want to come to America at all at the moment is to see you. Somehow since I've been back here all my tal-ent seems to be coming to the top again. It is undoubtedly the strongest weapon I have in my personal battle and the one thing that does not depend on Government support. My enemies have all been silenced by my return and gratifyingly furious about my success, which has really been bigger than it has ever been in this country. It is very possible that I may be able to come over for a little while at the beginning or the middle of September. If so I could help Jack with the play and do one or two things in Washington.

  There is so much that I long to tell you that I cannot possibly put it in a letter but you must try to read between the lines. I am on top of the wave and really happier than I have been since the war began, apart from being so far away from you. Even so I would much rather you were in America than here. Not so much on account of the Blitzes but because of the various minor discomforts which I know you wouldn't mind a bit but that I should mind for you.

  Everything, of course, has turned out quite differently from what I imagined—I certainly had no idea that I was going to come back and write a wildly successful comedy and a lot of songs and by doing so get back all the popularity that the press has been so busy trying to destroy.

  There are several other schemes in the air any of which might materialise at any moment, one of them is my writing and acting and directing a film here. I am thinking about this quite seriously because I think I have quite a good idea simmering in my mind. I'll let you know further if it develops. In any case and whatever I do, I really think I shall be able to manage to come over for a short while.

  When you're feeling low and depressed just remember that it really was the luckiest thing in the world that everything turned out as it did, not only for my own peace of mind but for my whole position in this country, which really was in considerable danger. Now my stock is high and I must say, as a writer, I wouldn't have missed what's going on here for anything in the world. The ordinary people are so wonderful and there is a new vitality all over the country, particularly in the badly blitzed areas, which are dreadful but somehow quite magnificent at the same time. It makes one very proud to belong.

  Next came the song …

  Standing one morning waiting for a train in a London terminus station, as Noël tells it, the platforms littered with the bomb damage of the previous night, he watched the ordinary Londoners going about their business as though nothing untoward had happened. His first reaction was to admire them for their incredible courage. Then he noticed a small wild-flower stubbornly growing in a crack in the concrete. He remembered what it was called, and the parallels seemed uncanny. “Though it has a Latin name / In town and countryside / We in England call it ‘London Pride.’ “ The song of that name was introduced into the London revue Up
and Doing a few days later (sung by Binnie Hale), and it has become the city's unofficial anthem.

  Writing war songs that would relieve the gathering gloom became a priority in Noël's mind at this time, and even more so when he received a cable from Henry Morgenthau, Jr., secretary of the treasury and Roosevelt's right hand:

  us GOVT.

  WASHINGTON DC OCTOBER I4TH 194I NOËL COWARD SAVOY HOTEL LDN.

  HAVE JUST HEARD YOUR RECORDS OF LONDON PRIDE AND CAN ANYONE OBLIGE US WITH A BREN GUN AT THE WHITE HOUSE WHICH WERE GIVEN TO THE PRESIDENT BY LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN STOP WOULD LIKE YOU TO BROADCAST THESE SONGS OVER NATIONWIDE HOOKUP UNDER AUSPICES OF THE TREASURY ON OCTOBER 2 I ST BETWEEN NINE AND TEN PM NEW YORK TIME STOP DETAILS COULD BE ARRANGED BY REPRESENTATIVE OF NBC WOULD APPRECIATE A REPLY CARE OF TREASURY WASHINGTON.

  Noël's answer was, of course, a foregone conclusion.

  OCTOBER 28TH

  YOUR BROADCAST LAST WEEK WAS SO WONDERFUL THAT OUR RADIO PUBLIC WANTS MORE TEN MINUTE PROGRAMS FROM LONDON DURING TREASURY HOUR STOP HAVE YOU OR OTHER COMPOSERS WRITTEN ANY NEW SONGS TYPIFYING SPIRIT OF LONDON OR ENGLAND TODAY STOP WHAT ARE MOST POPULAR SONGS BRITISH ARMY IS SINGING STOP DEEPLY APPRECIATE YOUR CABLING ANY SUGGESTIONS.

  Songs were to become a distinct weapon in the propaganda war. In 1943 one song in particular made quite an impact. A senior American journalist sent the lyric to the president with the following note: “Thought you might be amused by Noël Coward's latest contribution to post-war planning entitled ‘Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans.’ “ The lyric began:

  Don't let's be beastly to the Germans

  When our Victory is ultimately won

  It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight