The Letters of Noel Coward
Page 50
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION
MALET STREET W.C.i.
9th October 1942
My dear Noël,
I hope you will consider very carefully my suggestion that you should make a film about the Army. I have never seen a really good film about the Army and I am sure you could make one which would be as rousing a success as In Which We Serve, I know you are very busy but perhaps you will have time to think about this suggestion early next year. I should be only too glad to write to Sir James Grigg and ask him to give you all possible facilities.
BRENDAN BRACKEN
Brendan Bracken did have his wish—but not in the way he had envisaged. In early 1943 David Niven—whom Noël had met in Hollywood back in 1938 and who was now serving in the army—is writing to him:
Eechfield
Holmwood Ridge
Langton Green
Tunbridge Wells
January 14th
Now, Chum, you have in a very real sense altered the whole course of my military career. It happened yesterday. I was sent for by the Adjutant General himself, who said—”Now, look here, Niven. I understand you know a certain amount about motion pictures and I believe you are also an adequate officer.
“Noël Coward has done a magnificent thing for the Navy with his film, and it is absolutely essential that there should be a film of the same importance and scope made about the Army. Now the Army is not a popular service like the Navy, nor has it had a lot of success like the Navy, nor, above all, are you Noël Coward, but at least you know the sort of people who could get this sort of film written and produced and I want you to have a go at getting this thing started”!!
I have got this far. I have signed myself up and also I have got Two Cities to say they'll make it. Carol Reed has a fair story which might do (with a lot of work).
I know you have already refused to have anything to do with an Army film. And I also know that, beside risking gilding the lily after In Which We Serve, you have no love of the Army as you have of the Navy. But I'm going to ask you just the same! Is there any chance of getting you interested even to the extent of keeping an eye on things behind the scenes in exchange for wads of notes from Twin Cities Film Corp?
The film was The Way Ahead, released in 1944. It was well received by critics and public alike, though it lacked the impact of In Which We Serve, There was a nice irony in that it was Reed who had first suggested to Noël that he use David Lean.
He was amused to hear from Niven that the team suffered a complete replay of the bureaucratic angst that had plagued his own film.
•
THERE WERE TO BE two bizarre postscripts to In Which We Serve.
British prime minister Harold Wilson once famously said that “a week in politics is a long time.” In international politics it can seem a little longer, but on September 23, 1943, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan is cabling Noël in Cairo from the Denham Studios, where he was now working on This Happy Breed, Once again the problem was the dreaded Ministry of Information:
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION WANT PERMISSION TO REMOVE DEROGATORY REFERENCES TO THE ITALIANS IN COPIES OF IN WHICH WE SERVE FOR EUROPEAN SHOWING THIS IN VIEW OF SITUATION IN ITALY STOP LORN SUGGESTED THIS CABLE FOR INSTRUCTIONS STOP WHEN APPROXIMATELY WILL YOU BE BACK STOP
LOVE FROM US ALL.
The “situation in Italy” was that Italy had now surrendered.
And a bizarre 1944 footnote from a Paris-based friend:
At the risk of disquieting you, I must report on an item which, however much I avert my eyes, overcomes me with a slight nausea whenever I pass a certain cinema on the Champs Elysees. There would appear to be, according to the hand-painted placard, a film entitled Ceux Qui Serpent Sur Les Mers, which is “doublee en francais” and which features N.C. The peculiar, and to me, arresting part of this advertisement is that the portrait purporting to represent the gallant naval officer with rakishly tilted cap, is quite clearly and without equivocation the spitting image of M. Sessue Hayakawa [a famous Japanese film star] whom I recall from my childhood days having participated in a great naval film called The Battle, I feel that this must all be very confusing to your Parisian admirers—for whether it is N.C. trying to look like S.H. or vice versa, I'm damned if I know—and anyway, aren't we at war with these people?
CHAPTER 20
WORLD WAR II: “I TRAVEL ALONE”
(1943-1945)
I travel alone,
Sometimes I'm East,
Sometimes I'm West…
“I TRAVEL ALONE”
“I travel alone,” Noël liked to sing. Well, not always entirely alone. Noël (with unidentified friend) apparently heading South of the Border.
THE TWO COWARD PLAYS that had been in rehearsal when war was declared, Present Laughter and This Happy Breed, finally made their debut in a twenty-eight-week provincial tour under the title of Play Parade, Since he intended to star, Noël also threw in Blithe Spirit for good measure.
With him on the often wet and windy road were Joyce Carey and Judy Campbell (“a great find”).
In addition to the eight performances a week, I have done concerts everywhere [he wrote to Jack], hospitals, camps, aerodromes and munition factories. I also make a security speech telling people to keep their traps shut at the end of each performance. This is at the behest of the Naval Intelligence Dept.
[Noël looked forward] to the happy, happy day when the silver lining will show through, the clouds will bugger off, the light of Victory will illuminate our ageing faces, the Slough of Despond will be left behind, peace will reign again in this tortured World … except for whole hearted industrial, economic and moral revolution and perpetual bickering between the victorious united nations.
The tour continued through the winter and well into the new year of 1943.
David Niven voiced one of the few issues that troubled a number of people in This Happy Breed:
Please give some thought to switching the P.O.W [Prince of Wales] scene to George V, if it is anything like possible. I think people are still rather embarrassed by the Abdication but the death of the old man was the passing of something very great.
His plea fell on deaf Coward ears. The scene was his personal form of purging.
As for Present Laughter, Niven went on to suggest:
In the last scene when he [Garry Essendine] is cornered by the husband (Henry) and is asked point blank “Have you or have you not had an affair with Joanna?” he answers, “Yes, I have.”
Now I had a distinct feeling that the audience were hoping he never would be forced to say that and hoped he would say anything but “Yes.” I feel certain that, at that moment, although the husband is obviously a jerk, a great flood of sympathy goes out to him, and I was rather sorry, because Essendine could so easily have glossed over the question, as he had sailed through so many embarrassing moments already and one likes him so much that one does not like to see him stand in front of a man, whose only crimes are dullness and the breath of a rather sordid affair in the background, and tell him he has poked his wife.
This Happy Breed was one of the three plays Noël took on tour in 1943. A domestic moment between Ethel (Judy Campbell) and Frank Gibbons (Noël).
The husband was so obviously upset when he couldn't find Joanna on his return from Paris that the audience conclude he is very much in love with her, and do not like to hear Essendine say those hurting words—”Yes, I did.”
Couldn't you say something really bogus instead, or couldn't there be some diversion, so that he needn't answer at all? … Please don't let him lose any sympathy even for a moment.+
The line remained in the play.
Noël wrote to Lynn:
17 Gerald Road
S.W.i.
1 st February 1943
I am enjoying my tour enormously. It's so very rewarding playing in unget-at-able places to packed jammed audiences who look upon it as a terrific event. I am giving very good conscientious performances and if ever I do any naughtiness, howev
er infinitesimal, on the stage I fly to my dressing room look balefully at our triple photographs and say, “Lynnie, we are not amused”. The troop concerts are great fun, though rather arduous. I drove from Aberdeen to Inverness through a blizzard in an open Army truck giving two concerts on the way and thrived on it. Practically the entire company broke down after Carlisle, so we had a week out after playing in a sea of understudies and now everybody is back again …
… Joyce is with me on tour giving excellent performances. Lorn is as pretty as a picture and typing this letter. Mother and Auntie Veitch are full of vitality and as wicked as ever. Sybil [Colefax] continues to give a series of frightening dinner parties and hasn't been known to finish a sentence since September 1939.
Oh dear, oh dear, there is so much I want to tell you and I would like to go on with this letter for hours but I must get my dear little bottom into a train and go to Northampton where I play in a theatre which is next to a boot factory, which will be a fair bugger on matinee days. I finish the tour mid April and then do a six weeks season in London with Happy Breed and Present Laughter, after which I have no definite plans.
All my love, darlings and please, please write again.
NOËLIE
His letter crossed with one from Lynn that put in place the last piece in a sad puzzle. In his November letter Alec Woollcott had added a typically wry postscript:
I do not know whether you are aware that during the greater part of the time since last we met I have been on a bed of pain. For some time in the spring I was at death's door but the old fool was out. Now I am up again and, after a fashion, about. I tell you these details in case you are torn with anxiety.
Now Lynn would write:
Martin Beck Theatre
W. 45th St.
New York—
January 30th 1943
Darling,
First of all, of course, we are stunned by Alec's walking out on us like that, in spite of the warning signs. After that last operation on his gall bladder, which all the doctors said was aggravating his heart terribly and making it a good deal worse than it need be, all the doctors had great hope for him and, the best sign of all, he himself, was convinced he was going to live, whereas before he had made all preparations to be dead by Christmas and was convinced he would be. Then came the successful operation and he announced blithely that he was going to live. I believed it utterly and so it's a body blow. He had breakfast with us every few days. We saw him constantly. I talked to him on the telephone almost every day, so it was just as if he had walked out of our apartment five minutes ago forever and ever and ever and we shall never hear his voice or see his face again. Well, a lot of the fun in life is gone. Something you have had to face, my darling, so many times within these last years.
Woollcott had died on January 23 in the middle of one of his radio broadcasts. A world without The Town Crier seemed quiet indeed.
A month later the pattern of overworking followed by a temporary breakdown repeated itself for Noël. After the booking in Exeter in March he was forced to take a month to recuperate. He stayed in splendid isolation in King Arthur's Castle Hotel, Tintagel, Cornwall. He wrote to Jack:
I left Torquay, which is filled with prosperous escapists in evening dress, and came here, which I remembered from my very far off childhood as being one of the loveliest places in the world. It really is wonderful. The hotel is old-fashioned, very comfortable and perched on the edge of a thousand foot cliff. There's nothing but sea and sky and gulls and gorse; the weather has been like summer, there are masses of wild violets and primroses and bluebells everywhere and, above all, I have had the bliss of being alone! You know how necessary this is to me every now and again. I've read a lot of books, made a lot of future plans, including a novel, a sequel to Present Indicative and an operette.
By the end of April he was back in action, the tour was over and he was able to fulfill his commitment to play eight weeks at the Haymarket Theatre. Violet celebrated her eightieth birthday, and Noël wrote her a celebratory verse with just a touch of irony:
TO AN OCTOGENARIAN
FROM HER MIDDLE-AGED SON, APRIL 20TH 194?
Should an octogenarian wear a gay hat
Or some lace on her silvery hair?
The answer to this will be given you at
No. 10 Eaton Mansions, Sloane Square.
Should an octogenarian always be borne
Here and there in an invalid chair?
The answer to this is a volley of scorn
From 10 Eaton Mansions, Sloane Square.
Should an octogenarian wear a bright scarf
Or devote herself bleakly to prayer?
The answer to this is a hell of a laugh
From io Eaton Mansions, Sloane Square.
•
IN A LETTER to Jack (July 19) Noël gave expression to something that had been troubling him since the war began—the essential differences as well as the similarities between Britain and America.
It is bitterly sad that you, of all people, who have been in the Country so much and love it so well should not be here, even if only for a little, to note and absorb the extraordinary changes that have taken place in all of us. I am worried in my mind on general terms about the inevitable gulf that will always be between Americans and English who have stayed in America and Americans and English who have been here. There is nothing spectacular to be observed but the whole country has changed enormously since you knew it and I would have so very much loved it if you could only have been with us and become accustomed to our strangenesses. Even we don't know how much we have altered but that we have, there can be no doubt at all.
I am delighted to be able to tell you that Americans in England seem to be having on the whole, a very good time. We seem to have dropped much of our surface aloofness and are behaving with much more genuine and generous hospitality than ever we did in the degrading days of peace. I gather this, not from the Mayfair Americans but from the ordinary ones I have met all over the country and it is a good augury for the future because, unless Americans and English really get to understand each other after this war, the whole thing will be a balls up …
This has turned out to be a much more serious letter than I intended it to be and please, don't misunderstand one word of it. I know America has been in the War since December 1941; I also know that you've got restrictions and rationing and transport difficulties and upsets but what you haven't got is the sense of immediate happenings going on all round you and that we have had incessantly. The thought processes and feelings and language of ordinary people in this Country are so tremendously different from what they were before. The bad blitzing has been over for a long time now but of course we are always having “Alerts” and sneak raiders and a few bombs dropped here and there and we all fire-watch and wake up in the middle of the night and have cups of tea and go to sleep again and the whole shape of our lives, under the surface, is completely different. We are aware in our minds all the time that invasion, either by us or by the enemy, is imminent and might occur at any moment. We are aware all the time that only twenty miles separates us from the enemy and that, however many plays we play and however many jokes we make and however many lunches we may have at the “Ivy” or “Aperitif” or Savoy or Claridges, that anything might happen at any minute and it is the fact that we are all subconsciously prepared for this that makes the difference that I am trying, so unsuccessfully, to explain.
•
AND THEN …
Then he accepted another booking from another source—to tour troop installations in the Middle East. In late July the HMS Charybdis took him to Gibraltar on the first leg of his trip.
Anxious to be on the winning side this time, Brendan Bracken wrote to General Montgomery:
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION
MALET STREET, W.C.i.
19th July, 1943
My dear General,
I am sending you this letter by hand of Noël Coward who will need no introduction to you
from me. He is visiting the Mediterranean battlefields and is most anxious to see the troops under your command. He would be very glad to do all he can to entertain them during his journeys. On his return to England he has it in mind to write a film script dealing with the achievements of the Army. {At least Bracken had it in his mind.]
Yours sincerely,
BRENDAN BRACKEN
Gibraltar 1943. On his Middle East tour, Noël visited his former Paris colleague MacFarlane— then governor—and (here) saw old theatrical friends John Perry and Anthony Quayle.
First stop was Gibraltar, where the governor was another old Paris colleague, Noël Mason-MacFarlane. MacFarlane had written to Noël back in August 1942: “I have now just received your telegram offering to arrange an all star concert party for the Rock … We would all be delighted to see a concert party out here of such very distinguished people and our only sorrow would be that you can't come with it. I hope so much that you will be able to fix this up …”
Mountbatten had given Noël a letter of introduction to General Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces, and on August 5 Ike reported back:
Dear Dickie,
Noël Coward handed me this morning the note you sent by his hand.
I am glad you asked him to call on me. I found him most interesting and a very attractive personality. In fact, we started talking at such a great rate, I am afraid he will think I am a bit on the garrulous side. Nevertheless, I had a very enjoyable half hour, even if I am somewhat doubtful as to how he would classify it.
Cordially,
IKE
Noël somewhere in the Middle East.
Gibraltar, Malta, Algiers, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Cairo—it was another jam-packed itinerary that left him tired but pleased with what he had managed to achieve.