by Noel Coward
As he left he wrote to her about his newly confirmed personal resolution:
I have made a lot of very firm resolutions which you will thoroughly approve of. One is that I really am not going to embark on any more enterprises just because Binkie or Jack or Del [Giudice] want me to. If a lovely idea for a play comes roaring into my mind I shall do it. If fifteen gorgeous short stories attack me when I am lying in the sun I shall write them BUT I am not going to try to think of anything at all. I am also during the coming year going to see far fewer people. I have now definitely decided that I have had a basin full. They all want something from me and I really want nothing at all from them.
•
NOëL PROCEEDED To CREATE that necessary distance by taking Graham off to Jamaica, the island in the sun that had so impressed him with its tranquillity in 1944, when “Little Bill” had packed him off there for a break before his South African tour.
Jamaica's an island surrounded by sea
(Like Corsica, Guam and Tasmania)
The tourist does not need to wear a topee
Or other macabre miscellanea …
In fact every tourist who visits these shores
Can thank his benevolent Maker
For taking time off from the rest of His chores
To fashion the Isle of Jamaica.
They broke their journey in New Orleans:
Our three days in New Orleans were quite fun but a trifle too hectic. Fortunately we fell in with bad company early on. A strange lady with violent black hair and a tangerine make-up and a lot of false ospreys who came from Detroit and was rather the touring rights of Tallulah only a bit more refined. She led us with unerring instinct to a nest of angry lesbians and twittering pussy willows and we drank a lot of mint juleps and looked at a great many over-wrought iron balconies. The food I must say was wonderful and what is known as the “Old Quarter” has a certain charm but it has been badly mauled by American tourists and you can see on a clear day rows and rows of Helen Hokinson [a New Yorker cartoonist who specialized in female foibles] ladies with rimless pince-nez and perched hats queuing up outside the Clip Joints.
We finally poured ourselves onto a dear little bateau called the Alcoa Corsair, which was the last word in modern decoration and beds came out of the wall and socked you one and then snapped back again and the Captain, who was like a Norwegian sacred cow, was clearly a stranger to the Bridge. He spent most of his sea time telling funny stories in the dining-saloon. My suspicions of his ability as a navigator were amply justified when we arrived at Kingston and immediately rammed the pier.
In 1948 Noël rented Goldeneye, Ian Fleming's Jamaican retreat. Its lack of amenities caused him to christen it “Golden Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat.”
There was even something of a “clandestine” element to this particular visit, too. Another of Little Bill's “boys” had been journalist Ian Fleming, soon to be the creator of James Bond. Fleming shared his old boss's love of Jamaica and had recently finished building his own house there. He called it Goldeneye, and Noël heard it might be to let.
After a lot of good-natured haggling, he finally agreed to what he considered an exorbitant rent for something he later claimed should have been called Golden Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat. He described it to Lorn:
The house is perched on a little thirty foot high cliff. There is an enormous room with light walls and wide windows—no glass only shutters—nice bedrooms with private lulus and showers. There is a flight of cement steps leading down to an ideal little cove with white coral sand and a reef so that we can wade out and look at all the coloured fish through glass-bottomed buckets … Behind the house are banana plantations and then green covered hills and blue mountains in the distance … This side of the island is quite cool all year round and has a lovely wind that blows, not too hard, every day. I am paying two hundred pounds a month, so you can imagine what the rents are! That includes three servants, of course, but all the same it's on the expensive side.
His thank-you letter to Fleming took the form of a verse:
HOUSE GUEST
Alas! I cannot adequately praise
The dignity, the virtue and the grace
Of this most virile and imposing place
Wherein I passed so many airless days.
Alas! I cannot accurately find
Words to express the hardness of the seat
Which, when I cheerfully sat down to eat,
Seared with such cunning into my behind.
Alas! However much I raved and roared,
No rhetoric, no witty diatribe
Could ever, even partially, describe
The impact of the spare-room bed—and board.
Alas! Were I to write ‘till crack of doom
No typewriter, no pencil, nib nor quill
Could ever recapitulate the chill
And arid vastness of the living-room.
Alas! I am not someone who exclaims
With rapture over ancient equine prints.
Ah no, dear Ian, I can only wince
At all those horses framed in all those frames.
Alas! My sensitivity rebels,
Not at loose shutters, not at a plague of ants
Nor other “sub-let” bludgeonings of chance.
But at those hordes of ageing, fading shells.
Alas! If only commonsense could teach
The stubborn heart to heed the cunning brain,
You would, before you let your house again,
Remove the barracudas from the beach.
But still, my dear Commander, I admit,
No matter how I criticise and grouse
That I was strangely happy in your house—
In fact I'm very, very fond of it.
Whatever reservations Noël might have had about Chez Fleming, the visit confirmed the growing attraction Jamaica held for him. Perhaps he should put down roots here, too.
“Little Lad,” Noël wrote, “with a persistence born of his crude tom-tom [South African] upbringing, went beetling off on his own and found some land about seven miles from here.” Before they left, Noël had bought the plot of beach land and even designed the house that was to be built there by year end. He first thought of calling it Coward's Folly, then wisely reconsidered and named it Blue Harbour.
He and Graham also found a remote hilltop site called Look-Out, so called because the pirate Sir Henry Morgan had used it for that very purpose. In his enthusiasm, Noël bought that, too, vowing to build on it in years to come when his coffers weren't quite so empty. The four-acre site cost him all of £150.
By the time they returned to New York they were full of plans, and even if the memory of Tonight at 8:30 hadn't faded entirely, it was at least blurred around the edges.
•
BY THE END of the year Noël had stage problems of his own. He had decided he would like to play Present Laughter for two months in France— in French, Joyeux Chagrins, “I do hope it will be a success as I do not like to be associated with failures!”
It was not the best idea he ever had. The reviews were poor and the box office not much better. He wrote to Lorn: “Also feeling with insular unreason that as they (the reviews) are in French they don't matter. It seems that I am immensely aristocratic and the Left Wing hate me!”
More chagrined than joyeux, he boarded the Queen Elizabeth the following January. (“I suppose this succession of failures is good for my soul but I rather doubt it.”)
•
JAMAICA HAD ENTERED his life—or perhaps he had entered Jamaica's life—at precisely the right time. It was and would remain a safe haven, a place to lay one's plans, lick one's wounds, and get things back into perspective.
When he and Graham returned there in early February 1949, the main house (Blue Harbour) was “much more ready than I had anticipated.” It was also not quite what he had had in mind. Instead of being built in layers into the hillside, the architect had built it straight up and down like a single tower. (“My God, it's
the Flatiron Building done in white sugar!”) But that was soon forgotten in the pleasure Blue Harbour was to provide over the years.
He found himself with a mixed bag of occasional neighbors—Ian Fleming and his married paramour, Lady Ann Rothermere, Max Beaverbrook, and Ivor Novello among them.
When he came to see Ivor's house, it merely confirmed Noël's conviction that, whatever his other accomplishments, taste was not one of them. He reported to Lorn:
Ivor, with typical Welsh cunning, has almost achieved the impossible, which is to find in Jamaica a house with no view at all. It is a suburban villa with several tiled bathrooms (but a scarcity of water) furnished in flowered chintz and mock mahogany. You can see the sea, which is three miles away, by standing on the dining-room table. Any mountain vista is successfully obscured by a high hedge belonging to the people next door
… it is also deeply ensconced in the mosquito area, so that if Olive Gilbert [a close friend of Ivor's and one of his principal singers] so much as opens her twisted trap on the verandah after sundown, she will be in a malarial lather the next morning.
Noël's regular letters to Coley kept him up to date on local gossip. For instance, the long-running feud between Noël and Max Beaverbrook was at least damped down in the Jamaican air: “The Baron Beaverbrook came to lunch the other day oozing amiability and went really dotty about the maison and the garden and the view. There was a distinct glint of green envy in the baronial eye. He turned on masses of charm …”
There was also the continual crise of Ian and Ann. She was married to England's other press baron, Lord Rothermere, and, on Ann's frequent visits to the island, was living in reasonably open sin with Ian, under the eye of her husband's great rival, who had for some reason failed to focus on them or was choosing to ignore them.
In his letters to Violet, Gladys, and Lorn, Noël painted a pen portrait of the house and his life there:
I am enchanted by the house. It is well built, solid and comfortable. The top floor is my bedroom, sitting-room, shower and verandah looking out over eighty miles of mountains and sea. Below is the main sitting-room and verandah with a comfortable bedroom alcove for Graham and a shower and lulu. Also a kitchen and servant's room. The guest-house, which is a few yards away, is one big double room, bath (shower) lulu and verandah. Up above and out of sight is the garage and the servant's quarters. There are stone steps down to the beach and little paths laid out between the almond trees and the coco palms. It really is a dream. The beach as yet is a little disappointing, because they haven't got rid of enough rocks but that can be done in a week or so. We have a coffee-coloured chauffeur-valet, who is efficient and amiable. We have electric light and water, both of which are rare on this coast, and now we have to set to work on the garden and beach. We went into Port Maria yesterday morning and bought a lot of domestic necessities such as Polyflor wax and Brasso and hooks and scissors and cushions and paper fasteners, etc. etc!
Graham has become a gardening maniac—he pinches cuttings right and left, shoves them into the ground, croons to them and covers them and himself with manure. He is very busy bashing about and planting things upside down …
We have two new additions to the household; a minute white kitten called Evelyn because we are uncertain what sex it is and Evelyn will do for either!
The question was soon unequivocally settled, and a few years later: “Evelyn, who is now a grandmother, is about to have some more kittens, which really is going too far. She really is very modern in her outlook and I tremble to think what Marie Corelli would have thought of her.”
Nor was that the end of the saga:
Evelyn retired into the waste paper basket yesterday morning and gave birth to three kittens! As she is a great great grandmother, I consider this no mean achievement. We have not been permitted to meet the father socially but we think he is on the common side and lives down the road with some Indians. I am thinking of re-christening the house “Cat's Cradle”.
Firefly, the safe haven Noël built for himself in Jamaica. He was buried there, in a spot overlooking the Spanish Main.
We also have a small beige puppy with a black face and white gloves. He is called Jellaby after the little boy in Bleak House, who keeps on getting his head caught between things.
The plumbing has proved to be a trifle eccentric and my lavatory has hiccoups and sprays my behind with cold water every now and then which is all very gay and sanitary.
When it decides to rain here there are no half measures about it. It comes down in a deluge and there is already some valuable Penicillin growing in all my shoes!
There are no dangerous insects or animals here but I have just found a beetle the size of a saucer nestling among a lot of three-halfpenny stamps. It seems fairly amiable but its expression does not inspire confidence. I have now thrown it over the verandah and I think it went into Graham's bedroom window.
I rather enjoy my morning shopping trips into Port Maria. Everyone is very amiable and their colours are graded from deep ebony to pale cafeau lait,
Mr. Philpot in the General Store is coal black with far more teeth than are usual and he always wrings my hand like a pump handle and we make little jokes. Then, of course, there is Madame Cecilia Chung, my Chinese groceress. She, having read in some obscure Chinese newspaper that I was renowned for being witty, goes into gales of oriental laughter when I ask quite ordinarily for Colman's mustard or Worcester sauce!
The girls in the Post Office start giggling with anticipatory delight before I get out of my car so you do see that there is never a dull moment for anybody!
Oh la la! as I always say, having acted so prettily in the French language.
I went over to tea with Jean Batten [the aviator] the other day who has a sweet but ghastly mother who was so refeened that she could hardly speak. She asked very tenderly about you and I said that you were all right except that you drank heavily and kept on falling down in Eaton Square but that everything was under control, really, on account of us living so conveniently near the police station.
I have bought the top of the mountain that I have had my eye on since last year. It is exactly five minutes from here in the car and really the view is the most fabulous in Jamaica. I am not going to spend any money on it yet beyond planting a few things but I have a feeling that in the future it might come in handy. I have several acres and the ruined remains of an old house. If in the far future I ever wanted to let this house for long or even sell it at a vast price, I could keep one of the beaches and live up top. But all that is very far in the future because I am as happy as a bee here for the present. But this coast is being bought up like mad and it is nice to think that, if it ever becomes really overcrowded, I shall have a bolt-hole. On my three acres there are oranges, limes, breadfruit, avocado pears, pimentos and all sorts of tropical deliciousnesses. The place was what is known as a “Great House” about two hundred years ago and so it is well planted. The ruins are grown over with orchids! Little wild puce coloured ones, and it really is very peaceful and sweet.
There have been great carryings on about Lady R. and Commander F. She arrived in a blaze of Jamaican publicity and announced that she was staying with me. So when a Life photographer arrived here we had to send Little Lad [to Goldeneye] chaudpied to fetch her. There then began a very natty high comedy scene in which she kept forgetting she was a house guest and asking us what we had been doing all the morning etc. We then all traipsed over to Montego Bay for a night and Elle et hui discreetly (i.e. indiscreetly) had breakfast together on the balcony of his room! After this I descended upon them both and gave them a very stern lecture indeed. I must say they are very sweet but … I have grave fears for the avenir,
Jamaica was to provide a useful plot element when it came time to write his Samolan (Jamaican) novel, Pomp and Circumstance (1960).
Whatever its other attractions, Jamaica was not known for its haute cuisine, and Noël did not want his distinguished guests to go away hungry. He wrote again to Coley for re
cipe ideas:
Dearest Toley,
Thanks for yours like anything et mille mercis pour les jolis recipes which have caused a minor race riot dans la cuisine. We had some soft, damp fried bread for breakfast this morning cuddled round some old bacon rind. It was but delicious! Evan Williams, our homme a tout faire, is full of enthusiasm and tries like a mad thing. He is very sweet and coffee-coloured and I have to keep on buying him trousers. He will never quite supplant you in my affections on account of his inadequate knowledge of French (and English) and not being very good at crosswords. Little Lad alternates between savage irritation and hilarious joy at his film being postponed. Personally, of course, I am delighted because he can go on bashing about in the jardin and rolling in manure and generally enhancing the House Beautiful. The H.B. as a matter of fact is coming along a treat and is a seething mass of dark gentlemen of the sonnets hammering and fixing and smelling jolly poignant. Mrs. Calthrop's abandoned dwelling sits on the top of the hill with half a verandah and looks at us reproachfully every time we pass. I seem to hear it sighing, “Please send out someone to make me uncomfortable”. {Gladys had also bought a local house in a fit of enthusiasm but never stayed there.}
What happened off the screen may well have been more interesting than what happened on it. Here Celia Johnson clearly has the undivided attention of the production crew, not to mention of Graham Payn (left) and Joyce Carey (right).
It was a year—as they were all to be from now on—of wins and losses. In May Noël lost his beloved Neysa McMein, but in New York he made peace with Mary Martin, who was now starring in South Pacific. “I hate quarrels and feuds … Now all that is over and I could not be more pleased.”
Then there were what looked like being sure wins that later turned out to be unqualified losses. One of these was the film version of The Astonished Heart. Back in England in June, Noël had gone to Pinewood Studios to see rushes featuring Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, and Michael Redgrave. The ladies, he felt, were exactly right, but Michael Redgrave came across as false.