The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  THEN, ON SATURDAY, September 6, back in England, Noël spent the day at Folkestone races with Coley and Gladys. They bought an evening newspaper and read the news in the Stop Press. Gertie was dead. “A day that started gaily … ended in misery.” Despite her failing health, Gertie had insisted on remaining with The King and I. Her sole ambition was to take it to London the following year, Coronation Year.

  In the event, it was Noël who made a Coronation appearance on the West End stage and, for once, not in one of his own plays. He accepted the role of King Magnus in Shaw's The Apple Cart for a limited run at the Hay-market Theatre, opposite his old friend Margaret Leighton.

  He learned the long part while he was in Jamaica, and wrote to Violet:

  I am getting quite excited about it and I wander about spouting my long speeches to the lizards, who are mad about it … I expect I shall throw the entire cast into a frenzy by knowing my part perfectly. As a matter of fact I have rather enjoyed learning it … and Magnus is a part that might have been written for me. I don't think he goes “soppy” in the last scene. He actually wins hands down.

  Noël chose to play King Magnus in Shaw's The Apple Cart during Coronation year (1953), opposite Margaret Leighton (1922-1976). He claimed in the future he would always play kings. “It's so nice to have people getting up and down again every time you make an entrance.”

  So did Noël. The production received excellent reviews—perhaps because Noël hadn't written it—and the critics felt it would be bad form to dislike Shaw—at least, not when he was dealing with royalty in a Coronation year.

  •

  THE APPLE CART safely behind him, Noël took off on his ritual vacation. To Coley:

  Hotel de la Poste Avallon

  Well the holiday started with a bang. The bang was at six yesterday evening when the back axle broke in half in front of a War Memorial. Today we hope a Jaguar expert will arrive with a new one, in the meantime we are stranded. Napoleon, on his way from Italy in 1815, stayed one night in this hotel; we, on our way to Italy, look like staying a bloody sight longer. There is no way of leaving except by an autobus to Dijon and we have far too much luggage to get on to an autobus anyhow. Yesterday was further complicated by Little Lad having an appalling attack of wind after eating Lobster Gateau at Barbizon made with a lot of cream and washed down with vin rose, in such pain that he could not move. We hope that when he wakes the wind will have subsided, if not he will have to hobble to the local hospital and have a nice enema.

  The new back axle duly arrived, was affixed and we drove off, merry as grigs, at six p.m. The car went like a bird for an hour or so and then ejected clouds of steam and stopped. We limped along to a tiny wayside garage where it was discovered that the ventilator fan had not been greased and the rubber tube which supplied the engine with water had rotted! … the garagist tinkered away for an hour, and off we went again to Geneva.

  Hotel Palace, Montreux:

  A Victorian-Edwardian hotel filled with heavy furniture and tortured woodwork. The Jaguar returned to us looking shiny and a trifle self-conscious.

  Castello di Urio, Como:

  Yesterday was definitely strained … we drove without mishap to Brigue and over the Simplon, lunched in a scruffy hotel in Domo-dossola, after which we drove for fifty years down the main street filled with Sunday traffic, when there was a sharp grinding noise in the gearbox and the car refused to move forwards, backwards or even sideways. In an inferno of hooting and imprecations we waited forty minutes until a garage man arrived with a truck, managed to jack up the Jaguar and tow it to the side of the road. After another forty minutes it was towed to a garage where we waited gloomily for two hours, then told the gearbox was hopelessly jammed and could not be mended under twenty-four hours! We were fairly frantic, so we hired a Lancia and its driver, loaded all the luggage on to it and drove off at breakneck speed to Como, through, I believe, lovely scenery of which I saw little as I kept my eyes tight shut. The Jaguar we hope will be returned to us tomorrow or the day after. I am seriously thinking of suing the Jaguar people for negligence, irresponsibility, arson, slander, libel and sexual perversion.

  Castello di Urio,

  16th August.

  The Jaguar returned to us with only a slight knock in the engine. In the house, in addition to our host, there is a desiccated voluble gentleman who is the Chilean Charge d'Affaires, married and has three children but travels with a boy friend who is pretty, young and fairly idiotic. He speaks French and Italian more quickly and violently than anyone I have ever met. We have, during the week, visited one Principessa and one Duchessa. The former was born Ella Walker in America and is fabulously rich. She was a friend of Mussolini and had to flee to Switzerland, where she lived for two years in an elaborate clinique without enough eggs. She is eighty-four, very chic, has forty-eight gardeners, twelve manservants, three cooks, one Tiepolo, one Guardi and two dim grand-nieces in white broderie Anglaise who seldom utter and are so comrm il faut that it is difficult not to call them “Ma'am.”

  The Duchessa Sermoneta lives on the top of a mountain in a small square house which she fondly imagines is in “le style Anglais”. She is only about seventy, has had asthma for two years and is exceedingly grand. These rich grand, drained old ladies belong to a past that is dead-O and sigh for the times that are past-O. La Sermoneta had as guests an elderly English queen (grey moustache, Corps Diplomatique, beauty lover), his brother who is a Catholic priest (rather nice), and a startled young man fresh from Oxford with over-eager teeth. I don't know what he could have been doing there but I have my ideas. Mussolini, who of course they all bum-crawled to like mad, was caught and shot just near here on the border. He wasn't, however, hung upside-down until they took him to Milan.

  There is to be a Ball in Biarritz on September ist given by the Marquis de Cuevas. This is of tremendous social importance and is now in jeopardy, owing to the general strike in France. Nobody can get in touch with anybody else to find out what costume Zuki, Norman, Nada and Nell will or will not wear. It is clearly understood that Titi Something-or-other is going as a red parrot, perched on the shoulder of someone else as Man Friday. Apart from this concrete information we have little definite to go on. The excitement is reaching fever pitch and Chili Pom Pom [the Chilean Charge} is beginning to show signs of strain. So, as a matter of fact, are we, and are leaving tomorrow for Lago di Garda.

  •

  IN JANUARY work had begun on the Jamaican house Firefly, and Noël wrote to Lornie:

  The old ruin has been roofed in and a verandah made out in front where we can sit under cover and look at the fabulous view. It will be lovely to spend the day up there when there are too many people about.

  Last night we took a thermos full of cocktails up … and sat and watched the sun set and the lights come up over the town and it really was magical. The sky changed from deep blue to yellow and pale green and then all the colour went and out came the stars and the fireflies … The view is really staggering, particularly when the light begins to go and the far mountains become purple against a pale lemon sky.

  There is a very sweet white owl who comes and hoots at us every evening. I don't think he does it in any spirit of criticism but just to be friendly.

  Jamaica being Jamaica, things do not always go according to plan:

  Firefly is absolutely divine but far far from watertight. Pat Marr-Johnson's design admittedly is delightful but he is about as good a builder as Grant Tyler was an actor, and so now all the gutters have to be re-done and the outside walls rendered and possibly plastered and it's all jolly fun and I couldn't be crosser. The moral of all this being never have business dealings with friends.

  Very soon, though, the place inhabited Noël every bit as much as he inhabited it. Over the years his letters to the “family” back in England recorded the many moments of relaxation.

  When he, Graham, and Coley were there together, painting became a shared passion. To Lornie:

  We are all painting away like cra
zy. Little Lad, as usual, is at work upon a very large ruined cathedral. I can't think why he has such a penchant for hysterical Gothic. Perhaps he was assaulted in childhood by a South African nun. Coley is bashing away at a lot of thin people by a river while I, swifter than the eye can follow, have finished a group of negroes and am now busy with a crowded fairground with swings and roundabouts and what should be a Ferris wheel but looks like a steel ovary. The trouble with me is that I don't know the meaning of the wordpeur.

  Little Lad has done a sort of “Rose Red City,” which looks a bit like Golders Green. The effect is dashing but the architecture is a bit dodgy. I keep on doing lots of people walking about and I'm sick to death of them.

  Little Lad is painting a large picture of a Priest and an Acolyte in acid moonlight. He suddenly changed the Priest into a lady in a red dress, which is better really but perhaps not better enough. She is very tall and the Acolyte is crouching. It is all a great worry.

  Coley is doing one of his green garden parties with a lot of thin people on a lawn. Little Lad, surprisingly, has done a cherub's head. It had a too bulging a forehead to start with and looked like it had a gumboil but that, after bitter words, has been rectified.

  I am just painting hundreds and hundreds of people on beaches and esplanades. It is my new “style”. My present masterpiece has to date one hundred and seventy when last counted and it isn't half done! Coley, with his passion for statistics, says that means three hundred and forty shoes.

  •

  IN 1954 NOëL had a date with Oscar Wilde. He accepted the challenge of turning Lady Winderrmre's Fan into a musical to be called After the Ball.

  It was an ill-considered venture, for while he had an arm's-length admiration for Shaw, he did not have the same regard for Wilde. “What a silly, conceited, inadequate creature he was, and what a self-deceiver.” Noël was convinced that, as far as the libretto was concerned, “I am forced to admit that the more Coward we can get into the script and the more Wilde we can eliminate, the happier we shall be” [from his Diaries].

  The melodies came easily, and in his letter to Lornie from Jamaica (January 13, 1954) he could write:

  It's nearly complete. I want to write one more number for the men to sing in the Darlington Rooms scene, as it seems a pity not to use all those lovely voices. I have got a rousing tune for it and am just waiting for an idea for the words to pop into my curly head … As far as I can see it is going to be one of the longest musical entertainments ever written, so I shall have to do snippingtons and even then I think we shall have to run special late buses to get people back from Hammersmith.

  As with Bitter Sweet, his Muse took him over and he found that what he had composed was less a musical or even an operetta than an opera. (“I can scarcely go to the piano without a melody seeping from my fingers, usually in keys I am not used to and can't play in: it is most extraordinary and never ceases to amaze me.”) There is no doubt that, subconsciously or not, he was hoping to emulate Ivor's success in this field. Even key members c the cast, such as Vanessa Lee, Peter Graves, and, most important, Mar Ellis had been Novello regulars. And that was where the problems began

  Mary Ellis had long been a major star of musical theater on both sides c the Atlantic. She had created the part of Rose Marie (1927) and mor recently starred in Ivor's The Dancing Years (1939). Noël cast her automat ically as Mrs. Erlynne, the glamorous mother whom Lady Windermere ha never known. It was only well into rehearsals that it became all too clea that the Ellis voice was no longer up to the vocal demands of the role, an by that time it was too late to save anyone's face by delicately suggestin she abandon the part.

  By this time she was living the role:

  Dearest Noël,

  Thank you more than I can say for the part of Mrs. Erlynne, and how you are helping her to be her best.

  Oh dear, oh dear, help me to get some clothes that will make her better—not worse—no one who is ROUND should ever be asked to wear feathers or pink satinW I can look lovely in that period, I know. Pale roses, no glitter … plain dress in dull moire, rather Yvette Guilbert-ish—maybe pale flamingo colours with black gloves, so I can use the same cape and fan. I am so desperate in those moulting eagle feathers and dots and sequins and frills—neither Mrs. Erlynne or me. I long to get it absolutely right and despise a hindrance. Also a wrap for the duet that need not come off—it spoils the urgency.

  When After the Ball opened in 1954, aesthete Stephen Tennant(1906-1987) sent Noël this illustrated letter with some costume suggestions.

  Doris Zinkeisen's costume design for Mrs. Erlynne in act 2, scene 3.

  I will try and be all you want when you come to Manchester. This freezing hotel has set my voice back to non-resonance.

  Please,please help me with those costumes!!! I am miserable and self-conscious in them and they do not do my 24 inch waist proud.

  I am all homage and joy at being part of it.

  Another contribution on the costumes came from aesthete Stephen Tennant:

  My Dear Noël,

  I've been thinking about Mrs. Erlynne's dresses in your play. Don't you think that the rather too accepted idea of the spoiled demi-mondaine's clothes is a little monotonous? I see no reason why Mrs. Erlynne's toilette should not be very subtle and melting and soft— the crude femme-fatale has been so over-played by Martita Hunt, P[aulette] Goddard, Isabel J[eans] and many others. Do you agree? The black lace and scarlet roses has become a tedious uniform. Mrs. Erlynne's dresses should be softer, more ravishingly melting. Mysteries, to my mind—the roses—creamy … pink, soft-shaded roses on a glistening brown straw hat … snow leopard fur. I enclose some suggestions.

  With my love and longing to see you.

  STEPHEN

  Then came the question of the voice. From rehearsal Mary Ellis wrote:

  May I compromise and HALF sing from “Lord Augustus, how do you do?” because I find my voice is in such a pickle to get to singing status just suddenly hot from the speaking. I have never done that except in this and last night the audience was ever so puzzled. In these weeks of trial and error I know I'll evolve something to please you—please let me try. I know it must be QUICK and CLEAR and GAY.

  But it was too little too late. On May 24—well into the pre-London tour—Noël is telling the Lunts:

  I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis's singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat. I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile. If you don't quite understand what it means, ask that lovable old sod you dragged to the altar. At last, by battering and bludgeoning, we have persuaded her to sing softly. She plays the part beautifully, because she is a fine actress. The rest of the cast are enchanting and Graham is better than he has ever been.

  Mrs. Erlynne (Mary Ellis) and her daughter, Lady Windermere (Vanessa Lee).

  Seven minutes of what Noël considered to be some of his best music had to be sacrificed on the altar of the Ellis voice, leaving the show badly balanced. Then there were those who, in retrospect, wondered whether the Wilde-Coward combination could ever have really worked. “Everything that Noël sent up, Wilde was sentimental about, and everything that Wilde sent up Noël was sentimental about … It was like having two funny people at a dinner party,” director Robert Helpmann lamented.

  To compensate for Miss Ellis's vocal shortcomings, Noël tried to fill the lacunae with more comedy for her character, but even that failed to please. “She couldn't get a laugh if she were to pull a kipper from her twat,” he complained.

  Since the lady apparently never actually attempted this aquatic physiological feat, the point remained unproven.

  The show lasted 188 performances.

  •

  ON JUNE 30 Violet Coward died at the age of ninety-one with her son at her side. “It was as I always hoped it would be. I was with her close close close until her last breath … Fifty-four years of love and tenderness a
nd crossness and devotion and unswerving loyalty … I shall never be without her in my deep mind.”

  CHAPTER 24

  NESCAFE SOCIETY … AND THE SMALL SCREEN

  (1955-1956)

  It [Las Vegas} was rather a dangerous challenge and has turned out to be successful beyond my wildest dreams.

  LETTER TO LORNIE (JUNE 8, 1955)

  “Smile! You never know who's looking!” Noël and Jane Powell pose by the pool at the Desert Inn, Las Vegas. (The 1955 swimsuit fashion had still to discover the itsy-bitsy bikini.)

  Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

  INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD R. MURROW (1956)

  CABARET SEASONS at the Cafe de Paris from 1951 had proved both profitable and morale-boosting for Noël, and never more so than on a November evening in 1954 when he was visited backstage by a New York agent called Joe Glaser. Glaser suggested that Noël appear in Las Vegas and that he, Glaser, handle all the arrangements.

  Of course, everything would depend on how Noël took to the place. Somehow a fee of twenty thousand pounds tax free made the place attractive sight unseen, but, nonetheless, Noël and Glaser made a sightseeing trip a few days later. By the time they left, Noël had a firm booking at Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn for the following June.

  This is a fabulous madhouse. All around is desert sand with pink and purple mountains on the horizon. All the big hotels are luxe to the last degree. There are myriads of people tearing away at the fruit [slot] machines and gambling, gambling, gambling for twenty-four hours a day. The lighting at night is fantastic; downtown where the Golden Nugget is and the lesser dives, it is ablaze with variegated neon signs. In the classier casinos beams of light shoot down from baroque ceilings on the masses of earnest morons flinging their money down the drain. The sound is fascinating, a steady hum of conversation against a background of rhumba music and the noise of the fruit machines, the clink of silver dollars, quarters and nickels, and the subdued shouts of the croupiers. There are lots of pretty women about but I think, on the whole, sex takes a comparatively back seat. Every instinct and desire is concentrated on money. I expected that this would exasperate me but oddly enough it didn't. The whole fantasia is on such a colossal scale that it is almost stimulating. I went from hotel to hotel and looked at the supper rooms. They are all much of a muchness; expert lighting and sound, and cheerful appreciative audiences who are obviously there to have a good time. I noticed little drunkenness and much better manners than in the New York nightclubs. The gangsters who run the places are all urbane and charming. I had a feeling that if I opened a rival casino I would be battered to death with the utmost efficiency, but if I remained on my own ground as a most highly paid entertainer, I could trust them all the way. Their morals are bizarre in the extreme. They are generous, mother-worshippers, sentimental and capable of much kindness. They are also ruthless, cruel, violent and devoid of scruples.