by Noel Coward
There were two blazing rows at the beginning, then comparative peace, then another blazing row on Thursday when I asked her to play quicker. She was determined to play Ruth like Rebecca of Sun-nybrook Farm. Then rapprochement, because the mutual hatred was beginning to show on the screen, and last night she winged thru still not really knowing her lines but was very good, although not quite good enough.
Betty Bacall was gay and charming and a darling from first to last and no trouble at all. She looked divine but isn't really a comedienne, although she tried like mad and really gave a first rate performance within her limits.
Millie Natwick was wonderful throughout and the others all good.
We had two previews and two kinescopes and it was only yesterday at eleven in the morning that I had to deliver a tirade and insist on close-ups and so we spent the rest of the day under the lights with Claudette screaming blue murder and carrying on like Sarah Bern-hardt's Jewish aunt and me keeping cheerful and sweet with murder in my heart and only one hot dog and a dexamil in my stomach. Then came the performance and everybody came up smiling and I think, nay I am sure, that the prettiest of all contrived with harem-scarem skill to dominate the whole fucking enterprise.
On Sunday last I woke with a pain in my right leg. On Monday when we started camera rehearsals I could hardly walk, so I hobbled to a doctor and asked him to inject novocaine into the agonizing place on my right thigh. As he did so a Versailles fountain of star quality pus shot into the air, whereupon everybody said “Christ,” cultures were taken, I was x-rayed and sent back to bed bright green and in screaming agony. For the next two days I stayed in bed doped to the eyes and panic-stricken while my stand-in went on with the camera blocking. On Wednesday, still in agony, I hobbled to the studio and tried to rehearse, then sent for the doctor who plunged eight times a needle the size of the Eiffel Tower into my leg. This was really terrible because he had to do it eight times and I was shrieking like mad and Charles [Russell] listening outside the door nearly fainted. However, after ten minutes the novocaine began to work and I got through the rehearsal and hobbled home to bed. The next morning Thursday Doddie [God] decided to relent and I sprang out of bed like Margot Fonteyn with no pain at all. I can only conclude that the novocaine frightened it to death. From then on we rehearsed and rehearsed with Claudette screaming about her angles and her dresses, all of which were highly unsuitable, and me screaming about my close-ups. The whole studio is a hive of incompetence and everything was bloody chaos but it is all over now and a great success and one of the nastiest weeks of my whole life has retreated into the past. That is the story of my life to date.
The Coward-Colbert relationship was later patched up, but they never worked together again.
Someone who had relished the experience was Lauren Bacall:
February 1956
Noël dear,
How happy you must be—safely tucked away in your own home on your private island! Away from the Rat Pack, noisy parties, blowing lines, too much booze, etc. I could hear you sigh from here as you boarded your plane. Kept up with your Eastern activities via columns. Your evenings at the theatre, Stork Club, Sardi's and various and sundry other places. There's no escaping me, you see!
Holmby Hills, Beverly Hills and all surrounding areas remain the same. We call this the never changing world. The chit-chat continues. Who's doing what to who and where and even how! Can you imagine? Our friends and enemies are unchanged. How we survive I don't know—that we do impresses me … Trying to adjust to the fact that … no one really gives a damn what you accomplish is coming slowly but steadily to me. And I'm just about convinced.
I've been thinking a good deal about our excursion into ectoplasm. As you no doubt have, I've read all our reviews—was annoyed by a few. God, I hate critics. I suppose we must be patient with them—it's their only moment in the sun—but I'm still for their complete elimination.
Anyway, darling Noël, I wanted to tell you how much I truly enjoyed our three weeks together. I learned more then than I have ever learned here. You're very special in our world—working with you was a privilege—you were marvelous to me. I thank you for having me—for everything—I am so grateful to you and I adore you!
Love,
Betty
•
BY APRIL he was back in New York and sending Cole Lesley a highly colored account of his local doings:
25 West 54th Street
Sunday April 15th 1956
Carnegie Hall was a fair bugger on account of dear [Andre] Kostelan-etz [the conductor] with uncanny showmanship, placing me second on the bill [narrating Carnival of the Animals]. I spoke clearly and with great distinction and the audience was bewildered and morose and far far too large and very Sat: Nite: Pop: if you know what I mean …
The next day was another kettle of quite different fish, I give you my word and my Ed [Sullivan] was a dear dear and spent hours crushing the wretched Kostelanetz into the background and concentrating on this lovely little H shaped F and then we scragged Pete [Matz] off a plane to Florida and he arrived with a most curious beard and the band parts and away I went into “Mad Dogs” and the whole thing was a riot and fifty-two million Americans exactly stared and stared at me and all the New York taxi men have been most flattering ever since …
On Friday back I came again and moved in here. It is a curiously furnished little joint but I am quite happy. I putter about and cook myself little dainties and even wash-up afterwards. There is a gas stove which frightens me very much indeed and very very little crockery. However, there are about seventeen hundred glasses which are gradually becoming filled up with breadcrumbs and bacon fat and stock and what not … Unfortunately the kitchen is so very small that I couldn't even swing Croyden [his cat] in it, which I should love to do, as I miss her sorely. However, there is room for me to sit down and scrabble up my food from my cracked plate and pour the boiling water onto the Nescafe without scalding myself too much.
My coloured lady who obliges for two hours every week day is most frightfully grand and made up to kill with a lot of scarlet lipstick and rice powder. She has a wide eyed tottine which she brings on Saturdays and it sits and stares at so much unaccustomed splendour.
There is a certain amount of Chinoiserie about and several forbidding cocoa-coloured armchairs and no light at all but this has deja been remedied by me popping out and buying two alabaster lamps. My bed is also cocoa-coloured and pretends to be an alluring divan and then all of a sudden it isn't and there you are in bed and reading a bad book. I persuaded dear Earl Blackwell [his landlord] to buy a brand new Steinway and he consented and so I chose it and it is very nice. His old one had bright yellow notes and a number of moths flew out every time you touched it …
We are cooking up a little edifying idea about doing Relative Values with Gladys [Cooper] and Anna Neagle as Moxie. This may assuage a little bit the blind passion that Herbert [Wileox, Neagle's husband] has for me. She can't be all that terrible as Moxie, can she? Or can she? We are also dallying with the thought of getting N.B.C. to finance a Broadway production of a Noël Coward Revue using all the best stuff and some new numbers as well and then letting them do it afterwards as a Spectacular. This with Dora [Bryan] and Little Lad and a carefully picked cast might be a very good plan. However, all that is in the air as yet.
Miss Kay Kendall having made a cracking ass of herself and refused to play Queenie [in the TV version of This Happy Breed}, we have now engaged Patricia Cutts who read it beautifully. We couldn't get Una O'Connor and so Norah [Howard] is playing Granny and a most glorious Sylvia appeared called Beulah Garrick and on the whole the cast looks good. We take the first plungette tomorrow. I am quite looking forward to it.
Went to hear Albanese as Manon Lescaut and it was a grave grave mistake on account of she didn't ought to have attempted it for several reasons. Time's Winged Chariot being the principal one. She sang most softly and looked like a neckless shrewmouse. Jussi Boer-ling did a Mary Martin and belted the living
fuck out of her. He contrived this very subtly by the simple device of gripping her firmly by her shrinking shoulders, turning her bum to the audience and bellowing into her kisser. The production looked as if it had been stolen from Emil[e] Littler [British impresario, inclined to be frugal with production budgets].
A few days later was CBS's Person to Person with Ed Murrow, which was a fair carry-on and no error. I did it in the boys’ apartment on account of my cocoa-coloured cavern looking really too beastly. The waiting about for hours was calculated to be nerve-wrecking but I refused to let it get me down and went into the kitchen and made myself a delicious Dolly's omelette and cut my finger on a tin of Dundee cake and finally appeared before the cameras calmer than any concombre you have ever seen. Except for a few key moments the questions and answers were genuinely impromptu and I made a few quite good jokes one of which was when Ed asked me if I did anything to relax me after a long day's work and I said “Certainly, but I have no intention of discussing it before several million people!” It was all rather a curious sensation, because there was I in the apartment and there was he in a Studio in Grand Central station and I had to snatch his questions out of the air. In any event it was apparently a great success and I crept in a personalized way into thirty-one million gracious American homes.
Meanwhile rehearsals for This Happy Breed continued in unnerving tranquillity. He wrote to Cole:
Patricia Cutts is a good actress and her face is very very pretty. She is however a trifle too tall and very clumsy and keeps stamping on Edna's [Best] feet and rushing blindly through doors that aren't there. Roger Moore is most pretty and acts quite nicely but veree veree softly, as though he were afraid someone might hear him. This is being remedied.
My wigs are wonderful and my clothes perfectly alright and my own performance is coming along nicely, too. We are going to do it without an audience and wander about into the garden and the kitchen and make the whole thing desperately real and true and sincere.
On May 5 he could report to Lornie:
25 West 54th Street
New York
7th May 1956
Darling Lorniegraco—
I'm sitting up in bed weighted down with laurels and on the tired side, but very, very happy. Darling, Happy Breed came up a treat and turned out to be an absolute triumph. It was most beautifully played and Edna was absolutely beyond words as Ethel. She played it with tenderness, humor and reality and never let go of it for a second. She was also a perfect angel all through rehearsals. She was a constant help to me rather than a hindrance. The rest of the cast were all good, particularly Roger Moore, Patricia Cutts, Norah and the American boy who played Reg [Robert Chapman]. You will see all this for yourselves as I am bringing the kinescope with me to Paris, France. The director was one hundred per cent efficient and very nice to work with. In fact, there wasn't so much as an irritable frown from the first rehearsal to the performance.
At the end, before the credits were over, there had been over a thousand calls on the CBS switchboard. Bill Paley rang up, choked with emotion and said it was the finest thing he had ever seen in his life on TV, then Clifton and the Bogarts rang up from Hollywood, also C with E [choked with emotion]. Millions of people rang up, all with C with E. In fact, it was really the most undiluted triumph I have had, all of which goes to show that I'm very pretty indeed.
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
There was a sweet party afterwards at Edna's just for the company and a few common outsiders like Gladys Cooper and Rex Harrison.
I'm so thrilled about Edna being able to come back and do that so calmly and with such little fuss after six months in a mental home; she was really wonderful. This seems my big year for saving the Barmies! It's a pity Nijinski is dead—I might have written a little ballet for him.
I've really no more news except that I'm really very flushed with triumph and it's a most wonderful feeling to have vanquished my enemies by the simple reprisal of giving a good performance and I know it really was a good performance and I honestly think it has had a profound effect and that my stock in America is now higher than ever. The notices so far have been wonderful.
Love, love, love, love.
Love
Noël
The broadcast was watched by an audience of fifty-two million people.
CHAPTER 25
BUBBLES … AND NUDES
(1956-1957)
HOME AND COLONIAL (unproduced) begat Island Fling (Westport, 1951), which begat South Sea Bubble (United Kingdom, 1956).
In its final incarnation, the plot hinges on Lady Alexandra Shotter, the wife of the Governor of Samolo—a cross between Lady Diana Cooper and Lady Edwina Mountbatten—almost becoming involved with Hali, a young firebrand native politician she is trying to wean to conservatism. He mistakes her political advances for something more amatory in nature, and when her defensive rhetoric fails, a crack over the head with a bottle has to suffice. As plots went, it was not exactly Ibsen.
Written originally for Gertie (who dithered), revised and played at Westport by Claudette Colbert, further revised and offered to Vivien Leigh (who disdainfully refused), the piece then languished until Noël heard in late 1955, to his surprise, that Vivien now saw great merit in it and was anxious to star in it at the earliest possible opportunity.
At this point her career was at a crossroads, her health, both physically and mentally, was suspect, and her marriage to Olivier was beginning to unravel. The play seemed something of a lifeline.
She wrote to Noël in September from her dressing room at Stratford, where she was playing Lavinia in Titus Andronkus, His was the best play ever written and she wanted to play all the female roles. Why didn't he play all the gents? But, seriously, he must co-star in it with her and direct it. They would have such fun! She had already started learning the lines, she claimed, and not one of them must be cut. She even speculated jokingly that it would make a great musical film in Todd-A-O. (Todd-A-O was the big-screen cinema format of that time developed by impresario Mike Todd.) She remained his devoted Vivien.
He wrote to Lornie:
Blue Harbour
September 12th 1955
I had a really enthusiastic letter from Vivien about South Sea Bubble, saying she would like to start rehearsals second week in January if that would suit me. This is wonderful news and I am of course delighted but I really think that I cannot undertake to direct it, I would much rather Peter Brook did it and then I came back in time for the try-out, so I cabled Binkie to this effect and told Vivien that I will fly to Bermuda in December to see her and discuss all details.
Vivien wrote again a month later begging Noël to direct the play himself. She also explains her anxiety to get into immediate production—a prior film commitment in the following June or July.
Could they not do a short London season, then perhaps a TV production in New York and a film version—all of which should satisfy the financial backers? She didn't think she could manage another long run, if only because of her health. She had a history of tuberculosis and was suffering a recurrence. It would mean a stay in a clinic, having unpleasant injections, she told him, but it would be only a short stay if she behaved sensibly, which she fully intended to do, so as to be ready for the play. There was a distinct note of hysteria as she poured out her thoughts.
She knew precisely who should play the role of Hali, the male lead. Peter Finch. What did Noël think?
Noël privately thought it an extremely bad idea. It was an open secret that Vivien was having an affair with Finch. The part eventually went to Rank Film actor Ronald Lewis.
To Lorn:
December 24th 1955
Binkie is in New York, as you know by now, and I've had a lovely long talk to him on the telephone and apparently all is going well with the preparations. I do not think Billy Chapell [Chappell] is the ideal director of South Sea Bubble on account of his view of high society being confined to the area between Charing Cross Road and Dean Street. However, Larry and Vivi
en and Binkie think he will be right and Binkie and Vivien will supervise the social aspects of the play.
On the pre-London tour, Vivien wrote to keep him up to date with the play's progress. She felt her own performance, after a shaky start, had greatly improved and he would now not be too displeased with it. The play itself was going from strength to strength, with all the laughs coming in the right places. But oh, the theaters! The Opera House in Manchester was by no means ideal, although for some strange reason she was fond of it, which was more than could be said for Liverpool—more of a tunnel than a theater. She felt Noël would be pleased with the sets, despite the fact that they had been designed by a young man whose facial hair was entirely pink!
Noël wrote to Cole:
I haven't yet read the notices, of course, but I know in advance what to expect. They really do hate success in England, don't they? They hate and resent it with all their mean little souls. Here [in the United States] the press can frequently be cruel and vitriolic but they can also be capable of enthusiasm when they do happen to like something and at least they are interested in the Theatre.
Obviously the play is a smash hit, because it is highly entertaining and Vivien gives a lovely performance in spite of the dear first nighters and the moist cascades of faint praise. Hurray Hurray!!
The play opened at London's Lyric Theatre on April 25 and, despite the anticipated dismissive reviews, seemed to settle in for a successful commercial run.
Noël was beginning to make plans for a New York production and told Lornie: