The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  To which Lorn replied:

  Boo rang up last week. She has decided to be sensible about the whole thing … She said Frankie wrote his letter without her knowing (which I doubt) and that he did it in the heat of the moment, knowing how upset she was; although she swears she didn't cry or make any sort of scene. So that's that and we are, I suppose, as we were except for having put paid to Boo's musical of The Marquise,

  •

  NOëL HAD MORE LUCK with the London version of Lulu, in which Vivien Leigh did play the lead, yet even here there were further disquieting signs of a breakdown in his relationship with Binkie.

  As late as April Noël is writing to Lorn: “I haven't heard from Binkie yet whether or not or if and when he proposes to do Lulu,“ In the same letter he tells her: “I have finished Waiting in the Wings and I think it's pretty good … If Wings is a success, we shall have something going in London … If he [Binkie] doesn't do Wings, I shall give it to Toby Rowland together with Volcano and bugger the Pope!”

  1959. When the news of Larry and Vivien's separation became public, Noël whisked Leigh off to Chalet Coward for Christmas and—in one of his finest performances—benignly kept the paparazzi at bay.

  Lulu opened at the Royal Court on July 29, transferred to the New Theatre and managed a respectable run of 155 performances.

  There was, however, one sad, discordant note—a letter from Vivien. For some years now, like the rest of her friends, Noël had been concerned about the precarious state of her health, both physical and mental. As early as 1953 David Niven had said of a recent breakdown: “I feel very strongly that she must be helped over one point … She has a dread of it [a mental breakdown] happening again and unless some expert can persuade her that it won't, then in my humble opinion she'll go on expecting it till it does.“

  In that context the letter was particularly worrying.

  Vivien wrote to Noël to tell him that Larry had asked her for a legal separation. She found the shock tremendous, since she had always assumed that, whatever might go wrong between them, they would stay together. She knew there was respect and love there, and surely that would sustain anything after the twenty-two years they had been together?

  Yes, there had been problems, of course there had, but for her part, when she had had to choose between Larry and Peter Finch, there had been no doubt in her mind whom she would choose. She could never love anyone else as she had loved Larry.

  But, she confessed, she had watched Larry change. Things seemed to improve in the months of the doomed pregnancy, and they were very happy. But then, in 1956, came The Entertainer, Osborne's play in which Larry was to star, and into his life came Joan Plowright, who, Vivien felt, had now succeeded in destroying their lives.

  Larry had refused Vivien's plea to try again to have a child and had gone to New York in 1957 with the play and, naturally, the lady in question. Vivien went on to tell Noël that, in fact, she and Larry now hardly lived together at all, and being alone was agony to her.

  She felt she owed Noël her confidence in this matter, because of the earlier miscommunication over the baby. The only other person she had told was Sybil Thorndike, who had known Larry all his life. Sybil found it impossible to believe but sadly, Noëly, it is all too true and the door is closed.

  Would he please keep her secret for the time being? How would she manage? She felt her life was ended.

  It was time to forgive and forget past problems. When the run ended, Noël was to take Vivien to Les Avants for Christmas and keep the “charming newspaper” men and women at a friendly but firm arm's length.

  •

  AT THE END of the year Coley had everything in readiness for The Master, and Noël was finally able to move into his new home in Les Avants. He couldn't wait for his friends to see it.

  Christmas at Chalet Coward and (most of) the gang's all here. Jerry Hogan, Cole Lesley, Geoffrey Johnson, and Gladys Calthrop pose with Noël for photographer Graham Payn.

  To Clifton Webb:

  This house is perfectly lovely and I can't wait for you to get your ass off those Beverly Hills and come and stay in it. It is gloriously comfortable and the view across the lake and mountains is breathtaking. It is also very convenient being only two hours from London, fifty minutes from Paris and forty minutes from Nice. We have a very gemutlich little social celluloid colony. Charles Chaplin, Benny and George [Benita Hume and George Sanders], the Nivens, in the next valley, Bill Holden, etc., etc. and, temporarily, the Brynners. So it is all very gay and yet quiet enough to be quiet if you want to, and I generally do. But when I don't, I just pop round the end of the lake into France and gamble at Evian, or whisk into Lausanne to hear Turandot or Traviata sung by those clever, musical Italians who will keep it up whatever you may say. Oh, do come in the Spring when the wild narcissi are all a-growing and a-blowing.

  As he looked out over the mountains at a world covered in snow, it was time for reflection. In a letter to an unnamed friend he wrote:

  I am now more of a perfectionist than I used to be; I take pride in being a professional. I don't write plays with the idea of giving some great thought to the world, and that isn't just coy modesty. As one gets older one doesn't feel quite so strongly any more, one discovers that everything is always going to be exactly the same with different hats on … If I wanted to write a play with a message, God forbid, it would undoubtedly be a comedy.

  When the public is no longer interested in what I have to write, then it will be brought home to me that I am out of touch; not before. Nowadays, though, I find that I rather enjoy my downfalls; to me it's acridly funny when something flops that has taken me months to write and compose. In private I suppose I am a tremendous celebrity snob, and by celebrity I don't mean Brigitte Bardot but people of achievement like Somerset Maugham or Rebecca West. Looking back through my life I find that my personality only really changed once, and that was when I was twenty-four and I became a star and a privileged person. Yet to my inner mind I'm much the same now as I was before The Vortex; I'm as anxious to be good as I ever was, only now time's winged chariot seems to be goosing me. It doesn't bother me that I don't write in England any more. I love England but I hate the climate and I have absolutely no regrets about having left … looking around me I deplore the lack of style and elegance in most modern plays; I long for the glamour of great stars who used to drive up to the stage door in huge limousines. In my younger days I was tremendously keen to be a star and famous and successful; well, I have been successful for most of my life, and if at this late stage I were to have another series of resounding failures, I believe I could regard them with a certain equanimity.

  CHAPTER 27

  A VISIT TO “GREENELAND” …

  VIA HAVANA

  (1959-1960)

  TO SAY THAT Noël and Graham Greene were lifelong friends would be something of an exaggeration. In fact, they never actually met until 1949, when both were in middle age, but they had been well aware of each other for many years.

  A critic, mostly of film, Greene was one of the few dissenting voices on the 1941 stage version of Blithe Spirit, which he found “a weary exhibition of bad taste.” He continued to use Noël's work as an exemplar of what he considered outmoded and irrelevant in the theater, until finally Noël felt compelled to retaliate in verse:

  “In happy memory of Hawthorne,” wrote Graham Greene.

  Dear Mr, Graham Greene, I yearn

  So much to know why you should burn

  With such fierce indignation at

  The very fact that I exist,

  I've been unable to resist

  Sitting up later than I need

  To read in The Spectator what

  Appears to be no more, no less

  Than shocking manners, I confess

  Bewilderment, I've seldom seen

  Another brother-writer press

  Such disadvantage with such mean

  Intent to hurt. You must have been

  For years, in secret nourishin
g

  A rich, rip-snorting, flourishing

  Black hatred for my very guts!

  Surely all these envenomed cuts

  At my integrity and taste

  Must be a waste of your own time?

  What is my crime, beyond success?

  (But you have been successful too

  It can't be that) I know a few

  Politer critics than yourself

  Who simply hate my lighter plays

  But do they state their sharp dispraise

  With such surprising, rising bile?

  Oh dear me no, they merely smile,

  A patronizing smile perhaps

  But then these journalistic chaps

  Unlike ourselves, dear Mr, Greene,

  (Authors I mean) are apt to sneer

  At what they fear to be apart

  From that which they conceive as art.

  You have described (also with keen,

  Sadistic joy) my little book

  About Australia, one look

  At which should prove, all faults aside,

  That I had tried, dear Mr, Greene,

  To do a job. You then implied

  That I had run away, afraid,

  A renegade, I can't surmise

  Why you should view your fellow men

  With such unfriendly, jaundiced eyes.

  But then, we're strangers, I can find

  No clue, no key to your dark mind,

  I've read your books as they appear

  And I've enjoyed them, (Nearly all,)

  I've racked my brains in a sincere

  But vain endeavour to recall

  If, anytime or anywhere,

  In Bloomsbury or Belgrave Square,

  In Paris or Peking or Bude,

  I have, unwittingly, been rude,

  Or inadvertently upset you.

  (Did I once meet you and forget you?

  Have I ever been your debtor?

  Did you once write me a letter

  That I never got—or what?)

  If I knew, I shouldn't worry.

  All this anguish, all this flurry,

  This humiliating scene

  That I'm making, Mr, Greene,

  Is a plea for explanation

  For a just justification

  By what strange Gods you feel yourself empowered

  To vent this wild expenditure of spleen

  Upon your most sincerely

  Noël Coward,

  When they did actually meet, Noël recorded: “Met Graham Greene at long last and belaboured him for being vile about me in the past. Actually he was rather nice.”

  In March 1953 he ran across Greene and his mistress, Catherine Wal-ston, in Jamaica. “He was very agreeable and his beastliness to me in the past I have forgiven but not forgotten. He has a strange, tortured mind but, like most of God's creatures, aches to be loved.”

  A year later Greene is renting Blue Harbour for Mrs. Walston and himself, and making critical amends through Coley: “We went to After the Ball the other night and thoroughly enjoyed it. Personally I liked it better than Bitter Sweet,”

  In January 1959 Noël was invited to play with Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson in Carol Reed's film version of Greene's Our Man in Havana. Noël was to portray Hawthorne, a not very bright agent of MI-5 who decides to recruit Wormold (Guinness), a vacuum cleaner salesman, to be “our man in Havana.”

  In April the cast, a motley crew, arrived in a Cuba that had recently undergone a revolution in which Batista had been replaced by Castro. After Noël had finished his scenes and departed, Alec Guinness kept him informed of the film's progress, or lack of it:

  Before he and Noël embarked on Our Man in Havana in Castro's uncertain Cuba, Alec Guinness and his wife, Merula, were Noël's house guests in Jamaica.

  Capri—Havana

  April 26th 1959

  Two or three nights ago I saw the first batch of rushes, including your street walking and Sloppy Joe's {a scene Noël shared with Guinness}. In my opinion they were superb. Very funny, very excellent and they look marvellous. Carol's a clever old thing—what comes on the screen has such authority and decision and meaning. You look marvellous and the contrast between you and the Cubans creates an effect of great brilliance without losing in any way reality.

  Ernie Kovacs is very sweet and good natured but I think we are all prepared to brain him. The jokes are endless and ceaseless and exhausting to a degree. I'd far rather act with Renee Houston {a minor English comedienne} or appear in a chorus line. Between every take it's the gaiety or some gag he's thought up for his bloody TV show—and he's a little fluffy on the lines. But good, I know. I've become so square in his eyes I'm positively cubic.

  The girl {Jo Morrow} is still full of “Hi” and “Get you” and “Daddy-O!” and loud and bouncy but she has been told by Carol to calm down. I believe he's told her I'm too old for all that carry on. But I must say she performs well.

  Graham Greene agreed—at least in part. In the copy of his novel that he sent to Noël, he wrote, “In happy memory of Hawthorne and in memorable horror of a certain Jo Morrow.”

  Burl Ives arrived last night, together with wife, guitar and personal press agent! He seems a dear—I'm sure he is—and v. good—but I know he's going to sing to me when we have a quiet moment in the broiling sun.

  Safely back in England, Guinness became a regular correspondent. Noël had written commiserating with him on his recent foot operation:

  Kettlebrook Meadows

  Steep Marsh

  Nr. Petersfield

  August 25th 1959

  … I was unstitched five days or so ago—I looked as if I were wearing Wardour Street perverts’ boots, suitable for a cover of London Life—and here I am happily at home, quite comfortable in movement but walking with great dignity, like a latter day prophet. But when the green, yellow, purple and black blotches have subsided, I shall be fit to dangle a Mistinguette [Mistinguett—the French music-hall star of the 1920s] leg across the side of any blue pool with the prettiest of them.

  Guinness was visited in his sick bed by Graham Greene, who had recently had a more embarrassing operation of his own.

  Graham paid me a sweet visit, loaded with pate and cyclamen, and seemed in good form, though, I thought he sat rather gingerly on the arms of chairs.

  How good that Lulu is such a success and that the masses are crowding in with such pleasure. And I do hope you and Coley will be crowding into that Chalet soon. How infuriating for you not to be in yet, and the snow presumably getting ready to come. I shall think of you snug under the eaves in the evening lamplight.

  Not sure what is happening in my life. I was contracted (for money rather than pleasure, or rather to work off virtually the remains of my old Korda contract) to go to Hollywood in early October to make a very silly childish film—but after Havana I had a hankering for some funny lines for myself and to do something without]o Morrow, Burl Ives and Kovacs—but I've had to do rather a lot of foot stamping (very silly people indeed, 20th Century Fox) and it now looks as if it's all off … and I shall take myself to New York to do a rather nice TV (never done one before) which they hope will help to sell Ford cars.

  This is rather a ramble of a letter, isn't it? I'll bring it to a swift close. Merula [Alec Guinness's wife] sends her love. She hasn't quite got over “doing good works” a few weeks ago by taking a complete cripple lady to a cricket match, and the lady unbuttoned her shoes on the boundary and ate ice cream holding the spoon with her toes.

  December 11th 1959

  Very dear 59200,

  I have just read 338's letter to you in the Collected Volume [of letters]. Of course I had read them before, but years ago, and clearly forgotten. I am glad to be reminded that someone as prosaic and critical as T E. Lawrence appreciated your genius and fine clear prose.

  I imagine you and Coley at your yodeling, shoveling the snow and emerging now and then from the gables, eaves, whatever they are, in fine feathered green hats. I shal
l hope to see you at it one day— perhaps next winter. Merula, Matthew [the Guinnesses’ son] and a young American friend and I are off to Rome for Christmas. (I can't stand turkey, hate Merula doing all that stuffing and have always fancied myself close to the Pope at the Christmas Midnight Mass.)

  We only go for five days and then almost immediately on my return Johnny Mills and I wind our kilts around each other and fling ourselves before the cameras in Highland reels [Tunes of Glory]. What a good thing I had those varicose veins dumped in the bin in the Clinic in August!

  Nothing to report, really. I was sad to have missed you—and imagine you won't be at premiere of Havana. Pity but understandable. It's funny how one is never jealous of good actors—not in the remotest bit jealous of the huge and gay success you will make in it, but rejoice in it, but I shall be spitting fire if they think dear old Burl is good.

  Our Man was released to mixed notices, with the criticism largely focused on Guinness and director Carol Reed. Guinness wrote to Noël:

  January 5th 1960

  How sweet of you to have written. Very touched I was—and encouraged. Most of the press were pretty beastly to me—and to the film, if it comes to that. The Daily Mail was sufficiently vicious for me to have written myself. I was dull in it—in spite of the kind things you say. I'm in a rather “I-told-you-so-mood.” I JiJkeep telling Carol— I ought to have characterized it all more as a shopman, perhaps with a squint, a wall eye, buck teeth and a mop of ginger hair and a Manchester accent. I don't feel bitter about it, though. I knew perfectly well what was happening while doing it—and I can't possibly blame Carol now that he is taking the rap as well as me. In fact, I don't even blame him in my heart of hearts. In spite of weaknesses, I think it is a good film—and thanks to you and Ralph [Richardson] and Ernie Kovacs an entertaining one. I might add that so far it is breaking all records at Leicester Square since they pulled down the old Alhambra. The critics were bound to turn on me. They do about every five years. I'm sufficiently experienced and booed at to take it in my stride. If it hadn't been for the dreary Scapegoat [a tedious film he made for MGM in 1959, in which he played dual roles], I might have escaped it for another year. I prefer that it should be now.