by Noel Coward
“One never says ‘I.’ “ Cartoon by Gerald Hoffnung.
CHAPTER 32
SHADOW OF EVENING
(1967-1973)
I would prefer Fate to allow me to go to sleep when it's my proper bedtime. I never have been one for staying up too late.
DIARIES (1967)
Yesterday I went to the Garrick Club where all the flags were, symbolically, at half-mast. I met a mutual acquaintance … In a sort of idiotic attempt not to be depressing I said—”I wonder where Noël's dining tonight and with whom—St. Joan?” To which he instantly replied—”No … Ivor, of course. He's been there quite a time, and he's sure to know all the best joints.”
I know Noël would have liked that.
BEVERLEY NICHOLS (1975)
“Sir Noëlie, if you don't mind!” The newly ennobled Noël leaves the Palace with Gladys and Joyce, February 3, 1970.
AS 1967 BEGAN, Noël, with the recollection of his own failure of memory so recent, was increasingly aware that “Time's winged chariot is beginning to goose me.”
It was another year when the Grim Reaper decided to work overtime. In June Dorothy Parker was granted the oblivion she claimed to have long sought, without any further effort on her part. “Terrible about Dorothy Parker. Of course, hers was the living death of any non-producing artist. She was a uniquely talented wit and lived so unwisely.”
In the same month Spencer Tracy died. Noël immediately cabled to Katharine Hepburn, Tracy's longtime lover:
DARLING KATE
YOUR PERFORMANCE IN GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER WAS IMPECCABLE AND QUITE LOVELY STOP HOW WONDERFUL THAT DEAR SPENCE'S LAST PERFORMANCE SHOULD BE ONE OF THE FINEST HE HAS EVER GIVEN WHICH IS SAYING A GREAT DEAL STOP MY FOND LOVE TO YOU.
NOëL
To which she replied: “What a wonderful, lovely looking, sensitive creature I've spent so much of my life with. I know that I am lucky—he kept me hopping and I never had time to think about myself. So—on again alone …”
A month later Vivien Leigh made her own exit. Noël to Larry: “She often reminded me of a Bird of Paradise. Now perhaps she can find her own.”
Back in February Noël had turned his short story “Star Quality” into a three-act play. He sent it from Jamaica to Lorn:
I think it's pretty funny, whether it's too Pro-y for the great public remains to be seen. This is a DEAD, DEAD secret … As usual it needs a big star to play it. Obviously, I can only think of Maggie Leighton, who can't do it. I have a feeling Irene Worth might have a successful bash at it. She isn't quite a star but she's a bloody good actress … I wish one didn't always yearn for Gertie!
He had also written the first act of a new comedy, Age Cannot Wither, a sequel of a kind to Fallen Angels in which three sixty-ish ladies, who have been girls together since school days, meet every year to compare notes over a drink or two. It was looking distinctly promising, but the events that came so close upon one another distracted him. (“I've been too agitated by everything!”) Age Cannot Wither was never finished, and Star Quality remained unproduced in his lifetime.
There was worse to come. On November 21 Lornie lost her long battle with cancer. Noël shared his grief with Joyce:
Of course I'd known it was coming—for ages, really—but I just couldn't bear to accept it. When Gertie left us, the shock was cruel and immediate but one had to face it in public. With Mum it was one of those inevitable things one has to adjust to but with Lornie it somehow wasn't fair. It wasn't her time
For whatever time is left to me I shall always remember the jokes, the finger wagging, that Scots commonsense that I frequently needed but usually didn't want to hear, since she was invariably right. But most of all, I shall remember the love she brought and the dignity. She was very very special and I still can't believe when that phone rings that I shan't hear—”Now then, my darling Master, you really must …”
•
Boom (1968). Noël as the Witch of Capri, with Elizabeth Taylor as Flora Goforth, in Joseph Losey's film of the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore.
After playing opposite Noël in The Italian Job, Michael Caine claimed, “It's a bit like playing with God, actually.”
with suite Noëls's professional career reached its peak. There was nothing more he felt the need to prove, and even if there had been, his steadily deteriorating health would have prevented any serious commitment.
He appeared in Richard Rodgers's TV musical version of Androcles and the Lion and acted in two more films—in the 1967 Boom, with Elizabeth Taylor, and with Michael Caine in the 1968 The Italian Job. By now it would not have mattered what part he played. The legend was set and the man appreciated. He was—Noël Coward. When the film was over, Caine said he felt that playing with Noël “was a bit like playing with God.” Noël did not choose to argue the point.
Then came, with delayed inevitability, Star, a proposed film in which “Noël Coward” was to be depicted. Gertie was to be played by Julie Andrews.
Julie … is about as much like Gertie as I am Edna Ferber's twin, but what can one do? I liked her athletic, careening, whilom nun in The Sound of Music. She is a bright, talented actress and quite attractive since she dealt with her monstrous English over-bite. It will be interesting—more interesting, I hope, than dear Gertie's actual life.
Bea Lillie said firmly that she intended to play herself in the film! The character was written out of the script.
•
LATER THAT YEAR Noël took Coley and Graham to see the South Seas—Samolo Revisited. He could not resist writing to Gladys: “Well, here we are in Bora-Bora. Every time I come here [he had been there in 1962], I'm dying to say that it's a bore-a bore-a but no such luck. It remains, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful.”
On the trip he wrote a verse about it to encapsulate its charm:
The wild lagoon in which the island lies
Changes its colours with the changing skies
And, lovely beyond belief,
The dazzling surf upon the outer reef
Murmurs its lonely, timeless lullaby
Warning the heart perhaps that life is brief
Measured against the sea's eternity.
By the time the holiday was over the adventure had virtually turned into a round-the-world trip. It would be the last.
Now came his last professional outing in The Italian Job, Noël played Mr. Bridger, a criminal mastermind who organizes the “job” from the comfort of his prison cell, which he has decorated with photographs of the royal family. Our last glimpse is of Mr. Bridger graciously accepting the plaudits of his fellow inmates for the successful completion of his latest coup. All in all, the role of a royalist master was a fitting symbol for the man.
•
FOR SOME TIME NOW Noël had been battling health problems, and he was not, he admitted, the world's best patient. Apart from the impairment of his short-term memory, which he found more humiliating than anything else, he began to suffer increasingly from arteriosclerosis, particularly in his right leg. He complained to Gladys—and anyone else who would listen—about the regimen he had been set by his doctors.
Can you believe it? The bloody doctors tell me I've got to pound up and down the road to the village every day, wet or fine, to keep the circulation whizzing around. That it should come to this—walking] Every morning I peer out of the window with the greatest suspicion to greet what I hope will not be a bright new day. A good downpour is now my idea of a good time to be had by me—”I can't possibly go out in that,” I say to myself, and light up the consoling weed. Yes, I know it may shorten my life by a year or two but who's counting any more? Gather ye rosebuds—or a ciggie—while ye may is my motto these days. And you may quote me. Of course, I suppose I could make very old bones indeed—look at Mum—but I'm not at all sure I want that. I've never wanted to be the last to leave any party. In fact, I was saying to Coley only the other day—”I would prefer Fate to let me go to sleep when it's my proper bedtime and not
let me stay up too late.” Rather poetic, I thought.
Yours,
LAZARUS
As it turned out, there were to be an inordinate number of late nights in the year ahead, as individuals and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic prepared to celebrate his forthcoming seventieth birthday. As the day approached, the events came so thick and fast that Noël suggested it be called Holy Week.
When it was all behind him and he was back in the safe haven of Les Avants, he could write to Joyce:
Well, dear heart,
As Cole [as in Porter] might have said—and to the best of my knowledge actually did—”What a swell party that was!” I could say that this beautiful heart-shaped, if slightly time-worn face, is now creased in a perpetual smile of suitably modest gratitude but that would be me being afraid to show what I really feel.
Diaries: “I sat next to the Queen Mother at lunch. She was as dear as ever. The weather behaved with royal consideration and it was all enchantment.” (In the background, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.)
After the Tony Awards, April 1970. Lauren Bacall, Geoffrey Johnson, Noël, Alfred, and Cary Grant celebrate.
I have been genuinely moved by so many of the things that have happened and been said about me—simply because nobody needed to say any of them. You suddenly realize that a lot of the petty irritations of the past are just that—petty and past …
The moment that came closest to undoing him emotionally was the birthday lunch given in his honor by the queen. Would he consider accepting a knighthood, if offered? she asked. For once there was no ready Coward riposte, and his name was duly gazetted in the 1970 New Year's Honours List. On February 3 came the investiture and, to the accompaniment of a military band appropriately playing “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” Sir Noël rose on painful knee with the recognition from his country he had deserved thirty years earlier.
There was an audible sigh of relief from the ranks of the other theatrical knights, and Sir Alec Guinness spoke for all of them when he said, “We have been like a row of teeth with the front tooth missing. Now we can smile again.”
•
AND THAT, in effect, was the end of the Noël Coward Show. There were no more plays, no more songs; he even stopped writing his journal. It was as though he felt that he had delivered his curtain speech and he could now take as many bows as the applause would allow.
The applause never stopped. He received an honorary Tony Award; he appeared as a celebrity guest on TV talk shows. There were two anthology revues—Cowardy Custard in London and Oh, Coward! in New York— which played to capacity for months.
Noël at Firefly, standing on the spot where he was buried, overlooking the Spanish Main.
It was at a gala performance of the latter that he made his last public appearance, on January 14, 1973, with Marlene on his arm. The next day he, Coley, and Graham left for the haven of Jamaica. There in the calm early morning of Monday, March 26, he died peacefully.
His last words to them the previous evening had been, “Good night, my darlings, I'll see you tomorrow.”
PERMISSIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the following individuals and organizations for permission to quote from letters to Noël. Names in parentheses indicate the executors of an estate or the copyright owners.
Edward Albee; Lauren Bacall; Enid Bagnold (Dominick Jones); Lionel Bart; Cecil Beaton (Hugo Vickers); Binkie Beaumont; (Laurence Harbottle, Harbottle & Lewis); Joyce Carey (Combined Theatrical Charities); Sir Charles B. Cochran (Laurence Harbottle, Harbottle & Lewis); Sir Winston Churchill (Anthea Morton Saner—Curtis Brown); Duff Cooper (John Julius Norwich); “Clemence Dane'VWinifred Ashton (I. R. Gibbons); Basil Dean (Martin Dean); Marlene Dietrich (Maria and Peter Riva); Robert Donat (John Donat); Dame Daphne du Maurier (Kits Browning); Mary Ellis (Josh Liveright); (Sir) Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Vera Fairbanks); Edna Ferber (Julie Gilbert); Ian Fleming (Kate Grimond—with permission from the Ian Fleming Will Trustees); Pamela Frankau (Timothy d'Arch Smith); Greta Garbo (Gray Horan and courtesy Harriet Brown, Inc., and the Estate of Greta Garbo); Sir John Gielgud (Ian Bradshaw on behalf of the Sir John Gielgud Charitable Trust); Graham Greene (Francis Greene); Tammy Grimes; Sir Alec Guinness (Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson); Norman Hartnell (Tim Matlin at the Norman Hartnell Estate); Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan (Lady Sara Havelock-Allan); Fanny Holtzmann (Edward Berkman and the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio); Marina, Duchess of Kent (HRH the Duke of Kent); Harry Kurnitz; Gertrude Lawrence (the late Pamela Clatworthy); T E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust); Lorn Loraine (Jane Cooper); Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (Sean Malone and the Ten Chimneys Foundation); Hugh Martin; Mary Martin (Larry Hagman); W Somerset Maugham (Julian Hope and A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of The Royal Literary Fund); the late Sir John Mills; Nancy Mitford (the Duchess of Devonshire); Lord Louis Mountbatten (Lord Brabourne); Beverley Nichols (Janet Glass Agency); David Niven (David Niven Jr. and Jamie Niven); Ivor Novello (Samuel French and The Ivor Novello Trust); Lord Olivier (Laurence Harbottle, Harbottle & Lewis); John Osborne (the late Helen Osborne); Harold Pinter; Christopher Plummer; Terence Rattigan (Trustees of the Rattigan Estate); Sir Michael Redgrave (The Redgrave Family); The Royal Archives (on behalf of the late King George VI and the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother); George Bernard Shaw (The Society of Authors); Dame Edith Sitwell (David Higham Associates); G. B. Stern (The Society of Authors); Elaine Stritch; James Thurber (Rosemary Thurber); Kenneth Tynan (Matthew Tynan); Lord Robert Vansittart (Sir Colville Barclay); Margaret Webster (Diana Raymond); Sir Arnold Wesker; Thornton Wilder (Tappan Wilder); Virginia Woolf (The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf); Alexander Woollcott (from The Letters of Alexander Woollcott ca. 1944 by the Viking Press, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group [USA] Inc.); the late Irene Worth; Esme Wynne (Jon Wynne-Tyson).
NOTE: Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of letters to Noël used in this book. Should any further information come to light, we shall be glad to include it in any future editions.
So many people helped this project in so many ways that it would be impossible to name them and certainly to quantify their contribution. First and foremost, of course, the late Graham Payn, executor of the Coward Estate, for his unstinting support in this as in so many earlier Coward endeavours.
Then, in alphabetical order:
Christine Amos, Ken Bloom, Alan Brodie, Tricia Buckingham, Allison Derrett, Lisa Dowdeswell, Lisa Foster, Elizabeth Fuller, Greg Guiliana, John Hodgson, Claire Hudson, Kathryn Johnson, Geoffrey Johnson, Robert Kimball, Ed Knappman, Howard Mandelbaum, Richard Mangan, Leslie Morris, Sean Noël, Margot Peters, Silke Ronneburg, Steve Ross, Bernard Schleifer, Donald Seawell, Ken Starrett, Ray Wemmlinger, and Alice Wilson. You know who you are and what you did—and the invaluable Rosalind Fayne, who valiantly typed and typed and typed!
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Coward Estate Archives: frontispiece, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 24, 15, 26, 31, 32, 34, 44, 47, 52, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 80, 89, 90, 91, 95, 108, 112, 113, 118, 121, 123, 124, 128, 134, 137, 140, 147, 149, 153, 155, 156, 158, 164, 166, 167, 172, 176, 179, 180, 184, 203, 209, 223, 225, 248, 256, 278, 279, 283, 285, 292, 294, 316, 317, 329, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 338, 345, 351, 352, 361, 362, 366, 368, 369, 370, 372, 385, 395, 411, 419, 420, 422, 425, 435, 438, 440, 449, 458, 460, 464, 482, 484, 485, 490, 511, 514, 515, 527, 529, 532, 533, 539, 540, 544, 548, 563, 569, 575, 580, 582, 584, 586, 587, 590, 592, 594, 601, 620, 625, 630, 633, 640, 642, 644, 645, 649, 650, 656, 661, 664, 667, 677, 678, 682, 690, 691, 696, 697, 698, 702, 716, 718, 721, 723, 725, 727, 729, 745, 751,752,753
Barry Day Collection: 2, 5, 178, 216, 263, 264, 267, 269, 272, 275, 308, 310, 339, 428, 446, 463, 465, 503, 513, 547, 581, 610, 653, 660, 713
Geoffrey Johnson Collection: 4, 103, 284
The Players Club: 57
Algonquin Hotel: 61
Sitwell Estate: 83
; Photofest: 278, 316, 536, 688, 746, 749
Ten Chimneys Foundation: 276, 277, 290, 550
Sir Arnold Wesker: 235
Carlton/Rank: 470
Rosemary Thurber: 344
Ronald Grant Archive: 111, 354
Lord Snowdon: 721
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Letters from Noël Coward copyright © 2007 by N.C. Avantales AG Compilation and editorial and other material copyright © 2007 by Barry Day Individual letters to Noël Coward copyright © by the writers. Letters are included by kind permission and credits can be found in the acknowledgments.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc., New York and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coward, Noël, 1899-1973.
{Correspondence. Selections}
The letters of Noël Coward I edited and with an introduction by Barry Day. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-53742-3
1. Coward, Noël, 1899-1973—Correspondence. 2. Dramatists, English—20th century—Correspondence. 3. Actors—Great Britain—Correspondence. 4. Coward, Noël, 1899-1973—Friends and associates. 5. Coward, Noël, 1899-1973—Family.
I. Day, Barry. II. Title.
PR6005.085Z48 2007
822’.gi 2—dc22
{B} 2007012316
v3.0