A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  ‘Ah, see the world. All I hold dear

  Heigh Ho, it is a merry din,

  The rivers still are running clear

  The world’s still living in its sin.’

  Esmé remembers Noël as a plain, chubby and curiously bumptious child to whom she was devoted, mainly because he made her laugh. Theirs was an entirely unromantic alliance, though when Esmé first became a friend of his, she went to one of his birthday parties in Battersea where they played hide-and-seek together:

  ‘We hid in the same room and while we were waiting to be found he dared to peck at my cheek. When he’d done so we both shrieked with laughter and that was the end of any sentiment between us. But we stayed very great friends for a long time and we share marvellous memories of a time when life was easier and more fun. It was so much better to have been friends than lovers.

  ‘I think the first real sorrow in his life was when his voice broke – before that I remember him leaning up against the grand piano in Philip Streatfield’s studio in Chelsea singing “There is a Green Hill Far Away”. You’d have thought he was an angel from heaven if it hadn’t been for the conversation that went before and after it. But he was seldom really sad – he’s always had a natural ebullience and a flippancy that guards him from most of the sorrows of the world.

  ‘Both his mother and I had every confidence in his talent and his humour; we knew that he could do whatever he wanted, and it was all so carefully planned – even his refusal to discuss religion with me was I think partly because if he wanted to get where he was going, it was essential that he should keep an open mind. A religious man wouldn’t have written half the things that Noël has. Even the war didn’t concern him very much, though we were both pacifists of a kind; we neither smoked nor drank during our friendship, and we were rooted in Bernard Shaw who said that the majority are always wrong. We felt that about the war and we used to tell our friends who were old enough to enlist that they should be conscientious objectors. We’d never heard of sedition, but I suppose that’s what it was.... On the tour of Charley’s Aunt we had terrible rows, but they were over in a flash, usually because he couldn’t bear to be alone, although I didn’t mind it, and there was nobody else in the company that he could talk to.’

  The tour was, by all accounts or at least by those of Esmé and Noël, a deeply gloomy affair, characterized by endless meals of minced haddock and baked beans in chilly boarding-houses. They played Amy and Charley at salaries of two pounds and two pounds ten a week respectively, though for that money Noël was required to provide his own clothes. He discovered early in rehearsal that of all the characters in Brandon Thomas’s farce, Charley was the one who worked hardest and who got for his pains the least laughs. Neither the play nor the rest of the cast appealed to Noël even remotely; it was produced by J. R. Crawford, who also played the Colonel, and who, Noël remarked later, ‘directed rehearsals with all the airy deftness of a rheumatic deacon producing Macbeth for a church social.’ The tour ground on through provincial England from February to June 1916 playing in chilly theatres with an even chillier atmosphere backstage: in Peterborough they performed during a blizzard to precisely six people, rather less than were in the cast; in Bristol Noël had a brief bout of religious mania which arrived one afternoon during a matinée when he thought inexplicably that he was going to die, and left as abruptly the next morning when he found to his amazement that he hadn’t; and in Wolverhampton he was nearly knocked out by the leading juvenile after a series of rows about the state of the bath in their shared digs. Otherwise the tour was an uneventful one, marked only by Noël’s delight at coming to the end of it.

  Coward spent the summer months working with his Aunt Kitty on a series of impersonations of famous stars with which it was his intention to play the halls while Aunt Kitty played the piano. They went to a number of auditions but as the most they were ever offered was a trial week at their own expense in a particularly sombre seaside resort, Noël reluctantly abandoned that idea and went off to Cornwall to stay with a new friend, John Ekins, whose father was the rector of Rame. John was a year older than Noël, also a child actor and, if anything, even more stagestruck. He had once played Crispian, the part that Noël always wanted in Where the Rainbow Ends, and after their Cornish holiday he got a part in a melodrama called The Best of Luck which opened at Drury Lane with Madge Titheradge in September. Noël, out of work, used to walk on at the Lane to give himself the illusion of having a job, and he and Esmé remained devoted friends of John Ekins until he died suddenly of spinal meningitis (the disease that had killed Noël’s elder brother) while training for the Air Force in 1917.

  Later in 1916 Noël was hired by Robert Courtneidge to play a small part in a new musical comedy called The Light Blues, but before that went into rehearsal he completed the first successful full-length song of which he was both composer and lyricist. It was called ‘Forbidden Fruit’ and the first three lines ran:

  ‘Ordinary man

  Invariably sighs

  Vainly for what cannot be.’

  This world weary theme ended on a note of bitter disillusion:

  ‘For the brute

  Loves the fruit

  That’s forbidden

  And I’ll bet you half a crown

  He’ll appreciate the flavour of it much, much more

  If he has to climb a bit to shake it down.’

  In sheer self-defence Noël later pointed out that although the bet of half-a-crown did rather let down the song’s tone of sophisticated urbanity, it was about all he could afford at the time. Also, it rhymed with ‘down’.

  The Light Blues was a comedy about May Week in Cambridge, written by Mark Ambient and Jack Hulbert who had recently come down from that University; it opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre with a cast led by Albert Chevalier, Shaun Glenville and Jack Hulbert together with his wife of a few weeks, Courtneidge’s daughter Cicely. Noël, in an insecure false moustache that seems to have entirely vanished before the gentleman from Play Pictorial arrived to take the pictures, played a dude called Basil Pyecroft who became deeply involved in a sub-plot about a necklace that disappeared and then mysteriously reappeared in a banana skin at the end of Act Two. He was also allowed to understudy Mr Hulbert, and set off for a three-week tour of Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow in high hopes that Hulbert would have the grace to drop dead or at the very least fall ill before the West End opening on September 16th. Mr Hulbert did neither, but when the tour reached Glasgow Noël had one of the most painful experiences of his young theatrical life.

  In the show he had one brief scene with Shaun Glenville, who, to put it mildly, was prone to an occasional impromptu remark on stage. Noël, nothing if not a willing lad, used to laugh at these on the principle that laughing at the leading comedian could hardly fail to improve his standing in the company. Courtneidge however thought differently and, summoning Noël to the front of the stage during one morning rehearsal, told him that quite apart from being a very young and a very bad actor, it was practically criminal of him to accept a salary of four pounds a week for fooling about on the stage and giggling at other actors. ‘Young man,’ added Courtneidge, ‘I pay you to amuse the public, not yourself.’ Noël, deeply humiliated, rode out the storm and was only slightly cheered to hear Cicely murmur at the end of it ‘You mustn’t mind Father.’ She recalled later that Noël was ‘a thin, pale-faced youth who seemed to know everything and infuriated me because he was always right. During rehearsals he consistently aired his views, although he was never asked, and if he did not agree with the way a scene was being developed, even though he was playing the smallest part, he would say so. This made him difficult to like, particularly when my father repeatedly said “that young man is going to make a name for himself one day” and especially when Father never once said anything like that to me or Jack.’

  A fortnight before the opening of The Light Blues, Oscar Asche started a run of some two thousand performances in Chu-Chin-Chow at His Majesty’s. The same cann
ot be said for the cast of the Ambient-Hulbert musical, which was to fall very short of Asche’s theatrical landmark and in fact lasted only a matter of days. The public stayed away from The Light Blues in droves, perhaps because the first of the Zeppelin raids on London had coincided with the opening night; in less than two weeks the musical was out of the Shaftesbury and Noël was out of a job.

  As the legitimate theatre had nothing else to offer for the moment, Coward turned his mind to other ways of making a living and became, briefly, a professional dancer. Although, as he admitted later, ‘my adolescence was too apparent, my figure too gangling and coltish to promote evil desire in even the most debauched night-club habitués’, he was nevertheless employed during October 1916 to dance with a Miss Eileen Denis at the Elysée Restaurant which later became the Café de Paris and later still the home of Mecca Dancing in Leicester Square.

  Noël was billed, quite untruthfully, as ‘direct from the London Opera House’ and it was announced that during Dinners he would make his first appearance in ‘New Costume Dances’; these apparently were performed as part of ‘a pierrot fantasia’ at the insistence of Miss Denis’s mother. The programme was described as ‘a new innovation’ and during afternoon teas the customers were treated not only to Noël and Miss Denis but also to ‘La Petite Doria – the Wonderful Child Character Dancer’. The whole episode was rather a disappointment to Noël, who had exotic visions of being asked to leap naked out of pies at private supper parties; the invitations failed to materialize and by Christmas he was back in the theatre, a little older and none the wiser but largely unscathed by the experience.

  5

  1917–1918

  ‘I was paid, I think, a pound a day, for which I wheeled a wheelbarrow up and down a village street in Worcestershire with Lilian Gish. The name of the film was Hearts of the World, and it left little mark on me beyond a most unpleasant memory of getting up at five every morning and making my face bright yellow.’

  The Christmas season 1916–17 found Noël still on the fringe of the faintly cloying realm of children’s plays; he turned up in a red-and-white striped blazer and a pillbox hat playing a Sandhurst cadet, Jack Morrison, in The Happy Family by Cecil Aldin and Adrian Ross at the Prince of Wales. This was a bizarre entertainment in which the entire cast barring Mimi Crawford and Noël turned into animals during the second act. Noël was thus left to sing a rousing military number, ‘Sentry Go’, backed by a chorus consisting entirely of ducks and pigs. He was however delighted to be dancing and singing again for the first time on stage since The Goldfish, and one of the more obscure weeklies did have the generosity to note that ‘Mr Coward combines the grace and movement of a Russian dancer with the looks and manner of an English schoolboy’. For some time afterwards, Noël carried a yellowing copy of that notice in his jacket pocket.

  The Happy Family was to be remembered briefly by Noël about eight years later, mainly because its first act contained an over-cheerful number which began:

  ‘Isn’t it awfully jolly

  Doing a little revue?

  Never could be a more happy idea,

  It’s nobby and nutty and new.’

  At the end of a twenty-seven hour dress rehearsal for On With The Dance in Manchester during March 1925, Noël sang this in its gruesome entirety to his producer, an unamused Charles Blake Cochran.

  After The Happy Family Coward didn’t get work in the theatre again until the August of 1917, a state of affairs which depressed him immeasurably. But in his own eyes Noël was no longer only an actor; he was now a writer as well, and in the meantime he continued to turn out lyrics and some one-act plays, frequently in collaboration with Esmé Wynne. Their friendship had progressed far beyond the stage when their favourite pastime was to dress up in each other’s clothes; ‘I shall never forget.’ wrote Esmé later, ‘the sight of Noël dashing across Clapham High Road after a large straw hat which the wind had blown from his head, his short dark hair protruding ridiculously from the hole in his girl’s wig, his large patent-leather shoes flapping wildly below the knee-length skirts of my blue gingham dress.’

  All that transvestism in Clapham was by this time a thing of the past. Noël had written a number of verses, short stories, plays and even a full-length novel in the many spare moments of his life as a child actor, but the first of these to achieve any success at all was a one-act curtain-raiser written with Esmé called The Last Chapter and later renamed Ida Collaborates. It was a light comedy about the unrequited passion of a charwoman’s daughter for a distinguished author, and it was first presented by a touring management at the Theatre Royal, Aldershot, on August 20th 1917. Esmé herself played Ida and The Stage, while declining to comment on the play itself, noted that ‘the piece gives Miss Esmé Wynne full opportunities of showing her talents, and she does not fail to take advantage of them’. She had perhaps learnt, as did Noël shortly afterwards, that there’s a lot to be said for writing a play with yourself in mind for the leading role.

  The rest of Noël’s early work as a writer is shrouded not so much in forgetfulness as in secrecy:

  ‘There are indeed a great number of prose exercises of my own written between the ages of eleven and seventeen which are locked away in trunks and strong boxes and which I am determined will never see the light of day in my lifetime. After I am dead is quite another matter ... in the meantime however, these early immature whimsies will be left to gather the dust they so richly deserve for so long as there is breath in my body.’

  If 1917 was the year in which a play of Noël’s was first presented on the stage, it was also the year in which he played his first part in a film. David Wark Griffith, fresh from the triumph of his Birth of a Nation and the financial débâcle of Intolerance, came to Europe to make Hearts of the World, a propaganda film about the German occupation of a French village which had Lilian and Dorothy Gish in the cast. As it was designed to arouse anti-German feeling around the world (and Birth of a Nation had shown how suitable was the new silver screen for propaganda purposes), Hearts of the World was made with the full co-operation of the allied governments. D. W. Griffith himself was taken on a lengthy tour of the French and Belgian battlefronts, at the end of which he remarked memorably that ‘viewed as drama, the war is in some ways disappointing’.

  The film did its best to be beastly to the Germans, with Erich von Stroheim as a villainous Hun and such captions as ‘Month after Month piled up its legend of Hunnish crime on the book of God’; after it opened in June 1918 the British Board of Historians acclaimed Griffith as ‘the greatest of war historians’. Noël was engaged to be an extra pushing a wheelbarrow in some of the French village sequences which were in fact filmed amid the comparative safety of Worcestershire. His sole contribution to the picture was the suggestion that he should push the barrow towards rather than away from the camera, and he remained largely unimpressed by his luck at getting to work with the great Griffith so early in his career. He does, however, recall that Mrs Gish and her daughters were ‘remarkably friendly and kind’, and that they invited him to lunch whenever he was on the location.

  Hearts of the World was not rapturously received by the critics, who considered it maudlin, biased and essentially mediocre. For Noël too the film was a somewhat unrewarding experience; although he enjoyed meeting the Gish family, he felt he did not have enough to do in the picture and also that the elaborate mechanics of silent filming had involved a disproportionate amount of his time for so brief an appearance on the screen. Another seventeen years of his life were to elapse before he next appeared before the cameras.

  In August 1917, Noël went to Manchester for the Gaiety Theatre’s production of Wild Heather, a social drama by Dorothy Brandon in which he played a fairly aimless character called Leicester Boyd with Helen Haye as his mother. Leicester Boyd drifted in and out of the action until the end of the second act, when he drifted out altogether thereby allowing Noël to catch the second half of the variety bills at the Palace or the Hippodrome. One week he wen
t every night to watch Ivy St Helier and Clara Evelyn playing pianos back to back at the Palace, and afterwards made them agree to spend the next afternoon listening to him playing his songs, in the hope that they might buy one or two of them. Miss St Helier listened politely, showed Noël some basic chords which were good for the opening of almost any song, and in that one afternoon Coward learnt almost as much about being ‘an entertainer at the piano’ from her as he had about acting from Charles Hawtrey.

  He did, however, fail to sell them any of his songs. To Miss St Helier ‘he seemed a very shy boy, and I tried to help him with his technique a bit. I remember telling him “never apologize to an audience; when you sit at the piano, do it with authority and above all don’t just tinkle the notes – arrest them.’”

  Charles Hawtrey’s influence reappeared in Noël’s life, while Coward was playing at the Gaiety, in the unlikely shape of Gilbert Miller, a young American impresario. Hawtrey had suggested Coward for a part in The Saving Grace, a new comedy by Haddon Chambers which he and Miller were to present jointly at the Garrick in the autumn, and Gilbert had come to Manchester to see Coward for himself. He liked what he saw, offered Noël the part over dinner after the show, and told him he would be one of an otherwise all-star cast led by Hawtrey himself. ‘By this time,’ wrote Noël later, ‘I was so dazed that I should only have given him a languid nod if he had told me that Ellen Terry was going to play my baby sister.’

  The part in The Saving Grace was the breakthrough that Noël had been hoping for, working for and waiting for. Yet it came virtually out of the blue, a reflection of the faith that Hawtrey had in his talent rather than of the talent itself. The rest of the small cast were players of the calibre of Hawtrey, Ellis Jeffreys and Mary Jerrold, and if it seems strange that an unknown seventeen-year-old was in their midst one might remember that at the end of 1917 juvenile actors old enough to have some experience but young enough not to be fighting for their country were few and far between. A combination of Coward’s talent and his luck got him into a part which could not but do him good.