A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  Having nothing better to do until rehearsals began for I’ll Leave It To You, Noël made his first trip abroad early in the next year. He went, with a friend called Stewart Forster, to stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris – for one night, after which, seeing the bill, they moved in to a small hotel in the Rue Caumartin for the rest of the week. It was on this first visit to Paris that Noël announced to Bobby Andrews, whom he found in a café by the Gare du Nord, that he would not, for all the world, have a settled income: ‘Why?’ asked Andrews. ‘Because, murmured Noël, ‘it would take away my determination to succeed.’

  Back in England in the spring of 1920, Noël was soon to experience for the first time something of the success he so passionately desired. I’ll Leave it to You opened in Manchester on May 3rd; at the end of the day there were cheers from the audience and Noël, pushed forward by Kate Cutler, made the first of the curtain speeches that were to be a feature of his first-nights for the next twenty years.

  The following morning an early profile of Noël appeared in the Daily Dispatch:

  ‘There is something freakish, Puck-like, about the narrow slant of his grey-green eyes, the tilt of his eyebrows, the sleek backward rush of his hair. He is lithe as a fawn; and if you told him, with perfect truth, that he was one of the three best dancers in London, his grieved surprise at hearing of the other two would only be equalled by his incredulity.’

  The play itself does not bear very close scrutiny now, nearly fifty years after its first performance, but then as a light comedy of its time one could hardly expect that it would. I’ll Leave It To You seems to be the first example of Noël’s supreme talent for giving the public what they want when they want it, though one suspects that the critics’ enthusiasm for the play might not have been warmed by the author, who told them casually that it was written in a mere three days – ‘whereas many of my plays take a week.’ This was technically true, and a device that Noël would often use in later years to impress journalists with the speed at which plays and lyrics poured off his typewriter. It is, perhaps, only fair to add, as Noël never did, that before those three days he had spent some considerable time thinking out the play in detail – thus the time given only reflects his rate of typing, not that of composition. ‘The comedy is finished,’ said Richard Brinsley Sheridan in a similar context, ‘it only remains to write it.’

  At the end of a successful first week in Manchester, Mrs Gilbert Miller and Mrs Charles Hawtrey arrived from London to inspect the play on behalf of their husbands. To Noël’s barely disguised fury they appeared in his dressing-room after the last act to remark sadly that in their view the play didn’t have a hope of success in London, and that they were off to cable their husbands accordingly.

  Not so easily defeated, Noël completed the Manchester run at the end of the third week in May and returned to London where he found somebody prepared to take a more active interest in the production of his play: Lady Wyndham, the actress Mary Moore. As the widow of Sir Charles Wyndham, Miss Moore then managed that chain of theatres (Wyndham’s, the Criterion and the New) which her husband had established and which her grandson, Donald Albery, still runs. She agreed to give I’ll Leave It To You a London production at the New Theatre when Matheson Lang’s Carnival went off on tour in the middle of July. As Noël himself was still six months under age, his father signed the contracts.

  I’ll Leave It To You opened in London on July 21st, 1920 to reviews that were generally good but of little use at the box-office. It lasted only thirty-seven performances and has seldom been professionally revived since, though Noël did manage to sell the amateur rights to Samuel French for a ‘comfortable sum’ and it appeared some time later in a production by the Hong Kong Amateur Dramatic Club. The play, dedicated to his mother, was also the first of Noël’s to be seen in the United States: it opened in Boston in 1923 and then disappeared somewhere on the road to New York.

  Nevertheless, I’ll Leave It To You did Noël a great deal of public good; journalists assembled for his first press conference, at which it was announced that Noël was related to the distinguished organist James Coward. Indignant at being presented on the merits of someone else, Noël replied sharply, ‘I am related to no one except myself.’ The papers were filled the next morning with ‘boy author makes good’, and Lady Wyndham described him to the Daily Express as a ‘British Sacha Guitry’. But her enthusiasm for the new Guitry waned a bit when she saw the weekly box-office returns, and the gloom of the company’s fifth and final week at the New Theatre was darkened still further by Lady Wyndham’s determination to limit her losses by having the stage lighting cut to half. Noël arrived at the theatre to find the stage in darkness and most of the arc lights being carried round the corner to Wyndham’s where her ladyship felt they’d be more useful. Demanding their return, he refused to appear on stage without them; the audience were kept waiting for twenty-five minutes while Noël and the stage manager argued. There were not a great many people in the theatre at the time and the customers were fairly happy to be left talking amongst themselves. Finally, the lights were returned, the curtain went up, and Coward had learnt a good deal about his own strength in the theatre.

  The play still closed a few nights later, but the publicity made it all worthwhile from Noël’s point of view, if not from Lady Wyndham’s. The Glasgow Bulletin described him as an ‘amazing youth’, the Sunday Chronicle considered him an ‘infant prodigy’, and Noël himself began to give the first of innumerable interviews in the press. To The Globe he admitted:

  ‘The success of it all is a bit dazzling. This may be an age of youth but it does not always happen that young people get their chance of success. I have been exceptionally lucky. I made up my mind I would have one of my plays produced in London by the time I was twenty-one, which will be in December. I hope to be a manager by then, too.’

  For the record, he did not go into management until he was in his thirties.

  The New Witness predicted that within a year Noël would be enjoying the same success as Somerset Maugham in the theatre and the Daily Mail let Coward divulge the way he wrote:

  ‘With I’ll Leave It To You I wrote the first and last acts in a day, working from nine in the morning to about five in the afternoon with, of course, intervals for meals. The second act took me two days – it was very much harder, I roughly schemed out the plot, and then I let the play take its own way.

  I find all the technical details of entrances and exits and so on just work themselves out. I write at white heat, and during my work I occasionally read a book the style of which is different from what I am writing to get a kind of literary refreshment. I altered hardly a line of this play after I had written it.’

  This last habit was one that was to stay with Noël through most of his writing.

  Looking back, one realizes that his first London production as an actor-dramatist gave Noël more than encouragement; in the faintly unpleasant children of I’ll Leave It To You it is possible to see rough drafts for Sorel and Simon in Hay Fever four years later.

  After I’ll Leave It To You closed, Coward spent the August of 1920 working on two projects that were later abandoned: a play called Barriers Down which, he said later, ‘was awful’, and the lyrics for an opera called Crissa.

  The rest of the summer and early autumn, if not immediately productive months, were not entirely uneventful for Noël; in the best traditions of a ‘young man about town’ he was caught by the police in the act of removing a number of flower pots and a hideous sun-blind from outside a row of houses in Kensington. The adventure cost him a few uneasy hours in a police station, forty shillings in cash and a sharp reminder from Esmé Wynne that a police record would not help the start of a promising career.

  In November, by which time money was again an urgent problem, Nigel Playfair luckily decided to revive The Knight of the Burning Pestle, this time at the Kingsway Theatre in London. Noël was reengaged for ‘Ralph’, and they opened to tepid enthusiasm on November 24th. Noël’s
hopefully Don Quixotic performance was considered ‘a little too Mayfairish for a Jacobean grocer’s son’, though The Illustrated London News thought that ‘he wandered about delightfully’. At one performance Mrs Patrick Campbell caused vast excitement backstage when she was seen in the audience, until it was realized that she had slept soundly throughout. Noël sent her a sharp note commenting on the rudeness of her behaviour, and the next night Mrs Campbell was back in long white gloves, clapping wildly every time Noël appeared.

  Just before Christmas, playing in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Coward developed a temperature of a hundred and two; deciding in the best traditions of the theatre that it was his duty to carry on (a song of his some thirty years later was to be called ‘Why Must the Show Go On?’) he succeeded in giving one or two terrible performances and sixteen of the company mumps before he too retired to bed. Playfair himself took over ‘Ralph’ for a while, but generally bad business and the mass attack of mumps closed the production very soon afterwards.

  By the year’s end Noël had recovered sufficiently to sign a contract with Gilbert Miller for an American comedy, Polly with a Past, which was due to open at the St James’s in March 1921. In the meantime, Coward set off for a winter holiday at the Casino Hotel in Rapallo. It was not a success, as Noël had little money, less Italian and no friends there. After a few days he retreated to Alassio where his rich friend Mrs Cooper was staying at the Grand Hotel and only too happy to put him up. By now, thanks to I’ll Leave It To You, the Coward name meant something even in Alassio, if not to the natives then at least to the members of the English Club there who asked him to play the piano and sing at one of their annual concerts. In the audience on that occasion, and giggling openly to Noël’s indignation, was a young English woman who was to design almost all of Noël’s major successes in the theatre from The Vortex onwards, Gladys Calthrop:

  ‘Alassio was then a little village, and I was staying there with my parents; the Club was minute – a kind of church hall, I remember – and the man introducing Noël got his name wrong, which started my giggles and also infuriated Noël. But we became firm friends after that – mainly I think because we seemed to be the only two people in Alassio under thirty. Also Noël had what was politely known as a continental stomach for which I managed to find a cure at the local chemists. One night after that, being particularly rowdy, we managed to wreck the English Club by smearing the walls with black paint. Quite soon afterwards we went back to England, separately, and began to see each other a great deal in London.’

  Polly with a Past, an American farce that had done well in New York in the wartime conditions of 1917, opened in London at the St James’s Theatre on the second of March four years later. It was, by all accounts, not a very good play; but it did provide parts for Edna Best (as Polly), Edith Evans, Helen Haye, Noël and Henry Kendall as well as for two men who later became stalwarts of the English gentlemen actors’ colony in Hollywood – Claude Rains and C. Aubrey Smith. Noël himself got £20 a week for what he considered to be an unrewarding ‘feed’ part, but found a firm friend in Henry Kendall.

  ‘Noël was a very high-spirited young man in those days, and a frightful giggler on stage. We used to catch it, all except Edith Evans who would get furious with us. In the end it got so bad that the stage manager cabled Gilbert Miller, who had gone off to New York after we opened at the St James’s, saying that the younger members of the company were ruining the play by bad behaviour and back came Gilbert’s reply: “Sack them”. All concerned were saved from this embarrassment by a coal strike, which paralysed transport, killed theatre business and put an end to Polly and her past.’

  But a hundred and ten performances in a year when nearly fifty productions lasted less than a month was not exactly shaming, and Noël (as was his custom when playing small parts) managed to elaborate the character as much as possible, to the fury of Rains and Kendall who were left to struggle for their laughs against a barrage of Coward business. Noël also achieved a good deal outside the theatre during this run: ‘Songs, sketches, and plays were bursting out of me far too quickly and without nearly enough critical discrimination.’ One rather better than the rest was The Young Idea, a sub-Shavian comedy in three acts about a couple of precocious children who reunite their estranged parents. The title came from Thomson’s poem ‘The Seasons’, and the play owed a good deal to You Never Can Tell; perhaps for that reason the Vedrenne management sent it to Bernard Shaw, who then had Heartbreak House going into production at the Royal Court. Nevertheless Shaw took the time and the trouble to write to Noël about The Young Idea, suggesting that it was unwise to try to repeat the success he’d had with the twins in You Never Can Tell, but adding a word of encouragement:

  ‘I have no doubt that you will succeed if you persevere ... never fall into a breach of essential good manners and, above all, never see or read my plays. Unless you can get clean away from me you will begin as a back number, and be hopelessly out of date when you are forty.’

  While The Young Idea was doing a more than usually fruitless round of managers’ offices, Noël again found time on his hands between the undemanding performances of his role as Clay Collins in Polly With A Past. The result was a book called A Withered Nosegay, illustrated by Lorn Loraine, dedicated to Esmé Wynne-Tyson and published in the following spring by Christopher’s. This was a slim volume sending up the current vogue for romantic pseudo-historical character studies; it consisted of ten character sketches from the unforgettably named Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge through to Julie de Poopinac. Reading them now it is uncertain whether the satire hit any target at all, and it is difficult to judge the success of the parody. Few critics reviewed it at the time, though there were gossip-column items remarking yet again on Noël’s versatile youthful talents, and the only reader’s comment to hand is one inscribed on the fly-leaf of a copy given as a birthday present: ‘I think this book rather rude,’ writes the sender, ‘but you were once an admirer of Noël Coward.’ Coward himself felt, in retrospect, that A Withered Nosegay was written with too much zest and personal enjoyment and that it consequently fell a good way short of success: ‘I have often regretted that the idea didn’t come to me a little later, when I should have been more aware of its pitfalls and better equipped to grapple with it.’ The book earned a grand total of £15 once the printing costs were paid, and Noël’s share of the final profits was £7 10s. 0d.

  About halfway through the run of Polly With A Past, after the show one night, Coward met Jeanne Eagels at a party given by Ivor Novello in the flat he kept above the Strand Theatre. Fresh from her triumph on Broadway in a play called Daddies, Miss Eagels radiated an aura of American magic that made Noël decide instantly it was time he visited New York where surely countless actresses like her were eagerly awaiting the arrival of his acting and playwriting talents.

  Another inducement to go was Jeffery Holmesdale, then a captain in the Coldstream Guards, later Lord Amherst and throughout his adult life a close friend of Noël’s. He was leaving for New York at the end of May, en route for Massachusetts and the centenary of Amherst College; as he was booked on the Aquitania, Holmesdale suggested that Noël should sail with him. Already able to recognize and share the passionate love of success nurtured by all true Americans, Noël decided that his dream of ‘promising playwright conquers New World’ would have more chance of reality if he were to arrive aboard the Aquitania rather than the freight steamer that was economically within his reach. The Aquitania would cost £100 one way; Noël had about half this in the bank, thanks to ‘Polly’, and he made the rest by selling two songs to Ned Lathom, a friend and benefactor who didn’t actually want them but was charitably disposed and also very rich. Coward then persuaded Gilbert Miller’s London office that he should be released from the last few performances of ‘Polly’ and at the end of May, he set off for New York with Jeffery, a bundle of manuscripts and seventeen pounds in sterling.

  8

  1921–1924

  ‘My faith in
my own talents remained unwavering, but it did seem unduly optimistic to suppose that the Americans would be perceptive enough to see me immediately in the same light in which I saw myself. In this, I was perfectly right. They didn’t.’

  The Atlantic crossing on the Aquitania was a peaceful one, in spite of the need to polish up The Young Idea and of a ship’s concert at which Noël had to accompany the Chief Steward while he sang the living daylights out of ‘Mandalay’. On his arrival (‘New York looks,’ Coward wrote on a post-card to Esmé Wynne-Tyson, ‘like I’ve always imagined Babylon must have looked’), and in spite of a certain homesickness for his mother, Noël found that the city lived up to Jeanne Eagels’ promise – at least for the few days that Jeffery stayed there with him. In New York they embarked on a frantic sightseeing rush from Washington Square uptown to Harlem by way of such sights as the Woolworth Building, Coney Island and Fanny Brice singing ‘Second-Hand Rose’ in the Ziegfeld Follies. They were also invited to spend a week-end with Averell Harriman, on whose estate they were able to watch the rich playing polo.

  But after Jeffery left, Noël found less to like about New York. It is as Moss Hart once said, not a city in which to be poor or unsuccessful; and Noël was both. He also found that all three impresarios to whom he had letters of introduction – Al Woods, Charles Dillingham and David Belasco – were on their way out of the city for the summer, though Woods did pause long enough to tell Noël that he had reluctantly abandoned, after a number of unsuccessful rewrites, all plans to stage The Last Trick in America.

  Fighting off the temptation to return to England, which wasn’t difficult as he did not have the fare, Noël settled in an apartment in Washington Square South that was leased by Gabrielle Enthoven. Mrs Enthoven, who later gave her name and a vast amount of material to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s theatre collection, was a vague acquaintance of Noël’s who fortunately had not only a spare room but also enough money not to be too worried about Coward’s share of the rent.