Noël’s one success at this time was to sell to Vanity Fair for a very few dollars indeed some of the burlesqued character sketches from A Withered Nosegay. This was encouraging, but it was all; for the next four months, getting daily more depressed as he wandered from Washington Square to Central Park and back, Noël failed to do anything as an actor or a writer except to realize how far down on his luck he was. There was overwhelming apathy on the part of managers and agents, and Noël’s life was not made any easier at this time by the Theatre Guild, who, given his plays to read, had promptly locked them up for the summer months making it impossible for Coward to arouse the interest of any other prospective backers. Moreover he was now alone in the apartment, Mrs Enthoven having fled the heat of July in New York. He began to get slightly nervous about the neighbourhood; the discovery of large bed bugs and a broken lock on the front door was only partly offset by a friendly neighbourhood cop who left Noël a gun in case of any trouble.
But in these weeks Coward did manage to make a few friends, among them Tallulah Bankhead, Ronald Colman whom he’d first met in England, and George Kaufman who with Moss Hart later wrote (in The Man Who Came to Dinner) the only lastingly funny parody of Noël himself. Miss Bankhead, asked what Coward was like at this time, replied ‘frustrated’ and added, rather unexpectedly ‘he was living on herbs and wild berries’.
The beginnings of two Coward plays, the second vastly better than the first, are also to be found in that New York summer. After Noël saw Molnar’s Liliom on Broadway with Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut, he instantly began to write (with them in mind and remembering also a fiesta that he and Gladys Calthrop watched in Alassio the year before) a drama called Sirocco. He finished it quickly and had no cause to regret it until 1927 when it appeared for the first and last time, slightly retouched, with Ivor Novello and Frances Doble at Daly’s.
The other play was an altogether happier affair, and though not actually written out until some time after Coward returned from America, it stemmed from a number of evenings that he spent at Riverside Drive as a guest of the actress Laurette Taylor and her husband Hartley Manners. To be a guest of the Manners’ was evidently an altogether unnerving experience. They were a highly-strung family, deeply theatrical and prone to elaborate word games which always ended in hysteria and the entire family abandoning their guests to cope as best they could. Given eccentricity on this histrionic scale, and considering the unusually large number of authors on Miss Taylor’s guest list, it was inevitable that someone would realize there was a play here somewhere; to Noël’s great good fortune none of them thought of Hay Fever before he did.
One Sunday evening at Riverside Drive, Noël again met Lynn Fontanne, an actress he’d known slightly in London, who was now living in New York with Alfred Lunt:
‘Noël, who was then still precocious but somehow very brilliant, came to see Alfred and me with the script of The Young Idea. I introduced him to Helen Hayes who would have been good casting for it but wouldn’t touch it; still, we tried very hard and I also introduced him to some publishers including Condé Nast. After that Noël dined with us almost every night because he couldn’t afford to eat anywhere else, though we weren’t so damn rich either.’
Alfred Lunt, himself an actor six years older than Noël and also unemployed for the summer months:
‘Noël made no kind of success on his first visit to America, though he was very likeable and through us got to know a great many people in the theatre. A gentleness and at times a deep sadness marked his character then, though the determination to succeed and preferably rapidly at that was never far away.’
Noël’s firm friendship with the Lunts was the beginning of a three-cornered alliance that has lasted throughout their long working lives. The plans they made for themselves that summer included a success for Lynn in her new play, marriage for Lynn and Alfred soon afterwards, world stardom for all three of them, and ultimately a three-character play to be written by Noël and performed by the trio. Each of those four plans worked out impeccably, starting with Lynn Fontanne’s triumph in the title role of Dulcie; at the first night Noël and Alfred both unemployed and realizing that they depended on Lynn for their next meal, sat in the stalls ‘praying that Mother would bring home the bacon’. She did.
Lynn’s success as Dulcie was matched only by Noël’s continuing failure to make any money in New York until he was eventually forced to borrow twenty dollars from her. It was not by any means the only time in either past or future that Noël had to borrow money from a friend, but it was the time that hurt the most.
It was also the end of Noël’s poverty, not because twenty dollars went very far or lasted very long, but because the next morning brought a letter from the editor of a magazine called Metropolitan who had been given a copy of I’ll Leave It To You to read. The editor now suggested that if Coward would turn his play into a short story for the magazine he’d pay five hundred dollars. ‘For five hundred dollars,’ replied Noël, ‘I would gladly consider turning War and Peace into a music-hall sketch.’
Harold French, the boy-actor contemporary of Coward’s was already doing rather better than Noël in New York:
‘When Noël first came over we used to knock about a bit together; he was very broke, living down in the Village, and he used to pop into the Algonquin to see me, whether I was there or not ... but the last time I saw him there he’d just sold his short story to Metropolitan, and he gave us all a big party at Delmonico’s.’
With the autumn, theatres opened again and Noël was able to retrieve his manuscripts from the Theatre Guild; he also managed to convert The Young Idea into a short story for Metropolitan, using the proceeds to move back into an hotel and visit a number of Broadway shows, in most of which he found a verve, attack and pace then altogether lacking in the West End. At the end of October, thanks to a lady called Gladys Barber who befriended Noël and whose husband was an executive with a shipping line, Coward got himself a free cabin on the S.S. Cedric bound for Liverpool. He left New York with a certain regret, already glamorizing in his memory the gloomier moments of his stay; after five months in America, he had precisely seven pounds more than he’d brought with him. The voyage home was peaceful, marked only by long conversations in the ship’s tearoom with a fellow passenger and passionate theatregoer called Marie Stopes.
Back in Ebury Street, where George Moore was now one of a number of literary neighbours, Mrs Coward’s delight at having Noël home failed to hide the fact that with his father out of work there was still no money, and that life there had recently been very depressing indeed for his family. Noël was at first unable to help; though he returned to the round of managers’ offices he now found himself in a tricky position where his name was too well known for the offer of small parts and yet not distinguished enough for the offer of larger ones. The general despondency and total lack of work carried over into the beginning of 1922, but then Noël did manage to sell a couple of songs as well as the hack adaptation of a French play by Louis Verneuil, which had originally been called Pour Avoir Adrienne. The English version, commissioned for a hundred pounds by Dennis Eadie, was never produced, and characteristically Noël bought back the script some years later.
But without the prospect of any other work on the horizon, once Eadie’s money ran out Noël was again forced to ask for a loan. This time he got £200 from his friend Ned Lathom who had been generous enough to pick up a number of his bills in the past, and who now insisted on making it a gift as he believed a loan might spoil their friendship. Using some of this money, Noël decided to find his mother a cottage in the country where she could stay for a few months to get over an illness and recover from the strain of coping with the family and the lodgers. Athene Seyler lent her house at Dymchurch to Noël and Gladys Calthrop who was helping in the search, and after a week of bicycling through Kent villages they found a four-roomed cottage next to a pub at St Mary in the Marsh for a rental of ten shillings a week.
Noël and
his mother settled there for the spring while Mr Coward looked after the lodgers in Ebury Street; she recovered some of her lost health and her son spent the time writing a Ruritanian romantic melodrama of the kind later to be indelibly associated with Ivor Novello. It was eventually entitled The Queen was in the Parlour, and the fact that Noël wrote the whole play propped against a tombstone in the churchyard of St Mary’s does not seem to have made it any gloomier than countless other plays of the period about the high life in middle Europe.
But it was a depressing time for Noël, and in the first six months of 1922 his beloved London seemed every bit as eager to ignore his work as had New York the previous summer. Yet two productions served briefly to keep his name before the public; first the Newspaper Press Fund matinée at Drury Lane in May, when Nelson Keys and George Grossmith did a brief duet of Noël’s called ‘Bottles and Bones’, and then the Little Theatre’s Grand Guignol series which, improbably enough, ran twenty-nine performances of a one-act comedy called The Better Half that Noël had written just before he went to America. This came last in a macabre bill which included a play about a deaf mute trying to kill himself before his sister could murder him, and Noël’s light, acid look at marriage and separation seems to have been oddly out of place.
In his review, The Morning Post critic regretted that: ‘Mr Coward is cursed with fatal facility, that failing of the young writer; he seems to think all his geese are swans and writes them down without waiting to see if anything better could be found in their place.’
Meanwhile Noël’s father was running the lodging-house in Ebury Street with a success that surprised him almost as much as it did his long-suffering guests; with Eric no longer in school, money was at last becoming a little easier for the family. By the end of June Noël and his mother had returned to London armed with a letter from Robert Courtneidge agreeing to present The Young Idea for a six-week trial run round the provinces. In Sholto, the juvenile lead, Noël had again written a part ideal for himself; but this time he had considerable difficulty in getting Courtneidge, who was also directing, to let him play it. Courtneidge felt, though he subsequently lost the battle, that the role should be played by someone younger and less sophisticated than Noël.
With nothing to do until rehearsals started in September, Coward was delighted to get an invitation from Lady Colefax who had decided that he would be a conversational asset to a week-long houseparty she was giving at a stately, albeit rented, home near Oxford. Throughout the first half of the Twenties, Noël spent a large amount of his spare time in varying degrees of poverty among the very rich; they found him amusing and he revelled in their patronage, partly because of a certain inherent snobbery and mainly because he found them excellent copy for current work. Socially he was by now an ideal and near-professional house guest; by a careful development of his native wit and charm he made himself indispensable to a large number of hostesses who in return could offer living conditions vastly superior to Ebury Street. Moreover, at a time when the aristocracy and the more successful members of the theatrical profession were becoming closely allied, sometimes even by marriage, it gave him the chance to make a few useful professional contacts.
With Lady Colefax, at a dinner party in London, Noël met Elsa Maxwell. Not yet the hostess with the mostest, Miss Maxwell nonetheless came up with an offer to pay all his expenses if he would accompany her and a friend, Dorothy Fellows-Gordon, on a fortnight’s holiday in Venice. There the redoubtable Miss Maxwell even got him into a party for the Duke of Spoleto over the metaphorically dead body of its hostess; the rest of the holiday consisted for Coward of a couple of enchanting weeks on the Grand Canal and the realization that the life of a discerning gigolo could be very pleasant indeed.
The Young Idea opened at the Prince’s Theatre in Bristol during the last week in September. The state of Noël’s bank balance at the time can be judged from a letter written from the Prince’s to Nelson Keys:
‘I feel awful about the £50. I can’t possibly pay it back until I’ve been working a little – I’ve been existing on credit for such ages – can you wait until November? I’m sure to make something on this tour because we’re doing marvellous business ... please forgive me for not paying you back before but you do understand, don’t you? I’m eternally grateful to you for lending it.’
For The Young Idea and for Noël as author the provincial reviews were generally encouraging and business was excellent, though in spite of the play’s ‘sparkling dialogue, abounding humour and unexpected situations’ (Glasgow Citizen) a London theatre couldn’t be found for it until the Savoy became free when the Christmas play season ground to a halt in February. Until then the company disbanded, and Noël took the chance of a winter holiday in Davos where his benefactor Ned Lathom was recuperating after a bout of tuberculosis. He arrived there to find that Lathom had organized a massive welcome at the station with a reception committee and a friend dressed as the local Mayor to present Coward with the ‘keys’ of the town. Noël was then driven through Davos on a sleigh, waving graciously to the mystified residents.
Settled into an hotel where (as the skiing season had not yet started) he and Lord Lathom’s sister were the only two people not suffering from tuberculosis. Noël found Davos slightly macabre though somehow not depressing. Lathom seemed to be getting better; he was tremendously stagestruck, had already backed the Charlot revue A to Z, and now demanded to hear some of Noël’s material. Realizing that there were enough songs by Coward to support a revue, Lathom instantly summoned André Charlot to Davos. There the three men began a series of conferences from which, nine months and much sweat later, emerged a revue entitled London Calling!
Once the basic idea for the revue had been formulated by the three of them in Davos, Charlot returned to London leaving Noël to start work on the sketches: he had already agreed that Gertrude Lawrence, Maisie Gay and Noël together with one other comedian should head the bill. Coward worked hard on the sketches until Christmas came, turning Davos into one long party with such resident guests as Clifton Webb, Elsa Maxwell, Edward Molyneux, Maxine Elliott and Gladys Cooper. Someone else in Davos that Christmas, though not as part of the group, was Micheál Mac Liammóir:
‘Noël was with a very big, smart party and I used to see him in a white jersey riding around on a horse-drawn sled. I still thought then that he would do well, because without any effort or feeling of strain or social climbing he was always fond of fashionable, smart people. But at that time I’d developed a rather artificial hatred of the theatre and those kind of people; my idea of a good writer was somebody like Yeats, and I thought Wilde had already done everything that Noël could possibly do. I even used to run away and hide when I saw him, in case he recognized me.’
Gladys Cooper, staying at the same hotel, also has uneasy recollections of Coward in Davos:
‘He was unbearably smug then ... I remember once over dinner suggesting to him that instead of writing countless plays which nobody ever produced he should find a really good writer like Edward Knoblock and collaborate with him. Noël looked horrified, and replied that as Shaw and Barrie and Maugham never collaborated he failed to see why he should. So I told him how conceited he was, and left it at that.’
One should perhaps add here that in spite of that rough start, Dame Gladys and Mr Coward have been good friends now for about forty years.
Christmas over, Noël returned to London where The Young Idea opened to reviews that were even better than those for I’ll Leave It To You. They heralded a run of just over seven weeks. Again the critics hailed a brilliant young writer’s prodigious achievement, and again the audience stayed away in droves. But St John Ervine, writing in the Observer, was not altogether happy about the few who were already Noël’s vociferous supporters:
‘Mr Coward has not quite conquered his habit of writing plays as if they were charades, but he has wit and invention and if he can only restrain the enthusiasm of his friends and acquire a sense of fact, he will probably write a very g
ood comedy. I was unfortunately wedged in the centre of a group of his more exuberant friends who greeted each of his sallies with “That’s a Noëlism!” and “What a marvellous line!” even when Sholto referred to someone as possessing hands like wet hot-water bottles.’
Still, to balance Ervine there was The Sunday Chronicle describing The Young Idea as the best farcical comedy to hit London since The Importance of Being Earnest thirty years earlier, and the Royal Pictorial News voting Noël ‘the best-dressed young wit in London’. One wonders who were the runners-up.
The run was a brief but fairly happy one, improved for Noël by another satisfactory sale of the publication rights to Samuel French and by a telegram of heady praise from C. B. Cochran. With his mother safely re-installed in the lodging house, where his father continued to cope with the lodgers while she dealt with Eric and Aunt Vida, Noël set off with Gladys Calthrop to visit the hospitable Mrs Cooper, this time at Cap Ferrat where they would have stayed rather longer had it not been for the arrival of a Dominican Prior who took an instant dislike to both of them. As there was a strong possibility that Mrs Cooper, forced to choose who should remain with her, would have settled for the Prior anyway, Gladys and Noël swiftly moved on to Italy. There they holidayed until their money ran out, which it did alarmingly quickly, whereupon they returned to London and Charlot’s production of London Calling!
In view of Coward’s total inexperience where revue was concerned, and because Charlot was less than enthusiastic about some of the material that Coward had given him, Ronald Jeans was brought in to help with the book and Philip Braham with the music. Tubby Edlin was cast as principal comedian with Gertrude Lawrence and Maisie Gay, though there was now some doubt as to whether Coward himself would appear in the show. Charlot was only offering him a weekly £15, less than half what the others were getting and £5 a week less than Noël had been given for playing in The Young Idea. The salary did not therefore appeal to Coward, who held out for rather more on the grounds that he was anyway risking his prestige as a straight actor by appearing in revue. Charlot, unmoved, refused to go over £15 and decided to find someone else for the job. He had, however, overlooked a clause neatly inserted in the contract by Noël, guaranteeing himself as part-author the right to approve or veto all major casting. For the next few weeks Noël regularly and solidly objected to the suggestion of every juvenile lead in the business. Finally, with London Calling! now on the brink of rehearsal, Charlot was reluctantly forced to suggest a figure of £40 a week, an offer that Noël was graciously pleased to accept with the demand only that he be given the right to escape after six months.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 10