A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  This granted, Noël began work on his singing and dancing, talents that had been left unpractised since his days as a child actor. Enlisting the help of Fred Astaire, who at that time was conveniently enough appearing with his sister Adele in the London production of Stop Flirting, Noël learnt enough to get through such numbers as ‘Other Girls’ and ‘You Were Meant For Me’ in which he sang and danced with Gertrude Lawrence to arrangements by Astaire himself. Through its music, London Calling! saw the beginning of a long alliance between Noël and Elsie April, a bird-like lady given to wearing remarkable hats who, while refusing ever to compose anything herself, would solemnly transcribe any note Noël ever sang at her. This, as Noël himself could not then write music down on paper, proved an invaluable aid. Miss April, who later joined Cochran’s staff as a chorus mistress, was to be involved in all of Noël’s musical work between 1923 and the beginning of the second war; in that she transcribed and arranged his songs throughout these years it is fair to assume that hers was a major influence on the harmony of Coward compositions.

  After two postponements for alterations and more rehearsal, London Calling!, with costumes by Edward Molyneux, opened cold with a matinée at the Duke of York’s on September 4th 1923; the matinée was Charlot’s idea, his theory being that as the entire company of artists and technicians were already exhausted by four long, hard and difficult weeks of rehearsal, the matinée (to which no critics were invited) would tire them even further, thus ensuring that the first evening performance, played entirely on raw nerves, would be remarkable for its nightmarish vivacity. In this Charlot proved absolutely correct; the first night, though it ran just over three hours, went superbly.

  This first edition of the revue included twenty-six numbers of which half were solely composed by Noël; most of the numbers were published eight years later in his Collected Sketches and Lyrics, though only ‘Parisian Pierrot’, sung in the revue by Gertrude Lawrence, managed to outlive its original setting. This was the first successful song Noël ever achieved, and he had written it during a brief holiday in Germany.

  ‘The idea of it came to me in a nightclub in Berlin in 1922. A frowsy blonde, wearing a sequin chest-protector and a divided skirt, appeared in the course of the cabaret with a rag pierrot doll dressed in black velvet. She placed it on a cushion where it sprawled in pathetic abandon while she pranced round it emitting guttural noises. Her performance was unimpressive, but the doll fascinated me. The title “Parisian Pierrot” slipped into my mind, and in the taxi on the way back to my hotel, the song began.’

  Of the show itself, Noël notes ‘I appeared constantly, singing and dancing and acting with unbridled vivacity, and enjoyed myself very much indeed.’ But the critics at the first night of London Calling! tended to be unimpressed by Noël’s musical gifts: ‘Mr Coward cannot compose,’ said the Sunday Express, ‘and should sing only for his friends’ amazement.’ The number that provoked this comment was ‘Sentiment’, written by Coward himself and performed with a dance staged by Fred Astaire.

  ‘I bounded on,’ recalled Noël, ‘at the opening performance fully confident that I was going to bring the house down. It certainly wasn’t from want of trying that I didn’t. I was immaculately dressed in tails, with a silk hat and a cane. I sang every couplet with perfect diction and a wealth of implication which sent them winging out into the dark auditorium, where they fell wetly, like pennies into mud.’

  Months later, in New York, Coward was to watch Jack Buchanan bringing the house down nightly with precisely the same number. At first, Noël told himself it was because Buchanan appeared so effortless where he had patently been trying as hard as he could; ultimately though he admitted, generously if a little reluctantly, that it was simply because Buchanan’s whole revue technique was vastly superior to his own.

  But the reviews for London Calling! were not all bad, though most critics felt it was a little long and that Noël himself was better at writing sketches than performing them. Two papers offered dubious personal tributes to Noël: one referred to him as the ‘most promising amateur in the West End’, and the other noted that he was ‘unmistakeably talented, though not yet a Jack Hulbert’. Nor indeed was he as well known; a newspaper photograph of Coward that summer in a boat on what looks suspiciously like the lake at Battersea Park was captioned simply ‘Gladys Cooper and A Friend’.

  One number in London Calling! brought in a good deal of welcome publicity for Noël. This was ‘The Swiss Family Whittlebot’, an accurate if uncharitable send-up of a family of contemporary poets called Hernia, Gob and Sago; predictably a large number of critics thought they recognized a parody of the Sitwells. The result was an irate letter to Noël from Osbert, and the beginning of a bitter feud that only ended some five years later with a curt typewritten note from Edith Sitwell to Noël reading simply ‘I accept your apology’.

  However, the sketch caused such a furore, and the work of the fictional Hernia Whittlebot became so widely known that Noël was invited to speak her verse from the brand new 2LO Wireless Station; he made his first ever broadcast in a fifteen-minute reading of Miss Whittlebot’s poems, sandwiched in between Chamber Music and a talk by the secretary of the Folk Dance Society on ‘The Sword Dance Through the Ages’. Later Miss Whittlebot herself began to make regular appearances in the gossip columns, to which Noël would feed such information as ‘Hernia is busy preparing for publication her new books, Gilded Sluts and Garbage. She breakfasts on onions and Vichy water.’ The strained relations between Coward and the English family Sitwell were not improved by a recital they gave at the Aeolian Hall ‘from which,’ Osbert told Noël, ‘you might get a few ideas’. In the middle of it Coward rose ostentatiously to his feet and left the building. The cause of Noël’s passionate distaste of Miss Sitwell’s free verse is not hard to find; she had abandoned the one thing Coward held most important in all his work, a strict sense of form.

  London Calling! settled into the Duke of York’s for a lengthy run in spite of the critics and in spite of Osbert Sitwell who just after the opening remarked spitefully that as he was going to be out of town for a few days he would miss the revue altogether. Noël retorted that he would be delighted to put a stage box at Mr Sitwell’s disposal to hold Osbert, his sister, brother and all their followers and admirers any time they cared to come. But Noël was currently in a success for the first time in his adult career and although London Calling! got very much nastier notices than either I’ll Leave It To You or The Young Idea, it ran a great deal longer. Curiously, within a few weeks of the revue’s opening, Charlot decided to remove Gertrude Lawrence as well as the stage manager and a large number of the chorus and put them into André Charlot’s London Revue of 1924 which with three of Noël’s original numbers was to open at the Times Square Theatre in New York early in January. Joyce Barbour successfully replaced Miss Lawrence in the London production, but with the rest of the company depleted London Calling! began to fall apart at the seams.

  Noël rapidly lost interest in the show though the money was still useful, and it did give him the time to write two plays as well as a number with Melville Gideon called ‘There May Be Days’ for the seventh edition of Gideon’s The Co-Optimists. The two plays were later to emerge as Fallen Angels and The Vortex, a drama which had its origins, Coward later explained, in a chance meeting:

  ‘A friend of mine was a guards officer, and he had a problem mother, a lady whose lovers were men of her son’s age. One evening, I was in a supper club, the Garrick Galleries I think, with my friend when his mother walked in. “Look over there,” someone said, “at that old hag with the good-looking young man in tow.” I tried to imagine what her son must have been thinking, and the incident gave me the idea for The Vortex.’

  After Christmas Charlot returned from New York, where Beatrice Lillie and Jack Buchanan had opened his revue with tremendous success, and decided that London Calling! could do with a second edition. But by then Noël’s six-month contract was up and he took the chance to escape
the routine of grinding out a tired revue eight times a week. Now just twenty-four, Noël decided that the time had again arrived for him to try his luck in New York.

  Before leaving for America, out of the £250 Noël had saved from London Calling!, he rented his mother a cottage at Dockenfield in Surrey where she could again escape the gloom of Ebury Street. This cottage, which cost only forty pounds a year, was discovered by Noël in a thick January fog which led him to believe that it was ideally situated in mid-countryside. In February his mother took possession, whereupon the fog lifted to reveal a large number of semi-detached villas across the road. By this time however, Noël was en route for America.

  His visit to New York was partly a holiday, partly a celebration of the fact that he could now afford to spend his time in uptown New York rather than on a park bench in the Battery, and partly an attempt to collaborate with Jerome Kern on a new musical. That the attempt never got off the ground failed to depress Noël unduly, and he spent a few happy weeks hanging around Broadway reviving old contacts until he decided that it was time to go back to London where Gladys Cooper had suggested that she might be interested in doing Fallen Angels with Madge Titheradge under her own management at the Playhouse Theatre.

  While Noël was in America a revised version of A Withered Nosegay called Terribly Intimate Portraits brought from the New York reviewers an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm. But one critic at least recognized in Coward something out of the ordinary – Alexander Woollcott, writing in a New York paper about Coward’s imminent departure for London:

  ‘It ought to be fairly easy to get up an endurable ship’s concert during the next voyage of the Olympic. When she sails on Saturday her passenger list will bristle with such names as D. W. Griffith, Mary Garden, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and the like. Then, if the luckless wight on whom pressure is brought to manage the concert is really bright, he will be careful to exhume from his cabin one Noël Coward, a young and sprightly English comedian who wrote the words and music of three of the best numbers in the “Charlot Revue”. Coward seems to have been born into the world just to write songs for Beatrice Lillie ...’

  Noël had a pleasant voyage home basking in the reflected glory of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose travels were accorded the kind of press coverage achieved in later years only by Elizabeth and Richard Burton. But back in London, Coward went into another period of deep gloom; the weather was horrible, London Calling! was still playing in a tired, mechanical routine, and Charlot refused to let Noël put some new life into it. Worse still, Madge Titheradge and Gladys Cooper found that they would never be free at the same time to do Fallen Angels, while The Vortex was still on an unsuccessful round of managers’ offices. Noël fled London and settled into the cottage at Dockenfield outside Farnham, with his mother and an anaemic maid called Iris. There, visited occasionally by his father and Eric, Noël and Mrs Coward led a peaceful life only interrupted when, in the garden one afternoon, Coward remembered Laurette Taylor and his idea for a light comedy based on a week-end in a dotty theatrical household; he completed it within the next three days and called it first Oranges and Lemons and then on second thoughts, Hay Fever.

  At this time Noël was not altogether happy with the play, but he took it to London where he got an appointment to read it to Marie Tempest in the hope that she might play Judith Bliss. In her drawingroom, with Miss Tempest’s husband William Graham-Browne dozing quietly in the corner, she listened politely as Noël read the play aloud and then, equally politely, refused to do it. It was, she explained, yet another comedy at a time when she was looking for a drama; there was no emotion in it and though Judith might be a good part for her, the play was too light, too plotless and altogether lacking in any kind of action. All of which was true and did not prevent Hay Fever, with Miss Tempest in the lead, running for just 337 performances a year later. But at this time, though she felt that Noël was ‘as clever as a bag of monkeys’ and admired his perseverance (he in turn felt that ‘when she steps on to the stage a certain magic occurs and this magic is in itself unexplainable and belongs only to the very great’) she was sure that the play was not right for her, in spite of all that Noël had done to persuade her in his reading; it was Gladys Cooper who later remarked how much she hated having Noël read his own plays aloud to her: ‘He makes them seem so much better than they really are.’

  Undeterred by Marie Tempest’s refusal, Noël added Hay Fever to The Vortex and Fallen Angels on the tour of managerial offices and himself returned to Dockenfield. There he turned out yet another play, a drawing-room drama called Easy Virtue which owed a certain amount to the tradition of Pinero and The Second Mrs Tanqueray but which was destined to do rather less well than the other three Coward plays hanging fire at this time.

  The beginning of summer brought a letter from one manager, H. M. Harwood, expressing at last some interest in The Vortex. He said he was considering a production of it at the Ambassadors’, provided only that Noël himself would not play Nicky. Noël, who had written the part expressly for himself, not unnaturally refused the offer.

  In July, back on the ‘extreme poverty among wealthy friends’ circuit, Noël accepted an invitation from Ruby Melville to stay with her at Deauville for the rest of the summer. At her villa he met Sir James Dunn, an industrialist who decided at four o’clock one morning that Noël was a genius needing only the patronage that he could provide to the tone of a hundred pounds a month for the next five years in return for twenty per cent of Noël’s earnings over that period. The details were to be agreed on their return to London, and would have been but for the fact that Noël returned first and related the scheme to Gladys Calthrop; she disapproved so heartily of the idea, and of Noël committing himself for five years to a ‘strange financier’, that he was ruled by her and never signed. Almost immediately, Noël’s financial situation improved drastically.

  In the autumn of 1924 the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, once a drill hall, then a theatre and now a cinema, was being run by Norman Macdermott as a testing-ground for new plays, some of which went on from there to the West End. As soon as Noël returned from Deauville, Macdermott sent for him, said that he had enjoyed reading both Hay Fever and The Vortex hugely, and that his only problem was in deciding which should be staged in November at the Everyman.

  9

  1924–1925

  “The Vortex was an immediate success and established me both as a playwright and as an actor, which was very fortunate, because until then I had not proved myself to be so hot in either capacity.’

  The Vortex is a near-melodrama that reaches its climax in a mid-Twenties adaptation of the closet scene from Hamlet, with an uneasy mother-son relationship further complicated by the fact that the son takes drugs and that the whole crisis erupts during a stately weekend in the country. It was in many ways a very strong play indeed and would have found little difficulty in winning any contemporary award for the Play of the Year but for one other: 1924 also happened to be the year of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.

  As it was, The Vortex succeeded in good company with Shaw; from a production born amid a certain amount of technical and intellectual chaos emerged the success that gave Coward as actor and as playwright his name, his reputation and his future.

  Once Norman Macdermott had shown interest in either Hay Fever or The Vortex for the Everyman at Hampstead, Noël talked him rapidly and firmly into doing The Vortex for the obvious reason that it contained a whacking great star role for Noël himself where Hay Fever offered nothing of the kind. Persuaded, Macdermott went ahead enthusiastically with The Vortex though casting proved something of a problem, mainly because the top salary for acting at the Everyman was five pounds a week. If a play transferred from Hampstead to the West End, actors could hope for more usual salaries; but in the meantime they had to be prepared to work for very little and not everybody was. However, a cast was finally enlisted, with Kate Cutler in the lead as Florence Lancaster and Noël as her addicted son Nicky. Macder
mott, though hesitant about it at first, ultimately agreed to the author’s demand that the sets and costumes should be left in the hands of a comparative newcomer to the business, Gladys Calthrop:

  ‘It was the first play I had ever designed so I was terribly excited, though there was nowhere to paint the sets except outside the theatre in Hampstead High Street, and the costumes all had to be made in a kind of basement there.’

  But with the sets under way, all the contracts signed and rehearsals due to start in four days, Macdermott asked to see Noël in his office. From here on, the story of the first production of The Vortex takes on most of the qualities of the backstage sagas perpetrated by Hollywood in the Thirties, the only differences being that this was for real and that the end-product was vastly superior. The Everyman, Macdermott announced, was on the verge of bankruptcy and unless Noël could find a backer in the brief time available, The Vortex would not after all see the light of day.