The following Sunday, James Agate provided a less heated appraisal of Coward at this point in his career:
‘Mr Coward is a very young playwright of quite extraordinary gifts who at the moment can no more be trusted with his talent for play writing than a schoolboy can be trusted who has stolen a piece of chalk and encounters a providentially blank wall ... he is too rapid, his tongue is too constantly in his cheek, and the circle of his characters is not wide enough.’
In the Evening Standard a few days after Fallen Angels opened, Noël told a reporter:
‘I may say I really have a frightfully depraved mind. I am never out of opium dens, cocaine dens and other evil places. My mind is a mass of corruption.’
Lest there should be any lingering doubt in readers’ minds, the interview was headed ‘Author Jokes’.
Though the box-office takings for Fallen Angels were excellent as a result of all this publicity, opposition to the play persisted right up to the last performance when a Mrs Hornibrook, late of the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality, rose from her seat at the end of the second act to deplore the sordidness of the whole affair. The orchestra rapidly drowned her out with a rendering of ‘I Want to be Happy’, though not before Mrs Hornibrook had given it as her opinion that the work of Mr Eugene O’Neill was also undesirable, and that London playgoers did not go to see plays with ‘sordidness, immorality and sexuality as their theme’.
Coward himself answered his critics in a wide-ranging almost Shavian preface to three of his plays:
‘I certainly deny very firmly the imputation (made by several) that I wrote Fallen Angels in order to be “daring” and “shocking”. Neither of these exceedingly second-rate ambitions has ever occurred to me.’
He then proceeded to defend the free discussion of sex in the theatre:
‘Rocks are infinitely more dangerous when they are submerged, and the sluggish waves of false sentiment and hypocrisy have been washing over reality far too long already in the art of this country. Sex being the most important factor of human nature is naturally, and always will be, the fundamental root of good drama, and the well-meaning but slightly muddled zealots who are trying to banish sex from the stage will find on calmer reflection that they are bumptiously attempting a volte-face which could only successfully be achieved by the Almighty ...’
From that Coward moved to more general thoughts about the shape of the English theatre in 1925:
‘The actual cause of the very definite decline of our drama is that at least ninety per cent of the people at present concerned in it are mentally incapable of regarding it as art at all. I think, perhaps, that the public are still suffering from the complacent after-effects of winning the War, and have not yet regained the little discrimination they had a few years ago, otherwise they would not accept so cheerfully the somewhat tawdry efforts of our commercial managers to amuse them. One cannot, of course, blame the managers; they have their living to make and their wives and mistresses to support, but it certainly is regrettable that these noble and natural aspirations should be achieved so easily and at the cost of so little intellectual endeavour.’
All of which can hardly have endeared Coward to the gentlemen in offices above Shaftesbury Avenue.
Just a week after the opening of Fallen Angels in London, Cochran brought On With the Dance into the Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus where, under his banner, it ran for two hundred and twenty-nine performances. For the first night, stalls were boosted to an unthinkable twenty-seven shillings, and the queue for standing-room started at five in the morning. Herbert Farjeon reviewing for The Sphere found space to worry about Coward:
‘When you consider his present output compared with the output of other writers for the theatre; and when you consider that he’s also acting six nights a week and two afternoons; and when you consider, moreover, that in addition to all this he has his own public life to live, and lives it – well, you begin to realize that something is likely to get a little skimped now and then. It must be hard work throwing off a couple of lyrics before breakfast, setting them to music by eleven o’clock, finishing the big scene in Act II before dashing off to the Ivy Restaurant, appearing in a matinée, talking business with Mr Curtis Brown between Acts I and II and letting off gas to an interviewer between Acts II and III, sketching a new revue and practising the latest step before the evening performance, gathering copy and declaring that everything is just too marvellous or just too shattering at the Midnight Follies or the Gargoyle; as I say, it must be hard work, and I hope that Mr Coward will not suffer from a nervous breakdown as the result of it.’
The breakdown forecast or at least feared by Farjeon came fifteen months later; in the meantime Noël was heavily photographed, notably by the glossy weeklies above such captions as ‘Most versatile writer’ and ‘Best-known man of his generation’. One published a hilarious picture of him having breakfast in a rococo bed and talking animatedly on the telephone at the same time, wearing a dressing-gown apparently made out of material rejected by a bad tour of The Mikado.
With On With the Dance, Fallen Angels and The Vortex running simultaneously throughout the spring, Noël was still not too busy to bring out a further slim volume of poems by Hernia Whittlebot, the elaborate Sitwell parody which showed as yet no signs of palling.
By now The Vortex had made its final move, from the Comedy to the Little Theatre where Noël had first appeared on the stage in The Goldfish fourteen years earlier. His hatred of long runs was beginning to tell, and with business declining, the play drifted on into the boredom of daily repetition enlivened only by Seymour Hicks who stood on his seat cheering wildly after one matinée, by Bernard Shaw who left the theatre murmuring ‘wonderful, damnable’, and later by Madge Titheradge who was so moved by the whole affair that she fainted in Lilian Braithwaite’s dressing-room afterwards. As Farjeon had suggested, Noël’s social life (which consisted of nightly dinners at the Ivy and appearances at nightclubs dancing impeccably with Betty Chester or Gertrude Lawrence) as well as his other commitments in and around the theatre now took up so much of his life that he barely managed to arrive at The Vortex on time. John Gielgud, then still his understudy, used to stand at the stage door, looking down the street with a stick of make-up in his hand, ready to rush off to Coward’s dressing-room and make up if he should fail to appear. But Noël never did.
Before the run of The Vortex ended in June, Charles Kenyon who was then in management with Alban Limpus and looking for a vehicle that would suit Marie Tempest, remembered Hay Fever, the play that had almost been produced at Hampstead instead of The Vortex. He approached Coward, who pointed out that though Hay Fever had indeed been written with Miss Tempest in mind, she had turned it down a year before. ‘I think,’ replied Kenyon, ‘that she will like it now.’ Influenced perhaps by the successes that Noël had achieved in the meantime, Miss Tempest decided a few days later that she would be happy to appear as Judith Bliss in Hay Fever at the Ambassadors Theatre, provided only that Noël himself would direct.
The prospect appalled Noël, as she was reputed to be a daunting lady not tremendously fond of directors telling her how to act. In the event, he needn’t have worried; early in rehearsals Miss Tempest summoned him on to the stage and announced that as Noël had written one particularly difficult scene the very least he could do would be to show her how to play it. This he did, and the two of them got along very well from then onwards; she later wrote of Noël in her diary: ‘he is the most stimulating and exciting personality that has come into my life in the last ten years.’
Hay Fever (a meaningless title substituted at the last minute for Oranges and Lemons when a short story of that name was published in 1925) is a comedy of bad manners which starts with the arrival of four guests, invited independently by different members of the Bliss family for a week-end at a country house near Maidenhead. In a Twenties version of Albee’s memorable parlour game Get the Guests, the visitors are then alternately ignored, embraced, embarrassed,
humiliated and ultimately abandoned to slink away by themselves during a blazing family row, a curtain device echoed later by the end of Private Lives. As a play it offers some characteristic examples of Coward’s wit: ‘She goes about using Sex as a sort of shrimping-net’, and ‘You should wash, darling – really it’s so bad for your skin to leave things lying about on it.’
It has been the mistake of countless amateurs and innumerable local theatres to assume that because Hay Fever is a comedy with few characters in one set it must therefore also be easy to perform. Coward himself knew better: ‘Hay Fever is far and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever encountered.’ Played to perfection, as it was in a National Theatre production during the autumn of 1964, it becomes one of the great light comedies of this century; played with anything less than total perfection, as in a more recent West End revival, an audience can become suddenly and painfully aware that there is remarkably little action and that the lines are only funny if said dead right. Coward, asking in the Thirties to introduce his favourite play for a publisher’s anthology, unhesitatingly chose Hay Fever; in view of Private Lives this seemed a strange choice, but the play’s technical symmetry still appealed to him:
‘It’s quite extraordinarily well constructed. And as I did the whole thing in three days I didn’t even rewrite. I enjoyed writing it and producing it, and I have frequently enjoyed watching it.’
So, on the first night in June 1925, did most of the critics; though in some of their notices one detects the beginning of a curiously patronizing attitude which dictated that in almost all reviews of Coward comedies in the next forty years the words ‘flippant’ and ‘trivial’ were to recur with alarming frequency, implying by comparison that in some strange way the other comedies of the time were deeper and imbued with all kinds of significance denied by Coward to his audiences. Looking through the work of his contemporaries among writers of comedy, who range in style from Maugham through Lonsdale and Rattigan to Neil Simon, it is hard to find any who treat their themes with more weight or underlying seriousness than Coward, yet only he stood, until very recently, consistently accused of flippancy. Perhaps it was because the brittle, flash nature of his writing distracts attention from what his characters leave unsaid:
‘His comic creations,’ wrote John Russell Taylor in 1966, ‘do live as people, and their lives go on behind and under and around what they are saying; the text provides only the faintest guide lines to what is really going on between the people on the stage.’
To go further, it is a fair test of acting in Coward plays to say if the characters’ thoughts speak louder on stage than their words, then all is as it should be.
By the time Hay Fever opened, The Vortex was in its closing weeks and Noël had been replaced once again by John Gielgud, leaving him free to make a curtain speech at the end of Hay Fever in which he noted, with half an eye on the critics who had attacked Fallen Angels, that even if the new comedy was dreary they would have to admit it was clean as a whistle. This they did, and The Era went so far as to hail it as ‘the gayest, brightest and most amusing entertainment in London’. James Agate for the Sunday Times was less ecstatic:
‘There is neither health nor cleanness about any of Mr Coward’s characters, who are still the same vicious babies sprawling upon the floor of their unwholesome crèche ... Mr Coward is credited with the capacity to turn out these very highly polished pieces of writing in an incredibly short time; and if rumour and the illustrated weeklies are to be believed, he writes his plays in a flowered dressing-gown and before breakfast. But what I want to know is what kind of work he intends to do after breakfast, when he is clothed and in his right mind.’
With Hay Fever launched into a year’s run and Fallen Angels and On With the Dance still paying handsome royalties, Noël had a holiday through July; in the meantime he had been considering a number of offers from rival New York managements who wanted him to take The Vortex over to Broadway that autumn, and eventually he settled for Messrs Dillingham and Erlanger since they were willing also to have Lilian Braithwaite and Alan Hollis from the original cast. Basil Dean, arguably the leading director of the time and the man who’d directed Noël in Hannele at Liverpool in 1913, was brought in to produce The Vortex for New York, as Noël didn’t want the double burden of acting and directing it again. It was also agreed with Dean that Easy Virtue, written before Noël’s success with The Vortex but still unproduced, should be taken over with a view to doing it on Broadway later in the season. As well as these, The Queen Was in the Parlour, Noël’s Ruritanian answer to the novels of Anthony Hope and the sentiment of Ivor Novello, was offered as a vehicle for Nazimova, while under a different management Laura Hope Crews planned to do Hay Fever. The Americans were in for a Coward winter.
Noël sailed for New York in August, but not before Hannen Swaffer had fired a parting shot: ‘I hope The Vortex is a failure in New York. I should not like to think that America thought this typical of English life or the English character.’ Arriving in New York in a blaze of publicized glory, Coward and his mother moved into the Plaza Hotel and then, seeing the bill for their first few days, promptly moved out again. They settled instead into an apartment on the upper East Side and Noël began rehearsals while Mrs Coward coped with America. After a few days Erlanger, one of the two producers, sent for Noël. Mother love, he explained, was kind of a sacred thing in America and his paying customers wouldn’t go for all that shouting and abuse by the son in the last act. However, added Erlanger, this was only a minor problem and with some careful rewriting which he was himself willing to do while they rehearsed, The Vortex could be heaved into some kind of shape for New York. To Erlanger’s amazement, Noël was not only unwilling to alter a line of the last act, which had after all proved not unsuccessful in London, but was also unwilling to allow Erlanger anywhere near a rehearsal. Writers, in Mr Erlanger’s experience, were not expected to behave like that. Basil Dean, eager to smooth the whole thing over, suggested that with a little tact Erlanger could be managed. ‘I have not,’ replied Noël, ‘travelled three thousand miles to manage Mr Erlanger, but for him to manage me.’
Soon after that brief meeting, Erlanger and Dillingham withdrew their backing for The Vortex which was subsequently presented in Washington and on Broadway under the joint management of Sam Harris and Irving Berlin. After three weeks’ rehearsal the play, now with a partially American cast, opened in the sweltering heat of Washington in mid-September. The first night there was not helped by a massive thunderstorm which drowned out most of Act II, nor by a moment in the last act when Noël was sobbing hysterically on the bed and Lilian Braithwaite strode to the window where she flung out the box containing the dope. A stagehand, unfamiliar with the play, tossed it straight back to her. Reviews in the Washington papers were not good; the ‘unwholesome’ label was dragged out again, most critics considered the play disappointing, and one paper added that ‘if Mr Coward is the white hope of the English theatre, God help it’. Returning to New York at the end of the week in deep despair, Noël spent the few days before his New York opening night moving with his mother out of their first apartment, which had proved unsuitable, into a slightly larger one owned by Mae Murray and decorated in a style described by Noël as ‘early Metro-Goldwyn’ complete with wrought-iron doors, mock-Italian Gothic ceilings and a stained-glass window which lit up at night. Lilian Braithwaite, it is said, spent the few days prudently arranging a ticket for her return journey to England, convinced that The Vortex would not last out the week.
In fact, from the round of applause that greeted her first entrance onwards, the Broadway reception was nothing short of tumultuous. They cheered the end of each act and at the very end of the play Noël and his cast got a standing ovation the like of which they had never seen before and were seldom if ever to see again. That night, Noël maintains, he gave the best performance of his career.
The notices were generally excellent, though one or two critics objected to ‘Mr Coward’s
hysterical collection of oversexed, overdressed, overnerved and overwhelmed neurasthenics’. But New York took to Noël in much the same way as had London a few months earlier.
Socially Noël was invited everywhere, in particular to a series of deeply unrelaxing week-ends on Long Island, which he found considerably harder work than his eight performances a week as Nicky Lancaster, but which in later years provided him with invaluable copy for a short story called What Mad Pursuit?
The night before The Vortex, the dramatization of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat had opened on Broadway to equally ecstatic reviews, and Coward and Arlen found themselves, as they had been in London a few months earlier, the twin social and intellectual heroes of the season. Inevitably it was rumoured that Arlen was tremendously jealous of Coward’s success, though since he still had a considerable investment in The Vortex this was patently unlikely. However, the rumours persisted until he and Noël decided to scotch them and prove their friendship by meeting for dinner once a week at a night-club in New York. Thereafter it was rumoured that their relationship was, to put it mildly, unusually close.
But their friendship survived that too, and they remained for some years afterwards mutually admiring and fairly devoted. Arlen also showed something of Noël’s deprecatory sense of humour: ‘I am,’ he once remarked, ‘every other inch a gentleman.’ On the subject of themselves, Arlen once wrote to Noël that ‘the difference between us is that you give the impression of escaping conceit when deep in your heart you are the most conceited man on earth, while I make people think I am awfully stuck on myself when that front is only the protection for a timid soul’.
Soon after The Vortex opened on Broadway, Hay Fever went into rehearsal with Laura Hope Crews and an otherwise undistinguished cast brought together under a curious managerial policy of first casting the parts and then reading the play. One lady hired in this way to play Myra, the sophisticated English flapper, had a heavy Brooklyn accent and a passion for chewing gum. When Coward tentatively suggested to her that she was not perhaps ideal casting, she spat the gum at his feet and remarked ‘Accent hell – I gotta contract’.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 14