Noël himself went to see The Marquise on his first night back in London and was delighted with it. It had been composed, he wrote later:
‘with Marie Tempest speaking every line of it in my mind’s ear. To see her play it was for me obviously an enchanting evening, and it has made me forever incapable of judging the play on its merits. If, with intense concentration, I could detach myself for a moment from Marie Tempest’s personality and performance, I might perhaps see what a tenuous, frivolous little piece The Marquise is... I might, bereft of her memory, read with disdain the whole play; sneer at its flippancy; laugh at its trivial love scenes and shudder at the impertinence of an author who, for no apparent reason except perhaps that pictorially the period is attractive, elects to place a brittle modern comedy in an eighteenth-century setting. But I am not and never shall be bereft of the memory of Marie Tempest (who made) The Marquise gay, brilliant, witty, charming and altogether delightful.’
In retrospect, it is tempting to see in the toast by Esteban which opens Act One of The Marquise something of the Coward philosophy of life in general and playwriting in particular:
ESTEBAN: Children, my very dear children, if I were a magician the gift I would bestow on you would be Lightness of Touch. But being just an ordinary man, I can only whisper to you a little advice: enjoy yourselves as much as possible, it will pass the time pleasantly and lead you into old age with a few gay memories to cheer you – and don’t ask any more than that.’
Noël spent the spring and summer of 1927 living with Jack Wilson at Goldenhurst, the farmhouse in Kent which Coward had bought and where his mother and Auntie Vida also now lived. Stripping away the wallpaper and tiled fireplaces they had found a perfectly preserved seventeenth-century building which with some subtle conversions made Goldenhurst an ideal country house. In these otherwise uneventful months Noël wrote a night-club sketch called Pretty Prattle for a charity matinée to raise money for Lilian Baylis and her Sadlers Wells Fund. At this time Coward also sold the film rights of The Vortex and The Queen Was In The Parlour to Michael Balcon, who already had Easy Virtue going into production with Alfred Hitchcock directing a cast led by Isobel Jeans and Franklyn Dyall. Balcon announced that Ivor Novello, who was then under contract to him, would star in The Queen Was In The Parlour, and that Noël himself, who had made some satisfactory screen tests for Gainsborough, would play his old part in the film of The Vortex; but Novello proved unavailable for The Queen Was In The Parlour, and in the end it was he who starred in The Vortex instead.
Noël was also becoming something of a cult among students, notably at Cambridge where undergraduates at King’s College said that in an attempt to bring some reality to the acting of Shakespeare they would in future present his plays ‘in the modern manner of Mr Noël Coward, with telephones’.
With work on the redecoration of Goldenhurst almost finished, Noël and Jack travelled to Vienna for the Austrian première of The Marquise which, they were more than a little surprised to find, was being played by a large German lady in a modern red leather motoring coat. It was apparently a wildly funny performance, but not in quite the way the author had intended.
In the weeks while Noël had paused to consider his playwriting career, the critic St John Ervine had been doing precisely the same thing, and in the summer of 1927 Ervine published his findings in that unlikely organ of theatrical thought, Good Housekeeping. His view of Coward at this stage in Noël’s development was twofold; firstly that he was undoubtedly the most interesting figure to have appeared in the English theatre since the war, an accomplished dramatist and composer and an actor who ‘does all the wrong things and yet contrives to get the right effects’. As a man, said Ervine, the young Coward ‘is brilliant, loyal to his friends, generous and unaffected in his behaviour; he remembers those who were kind to him when he was in need of kindness, and he is full of courage and decision. He knows his mind and is not afraid to express it. He is sincere and simple and modest. His wits are quick and he has an uncanny knowledge of stagecraft. He writes good “theatre”; his plays click; his big scenes come off... but a dramatist cannot live on technique. He certainly cannot live on tricks and the danger in which Mr Coward now is, or so it seems to me, is that of a man who has learnt one trick very well and is content to repeat it. Mr Coward is now at a turning point in his career. There is evidence in his work of sincerity, but one feels that it is in him rather than in his plays. Behind the flippancy and (the word is a harsh one but it is not used harshly) the ignorance of Mr Coward there is a fine, flexible and sensitive mind questing for truth. He writes too quickly and too much. Mr Coward is more than twenty-five, and he must now, if he is to maintain the high position he has so brilliantly won for himself, begin to think like an adult. The stuff is in him; he has only to bring it out.’
Whether or not he admitted it, one suspects that Coward himself would have been forced to agree with almost every word of Ervine’s appraisal.
Early in the summer Noël finished a new comedy, Home Chat and though he was not entirely happy about it he sent the script to Madge Titheradge who had made a success of his The Queen Was In The Parlour a year before. She liked it, as did the ever-present Basil Dean, and it was decided to put it into rehearsal during the autumn at the Duke of York’s. In the meantime Noël had a brief holiday on the Lido outside Venice with Mr and Mrs Cole Porter. Returning to Goldenhurst, he then played host to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne who brought with them a new play by S. N. Behrman called The Second Man which they had acted on Broadway and now suggested that Noël should act in London; on the Lunts’ recommendation Noël agreed with the English producers, MacLeod and Mayer, that he would do it early in the following year.
The opening night of his own comedy Home Chat on October 27th 1927 was altogether ghastly and the first of two disasters in rapid succession that Noël was to endure that autumn. Somehow Home Chat, a mild comedy of supposed marital infidelity, was simply not up to what the audience had come to expect of Coward; at the first performance Nina Boucicault, nervous after her long absence from the stage, dried up frequently thereby making an already slow production filled with over-meticulous business seem a great deal slower. The audience, some of whom had queued for ten hours to get in, grew restive and at the final curtain there were boos from the gallery and the stalls. Noël, deciding that attack was the best form of defence, leapt up on to the stage whereupon the booing grew a great deal louder. One shout rose above the rest: ‘We expected a better play!’ ‘And I,’ retorted Noël, ‘expected better manners.’
With that the curtain was lowered to avoid further hostilities, and Noël was left to reflect that Home Chat ‘is a little better than bad but not quite good enough and that is that.’ Not, however, as far as the critics were concerned; their reviews the next morning were little short of vitriolic.
Home Chat staggered along for a bare month, at the end of which it was withdrawn from the Duke of York’s. Basil Dean, undaunted, went straight on to the production of another Coward play, Sirocco, the Italian fiesta drama that Noël had written in America early in 1921; for this he cast Frances Doble as the wife and Ivor Novello as the lover. It was to be the only time that Coward and Novello worked together in the theatre; Novello at that time had made a considerable name for himself as the star of several silent films, but he still lacked much experience of playing leading roles on the stage, as indeed did Miss Doble, who was getting her first big chance. Dean however was optimistic and Noël was in no doubt that Sirocco was rather better than most of the other entertainment being offered by London theatres of the time.
Rehearsals for Sirocco started immediately after the first night of Home Chat, and Dean took infinite care over the big scene, the fiesta, which was mounted as a full scale production number. But on the first night at Daly’s, where Noël was to be seen sitting in a stage box with his mother opening telegrams before the curtain rose, both Novello and Frances Doble found difficulty in developing or even sustaining two long parts that woul
d have taxed actors of much wider experience. The gallery, though jammed with Novello’s film fans, began to grow restless and during the second act when he tried to play the love scene with Frances Doble they started to laugh. G. B. Stern, sitting at the back of the stalls, reported to Noël that by the end of the second act they too were getting pretty bored. The last act was nothing short of a catastrophe, with jeers and catcalls in the gallery and an attempted polite hushing from the dress-circle below. Noël began to feel, perhaps rightly, that the jeering was directed at him rather than the play; that people tiring of his ‘casual’ triumphs were only too pleased to be present at a Coward failure. Certainly Sirocco was no worse than Home Chat, and perhaps no worse than other plays running more peacefully in London at that time; on the other hand it was not noticeably any better, and the reaction might purely have arisen from a feeling that Coward, who had shown his talent so young, could and should be doing better than this by now. In the chaos that followed the final curtain, two people failed entirely to grasp what was going on: Mrs Coward, who being slightly deaf turned to her son in the stage box murmuring, ‘Is it a failure, dear?’ and Basil Dean who, following his usual practice, had not been in front for the opening. Returning backstage after a quiet dinner he stood in the wings smiling happily, convinced that the noise he could hear out front was frenzied cheering. Noël, rushing backstage, found him happily raising and lowering the curtain while the cast took some of the most unnecessary curtain calls in the history of the English theatre.
Coward decided that the least he could do would be to join his cast on the stage; this, predictably, increased the fun of the audience. After about five minutes, when they showed no sign of going home and were still shrieking their protests, someone began to call for Frances Doble. The call was taken up and Miss Doble moved to the front of the stage to acknowledge some scattered but friendly applause; Noël, ushering her forward, was greeted with a cry of ‘Hide behind the woman, would you?’ In that moment of emotion, all Miss Doble could think of was the speech she had learned in anticipation of a less calamitous evening: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, ‘this is the happiest moment of my life.’ On stage Ivor and Noël, unable to contain themselves any longer, began to giggle; this brought even louder catcalls as the curtain fell for the last time. But the evening was not quite over; as Noël left Daly’s, an unsuitable theatre which for many years had housed only musicals but which appeared to be the only one free when Sirocco was looking for a home, there were a number of people waiting outside the stage door. As he got into his car several of them spat at him.
All of which suggests one of two possibilities; either audiences then were a great deal more fervent in their theatrical likes and dislikes than they have ever been since, or else Noël himself was capable of provoking rather more violent reactions to himself than almost any of his contemporaries. He personally remained convinced that public opinion had turned against him as a reaction to his rapid and early success, and that it was not solely motivated by the inadequacy of this one play. For their part the critics, who might have been more gentle with a less successful or self-assured writer, fairly slaughtered the play and its author. Sirocco was an unmitigated disaster, provoking notices that were probably the worst since the Archduke Ferdinand had been shot at Sarajevo. Hannen Swaffer in the Sunday Express was beside himself with glee: ‘At last the public seem to appreciate the truth of what I have said now for over three years in season and out of season – that Noël Coward has nothing whatever to say, that he has no wit, and that his sneers at ordinary respectable people are irritating to the point of painfulness.’
Edgar Wallace published ‘a defence of Noël Coward’, but it came too late to save Sirocco; though the house was sold out for three days, by lunchtime on the morning after the first night more than half the tickets had been returned. Suppressing a desire to leave England on the first boat, Noël decided to put a brave face on it; he appeared at the Ivy for lunch with Jack and Gladys where he discovered that Novello, surrounded by his coterie, had made the same decision. To their amazement they found themselves treated with sympathy rather than hostility, and Ivor went on to play Sirocco for every one of its twenty-eight performances. Noël took Jack Wilson to Paris for a short visit, moving on to Neuilly where they spent a few days with the designer Edward Molyneux who did his best to reassure Noël that by the time they returned to England the Sirocco fiasco would be entirely forgotten; Noël remained unconvinced, largely because every time he went out to buy an English paper he found yet another reference to the disaster of a few weeks ago. Indeed Noël became so convinced that editors were being unnecessarily spiteful in flogging what he hoped was a dead horse that he promised never again to write an article for an English newspaper, a promise that he kept unbroken for more than thirty years. He did however publish a few last thoughts on Sirocco:
‘The reason given for its depressing reception have been varied and interesting. Some contend that the theatre was too big, others that the play was too small. The Press with a few kindly exceptions found it dull, unreal, immoral, stupid, over-produced, over-acted, under-produced and under-acted; the few kindly exceptions found it vital, significant, moral, dramatic, exquisitely produced and acted, and profoundly interesting. The Public, I regret to say, hardly found it at all.’
Coward already belonged to a long line of ultra-English performers, unrelated only by blood, who believed that to give in to failure of any kind was unnecessary and unforgiveable. Unaffected by these London disasters, the Komödie Theatre in Berlin had a considerable success with an adapted and altered version of This Was A Man; meanwhile New York managements still working their way stolidly through the Coward canon had arrived at Fallen Angels and The Marquise. Both these comedies opened on Broadway in the autumn of 1927; neither achieved huge success but The Marquise avoided the fate of Fallen Angels which was an undoubted flop. Both productions received kindly if not sparkling reviews: ‘light but well-made comedies with some good ideas spread rather thinly’ summarized the views of most New York critics on each occasion.
Before Sirocco, Noël had been contracted to do The Second Man in London early in 1928 and also to write a new revue for Cochran; after the deluge (‘I hope you enjoyed the French Revolution,’ he wrote to the people who’d sent him Sirocco first-night cables) he offered both managements the chance to cancel the contracts and to extract themselves from what must have seemed extremely unattractive ventures in the current climate of anti-Coward feeling. Neither did; it was agreed that rehearsals for The Second Man would start soon after Christmas, and Cochran had merely laughed when Coward suggested he should abandon the revue. Instead they agreed to go ahead with it early in the new year; Noël was to write all the music, the book and the lyrics as well as supervising the production, and the cast was to be led by Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale, and Maisie Gay with a young Viennese dancer called Tilly Losch who was a discovery of Cochran’s. By the time Noël and Jack returned to England after their stay with Molyneux, and a brief skiing holiday with Michael Arlen at St Moritz, Coward had learnt the whole of The Second Man and also written at least one of the songs for the revue – a number called ‘Dance, Dance, Dance, Little Lady’ which continued the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ philosophy.
He had also found time to put the events of his immediate past into some kind of perspective: ‘On looking back over the past few years during which I have achieved a certain amount of success as a playwright, it has depressed me a little to perceive in peaceful retrospect that my greatest success seems to have been as a public nuisance. I appear by quite unintentional means to have aroused many members of the Press, Church and Public to frenzies of irritation and rage. Elderly Clergymen in Norfolk have burst into print accusing me of sordid licentiousness, decadence, immorality and second-rate sensationalism. Outraged matrons have protested that young virgins visiting my plays are pretty likely to fling aside their hitherto closely guarded virtue forthwith and dive headfirst into lives of unspeakable cor
ruption. The Press in their criticisms have deplored my upholding of vice and belittling of virtue, and in their gossip columns and paragraphs have frequently used my name as a label for any peculiarly unpleasant social type who happened to be in the news at the moment.’
13
1928–1929
Youth is fleeting ...
to the rhythm beating
in your mind.
Noël rehearsed The Second Man through the January of 1928 under the careful direction of Basil Dean; the comedy was to open cold at the Playhouse on the embankment at the end of the month with Zena Dare, Ursula Jeans and Raymond Massey as the only other members of a distinguished cast. The author, S. N. Behrman, was then a New York journalist and critic largely unknown in England, though he had already written a trio of plays for Broadway. His The Second Man was a Lonsdalian comedy concerned, like On Approval, with the mixing and ultimate matching of two couples; Noël’s character, Clark Storey, was a second-rate author with the detachment to know it, and the part allowed Noël to impersonate throughout the press caricature of himself: removed, cynical, flippant and periodically very witty. At the beginning of the third act, though, there was an uneasy moment of post-Sirocco truth when Noël, as Storey, had to hurl one of his own manuscripts into a wastebasket murmuring ‘trash, trash, trash’. Coward warned Behrman that the audience were liable to react wildly to this; in fact they never did.
Behrman’s play suggested a basic grounding in English drawing-room comedy that came incongruously from an American journalist, though it perhaps explains why The Second Man did considerably better in London than when it was staged in New York with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The characters were strong, the play had an almost perfect symmetry together with a powerful scene in which Ursula Jeans announced that she was carrying Coward’s baby, followed almost instantly by another in which Ray Massey tried to kill Coward for ruining Miss Jeans, and on top of all that a fairly happy ending was the final guarantee of the play’s instantaneous success in London. Even so, Noël had been deeply apprehensive; rehearsals were not altogether smooth and he remembered only too vividly his reception on the last occasion that he had appeared on a stage, as the author of Sirocco. This time however it was all a great deal better, from the applause that greeted his first entrance to the curtain calls which told the cast that they were in a success. Yet Noël could not altogether forget Sirocco: ‘through the applause’ he said later ‘I was listening ironically to crueller noises’. Hannen Swaffer of the Daily Express went backstage to make his peace with Noël:
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 17