A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  ‘I have always said,’ murmured Swaffer in the dressing-room, ‘that you act much better than you write.’

  ‘How odd,’ replied Noël, ‘I’m always saying the same thing about you.’

  Other critics next morning were in firm favour of the play and of Noël’s performance, their main thesis being that what Noël had lost on the swings he was now making up on the roundabouts: ‘The world,’ according to the Sporting and Dramatic, ‘will readily lose an unequal dramatist for a player of such quality.’

  But not all the reviews left it at that; two or three critics decided that as they had never heard of S. N. Behrman, he must be a pseudonym for Coward himself who doubtless had not wanted to risk his name under the title after the catastrophes that were Sirocco and Home Chat. The mistake was a tempting one, if only because so much of the dialogue of The Second Man was in the well-turned, superficially brilliant mould of mid-Twenties Coward, and with the wisdom of hindsight one could almost see it as a dry run for the quartet-crossing of Private Lives. But as a matter of record, not one word of The Second Man was the work of Coward, who was appearing purely as an actor; though from the end of The Second Man to the beginning of The Apple Cart a quarter of a century later, all his subsequent London appearances were to be in plays or revues of his own. During the rehearsals and run of The Second Man, Noël got along excellently with Sam Behrman who found him ‘the most entertaining companion in the world and one of the most generous spirits I know’.

  In February 1928, soon after the opening of The Second Man, Noël’s first play-into-film opened at the Pavilion; it was an Anglo-German co-production of The Queen Was in The Parlour with Lili Damita as Nadya and Paul Richter in the part for which Ivor Novello had originally been cast. It was not a critical success, largely because lengthy subtitles played havoc with the flow of Coward’s drama and with the talents of the title-writer who seems to have had some difficulty spelling words like aspirin. ‘An excuse for bad bed, bathroom and ballroom scenes,’ wrote Beatrice Curtis Brown of the film in The Graphic, ‘do let us be rid of this arty suggestiveness.’ A month later the silent film of The Vortex, with Novello and Frances Doble directed by Adrian Brunel, opened to better but still mixed reviews at the Marble Arch Pavilion.

  Late in March the Hitchcock silent version of Easy Virtue opened at the Stoll; it was considerably less faithful to the play, introduced various court sequences, but achieved much better reviews. By this time Michael Balcon at Gainsborough had decided that Noël might be commissioned to write directly for the screen; the result was the script for a romantic costume piece called Concerto, designed as a vehicle for Gainsborough’s leading star of the time, Ivor Novello. But when Noël gave him the script, Balcon realized that although the story was good enough in itself, it simply would not work in silent film terms since ‘it cried out for music’; although he had commissioned it for £1,200, most of which had already been paid, Balcon now asked Noël to call off the deal. Noël agreed, and even returned the money he’d received for it; but Concerto was not a total loss for him. A year later, threads of the plot turned up in Bitter-Sweet.

  While he was playing in The Second Man, Coward’s still-banned drama This Was A Man was performed to tepid reviews but huge audiences by the English Players in Paris where the Lord Chamberlain’s ban did not of course apply; extra police were called out to control the crowds on the first night. Some of the English papers reviewed it there, though most suggested that London audiences were not missing a great deal. The Players kept it in their repertoire for the next five years, acting it on tour in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Monaco, Egypt, and South America. In England the Lord Chamberlain’s edict appeared still more pointless in March 1928 when Martin Secker published the play in a Coward collection that also included Home Chat and Sirocco.

  Most critics at this time were prepared to accept Coward as an actor after his success in The Second Man, but still unwilling to allow that he might again be a good playwright; an exception here was Ivor Brown, who had already managed to get Noël into some kind of historical perspective as a writer:

  ‘Ten years ago we were all looking for that “new world after the war”. Everybody had his eyes on the horizon and scanned it for the rising walls of a New Jerusalem. We had grand hopes of peace and plenty, of democracy fired by a common sympathy, of a new and kindly social order. People trumpeted the word “Reconstruction” as though it were magic. We have had our disillusion. Reconstruction withered where it grew. New Jerusalems never rose from their fanciful foundations. Bravery of thought was replaced by bitterness of mood. It was easy to doubt everything: hard to find acceptable faiths. The younger generation may have been dismayed; but at least it could dance. It turned its back on solemn creeds. It was light of toe, light of touch. Of that period and temper Mr Coward is the dramatist ... what he has done is to record the laughing way of a generation which is hiding its disenchantment under a smile.’

  A guest at Goldenhurst on one of the week-ends during The Second Man was Noël’s old friend G. B. Stern, now back from Italy and making some quick money out of short stories and articles for which Noël berated her thoroughly. Her talent, he claimed, was too great to dissipate; but Miss Stern suspects that what really annoyed her host over the week-end was that of the nineteen rounds of croquet they played on the lawn in front of the house she won nineteen. It was some time before she was invited to Goldenhurst again. Another guest at what was rapidly becoming the most highly populated country-house in Kent was Dorothy Dickson, the American actress and dancer who was already living and working in England. Though later a friend and admirer of Noël’s, she had found him unimpressive on a first acquaintance: ‘Noël Coward?’ she queried. ‘Back home where I come from they grow on trees.’

  Meanwhile, with The Second Man in the middle of a profitable run, Noël started auditions for the Cochran revue which remained without a title until, on its pre-London tour, Lorn Loraine brilliantly christened it This Year of Grace! This time Noël did not give up his role in London to be in Manchester on the opening night, though he and a relatively new friend, the novelist Arnold Bennett, did go up for the Sunday dress rehearsal. It was another all-night affair, but rather less gloomy than the final run through of On With The Dance at the same theatre almost exactly three years earlier.

  The revue (‘a form of entertainment,’ wrote Ronald Jeans, ‘so designed that it doesn’t matter how late you get there’) was in the best Charlot/Coward/Cochran tradition of no-expense-spared entertainment destined to be taken only after a large and rather good dinner. Not all of the twenty-four numbers were winners, but This Year of Grace! did give its audience two new Coward songs that were the stuff theatregoers’ dreams were made of: Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews sang ‘A Room With A View’ and then, in the second half, Hale chanted ‘Dance, Dance, Dance Little Lady’ to Lauri Devine surrounded by the grotesque, grinning masks of Oliver Messel. Lovers of the kind of revue that used to be described as ‘intimate’, where the word signified an almost incestuous devotion to proper names, stage jokes and theatrical gossip, were kept more than happy by a number called ‘Theatre Guide’ which parodied in single-line blackouts some of the current West End plays (Douglas Byng turned up as a bizarre Young Woodley) ending with ‘Any Noël Coward Play’ in which an actress stepped forward amid raucous booes to announce that this was the happiest night of her life.

  The morning after the dress-rehearsal Noël returned to London and The Second Man, and that night the opening of This Year of Grace! went splendidly; during the week ticket agency representatives, hearing glowing reports of the revue, travelled to Manchester to do an advance sales deal with Cochran. Their request that he should remove Coward’s name from the London billing as ‘it might deter family audiences’ was indignantly refused.

  This Year of Grace! opened at the London Pavilion on March 22nd 1928; the first night curtain rang up at eight, an hour before The Second Man, which meant that Coward was able to watch most of the first half and then,
by persuading the other three in The Second Man to play at about double their usual pace, he got back to the Pavilion in time for the finale. His revue collected, faintly surprisingly, some of the best notices of Coward’s career; surprisingly not because it was a poor revue, which it wasn’t, but because it was in many respects run-of-the-mill where much of Coward’s subsequent work showed rather more striking originality and theatrical courage. St John Ervine, for the Observer, went alphabetically overboard in writing what Terence Rattigan later called ‘the best notice ever written anywhere by anyone about anything’:

  ‘This Year of Grace! is the most amusing, the most brilliant, the cleverest, the daintiest, the most exquisite, the most fanciful, the most graceful, the happiest, the most ironical, the jolliest, the most kaleidoscopic, the loveliest, the most magnificent, the neatest and nicest, the most opulent, the pithiest, the quickest, the richest, the most superb and tasteful, the most uberous, the most versatile, the wittiest ...’

  and there happily he was stopped by the impossibility of the letter x. Reviews don’t come like that very often. All this, so soon after the Sirocco attacks, seemed almost like compensation.

  1928 was not an altogether exciting year in the light theatre and certainly the revue which earned Coward a thousand pounds a week in royalties was the best of its kind in town. Noël’s double triumph in The Second Man and This Year of Grace! was already being written about in terms of the greatest theatrical comeback yet recorded, and the seal was put on his new success by the then Prince of Wales, who had the orchestra play ‘A Room With A View’ no less than nine times at the Ascot Cabaret Ball. Virginia Woolf, too, was a keen if unlikely fan of This Year of Grace! In a letter to Noël she wrote that some of the numbers ‘struck me on the forehead like a bullet. And what’s more I remember them and see them enveloped in atmosphere – works of art in short ... I think you ought to bring off something that will put these cautious, creeping novels that one has to read silently in an arm chair deep, deep in the shade.’

  These were the years of the café society, which, contemporary press reports suggest, had been invented jointly by Noël and Prince Edward. In fact its roots went back further, to the marriages which linked the Gaiety Girls and Cochran’s Young Ladies to the aristocracy, making the theatre suddenly socially acceptable; the arrival of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet in high society further destroyed the barriers that separated the peers from the players, and such hostesses of the time as Sibyl Colefax gave young actors like Coward and Gielgud the chance to meet not only the aristocracy but, more valuably, novelists and sculptors and other artists in a kind of latter-day salon. But this process of social change, the abolition of rigid formality in entertainment and an uneasy nightclub fusion of the decaying aristocracy and the advancing democracy could hardly be attributed to Noël, though certainly he took part in it and benefited from it in terms of the new opportunities it offered.

  Early in the summer of 1928 The Second Man came to the end of a successful if not over-long run, and Cochran with his American partner Archie Selwyn began trying to persuade Noël that he should take a second company of This Year of Grace! to New York, led by himself and Beatrice Lillie, leaving intact the London Company which was still playing to capacity at the Pavilion. While Noël was trying to decide whether he wanted to appear in revue again, he went with Gladys Calthrop to spend a week-end with her family solicitor in Surrey. On the Monday morning, just before they left, the solicitor’s wife played them a new recording of Die Fledermaus, and on the way back to London Noël found himself thinking about how and why romantic operettas had virtually disappeared from the London stage, to be replaced by the slick, fast, funny American musicals of the Twenties. Out of a sense of nostalgia for the sentimental escapism of the old Daly’s musicals, the idea for Bitter-Sweet began to form in Noël’s mind.

  He started to write it on a trip to New York where he went with Cochran in July to scout out possible talent for the Broadway production of This Year of Grace!, having now decided that he would like to play the revue there for three months in the autumn. He and Cochran didn’t find many revue performers of the kind they were looking for, but they spent an enjoyable expense-account fortnight on Broadway seeing such old friends as Fred and Adele Astaire in Funny Face. By the time they returned to England the first act of Bitter-Sweet was complete and Cochran had agreed to present it in the spring of 1929.

  The rest of the summer was taken up with minor family crises; by this time Mrs Coward had sold the lease of the house in Ebury Street (though for a while Noël kept on his rooms there, using them as a flat and an office) and moved the entire family down to Goldenhurst. There, enjoying the full luxury of Noël’s success for the first time, she bought herself a new car and drove it smartly through the plate-glass window of the grocer’s shop in Ashford. Her other son, Eric, was now twenty-three and not finding it easy to be Noël’s younger brother; he was by all accounts a likeable man who seemed in contrast to Noël amazingly ineffectual, a characteristic inherited from their father rather than their mother. As Eric wanted to travel, and as he could find no immediate prospects of any work in England, the family packed him off to Ceylon where he became a tea-planter in the hills outside Colombo. Meanwhile Goldenhurst was proving a trifle cramped as the permanent home of Noël, his parents and Auntie Vida as well as such regular guests as Jack, Gladys, Lorn and Jeffrey Amherst, so Jack came up with a plan which involved converting the barn into a home for all the family while Noël kept the house for himself and his visitors. The family rebelled, fearing that they were being turfed out to make way for Noël’s ‘grand theatrical friends’, and Coward himself proved unequal to the struggle; his family stayed where they were and when the barn was converted it was Noël and Jack who went to live in it.

  Soon after they moved in, Noël made plans to spend a few days on holiday in Paris: hearing of this, Alec Woollcott and his friend Harpo Marx decided they would be there first to give Coward a surprise at the railway station. When his train pulled in, Harpo was on the platform heavily disguised as an impoverished musician, complete with violin and upturned hat. ‘Hello, Harpo,’ remarked Noël as he walked up the platform, stopping only to throw him a coin, ‘where’s Alec?’

  The second lavish and sentimental act of Bitter-Sweet, complete with such songs as ‘Dear Little Café’, was written in the unromantic and unlikely surroundings of a London nursing-home where Noël was recovering from an operation for piles in the late summer; Marie Tempest proved one of his more faithful and informative sick-bed visitors. Earlier Noël had taken the precaution of having a few dancing lessons before embarking on Sonnie Hale’s numbers in This Year of Grace!, and he’d also made his first records, five songs from the revue recorded with the Carroll Gibbons orchestra and released by HMV. Once out of the nursing home he went straight into rehearsal with Bea Lillie for the American production of This Year of Grace!

  Coward still felt that he was not entirely at home in a revue of this diverse kind, and he wasn’t altogether reassured by a ghastly tryout week in Baltimore when he and Miss Lillie ploughed through a series of tumultuous rows about the show and their own parts in it: ‘for that one week we loathed each other with every quivering fibre of our beings.’ Though he blamed Bea for Baltimore, Noël knew he lacked the elusive revue talent of Jack Buchanan or Sonnie Hale, and felt that he had to work much harder to achieve the same debonair effect. Nevertheless, the opening night at the Selwyn Theatre on Broadway was a riotous success, with stalls going for fifteen dollars on the black market and reviews the next morning that might have been written by Coward himself; Bea Lillie took the town by storm again, something she has done at roughly five-yearly intervals ever since, their quarrels were instantly forgotten, and according to Robert Benchley in Life: ‘Noël Coward has proved himself nothing short of a wonder-man in the concoction of This Year of Grace!... it is the kind of revue that one might dream of writing for a completely civilized world and, so long as people crowd in to see it as they are doi
ng now, we are prepared to retract everything we have ever said against mankind. If Mankind wishes we will even endorse it – blindfold. But unless someone in America is able to do something that approximates Mr Coward’s feat we shall always feel that it was a mistake to break away from England back there in 1776’. George Jean Nathan led a small rearguard action by less anglophile critics who couldn’t see much to enjoy about This Year of Grace!, but they were heavily outnumbered and the revue was obviously all set to be as much of a triumph in New York as it had been in London. The following night Gertrude Lawrence opened in George and Ira Gershwin’s Treasure Girl at a theatre a few blocks away, and although this was considerably less successful, the Coward-Lawrence-Lillie trio became the most popular of the Broadway stars that season, appearing not only on stage but also at an endless series of charity and social functions where they were called upon to repeat ad nauseam the better-known parts of their musical repertoire.

  Coward had originally contracted to play for just twelve weeks in New York, but in view of the packed houses he agreed to stay on through the winter in This Year of Grace!. In these extra months he revived a number of old friendships, notably among the Alexander Woollcott set which, ranging from Ethel Barrymore through Harpo Marx to Thornton Wilder, gathered every Sunday morning at Alec’s apartment for breakfast and backgammon. In December Woollcott devoted five pages of the New Yorker to a loving profile of the Master entitled ‘Heureux Noël’, and Coward himself published three plays (The Queen Was in The Parlour, Sirocco and Home Chat) that were as yet unknown in America. This edition carried an introduction from Arnold Bennett describing Coward as ‘boyishly ingenuous, yet the most comprehensive man of the theatre in London today’.