A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  Apart from the appearance of this, the first of six Play Parades that Noël was to publish over the next thirty years, 1934 also saw the arrival in London of the Ernst Lubitsch film of Design for Living. In an adaptation for the screen by Ben Hecht, the three central characters were played by Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper (in the Coward part) and Fredric March; the result was successful but unfaithful to Noël’s original script. The Coward plot might have seemed ideally suited to Lubitsch’s own style of pointed screen comedy, but Hecht’s adaptation abandoned most of the lines in the play and broadened a sophisticated comedy into what sometimes became near-farce. Lubitsch was unrepentant: ‘I offer no apologies to Mr Coward for altering his play... he knows as well as I do that no picture ever lived up to a stage reputation if taken word for word.’ Coward was not pleased, but as he’d been paid ten thousand pounds for the screen rights he was able to get over it; the unkindest cut of all was perhaps Hecht’s, who was reported by one paper to have said, ‘There’s only one line of Coward’s left in the picture – see if you can find it.’ Noël refused even to find the picture.

  In July Noël went back, as he had promised Cochran that he would, to the part of the Duc de Chaucigny-Varennes in Conversation Piece which Fresnay had been playing in his absence. But after only a dozen performances he was rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis and Fresnay returned to finish the run which had in fact only a few more weeks at His Majesty’s before the entire production was moved to New York for the autumn.

  Recuperating at Goldenhurst after the successful emergency operation to remove his appendix, Noël wrote a new play which he intended as a vehicle for the Lunts and called Point Valaine. Then, as there was no chance of producing it before Christmas since Lynn Fontanne was also meant to be resting for her health, and as Noël had to direct another play for the Wilson management in London early in the autumn, he decided to take the chance of a brief holiday aboard a yacht that he’d chartered from Claude Grahame-White. The outcome was disastrous; Noël took a new friend, the actor Louis Hayward, with him and together they sailed down the coast of Italy to Ile Rousse off Corsica, where the yacht was anchored while they went ashore for a couple of days. During one night a storm blew up and the yacht was thrown against some offshore rocks where it broke up. The next morning Noël and Hayward waded out to it and managed to retrieve a few of their possessions, in Noël’s case his typewriter, his passport and the manuscript of his first autobiography, Present Indicative, which he had just started to write. He lost all of the clothes that were on the yacht as well as about three hundred pounds in cash.

  Returning to London after this rather traumatic holiday, Noël started the production of another Broadway comedy for the Wilson management; this one was The Royal Family, a comedy by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber about a family of celebrated but hysterical American actors not a million miles removed from the Barrymores. In England, for obvious reasons, the play had to be retitled and was therefore rechristened Theatre Royal by Noël. Rehearsals for this most theatrical of comedies proved chaotic, initially because even after they had started there was some doubt about who was to play the male lead. Brian Aherne had been Coward’s original choice, but an overrunning film in Hollywood meant that he wouldn’t be available for another month at least; in the meantime Laurence Olivier agreed, as a favour to Noël and for £100 a week, to rehearse and play the beginning of the pre-London tour, leaving Aherne to take over before it went into the Lyric Theatre. But Olivier, though not pleased at being cast as a kind of provincial understudy, turned in a performance of such splendour in the John Barrymore role and became so popular with the rest of the cast on tour that it was soon clear Aherne would find his act an almost impossible one to follow. Aherne decided, rather than put his head into that particular noose, that he’d accept an alternative offer to play Mercutio on Broadway; thus after considerable persuasion by Coward it was Olivier who opened in London as well, and who played throughout the run of Theatre Royal. With him, as the older generations of the Cavendish family, were Madge Titheradge and Marie Tempest; they were a distinguished and mutually devoted company in a play that had already proved a cast-iron success in New York.

  Coward, directing Olivier for the third time in four years, had a firm understanding of and liking for his performance in a comedy which was, after all, not so very far removed in theme from Noël’s own Hay Fever. But the rehearsals, even when Olivier was established in the part, were neither as smooth nor as straightforward as one might have expected of that cast and director; Noël himself developed another intestinal inflammation soon after his appendicitis, and had to spend alternate days in the theatre and in a London nursing home.

  By the time Theatre Royal opened in Glasgow, however, Noël had totally recovered and from that first week of the tour onwards the play was an evident success; when it reached Edinburgh, an observant theatre-goer at one performance noticed that the Indian servant who makes a brief appearance in the comedy bore that night a striking resemblance to Mr Coward himself: ‘he had dressed rather sketchily for the part, his turban askew, and he uttered a long string of pseudo Hindu words. It took the cast some seconds to realize what was happening, then there was a sudden pause followed by a few aborted giggles whereupon Coward vanished offstage as surprisingly as he’d arrived.’

  In London the reviews for Theatre Royal were almost all good, and business was even better. Noël had latched eagerly on to the eccentric theatrical exaggerations of Broadway’s ‘royal family’ and in his production of the generations of highly-strung actors slinging desperately to their artistic temperaments were played up for all they were worth. Their moves, their meals, even their baths were all timed and produced for major effects, and it turned out to be a play in which all Coward’s deep-rooted instincts for the theatre theatrical could be expressed on stage. Discussing the acting, one critic said that even allowing for the subject-matter it still seemed far too hammy; ‘all acting,’ replied Noël, ‘worth the name is ham. We rehearse for weeks to hide it, but it has to be there all the time.’ For Coward, the lasting pleasure of Theatre Royal was the chance to work again with his beloved Marie Tempest: ‘she has more allure and glamour and charm at seventy than most women I know who are in their twenties and thirties. Her dignity is unassailable and I have a strong feeling that it always was; I think what impresses me most about her is her unspoken but very definite demand for good behaviour.’

  For Marie Tempest, Noël at that time was still ‘the enfant gâté of the theatre. At his birth two godmothers sat over his cradle, the benevolent one who gave him one superb gift, and the malignant one who tossed in a handful of gifts almost as good. She disappeared with a cackling laugh. Noël is aware of these gifts and he feels that he must exploit them all. That is the trap which was laid by the malignant godmother. This is just my Victorian way of saying that I do not think he will ever quite fulfil his great promise if he does not curb his versatility. He is spending his gifts too lavishly. When one is a considerable person it is not wise to do anything below the standards set by one’s best. As an artist he is extraordinarily generous in his praise of others. His spontaneous appreciation of other writers and other actors shows the bigness of his heart. And he has never grown beyond the friends who were kind to him before he was successful. On no one has success sat more lightly; he has warmed himself in it, and he has mellowed.’

  With Theatre Royal safely launched in a production that was to run comfortably and profitably through the winter, Noël turned his attention briefly to an appearance as a guest singing some of his own songs on Henry Hall’s radio programme, and then to the casting of Point Valaine for New York. In the meantime Conversation Piece had opened on Broadway with Yvonne Printemps, Pierre Fresnay and almost exactly the same cast that had played it in London earlier in the year. Cole Porter’s cable to Noël after the first night read ‘I have just left Conversation Piece. It’s a Wow!’ but the Broadway critics were less flattering.

  Though it played to weekly
returns of over ten thousand dollars for the first couple of weeks at the 44th Street Theatre, business soon fell away badly and Conversation Piece lasted rather less than two months in New York.

  A few weeks after Theatre Royal had opened in London, Noël left England to join the Lunts at their home, in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin; by the time he arrived there they had read Point Valaine, liked it, and were keen to do it on Broadway. It was agreed that, with Noël directing but not on this occasion playing any of the parts, they would rehearse in New York through December before opening on Christmas night 1934, at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. In the cast were Philip Tonge, Noël’s old child-actor friend, and his mother Lilian. It could scarcely be said of Noël that he ever failed to find work for old friends.

  Before rehearsals started, Noël went to spend a week-end with Alec Woollcott at his Neshobe Island home; there, after dinner one night, Coward announced that he would read Point Valaine to the assembled company. ‘Where?’ asked Woollcott, icily; as the room where they were sitting was the only possible location, the reading was indefinitely postponed.

  But Point Valaine proved on this its first outing to be one of Coward’s least successful plays, and neither of its two subsequent revivals has done anything to rehabilitate a drama which the author himself admits is based on a theme ‘neither big enough for tragedy nor light enough for comedy’. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Point Valaine should be dedicated by Noël to Somerset Maugham: in its characters and theme the play is unlike anything that Noël ever tried to do before or afterwards, and in its murky way the plot echoes Maugham at his most lugubrious. Indeed some of the characters in Point Valaine seem to have drifted in from a road company of Rain.

  For Noël, it was an attempt to break entirely new ground, and in that if nothing else he was successful. Evidently he was experimenting with the creation of new moods and feelings, above all trying to find ways to convey a sense of impending horror on the stage without, until the bitter end, being forced to give any actual reason for it. As a short story it might have worked very well indeed; as a play it failed to work at all. Neither the mood nor the plot are alone enough to sustain Point Valaine, and the characters are a vaguely defined and deeply unattractive lot who seem to deserve all that they ultimately get.

  The opening night in Boston was a gloomy way to spend Christmas, and it is not surprising that this production marked the low watermark in Coward’s enduring friendship with the Lunts. They became as depressed about the play as Noël himself, and the result was a mutual irritability that started in rehearsals, and lasted through Boston, where a rain machine flooded the stage and all the sets were found to be too big for the scene-changes. The Broadway opening in January was disastrous. The audience, who had come in the expectation of a light Coward comedy, were reduced to stony indifference and the reviews were quick to point out that as a play it was well below Coward’s best. Brooks Atkinson put his finger on one of the main reasons for the disappointment that greeted the play: ‘Coward’s gifts are so multitudinous, his range is so bewildering and his success has been so dazzling that we are all inclined to expect too much of him. When we come to one of his new plays we are feverishly prepared as for a sign from God.’

  Point Valaine lasted less than eight weeks at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, and financially it represented another considerable loss to Noël’s management. It was also the greatest failure that the Lunts have ever had.

  On the credit side of John C. Wilson Ltd, Theatre Royal was still making good money in England, and Design for Living had been sold as Sérénade à Trois for France, but the losses sustained by first Biography in London and now Point Valaine in New York were very heavy. At the beginning of April 1935 Lorn Loraine wrote to Noël’s mother at Goldenhurst: ‘We have got to go very, very easy on money and economize rigidly wherever it is possible. Mind you, I am pretty sure the shortage is only temporary and would never have arisen if Point Valaine had done better and if it were not for the fact that half of all Noël’s personal earnings have to go into a special tax account as soon as they are received. Still, the fact remains that money is definitely tight and has been for some months. Both the bank accounts have overdrafts and there is very little coming in just now – a good deal less than has to go out.’

  Noël, still in New York after Point Valaine closed, realized the need to make some money rapidly. He agreed therefore, for the first time in the seventeen years since he had worked for D. W. Griffith, to make a film; his sole celluloid appearance in the meantime had been in a disappointing screen test with Gertrude Lawrence during the run of Private Lives. The new film’s title was The Scoundrel, and it was one of a series of three independent productions written and directed jointly by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur who in an attempt to escape the professional bondage of Hollywood were making low-budget pictures in their own Astoria Studios on Long Island. For Noël the money, around five thousand dollars, was only a fraction of what he could have earned by going to Hollywood, but by this time he was interested in the script and the promise that he’d be playing opposite Helen Hayes who later became Mrs MacArthur. But at the last minute she was unable to make the film and her part was played by Julie Haydon; Noël did, however, have one old friend in the cast in the massive shape of Alexander Woollcott, who noted that throughout the studio Coward was known colloquially as the czar of all the rushes.

  The Scoundrel was made quickly and efficiently, but even so Noël found the business of filming a confusing and irritating affair, and seeing the film afterwards he felt that both he and it should have been considerably better than they were. Critics in New York and London disagreed: they found it an adventurous, off-beat morality tale with Noël ideally cast as the cynical publisher who comes back from the dead grasping a bunch of seaweed to proclaim that salvation can be found in altruistic tears. It was, for its time, a very modern, impressionistic and indirect film which failed to appeal to the mass of audiences outside London who were already acclimatized to the more orthodox fare of Hollywood, but which nevertheless achieved a considerable artistic success.

  In New York The Scoundrel, perhaps because it was unlike any other film of the period, became something of a cult; the writers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, then still in their teens, held parties at which they would act out the entire script before their long-suffering friends, and Miss Comden subsequently went so far as to hold her wedding luncheon in the restaurant where Noël and Julie Haydon had filmed a highly-charged love scene.

  As soon as The Scoundrel was safely in the can, Noël left New York for London, travelling by a route that was less direct though infinitely more picturesque than the North Atlantic. He went home via Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Colombo. It was while he was in Singapore that he heard of the death of his friend T. E. Lawrence. ‘It is ironic,’ Noël told a reporter from the local paper, ‘that a man of his genius, courage, strength of purpose and vision should have been snuffed out in one blinding, noisy moment on that idiotic motor-cycle.’

  On his way around the world, his old and ever-present wanderlust briefly allayed, Coward worked on Present Indicative the autobiography which he had promised Nelson Doubleday in New York for the autumn. In idle moments he also began to think about the construction of not one but nine new plays.

  19

  1935–1937

  ‘The critical laurels that had been so confidently prophesied for me in the Twenties never graced my brow, and I was forced throughout the Thirties to console myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success which I enjoyed very much indeed.’

  When in the late summer of 1935 Gertrude Lawrence went to stay with Noël, now back home at Goldenhurst, he was able to show her the basic layout and most of the scripts for a new and elaborate vehicle that he had erected for their respective talents: a series of nine one-act plays ranging in mood from slapstick comedy to high tragedy, in all of which they would both appear, to be played in first London and then New York as alternating t
riple bills under the omnibus title Tonight at Eight-Thirty.

  The success of Private Lives, together with Noël’s fervent belief in the star system, had made him think deeply about another way to bring himself and Gertrude Lawrence together again on the stage in parts that would allow them to display their varied acting and singing talents to the best possible advantage. Private Lives had, in his view and that of many of the people surrounding him, proved that the combination of Gertrude Lawrence and himself conjured up a box-office magic which could be invoked again given the right vehicle. But he needed to write something that would be varied enough to let them both work in their own individual ways, and also exciting enough to overcome the very real boredom that he found in nightly repetition of the same part; given those requirements, it very soon occurred to him on his way around the world that three plays would be better than one, and by the same token, nine would be better than three.

  In the first quarter of this century, with a few distinguished exceptions among the works of Bernard Shaw and J. M. Barrie, the one-act play had fallen on hard times; in the provinces some were still presented as undercast, ill-produced curtain-raisers, but in general the form had disappeared as a result of a widespread managerial belief that the public did not come to see double- or triple-bills because they felt paradoxically they would be getting less value for money. But for Coward, the one-act play, ‘having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or overpadding, deserves a better fate, and if by careful writing, acting, and producing I can do a little towards reinstating it in its rightful pride, I shall have achieved one of my more sentimental ambitions.’

  With some of the Tonight at Eight-Thirty plays already virtually complete in his mind, Noël had returned to England in mid-June for the annual theatrical garden party which he and a distinguished committee of actors ran to raise money for the eighty children who then lived in the Actors’ Orphanage.