A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  ‘What are we left with? The picture, carefully incomplete, of a success; probably of one of the most talented and prodigiously successful people the world has ever known – a person of infinite charm and adaptability whose very adaptability however makes him inferior to a more compact and worldly competitor in his own sphere, like Cole Porter; and an essentially unhappy man, a man who gives one the impression of having seldom really thought or really lived and who is intelligent enough to know it. But what can he do about it? He is not religious, politics bore him, art means facility or else brickbats, love wild excitement and the nervous breakdown. There is only success, more and more of it, till from his pinnacle he can look down to where Ivor Novello and Beverley Nichols gather samphire on a ledge, and to where, a pinpoint on the sands below, Mr Godfrey Winn is counting pebbles. But success is all there is, and that even is temporary. For one can’t read any of Noël Coward’s plays now ... they are written in the most topical and perishable way imaginable, the cream in them turns sour overnight – they are even dead before they are turned into talkies, however engaging they may seem at the time. This book reveals a terrible predicament, that of a young man with the Midas touch, with a gift that does not creep and branch and flower, but which turns everything it touches into immediate gold. And the gold melts, too.’

  In the March of 1937 the strain of playing nine parts in as many plays within a repertoire that often entailed acting no less than six of them on a single matinée day finally took its toll of Noël; like Gertrude Lawrence in London a year before him, he collapsed. At first he was only off for six performances, but then three days after he returned to the theatre he broke down again directly after a performance, and this time his New York doctor refused to let him go back to the theatre. Tonight at Eight-Thirty was closed at once, almost a month before it was due to end its Broadway run, and Noël left for a holiday in Nassau.

  From Nassau, Coward sailed on to Bermuda before returning to New York and then London in time for the coronation of King George VI, by which time he had entirely recovered from the second nervous breakdown he’d had in ten years. But he did not intend to risk a third; back home at Goldenhurst he told the press that he would not be working again as an actor for at least two years, and as events developed it was, in fact, six years before he again appeared on the stage in a play.

  For the Coronation, after lacerating his hands by pulling every string in sight, Noël managed to procure for Lorn and himself two seats on the Royal Household stand outside Buckingham Palace. Then, after a few weeks in comparative idleness at Goldenhurst, he reached an agreement with Hugh (‘Binkie’) Beaumont of H. M. Tennent whereby he would direct Gerald Savory’s new comedy George and Margaret for New York in the autumn, though as a result of various backstage disagreements and the sacking of one director he was only to be involved in the last week of rehearsals in Manchester prior to the company leaving for Broadway. In his view the play’s Broadway chances were not good; from the ship on his way to New York he cabled Jack Wilson: ‘SEE VERY LITTLE POSSIBILITY NEW YORK SUCCESS BUT HOPE AT LEAST I HAVE AVERTED SCANDALOUS FAILURE AS REGARDS BILLING UNOFFICIAL GOSSIP INEVITABLE BUT PREFER MY NAME HAVE NO OFFICIAL CONNECTION WITH PRODUCTION WHATEVER BOTH FOR PLAY’S SAKE AND MY OWN SUGGEST NO DIRECTOR’S NAME BE MENTIONED WILL BE VERY CAREFUL WITH PRESS AND ONLY MENTION BUYING LARGE CASTLE IN GEORGIA.’ By the end of the Atlantic crossing Coward’s cables to Wilson were getting even more urgent: ‘ABSOLUTELY REFUSE HAVE MY NAME OFFICIALLY CONNECTED WITH GEORGE AND MARGARET HAVE MERELY REDIRECTED CAST NOT ENGAGED BY ME AND TIDIED UP AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE THIS DEFINITELY NOT MY PRODUCTION.’

  Although, or perhaps because, Noël had altered the play slightly for an American audience, George and Margaret failed to repeat its overwhelming London success in New York; it suffered by being seen in the same Broadway season as another English comedy, Rattigan’s French Without Tears, and ran for barely two months. While Noël was with the play in New York his father died, peacefully and not altogether unexpectedly, at Goldenhurst; Lorn Loraine looked after his funeral arrangements, and Noël stayed out in America to visit first Alec Woollcott in Vermont and later the Lunts in Wisconsin. Then in October, he decided to return on the Normandie to England because, as he cabled Lorn from New York, ‘I CAN’T WORK OUT HERE AND I AM LONGING TO GET ON WITH IT.’

  20

  1937–1940

  For me, the pre-war past died on the day Mr Neville Chamberlain returned with such gay insouciance from Munich.’

  Noël’s telegram from New York about ‘getting on with it’ referred to an idea for a new production that had occurred to him while he was staying in America; he now had it in mind to write a musical comedy called Operette which, he told Peggy Wood on his way home, would be ‘rather Bitter-Sweet in atmosphere but later in period’. Back at Goldenhurst he worked on the idea throughout the October and November of 1937, and by Christmas he was ready to start thinking about a cast. In the meantime Gertrude Lawrence had opened on Broadway in Susan and God, the first straight play she had done for some years. ‘LEGITIMATE AT LAST,’ cabled Noël, ‘WON’T MOTHER BE PLEASED.’

  Though the London theatre had seen nothing of Coward’s work in 1937, in the provinces Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson were touring with their own company in two plays from Tonight at Eight-Thirty (Fumed Oak and Hands Across the Sea) to which they added Bernard Shaw’s Village Wooing in a triple bill. ‘Two of my plays and one of his,’ Coward remarked, ‘that fairly puts Mr Shaw in his place.’

  In Operette Noël had written parts for Peggy Wood, hoping that she might repeat her Bitter-Sweet success, and also for the Viennese singer Fritzi Massary whom he brought out of a five-year retirement to play Liesl. Noël planned to direct it himself, and it was arranged that the John C. Wilson management would present it at the Opera House in Manchester for a month from mid-February, prior to bringing it into His Majesty’s Theatre in London where both Conversation Piece and Bitter-Sweet had played. By the end of the year the book for Operette was complete, and Noël had written the score of a dozen songs including ‘Where Are The Songs We Sung?’, ‘Dearest Love’ and, most memorably, ‘The Stately Homes of England’.

  Operette was the second and last attempt that Coward made to follow the nostalgic success he’d had with Bitter-Sweet almost a decade earlier, but it was one of the least successful musicals Coward had ever written. It told the story of an imaginary Gaiety Girl in the early nineteen-hundreds who achieved stardom overnight but then had to sacrifice her love life to her career, and within its two acts and seventeen scenes Coward left no cliché of backstage life unturned. There was the understudy who took over at a few minutes’ notice after the star had a tantrum, the actress in love with the young aristocrat whose stiff-backed dowager mother told her to give him up, and the star who staggered on with the show in the face of overwhelming grief and in response to lines like ‘Go on and act ... act better than you have ever acted in your life!’

  But from Coward’s point of view the main trouble with Operette was that it was overwritten and undercomposed, so that in production the plot became an elaborate and top-heavy affair which the songs were unable to carry. This is where the structure that had served Bitter-Sweet so well tended to collapse, and with the exception of ‘The Stately Homes’ there were no musical show-stoppers at all. The action of Operette switched rapidly between the play-within-a-play and the backstage lives of those involved in it, a device which confused theatregoers in Manchester quite considerably. On the first night there Coward leant out of his box to see bewildered playgoers furtively striking matches and rustling their programmes in a frantic effort to find out where they were supposed to be and what the hell was going on.

  But by this time it was too late to perform any drastic rescue operation on Operette, and though Noël did manage to simplify it considerably before London, it opened at His Majesty’s a month later to notices that were almost uniformly bleak. ‘I can stand any amount of criticism,’ said Noël, ‘as long as it’
s unqualified praise.’ On this occasion it wasn’t. The magic of Coward’s name on the posters was still potent enough to give Operette a run of just over four months, but the musical did little for the esteem in which he was held by theatre-goers. Nevertheless, ‘The Stately Homes’ later came in useful for Noël’s cabaret repertoire and a couple of other songs were salvaged from the wreck for use again in two of his post-war musicals.

  Within a few days of the London opening of Operette, Coward left for the Mediterranean; he had been asked by Louis Mountbatten to do some work on behalf of the Royal Naval Film Corporation which had been founded by Mountbatten earlier in the year. Its object was to equip the Navy with enough projectors to make the showing of feature films a regular part of off-duty life for all ranks in the senior service, and Coward’s job was to travel around the Mediterranean fleet asking sailors what kind of films they would most like to see on board ship, and relaying their answers back to the Corporation in London. It was a task that he enjoyed hugely, as it allowed him to renew his old affection for the life of the wardroom. It also laid him wide open to Emmanuel Shinwell, who popped up in the House of Commons to enquire with untiring regularity why Mr Coward should be conveyed around the seven seas by ships of the Royal Navy at vast cost to the British taxpayer.

  When Noël got back to England in the early autumn of 1938, he and Jack Wilson decided to rehash Words and Music as a revue for Beatrice Lillie to play on Broadway under the title Set to Music. Some of the songs that Coward had written for Words and Music six years earlier were left in the new show, and the added numbers included ‘The Stately Homes of England’ which was put into the revue since there was not now much likelihood of Operette being seen in America. Coward also put in ‘Marvellous Party’ for Bea, a song he had written the previous summer after Elsa Maxwell invited him to come ‘just as he was’ to an informal beach party in the South of France. When Noël arrived, just as he was, he found about a hundred people in the last stages of evening dress expecting him to entertain them.

  ‘I’ve been to a marvellous party

  With Nounou and Nada and Nell,

  It was in the fresh air

  And we went as we were

  And we stayed as we were

  Which was Hell.

  Poor Grace started singing at midnight

  And didn’t stop singing till four;

  We knew the excitement was bound to begin

  When Laura got blind on Dubonnet and gin

  And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin,

  I couldn’t have liked it more.

  Elaborate plans for the Broadway staging of Set to Music went ahead throughout September with Noël at Goldenhurst and Jack Wilson in New York exchanging cables daily if not hourly; the dialogue that Noël carried on in this transatlantic fashion began in the usual theatrical terms: ‘SUGGEST YOU ENGAGE EIGHT REALLY BEAUTIFUL SHOWGIRLS MORE OR LESS SAME HEIGHT NO PARTICULAR TALENT REQUIRED ALSO NEED CLOSE HARMONY TRIO.’ But then, as the pre-Munich situation worsened, the cables got more agitated: ‘GRAVE POSSIBILITY WAR WITHIN NEXT FEW WEEKS OR DAYS IF THIS HAPPENS POSTPONEMENT REVUE INEVITABLE AND ANNIHILATION ALL OF US PROBABLE.’

  With Neville Chamberlain back from Munich bearing his piece of paper the gathering storm seemed to have subsided, at least for the moment; but Noël, not normally a man who could care one way or the other about affairs even remotely political, felt violently that the bid for ‘peace in our time’ had been a grave mistake, and that his beloved country had now been severely compromised.

  After a brief holiday in Rome where he watched a parade led by Mussolini, looking ‘like an over-ripe plum squeezed into a white uniform’, Coward left Europe for New York aboard the Normandie with Gladys Calthrop, who was going to design Set to Music, and Cole Lesley whom Noël had taken on as a valet during the run of Tonight at Eight-Thirty: ‘Coley’ was to stay with him as his personal secretary for the next thirty years with only a wartime break. Noël was also involved at this time in complicated negotiations for the presentation by the Wilson-Coward management of Dear Octopus during the same New York theatre season as Set to Music. It was some time before both the play and the revue emerged from the chaos of transatlantic casting and planning into some sort of shape for rehearsals in the late autumn.

  Set to Music opened in Boston on Boxing Day 1938 to a considerably more enthusiastic response than had greeted the world première of Point Vaiaine in that city four years and one day earlier. From there it went to Broadway where the reviews were excellent for Bea Lillie, if rather grudging about Noël; for most critics Bea was the show and it became an evening with Beatrice Lillie rather than another Coward revue. There was praise too for Richard Haydn, the young English comedian, who made an appearance in the second half as Edwin Carp, ‘the phenomenal fish mimic’, holding forth in some imaginary, demented vaudeville programme. On the opening night in New York, as the ‘five minutes’ was called, Noël burst into Haydn’s dressing-room: ‘I just came by,’ he said, ‘to remind you not to be nervous; all you have to remember is that the entire thing depends on you.’

  Almost immediately after the first night, with business for the revue looking very satisfactory indeed, Noël decided to travel again; this time to Pago-Pago by way of his beloved Honolulu. On the way he stopped off to visit Cary Grant in California, and briefly joined the frenetically social Hollywood round.

  At the very beginning of 1939, fully six years after Coward himself had played it in America with the Lunts, Design for Living opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, with an English cast. Beyond doubt the play suffered from the six-year gap which separated its writing from its first London production, and the climate of the Thirties had changed fast enough for the comedy to belong already to a different and dated era.

  After his brief holiday by the Pacific with Cary Grant, Coward decided that he would not after all be visiting Pago-Pago; instead he planned to stay with the Dillinghams in Hawaii and while there to write himself a new play for London in the autumn. But even that plan was subject to change; after Noël had been in Honolulu for a few days, he found that he was not writing a play at all but instead the first of the many short stories that were to make up a major part of his output as a writer in the later stages of his life. Coward found the short story, lying in form as it does somewhere between a novel and a play, an absorbing experiment in disciplined writing which combined the advantages he had already found in the one-act play with none of the disadvantages of the inevitable compromises over casting or production.

  In this first collection that Coward wrote while he was in Hawaii and titled To Step Aside there were seven short stories, some of them distinctly Maughamesque in their flavour but all written in a spare, dry, witty style which suggested that Coward, had he not been first and foremost a playwright, could have earned a decent living as a writer of fiction. Maugham himself, to whom Noël subsequently sent his stories, had reservations about only one of them:

  ‘I have just finished To Step Aside and should like to tell you how much I enjoyed it... but I’m sorry you have wasted “Aunt Tittie” on a short story; you had material there for a great picaresque novel which probably no one but you could write and it is a shame to have squandered thus such a wealth of splendid stuff. Heaven knows I’m all for concision, but no one in the world could cram Tom Jones, say, into a couple of columns of an evening paper.’

  Among the other stories that made up To Step Aside one was distinctly autobiographical: What Mad Pursuit?, written in a fit of retrospective fury after Noël had spent one of the most frantically uncomfortable week-ends of his life in what he had been told by his hostess would be a ‘restful’ house on Long Island. Coward’s account of a hectic and altogether ghastly American social scene is in many respects the prose equivalent of his ‘Marvellous Party’ song.

  Within the month in Honolulu he had completed all the stories and, feeling on the good authority of almost every newspaper in sight that another European crisis was imminent and this one wo
rse than the last, he returned home in the early spring of 1939. While Noël was passing through New York, Jack Wilson tried to persuade him to stay and join the cast of Set to Music, as business for the revue had fallen off badly during the winter. But Coward was determined to refuse, partly because he didn’t want to risk the prestige of his name on Broadway by trying to bolster a shaky show well into its run, and mainly because he honestly felt that at a time of such world uncertainty he wanted to be at home. He did, however, stay in New York for long enough to attend the 1939 World’s Fair; the organizers had promised him the honour of a ‘Noël Coward Evening’ there and he arrived with Constance Collier to find a massed band at the gates proudly playing selections from Jerome Kern’s Showboat, until they realized their mistake and switched rapidly if discordantly to Bitter-Sweet. Inside the gates, Noël discovered that the prospect of an evening in his honour had singularly failed to attract the fair-goers, most of whom had by now gone home. Followed by a few embarrassed officials Noël took to stopping people on the sidewalk and begging ‘Please, can I give you my autograph?’ Later he was given a ceremonial dinner in a huge and otherwise totally empty restaurant, by which time both Noël and Miss Collier were in fits of hysterical laughter; but their evening was finally vindicated by a visit to the amusement area of the fairground where Noël was gratifyingly mobbed, albeit none too soon.

  Noël got back to Goldenhurst to find waiting for him some crippling tax bills and the threat of early action by the Inland Revenue; but within a few days Jack Wilson was able to reassure him from New York that M.G.M. had agreed to pay eighty thousand dollars for the film rights to all the plays in Tonight at Eight-Thirty. With that new financial crisis overcome almost as quickly as it had arrived, Noël settled back at Goldenhurst to the writing of two new and totally contrasting plays; Present Laughter (which was originally entitled Sweet Sorrow) and This Happy Breed, in both of which he planned to appear in London during the autumn, alternating the two on successive nights with the same company. While he was writing them he was evidently aware that long before the autumn, world events might well make the whole venture ludicrously optimistic and improbable, but bathed in the general glow of governmental optimism Coward was prepared at that stage to believe that his country might yet last out the rest of 1939 in peace.