A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  With both plays virtually complete and another theatrical garden party successfully presided over in an even more exalted social atmosphere than usual, due largely to the arrival of his friends the then Duke and Duchess of Kent, Noël attempted to cheer up Jack Wilson (who had just been forced by declining business to close Set to Music on Broadway) with the news of his two new plays which, he now believed, would be ready to open in Manchester on September 11th 1939. In the meantime, as a holiday before starting rehearsals, Noël decided to try to see for himself the current condition of Europe; inside six weeks, and with help from a friend at the Foreign Office, he planned to visit Warsaw, Danzig, Moscow, Leningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen in the late summer.

  In Warsaw, he found amid the rampant feudalism of country house-parties a fatalist conviction that war was imminent, but also an absolute confidence that it would be won by the allies without a Nazi invasion of Poland; Lawrence Durrell, then stationed in Danzig, later reported that German agents, already suspecting that Noël was a spy, became thoroughly convinced by his fleeting visit. From Poland Coward travelled on to Moscow where, despite the fact that he arrived in the midst of a carnival week, he discovered an overwhelming and deeply depressing lethargy among the citizens. He had hoped to meet some of the leading Russian actors of the time, most of whom had been enthusiastically described to him by the Lunts, but to his amazement he discovered that the ones who weren’t actually out of the capital on summer tours were unwilling to receive him in their houses, since he was visiting Russia on his own initiative and not through Intourist. He was, however, taken on an alarmingly official tour of Moscow’s highlights, including the huge marble underground stations which gave him the impression of ‘a series of ornate gentlemen’s lavatories’.

  After a brief visit to Leningrad he left Russia gladly vowing never to return and experiencing ‘a sensation of despair, of utter hopelessness for the future of a world in which a political experiment of apparently immense social significance should, in order to achieve its obscure ends, have to be based primarily upon enforced ignorance; the denial of personal freedom, even of thought; and the organized debarring of an entire race from the slightest contact with any ideas of life other than those arbitrarily imposed upon it by a self-constituted minority’.

  From Leningrad Noël crossed over to Finland which he found by contrast quite enchantingly pleasant; the one uneasy moment of an otherwise highly enjoyable visit occurred when a local journalist announced to Noël that Sibelius, who lived a few miles outside Helsinki, was so looking forward to meeting him that he’d be bitterly hurt if Noël returned to England without paying his fellow-composer the courtesy of a brief visit. Impressed and flattered, Noël travelled out to a small Finnish village where he found a bald, startled old gentleman who spoke no English, had never heard of Coward, and who was consequently mystified and irritated by this disruption of his peace. Sibelius did, however, supply tea and biscuits, and smiled on the one occasion when it became clear to him that Noël was about to leave.

  Coward travelled on through Scandinavia and then back to England, making a detour to spend what he correctly believed would be his last week on holiday in the South of France for many years to come. This was, in effect, the last gathering of the pre-war clans on the Riviera; Noël was surrounded by old friends, among them Joyce Carey, Marlene Dietrich, Somerset Maugham and Alan Webb; it was in some ways a melancholy occasion, made almost unbearable by the realization when he visited Maxine Elliott at her Villa above Golfe Juan during her last illness that both he and she knew they would never see each other again. As Noël’s boat pulled away from the jetty below her Château de l’Horizon he looked up to see her on her balcony, a classically beautiful figure in a white nightgown and flowing hair, waving at him. She died within a few months.

  Back in England during the August of 1939, Noël had already started rehearsals for Present Laughter and This Happy Breed when a man called Sir Campbell Stuart telephoned and insisted on meeting him at midnight on the same day at the studio in Gerald Road; he also asked mysteriously whether Coward happened to like Paris. Noël, with some help from his friend Robert Boothby who knew that Sir Campbell was a director of The Times and had been involved in propaganda in the First World War, guessed that Stuart was about to offer him a job in the Information Service in the event of war, for which he would presumably be based in Paris.

  As it happened, Boothby, who had been lunching at Goldenhurst on that day, was returning to London by way of Winston Churchill’s house; he suggested that he should take Noël with him, for dinner at Chartwell, and that Coward could then ask Churchill what he should do about Stuart’s offer. In spite of the plays Noël was keen to start some kind of war work as soon as possible, since it was obvious that the actual declaration could now only be a matter of days away. His first inclination, before hearing from Stuart, had been to suggest himself for work as some sort of entertainments officer in the navy, since he already had good contacts in that direction through Mountbatten and his work for the Royal Naval Film Corporation. But in many ways that solution seemed too comfortably easy, and Coward felt that possibly even he could do more for his country in time of crisis than see to it that sailors were properly entertained.

  Coward put his problem, which essentially came to a choice between the navy that he knew and a possibly more rewarding post with the as yet unknown Stuart outfit, to Winston Churchill at Chartwell a few hours before the meeting with Stuart. After insisting that he should sing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, Churchill offered Noël advice that was unequivocal, if not very helpful: ‘Get into a warship and see some action! Go and sing to them when the guns are firing – that’s your job.’ Noël, given an answer he neither expected nor wanted, bitterly reflected that if the morale of the Royal Navy was at such a low ebb that the sailors were unable to go into battle without him singing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ at them, then the country was in even more trouble than he’d realized. Apart from that, although singing while the guns fired sounded like resolute and courageous action, it would in fact be pretty impracticable; during a naval battle all sailors would be at action stations, and Noël would thus be left singing to himself in the wardroom.

  The few hours that separated Churchill’s advice and the meeting with Stuart in London were crucial to Noël; he was faced, finally and after much theoretical argument, with the urgent need to decide what he was going to do in the war. On the one hand, he understood Churchill’s point; he was an entertainer, and there would undoubtedly be many occasions in the next few years when he would find himself singing merrily to the troops. On the other hand, he genuinely believed that as an intelligent and able writer he perhaps had more to offer in the field of propaganda. Eventually, for that reason, he chose to ignore Churchill’s advice, for which Winston, who had never liked Coward as much as his songs, did not readily forgive him.

  But Noël’s patriotism at this time was a vital if sometimes overstated affair; he was now thirty-nine, and it had been twenty-one years since he’d abruptly left the army with a mixture of illness and relief at the end of the first war. At that time his career, and the need to get his mother out of the lodging house in Ebury Street, were considerably stronger forces in his life than the needs of King and Country. But now, with Mrs Coward safely installed at Goldenhurst and his career secure enough to withstand a wartime gap, Noël threw himself into war work with an ardour that made it seem almost as though he wanted to compensate in the second war for not having done quite enough in the first.

  His travels through Europe in 1939 had given him at least a fleeting glimpse of the way of the world outside England and America, and in twenty years of adult life he had developed a devotion to his own country which was not diminished because it was often a sentimental and almost theatrical feeling. But more important to him, even in the late August of 1939, than any considerations of King or Country, of victory or defeat in war, was the crystal-clear realization that if he bungled the meetin
g with Stuart, or if he failed to get himself into some useful kind of war work as rapidly as possible, whatever books or plays he lived to write in the future ‘would be inevitably and irrevocably tainted by the fact that I had allowed to slip through my fingers the opportunity to prove my own integrity to myself’.

  At the meeting in Gerald Road, Sir Campbell Stuart outlined to Noël what he had in mind; if and when war came, Coward was to go instantly to Paris and there set up a Bureau of Propaganda which would operate in conjunction with the French Ministry of Information, then run by Jean Giraudoux and staffed by André Maurois among others, to ‘disseminate propaganda in neutral territory.’

  Coward agreed to do it. For the next two weeks, while rehearsals carried on for both This Happy Breed and Present Laughter, he spent almost every evening at secret briefings for the Paris assignment given by either Stuart or his deputy, Colonel Brooks. Then, on the first of September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and it was obvious that the war was only hours away; Noël cancelled his two plays, disbanded the company and within a week he was installed at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. What he found when he got to France was a disillusioning mixture of apathy and absolute ignorance on all sides; few people knew who Noël was or why he was there and fewer still cared. Moreover, given the ludicrous conditions of absolute secrecy in which he was supposed to be operating, the prevailing atmosphere in Paris at the outbreak of war, and the apparent lack of any official support for him from either government, it was virtually impossible for Coward to start doing anything at all. To make things worse, whereas the German propaganda machine was already dropping lurid and effective anti-British cartoons into France, Coward knew that British intelligence was merely bombarding Germany with copies of the speeches of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. ‘If,’ Noël wrote in an add memorandum to Stuart, ‘it is the policy of His Majesty’s Government to bore the Germans to death, I don’t believe we have quite enough time.’

  But gradually, given at last the help of the Director of Military Intelligence, Coward’s role sorted itself out; with the assistance of his own Chief of Staff, Viscount Strathallan, Noël found an office and set it up as the British propaganda headquarters in Paris. With Cole Lesley he’d also found himself a flat opposite the Ritz in the Place Vendôme, and by the end of 1939 he had an office staff of no less than five. None of them was entirely clear about what precisely they were supposed to be doing, but they did spend a fair amount of their time conceiving, minuting and suggesting ideas for propaganda, while a vast amount of it was also taken up in the endless reading of stupefyingly boring official documents. Still not enough, however, to dispel a distinct feeling of anti-climax and irritation. Nothing whatsoever seemed to be happening; the Maginot Line was apparently impregnable, and at times during that winter in Paris it was hard for Noël to realize that there was a war on at all.

  About once a month Coward managed to get back to England on the pretext of having something vital to discuss with Stuart; then he would stop off at Goldenhurst for a week-end with his mother and Lorn and Joyce and Gladys and those friends who were still around, before returning to Paris and the frustrating realization that the work he was doing there was sadly lacking in either importance or utility. He did, however, use the time in France to embark on two training courses which he felt might prove useful to him in some as yet unimaginable contingency; first he found a teacher to improve his already adequate knowledge of the French language, and then he persuaded one of the men in his office to teach him the basic principles of radio operation.

  Not a mechanically-minded man at the best of times, Noël did nevertheless manage to learn enough about the working of wireless transmitters to pull off the one solid achievement of his seven months in charge of the Paris office: the closing of Radio Fécamp in January 1940. Fécamp was a small commercial radio station in northern France which was continuing through the winter of 1939 to broadcast independently, in defiance of an agreement between the English and French governments that in the event of war all radio broadcasts in France would be centrally controlled and operated only on certain wavelengths, to avoid the danger that stations in the north like Normandie and Fécamp could provide radio cross-bearings for enemy aircraft on their way up the English Channel. Noël, in the face of considerable official apathy from those above him, launched his office into a hard-fought campaign to get the station closed down at once. This in itself was no simple task, as a number of leading French politicians of the time had financial interests in keeping it open.

  But after taking the problem to his own boss and then as high as Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, and signally failing to get any help, Noël found a dishonest but thoroughly successful way round the difficulty. He went to Jean Giraudoux at the French Information Ministry and, lying through his teeth, told him that he had heard privately through certain political and journalistic sources that an almighty public scandal was about to break over the French government’s involvement in Radio Fécamp and the dangers it posed to allied aircraft. Forty-eight hours later Radio Fécamp was closed down for the duration of the war.

  While Noël was in Paris, a telegram from Adrianne Allen (whom he had not nicknamed Planny Anny for nothing) and her second husband Bill Whitney suggested he ought to put to Chamberlain and to the then French leader Edouard Daladier the proposal that they should demand an explicit statement of moral support for their two countries from President Roosevelt. Noël’s cabled reply was brisk: ‘DARLING PLANNY THOUGH INTERNATIONALLY BOSSY I AM NOT YET INTERNATIONALLY AUTHORITATIVE FEAR GENTLEMEN YOU MENTION MIGHT CONCEIVABLY RESENT MY TELLING THEM HOW TO READ THEIR LINES.’ Noël’s frustration and boredom at the lack of anything to do in Paris returned once the Radio Fécamp episode was closed, and he felt badly out of touch with England where in the theatre at least his friends seemed to be carrying on much as before the declaration of war. In fact three of his numbers from Set to Music were currently being performed by Bea Lillie and Bobby Howes in a new Tennent revue at the Queen’s Theatre called, somewhat prematurely, All Clear.

  Because a veil of secrecy had been drawn over Noël’s activities, or lack of them, and as he himself had been told by Stuart to give no interviews, a number of English papers began to wonder in print what he was doing in Paris, spending good tax-paid money to no obvious or apparent end. Both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Pictorial announced that Noël had been seen ‘sauntering along the rue Royale in Naval uniform’ and asked what right he had to wear it. Patently he had no right at all, as although he had been offered the honorary rank of a Lieutenant Commander in the R.N.V.R. after his work for Mountbatten’s Royal Naval Film Corporation, he had turned it down; then, when war came it was decided that he would be far more useful and more mobile as a civilian than as an officer under orders.

  In fact the press reports from Paris were untrue; Noël had never been seen in uniform, nor (as another report suggested) had he been seen in the Ritz bar ‘hissing unutterable secrets into the ear of a beautiful Polish spy’. But as he was officially forbidden to offer any convincing explanation for his civilian presence in Paris, the stories were left uncorrected and probably did Coward’s image a fair amount of damage in the eyes of those who actually were wearing uniforms and indeed fighting in them.

  In March 1940, by which time the only useful thing that Noël had done since the closing of Radio Fécamp was to sing with Maurice Chevalier at an Anglo-French troop concert in Arras, he was getting desperate to leave France. His occasional suggestions for propaganda, such as showering Berlin with sticky confetti printed in Union Jack patterns after the German had boasted that the RAF never flew over their cities, were rejected out of hand by his superiors as either too frivolous or too fanciful, while the few ideas that London was prepared to accept were then modified to a point of absolute ineffectuality.

  On one of his monthly visits to London, Noël pointed out to Stuart that the Paris office was now set up and running smoothly, and that his only use there was as a kind of fi
gure-head. The office, he suggested, could be run rather better and more efficiently in his absence by Strathallan. Stuart accepted Coward’s passionate request for a change, and offered him six weeks in America; though officially on leave, Coward’s unofficial brief would be to travel around the States talking to leading politicians and newspaper editors and proprietors in an attempt to assess broadly the climate of opinion in America towards the war in Europe. Leaving David Strathallan to look after the office and Coley to look after his flat in the Place Vendôme, Noël left for America in the middle of April with the firm belief that he would be back at the Paris office by the beginning of June.

  21

  1940–1941

  ‘I behaved through most of the war with gallantry tinged, I suspect, by a strong urge to show off.’

  In the few weeks before Noël left Paris for New York in the spring of 1940, the atmosphere there changed considerably; after the German invasion of Norway and Denmark the ‘phony war’ seemed to be over and Noël, believing that his job in Paris might at last begin to come alive, was no longer so sure that he was right to leave it. He had already decided, with tight-lipped patriotism, that for the duration of the war he would renounce all creative impulses and devote himself entirely to the service of his beloved country, and in this mood of self-sacrifice he was entirely prepared to remain in Paris if anybody would actually tell him what to do there. But Stuart still wanted him to go to America in an attempt to assess the feeling across the States about the start of a more active war in Europe; so Coward duly travelled by train to Genoa and then from there, aboard the Washington, he sailed to New York, only slightly unnerved by Stuart’s firm belief that Nazi agents might try to intercept him on the way in an effort to uncover the ‘secrets’ of what Coward had been doing in the Paris office. But either the German intelligence was already aware of Noël’s almost total ineffectuality in Paris or else they remained bleakly uninterested in whatever he had been doing. In any event he was allowed to board the Washington unintercepted, and did not even have to resort to the dramatic precaution, suggested by his London superiors, of locking himself in a cabin for twenty-four hours before the ship sailed.