From Leicester the company travelled down to Southsea and Noël was able to stop off on the way to collect his mail from Lorn Loraine; among the post was a telegram from Ray Goetz in Hot Springs, Arkansas, suggesting that he and Gertrude Lawrence would be so very pleased if Noël would write the life of Sarah Bernhardt as a play for Miss Lawrence. Noël cabled in reply: ‘DEAR RAY TERRIBLY SORRY UNABLE TO WRITE LIFE OF SARAH BERNHARDT FOR GERTRUDE LAWRENCE AS BUSY WRITING LIFE OF ELEANORA DUSE FOR BEATRICE LILLIE.’
The twenty-fourth week of a tour only occasionally interrupted by air raids was played in Exeter, where Noël suddenly acquired a temperature of 104 and a vehement attack of jaundice during the first performance there of This Happy Breed. Dennis Price took over for the rest of that week and the next in Bournemouth, but the final week in Plymouth had to be cancelled altogether.
Before jaundice confined him for some days to an alien hotel bed, Noël had agreed with H. M. Tennent that he would play an eight-week London season of Present Laughter alternated nightly with This Happy Breed. As this was not due to start until the end of April, Noël had six weeks in which to recover; he went first to the Imperial Hotel in Torquay and then to a clifftop hotel at Tintagel in Cornwall where he spent the next month thoroughly depressed but gradually recuperating. He then returned to London, having decided that as soon as the Hay-market season was over he would like to go abroad again for a series of troop and hospital concerts; but he resolutely refused to have these sponsored by ENSA. Noël found the whole concept of actors entertaining in uniform somehow ludicrous; he felt that Basil Dean’s organization was not always as efficient as it might be, and above all he had learnt from the months in Paris and America early in the war to steer well clear of any kind of officialdom whenever possible.
On April 29th 1943, nine days after his mother had celebrated her eightieth birthday in London, Noël opened Present Laughter at the Haymarket and followed it the next night with This Happy Breed. Both plays drew more good than bad reviews, though the national critics were happier with Present Laughter because Noël himself seemed more at home in its urbane surroundings than in those of This Happy Breed. W. A. Darlington, however, found that Noël was here writing ‘for the first time with sympathy, understanding and admiration of the common man’.
During the eight-week run of what was billed simply as ‘The Coward Season’ at the Haymarket, Noël rejoined the David Lean/Ronald Neame/Anthony Havelock-Allan unit which had made In Which We Serve. After the world-wide success of their first film together, the four men now planned to transfer both Blithe Spirit and This Happy Breed to the screen. The first of these was only in its earliest planning stages while Coward was playing in London, but This Happy Breed went into production as a film during his Haymarket run with an entirely different cast led by Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, Stanley Holloway and John Mills. Noël was nominally the producer, though in fact he had little direct control over the picture and was happy to leave most of the production details to Lean and Havelock-Allan.
When ‘The Coward Season’ was over, Noël sadly took leave of the actors with whom he’d been playing for almost a full year, and sailed from Plymouth aboard H.M.S. Charybdis, a light cruiser bound for Gibraltar where he was to start a troop tour of the Middle East that would take him from the middle of July until the beginning of October 1943.
The night before he left England, Noël did a forces’ broadcast for the B.B.C.; introduced as ‘nothing less than a national figure’ he sang a selection of his songs, including one new number which provoked a considerable furore. Entitled ‘Don’t Let’s be Beastly to the Germans’, it was an acid comment on those who were already suggesting that when the war ended in an allied victory the Nazis should be treated with generosity and mercy:
Let’s help the dirty swine again
To occupy the Rhine again
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.
was the general tone of the parody, and when Noël first sang it at a private party on the stage of the Haymarket to mark the end of the season there, Churchill had liked it enough to demand three reprises. But now, public reaction was vastly less enthusiastic; dozens of radio listeners entirely missed the point of the satire and believed that Noël was genuinely calling for gentle forgiveness of the enemy. The result was a sackful of abusive letters, a vitriolic article by Spike Hughes (who had once worked for Coward as the orchestrator of Words and Music) in the Daily Herald accusing him of ‘appalling taste and mischievous disregard for public feeling’, and joint panic by the B.B.C. and H.M.V. who first disowned and then suppressed Noël’s recording of his song for the rest of that year.
Coward himself, happily oblivious to all this, was by now halfway to Gibraltar and delighted to find himself back amid the dignity and discipline of the Royal Navy. It was the first time he had been on board ship since the preparations for In Which We Serve, and it was with some difficulty that he restrained himself from giving a repetition of his valiant Captain Kinross performance when the Charybdis ran into trouble with enemy aircraft and a submarine in mid-crossing. His stock was high with the ship’s company, for whom he did a couple of special concerts below decks, and he was formally invited to become ‘godfather’ to the ship. He agreed, and was to be seen standing proudly on the bridge as H.M.S. Charybdis sailed into Gibraltar harbour with the marine band solemnly playing the waltz from Bitter-Sweet.
In Gibraltar Noël stayed at Government House, where he found Anthony Quayle acting as an A.D.C. to the Governor; together they spent a happy evening watching Beatrice Lillie, Vivien Leigh and Leslie Henson leading a travelling concert party on its way home from North Africa. After a few days on the rock, Noël flew to Oran and from there on to Algiers where he was to give the first three of nearly a hundred troop concerts on this twelve-week tour. In Algiers he met, between performances, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Macmillan, General Eisenhower and André Gide, all of whom welcomed him with some enthusiasm. The efficiency and common sense of the American leader impressed Coward hugely; ‘I devoutly hope,’ wrote Noël in his diary for August 5th 1943, ‘that after the war Eisenhower’s voice will be heard in the United States.’
After the concerts in Algiers, Noël sailed on to Malta with a convoy of small destroyers; halfway across the Mediterranean they ran foul of enemy submarines which sank one of their number, but Noël’s destroyer reached harbour without mishap and on the way he gave another performance of his songs for the sailors on board, this time without a pianist or indeed a piano. In Malta Noël sang his songs at an average of three concerts a day, mostly in hospitals where he never ceased to be overwhelmingly impressed by ‘the sheer endurance of those soldiers, sailors and airmen, and their capacity for overcoming, or at least appearing to overcome, desolation, boredom, homesickness, pain and discomfort. They lay, day after day, week after week and sometimes month after month, with nothing to do but swat flies if they happened to have an uninjured hand to do it with, and I seldom heard them complain. Many of them had snapshots of their wives or mothers or girlfriends or children always close at hand so that they could look at them whenever they could bear to. Most of them hadn’t been home for two or three years; some of them would never go home again. It was only after I had left them that any sadness came into my mind. In their presence their own good manners made any display of sympathy impossible. I could only hope that by just chatting to them for a few minutes I had at least temporarily mitigated their boredom and given them something to talk about in their letters home.’
Just before he left Malta Noël ran into Randolph Churchill, an old acquaintance who was currently serving in North Africa; their tenuous friendship was to survive until the end of Churchill’s life, relatively unharmed by Noël’s remark that ‘the thing I like best about dear Randolph is that he remains so unspoiled by his great failure’. After a few hours spent in Sicily with the R.A.F., coincidentally on the day the Germans finally decided to evacuate it, Noël took off in a DC3 for an uneventful flight to Cairo. There he w
as met by Jeffery Amherst, now a wing-commander in the Air Force, who guided him through a city almost untouched by the war. The pre-1939 life of the ‘international set’ seemed to survive there in its own exclusive way under Farouk, and for Noël the brief stopover was a pleasant moment of absolute relaxation, though he felt the atmosphere to be unnecessarily escapist and in fairly bad taste at that particular moment in the war. From Cairo he went on to talk and sing to patients at the hospitals of Beirut, Baghdad and Basra, in all of which he had cause to be grateful that he’d recently done a six-month tour of the English provinces; without it he would never have been able to answer in eyewitness detail all the questions about conditions in various home towns put to him by countless injured servicemen. Coward also did a couple of troop concerts in Basra, where apart from the usual problems of bad acoustics and eccentric lighting to which Noël and his long-suffering accompanist were now immune, they had to contend with all the noises of a railway shunting yard beside which they had been allocated their make-shift stage.
When news of the Italian surrender came at the end of the first week in September, Noël was back in Cairo for six more hospital concerts and then a tour of the canal zone; there he sang for the troops and also gave them occasional renderings of such patriotic verse as Clemence Dane’s ‘Plymouth Hoe’ and the Agincourt speech from Henry V. Between the shows he stayed with Richard Casey, the ambulant Australian politician who had sent Noël on his first wartime tour in 1940; and it was while he was with Casey again that Coward received another invitation from the government of South Africa to do a prolonged tour there early in the following year. He accepted, after first reassuring himself that he would get two months at home in London between the end of these concerts and the start of the next series. Then he went on to play at hospitals and camps in Alexandria and Tripoli, where he found hospital wards crammed with victims of the recent Salerno landings and a sadly seedy town with ‘the foolish pathos of an expensive tart who has allowed herself to go to seed’.
The producer Peter Daubeny, in hospital at Tripoli having just lost an arm in the fighting, was among the audience at one of Noël’s concerts there:
‘I was beset by anxiety lest Noël, who was disguised as a Desert Rat and had managed to give his disguise a Cartier finish, should exasperate this audience still numbed and battered from the Salerno beach-head ... Noël was revealed, sleek, over-trim and debonair as usual, grinning from ear to ear ... but it was an extraordinary triumph of personality over environment ... if the audience were not to be wooed lightly, by the sorcery of Noël’s talent, they were to be bludgeoned into a state of attentive submission by his vitality and determination ... like a child being kissed goodnight, Noël used every flattering artifice to keep us with him.’
After that particular concert, Noël visited Daubeny in his ward, where a man in the next bed was also a Guards officer who had lost an arm in the fighting: ‘It was heartening talking to those two boys, both of them a million per cent English, both of them Guards officers and both so utterly different from each other and so unmistakable in type ... between them they created an atmosphere of well-bred, privileged England at its best. I had a mental picture of sycamores, tennis-courts, green lawns and rather yellowing white flannels.’
From Tripoli Noël returned to Algiers for more concerts and then finally to Gibraltar, where he rounded it all off with one last broadcast of his songs. He was left in little doubt that his tour had been a success, at least from the troops’ point of view; officers had, understandably enough, been sometimes reluctant to spend their valuable time organizing transport and facilities for a lone entertainer not even backed by the official blessing and resources of ENSA, and from time to time Noël had found to his righteous indignation that he was being classified and treated quite simply as a nuisance. But the soldiers, sailors and airmen of all allied countries to whom he had played in hospitals and camps had proved receptive, appreciative and only too delighted to have Noël take their minds off the grim realities of their situation for an hour or so.
After his last broadcast Noël had hoped to sail back to England on H.M.S. Charybdis, but she was given a sudden change of orders and the last Noël saw of his ‘godship’ was her silhouette leaving Gibraltar harbour on the evening tide. A fortnight later, by which time Noël had flown back to London on a Dakota, H.M.S. Charybdis was sunk in action off the coast of France.
Back at his studio in Gerald Road, Noël found a telegram from Field-Marshal Smuts confirming that he was expected to start a three-month tour of South Africa early in the new year. He arranged with the Ministry of Information that he should travel via New York, where Henry Morgenthau at the Treasury had asked him to do a couple of government broadcasts, and Noël was therefore due to sail from Glasgow on the Queen Elizabeth in barely eight weeks’ time. In London before he left again, Noël did find the time to visit those of his friends and relations who had not either evacuated themselves or been posted abroad, and he also started discussions with David Lean and Ronald Neame about the filming of Blithe Spirit which, now that This Happy Breed was virtually complete, Lean intended to put into production at Denham. As a play, Blithe Spirit was still running in London to near-capacity, though it had by now transferred from the St James’s to the smaller Duchess Theatre. For the film, Coward approved Lean’s casting of Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings and (from the original stage company) Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford.
In these autumn weeks Noël rather unwisely decided to publish the diary that he had kept of his recent Middle-Eastern tour. This appeared on the bookstalls a few months later, in a version heavily cut by the censor for ‘security reasons’, to be greeted by widespread critical derision. Coward had intended the diary to be both a recollection of and a tribute to the fighting men he had met on his travels, but reviewers found Noël’s day-to-day jottings superficial, glib, condescending and flippant in turn; they gave an unflattering impression of Noël as a gossipy traveller perhaps over-concerned with his own creature comforts in wartime, and the diary was not helped by self-consciously grand footnotes graciously informing the lay reader that ‘Dickie and Edwina’ were in reality Lord and Lady Mountbatten. In the Observer Ivor Brown noted with a certain accuracy that ‘Coward remains a puzzle. He sees so much – and so little. He has travelled far more than most men of his age and yet, when he writes, it always has to be of the same little world. Dump him anywhere, on any island of the seventeen seas, and he would certainly at once run into somebody known as Tim or Tiny, Boodles or Bims, and be dining with an Excellency or an Admiral twenty minutes later. If there were natives on the island he would hardly notice. God put them there, no doubt, to serve dinners to Excellencies.’
But far worse was to follow; the Middle East Diary was also published in America, where readers took exception to a paragraph describing some Americans in hospital at Tripoli after the Salerno landings; it ended, ‘I was less impressed by some of the mournful little Brooklyn boys lying there in tears amid the alien corn with nothing worse than a bullet wound in the leg or a fractured arm.’ The people of Brooklyn were bitterly offended by what they considered a gratuitous and apparently anti-Semitic insult; Fiorello la Guardia delivered a vituperative broadcast against Noël, and there was even a club ‘For the Prevention of Noël Coward Re-Entering America’. It was Beatrice Lillie who thoughtfully procured a membership card and posted it to Noël.
But that particular storm didn’t break until Noël was deep into South Africa; in the meantime he sailed from Glasgow for New York at the beginning of December 1943, having first made sure that Norman Hackforth, who was to be his pianist on the tour, would join up with him in Pretoria early in January. Hackforth, known in later years as the mystery voice in innumerable broadcasts of Twenty Questions, had been an accompanist for Bea Lillie and in 1943 had been touring the Middle East as the pianist for a troop show. Meeting Noël there, he offered to play for him on the rest of his wartime tours. The third member of Coward’s troupe for South Africa was
to be Bert Lister, Noël’s old dresser who (while Cole Lesley served in the R.A.F.) acted as his valet and a kind of travelling secretary; a witty, volatile Londoner, Lister was to stay with Noël throughout the South African tour, cheering him through his concert appearances and criticizing him in no uncertain terms when he felt that Noël’s performance was not up to standard.
On the crossing aboard the Queen Elizabeth, Noël pranced through his repertoire at the inevitable concert for the passengers; otherwise the journey was uneventful, and when the ship docked in New York five days later Jack Wilson was waiting on the quayside. Noël spent the next three weeks staying at his flat and visiting old friends on and off Broadway. He had not been in the city since early in 1941 when America had still been at peace but even now, with the country at war, he saw very little sign of it in New York itself; theatres and restaurants were as crowded as ever, blackouts and rationing and air-raid sirens were still unknown, and Noël rapidly became very irritated by a city ‘intolerably shiny, secure and well-dressed, as though it was continually going out to gay parties while London had to stay at home and do the housework’.
In New York Noël did the Morgenthau broadcasts and also an extra one on Christmas Day for the Free French. He had then planned to fly on to South Africa right away, but a bout of ’flu while he was staying with Jack left him tired and not altogether fit; Bill Stephenson, his old friend from early wartime tours of America, who was then running a secret service agency with headquarters rather surprisingly located in an office overlooking the skating rink at the Rockefeller Centre, insisted he should take an extra fortnight out to rest and recuperate in Jamaica on his way south. Stephenson had already arranged to have the beginning of Coward’s South African tour postponed, acting on the reasonable theory that this would cause far less trouble in the long run than if Noël were to break down midway through it. Thus it was early in the January of 1944 that Noël found himself in Jamaica for the first time; he became instantly addicted to the island, its people, its scenery and above all its climate, and for the last two decades he has managed to spend at least three months of almost every year of his life there.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 34