A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  On that first visit to Jamaica Noël stayed in retreat at a house high above Kingston where within a few days he had fully recovered; but remembering Stephenson’s warning about the dangers of a collapse in mid-tour, he stayed on for the second week to be absolutely sure of his health and used the time to write a joky number about a relapsed missionary called simply ‘Uncle Harry’.

  Then, browned by the sun and already determined to return to Jamaica as soon as possible after the war, Noël flew on to Trinidad where he did a couple of concerts at the naval base before continuing his flight with the American Air Force to Natal. There, during a brief touchdown for refuelling, Noël just had time to have dinner and sing ‘I’ll See You Again’ even more rapidly than usual to the faintly surprised guests at a dance in the local officers’ mess before he rejoined the plane for the flight to Accra. From there after various delays and changes of aircraft he got himself to Khartoum where Bert Lister was waiting with most of the luggage and a nasty attack of tonsilitis. This delayed everything still further, and the two men didn’t reach Pretoria until the beginning of February, almost a month after the tour had originally been due to start.

  Once in Pretoria, Noël started again on the punishing routine that had become so familiar to him in Australia three years earlier: an endless succession of rehearsals, performances, broadcasts, official luncheons, bazaar openings, dinners, arrivals, departures and civic receptions, interrupted only very occasionally by a quiet week-end between engagements. Almost as soon as he arrived, Coward decided that since he was there as an official guest of Smuts and the South African government he would do well not to refer to his heartfelt dislike of segregation and racial intolerance, a resolve he kept with amazing self-control throughout the tour. He was greeted everywhere with a fervour that had not been equalled on any earlier tour; there were special carriages on trains, town hall receptions jammed to the doors, and policemen to guard him from the crowds lining the streets wherever he went; for Norman Hackforth it all resembled nothing so much as a royal tour by a popular and much-loved monarch.

  In actual performance, Noël had no doubts about his abilities as a solo entertainer, though he knew full well that he and Norman could not carry much more than an hour on the stage; nevertheless, he was horrified to discover on arrival in Pretoria that Myles Bourke, the officer who was organizing the tour for the government, had arranged for him to be accompanied throughout by an air force band complete with their resident crooner. Noël had no intention of having to follow another singer in his shows, nor did he fancy competition of any other allied kind. He would, he told an aghast Bourke, expect to be preceded whenever he sang in city theatres by the full Cape Town Symphony Orchestra which would have to play for the first half of the programme. ‘That,’ Noël told Hackforth privately, ‘will bore the bejesus out of the audience and then we can go on for an hour in the second half and they’ll be only too delighted to see us.’

  When he was singing for the troops, Noël told the organizers, he would manage just with Hackforth; he also rearranged the whole of Bourke’s scheduled itinerary for the tour and insisted that Smuts himself together with his full cabinet should attend the opening concert in Cape Town. With Hackforth, Noël then began to rehearse in earnest; their plan was that after the interval they would launch together into a selection of Coward songs, after which Noël would give a brief patriotic rendering of Clemence Dane’s ‘Plymouth Hoe’ and his own ‘Lie in the Dark and Listen’. From time to time he would also slip in the Agincourt speech from Henry V and the closing commentary from In Which We Serve for good measure. During the poems, Norman would leave the stage to return refreshed at the end and play a five-minute medley of Coward tunes known affectionately to their composer as ‘scrambled father’:

  This medley would allow me to retire to my dressing-room and decide whether or not to shoot myself. Then, provided the audience was still present, I would come back on and round off the evening with the strongest comedy numbers in my repertoire.’

  After a week of rehearsals, they tried out the performance at a number of army camps around Pretoria and then travelled down to Cape Town by train, stopping briefly on the way at Paarl where a bewildered Afrikaans-speaking Mayor attempted a rather halting speech of welcome to Noël’s intense but regally suppressed embarrassment.

  Arriving in Cape Town in mid-February, Noël was driven through thick crowds of welcome, waving graciously from an open car; he was only mildly surprised to find that many thousands of people should have been at a sufficiently loose end to turn out and cheer him in the middle of a weekday morning. A reception committee at the station had been led by Marie Ney, the actress who some forty months earlier had been at the railway station in Melbourne to greet Noël on his arrival there, thus giving him the pleasant but curious impression that, in the Dominions at any rate, Miss Ney must be omnipresent. His Grand Opening Concert at the Alhambra Theatre in Cape Town was given in aid of Mrs Smuts’ Comforts Fund, and it was packed with people who’d paid up to five guineas for a ticket. The Symphony Orchestra took care of the first half of the programme, and Noël bounced on, sweating with fear, after the interval. He sang upwards of a dozen of his own songs as well as a topically rewritten version of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’, all of which went very well indeed, though he and Norman and Bert realized that a bad attack of nerves had prevented him from being anything like as good as he could be and would be again later in the tour.

  At thirty-eight other concerts in and around Cape Town during the next three weeks Noël sang this repertoire of his numbers over and over again, together with such additions as ‘Surrey With The Fringe On Top’ from the new Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit Oklahoma! At one of these concerts the critic of the Cape Argus noted ‘though Coward has none of the usual equipment of the chanteur (he has little looks, no natural charm and little sympathy with his audience) such is his consummate craftsmanship that each crisp, clear song sparkles with a very acceptable brilliance’. In fact Noël’s stay on the Cape would have been an unqualified success but for the aptly named Mr Sauer, who demanded in parliament to know why private carriages on trains and other special facilities were being accorded to ‘this English music-hall crooner’. Smuts himself came to Noël’s defence, explaining that as he was there on the government’s business it was their duty to provide him with all the help available. Sauer pressed his point no further, but the fracas made a good story for those English newspapers (notably Beaverbrook’s) which were still far from charitably disposed toward Coward’s wartime activities.

  Noël spent a fair amount of his spare time in Cape Town dodging a hectic round of private social activities which he felt would leave him far too exhausted to get through his innumerable performances adequately; he did, however, succumb to one nightmarish week-end built around a lavish dinner party at which Noël, as the guest of honour, was solemnly expected to eat each course at a different table, tête-à-tête with six of the more socially acceptable ladies of the district. At a moment during this routine when he was left unguarded, Noël managed to slip away and ring the ever-faithful Bert Lister who duly arrived half an hour later with his car and garbled messages about an entirely mythical but apparently urgent telephone call awaiting Noël at his hotel: with that the two men disappeared rapidly into the night, never to be seen by that particular hostess again.

  From Cape Town Noël took his entourage on by train to Durban, arriving there a day too early for the full official reception which meant that he had to hide out at Umdoni Park for the next twenty-four hours and then reappear nonchalantly on the Monday morning to be greeted by an overwrought Deputy Mayor while a Ladies’ Orchestra scratched through Bitter-Sweet in what felt like its entirety. Coward then gave a series of concerts at Ye Playhouse, a large cinema decorated incongruously like a medieval castle. Here Noël started on the busiest section of his tour, which involved concerts in towns, army camps and air bases from Bloemfontein and Kimberley to Pretoria and finally Johannesburg. Alo
ng the way Noël also inspected, with truly royal fervour, bazaars and flower shows, art exhibitions, cadets of all descriptions, hospitals, gold mines, boys’ clubs and on one surprising occasion the ladies’ lavatory at a Victoria League hostel.

  The concerts all seemed to go reasonably well, some obviously rather better than others, though Noël remained convinced that of all the hundreds of performances he’d given in the course of the war so far, only about a dozen had been much more than adequate. Hackforth was constantly amazed by Noël’s perfectionism and his ox-like stamina on the tour, but they were both relieved to think that their travels were slowly coming to an end after the long, hard three-month slog. On his last day in South Africa Noël went to bid farewell to Smuts and his wife Ouma, whom he found living in cosy chaos in a ramshackle ex-British Army barracks in Pretoria. Then after one last broadcast Noël and Norman and Bert went on to Southern Rhodesia, where they had agreed to do nine shows in as many days in and around Bulawayo and Salisbury; when they were over, there were more concerts to be done in Nairobi and Mombasa, after which the three men intended to fly home, exhausted but happy, by way of Cairo. While they were in Bulawayo, however, a cable from Lord Mountbatten put a rapid end to that idea. Mountbatten wanted Noël to fly direct to his headquarters in Ceylon after he finished in Mombasa, and from there to go on to Assam and Burma, specifically to entertain the Fourteenth Army, who were, said the cable, badly in need of a little light relief.

  Noël felt he had no alternative but to agree; the South African tour had unquestionably been a success, over twenty thousand pounds had been raised for the Red Cross and Mrs Smuts’ Comforts Fund, yet for all that he was well aware that he’d been working far away from any front line, among people for whom the war was still a very distant reality. Now Mountbatten was offering Noël the chance to sing for men who were in far greater need of entertainment; Coward immediately cabled Mountbatten that as there was no direct flight available he’d travel on a ship from Mombasa, and he then left Southern Rhodesia after firing a brisk parting shot at an insistent lady reporter from one of the local papers who kept asking whether he had anything to say to the Star: ‘Yes,’ replied Noël, as his train pulled out, ‘Twinkle.’

  24

  1944–1948

  ‘The theatre must be treated with respect. It is a house of strange enchantment, a temple of dreams. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit drill hall serving as a temporary soap-box for political propaganda.’

  After one farewell performance in Mombasa, Noël sailed in a convoy for Ceylon aboard the destroyer Rapid, having first arranged for Norman and Bert to fly direct to Cairo and wait there until he found out when and where he would next need them. On his arrival in Ceylon, Noël was briefed by Mountbatten about the tour that lay ahead; his old friend warned him that he would be singing to groups of weary, embittered, disgruntled, depressed, homesick and often frustrated ‘forgotten army’ soldiers at the height of the monsoon season. In addition, Mountbatten foresaw trouble for Noël from ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, the American Army General then in command of North-Eastern Burma, who did grudgingly allow Coward to sing to his troops along the Ledo Road but later refused to allow him near his front line.

  This tour started early in June at Chittagong, where Noël was rejoined by Norman but not by Bert who was trapped in Alexandria with a mild attack of typhoid fever. Equipped only with a small elderly upright piano known lovingly as the ‘Little Treasure’ and an A.D.C. seconded to them by Mountbatten, Noël and Norman travelled slowly along the Arakan Front doing up to five troop shows a day and sleeping in damp bamboo huts at night. Occasionally a telegram would filter through from Lorn Loraine in London, telling Noël that she had moved his mother out to the comparative safety of Malvern after three houses within twenty-five yards of her flat had been rased to the ground by flying bombs, or (in more cheerful vein) that the film of This Happy Breed had opened to a universally excellent press. Alternately depressed and buoyant, depending on the cables and how well or badly the last show had gone, Noël ploughed on through the Imphal Valley to Comilla, visiting field hospitals and troop divisions often only a matter of yards from the Japanese lines.

  Retaining an absolute, rock-hard sense of professional duty, and secretly rather glad to be seeing some action after the almost guilty tranquillity he had sensed in South Africa, Noël refused to let the misery of the hospitals or such considerations as exhaustion and the heat, snakes and bedbugs, in any way deter him or even crack that faintly glazed smile which was by now fixed permanently to his face. Colonel Williams-Wynne, D.S.O., was commanding one of the units that Noël visited a few miles inland from the Arakan coast of Burma:

  ‘We had not had any entertainment at all for nearly two years ... we were over a hundred miles from a one-horse railhead and separated from it by one of the bumpiest roads in the world ... even ENSA had failed to find us and it seemed highly improbable that Noël Coward would ever get to us through the monsoon ... each hour a shower as heavy as Niagara poured down on to us, battering our shelters and turning every gully into a raging torrent. The temperature and humidity were dead-heating for a hundred ... but Coward did arrive, exactly on schedule, and we built him a stage made out of a few boards raised just high enough to keep the piano out of the water. At first his songs seemed too sophisticated, intimate revue stuff a bit beyond most of our troops; but gradually he won them over and, with short intervals to gulp some water and change his shirt, he sang on for two hours: everything from ‘London Pride’ to a much-encored finale of ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. Then we gave him a mug of chlorinated tea in the officers’ mess and he and Hackforth drove off to do two more shows further along the front that night.’

  Noël’s rigid sense of his duty to try and entertain the troops, come what might, only let him down once on this tour; after five shows in a single day he was exhorted to do a sixth by a jovial C.O. who then ignored his songs entirely and passed a series of mildly filthy pictures around for the perusal of the rest of that small audience. Noël, in high fury, stormed off the stage and out of the camp. But all the rest of his shows went rather better, at least until he and Norman reached the Ledo Road where they began playing to all-American audiences. There, one particular contingent of Negro troops who had never heard of Coward by reputation found themselves also unable to hear him in person since he was belting out the songs from a platform built right beside the Road itself, along which lorries and heavy transporters thundered continually. That particular afternoon was the last occasion on which Noël ever got the bird. For Norman, fighting a losing battle to keep his ‘little treasure’ out of the water which threatened to engulf it and him, the performance was an equally ghastly experience, but it made everything else on the tour seem almost comfortable by comparison.

  A few days later Noël developed a mild dysentery which forced him to leave the platform periodically during performances while Norman filled in with tactful interludes at the piano until Coward was able to reappear and carry on with the show. But this part of the tour was now virtually complete, and leaving the advanced forces they soon returned to Calcutta for a brief pause before setting off on a more comfortable if less rewarding round of Delhi, Madras, Bombay and Bangalore. On this the last stage of his last wartime tour, Noël found the Empire spirit still rampant in India; the war even at that stage had done little to alter the Blimpishness of the old-guard Indian Army Officer about whom, during the break in Calcutta, Coward wrote a number called ‘I Wonder What Happened to Him?’.

  The morning after Coward’s first performance in Bombay he narrowly avoided being killed when his car was in a violent crash with a naval lorry; the collision left an already tense man thoroughly shaken and totally unable to move his right arm for some days.

  Resolutely inbued with the ‘show must go on’ spirit, he completed the final fortnight in India and then collapsed totally under delayed reaction to the crash as soon as he got back to Ceylon. There he stayed in a hotel
bed for a week, slowly recuperating but dejected that he’d had to cancel all the dozen shows he’d originally promised to do for Mountbatten’s special forces in and around Kandy. He did eventually manage three rather strained farewell performances at the naval base in Trincomalee, and then returned to the doodlebugs in London after tours which had in the end kept him away from England for almost a year.

  Back home after some of the most strenuous months of a not uneventful life, Noël took the rest of 1944 comparatively quietly; he read a lot, mostly novels, and gradually eased himself back into the routine of film and theatre work. The Coward-Lean-Neame unit, by now christened Cineguild, had another success with Happy Breed; it had played to a consistently good box-office ever since the gala première which, while Noël was in India, had been presided over by his mother. It was already on general release when Coward returned, and the filming of Blithe Spirit by Cineguild was in its final stages at Denham. As soon as he felt he’d got his health back, Noël began to work on yet another film for them; this was to be a screen adaptation of Still Life, originally one of the Tonight at Eight-Thirty plays and now expanded by Coward into the script for Brief Encounter. For a time he did no more war work, though after his return from Ceylon Noël was appointed to the largely honorary post of an advisor to the B.B.C. on the content and quality of their forces’ broadcasting.

  In spite of renewed attacks from the doodlebugs, Noël found that by the year’s end life in London was gradually getting back to normal, and he started to make plans for the peace which he felt could not now be more than a few months away; his ideas ranged from a new and romantic operetta (the determination to repeat the success of Bitter-Sweet died hard) through American productions of This Happy Breed and Present Laughter to a post-war revue for London, though only the third of these materialized in the immediate future.