That spring, with Relative Values already virtually complete, Noël began to outline another light comedy which emerged three years later as Nude with Violin. In the meantime his Star Quality collection of short stories was published both in London and New York to mixed reviews, more good than bad but generally less enthusiastic in England than in America where the unforgettably named Florence Haxton Bullock gave it the Herald-Tribune’s approval. Apart from his fascination with what was to Coward a comparatively new form of writing, short stories began to acquire an obvious advantage over plays for him:
‘You sit there, on your balcony or wherever you are, and write a short story, and enjoy being able to do it and the pattern the story constructs for itself as it goes along; but you don’t then have to go through the misery of casting, rehearsing and ultimately being panned by the critics for all your trouble. It’s so lovely to be able to write it, send it to the publishers, correct the proofs, take out all those extra adjectives and then realize that there’s an end to the whole thing.’
At the beginning of June Noël returned to London with some of his Jamaican paintings which he showed at a charity exhibition in the company of such other untypical artists as Edward G. Robinson and the Duchess of Gloucester. Later in the month the usual garden party for the Actors’ Orphanage was held in Chelsea, where number 42 on a programme listing the various attractions read simply ‘Noël Coward at home: Admission Three Shillings’. Home in this case turned out to be a rather small tent where instead of his usual autograph-signing Noël had decided to sing his way through a medley of his old songs. This he did no less than a dozen times during the afternoon and evening, to considerable acclaim from audiences who had been queueing to see him for up to an hour in the teeming rain. His success that one day was to lead directly to the last major development in Coward’s varied career; his emergence later in the year, to his own and everyone else’s surprise, as a highly successful cabaret entertainer.
But before Noël could turn his mind to cabaret there remained the H. M. Tennent production of Relative Values, the new play that was to re-establish Coward in the eyes of a postwar audience as a writer of immaculate light comedy. Gladys Cooper came back from California to play the lead (curiously it was the first and only time that Coward worked with her, although they had been friends for over thirty years) and Noël himself planned to direct. But for the first time since The Vortex twenty-seven years earlier, Noël did not use Gladys Calthrop as his designer; she was away, and in her absence the setting for the play was designed by Michael Relph.
When Noël was casting Relative Values in mid-August, a severe hurricane hit the North Shore of Jamaica, leaving Blue Harbour unscathed but wrecking other houses around Port Maria and tearing up the beaches. Noël instantly cabled a hundred pounds to the governor, Sir Hugh Foot, as a token gesture of help for the disaster fund, and then waited anxiously until his many new friends in the area all reported that they were safe and comparatively well.
In London during that summer Beatrice Lillie opened a season in cabaret at the Café de Paris with Norman Hackforth as her accompanist; Noël was at her first performance and afterwards, remembering their wartime tours together, Hackforth asked him why he didn’t venture a season in cabaret there himself. Noël thought it over carefully, agreed that for £750 a week and with Norman at the piano again he would try a month at the Café in the autumn, and then went back to work on Relative Values.
In September 1951, when he was just about to put the play into rehearsal, Noël at last found a buyer for White Cliffs which was now lying empty as all the furniture had been moved back to Goldenhurst; the buyer turned out to be none other than Noël’s Jamaican neighbour Ian Fleming who, about to marry Anne Rothermere, was looking for somewhere for them to live at weekends when they were in England. Thus domestic negotiations between the two writers started again, and stretched on through the winter provoking a lengthy and sardonic correspondence about who was to pay for what.
Relative Values went through rehearsals smoothly enough, and there was already a feeling among the company that this was to be the play which could put an end to the run of theatrical failure from which Noël had not really escaped since Pacific 1860 five years earlier. The cast, though not quite so heavily loaded with the old Coward brigade as usual, were all at home in his work and Gladys Cooper remained thoroughly enthusiastic about his play although she occasionally found Noël’s direction too doctrinaire for her taste. ‘It is ridiculous,’ she remarked after one especially trying morning, ‘Noël expects me to be word-perfect at the first rehearsal.’ ‘It is not,’ retorted Noël, ‘the first rehearsal I worry about so much as the first night.’
However, the play opened to considerable acclaim in Newcastle, and after the first week of the tour Noël felt confident enough to leave the cast to their own devices and return to London where he started getting his cabaret act into shape. He had, of course, a vast repertoire of songs to choose from; but he’d not sung many of them for more than five years and he was uncertain which were still topical and whether there were some that had gone well on the wartime tours abroad yet would turn out to be disastrous when sung to a peacetime audience at home. To discover all this, he did an experimental concert at the Theatre Royal in Brighton one Sunday late in October, and then, faintly reassured by his success with that but still highly nervous, he opened at the Café de Paris for the first time on October 29th 1951.
‘The lights were lowered,’ recalled Donald Neville-Willing who then managed the Café and was known to Noël as Major-Baby on account of his army rank, ‘the orchestra struck up “I’ll See You Again”, and very slowly a spotlit figure walked down the staircase to tumultuous applause from the crowded tables around the dance-floor. It turned out to be Norman Hackforth.’ Noël followed, however, and the result was one of the greatest personal successes in his career. ‘For nearly an hour,’ reported the Evening News, ‘this quizzical, faintly oriental-looking gentleman with a shocking voice held spellbound an audience that included Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent.’
Noël sang them a medley of his own songs from ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ through the canon to ‘The Stately Homes of England’, with such occasional interpolations as an upbeat rendering of ‘Loch Lomond’ and his own rewritten version of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’.
The success of that first night in cabaret restored to the currency of Coward’s name a value it had not held since the partnership with Gertrude Lawrence ended in the Thirties; suddenly the magic was back. The Café de Paris boosted his salary to a thousand a week and begged him to stay on for an additional fortnight making six weeks in all; Noël agreed, taking his last two weeks’ salary in the shape of an enchanting Boudin that he found in a Bond Street art gallery.
While he was still appearing in cabaret, Relative Values ended its tour and went in to the Savoy Theatre; Harold Hobson considered that it was ‘the best play Coward has written for several years’, and Anthony Cookman for the Tatler found it ‘a flawless piece of work’. Another critic, the young Kenneth Tynan, went to see Noël in cabaret at the Café de Paris:
‘Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since. No private considerations have ever been allowed to deflect the drive of his career; like Gielgud and Rattigan, like the late Ivor Novello, he is a congenital bachelor. He began, like many other satirists (Evelyn Waugh, for instance) by rebelling against conformity, and ended up making his peace with it, even becoming its outspoken advocate ... to see him whole, public and private personalities conjoined, you must see him in cabaret ... he padded down the celebrated stairs, halted before the microphone on black-suede-clad feet, and, upraising both hands in a gesture of benediction, set about demonstrating how these things should be done. Baring his teeth as if unveiling some grotesque monument, and cooing like a baritone dove, he gave us “I’ll See You Again” and the other bat’s-wing melodies of his youth. Nothing he does on these occa
sions sounds strained or arid; his tanned, leathery face is still an enthusiast’s. All the time the hands are at their task, affectionately calming your too-kind applause. Amused by his own frolicsomeness, he sways from side to side, waggling a finger if your attention looks like wandering. If it is possible to romp fastidiously, that is what Coward does.’
To Douglas Fairbanks, who had cabled his congratulations on Noël’s return to public grace and favour, Coward wired ‘DEAR DOUG THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH FOR SWEET CABLE BUT TRIUMPH INCOMPLETE UNLESS YOU ARE HERE TO SEE THE ENGLISH MISTINGUETTE.’ In fact London’s answer to Mistinguette refused to prolong his season at the Café any further than mid-December, and although he was nightly bringing the house down there he still decided to reject a dazzling offer of more than five thousand dollars a week to do a cabaret tour of American hotels in the spring; Noël remained uncertain about whether his ultra-English material would go down as well on the other side of the Atlantic, and he did not intend to risk it at that moment. While he was playing at the Café he did however think back to certain other concert appearances abroad at an earlier and tougher moment in his professional life:
‘In the luxurious intimacy of the Café de Paris I sometimes glanced at Norman sitting impeccably at the grand piano, and my mind flashed back to those rickety wooden stages, to the steaming heat, the wind, the rain, and the insects, and I saw him with sudden vivid clarity divested of dinner-jacket, red carnation and brilliantine, and wearing instead an open-neck, sweat-stained khaki shirt, with a lock of damp hair hanging over one eye, and hammering away at the Little Treasure as though he was at his last gasp and this was the last conscious action of his life.’
After his first season at the Café de Paris came to an end, and having promised to play there again in the following year, Noël delayed his usual winter trip to Jamaica and instead stayed at Goldenhurst to work on a new comedy for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. It was the first play he’d written for them since the ill-starred Point Valaine in 1934, but this by contrast was to be the lightest of romantic period comedies: entitled Quadrille, it opened in London during the autumn of 1952.
26
1951–1955
Let’s hope we have no worse to plague us Than two shows a night at Las Vegas.
With Relative Values running to near-capacity at the Savoy and his first triumphant season in cabaret at the Café de Paris drawn to a close, Noël continued to work with an almost religious fervour; Quadrille was still on the typewriter, there were more songs to be written for future cabarets, and there were negotiations in progress about the possibility of filming three of the original Tonight at Eight-Thirty plays as one composite film, since similar celluloid packages of stories by Maugham and O. Henry were proving successful at the box-office. While he was at Goldenhurst for the Christmas of 1951, Noël heard again from his old childhood friend Esmé Wynne-Tyson; in the thirty years that had elapsed since they went their separate ways she had become a fervent Christian Scientist, and she now wrote to ask whether Noël in his turn had developed any kind of mental or spiritual philosophy. His reply was predictably down to earth:
‘You ask how I am thinking these days; do you know, the awful thing is I don’t believe I am thinking very differently from the way I have always thought. My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievement of Noël Coward. I do not care for any church (even the dear old Mother Church) and I don’t believe there is a Universal Truth and if you have found it you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din. In spite of my unregenerate spiritual attitude I am jolly kind to everybody and still attentive and devoted to my dear old Mother who is hale and hearty, sharp as a needle and occasionally very cross indeed. I have built myself a little house in Jamaica on the edge of the sea where I eat bread-fruit, coconuts, yams, bananas and rather curious fish and where I also lie in the sun and relax and paint a series of pictures in oils, all of which I consider to be of great beauty but which, in reality, are amateur, inept and great fun to do ... in the meantime, do you ever come up to London or are we never to meet again until I am on my deathbed and you appear with, I hope, not extreme unction?’
Meanwhile the tenancy of White Cliffs was about to pass from Noël Coward to Ian Fleming who was still a year away from the publication of his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale; by now the two writers were old and close friends, since Coward had frequently offered the sanctuary of week-ends at Goldenhurst to Fleming and Anne Rothermere during the more tempestuous moments of their friendship, and within months of the sale of White Cliffs Noël was a delighted witness at their wedding in Jamaica.
A couple of weeks into 1952 Noël, who in a recent interview had described himself as ‘that splendid old Chinese character actor and writer’, was able to wire the Lunts in New York: ‘QUADRILLE IS FINISHED I LOVE IT VERY MUCH AND ONLY HOPE THAT YOU WILL.’ This, his latest play, was a romantic comedy in three acts based on a variation of the mixed doubles principle that had proved so successful with Private Lives just twenty years earlier; in this case it opened with lovers escaping their marriages and finding in a chilly Victorian railway buffet much of the same melancholy romanticism that had characterized Coward’s other railway love-story, Brief Encounter. But the main asset of Quadrille was a couple of hefty star leads for the Lunts, and as a vehicle for their two performances (or rather for the single performance into which their remarkable talents had long since coalesced) it trundled along satisfactorily enough while lacking the sparkle of many of Coward’s earlier comedies.
Having decided that with this play he might as well go the whole romantic hog, Noël invited Cecil Beaton to design some lavish period costumes and settings. It was the first time the two men had worked together, and Beaton’s relations with Coward had been a trifle chilly ever since he had been told by Noël in the course of a transatlantic crossing from New York in 1930 that he was ‘flabby, flobby and affected, with an undulating walk, clothes too conspicuously exaggerated, and a voice that is both too high and too precise’. Since then, however, he had established himself as a designer and photographer of considerable international repute, and Noël had revised his earlier estimation. Beaton was delighted to get the offer to design Quadrille and wrote in reply:
I am utterly enchanted by the play; it has the charm, wit and frivolity of The Importance and is more tender and mature than anything you have ever written ... it has always been my ambition to do scenery and costumes for one of your plays, and I feel that I am very lucky to have been kept for this particular occasion ... nothing on earth that I know of would prevent me from doing the job.’
In a similarly ecstatic mood, Beaton wrote to Lynn Fontanne about what fun it would be for them all to be working together on a play; Miss Fontanne replied that on the contrary, ‘it will be a lot of hard work, anxiety, worry. We will very likely fight to death, we will hope to win through to success, but it won’t be fun.’
Towards the end of January 1952 Noël staged one special evening of cabaret at the Café de Paris which raised over two thousand pounds for the Actors’ Orphanage. The annual Orphanage garden party was by now proving both over-costly and impracticable on account of the rain which invariably drenched it; so Coward’s committee had voted to raise funds instead by occasional gala evenings at the Café and also by a midnight matinée to be given annually at the London Palladium in June. But one of the committee’s new problems was the need to find a title for what eventually became the ‘Night of 100 Stars’; to the suggestion that this midnight benefit involving most of the actors in London should be called ‘Summer Stars’, Noël had replied quietly that ‘Some are not’.
At the Café Noël had Mary Martin as a partner; she was by now back at Drury Lane playing Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, the squabbles with Noël over Pacific 1860 had long since been forgotten, and in cabaret the Coward-Martin partnership had a considerable one-ni
ght-stand success which the two entertainers later repeated on American television in Together with Music. A couple of days after the Café appearance Noël left London for Jamaica, stopping briefly in New York to read Quadrille to the Lunts who were suitable impressed and also reassuringly optimistic about its chances of success.
At Blue Harbour Noël was kept fairly busy by a succession of visitors to Jamaica who that winter included the Lunts, Jack Wilson, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier; he was also obliged to take delivery of a live alligator, sent express from Harrods by Bea Lillie who had tied a label around its neck reading simply ‘So what else is new?’. Early in May, with another season at the Café de Paris and the London production of Quadrille on the horizon, Noël left the alligator at Blue Harbour and flew back to England.
In the middle of June Noël opened at the Café de Paris and simultaneously put Quadrille into rehearsal; at the Café nightly except Sundays for a month he sang a selection of those of his songs from the Twenties and Thirties that had worn well or already acquired a period charm, adding to the repertoire some new numbers which included ‘There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner’, a song dedicated to the belief that every cloud did not in fact have a silver lining. ‘His personality,’ said the Sunday Times, ‘almost persuaded his audiences that he could sing.’ Coward’s opening night was as always a star-studded occasion, a night for journalistic drooling in the world of Paul Slickey, and it set Coward fair for the second record-breaking season of the four that he was to do at the Café in the early Fifties. ‘In cabaret’, noted one critic, ‘Coward is benign though slightly flustered, like a Cardinal who has been asked to participate in some frenetic tribal rite.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 38