A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  After the first night in New York, Noël flew to Jamaica where he spent Christmas at Blue Harbour working on the plans for High Spirits. Coward himself was to direct this musical version of Blithe Spirit (adapted by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray) and he had already signed Bea Lillie for Madame Arcati and Tammy Grimes for Elvira. But it was, from the very beginning, readily apparent to Coward and everyone else involved that the production was destined to become another of those evenings with Bea Lillie; her rare, zany, remarkable talent found in Madame Arcati an altogether suitable vehicle and she proceeded to lift the show off the ground at each of her entrances, putting it back neatly where she found it as she left. High Spirits opened on Broadway at the beginning of April and ran on to almost capacity business for the rest of 1964.

  During the summer Noël filmed short introductions to four of his plays (Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, The Vortex and Design for Living) which were being revived on English television. Looking, he said, ‘as though someone had sat on my head,’ Coward delivered to the camera brief thoughts about each of the plays and why he wrote them; he also managed to work in cogent if defensive statements about the star system, the need for plays to have beginnings, middles and ends, and the advantages of playwrights who wrote hefty starring leads for themselves. But in private there were signs now that Noël had reached some kind of peace in his own mind; after all the attacks and defences of the past few years, when he seemed to stand alone in literate reaction against the theatrical avant-gardistes, he had at last satisfied himself that on his own behalf he had no cause for concern about posterity:

  ‘It must not be imagined however that I was not beset by doubts ... in my deep Christian subconscious there was the gnawing suspicion that I was nothing but a jester, a foolish, capering lightweight with neither depths nor real human understanding; that immediately after my death, if not a long while before, my name would be obliterated from public memory. I searched my mind, for long years I searched, to find a theme solemn enough on which to base a really important play. It was only a little while ago that, to quote Madame Arcati, “it came upon me in a blinding flash” that I had already written several important plays ... important because they had given a vast number of people a great deal of pleasure.’

  But if Noël himself had already accepted his place in theatrical history, it still needed some kind of official recognition. In the absence of a knighthood, he got the next best accolade: an offer from Sir Laurence Olivier to revive Hay Fever with the new National Theatre Company.

  Olivier, who in 1926 had himself auditioned for a role in the first touring production of the play and been turned down, now saw in Hay Fever one of the minor twentieth-century classics that have always been a part of the National’s catholic repertoire, and he invited Coward to direct it. ‘I am thrilled and flattered,’ wrote Coward in reply to Olivier’s offer, ‘and frankly a little flabbergasted that the National Theatre should have had the curious perceptiveness to choose a very early play of mine and to give it a cast that could play the Albanian telephone directory.’

  Hay Fever, written just forty years earlier, was not perhaps the most obvious of Coward’s plays for the National to honour; Private Lives is funnier and Design for Living more typical of the now time-honoured ‘cocktails and laughter but what comes after’ Coward myth. Yet of all his work Hay Fever is the best suited to a talented company playing together and off each other in perfect harmony; it offers one tremendous star lead, but unlike many of the other comedies it also offers five other parts that are very nearly as good. To have Coward direct it himself was a good idea; not only did he remember the style of the early Twenties with an accuracy that could be rivalled by few other directors still in the business, but he also understood better than anyone the elliptical twin-level technique which he had first perfected and which Harold Pinter had later adapted to his own darker dramatic purpose: the technique of having a character say one thing while thinking and meaning something entirely different. In retrospect it was now possible to see this as Coward’s greatest contribution to stage comedy in the Twenties; after the carefully orchestrated epigrams of Oscar Wilde he brought to the theatre a style that was at once simpler and more spontaneous though less literary and no longer so explicit. A character in Shadow Play, written eleven years after Hay Fever, summed it all up: ‘Small talk, a lot of small talk, with other thoughts going on behind.’

  Early in October Noël flew to London to start rehearsals for Hay Fever; at the airport he was met by a reporter who suggested it was rather old hat for the National to be doing a revival like this in the mid-Sixties. Fixing him with that stare once described by Robert Benchley as ‘the look of a dead albatross’ Noël remarked acidly that if a comedy was intrinsically very good it would live over the centuries without becoming dated, like for instance The School for Scandal or The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Oh,’ said the reporter, ‘and are they yours too?’

  Noël had not worked with Dame Edith Evans, who was playing Judith Bliss at the National, since they had acted together in Polly With A Past during the spring of 1921, and although he found her performance ‘funny and true and fascinating’, there were certain problems in rehearsal. One particular line which ran: ‘On a clear day you can see Marlow’, Dame Edith would always read as ‘On a very clear day you can see Marlow’. Finally Noël could bear to have the rhythm of his line destroyed no longer; rising to his feet in the stalls he called out, ‘Edith, the line is “On a clear day you can see Marlow”. On a very clear day you can see Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher.’

  With Hay Fever and the London production of High Spirits running simultaneously, Coward had come back with a vengeance. Less than ten years after the row over his emigration had threatened to exile him forever, and less than five years after the row over his Sunday Times articles had threatened to define him as a perpetually angry old outcast rejected by the theatre which he had helped to shape, he turned overnight into the grand old man of entertainment, an imposing theatrical figure demanding reverence for his longevity and admiration for the way his reputation had bounced back. Ronald Bryden summed it up for the New Statesman: ‘the perennial shock of modernity is the amount of it which simply consists of old things looking different ... who would have thought the landmarks of the Sixties would include a Nobel Prize for Sartre, a singe of historical interest in the Great War and the emergence of Noël Coward as the grand old man of British drama? There he was one morning flipping verbal tiddlywinks with reporters about “Dad’s Renaissance”, in that light, endlessly parodiable voice which sang “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and “Mrs Worthington”. The next, he was there again, a national treasure: slightly older than the century on which he sits, his eyelids wearier than ever, hanging beside Forster, Eliot and the O.M.s, demonstrably the greatest living English playwright.’ As if further proof were needed of Coward’s new establishment status, the B.B.C. approached him at this time and asked him to link their ninetieth-birthday tribute to Sir Winston Churchill, which Noël did on television at the end of November.

  After their brief provincial tours, Hay Fever reached London a week before High Spirits and opened at the Old Vic to notices that were among the best Coward had ever received from the English press; even the younger tabloid critics wrote of ‘a classic’ and admitted to falling about with laughter at it. As Judith Bliss, Dame Edith Evans swept voluminously about the stage, sang in a voice which put Douglas Byng to shame, and dared her audience to realize that strictly speaking she was almost twenty years too old for the part; yet her outrageous theatricality was ideal. In Judith, it now became clear, lies the archetypal Coward mother-emblem exaggerated beyond life itself but possessing characteristics central to both Florence Lancaster of The Vortex and Jane Marryott of Cavalcade, while pointing the way to the Countess of Marshwood in Relative Values and even to Mrs Wentworth-Brewster for whom life called so vociferously in a bar on the Piccola Marina.

  The rave reviews for Hay Fever, vastly better than those for the
play’s original production, did not encourage Coward to start arranging any laurels: ‘Bad notices depress me for about an hour, but good notices cheer me up for only about an hour and a half. After that I want to begin working on something entirely new.’

  Early in the new year Noël found that the Coward Renaissance in London had encouraged an American management to think of presenting three of his major comedies on Broadway under the direction of Edward Albee, yet another contemporary playwright who had long been a self-confessed Coward enthusiast. In fact the project failed to materialize, but Albee did write a glowing preface to a paperback reprint of some of the early plays:

  ‘Mr Coward writes dialogue as well as any man going; it is seemingly effortless, surprising in the most wonderfully surprising places, and “true” – very, very true. He is, as well, a dramatic mountain goat; his plays are better made than most – but not in the sense of the superimposed paste job of form, but from within: order more than form. And Mr Coward’s subjects – like ways we kid ourselves – have not, unless my mind has been turned inward too long, gone out of date ... his work stands a very good chance of being with us for a long, long time.’

  While Noël was in Jamaica during the early months of 1965, in London Nigel Patrick directed and starred in a revival of Present Laughter. But already the critics’ enthusiasm for rediscovering Coward had begun to wear thin, and the wit of Present Laughter which had sparkled and entertained hugely in wartime London seemed a trifle flat more than twenty years later. It had not yet acquired the ‘period piece’ flavour of Hay Fever yet in spite of disappointing reviews it still proved to be indestructible at the box office; it ran on at the Queen’s for 364 performances.

  Noël spent the first half of 1965 at Blue Harbour, where his many guests included not only Peter Sellers and Joan Sutherland but also, for one distinguished lunch party, the Queen Mother herself who repaid Coward’s hospitality by having him to stay at Sandringham later in the summer. During his months in Jamaica, that year as in so many past, Noël slipped back into a rigid pattern of work at the typewriter from seven in the morning until midday. He was starting to draft a trilogy of plays set in a Swiss hotel, which was to emerge in the following year as Suite in Three Keys.

  Early in the summer of 1965 Coward returned to England and accepted an offer from Otto Preminger to play Carol Lynley’s seedy, perverted, lecherous old landlord in the thriller Bunny Lake is Missing. It was the first of three films (the other two were Boom in 1967 and The Italian Job in 1968) for which Coward was cast against type and allowed to escape at least temporarily from the smooth, svelte, impeccable image conveyed by the rest of his screen appearances. Bunny Lake starred Laurence Olivier, with whom Coward had last appeared in Private Lives in New York thirty-five years earlier, and the rest of a distinguished cast included Martita Hunt, Anna Massey and Keir Dullea, an actor who was not exactly overjoyed one morning to find Noël creeping up behind him on the set murmuring ‘Keir Dullea ... Gone Tomorrow.’

  After his work for Preminger Noël returned to Switzerland where he finished Suite in Three Keys. Then, towards the end of November he decided that the time had again come for him to travel: ‘My passion for journeys is undimmed by the passing years. I’m always too late or too early, however; I arrive in Japan just when the cherry blossoms have fallen. I get to China too early for the next revolution. I reach Canada when the maple leaves have gone and the snow hasn’t arrived. People are always telling me about something I have just missed; I find it very restful.’

  This time, Coward decided to visit the Seychelle Islands for no real reason other than that they were there and that he had never seen them; the expedition was however something of a disaster. Almost as soon as he arrived in the Seychelles he caught a particularly virulent form of amoebic dysentery which drained him: ‘I lay about, moaning and groaning, on a chaise longue thoughtfully supplied by Government House.’ Then, in an increasingly desperate attempt to get cured he flew to Rome where an eminent specialist diagnosed chronic colitis, wrongly, and prescribed a useless diet of mashed potatoes to be taken every four hours. Soon after Christmas Noël was back in Switzerland, at a clinic in Geneva which diagnosed, correctly this time, that he had a spastic colon; there they managed to put an end to the dysentery with a series of drugs, though he was left at the end of it a very weak man indeed. In time most of his strength duly returned, but his health has never entirely recovered from the battering that it took in those months.

  In March 1966, against the advice of his Swiss doctors, Noël flew to London and started rehearsals with Irene Worth and Lilli Palmer for Suite in Three Keys. Of these three latest Coward plays, A Song at Twilight was the most important and also far and away the best; an earnestly moral drama, it concerned an ageing distinguished, petulant, bitchy and truculent writer who managed to conceal his homosexuality from the world at the cost of warping his talent and cutting off his human sympathies. Yet curiously enough A Song At Twilight started out in Coward’s mind as a comedy; he had recently read David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm, which describes Constance Collier’s visit to Max when they were both in their seventies and long after their friendship had ended; ‘I thought how funny it was. There was Constance, Max’s old flame, coming to see him again, only now she was still full of vitality and he of course wasn’t, so she absolutely exhausted him.’

  But gradually, as the play developed in Coward’s mind, he realized that there could be more to it than just the meeting of a couple of Elyot and Amanda figures in their old age. What if the writer, unlike Max Beerbohm, had been homosexual for most of his life; and what if the woman brought with her letters that could incriminate him in the eyes of posterity? Slowly but surely this became the theme of A Song at Twilight; an old, queer author fighting off a threat to his ‘good name’. Given that plot, it is not altogether surprising that many critics took the play to be firmly based on Somerset Maugham, an allusion which Coward fostered by making up to look curiously like him on the stage. But if Beerbohm and Maugham were the direct influences on the creation of Sir Hugo Latymer, there was also a certain amount of Coward himself in the character he had written and was about to play.

  Those critics who saw a reference to Maugham in A at Twilight also saw a kind of poetic justice, remembering the way that Maugham had characterized Hugh Walpole in Cakes and Ale. But Coward’s play was built on an issue at once wider and more subjective than that. His attitude to Maugham was one of retrospective pity rather than vindictiveness; reading the Beverley Nichols revelations, Noël’s only comment had been ‘how nice for dear Beverley to have found all that gold down in Somerset’.

  Shadows of the Evening and Come Into the Garden, Maud (the double bill which completed Coward’s Suite) opened at the Queen’s ten days after A Song at Twilight and then alternated with it until the end of July, so that on matinée days Coward would find himself acting all three plays in an eight-hour period, an experience which taxed his health, his strength and his memory quite considerably.

  It was Peter Lewis for the Daily Mail who pinpointed the one component that held together all the parts of Suite in Three: ‘As the curtain fell last night I felt oddly elated, as if I had recaptured the flavour of an elusive drink that one tasted when young but which had never been mixed quite right since. I know the name of it ... not mannerism, not bravura, not histrionics, but style.’ The Observer saw these plays as a kind of Cowardian answer to Sartre’s Huis Clos (similarly involving three characters in one room) bearing back the message that ‘love, courage and consideration can prevent other people from being Hell’ while Alan Brien for the Sunday Telegraph thought he had seen ‘the greatest theatrical entertainer of our century desperately signalling to us that he has a message but is afraid he lacks the equipment to transmit it across the footlights’.

  Throughout Coward’s career his reputation has gone up and down like the mercury in some particularly unreliable thermometer, but with the success of Suite in Three Keys it was definitely moving upward
and it is possible that Noël has decided to leave it there: in any event he has not appeared on a stage since, and it was tempting to see in the ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’ which ended Suite in Three Keys a more significant farewell.

  30

  1966–1969

  ‘It’s terrifying how little time there is left; every day now is a dividend, and there is still so much I want to do ... but my life up to now has left me with no persistent regrets of any kind. I don’t look back in anger nor, indeed, in anything approaching even mild rage; I rather look back in pleasure and amusement. As for death, it holds no fear for me ... provided it is not going to be a painful, lingering affair.’

  Suite in Three Keys ran on in London until the end of July 1966; having then reached his time-honoured three month limit Noël ended the season in spite of the fact that they were still playing to near-capacity every night. The plays had severely strained his health and he knew it; there had been talk of producing them on Broadway in the autumn, but Coward’s doctor ruled this out entirely and insisted that he should take the rest of his sixty-seventh year very quietly indeed.