A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  Just before he left London to go back to Switzerland for the rest of the summer, Noël gave his name for a fee running into thousands of pounds to an advertisement for a new Gillette razor blade; he was asked simply to list those things which he believed still had ‘style’, and his reply was, in S. N. Behrman’s phrase, ‘echt-Noël’:

  A candy-striped jeep

  Jane Austen Cassius Clay

  The Times before it changed

  Danny La Rue

  Charleston, South Carolina

  ‘Monsieur’ de Givenchy

  A zebra (but not a zebra crossing)

  Evading boredom

  Gertrude Lawrence

  The Paris Opera House

  White

  A seagull

  A Brixham trawler

  Margot Fonteyn

  Any Cole Porter song

  English pageantry

  Marlene’s voice

  Lingfield has a tiny bit.

  After Suite in Three Keys closed in London Noël went back to Les Avants and spent the next few months there, taking them almost as quietly as his doctor had asked; he did, however, start collecting together some of the verse he’d written over the last twenty years with a view to publishing it together with two new poems of near-epic length, ‘P. and O. 1930’ and ‘Not Yet the Dodo’. But these did not give Coward any illusions about the lasting value of his work as a poet: ‘those dear old fairies at my christening in St Alban’s church, Teddington, endowed me with many rich gifts, but a true poetic sense was not one of them.’ At Les Avants Coward also persevered with his painting, made fervent attempts to learn the Italian language from gramophone records, and edited the latest collection of his short stories which was to be published in the following year.

  During the October of 1966 one remaining Coward play had its English stage première; this was Post-Mortem, the angry vilification of the First War which he had written in 1930 shortly after acting in Journey’s End and which remains the most unfamiliar and least typical of all his published plays. Recognizing its limitations, Coward had never allowed it to be performed professionally; it had, however, been staged in a German prisoner of war camp in 1943, and the author now gave permission for it to be produced by sixth-formers under Gerard Gould’s direction at the grammar school where he teaches in Oxfordshire. Gould had recognized that the play could work, given the fervent sincerity of a very young cast, and Eric Shorter for the Telegraph saw in his production a play ‘written in a tremor of youthful indignation – and much overwritten in places. But its rage is authentic, the fury is fresh, and the feeling in the writing is very considerable’. The play also came to light as somewhat belated support for the theory that within Coward a social historian, a moralist and a philosopher are forever asking to be let out. Coward however would have none of this: ‘I have no deep thoughts about the human race, nor am I particularly interested in reforming it; indeed if I did there would be nothing left for me to write about. Anyway, I don’t think perhaps I could.’

  Towards the end of May 1967 Coward, by now almost fully recovered from the various illnesses which had dogged him over the past two years, flew to New York where he’d agreed to play Caesar opposite Norman Wisdom in a spectacular television musical version of Androcles and the Lion for which Richard Rodgers had written the score. While Noël was in New York he also agreed that his godson, Daniel Massey, should be the actor to play him as a young man in Star!, the film of Gertrude Lawrence’s life which Robert Wise was then about to put into production as a vehicle for Julie Andrews.

  At the beginning of the autumn Noël returned to London for the publication of both Bon Voyage, his short story collection, and the thin volume of his verse which took Not Yet The Dodo as its title; he also did his usual autumnal round of London theatres, dropping into the Royal Court where he found Alec Guinness and a painfully miscast Simone Signoret in Macbeth, a production which Coward subtitled ‘Aimez-Vous Glamis’.

  All four stories in Bon Voyage were concerned with age, loneliness and death, and they were greeted by the literary critics with that mixture of grudging admiration for the content and lofty distaste for the form which had marked most reviews of Coward publications since To Step Aside in 1939. Not Yet The Dodo, in many respects a companion volume, showed Noël in a gentle, Betjemanesque light (subjects included retirement to the West Country and a Battle of Britain dinner) using rhyme schemes that somehow looked as though they should have been set to music.

  Later in the autumn Noël left London for Sardinia, where he’d agreed to play a male witch opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in what was then called Goforth but subsequently became Boom. The film was adapted by Tennessee Williams from his play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More and directed by Joseph Losey, but neither they nor the Burtons managed to save a ponderous and pretentious picture from some terrible reviews. Of Coward it was said, as with every one of his screen appearances over the last fifteen years, that he’d stolen whatever there was to steal in the picture.

  Towards the end of November, a few days after Coward had returned to Switzerland from Sardinia, Lorn Loraine died in London at the age of seventy-three. For the last forty-seven years she had been Coward’s closest friend, confidante and adviser; a sensible, practical, tremendously kindly woman, she had organized his English affairs as both his manager and his secretary, running his professional life with a mixture of efficiency and devotion which he found both invaluable and irreplaceable. Above all she had taught him the permanent value of rigid self-criticism. Now, with Lornie dead, Coward’s last great personal tie to England was broken; moreover he had lost one of the few deep friendships which had survived throughout his adult life. It is not that Coward was a difficult man to befriend; merely that he found lasting alliances hard to sustain:

  I am no good at love

  My heart should be wise and free

  I kill the unfortunate golden goose

  Whoever it may be

  With over-articulate tenderness

  And too much intensity.

  But Coward still had Cole Lesley and Graham Payn as perpetually loyal and devoted companions, and with comfortably run homes for the three of them in Switzerland and Jamaica he was finding it increasingly hard to think of anything they missed by not living in England. Les Avants provided a base from which he could easily go to work anywhere in Europe, and Blue Harbour did the same for North America, while both places were ideal to live in at precisely the times when most people chose not to be there: Switzerland in the summers and Jamaica in the winters.

  After Lornie’s funeral, Noël flew back to Blue Harbour for the winter which, once the shock of her death had passed, he spent working on Past Conditional, the latest and as yet unpublished instalment of his autobiography. Then early in the spring of 1968 Coward decided that once again it was time to travel; taking Coley with him, he set off from Blue Harbour via Bali and Bangkok for Hong Kong. There, surrounded by photographers, he solemnly but cautiously fired off the gun which he had immortalized in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ thirty-seven years earlier:

  In Hong Kong

  They strike a gong

  And fire off a noonday gun

  To reprimand each inmate

  Who’s in late.

  Early in March Noël was back in England, where he turned up briefly in Don’t Count the Candles, a film about old age made for television by Lord Snowdon; ‘fifty years ago’ Coward remarked in this, ‘at the age of fifty people had given up – now they’re all taking rejuvenating shots. I tried some once: they had no effect at all beyond making me feel very sleepy’. Noël was also unimpressed by a Swiss doctor who specialized in the attempted rejuvenation of others: ‘I believe he uses a bloody great syringe about the size of a rolling pin and he injects a horrifying solvent made from an unborn ewe. To judge from the effect on some of my friends, it’s a very non-U ewe.’

  Coward stayed in Europe for the rest of the year, travelling only as far west as Dublin where he spe
nt a few summer weeks playing a majestic old lag in a film called The Italian Job. The director for this was Peter Collinson, whom Coward had first encountered as a particularly obstreperous youth at the Actors’ Orphanage during the war; the star was Michael Caine, who noted that ‘acting with Coward is rather like acting with God’.

  Early in the autumn, Noël returned to London for a memorial service to his old friend Princess Marina, and then travelled on to Paris for an infinitely more cheerful occasion: the eightieth birthday of another old friend, Maurice Chevalier. Meanwhile the ‘Coward Renaissance’ still seemed to be at its height: in England the newly-formed Thames Television company ran a series of dramatizations of his short stories, in America a collection of his early songs and sketches was presented as ‘Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato’, in Australia there was a festival of his plays, and in Paris a boulevard revival of Brief Encounter. Later in the year Coward himself recorded a lengthy television interview with David Frost, and just before Christmas two of his one-act plays were converted into a somewhat disastrous stage musical called Mr and Mrs. But what really kept Coward in the public eye during 1968 was the release, on both sides of the Atlantic, of Star! By choosing Daniel Massey (who as a child had played Coward’s son in In Which We Serve) to play him as a young man, Noël had thoughtfully secured the services of a subtle and intelligent actor who knew his godfather well enough, paradoxically, to give an impression rather than an impersonation of him, Within these limits Massey built up a careful and altogether credible portrait of the young Noël which remained for many critics the best thing about an otherwise disappointing musical epic.

  Nevertheless, it, too, will only serve to foster the Coward myth built up by journalists and the man himself in roughly equal proportions over more than forty years and now apparently indestructible; the witty young man with the clenched cigarette-holder and the silk dressing-gown is finally perpetuated on celluloid. In a way, one suspects that is how Coward himself wants it; the rest of the story, and the work that has gone on behind that increasingly oriental façade, are far too complex for instant public recognition. In the Twenties Coward found himself suddenly the right man in the right place at the right time; he had what the public wanted and with surprisingly few interruptions he has been giving it to them ever since. If ever an author knew his market and wrote for it, then Coward is that author; luck has played its part in his success, but he is a man who made luck happen.

  Usually, when a playwright dies, his work goes into a kind of instant oblivion from which it emerges after ten or fifteen years to enjoy renaissance and rediscovery. It is curiously typical of Coward that he should have gone through this process and remained alive at the end of it. His talent has for years been overpublicized and under-estimated; now, perhaps for the first time, the estimates are getting closer to accuracy. But Coward himself is far from through; for as long as he lives there will almost certainly always be another book, another short story, another film, perhaps even another play. Yet looking back through a lengthy and infinitely unpredictable career it seems unwise to make any forecast at all about his future; Coward is surely the only entertainer on the brink of his seventies of whom it can honestly be said that one has not the remotest idea what to expect next. Retirement, however, seems unlikely; asked once how his friends would know when he had given up, Noël replied ‘they can follow my coffin’.

  When Star! opened in London, Coward himself was at the première. On the screen a young man of seventeen, eager and efficient, started to entertain; looking from screen to stalls one realized that in more than fifty intervening years he had never really stopped:

  But I believe

  That since my life began,

  The most I’ve had is just

  A talent to amuse.

  Epilogue

  And that is the way it was at the beginning of 1969 when this book went to the printers for the first time: Coward was to live four more years, but they were by his standards remarkably inactive ones. No new plays written or produced, no more film appearances, no more short stories, no more songs: just a gentle retreat from professional life caused partly by increasingly ill health and also I believe by the fact that he had at last lost the will to work, the will that had driven him so hard since the days of Goldfish sixty years earlier.

  While I was writing A Talent to Amuse, our first child was born and Noël became Hugo’s godfather: every Christmas thereafter there would be a present in the post, except one year when a huge chauffeur-driven Daimler drew up outside our terraced house in Dulwich with, on the back seat in splendid isolation, an enormous teddy bear bearing a label reading simply ‘love Noël’. Whenever he was in London we would meet to show him how his godson was ageing or how we were, and sometimes we would go out to Switzerland for marvellous weekends in the snow with Noël and David Niven and Joan Sutherland, who were among his starrier neighbours on the slopes above Montreux. He could not conceivably have been more generous either to us or about the book, and somehow its success seemed to warm and reassure him, proof at last that people did still want to know about his work. ‘I am,’ he said in a cable to me on the day of publication, ‘simply wild about me.’

  But for much of the year he was now staying under his beloved Jamaican sun with his devoted companions Cole Lesley and Graham Payn, and increasingly when I saw him back in London or Les Avants I was struck, as many must have been, by how quickly old age seemed to be catching up with him. When we first met he was a very young sixty-four, and when I last saw him he seemed to be an elderly seventy-two: a succession of illnesses chronicled in his own Diaries (and therefore not to be repeated here) had taken their toll, but health apart, these could not, I think, have been unhappy years for him.

  His seventieth birthday in December 1969 was marked by a seven-day media celebration (christened by Coward himself ‘holy week’ or, alternatively, ‘Dad’s Renaissance’) which included a season dedicated to his screen work at the National Film Theatre, a dozen of his plays on BBC radio and television, a gala midnight matinée at the Phoenix Theatre which we also called A Talent to Amuse, a televised banquet at the Savoy for which the afterdinner tributes to him came from the Lords Mountbatten and Olivier, and countless TV, radio and press features all of which led up to the news two weeks later that he had at last been awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours of 1970.

  Those celebrations, marking as they did the height of the Coward revival which had started four years earlier with the National’s Hay Fever, were for Noël ample proof that he had returned to public grace and favour, both as an artist and as a man. With them, I believe, he saw a fitting end to his public and professional life, simply because there was no conceivable way they could be topped – and Noël was not a man who believed in anti-climax.

  Broadway, not to be outdone by the West End, gave him a special Tony for Distinguished Achievement a few months later, and the University of Sussex gave him an honorary doctorate: suddenly everyone seemed aware of a national treasure for too long neglected, and revivals were now everywhere – Brief Encounter on stage in Paris, Private Lives on Broadway and Blithe Spirit in London. The comedies were, of course, vastly easier to revive than the musicals, many of which had badly-dated books but still contained a treasury of great songs. First in recital at such festivals like King’s Lynn and Aldeburgh, then in a Toronto cabaret devised by Roderick Cook (Oh! Coward) and finally in a Mermaid Theatre anthology called Cowardy Custard, it became clear that these songs could however be rearranged into revue evenings of enormous charm and success.

  By the beginning of 1973, Noël had Cowardy Custard and a Maggie Smith revival of Private Lives playing to capacity in the West End and Oh! Coward doing equally well on Broadway. After inspecting all three, and accompanying his old friend Marlene Dietrich to a New York gala, despite the fact that she had just announced to the press that she had decided not to spend Christmas in Switzerland with him ‘because he might be dead before I get there,’ Noël travelled on to Jamaica for his us
ual winter in the sun.

  And it was there, three months later, that he died: on the night of 25/26 March he had dinner as usual with his beloved Coley and Graham, and bade them goodnight from the threshold of Firefly, the house on the hill where he slept and worked. They walked back down the hill to the main house at Blue Harbour: when they awoke it was to a distraught houseboy bearing the news that Noël was suddenly very ill. By the time they got back to Firefly he had died, in bed, of a heart attack: his last words to them had been ‘Goodnight my darlings – I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  The morning after his death, The Guardian in London noted that ‘he died, as he had lived, with no self-pity and a ruthless instinct for the quick curtain’ and throughout the lengthy obituaries that ran in press and television around the world there was the feeling that Coward’s death, though undeniably sad for anyone who cared even remotely about the British theatre, had come with the perfect timing that had always been a feature of his life. Rebecca West, his lifelong friend, wrote of ‘a very dignified man, dry but not dry like a desert, dry like a very good dry sherry.’

  Noël was buried where he had always been happiest, in the garden at Firefly. His estate, valued in six figures, was left in the care of Cole Lesley and Graham Payn who returned to England for a memorial service at which Sir John Betjeman, the Poet Laureate, read Noël’s last completed work:

  When I have fears, as Keats had fears,

  Of the moment I’ll cease to be;

  I console myself with vanished years,

  Remembered laughter, remembered tears,

  And the peace of the changing sea.

  When I feel sad, as Keats felt sad,

  That my life is so nearly done;

  It gives me comfort to dwell upon

  Remembered friends who are dead and gone,

  And the jokes we had and the fun.

  How happy they are I cannot know,

  But happy am I who loved them so.