When Wild Heather was in its last week at Manchester, the two men who were to lead the British musical theatre from the 1920s into the 1950s met face to face for the first time. Ivor Novello was seven years older than Noël and at that time considerably more successful; he was in Manchester with Arlette, a musical comedy which he had written and was now watching on its way to London. Novello, already widely known as the composer of ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, had written the scores for other West End shows before Arlette and was in a position deeply envied by Noël who was hoping to achieve the same kind of early success but unable at that time to see much chance of doing so. Coward was nevertheless reassured to discover that when they first met, with a mutual friend, Bobby Andrews, outside the Midland Hotel, Novello was ‘wearing an old overcoat with an Astrakhan collar and a degraded brown hat, and if he had suddenly produced a violin from somewhere and played the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffman, I should have given him threepence from sheer pity’. Esmé Wynne, who knew them both early in their long careers, remembered that ‘Noël was infinitely more intelligent, and certainly more talented as an actor, but Ivor was much more affectionate and sweet’.
But comparisons between Novello and Coward are largely futile, since their talents, superficially the same, were in fact widely different; Novello’s music came from a native Welsh sense of melody that flowed through innumerable lilting songs whilst Noël’s was a more careful, studied, staccato style of composition which depended for its effect as much on the words as the music. They had in common a great love of the theatre, and a sort of wary mutual respect; ‘if,’ Noël once said to Novello, ‘anyone ever tells you that I’ve been rude about you behind your back – believe them.’ It seemed to Coward that Novello had everything going for him; his looks were considerably better than Noël’s and in their music what came almost instinctively to Ivor only came to Noël after endless hard work, though in their acting if anything the reverse was true. ‘Ivor,’ said Bobby Andrews, ‘admired Noël’s talent – whereas Noël admired Ivor’s flair.’
The Saving Grace ran in the West End for several months through the worst Zeppelin raids of the war, which nightly coincided with a tender love scene that Noël played with Emily Brooke. Coward in fact had found some difficulty with the part, since it was the first time he had tackled the intricate art of light comedy as an adult, but once again the presence and careful direction of Hawtrey came to his assistance and he made the first real success of his career as an actor. Noël was now playing a good part in a distinguished production and beginning to be recognized in the street for the first time; things were going in precisely the direction he wanted.
In his home life too, times were changing; Mrs Coward, bored and depressed by life in a maisonette on Clapham Common, decided to move back into central London and to return to the lodging-house business. As her sister Borby had died in the meantime, Noël’s mother took Vida with Noël and Eric to live at 111, Ebury Street, across the road from where Aunt Ida had been successfully running a lodging-house for many years. Payne’s Pianos had now entirely given up and Noël’s father was left in early and enforced retirement to make and sail his model yachts on the Serpentine while his wife cooked for and coped with the lodgers. It was hard work, but life ran fairly smoothly for the family until January 1918. Then with the run of The Saving Grace over and Noël in rehearsal for a new play, a small grey card arrived: Noël was summoned instantly to an Army medical at the Camberwell Swimming Baths.
6
1918–1920
‘My career in the British Army was brief and inglorious.’
It is perhaps fair to say that a summons to the Camberwell Swimming Baths is not the most auspicious beginning to a career in the armed forces; and for Noël, the nine months of 1918 that he spent on totally inactive service in and around Romford were one long disaster. A look at his writing and performance during the Second World War shows that he is not by any means an unpatriotic man; nor is he uncourageous. But as an admittedly self-centred young actor whose main priority in life was to get some money into the family and to get his mother out of the lodging-house as soon as he could, the war until 1918 meant very little to him. When it started he had only been fourteen, and now that it did at last affect him personally the national feeling of optimism and determination had degenerated into an overwhelming sense of futility and loss that Noël felt more keenly than any of the hope which had preceded it. In the last winter of the war it was hard to see that any good could come of the fighting, and the massive loss of life already seemed too high a price to pay for a still-distant peace. Noël would not, perhaps, have been afraid to fight; but he felt there was nothing he could usefully contribute to the war, while on a more domestic level there was a great deal to be done: ‘the needs of my King and Country seemed unimportant compared with the vital necessity of forging ahead with my own life.’
As it happened, the King and Country took a similarly dim view of the usefulness of Noël to the war effort. From Camberwell, where the medical officer heard of Noël’s earlier bout of tuberculosis, he was sent straight to a Labour Corps at Hounslow. There, only marginally reassured by the fact that the other fifty men drafted with him looked as though they could barely make it back to Camberwell, let alone to the front, Noël spent one uneasy night and a few hours next morning learning the elementary parade drill. Then, assisted by a ten-shilling note placed swiftly into the right hands, he managed to see the commanding officer and to get a day’s leave of absence on the pretext of having to settle his affairs at home. Once back in the centre of London he went straight to the War Office, having prepared on the train a short list of influential officers who might help him get out of the Labour Corps as rapidly as he had fallen into it. At the tender age of eighteen Noël already had a few friends – if not actually at Court yet, then at least in the War Office.
Getting hourly more frantic, Noël worked his way through the list drawing a total blank every time, until the very last man on it suggested that he should see a Lieutenant Boughey. And here, finally, Noël got lucky. Boughey agreed that he was now perfectly fit and therefore had no right to be in a Labour Corps, telephoned the Hounslow C.O. to tell him so, and promised to get Coward a place in the Artists’ Rifles, Philip Streatfield’s old regiment, after first letting him off for a couple of weeks’ leave.
The Training Corps of the Artists’ Rifles was then stationed in the middle of Gidea Park, near Romford in Essex. Life there was certainly a good deal better than with the Labour Corps at Hounslow, but it was still army life and Noël hated every regimented moment of it. He also snored, which failed to endear him to the other inhabitants of his hut. He was not a soldier, he was patently never going to be a soldier, and as his medical grading was B2 he was unlikely ever to see active service. Thus the long hours that he spent marching around Gidea Park were an exercise in total futility, though Noël himself was the only one to appreciate this fully. He developed a deep-seated loathing of the army that was to be matched only by his devotion in later years to the navy.
It was while he was forced to stay at Gidea Park that the second of Noël’s one-act collaborations with Esmé Wynne, Woman and Whisky was produced on a provincial tour; this brought from a columnist in the Daily Sketch the fairly surprised comment that ‘Noël Coward is not only an actor – he is something of a dramatist as well’.
The training session at Gidea Park came to an abrupt halt one morning when, running along a wooden path, Noël tripped on a slat and went crashing to the ground giving himself severe concussion which lasted until he awoke in the First London General Hospital to hear his mother explaining tearfully that he’d been unconscious for three days. In spite of a number of sceptical doctors, convinced that the whole thing was a hoax, Noël spent six weeks in the hospital where he was surrounded by shell-shock cases and given far too long to wonder whether he had a brain tumour or not. As it happened, he hadn’t; the headaches got less frequent and soon he was well enough to sit up in
bed reading the newly published first novels of G. B. Stern and Sheila Kaye-Smith. He wrote ardent fan letters to both ladies and, in the case of Miss Stern, succeeded in introducing her to her future husband, a young New Zealander called Geoffrey Holdsworth who befriended him in the hospital.
As well as reading a good many novels at this time, Noël also managed to write one, which, he said later, ‘taught me two things – one was that it wasn’t good enough for publication, and the other was that I had the knack of bright dialogue.’
When Noël was at length discharged from hospital he was given a week’s leave before being ordered back to Gidea Park. In one of the more eccentric episodes of his life, he spent that week as chaperone on a kind of pre-honeymoon in Devon organized by Esmé Wynne and her future husband, Lynden Tyson. Esmé herself explained later: ‘Lynden and I were so terrified of having children that we took Noël away with us on a holiday just before we got married. Lynden was paying for it all and, much as I loved him, I think he got rather jealous because I spent all the time talking to Noël; whenever I had to choose between them I chose Noël because mentally we got on so well together – with Lynden it was a much more physical thing.’ Nevertheless the ménage à trois seems to have worked out except for one moment of crisis when Esmé and Noël were discovered by Lynden as they sailed simultaneously out of the bathroom. For Lynden this was almost the last straw: ‘I knew that intellectually Noël and Esmé were very close, and though I wasn’t able to understand their non-sexual relationship, I was getting a bit jealous of Master Noël. He spent most of the time with my fiancée and when one morning I saw both of them coming out of the loo together that, for me, was the end. I decided to break everything up and push off to London and leave them to it. But being very much in love with Esmé I didn’t catch the train – I conveniently missed it, so I was there when she and Noël came back from their walk and after that Esmé and I had a hell of a row and then we made it up in the usual way and decided to get married anyway.’ After Esmé and Lynden got married, Noël came up trumps again; he managed to get a friend of his in the Air Force to ensure that Lynden stayed in London for the last few months of the war.
Back with the Artists’ Rifles Noël was put on ‘light duties’ and spent a few gloomy weeks polishing everything in sight and cleaning out the latrines. Soon, and perhaps not surprisingly, the headaches began to recur, and eventually he said they became so bad that he could barely stand up. This time he was sent to the Colchester Hospital and placed, inexplicably, in a ward where all the other patients were epileptics. The alarming thing here was not so much their fits as the fact that none of them knew they were epileptic; Noël, not unnaturally began to wonder whether he too was epileptic without knowing it. For twenty-four hours, every ten minutes, he checked off squares in an exercise book; he did this twice a week for three weeks, and only then, looking back over all the squares safely filled in, could he be sure. After two months, in which he learnt among other things how to prevent an epileptic from leaping off his bed and out of the window, Noël was finally given a total discharge from the British Army and awarded a pension of seven-and-sixpence a week for six months. One suspects that he would happily have paid them rather more than that for his freedom. ‘His breakdown,’ said Esmé Wynne, ‘came at a very convenient time – and thank Heaven it did. I dreaded that Noël, like Saki who was then our great hero, would be killed in that dreadful war. In those days one’s awareness was always of the waste and the sorrow ... we hadn’t learnt to talk of “mopping-up operations”, and death was something that happened daily to people we knew.’
Once discharged, Noël started a lengthy round of auditions at which, dressed in a blue suit with a shirt, tie and socks to match (it took him some months to learn that the height of fashion was not necessarily to wear everything in the same colour) he would give them a brisk rendering of his own songs including his first, ‘Forbidden Fruit’, and a sentimental ballad called ‘Tamarisk Town’. While he was waiting for work in London he also appeared with an amateur concert party entertaining wounded troops in Rutland; a lady who was at Oakham with the Women’s Legion at that time remembers Noël singing a song of his which began:
‘My name’s Elizabeth May
And no one takes liberties with me.’
‘I have never,’ notes the lady rather sadly, ‘heard this since.’
By now Coward was always accompanying himself on the piano, a talent more or less self-taught; to this day he finds it difficult to read music and almost impossible to write it down – when he plays he does so by ear rather than eye, and in the years when he was composing regularly, he would either sing, whistle or hum the tune, often over the phone, to somebody who could transcribe it for him. But this limitation does not seem to have hampered his talent too severely; years later he reflected:
‘I have only had two music lessons in my life. These were the first steps of what was to have been a full course which Fred Astaire and I enrolled for at the Guildhall School of Music, and they faltered and stopped when I was told by my instructor that I could not use consecutive fifths. He went on to explain that a gentleman called Ebenezer Prout had announced many years ago that consecutive fifths were wrong and must in no circumstances be employed. At that time Ebenezer Prout was merely a name to me (as a matter of fact he still is, and a very funny one at that) and I was unimpressed by his Victorian dicta. I argued back that Debussy and Ravel used consecutive fifths like mad. My instructor waved aside this triviality with a pudgy hand, and I left his presence for ever with the parting shot that what was good enough for Debussy and Ravel was good enough for me. This outburst of rugged individualism deprived me of much valuable knowledge, and I have never deeply regretted it for a moment. Had I intended at the outset of my career to devote all my energies to music I would have endured the necessary training cheerfully enough, but in those days I was passionately involved in the theatre; acting and writing and singing and dancing seemed of more value to my immediate progress than counterpoint and harmony. I was willing to allow the musical side of my creative talent to take care of itself. On looking back, I think that on the whole I was right. I have often been irritated in later years by my inability to write music down effectively and by my complete lack of knowledge of orchestration except by ear, but being talented from the very beginning in several different media, I was forced by common sense to make a decision. The decision I made was to try to become a good writer and actor, and to compose tunes and harmonies whenever the urge to do so became too powerful to resist.’
In one respect Coward resembles Irving Berlin, born eleven years earlier; both men were to become prolific composers of light music while themselves remaining only able to play it in limited keys and experiencing throughout their lives considerable difficulty in either writing or reading it. Perhaps for this reason both wrote songs that were melodically very simple and successful precisely because the tunes were easy to pick up and repeat; both also managed to reflect in their music the changing pattern of life in England and America between the wars, though in this Berlin was the more consistently accurate.
At about this time Noël also began to paint; Edna Mayo, with whose family he used to spend week-ends at Braintree, remembered that ‘he would share my paint-box and produce some pretty startling results. I was also fond of music and at that time the song “The Rosary” was very popular – Noël had a beautiful voice and sang it like an angel. Then he would improvise at the piano for hours, going through the scores of the current musical comedies – all of which he seemed to know by heart.’
But the talent that was so apparent in other people’s drawing-rooms went largely unrecognized at auditions, as management after management decided that they could do without the theatrical services of Mr Coward. His luck, however, seemed about to change with the arrival in England of Jerome Kern’s musical Oh, Boy! which for the benefit of un-American audiences was later retitled Oh, Joy! Auditions for this were held at the Shaftesbury Theatre, and it was only when N
oël, wearing the routine blue suit with his audition smile frozen on to his face, was half-way through his song that he realized George Grossmith and Mr Laurillard, who were presenting the show in London, were so deep in conversation in the stalls that they had entirely failed to notice his presence at the piano. Pausing until the silence became so loud that even Grossmith and Laurillard broke off their chat to wonder what was happening, Coward then informed them that unless they were prepared to listen he was not prepared to sing to them. Mr Grossmith, overcome with remorse, not only listened but then insisted that Noël be hired, at a salary of twelve pounds a week, to play a part that would be decided on when rehearsals began in a few weeks’ time.
Secure in the knowledge that he was about to be employed again, Noël decided the time had come for a holiday; this he managed to combine, albeit not very successfully, with his first actual meeting with G. B. Stern, the novelist to whom he’d been writing ardent fan letters since his illness in the First London General Hospital. Miss Stern happened to be staying at St Merryn in Cornwall as the guest of a family called Dawson-Scott, and she suggested that Noël should join them. In reply to his enquiry, Mrs Dawson-Scott told Noël that she would be happy to put him up for a fortnight if he could pay two pounds a week for his bed and board; Noël decided to go, and in one of the most unwise of the many telegrams he has scattered over the world in his lifetime he told the Dawson-Scotts ‘ARRIVING PADSTOW FIVE-THIRTY TALL AND DIVINELY HANDSOME IN GREY’. The recipients were not amused; Mrs Dawson-Scott, a large lady given to writing earthy novels in the Mary Webb tradition, was nervous that her beloved ‘Peter’ Stern would settle for Noël instead of Geoffrey Holdsworth, his old acquaintance from hospital whom the Dawson-Scotts far preferred as a future husband for her. On top of that, Noël’s already acutely theatrical background and what Miss Stern called his ‘young ferocity’ did not blend well with the bleak existence led by the family in the depths of Cornwall; that the holiday was going to be a disaster became apparent on the very first evening after Noël’s arrival, when he suggested that they should call him by his Christian name. ‘I think, Mr Coward,’ said Mrs Dawson-Scott, ‘that we would rather wait a little.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 7
