But Noël did succeed in his main objective, which was to develop his friendship with Miss Stern; leaving their hosts to mutter darkly about Noël’s theatrical decadence, he and ‘Peter’ would set off for long walks along the cliffs. On these Noël kept threatening to dispose of the Dawson-Scotts, a threat he failed to pursue, and also sang Stevenson’s ‘Lad That Is Gone’ persistently and apparently rather well. Miss Stern later published other memories of Noël on that tricky holiday:
‘Bare legs, flannel bags rolled up, an old grey sweater splashed with ink, silk handkerchief knotted tightly around his head, wistful as the eternal Pierrot, mischievous as the faun he so curiously resembled ... through a sea fog which lasted five days Noël talked gaily and incessantly and wrote plays and read them to us and read them to us and read them to us ... I still don’t know how he survived our irritation.’
Shortly afterwards, Noël acted as best man when G. B. Stern married Geoffrey Holdsworth, the fellow-patient whom he had first introduced to her. It is said that in the vestry after they signed the register, he managed to delay the happy couple for some minutes while he read to them the first act of a new comedy. Later still, G. B. Stern was to dedicate her novel Mosaic, ‘to Noël Coward, with as much respect as affection, which is saying a very great deal’. For his part, Noël remembered that on those Cornish cliff-top walks ‘she permitted my Ego to strut bravely before her ... never once did she trot out the “Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none” bugbear from which even at that age I had suffered a great deal’.
Never one to waste money, and he had paid the four pounds in advance, Noël stuck out the full fortnight in the face of continued hostility from the Dawson-Scotts. He then returned to London with a view to starting the rehearsals for Oh, Joy! But after the Cornish holiday a sharp attack of influenza kept him in bed for a week and when he did eventually report to the theatre for rehearsals it was to discover that the role in Oh, Joy! which Mr Grossmith had assured him would give full rein to his talent happened to be as one of a large number of gentlemen in the chorus. Livid, Coward took a taxi to the offices of Grossmith and Laurillard in Golden Square; there he banged on the desks until Mr Laurillard calmed his fury by agreeing that there really wasn’t anything suitable in Oh, Joy! and instead offering Coward a part in Scandal, a new play which Arthur Bourchier and Kyrle Bellew were to do at the Strand in December.
Noël now had another enforced holiday, waiting for the rehearsals of Scandal to begin and in the meantime working on the beginning of a lush novel called Cherry Pan about a daughter of Pan who, by Coward’s own admission, managed to be arch, elfin and altogether nauseating for nearly thirty thousand words, at which point she petered out owing to a lack of enthusiasm on the author’s part and a lack of stamina on hers. Just before work started on Scandal, Armistice Day 1918 found Noël at the Savoy listening to Delysia singing the ‘Marseillaise’ over and over again; the First World War had been, for Noël, little more than a gloomy background against which he grew through his teens:
‘When it began I was too young to realize what it was all about, and now that it was over I could only perceive that life would probably be a good deal more enjoyable without it.’
By the late autumn of 1918 the ambitions to be a composer, lyric-writer, novelist, actor and playwright, about which he’d talked endlessly to G. B. Stern on those Cornish cliffs, were crystallized in Noël’s mind though his actual achievement to date was not so spectacular. Nevertheless, he had written a good many songs and sketches in collaboration with Esmé Wynne, as well as a couple of unfinished novels and some lyrics for the tunes of Doris Joel and Max Darewski. One of the latter, at least, was in the classic war-song mould of the time:
‘When you come home on leave I’ll still be waiting
Waiting to greet you with a smile
To charm away your pain
And make you feel again
That life is going to be worth while.’
‘Good old pot-boiling words,’ said Noël, recalling them almost fifty years later, ‘but what of it?’
Another of Coward’s lyrics, for a song entitled ‘Peter Pan’ with music by Doris Joel, found its way into an André Charlot ‘musical entertainment’ called Tails Up which opened at the Comedy Theatre in June of that year. Until this minor triumph Noël’s relations with Charlot, the leading impresario of the time, had been disastrous. After trying unsuccessfully to get an audition with him on a number of occasions, Noël struck up a casual friendship with Beatrice Lillie, who was already working with Gertrude Lawrence in the Charlot revues. He then persuaded Miss Lillie to take him into Charlot’s office, where sitting at a piano one day in 1917, Noël rapidly sang and played his way through his ‘Forbidden Fruit’. Charlot listened in silence, bade him a polite farewell, and then rounded on Bea: ‘How dare you,’ he demanded, ‘bring that untalented young man into my office? He plays the piano badly and sings worse. Kindly do not waste my time with people like that ever again.’ By the time of Tails Up, though Charlot had relented to the extent of buying Noël’s lyrics, he still refused to allow him to sing them.
Noël also managed to sell a few magazine stories at this time and through the help of Max Darewski, he landed a three-year contract to write lyrics for the music-publishing company then run in the Charing Cross Road by Max’s brother Herman. For this he got fifty pounds the first year, seventy-five the second, and a hundred the third; but the firm were deeply uninterested in the work that Coward produced for them in the first few months, and after a while Noël stopped going to their offices at all, except of course to collect the annual cheque which was paid promptly and charmingly, without any feeling of rancour, at the end of December. Some time after this Darewski’s business went bankrupt, ‘a fact,’ noted Noël ungratefully, ‘that has never altogether astonished me.’
The part of Courtney Borner in Scandal was limited to two brief scenes in one of which Noël was got up, inexplicably, as Sir Walter Raleigh; perhaps because his part was not exactly crucial to this marital drama, Noël rapidly got bored of the play and its production, and his behaviour around the theatre left a good deal to be desired. His stock was particularly low among the middle-aged ‘character’ ladies in the cast, one of whom complained with a certain amount of justification that Noël made clucking noises behind her back whenever she appeared on the stage; he was also unwise enough to remark in the hearing of a comedienne called Gladys Ffolliot that her dog smelt. A plea of truth did not help, and Noël soon discovered that his only friends in the company were Kyrle Bellew and Bourchier himself. Not long after they opened at the Strand, it was Bourchier who sent for Noël and warned him that as he was about to be sacked by the management, it might save a good deal of humiliation for Noël if he were to shoot off a letter of resignation that night. This Coward did, explaining with a certain evil delight to Grossmith and Laurillard that ‘owing to the peculiar behaviour of the old ladies in the cast’ he would have to give a fortnight’s notice. The management, however, went one better, and when Noël arrived at the stage door the next evening he was given the rest of his salary and just half-an-hour to get his things out of the dressing-room.
At the very end of 1918 Noël was out of work and there was no immediate sign of anything on offer; there was, however, The Last Trick, a melodrama about revenge in four acts which he had written inside a week and now took to Gilbert Miller, the impresario who had cast him in The Saving Grace a year earlier. Miller liked the play, recognized in the nineteen-year-old Coward a ‘man of many talents, over-sure of himself but a very hard worker’ and agreed to take the play back with him to New York, to see if he could arrange for its production. Miller also taught Noël a few basic rules of playwriting that he’d learnt from months in Paris studying the well-made plays of Sardou and his contemporaries, remarking that though Coward’s dialogue was fairly good the construction of his play was not; ‘the construction of a play,’ said Miller, passing on some invaluable advice that had once been given to his father Henry, ‘i
s as important as the foundation of a house – whereas the dialogue, however good, can only be considered as interior decoration.’ Coward never forgot this, and forced himself to become an architect as well as a decorator of plays.
After his ignominious departure from Scandal, Noël failed to get back into the theatre until the August of 1919, eight months later. In the meantime, boosted by the enthusiasms of Gilbert Miller, he wrote three more plays in rapid succession of which only the third, The Rat Trap, survived to achieve production, albeit eight years later and then only for twelve performances at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead. The play was first published in 1924, with a dedication to ‘the dear memory of Meggie Albanesi’. In the introduction to the third volume of his Play Parade, Coward described it as ‘my first attempt at serious playwriting. As such it is not without merit. There is some excruciatingly sophisticated dialogue in the first act of which, at the time, I was inordinately proud. From the point of view of construction it is not very good except for the two principal quarrel scenes ... I think it will only be interesting as a play to ardent students of my work, of which I hope there are several.’
The play does have moments worthy of a later Coward, and a few characteristic traits are already recognizable, such as the passion for proper names; but by far the most important thing about The Rat Trap was that when Coward had finished it he felt, ‘for the first time, with genuine conviction, that I really could write plays.’
But Noël still had ambitions to be a songwriter as well as a playwright and one frequent visitor to the room where he worked in Ebury Street was Lynden Tyson:
‘I used to go into the front room where the grand piano was, and hear him banging away until he’d gradually built up a tune; then he’d say to Esmé “Give me words to fit in with that” and Esmé would write down a lot of tripe but it fitted in with the tune and Noël would build on that. He never could put music on to paper, so he’d go off round the corner to someone who would transcribe it for him while he played; he could read music then, though he hadn’t much of a voice for it. As an actor he was up against it because he was very young and provocative, and the older stage people used to give him a good bit of hell. I remember him saying to me once “They don’t like me; they’ve got no time for me, but I’ll have them eating out of my hands before I’ve finished”.’
At this time the generosity of the Darewskis and the occasional magazine sales were enough to keep Noël in clothes and to help out with the rent; his stories, no longer concerned with the whimsies of Pan, ‘dealt almost exclusively with the most lurid types; tarts, pimps, sinister courtesans and cynical adulterers whirled across my pages in great profusion.’ When he wasn’t working he spent as many week-ends as possible at large country-houses, enjoying every moment of an atmosphere that was to him quite new and attractively wealthy. He also made a good many new friends, among them Lorn Macnaughtan; she later became Lorn Loraine and for forty-four years until her death in November 1967, she remained Noël’s secretary, representative and most devoted ally.
As his social contacts widened, Noël moved from his attic room at 111, Ebury Street to a larger room on the top floor; there he would give tea parties for his friends, most of whom tended to mistake his father for the butler, understandably enough since it was he who served the tea. Gertrude Lawrence reappeared in Noël’s life at about this time, and Harold French recalls them dancing together, impeccably, at a place called Martan’s which had opened in Old Bond Street just after the war; ‘but,’ said French, ‘as early as this we were in slight awe of Noël – he had a very serious application to work which the rest of us failed to share; he was always very friendly, yet somehow slightly removed from the rest of us actors.’
And all the time, in the background, encouraging and helping Noël was his mother; ‘a small, very gentle woman,’ said Lynden Tyson, ‘extremely kind and so unlike the usual stage mother.’
In the August of 1919 Nigel Playfair offered Noël the part of ‘Ralph’ in a production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle with which he was opening the sixth autumn season at the Birmingham Repertory theatre. Noël accepted Playfair’s offer delightedly and went into rehearsal with Betty Chester, later a Co-Optimist and one of his greatest friends. But this production got off to a bad start, and failed to improve later; there was not much time before rehearsals began so Playfair suggested that Miss Chester and Noël should spend the few days staying in Oxford where they could learn their lines rapidly and in peace and quiet. All might have been well had they not elected to hire a punt and to learn the script while gliding down the Cherwell; predictably, the punt capsized, and two copies of The Knight of the Burning Pestle sank rapidly to the bottom leaving Noël and Miss Chester to return shamefacedly to London with only a passing knowledge of the lines. ‘There was,’ said Noël later, ‘a quality of fantasy about the whole engagement,’ possibly because of Playfair’s rigid loyalty to the Elizabethan atmosphere of the original. To signal the interval, it was decided that a performing bear should climb up a pole; Maud Gill was thus inserted into a bearskin (the real animal being unavailable) and forced to sit on the pole while Noël and Miss Chester, whose aim was faultless, hurled buns into her mouth. For all that, Coward did not really enjoy The Knight of the Burning Pestle much; he failed to understand the play in particular or Elizabethan comedy technique in general, and felt that Playfair, who in his view ‘directed with more elfishness than authority’, had not really done quite enough to help his own performance: ‘I mouthed and postured my way through it with little conviction and no sense of period’ – a self-analytical verdict with which most of the critics agreed.
The three weeks in Birmingham were however considerably enlivened by a cable from Gilbert Miller, announcing that an American producer called Al Woods would pay five hundred dollars for an option on The Last Trick. Astounded, pleased and considerably richer, Noël returned to London where he and his mother stood gloatingly at the counter of a bank in the City while the money was counted out to them. Feeling for the first time that he really could afford to spend, Noël dined at the Ivy, went to innumerable theatres with Albanesi or Gertrude Lawrence, and ordered a number of backless waistcoats of the kind currently made fashionable by the novelist Michael Arlen, one of a growing collection of writers and painters and actors whom Noël could now call his friends.
When 1919 was nearly over, Gilbert Miller returned from America, sent for Noël, and continued the lesson in playwriting that he had begun some months earlier. This time he also gave Noël the title and plot outline of a light comedy that he wanted written for Charles Hawtrey. ‘I was then,’ said Noël, ‘as I am now, extremely chary of writing anything based upon somebody else’s idea.’ But, hardly in a position to refuse, he had I’ll Leave It To You completed within three days; it was an amiable, innocuous, deeply unpretentious little comedy and Miller was fairly pleased with it, though not as entranced as was Noël himself. After negotiating a few alterations Miller returned to America having promised that he would stage it for a trial production at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester during the following April.
Noël, without any work in the meantime, was not best pleased by the delay; but he had at least the foresight to make sure that one part had his own name written all over it, thus guaranteeing that when the play was eventually produced he could claim payment as actor and as author. By now it was the January of 1920 and the beginning of the decade with which Coward was to be constantly and inevitably associated.
7
1920–1921
‘I cannot think off-hand of anyone who was more intimately and turbulently connected with our theatre in the Twenties than myself.’
The decade that began for Noël with I’ll Leave It To You and ended with Bitter-Sweet did not, theatrically, get off to a very good start. The early Twenties were bleak and unproductive years for plays and the beginning of 1920 saw the London stage moving in no recognizable direction, though undoubtedly the days of the actor-managers were numbered. ‘We
have nobody,’ remarked Sir John Martin-Harvey sourly, ‘who will sacrifice himself for the benefit of the higher drama in London by maintaining on his own shoulders the great traditions of the past.’
For Coward the decade was to be a highly productive and tremendously successful one, though he went into it with nothing certain beyond the April production of I’ll Leave It To You in Manchester. In retrospect, it is tempting to see in Noël the spirit of the Twenties; in fact they were simply the first ten years of his adult working life, though to get them into that perspective would take him another quarter of a century:
‘Between 1920 and 1930 I achieved a great deal of what I had set out to achieve, and a great deal that I had not. I had not, for instance, envisaged in those early days of the Twenties that before the decade was over I would be laid low by a serious nervous breakdown, recover from it, and return to London to be booed off the stage and spat at in the streets. Nor did I imagine, faced by this unmannerly disaster, that only a few months would ensue before I would be back again, steadier and a great deal more triumphant than before.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 8
