A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  ‘To say that this age is degenerate and decadent is supremely ridiculous – it is no more degenerate and decadent than any other age; the only difference is that the usual conglomeration of human vices have come to the surface a little more since the war, and there is mercifully a little less hypocrisy about.

  ‘Speaking for myself I should like to say that I intend to write as honestly and sincerely as possible on any subject that I choose, and if the public do not like it they need not pay to come and see it. Theatre-going, when all is said and done, is optional.

  ‘When the self-advertising denouncers of the stage describe the English theatre as being “in a disgraceful state”, they speak a bitter truth without being aware of it – for a theatre-going public which cheerfully tolerates such false and nauseating sentimentality as has been handed out to them recently can hardly be acclaimed as judges of what is right or wrong, moral or immoral, in the theatre or out of it.’

  The success of The Vortex separated firmly and for about a quarter of a century Noël’s public persona from the reality of his private life. To the press, since it was right for his Vortex image and was having a decidedly good effect at the box-office, Coward let it be known that he was a pampered, dilettante, casual playwright prone to knocking off a play like The Vortex in a few days and then lucky enough to get it put on in London. The truth, that he was a hard-working and dedicated playwright who had persevered with his plays over a long period of time uninterrupted by anything so chancy as luck, was of little interest to interviewers in search of lively copy, and was therefore suppressed by Noël who at that time was nothing if not obliging where journalists were concerned:

  ‘I was wide open to them all, smiling and burbling bright witticisms, giving my views on this and that, discussing such problems as whether or not the modern girl would make a good mother or what I thought of current books and plays.’

  There seems to have been little doubt that The Vortex had already begun to change the climate of the London theatre from the whimsicality of Barrie to the hard-hearted cynicism of Coward; there were, however, a few dissenting voices, in particular those of a critic who noted in The Graphic that ‘the fault, dear Noël, lies not in our Ma’s but in ourselves that we are slaves to dope’, and of Hannen Swaffer who began long years of published attacks on Coward with a full page article for The People. In the course of this, Mr Swaffer deprecated the ‘most decadent plays of our time’, regretted that Coward’s ‘most promising of upbringings should have ended in this demi-mondaine disaster’ and added, sorrowfully if a trifle inconsequentially, that ‘this is not the sort of play you would like intelligent Indians to see’.

  Elsewhere though it was generally accepted that The Vortex was beyond all others the play which typified the less attractive characteristics of the mid-Twenties; it also achieved a footnote in the history of the London theatre as the first major production in which the cast took curtain calls only at the end of the play and not between each act.

  A profile of Noël at this time, combining moments of perception with a rather trusting repetition of the impression that he wished to convey came from the pen of Hesketh Pearson:

  ‘Like Wilde, Noël Coward has a good deal of the showman in him ... it takes the form of charm, plus excessive volubility. He is “charming” to everybody, and as a consequence he has a host of admirers. Also no one who can entertain folk with an endless stream of persiflage is ever likely to want for company, and Noël’s life is almost passed in a prolonged procession through applauding parties.’

  With The Vortex settled in to a long London run, Noël lent his musical talent to a couple of charity matinées and then started work almost at once on a number of new projects, among them the commission to write silent-screen titles for some films then being made by Michael Balcon at Gainsborough Studios. Difficult though it is to assign precise authorship to these, it is believed that one of Noël’s titles, introducing an evil Count in an Ivor Novello-Isabel Jeans opus called Return of the Rat read:

  THE COUNT, A MAN OF MORE CASH THAN

  CONSEQUENCE, WHO KEPT HIS HEART IN

  HIS TROUSER POCKET ALONG WITH HIS

  OTHER SMALL CHANGE.

  But film titles were not the full extent of Noël’s literary occupations at this time. He also started to work on a revue, On With The Dance, which marked the beginning of a partnership with the impresario Charles B. Cochran that was to last for the next nine years. Coward wanted the authorship of the whole revue to be in his own hands; Cochran, uncertain still about Noël’s musical gift, agreed that he should do the book and lyrics but gave the music to Philip Braham who had written some of the numbers for London Calling! In the event Noël so contrived the book that most of the music led directly into or out of his sketches, and therefore, had to be his own, allowing the long-suffering Mr Braham only three self-contained contributions. The revue starred Alice Delysia, supported by Douglas Byng and Hermione Baddeley; they were due to open at the Palace in Manchester on March 17th 1925, just three months after The Vortex transferred to the Royalty. Of the many Coward numbers in the show, one particular sextet in the revue seems to have been inspired by Noël’s memories of his childhood at the Chapel Royal School; it began ‘We’re six dirty little choirboys, with really frightful minds ...’

  Rehearsals for On With the Dance, as so often for a Cochran revue, were held at the Poland Rooms in Soho and Coward kept a careful eye on them between performances of The Vortex. Apart from his and Braham’s numbers there were also two brief ballets in the revue staged by Diaghilev’s choreographer, Leonide Massine. One of these, ‘Crescendo’, was a modernistic interlude in which Massine and his puppet-like dancers ‘jig to the tune of cocktails and jazz until, willy-nilly, they are swept up to a frenzied climax of impressionistic movement’ and it seems to have found its echo in the ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ sequence that ended Coward’s Calvalcade five years later.

  To be in Manchester for the opening of On With The Dance Noël took two nights off from The Vortex; he left the part of Nicky, after one rehearsal, in the hands of his understudy: a young, nervous but enthusiastic actor by the name of John Gielgud who had until recently been in repertory at Oxford. Prior to The Vortex Gielgud had first met Noël with Betty Chester at a party near his home in South Kensington, where he found Coward ‘dreadfully precocious and rather too keen to show off at the piano’. Later, seeing The Vortex for the first time, Gielgud found himself bowled over by it, and was delighted when Noël interviewed him at the theatre and gave him the chance to understudy. But he had not expected to be thrown into the part quite so soon:

  ‘There are few occasions more nerve-racking than playing a leading part in the absence of a principal. Before I went on that evening, some kind person knocked at my door to tell me that several people had asked for their money back because they saw the notice posted at the box-office announcing that Noël was not appearing. But audiences are extraordinarily fair and well-disposed towards young understudies, especially if the play is an interesting one, and at the end of the evening the applause was just as warm as it had been on other nights.’

  Meanwhile in Manchester all was not going so smoothly; on his arrival there Noël discovered that his name was nowhere to be found on the hoarding above the theatre. Instead, in huge neon letters were the words ‘Charles B. Cochran’s Revue’ which, considering that Noël had written three-quarters of the score, all the lyrics, all of the book, and directed the sketches as well as some of the numbers, seemed to him a slight overstatement of Cochran’s involvement. Worse was to come; Cochran had also decided that in view of the show’s inordinate length (the dress-rehearsal lasted just twenty-seven hours) the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ number would have to go. In the course of an irate confrontation in the Midland Hotel, throughout which Cochran remained draped solely in a bath towel and dripping wet, Coward managed to get his billing improved and, more important, to ensure the survival of ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ which became the revue’s only lasti
ng memory unless of course one counts the existential vision of Douglas Byng and Ernest Thesiger as two old ladies going to bed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house. ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, three verses and a refrain of rather moralistic advice, originally sung to Hermione Baddeley by Delysia, was played for the next forty years in most of the palm courts and on almost all the piers our coastlines possess; it also became a permanent part of Noël’s piano repertoire. The song already showed signs of the clipped, economical phrasing that was to become the hallmark of so many of Coward’s later compositions, and it managed to set to music the essence of the warning that he was nightly passing on to his stage mother in The Vortex:

  Poor little rich girl,

  You’re a bewitched girl,

  Better beware!

  Laughing at danger,

  Virtue a stranger,

  Better take care!

  The life you lead sets all your nerves a jangle,

  Your love affairs are in a hopeless tangle,

  Though you’re a child, dear,

  Your life’s a wild typhoon.

  In lives of leisure

  The craze for pleasure

  Steadily grows.

  Cocktails and laughter,

  But what comes after?

  Nobody knows ...

  For that song, as for ‘A Room With A View’, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, ‘Someday I’ll Find You’, ‘Mrs Worthington’, and ‘I’ll See You Again’, the royalties are still coming in rather larger cheques than for any of the other 281 that Coward has so far published.

  Further down the cast-list for On With the Dance, playing assorted waiters and passers-by, was a young actor who years later turned impresario and presented Noël in a cabaret season at the Café de Paris, Donald Neville-Willing:

  ‘Noël at the time of On With the Dance was very cryptic; he would look at us through those half-closed eyes and one never quite knew what he was thinking, though I suspected it was nothing very favourable where most of us actors were concerned.... One realized that there was something different about Noël; he knew precisely what he wanted, and was ruthless about getting it where the show was concerned. He was also a tremendous leader, in that we all tried to follow the way he dressed and talked because we knew it was fashionable. He was a very old young man: important and powerful but fantastically kind in private. In the show one always worked for him, not the audience. His approval was all that mattered. Though he was our age, he knew it all; he was the first of the bright young things...’

  It was originally planned to open On With the Dance on the Monday night in Manchester; in the event, the dress-rehearsal ran from Monday morning until a few hours before the curtain went up on Tuesday, when the show opened to rapturous if unexpected acclaim.

  Already the theatrical name of the season, Coward was now fêted accordingly; to say that all this success did not change him would be the oldest cliché in theatrical journalism, and at least partially untrue. But if ever a man was ready and prepared for success it was Noël; so far from it catching him unawares he had been conscious of his own talent since his days as a child actor, and in his view it had always been only a question of time before critics and audience alike endorsed that talent, which now, vehemently, they did. He had become a celebrity and what he enjoyed about it above all else was that it allowed him to indulge his passion for meeting other celebrities; membership of the Pen Club brought him into contact with Galsworthy, Wells and Arnold Bennett, and he was to be found at most of the literary gatherings which were then as much a feature of Bloomsbury as of Hampstead. Arriving at one of these, dressed in a suit and straight from the theatre, he discovered that everyone else present was in evening dress. Noël held up his hands for silence: ‘Now,’ he announced magnanimously, ‘I don’t want anyone to feel embarrassed.’ But because of a penetrating gift for confident though curiously not often cocky self-appraisal, success did not change Noël beyond all recognition; it merely confirmed what in him had been tentative, allowed him more freedom in what he said and in where he went, and above all released him and his family from the need to wonder ever again where the money would come from. The confidence remained unchanged, but now there was something tangible to justify it.

  10

  1925

  ‘Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.’

  If Noël himself didn’t change unrecognizably after The Vortex, people and places around him did; success altered the face of London for him. At home, he found the small room at the top of the lodging-house in Ebury Street could no longer contain him and the friends he now entertained; thus he moved to a larger room on the floor below and for some years to come, until he moved out altogether, it was true to say that as he moved up in the world he moved down in his mother’s house, so that ultimately he was occupying the whole of the first floor.

  Away from home he persevered with the parties and the rich social life of London in the mid-Twenties, but now there was one vital difference: he was there in his own right, as a celebrity, and no longer a vaguely disliked hanger-on. His immediate friends now included most of the young actors and writers in the English theatre, and Noël himself indulged a passion for celebrities which to this day has never left him. After the show at night his life centred on the Fifty-Fifty Club, then run by Constance Collier and Ivor Novello as a kind of licensed green-room; their idea had been to provide somewhere cheap for actors to meet and drink after their shows, but it soon became so fashionable that the actors themselves found it hard to prise the tables away from countless celebrity-spotters. Ultimately Novello reserved a corner table for his own especial friends and there, night after night, Noël would sit asking Constance Collier to tell him stories about the theatre of her youth. Before The Vortex she remembered him being ‘a little bitter, as if aware that he had a much better brain than many of his more successful contemporaries’. But with his own success, she said, he became gradually more gentle: ‘It made him kinder, more sympathetic.’ By now Gladys Calthrop and, when he was in England, Jeffery Amherst were Noël’s constant companions, as was Lorn Loraine who had worked for Meggie Albanesi until her death and then, during The Vortex, become Coward’s personal secretary; another close friend in these years continued to be Betty Chester of the ‘Co-Optimists’. She and Noël are remembered by Joyce Carey as ‘continually together and very noisy indeed, particularly in restaurants’.

  One friend, though, had by now disappeared almost entirely from Noël’s life: Esmé Wynne-Tyson. The days of their close companionship were at an end. This was not so much because of her marriage to Lynden, of whom Noël approved thoroughly, but rather because of her developing interest in Christian Science which gradually became the ruling factor in Esmé’s life. Noël couldn’t cope with this at all; told on one occasion by Esmé that there was really no such thing as pain, he is said to have stuck a pin into a friend’s behind and, as he let out a piercing howl, to have asked Esmé how she explained that then.

  On the principle that success breeds other successes, once The Vortex was an established hit both Hay Fever and Fallen Angels, which had previously been turned down by almost every management in London, went into rapid production; by June of 1925 Noël had all three and On With the Dance running simultaneously in the West End.

  1925 was a good year not only for Coward but for the London theatre in general: Sean O’Casey made his name in England with Juno and the Paycock, Lonsdale offered The Last of Mrs Cheyney and John Barrymore played Hamlet at the Haymarket. On the musical front Rose Marie opened at Drury Lane a week after No, No, Nanette at the Palace, while at the Empire Leicester Square, Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson staged a production of Henry VIII in which the Second Serving Man was played by Laurence Olivier.

  Fallen Angels, which went into rehearsal during April, had lain idle since the plans for it to be played by Gladys Cooper and Madge Titheradge collapsed almost a year earlier. As a play it has always seemed a faintly unsatisfactory affair, perhaps because it is cons
tructed as a vehicle for two stars on whom the whole thing depends; the second act is almost exclusively a dialogue for their two voices, while the first and third seem in a curious way to have been tacked on in order to expand into a full-length play what is essentially a revue sketch about two respectable middle-class ladies getting progressively drunker while they wait for the return of an old and common flame. The parts, in this case, are better than the play.

  Edna Best and Margaret Bannerman were originally cast as Jane and Julia, the angels of the title, but during rehearsals Miss Bannerman gave way to a nervous breakdown and had to be replaced just four days before the opening night by Tallulah Bankhead.

  Yet nothing in those somewhat fraught rehearsals or in the play’s reception on the first night prepared either author or cast for the moral indignation and fury of most reviews the following morning. For though in retrospect Fallen Angels marks a return from the near-melodrama of The Vortex to the stream of light comedies that ran through Coward’s work from I’ll Leave It To You to Nude With Violin some thirty-six years later, it happened to come in the midst of the 1925 row over ‘sex plays’ to which du Maurier had already added the weight of his disapproval. In this climate of almost hysterical morality, Fallen Angels was deplored not as a bad or even an unfunny play, which would have been a tenable if uncharitable view, but rather as ‘degenerate’, ‘vile’, ‘obscene’, ‘shocking’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘nauseating’.

  The admission that both Jane and Julia had a pre-marital affair with the same man was leapt upon as conclusive proof that Noël had this time ventured too far into the realms of degradation. Drugs yes, sex no, seems to have been the general critical opinion with regard to Coward; and one gathers it was the prospect of ladies getting drunk (and upper-middle-class ladies at that) which visited upon him the wrath of Hannen Swaffer among many other critics.