A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  The production was by Noël himself and Miss Hope-Crews, who decided that in the face of some pretty uninspired support the best thing she could do would be to overact the hell out of Judith Bliss, on the understandable theory that if she didn’t Hay Fever would reach a total standstill somewhere in the middle of Act One. For her pains she received a severe roasting from all the critics except one who couldn’t resist the temptation to head his notice ‘Hay Fever Nothing to Sneeze At’. Not altogether surprisingly, Noël’s comedy was a resounding flop.

  11

  1926

  ‘Noël Coward died here.’

  Although the American Hay Fever collapsed after about six weeks of desultory business and a note by Alec Woollcott reading ‘Noël Coward as an industry is still in its infancy’, the Broadway run of The Vortex was cast-iron and kept Noël in New York throughout the winter of 1925–6; his mother and Gladys Calthrop stayed there with him, and they were joined by John C. Wilson, a young, dark and handsome American with the looks of an early film star. Wilson had been groomed by his family to go into the stockbroking business but instead he chose to attach himself firmly to Noël, becoming first his business manager then his partner and remaining for the next twenty years his closest friend.

  While The Vortex played on to near-capacity even when Noël was off for a week with a virus infection, Easy Virtue (the second of the plays brought over to New York in partnership with Basil Dean) went into rehearsal with Dean again directing and Jane Cowl heading a large cast. Coward had written it, with Constance Collier originally in mind for the lead, immediately after Hay Fever in the autumn of 1924, and it was to be the first of his plays premièred in the United States. In both theme and form Easy Virtue is a conscious throwback to the well-made drawing-room dramas of Pinero and Maugham which Noël remembered with affection and whose form he acknowledged with gratitude. Though times had changed since the days of Pinero, Coward noted, they had not necessarily changed for the better.

  ‘The narrow-mindedness, the moral righteousness and the over-rigid social codes have disappeared, but with them has gone much that was graceful, well-behaved and endearing. It was in a mood of nostalgic regret at the decline of such conventions that I wrote Easy Virtue.’

  So far, so good; a young playwright tactfully acknowledging what he owed to the masters of the past by writing a play in their convention as a kind of valedictory salute. But it didn’t work out quite like that; precisely because things had changed since 1880, writing in 1924 Coward had to create a different sort of play, giving almost psychological reasons for attitudes which forty years earlier would have passed without question. In updating a Pinero theme for the Twenties, the rigid convention had inevitably to be broken.

  The critics unsurprisingly found the whole venture rather old-fashioned (‘an ancient whangdoodle’ in George Jean Nathan’s phrase), but Easy Virtue settled comfortably into the Empire Theatre where it ran through the winter. Noël continued to play Nicky in The Vortex and spent some enjoyable months bathed in the cosy aura of success that New York in general and Sardi’s in particular bestows on its theatrical favourites of the season; he was to be found with Jack Wilson at most of the right people’s parties, occasionally playing the piano alongside such distinguished fellow-composers as Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin who apparently worried that Coward was unable to play nearly as well as he composed: ‘Dear George Gershwin used to moan at me in genuine distress and try to force my fingers on to the right notes. As a matter of fact he showed me a few tricks that I can still do, but they are few and dreadfully far between. I can firmly but not boastfully claim that I am a better pianist than Irving Berlin, but as that superlative genius of light music is well known not to be able to play at all except in C major, I will not press the point.’

  Coward also found some old friends in Charlot’s 1926 revue, now in New York with Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Buchanan and Beatrice Lillie who sang ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ and one or two of Noël’s other compositions. Living up to the success of The Vortex and Easy Virtue, Noël bought himself a huge Rolls Royce which earned its keep with a number of publicity pictures in which Noël was to be seen clambering into the back of his chauffeur-driven limousine with a cigarette dangling from the lips and a slouch hat, looking curiously like one of the subsidiary gangsters in an Edward G. Robinson picture. The fact that Coward frequently had to clamber out again on the other side and hail a taxi, because the Rolls failed to start, went happily unrecorded by the New York press.

  After five months of The Vortex in New York, Noël and Lilian Braithwaite and most of the Broadway company set off on a road tour which included weeks in Newark, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Chicago and Cleveland. Noël found the tour deeply depressing, and indeed swore during it that he would never again play one part for more than six months, ideally three in London and three in New York. As an actor, a longer run might have seemed attractive, but as a playwright he realized it would destroy both the inclination and the energy needed to write something new. Nevertheless, this tour started off well enough, with the impetus of the play’s Broadway success, and at first the out-of-town audiences, though not as exciting to play to, were at least there in sufficient numbers to fill the theatres. Noël was travelling with his mother and Jack, Gladys having left them to become art director of Eva Le Gallienne’s newly-formed Civic Repertory Company.

  The Vortex tour remained bearable until Chicago; in that city, supposedly the best date of them all, Coward reached what he considered to be the nadir of his professional career. The Vortex was booked to play Chicago for six weeks and Noël had ordered the Rolls to be driven from New York to meet him there. They opened at the Selwyn Theatre on George Washington’s birthday, February 22nd, 1926, to a capacity audience who sat in stony silence through the jokier moments of the first act, and then fell about with laughter at the sight of Noël in his pyjamas upbraiding his mother at the play’s hitherto serious climax. Noël had only been prevented from packing it in at the end of the second act, and from telling Chicago’s theatregoers precisely what he thought of them, by Lilian who hissed in his ear the immortal words ‘Remember You Are English!’

  The season in Chicago was swiftly cut back from six weeks to two and even that seemed too long, though socially Noël enjoyed himself hugely with Iris Tree, Diana Cooper and Judith Anderson (all of whom were also playing in Chicago) on daily excursions to the local riding club. His friendship with Lady Diana was comparatively recent, and had begun on an uneasy footing after she announced to Noël at a party in London that she had not laughed once throughout The Young Idea. ‘How strange,’ mused Noël, ‘when I saw you in The Glorious Adventure I laughed all the time.’

  Coward also used his free time in Chicago to write a play called Semi-Monde which was set over a number of years at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The play was never professionally or indeed amateurly produced, perhaps because certain sexual abnormalities among the leading characters failed to convince the Lord Chamberlain that it deserved a licence; in Germany a translation of Semi-Monde by Rudolf Kommer stood a good chance of production by Max Reinhardt until the advent of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel made its theme redundant.

  When the two weeks in Chicago came to an end the company moved on to their final date, Cleveland, though not before the Master – as he was to be known in the years to come – had inscribed ‘Noël Coward Died Here’ in indelible ink on the wall of his dressing-room at the Selwyn; thirty years later the inscription was still there. After Cleveland Noël took his mother back to New York (‘the two of them are so devoted to each other,’ remarked Jane Cowl, ‘that they behave like newlyweds’) where they made plans to sail back to England together with Jack Wilson on the Olympic. New York was still besotted by Noël: ‘Coward excels at Charleston!’ exclaimed one paper, and he himself made the affection a mutual affair: ‘I had always felt,’ Noël told the New York World, ‘that if I could only make a hit in America I should feel that I had done something quite wonderful. Success is tremend
ously important to me ... I get a kick out of being recognized and feeling that I matter. Life is pleasanter now, but I always felt that success would come. I didn’t mind waiting for it and I’m not selfconscious about having achieved it.’

  Back in London with his mother and Jack and the Rolls in the spring of 1926, Noël found that he had nothing to do until the English production of Easy Virtue went into rehearsal in May. There were of course, the usual parties: ‘I don’t suppose you’d remember me,’ said an acquaintance to Noël at one of these. ‘Of course I do,’ answered Noël, using his stock reply in time of social crisis, ‘and how’s Muriel?’

  Then, as always when he could think of nothing else to do, Noël travelled; this time through the South of France and on to Sicily and Tunis. The result of the journey was a new comedy. This Was A Man, written in Palermo and dedicated to Jack Wilson; Noël himself considered it to be ‘primarily satirical and on the whole rather dull’, but when he got back to London he showed it to the ubiquitous Basil Dean who liked it enough to suggest putting it into production immediately after Easy Virtue. With this in mind, Noël sent it to the Lord Chamberlain’s office where Lord Cromer, still in residence, took an even dimmer view of This Was A Man than had its author. It was, decided Cromer, totally unsuitable for public presentation, and though the Lord Chamberlain was never obliged to give reasons for refusing to license a play, it is fair to assume that his disapproval had something to do with a scene in the last act where the husband, told that his wife has committed adultery with his best friend, merely laughs. Infidelity was not, in the official view, a laughable affair and although This Was A Man was staged in New York later in 1926, then with rather more success in Berlin in 1927 (again translated by Kommer) and finally in Paris in 1928, it remained unproduced in this country. There is no doubt that if anyone wanted to produce it in England now they could do so, though by the time official standards of morality had crumbled sufficiently to allow it, the play itself had become so out of date as to make the whole undertaking pointless.

  But Semi-Monde and then This Was A Man were not the only causes of Coward’s brush with censorship in 1926; early in May Easy Virtue started rehearsals in London with Jane Cowl and most of the original American company again under the direction of Basil Dean. When the play arrived in Manchester the local Watch Committee, while allowing the play itself, felt they could not permit so risqué a title; thus it was billed for the week as ‘A New Play in Three Acts by Noël Coward’ and played to large audiences next door to a cinema where the current attraction was shamelessly billed as Flames of Passion.

  But the Manchester Watch Committee was at most a minor irritation; Noël’s real quarrel lay with the Lord Chamberlain himself who, apart from Coward’s recent plays, had also banned such diverse classics as Six Characters In Search Of An Author, Desire Under The Elms, L’École des Cocottes and Young Woodley. Noël unburdened his fury to the Sunday Chronicle:

  ‘I protest with all the energy I can summon up after an exceptionally strenuous season against this fantastic condition of affairs. Almost any day the law courts and police courts reveal the details of some unorthodox human alliance or intrigue. Yet no one makes a shout about it. But let a variation of these same circumstances be translated to a stage play that even sets out to show the wickedness of the thing, and see what an uproar they evoke. See how the Censor will arise in his wrath to smite with his blue pencil ... what I am calling for is a freer stage but at the same time I am not advocating licence for any one to come along and produce a play whose only point is its indelicacy.... If we must have a Censor, at least let us have one that is able to discriminate between vulgarity and wit.’

  ‘A New Play in Three Acts By Noël Coward’ moved from Manchester to the Duke of York’s Theatre in London on June 9th 1926, just over six months after its first appearance in New York. In London the Coward name under the title (now permitted to revert to Easy Virtue) drew over three thousand applications for first-night tickets, and Miss Cowl took ecstatic curtain-calls amid an orgy of flowers; but the critics the next morning were again uncertain about the value of the play. The Telegraph felt that it was ‘a good piece of theatrical mechanism, unworthy of Mr Coward’s promise’, and the Daily Express, using a line that had already become a cliché where reviews of Coward were concerned, announced ‘Play from an author not yet grown up’. There remained a quality in Noël that G. B. Stern described, not intentionally unkindly, as ‘perpetually promising’.

  At the box-office business was good, helped not inconsiderably by King George V and Queen Mary who made the first of innumerable royal visits to a Coward play, and Easy Virtue ran on well into the autumn.

  Soon after the first night Noël took Jane Cowl to meet his family; it was an uneasy tea party not helped by his father who, turning to the already subdued actress, remarked, ‘Here, have a tongue sandwich: that’ll make you talk.’

  Six weeks after Easy Virtue opened, the Coward/Dean partnership put The Queen Was In The Parlour into rehearsal with Dean directing a cast headed by Madge Titheradge, Herbert Marshall and Lady Tree. This was the Ruritanian melodrama that Noël had written in the spring of 1922 when he was living with his mother in the cottage at St Mary in the Marsh. Originally titled ‘Nadya’, it was then called ‘Souvenir’ and only reached its final title during these rehearsals. Odd as it must have seemed for Coward, then considered the most modern of playwrights, to be writing about Ruritania, The Queen Was In The Parlour did in fact predate The Vortex by more than a year. It adopted the full escapist flavour of lush romantic costume drama, with characters like Nadya, Queen of Krayia, who forsook her lover for her country in a plot that would not have disgraced Novello’s King’s Rhapsody thirty years later.

  Yet Coward did not intend to parody, or even to mock, the Ruritanian form; he wrote the play, his only expedition into this limited terrain, because ‘Anthony Hope had blazed the trail and what was good enough for Anthony Hope was good enough for me. Ruritania is a dangerous country where romantic clichés lurk in every throne room but at that time I was young and eager and valiantly oblivious of them. I thought, with an arrogant naïveté at which I can now smile tolerantly, that my brisk modern mind could fill old bottles with heady new wine.’

  It couldn’t and it didn’t; but due largely to the acting of Madge Titheradge, The Queen Was In The Parlour held the St Martin’s as a modest but steady success, and with Easy Virtue still at the Duke of York’s Coward again had more than one play running in the West End. He was also writing more sketches at this time, and then there were the songs; none at this time very memorable perhaps, but still written frequently on an ad hoc basis:

  ‘I just go on with the business of living, like other people do, until a song occurs to me. It may be while I am at dinner or on a bus or even while I am having a bath. If I am anywhere near a piano I fly to it, and play the tune with one hand. That “fixes” it as a photographer would say, and I can proceed with the rest in a more leisurely way.’

  In Noël’s private life the weeks after the opening of The Queen Was In The Parlour were a time to anchor and to try to estimate his rapid, frenzied success on both sides of the Atlantic in the last twenty months. In England he had become a star with The Vortex, and the play’s success on Broadway had only served to bolster a steadily enlarging reputation when he returned to London. Added to this there was the success of On With The Dance, Fallen Angels, Hay Fever and, more recently, Easy Virtue and The Queen Was In The Parlour which though not ecstatically received had swept along on a general tide of enthusiasm for Coward and on the rather prurient hope that he might be again as outrageous as he had been in Fallen Angels. ‘Consider his dialogue,’ wrote Beverley Nichols in a 1926 Coward profile, ‘smooth, hard, swift pebbles of thought thrown disdainfully against the glass windows of the houses in which we have ensconced ourselves.’

  In short, Coward had not had a failure since before The Vortex unless one counts, as only he did, that play’s disastrous visit to Chicago. He was
now twenty-six, had formed himself with Gladys Calthrop and Jack Wilson into a limited company for tax purposes, and was financially secure if not yet hugely prosperous. In the last six years London had seen seven full-length Coward plays plus two revues; New York had seen four plays and there were three others from those years (The Rat Trap, Sirocco and This Was A Man) which had still to be staged. Apart from this enviable rate of strike as a playwright, Coward had made his name in the theatre as an actor, lyricist and composer, and in London and New York society as a generally presentable if slightly risqué wit suitable for all invitations. Like Cole Porter, already a friend and the songwriter who of all Americans came closest to Coward in the meticulous arrangement of his lyrics, Noël straddled the gap between showbusiness and the social aristocracy.

  But now, in the autumn of 1926, Coward began to realize that he faced problems unthought of before he took The Vortex to America. For no longer was he the struggling, hopeful, promising young playwright of whom critics could confidently forecast great things: now, in their eyes, he had arrived and would henceforth be judged not on his potential but on his ability to maintain a rapidly acquired position near the head of his profession, a position which was already under fire from those who had disliked the plays that gave Coward his lead in the first place.

  Though nobody was ever more confident about success than Noël, it had all happened very fast and this was really the first moment he’d had to step aside and think it all over. After The Queen Was In The Parlour the next project was to be an American production of his latest play, This Was A Man, which had been banned for England by the Lord Chamberlain. But first, while he had the time, Noël decided to abandon the cottage at Dockenfield which had never been a great success anyway, and instead to find a larger house further out in the country for himself and his family as well as those of their friends and relations who were likely to turn up at week-ends. What he found, since there was now the money to pay for it, was Goldenhurst: a farmhouse near Aldington in Kent which became Coward’s country home until some years after the second war.