But before they moved in, and before Coward had really found the time to think in general terms about what to do and where to go next, Basil Dean came up with a new offer; he wanted Noël to appear as Lewis Dodd in his production of Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph at the New Theatre. Coward was not keen; he was still very tired, it was a long and potentially unrewarding part, and in any case he could only play it for a month prior to leaving for New York and the production of This Was A Man. In spite of that Basil Dean and Edna Best, who was to play Tessa, managed to bully Noël into creating the part. A few days later, lunching in the Ivy, Coward met John Gielgud and told him what he had agreed to do next. Gielgud replied that he would be very good as Lewis Dodd, and the two men parted. It was not until some weeks later that Coward discovered Basil Dean had originally promised the part to Gielgud, who until that meeting in the Ivy, still thought it was his. In the event Gielgud agreed to take over the part when Coward went to America, since by this time following Noël was nothing new to him, and the part of Lewis Dodd seemed too good to miss even at secondhand.
In the meantime Easy Virtue was coming to the end of its run after nearly five months at the Duke of York’s because Jane Cowl wanted to go home to New York. When this was publicized Mrs Patrick Campbell wrote to Noël asking if she could play the part since she was, she said, badly in need of work. It had been decided however that the play should close, because business by then had begun to get a little shaky anyway; but Mrs Campbell was not pleased. ‘All Noël Coward’s characters,’ she remarked at a party soon afterwards, ‘talk like typewriters.’
To replace Easy Virtue, Dean transferred The Queen Was in The Parlour from the St Martin’s, and there was a suggestion that the Duke of York’s should continue in this way to be a permanent Noël Coward theatre. No one seems to have doubted then that there would always be a Coward play in the West End capable of filling it, and his career as a playwright had moved at such a rate that already he was being revived: a few months before his twenty-seventh birthday the ‘Q’ Theatre resuscitated his first produced play I’ll Leave It To You.
Abroad, The Vortex and Fallen Angels were running side by side in Berlin, though in The Hague performances of the latter play were banned by the city’s Burgomaster on the grounds that it was ‘obnoxious and below the standards of the Dutch Theatre’. Even without such drastic reaction from overseas, Noël remained good copy for the gossip-columns:
‘He is still the same simple-hearted cheery boy he was when he got his first job in a revue chorus (sic) ... unlike the other successful moderns, Noël has not taken a luxurious flat in Mayfair ... he still lives at home with his people, of whom he is very fond ... he will tell you with pride that whatever success he may have gained he owes entirely to his little mother, his greatest pal, who goes everywhere with him. When he was a small boy, she was the only one to recognize the spark of genius in Noël.’
But Coward was to be seen from time to time out of his mother’s company, usually with Jack Wilson though on one occasion in a theatre bar talking to a girl described in all seriousness as, ‘very modem, favouring the Eton crop and long ear-rings, and recently returned from the Antipodes.’ The item was headed, improbably, ‘Noël Coward to Wed?’
Just before Noël went into rehearsal for The Constant Nymph, Michael Balcon announced that his thriving Gainsborough Pictures would be the first to film a Coward play as they had bought the rights to Easy Virtue. Balcon was delighted: ‘British production,’ he said, ‘has been reproached with making films on American lines, with having failed to develop a national characteristic as the Germans have done. Easy Virtue is the answer: a country-house play with county people ... the future of the cinema lies in the hands of the young writers and Mr Coward, as one of the most brilliant of them all, is a notable newcomer to British films.’
For The Constant Nymph, which Basil Dean himself had adapted from Margaret Kennedy’s best-selling novel about the Sanger family, Noël was required to grow his hair long, wear glasses and ill-fitting suits, smoke a pipe and generally to behave on the stage as he never had before. The part of Lewis Dodd demanded more of him as an actor, since it was less like him as a man, than anything he had ever played in the theatre and it is fair to say that he hated every single moment of it. Dean was determined to get him away from the ‘Noël Coward mannerisms’ that had already become over-familiar to London audiences: the result was not without difficulties for Noël, who had never smoked a pipe or worn his hair long in his life, and who consequently spent a fair amount of rehearsal time setting fire to his hair along with the tobacco. Asked why he had agreed to play the part, Noël told the Daily Express: ‘Because I want to see if I am any good as an actor in other people’s plays.’ He hadn’t acted in a play by any other author since Polly With A Past in 1921, and in return for getting him to do so now, Dean had to agree to act in a play of Noël’s at some future date. Coward did not hold him to that promise.
At the end of a long and tough rehearsal period in which Noël threatened to give up the part roughly three times a week (with Gielgud constantly standing by to take over at a moment’s notice), Mrs Patrick Campbell rang up and begged for dress-rehearsal tickets since, she said, she was now a poor, lonely, unwanted old woman who couldn’t afford to buy them for the first night. She arrived at the final run-through slightly late, bearing in her arms her small Pekinese which yapped throughout.
The next morning, only hours before the first night, she rang Noël again with the news that she had enjoyed the play greatly and thought Edna Best quite good. As for Noël himself though, she told him that he was entirely miscast for Lewis Dodd, that he lacked the necessary glamour and should anyway be wearing a beard.
Unencouraged by the views of Mrs Patrick Campbell, Noël staggered through a mechanically difficult opening night involving innumerable scenes and at least three quick-changes from sports clothes to full evening dress and back. The play took nearly three and a half hours to perform but the reviews next morning were excellent for the play, for Edna Best, and for Noël. Even his old enemy, Hannen Swaffer, was forced to conclude:
‘Noël turns his face against the back wall, drops his voice and does everything that would make David Garrick very very angry, yet by sheer triumph of personality he holds up every scene in which he appears. You may like his plays or you may not, but this tribute you must pay him – there has been in our memory no stage personality who has achieved such success in so many branches of his art as this youth of twenty-six.’
After the first night, The Constant Nymph became technically easier to play, though at the end of the third performance the mood of Edna Best’s tragic death on stage was shattered by a broken window-cord. Noël, having lifted her on to the bed, was supposed to fling up the window and utter the last line: ‘Tessa’s got away; she’s safe; she’s dead.’ On this occasion, as the window crashed back on to his fingers, it became ‘Tessa’s got away; she’s safe; she’s – ow!’ Whereupon the dead Tessa sat bolt upright on the bed and the curtain fell amid hysterical audience laughter. After that all went well for about a fortnight, but Noël did not complete the month that he had agreed to play Lewis Dodd; early in the third week his nerves, which had been considerably strained by the frenetic work of the past two years, finally snapped and he broke down. He played one entire performance in floods of uncontrollable tears to the bemused horror of cast and audience alike, and was then injected with a minute amount of strychnine by a doctor who ordered him to bed for a week in severe isolation. John Gielgud, who was rehearsing to follow Coward into the part a week later, took over at the matinée on the day after Noël’s collapse. He, too, was unhappy in the role, hampered again in his interpretation by the memory of how Noël had spoken the lines, and not pleased by the fact that throughout the twelve months he played the part, photographs of Coward were left hanging in the lobby of the New Theatre.
Gielgud remembers that he imitated Noël terribly: ‘It was the best thing to do since The Vortex and
The Constant Nymph were his kind of plays. But following him made me very nervous, and I think it delayed me in finding a style of my own. When you start as an actor, though, you do need a model, and Noël was mine; he knew how to hold the stage, and I felt he was a great star even then.’
A week after his collapse Noël, feeling well enough to ignore the advice of his doctor, caught the first boat to New York.
12
1926–1928
I can hardly wait
Till I see the great
Open Spaces,
My loving friends will not be there,
I’m so sick of their
God-damned faces,
Because I’m world weary, world weary,
Tired of all these jumping jacks,
I want to get right back to nature and relax.
In October 1926, while Noël was on his way to New York, the new Raymond Massey management at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead staged a rather belated production of his first serious play, The Rat Trap. Written eight years earlier, this was the account of marital disaster in a novelist’s household which Gilbert Miller had tried without success to sell in New York before suggesting that Noël might have better luck with the plot of I’ll Leave It To You. But if the Hampstead theatre hoped to repeat the success they’d had with Coward’s The Vortex a few seasons earlier they were severely disappointed. In spite of a distinguished cast led by Robert Harris and Massey himself together with his future wife Adrianne Allen, and some intermittently witty lines, the production lasted a meagre twelve performances and has seldom been professionally performed since.
Arriving in New York, and believing that the nervous breakdown had departed as rapidly as it had arrived a fortnight earlier, leaving no tangible after-effects beyond a general feeling of physical and mental exhaustion, Noël began to cast the American production of This Was A Man. Though Lord Cromer had deemed this unsuitable for the consumption of English audiences, there could be no objection to its appearance in New York, where the conditions governing the presentation of plays related to the normal laws of libel and obscenity rather than to the arbitrary moral scruples of any single official – a system that England was only to adopt some forty years later. Francine Larrimore was cast as Carol, more for the power of her name at the box office than for her suitability, which was dubious; supporting her were Auriol Lee and two stalwarts from the brigade of English gentlemen, Nigel Bruce and A. E. Matthews. Rehearsals, under Basil Dean’s direction, went badly; Matty remembered being constantly uneasy, particularly at the dress rehearsal when Dean kept shouting ‘Louder and funnier, Matthews’. Miss Larrimore was efficient but apparently miscast, and Noël dismissed the whole thing as ‘that dreariest of dreary productions’, being inclined to put the blame for its failure squarely on to Basil Dean: ‘if the writing of This Was A Man was slow, the production was practically stationary. The second-act dinner scene between Francine Larrimore and Nigel Bruce made Parsifal in its entirety seem like a quick-fire vaudeville sketch.’
The first night audience at the Klaw Theatre in New York, presided over in the stage box by Noël, Jack Wilson and Gladys Calthrop (who had done the sets), was scarcely more enthusiastic and during the evening a crowded, fashionable auditorium gradually thinned out until after the second interval only a few small bands of the faithful remained dotted about the stalls. Talking to a reporter just before the opening night about the English ban on the play, Noël had said, ‘I shall in future concentrate on New York where I am taken seriously as a serious writer, whereas in England people think I am out for salacious sensations. I shall from time to time write a pleasant little trifle for London.’ The difficulty with this play was that it was neither one thing nor the other; serious perhaps in its intent, but essentially trifling in its execution, it lasted in New York for only thirty-one performances.
Noël, who had not been in exactly rude health when he arrived in New York, did not improve with the failure of This Was A Man; for a while he stayed in the city, where ‘melancholia enveloped me like a thick cloud, blotting out the pleasure and the colour from everything’. Then, in an attempt to escape it, he took Jack Wilson with him for a fortnight’s holiday in the Virginia mountains at White Sulphur Springs. But even there, far from anywhere familiar, he was unable to rest; by now he was so keyed up that he could not begin to cope with the meaning of a holiday, and instead wrote an eighteenth-century joke called The Marquise, a play which he had long promised for Marie Tempest. Unable to face the English winter or the effort of casting and rehearsing another new comedy, he merely sent the script back to London with a few production notes and decided to travel on to Hong Kong, keeping Jack with him as far as San Francisco.
Coward’s hope was that time, together with the sight of new landscapes and a complete escape from routine and friends, would fend off the absolute mental and nervous breakdown that he now felt to be imminent. Leaving Jack unwillingly on the quayside at San Francisco, Noël sailed for China aboard the S.S. President Pierce on Christmas Day 1926. He only actually got as far as Honolulu before the breakdown caught up with him.
In the week that it then took to reach Hawaii from the West Coast, Noël got progressively worse; all the tension and the sweat of the last two years, which had been suppressed by the sheer force of continuous work, began to overtake him at last. In the throes of a severe nervous breakdown he became almost suicidally gloomy, was unable to sleep, and felt convinced that he was already spent – that at just twenty-seven he would never be able to write another word. But the illness was not purely mental; by the time the President Pierce docked in Honolulu, Noël’s temperature ran to a hundred and three. On arrival, he was met by the chauffeured car of the Walter Dillinghams, one of the five patrician families who controlled through their land and their fortunes the social life of the islands before Hawaii achieved statehood, and who remain to this day a considerable influence on the political and economic shape of the fiftieth state. Mrs Walter Dillingham had planned a large and celebratory lunch to welcome Noël at her home on Diamond Head; in the middle of it the collapse that he’d been fighting for about six weeks finally arrived, and Noël went out cold.
When he woke up some hours later in a bed at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki, Honolulu’s beach resort, a doctor was telling him that he had a slight fever. The ‘slight fever’ persisted for about a week, at the end of which Noël was strong enough to visit the doctor’s surgery for a complete check-up. Finding no other visible cause for the fever, the doctor ultimately settled for Noël’s long-healed tubercular scar and diagnosed that he had again, this time far more seriously, contracted tuberculosis. It was an alarming possibility; but Noël, who remembered the symptoms from his visits to Ned Lathom in Davos, knew enough about the disease to realize that in all probability he didn’t have it. Still, he had something, and it was patently going to take a long time to go away even though his temperature was already back to near-normal.
The Dillinghams offered Noël their ranch at Mokuleia on the other side of the island, complete with its French caretaker, for as long as he wanted to stay there and recuperate. He stayed for about six weeks, untroubled by visitors or indeed anybody except the caretaker and his wife. He swam, slept and read, resolutely refusing to work though a tune did occur to him as he lay one morning on the beach; he did nothing about it at the time, but it stayed in the back of his mind until nearly a year later when it emerged as ‘A Room With A View’.
He also used the time to reflect, to realize that he had tried to do too much too quickly, and to swear that in the future he would pace himself more carefully, doing less and ceasing to be the instant, adaptable, all-singing, all-joking, all-talented Noël Coward, available, neatly dressed and carefully rehearsed for all occasions. Instead he would do only what he wanted to do, and that with more care and selectivity.
At last, though, the loneliness combined with a certain yearning for home and his mother became too much for Noël; by now fully recovered and burnt black by the sun, he
returned to Honolulu from where he sailed back to the mainland and then travelled home to England, collecting Jack and Gladys in New York on the way.
Meanwhile, at the Criterion Theatre in London, Marie Tempest had opened in The Marquise; the production had been rushed into rehearsal when another vehicle for Miss Tempest failed to run, but she wrote reassuringly to Noël in America: ‘I may tell you that no library, picture gallery, antique furniture or silver shop has been overlooked to have everything period and correct ... Your writing of the play is, to me amazing ... I cannot tell you how much I love it all.’ With her in the cast were her husband, William Graham-Browne who also directed, Frank Cellier, Robert Harris and a youthful Godfrey Winn. Press reaction to this ‘boulevard farce in picturesque dress’ had been largely favourable; ‘amusing and well-constructed’ was the general feeling, and thanks presumably to the expertise and enchantment of Miss Tempest the critics failed to notice that the The Marquise was in fact a slight domestic comedy with an unwieldy plot set in a curiously incongruous period. As a dramatist, Noël moved his career neither forward nor backward with The Marquise, but found a way of marking time pleasantly, innocuously and profitably enough, while (as Desmond MacCarthy noted) the success on this occasion belonged to Miss Tempest.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 16
