Early in 1929 Noël too wrote an introduction, one of the first of dozens that he was to pen over the years; this was to Constance Collier’s autobiographical Harlequinade, and it ignored a bitter quarrel they’d been through a few seasons earlier when Miss Collier had wanted to play in Easy Virtue. Noël managed, in paying tribute to Miss Collier’s character, to pinpoint the qualities that he admired in and demanded of an actress: ‘She is one of the few people I know who has concentrated heart and soul on her job and who has never for an instant wished for any laurels other than those legitimately earned in her profession ... Nor has she ever doubted that for her as for all of us who belong, the theatre is the most adventurous, exciting and glamorous life in the world.’
In spite of the nightly demands of This Year of Grace! and a large amount of socializing in and around New York, Noël found time that winter to complete Bitter-Sweet. Alfred Lunt suggested the title, and the rest of the music progressed smoothly once the main tune, ‘I’ll See You Again’, had established itself firmly in Noël’s mind during a traffic jam on the way home from the theatre. His first idea about Sari – the character who starts the operetta as a dowager Marchioness in London and then, in a flashback to the Vienna of 1880, drops fifty years to become the tragic romantic heroine who loses her lover in a duel – had been that Gertrude Lawrence should play it; but in New York during the winter both he and she came to realize that her voice was not strong enough or operatic enough to carry so lengthy and demanding a role as a singer. So Coward cabled Cochran in London, asking him to find a theatre and also to approach Evelyn Laye with a view to her playing Sari. But Miss Laye was not at that moment best pleased with the Cochran management. Her marriage to Sonnie Hale had recently broken up, according to rumour, because of his devotion to Jessie Matthews whom he later married; and it was after all Cochran himself who had just presented Miss Matthews and Mr Hale together as the co-stars of Wake Up and Dream. In a mood of some bitterness Miss Laye turned down Cochran’s offer, and Bitter-Sweet was still without a leading lady.
Then, shortly before Coward was due to leave New York, he literally ran into the American actress Peggy Wood in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. Alec Woollcott had suggested that she might be right for the part of Sari; Noël rapidly auditioned her in his studio apartment at the Hôtel des Artistes, and within a matter of days she had signed the contract to play it in London, though Cochran was to have severe doubts about her looks and her faint American accent. A few days later Noël returned to London, leaving Bea Lillie to take This Year of Grace! on to Philadelphia with Billy Milton as his replacement, and Bitter-Sweet went into rehearsal on the stage of the Scala Theatre at the end of May 1929. It was, wrote Noël afterwards, ‘a musical that gave me more complete satisfaction than anything else I had yet written. Not especially on account of its dialogue, or its lyrics, or its music, or its production but as a whole. In the first place, it achieved and sustained the original mood of its conception more satisfactorily than a great deal of my other work. And in the second place, that particular mood of semi-nostalgic sentiment, when well done, invariably affects me very pleasantly. In Bitter-Sweet it did seem to me to be well done, and I felt accordingly very happy about it.’
Noël’s first venture into the world of operetta was a lavish return to the Viennese past in three acts and six scenes, and its score represents Coward at his closest to Ivor Novello, with lilting, unashamedly sentimental numbers like ‘Zigeuner’ and ‘If Love Were All’ as well as the classic ‘I’ll See You Again’ which over the years proved to be one of the greatest song hits he ever had. Not surprisingly, it retains a very special place in his musical affections: ‘Brass bands have blared it, string orchestras have swooned it, Palm Court quartettes have murdered it, barrel organs have ground it out in London squares and swing bands have tortured it beyond recognition ... and I am still very fond of it and very proud of it.’
In the gloom that followed the General Strike, Coward had decided the time was right for a little romantic escapism and Bitter-Sweet was just that. It is true that in numbers like ‘Ladies of the Town’ and ‘Green Carnation’ there were signs of a wittier, more pointed and less schmalz-ridden musical, but by and large he seemed happy to surrender himself to the charm and the emotion that had filled Daly’s so successfully for so many years; if Bitter-Sweet was not one of the original tales from the Vienna Woods, then it was a very passable imitation.
With Peggy Wood engaged, the rest of the characters proved easier to cast; Ivy St Helier was playing the part of the love-lorn diseuse, Manon la Crevette, which Noël had written with his old friend in mind, and George Metaxa (who had only recently abandoned a promising career in the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture for the comparative insecurity of the stage) was cast as the music teacher Carl Linden. A young Robert Newton played Sari’s priggish fiancé, and Alan Napier turned up as the Marquis whom she ultimately married. Cochran left Coward totally in charge of the production after an initial squabble over who should design the sets; Noël had wanted Gladys Calthrop to do them all, but Cochran insisted reasonably enough that if the second act, which took place in the Vienna café, was to stand apart from the English scenes before and after, it should be designed by a different artist. Accordingly he brought in Ernst Stern, who had done the sets for Reinhardt’s production of The Miracle, to design the second act while Gladys did the first and third. Expert help was also sought from Tilly Losch, who came in to choreograph one of the dance sequences.
In rehearsal, Coward managed a company of nearly a hundred people, among them Sean O’Casey’s future wife Eileen Carey, with tact and efficiency; Billy Milton, who had taken over from Coward in the New York production of This Year of Grace, now returned to London to play Vincent Howard, the young lover at the beginning of Bitter-Sweet. Coward’s instructions at rehearsal are with him to this day: ‘Play it very quickly, very clearly – and don’t give them a chance to think.’ Milton remembers Coward in rehearsal as kindly but somewhat distant ‘like visiting royalty, gracious, lofty and always looking as though he were about to bestow some tremendous honour on one of the company’. One morning Ivy St Helier, having a little trouble with her part, heard a voice from the back of the dress-circle reminding her of something she had told Coward in a Manchester Hotel room twelve years earlier: ‘Never apologize to an audience!’
A great deal was at stake here – not only in terms of the tens of thousands of pounds that Cochran was spending on Bitter-Sweet but also because this was Coward’s first major work as a composer and the first big show for which he alone could be held totally responsible as writer, composer, lyricist and director. By the nature of revue, This Year of Grace! had been a far more fragmentary affair. With Elsie April, Geraldo and Cochran’s resident orchestrator, de Orellana, looking after the notation of the music, rehearsals went remarkably smoothly; both Peggy Wood and Ivy St Helier had effective if highly emotional moments which they worked hard and carefully to bring to life, and when Cochran came to the final rehearsal in London he was incoherent with joy at the effectiveness of it all. That run-through was, decided Noël later, the most exciting performance of Bitter-Sweet that the cast ever achieved; as it finished Cochran found his voice, ‘I would not,’ he told the company, ‘part with my rights in this show for a million pounds.’
Again Noël decided to use Manchester for a fortnight’s try-out before bringing Bitter-Sweet into His Majesty’s Theatre in London, and so its first public performance was at the Palace on July 2nd 1929. A few hours before it, Coward sent Cochran a telegram:
‘DEAR COCKY I HOPE THAT TONIGHT WILL IN SOME SMALL MEASURE JUSTIFY YOUR TOUCHING AND AMAZING FAITH IN ME. WITH MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE I WISH YOU SUCCESS. YOURS AFFECTIONATELY NOËL COWARD.’
Cochran’s amazing faith was indeed justified. The opening of Bitter-Sweet proved to be a riotous success and the reaction from both audience and press in Manchester, where on opening night they actually stood on their seats to cheer it, made the London opening ten days lat
er seem something of an anti-climax.
Where Manchester had been lyrical in its praise, London was grudging; after a glittering first night, attended by Prince George, Lilian Braithwaite, Lady Mountbatten and Ivor Novello among innumerable others, the reviews were something less than ecstatic. The Times considered it ‘a rather naïve medley for a man of Mr Coward’s talents’, and though the tabloids were slightly better, awarding most of the acting honours to Ivy St Helier as Manon, the general temperature of the reviews was greatly and inexplicably cooler than for This Year of Grace! The fact that Coward had achieved a one-man English operetta unequalled in scope since the demise of Gilbert and Sullivan seemed to go largely unnoticed except by James Agate, who observed that it was a ‘thoroughly good light entertainment’.
Nevertheless Madge Garland noted at the first night, that ‘tiara’d women clapped till the seams of their gloves burst; the older generation could say with more complacency than truth that this was the way they had fallen in love, and the younger generation were wondering if in rejecting romantic love they might not have missed something’.
The journalistic estimate was that Bitter-Sweet would run at His Majesty’s for about three months; in fact it lasted there for eighteen, then transferred to the Palace Theatre and ended its run in April 1931 after playing to cut-price audiences at the Lyceum. All in all nearly a million people saw it during more than seven hundred and fifty performances in London, and counting the subsequent French and American productions as well as the film rights and song royalties, it would be fair to assume that Bitter-Sweet made its author richer over the years by something in the region of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The published script was dedicated by Noël to Cochran, ‘my help in ages past, my hope in years to come’.
14
1929–1930
‘My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered nearly enough.’
In the autumn of 1929, Cochran was planning a Broadway production of Bitter-Sweet in partnership with Archie Selwyn and Florenz Ziegfeld whose theatre it was to occupy. Once the London company with Peggy Wood were settled into His Majesty’s, Noël took ten days off and went to stay in Avignon with William Bolitho, the author of Twelve Against the Gods, whom he had first met at one of Woollcott’s levées in New York the previous winter. Then, early in September, Noël began without much energy or enthusiasm to direct the second company for New York. Again he worked at the Scala, where rehearsals that had become repetitive and unexciting beyond belief were enlivened by the enthusiasm of Evelyn Laye, who was at last playing Sari having in the meantime seen Bitter-Sweet and realized the appalling mistake she had made in turning down the original offer. Cast opposite her as Carl was an incoherent Italian tenor called Alexandro Rosati, who had been engaged by Noël largely on the strength of his operatic voice but who then had to be abandoned in Boston on the way into New York when it was realized that hardly a word he spoke could be understood by the other actors, let alone the audience.
Evelyn Laye, who had never worked with Coward before, gave a broader performance than Peggy Wood and found it an enjoyable if daunting experience: ‘in rehearsal Noël would give precious little actual direction, but he came up on the stage and acted some of the scenes with me and then suddenly I realized how they had to be played; he lit up everything and everybody around him at those rehearsals. I was always rather nervous of him offstage, and of that set of people like Gladys Calthrop and Jack Wilson who were always with him, but he was easy to work for because he seemed always so dedicated to it all. His music for Bitter-Sweet was remarkably easy to sing if you had a trained voice, and yet somehow it was unexpected. Like Noël himself, the tunes go off abruptly in a new and different direction when you are least ready for it. Like Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter, Coward demanded discipline in his music, and he is still the most terrifying man to see in an audience, because his criticisms are ruthless and invariably accurate.’
The try-out of Bitter-Sweet in Boston was fraught with technical problems, quite apart from the need to replace Rosati by Gerald Nodin at the last minute and the extra work that this entailed; on the opening night Miss Laye was to be heard hissing instructions at him under her breath on stage. Ziegfeld himself washed his hands of the whole production in a fit of pique after Noël had refused his offer of twelve lovely leggy showgirls to brighten up what he considered to be a sub-standard chorus line. But by the end of the Boston fortnight Bitter-Sweet was in presentable shape again, and the word of mouth from there ensured a glittering opening night on Broadway, with floodlights outside the theatre and tickets going for anything up to two hundred dollars a pair. A few moments before the curtain rose, Noël appeared in Evelyn Laye’s dressing-room with a small mechanical bird in a cage. ‘I wanted,’ he said, ‘to be the first to give it to you.’ Miss Laye put the songs over that night with a vitality and charm which amazed even Coward, who had only caught a glimpse of her power in rehearsal and on the road. The show went marvellously; Noël made his by now traditional curtain speech at the end, and as he spoke, wrote Laurette Taylor, ‘wreaths of laurels bearing inscriptions like “Duty”, “Perseverance” and “Believe in your Star” seemed to be hanging from either arm.’
The reviews next morning went overboard for Evelyn Laye, and were only slightly less enthusiastic about Noël’s operetta. Even the stockmarket débâcle on Wall Street did not prevent Bitter-Sweet playing to a weekly gross of fifty-five thousand dollars. It was published in an American edition with Easy Virtue, Hay Fever and a preface by Somerset Maugham who gracefully acknowledged that:
‘For us English dramatists the young generation has assumed the brisk but determined form of Mr Noël Coward. He knocked at the door with impatient knuckles, and then he rattled the handle, and then he burst in. After a moment’s stupor the older playwrights welcomed him affably enough and retired with what dignity they could muster to the shelf which with a sprightly gesture he indicated to them as their proper place ... and since there is no one now writing who has more obviously a gift for the theatre than Mr Noël Coward, nor more influence with young writers, it is probably his inclination and practice that will be responsible for the manner in which plays will be written during the next thirty years.’
Other writers, however, were less enthusiastic about Coward’s talents. T. S. Eliot, writing at this time a Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry noted rather forlornly, ‘I doubt that Mr Coward has ever spent one hour in the study of ethics,’ and Sean O’Casey was soon to publish his Coward Codology, a scathing tripartite attack on both Noël and his admirers.
But in New York, Coward suddenly found himself in huge demand again, be it to write a musical for the Astaires or to direct and compose background music for a projected season of lavish Cochran Shakespeare. Neither plan came to anything though, and by the end of November Noël was off on his travels again. Before he left, one notice for Bitter-Sweet above all the others pleased him in that it explained and justified precisely what he had tried to do; it came from William Bolitho, the novelist with whom Noël had been staying in Avignon earlier in the year. Discussing the essence of Bitter-Sweet in the New York World, Bolitho wrote: ‘You find it faintly when you look over old letters the rats have nibbled at, one evening you don’t go out; there is a little of it, impure and odorous, in the very sound of barrel organs, in quiet squares in the evenings, puffing out in gusts that intoxicate your heart. It is all right for beasts to have no memories; but we poor humans have to be compensated.’
In England, Bitter-Sweet was still playing to huge audiences at His Majesty’s (one old lady went every Wednesday afternoon to sit entranced in the stage box clutching a bunch of violets) and early in 1930 a French adaptation, Au Temps des Valses, opened in Paris with Jane Marnac. Later in that year when Peggy Wood had to leave the London cast for a brief rest, Evelyn Laye flew back from America to take over the part of Sari. By this time the transatlantic production had closed after New York and a brief visit
to Detroit, but in England Bitter-Sweet was still doing well enough to have a new brand of marmalade named after it. Max Beerbohm, already the sage of Rapallo, returned to London briefly and while he was there Cochran commissioned him to do a portfolio of drawings of the cast called ‘Heroes and Heroines of Bitter-Sweet’, which included an uncharacteristically portrait-like sketch of Noël to whom Max took a great liking. When the drawings were published, Beerbohm added to them a note about the everlasting nature of sentimentality, something that must have prompted Coward into writing Bitter-Sweet in the first place.
‘Sentiment,’ wrote Beerbohm in 1930, ‘is out of fashion. Yet Bitter-Sweet, which is nothing if not sentimental, has not been a failure. Thus we see the things that are out of fashion do not cease to exist. Sentiment goes on unaffrighted by the roarings of the young lions and lionesses of Bloomsbury.’
Soon after Bitter-Sweet opened in New York Noël felt that the time had again come for him to travel; he caught a train from New York to Los Angeles, where he spent ten hair-raising and somehow unlikely days amid the frenzy of Hollywood, dining and gossiping with the likes of Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin until he could no longer be certain which were the film sets and which the real houses. Escaping north to San Francisco, he caught a boat to Yokohama at the beginning of a journey that was to take him half-way around the world before he arrived back at Goldenhurst six months later.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 19
