A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  These periodic voyages, almost total breaks from work and friends alike, were really the only private life Noël achieved until quite late in his life, and to get them he was having to travel further and further afield. The reason for them was a simple one; Noël had begun to take tremendous care of himself, and was the first to realize that if he wanted to carry on working at his particular rate then he would have to pace himself assiduously. ‘I am neither stupid nor scared,’ he once wrote, ‘and my sense of my own importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand my sense of my own importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about me or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.’

  One suspects that, though for most of his life he has been closely surrounded by a small band of loyal friends, Noël enjoys his own company enormously; certainly at the beginning of this voyage he was painfully aware that for the last three years he had been living in a crowd of people and events which had not really given him any time to think clearly beyond the next first night. On the boat, sailing away from San Francisco, he found that time; he also began to realize that, though he was back on top after the Sirocco fiasco, he had no way of knowing how long his success would hold out this time or, worse still, whether it was at all justified. He still could find no measuring-stick by which to assess whether his talent for playwriting, the one most important to him, was a real and lasting talent or whether it was (as most critics were suggesting then and for many years to come) a superficial gift of the glib gab which made possible rapid and early success but not the chance to develop, mature and expand as a writer. Noël simply did not know what his ability was, or where its limits lay, and he could think of nobody objective or perceptive enough to tell him.

  In one way, this journey was an attempt by Noël to assess his career and to find out for himself where he could go from here. Looking back over the recent successes on both sides of the Atlantic, he couldn’t escape the feeling that ‘most of my gift horses seemed to have bad teeth’ and that if they were to represent the height of his theatrical achievement then the accusations of superficiality would have had rather too firm a foundation in fact. In the past Noël had always been able to account for bad notices with the theory that critics were influenced by his over-rapid and apparently facile success: now, for the first time, he began to wonder if the plays had also been influenced by that same success. On the boat, as seldom elsewhere until after the war, Noël turned himself mentally inside out and began to consider himself almost objectively. For the rest of the time, as Ivor Brown has said, ‘one knows everything of what Mr Coward does and nothing of what he is’; it is possible that except on such rare occasions as this, the ignorance about himself was shared by Noël too. His total obsession with whatever work was in hand led St John Ervine to remark that ‘Coward’s entire existence has been spent in a corner of the theatre, remote from the general contacts of everyday life. I am amazed and disturbed at the slenderness of his intellectual resources ... we might well wonder whether he has ever read a great book, seen a fine picture or a notable play, listened to music of worth, observed a piece of sculpture or taken any interest in even the commonplaces of a cultured man’s life ... his political, social and religious interests are negligible or non-existent.’

  It seems unlikely that the journey around the world gave Noël a chance to catch up on all that, and one doubts whether he returned to Goldenhurst with a political, social or religious awareness that was noticeably more acute than when he left, but it was at least a beginning: this journey also gave Noël a chance to think ahead and to involve himself in issues greater and more important than the need to write a little something for the next Cochran revue. It was to supply one classic light comedy, but also a play that was both angrier and more committed to a point of view than anything else Coward ever wrote.

  On this therapeutic voyage as on the last in 1927, Noël’s first destination was Hawaii. This time he stayed only a few days, again as a guest of Walter Dillingham on Diamond Head, and they returned to the ranch at Mokuleia on the other side of the island where Noël had spent so long in convalescence on his first visit. Again Coward was overwhelmed by the already legendary hospitality of the Hawaiians, only this time he was in a fit state to enjoy it; he found time for a fish-spearing exhibition off the Oahu beaches, which were in those days comparatively unadopted by the tourist trade, and he also managed a vast amount of bathing before it was time to board the Tenyo Maru, a rather shaky steamship bound for Yokohama.

  In the eight days that it took to reach Tokyo’s maritime port from Honolulu, Noël set to work on a lengthy novel called Julian Kane which soon became so boring that he decided neither he nor any future reader would ever have the energy or the willpower to finish it. Instead he began to think about a new play, one that he had promised to write for Gertrude Lawrence as a consolation prize for not giving her the part of Sari in Bitter-Sweet. But no theme of any kind presented itself to his imagination, and all that Coward managed before the ship docked at Yokohama was the resolution never again to promise a play to anyone without first having something definite in mind.

  Arriving in Japan, Noël discovered that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had been there before him. Moreover they had arranged for him to be met by a massive official welcoming party on the quayside at Yokohama. Accordingly a launch was sent out to intercept his boat in the harbour and bring him ashore; but it pulled away from the Tenyo Maru rather too sharply with the result that the Japanese dignitaries were given their first sight of Noël flat on his face on the deck.

  From Yokohama Noël travelled less precariously overland to the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where he was to meet his old friend and travelling companion Jeffery Amherst. According to a plan the two men had formulated at Goldenhurst almost a year earlier, Amherst, who had given up his job on the New York World to travel through the South Seas, would join up with Noël in Tokyo and together these two compulsive tourists would journey on to Peking, Angkor, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Indo-China, Singapore and back home via Colombo and the Suez Canal. That, at least, was the plan. Checking in at the Imperial, Noël discovered that Jeffery would be three days late; Noël spent the time sightseeing around Tokyo, which in 1929 he found flat and tremendously ugly, ‘a sad scrap-heap of a city, rather like Wembley in the process of demolition’. Then, on the night before Jeffery was due to arrive, he went to bed early in the hope of waking up in time to greet him off the boat. But he failed to get much sleep: ‘the moment I switched out the lights, Gertie appeared in a white Molyneux dress on a terrace in the South of France and refused to go again until four in the morning, by which time Private Lives, title and all, had constructed itself. In 1923 the play would have been written and typed within a few days of my thinking of it, but in 1929 I had learned the wisdom of not welcoming a new idea too ardently, so I forced it into the back of my mind, trusting to its own integrity to emerge again later on, when it had become sufficiently set and matured.’

  The next morning Jeffery arrived, and with him Noël spent three weeks viewing Japan before they moved on through Korea and Manchuria to Peking and then Shanghai. Paradoxically, Noël was able to find absolute peace and quiet in his life only when travelling; by some curious temperamental reversal of the nerves he was at his most tranquil when moving, and he travelled not for the pleasures of leaving or arriving or returning, nor yet for those of sightseeing, but for the sheer joy of finding himself on the move again. These were the only moments in his youth and middle age when time and place were absolutely immaterial, when he felt totally relaxed, and they resulted in some of his best writing.

  The very end of 1929 found Noël and Jeffery at Mukden in Manchuria, where they celebrated the arrival of the Thirties with the understandably homesick members of the English Club before t
ravelling on by train to Shanghai. En route Noël and Jeffery kept a gramophone and a large supply of Sophie Tucker’s records in the train compartment, and left it only occasionally at stations when a local delegation would greet them with a few halting words of English. The sight of two travelling Englishmen – one an aristocrat at that – was still rare enough in many parts of the far east to warrant an effusive reception committee, and in some places Noël’s name was already vaguely familiar. Earlier, travelling by train through Korea, they had been flattered to find a huge crowd at one station and Noël was already shaking hands and launching into an impromptu speech to thank the Koreans for turning out in such force to meet him along the way when Jeffery saw out of the corner of his eye that a coffin was being unloaded from the other end of the train. It gradually became apparent that the Korean dignitaries were on the platform to meet and mourn the body of a distinguished local general.

  After they reached Shanghai Noël spent a week in the depths of influenza, followed by a further fortnight’s convalescence; wrapped in an uncharacteristically hideous flannel dressing-gown, he spent the time sketching out in some detail the three acts of Private Lives which he now considered to have matured sufficiently for the whole lot to be put on paper. The actual writing of what is perhaps his best comedy, and certainly the one which provides his safest claim to posterity, took him barely four days. He then cabled Gertrude Lawrence in New York telling her to keep the autumn of 1930 free, and put Private Lives away in his suitcase for a few more weeks before revising and typing a final draft.

  Now totally recuperated, Noël stayed on for a further week in Shanghai where he and Jeffery met and made friends with a group of young naval officers who got permission from their captain for the two men to travel as passengers aboard HMS Suffolk on the journey down river from Shanghai and on to Hong Kong. It was, for Noël, the first of countless voyages as a guest of the Royal Navy; their traditions, the routine and discipline of the ward-room, the relentless Englishness of naval officers and their habit of dressing nightly for dinner while a marine band struggled through Bitter-Sweet as a well-meant tribute to their distinguished passenger, all struck in Coward a loud chord of sentimental attraction and devotion. Apart from his deep love of the sea, he found in the permanent activity of a cruiser, so long as it did not directly involve him, precisely the kind of relaxation in transit that caused him to travel in the first place. Better than any place on earth, Noël liked being on board a well-run ship and preferably one of the Royal Navy. In the fifteen years between that first voyage to Hong Kong and the end of the second war, he managed to go to sea frequently and almost always with the navy; by way of recognition and gratitude he wrote In Which We Serve which for all its emotional patriotism perhaps captured the spirit of the wartime navy better than any other film of the period.

  At Hong Kong Noël and Jeffery reluctantly disembarked, leaving HMS Suffolk to sail on without them, and stayed for a week at the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon. There Noël typed the final draft of Private Lives and posted copies of it to Gertrude Lawrence and Jack Wilson, with instructions that they should cable him in Singapore or Colombo with their reactions. That done, he and Jeffery caught a foul and filthy French cargo boat which happened at that time to be the only vessel leaving Hong Kong for their next chosen port of call, Haiphong. After five indescribably gloomy days at sea in a ship resembling the Suffolk only in so far as it travelled reasonably successfully over the water, they docked at Haiphong in what was then Indo-China and hired a car to drive inland. Their first stop was Hanoi, then capital of the French colony of Tonkin and in the throes of a minor revolution infinitely quieter and less devastating than the war which was to tear it apart thirty-five years later. Noël and Jeffery stayed overnight in Hanoi and then, hiring another car this time complete with driver, drove south through what is now Vietnam to Saigon. It took them a week, and Noël used the time to compose without pen, paper or piano, a song which had more than a passing relevance to his current occupation:

  Mad Dogs and Englishmen

  Go out in the midday sun,

  The Japanese don’t care to.

  The Chinese wouldn’t dare to,

  Hindoos and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one.

  But Englishmen detest a siesta.

  The night before they were supposed to reach Saigon, Noël and Jeffery and their driver were staying in the rest-house of one of the villages developed along the route by the French colonizers when Jeffery became violently ill. During the night Noël took his temperature and, deciding not to tell Jeffery that it was over a hundred and four, woke the driver to make the last lap of the journey to Saigon as rapidly as possible. There Amherst was diagnosed, wrongly, as suffering from nothing more acute than a minor complaint of the liver. Nevertheless the doctor kept him in hospital in Saigon for over a month, leaving Noël on his own to explore a city that then claimed to be the Paris of the Orient. Coward found Saigon in 1930 ‘a very small town, well-arranged with several cafés and a municipal opera house, but not very like Paris’.

  After the month was up, Jeffery, though still painfully thin and drawn, seemed to be better so he was allowed to leave hospital and with Noël travelled on to Angkor and then over the Siamese border to Bangkok. From there they caught a Danish freighter to Singapore, and on board Jeffery was again taken severely ill. From the boat Noël got him into a hospital in Singapore and was already beginning to think about how he would break the news of his old friend’s death to the Amherst family in London when a local doctor diagnosed, correctly this time, that Jeffery had a bad case of amoebic dysentery which if treated correctly would keep him in hospital there for a month but no longer.

  Faced with another enforced delay, Noël wondered what to do with his time in Singapore; it didn’t take him long to find a group of English actors in the town, members of a troupe of strolling players called The Quaints whose strolls, organized by James Grant Anderson, took them all over India and the far east in the late Twenties and early Thirties. Currently they were playing at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore with a company which included Betty Hare and a twenty-two-year-old John Mills, and their repertoire was catholic enough to comprise Hamlet, Mr Cinders, When Knights Were Bold and R. C. Sherriff’s triumphant war play Journey’s End. Noël spent the whole of that month with The Quaints, first as a friend and then as an actor when (having temporarily lost one of their leading men) they persuaded him to play Stanhope for the three performances they were giving of Journey’s End. Coward, having nothing better to do while Jeffery was still in hospital, agreed to try the role and according to what was almost standard procedure for The Quaints he learnt the part in two days and went through it at just three rehearsals before the first performance.

  To an audience made up of the social élite of Singapore, who had seldom had the opportunity to see an actor of Noël’s distinction in their corner of the world, Coward played Captain Stanhope in an intense, undisciplined, neurotic performance strongly reminiscent of the way he had acted in the early days of The Vortex. The local press were keen about John Mills as Raleigh and respectful towards Noël, all save the critic on the Straits Times who found the nerve to point out that Noël was unlikely casting for the gallant, tight-lipped officer and that his portrayal of Stanhope as ‘a whimpering neurotic prig’ was not really what the author or he, the critic, had in mind. Looking back on it Noël found himself forced to agree, adding only that with a little more time he might have improved in the part.

  After Journey’s End, with Jeffery now out of hospital, Noël abandoned The Quaints to continue their tour of the far east without his services as an actor, and together again he and Jeffery set off on the penultimate stage of their journey. This took them by way of Kuala Lumpur and Penang to Colombo where they were met by Noël’s brother, Eric, who was still working as a tea planter nearby. It was, though he could hardly have been expected to realize it, the last time that Noël was to see his brother in good health. He and Jeffery spent a few days
at Eric’s bungalow in the hills above Colombo before returning to an hotel in the town itself where they found Linda and Cole Porter, also on a world tour, among the other guests. It was there that Noël received the first of about thirty telegrams from Gertrude Lawrence on the subject of Private Lives. It read, simply if unnervingly:

  YOUR PLAY IS DELIGHTFUL AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT CAN’T BE FIXED.

  Noël, outraged, cabled back:

  THE ONLY THING TO BE FIXED WILL BE YOUR PERFORMANCE.

  It appeared, however, from subsequent wires that what needed fixing in Miss Lawrence’s view was not the play but her commitments to André Charlot. After she had suggested in successive cables that Noël should postpone Private Lives until the following spring, that he should in the meantime do a revue with her for Charlot, that she was contracted to Charlot forever, and then that she perhaps wasn’t committed to Charlot at all and a team of international lawyers were trying to sort it all out, Noël not for the last time in his life lost patience with her. Gertrude Lawrence was still for Coward the artist who ‘of all the actresses I know can, when she is playing true, give me the most pleasure’ but he was not yet prepared to embroil himself in the incredible complexities of her private life and other involvements. He sent one final cable announcing that in view of her indecision he intended to stage Private Lives with another actress (an apparently foolhardy gesture until one remembers the number of other actresses who have played Amanda over the years with reasonable success) and before there was time for her to reply to that one, Noël and Jeffery had boarded an elderly P. and O. steamship heading back through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to Marseilles.