A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  Coward’s devotion to Gertrude Lawrence had to survive a few backstage rows during Private Lives; on one occasion Everley Gregg was unwise enough to try to break up a fight between them, whereupon as at a given signal both Noël and Gertie rounded on her instead. A week after Private Lives opened at the Phoenix, Heinemann published the text of the play, thereby allowing the literary critics to have a go at it. The Times found it ‘unreadable’ while their Literary Supplement considered with rather more justification that the plot was ‘so light as to be almost non-existent’. After years in which Noël had been compared relentlessly to Sacha Guitry, J. K. Prothero found a new comparison: ‘Mr Coward, brilliant and rootless, emerges more and more as the Aldous Huxley of the theatre. With the same genius for the preposterous, he seizes unerringly on the exuberances and affectations of the moment, but for the purposes of recording only. His satire is not corrective, nor his wit creative. There is the same fundamental lack in his latest as in his earliest plays. He is neither constructive nor combative.’ Aircraftsman Shaw, T. E. Lawrence, writing in private to Noël, was impressed by the economy of style in Private Lives: ‘For fun I took some pages and tried to strike redundant words out of your phrases – only there were none.’

  Although Noël claimed that he was unable to write anything while he was playing, during the autumn of 1930 he did, in fact, begin to work somewhat hesitantly on a new play. After the intimacy of Private Lives he wanted to try something on a much larger scale, to test his ability to write and produce a show big enough to fill the stage of the London Coliseum. Cochran was enthusiastic about the idea, and Noël began to think over the various possibilities, scouring history from the collapse of the Roman Empire through the French Revolution to a pageant of the Second Empire in his search for a suitable setting. But nothing he could find offered the right combination of crowd scenes and intimate characterization, lavish spectacle and manageable drama, until one afternoon, browsing in Foyles’ bookshop, he happened almost by accident upon some old bound volumes of the Illustrated London News. In one of these there was a full-page picture of a troopship leaving England for the Boer War. Instantly, though he has never discovered quite why, Noël knew that this was the period he was looking for. He bought the magazines, hurried back to the new studio flat he had leased in Gerald Road, and began to go through the tunes of the time remembered from his earliest childhood, primarily ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ and ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’. He had invited Gladys Calthrop and G. B. (‘Peter’) Stern for tea, and in Monogram Miss Stern recalled:

  ‘... I had gone down late one afternoon to see Noël Coward at his studio in London and found him in a state of excitement, surrounded by a litter of old illustrated volumes of reference: “Peter, do you know anything about the Boer War?”, for he had just had the idea of writing a revue on a big scale that would cover the events of the first thirty years of the twentieth century. He was going to take one family, he said, and their servants, and show the same people going through it all, and I had ten years’ start of him, for he was only just going to be born when the Boer War broke out. I told him about the newsboys down the street, about the siege of Mafeking, about Bugler Dunne ... We found the title that same evening. I kept on saying “You want something like Pageant or Procession” – and then Noël shouted “Cavalcade”!’

  Cavalcade was ultimately dedicated ‘to Peter ... in gratitude for a friendship maintained through many of its years’, but its publication was still some way into the future. For Noël realized that although he had now crystallized the idea, he wouldn’t be able to get it into any kind of shape until after he had finished playing Private Lives; only then could he give to Cavalcade the vast amount of time, concentration and research that it so obviously needed. Therefore he outlined the story in brief to Cochran, and promised it vaguely for the middle of 1931.

  Meanwhile Private Lives was coming to the end of its run at the Phoenix; before those early rehearsals at Cap d’Ail, Noël had made it clear in a letter to Cochran that he was not prepared to let the play run for more than three months in London and three on Broadway: ‘If I play the same part over and over again for a long run, I become bored and frustrated and my performance deteriorates; in addition to this I have no time to write. Ideas occur to me and then retreat again because with eight performances a week to be got through, there is no time to develop them.’ True to this limit, Noël closed the play in London in mid-December and went down to Goldenhurst to spend Christmas with Jack and the family. Cochran was already preparing his 1931 Revue and during that Christmas week Noël wrote four numbers for it; two of them, ‘Any Little Fish’ and ‘Half-Caste Woman’ he later recorded himself, and both became if not spectacular hits then at least reasonable and respectably-selling song successes.

  The American production of Private Lives was due to open at the Times Square Theatre on Broadway at the end of January; Robert Newton was now to understudy Noël, and as Adrianne Allen was committed elsewhere to a film, her part was taken over by Jill Esmond, the actress who a few months earlier had married Laurence Olivier. Soon after Christmas, having given himself a little more time to think carefully about Cavalcade, Noël sailed for America on board the Europa.

  Coward’s original idea for Cavalcade had been that the thirty years of English history should be traced and dramatized through characters who would be the bright young things of the Nineties, giving birth in their turn to the equally vapid flappers of the Twenties. But on the boat to New York he began to realize that in The Vortex and in songs like ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ and ‘Dance Little Lady’, in self-appointed roles as prophet and historian of the Bright Young Things, he had exhausted his anger about the rich, young and trendy of the time; the only trace of that moral finger-wagging at the ways of the modem world to be found in Cavalcade is the closing number, ‘Twentieth Century Blues’. For his leading characters Noël chose to create a family called Marryot who perhaps for the first time in his work take on a life of their own (later the same was to be true of the family in This Happy Breed) and who exist in their own self-perpetuating right, not merely as personifications of something that Noël wished to state. Though still in embryo, the Marryots of Cavalcade were to become the quintessential English Family, every bit as archetypal as Dodie Smith’s in Dear Octopus almost a decade later.

  Arriving in America, Noël hired a penthouse on the comer of West 58th Street, looked up such old New York friends as Alec Woollcott and the artist Neysa McMein, and interrupted his researches on Cavalcade for long enough to re-rehearse Private Lives. It opened at the Times Square Theatre to reviews that were nothing short of ecstatic even from the less anglophile critics. On Broadway as in London the Coward-Lawrence partnership worked like a dream; Richard Aldrich, the American producer who years later was to meet and then marry Gertrude Lawrence, saw her for the first time on the stage during the Broadway run of the play: ‘I can think of no two people who have given Broadway a more sparkling and memorable evening than Gertrude and Noël in Private Lives. Each demanded the best from the other, and always received it; together they seemed the very essence of teamwork.’

  Walter Winchell thought it ‘something to go silly over’, and in one memorable notice Variety summarized the plot: ‘Mr Coward and Miss Lawrence are a couple of cooing meanies ... Coward seems kinda grouchy over the scrapping ... he goes to the piano and starts to sing’. The press reaction elsewhere was good enough for Metro-Goldwyn to put in an immediate and excellent offer for the screen rights.

  Private Lives played on to packed houses in New York for the twelve weeks to which Coward had again limited himself, and on non-matinée days he locked himself up in the penthouse to plough through all the old volumes of the Illustrated London News that he had brought with him in the continuing search for Cavalcade material. Some of it, of course, he was old enough to remember: the 1910 beach scene was drawn accurately enough from his memories of Uncle George’s Concert Party on the sands at Bognor, and as a South Londoner he could recall all
the activity of Victoria Station when the troop trains pulled out for the First World War. Armistice Day he remembered, too, and the frenzy of a night-club in the early Twenties: all that and much more went into Cavalcade.

  In March, Noël gave an interview to the New York Herald-Tribune: ‘So far as I am concerned, posterity isn’t of any frightful significance; I think if it were I’d become self-conscious and wouldn’t be able to work at all. I could no more sit down and say “Now I’ll write an Immortal Drama” than I could fly, and anyway I don’t want to. I have no great or beautiful thoughts. More than anything else I hate this pretentious, highbrow approach to things dramatic. The primary and dominant function of the theatre is to amuse people, not to reform or edify them.’ In six years Coward had radically altered his ideas about the purpose of the medium in which he worked.

  While Private Lives was still running in New York Cochran cabled from London that the Coliseum would not after all be available for Cavalcade, since White Horse Inn was going in there, but that he could get the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane if Noël would commit himself to a definite opening date. Reluctantly, not really knowing whether or not he would be able to get it ready in time, but realizing that the Lane was too good to miss, Coward agreed to an opening date in September 1931. Cavalcade was already very clear in his mind, but he had only just begun to realize the amount of work involved; Cochran had also asked for production details, and Noël cabled in reply:

  ‘PART ONE SMALL INTERIOR TWO DEPARTURE OF TROOPSHIP THREE SMALL INTERIOR FOUR MAFEKING NIGHT IN LONDON MUSIC HALL NECESSITATING PIVOT STAGE FIVE EXTERIOR FRONT SCENE BIRDCAGE WALK SIX EDWARDIAN RECEPTION SEVEN MILE END ROAD FULL STAGE BUT CAN BE OPENED UP GRADUALLY AND DONE MOSTLY WITH LIGHTING PART TWO ONE WHITE CITY FULL SET TWO SMALL INTERIOR THREE EDWARDIAN SEASIDE RESORT FULL SET BATHING MACHINES PIERROTS ETC. FOUR TITANIC SMALL FRONT SCENE FIVE OUTBREAK OF WAR SMALL INTERIOR SIX VICTORIA STATION IN FOG SET AND LIGHTING EFFECTS SEVEN AIR RAID OVER LONDON PRINCIPALLY LIGHTING AND SOUND EIGHT INTERIOR OPENING ON TO TRAFALGAR SQUARE ARMISTICE NIGHT FULL STAGE AND CAST PART THREE ONE GENERAL STRIKE FULL SET TWO SMALL INTERIOR THREE FASHIONABLE NIGHT CLUB FULL SET FOUR SMALL INTERIOR FIVE IMPRESSIONISTIC SUMMARY OF MODERN CIVILIZATION MOSTLY LIGHTS AND EFFECTS SIX COMPLETE STAGE WITH PANORAMA AND UNION JACK FULL CAST NECESSITATES ONE BEST MODERN LIGHTING EQUIPMENT OBTAINABLE TWO COMPANY OF GUARDS THREE ORCHESTRA FIFTY FOUR FACILITIES FOR COMPLETE BLACKOUTS FTVE FULL WEEK OF DRESS REHEARSALS SIX THEATRE FREE FOR ALL REHEARSALS SEVEN ABOUT A DOZEN RELIABLE ACTORS THE REST WALKONS A FEW STRONG SINGERS EIGHT FOG EFFECT INDIVIDUALS NECESSARY ONE FRANK COLLINS STAGE SUPERVISION TWO DAN O’NEILL STAGE MANAGEMENT THREE ELSIE APRIL MUSIC SUPERVISION FOUR CISSIE SEWELL CROWD WORK FIVE GLADYS CALTHROP SUPERVISION OF COSTUMES AND SCENERY AND YOUR OWN GENERAL SUPERVISION THIS SYNOPSIS IS MORE OR LESS ACCURATE BUT LIABLE TO REVISION PLEASE TAKE CARE THAT NO DETAIL OF THIS SHOULD REACH PRIVATE OR PARTICULARLY PRESS EARS REGARDS NOËL.’

  It says a great deal for Cochran as an impresario that he flinched only slightly on receipt of that cable; the placing of the actors at seventh on the list of priorities came as a firm hint, as if one were needed, that what Coward had in mind here was not so much a play as a spectacular.

  Early in May 1931 Noël played Elyot in Private Lives for the last time and sailed back to England, delighted that he would at long last be able to start the actual writing of Cavalcade. But it was Private Lives which was to live on, and to remain at the centre of Noël’s career; it also forged a vast number of links that led into the future – both Adrianne Allen and Laurence Olivier made Noël the godfather to their first children, and almost forty years later it was Adrianne’s son Daniel Massey who played the part of his godfather in Star!, the film of Gertrude Lawrence’s life. Noël and Gertie worked together in one other production. Tonight at Eight-Thirty five years later, but for many theatregoers they were never again to be quite as magical as they had been in Private Lives: that one comedy lies at the heart and the basis of their reputation both joint and single.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Noël, ‘in Private Lives I would look across the stage at Gertie and she would simply take my breath away.’

  16

  1931–1932

  ‘The first night of Cavalcade will remain forever in my memory as the most agonizing three hours I have ever spent in a theatre.’

  More than thirty-five years after the first, and to date the only full stage production of Cavalcade, Coward found himself at a fork lunch in London the only man in possession of a knife. ‘But, of course, dear boy,’ he explained to an impressed reporter, ‘after all I did write Cavalcade.’ And indeed if Noël is to be considered in the light of any single technical achievement in the theatre, then Cavalcade is undoubtedly the one. Not because it is a very remarkable play, nor because it offers to the literature of the theatre any new or staggering thoughts, nor yet because it has much of a chance of survival (its size and scope have so far defeated any thoughts of professional revival on the stage) but purely because of the massive, almost numbing scale on which it is conceived. From Noël’s one ambitious idea, confirmed and clarified by that single picture in a back number of the Illustrated London News, grew a grandiose show in three acts and twenty-two scenes that was to cost an almost unprecedented thirty thousand pre-war pounds, and that was to keep a cast and backstage crew of well over four hundred people employed at the Lane for more than a year, playing to a total box-office take of around three hundred thousand pounds. It was, in short, an epic.

  Noël returned from New York with the intention of starting work on it immediately, but almost as soon as he landed his mother had an acute attack of appendicitis, and work on Cavalcade was put off for a while when it seemed that she might be even more seriously ill. Noël’s devotion to Mrs Coward was such that concentration on anything else became impossible when she was ill; she had always been a steely lady whom he could rely on absolutely, and who knew with crystal clarity what was good for Noël and what was not. Now, suddenly, their roles were reversed for a time and Noël found it an uneasy experience; but soon she recovered. When she was better Noël returned to London from Goldenhurst, and together with Gladys Calthrop and the assembled heads of the various technical departments he carried out a long and detailed inspection of the facilities at Drury Lane: the depth of the stage, the width and height of the proscenium arch, and the various lighting and flying effects that were possible. They decided to use all the six hydraulic lifts to move actors and scenery in and out of the action, and settled on an incredibly complicated stage and lighting plot which involved, for the first time in the English theatre, the use of collapsible footlights. Already it was apparent that one of the major headaches for the Cavalcade crew was going to be the amount of waiting time between each scene while sets were struck and others built at breakneck speed. Noël and Gladys planned it with the stage staff so that, in theory, there should never be a pause of more than half a minute between scenes, and then having cleared all the estimates with Cochran the two of them went down to Goldenhurst for ten days of intensive work.

  From eight in the morning until five every evening with an hour off for lunch, Noël worked upstairs on the script while in the garage Gladys created the designs for the hundreds of costumes and dozens of sets. While Cavalcade was in preparation, Bitter-Sweet was coming towards the end of its two-year run and had reached the Hippodrome at Golders Green. On an impulse Noël decided to see it there one night, but at the box-office he found himself faced by a formidable lady who told him that there were no tickets to be had and no standing room either. The house was full. Patiently, Noël explained that he had written the book, music and lyrics for the show. For good measure he added that he had also directed it. There was a pause. Then the lady spoke: ‘Proper little Ivor Novello, aren’t you?’

  The London theatre of the very early Thirties was in a fairly desperate condition, not only because the after-effects of the General Strike and the Depression had severely limited the amount of money people were able o
r prepared to spend at box-offices, but also because the cinema, now an all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing attraction, was offering cheaper and often considerably better entertainment. For the theatre it was a far from vintage time, and most critics found it hard to quarrel with the American George Jean Nathan who, on a visit to London early in 1931, remarked that ‘your stage is unworthy of your country’.

  Work on Cavalcade continued through the summer; in August, with the script typed and all the designs complete at last, Noël and Gladys had a break while the scenery and costumes were being made. They took themselves to a beach in the South of France where the weather was marvellous and the sea warm, but where they never managed to escape Cavalcade or to stop thinking for a moment about the gigantic technical problems that still lay ahead.

  Back in England at the end of the month they finished casting the show: Mary Clare and Edward Sinclair were to play the Marryot parents and the company also included such Coward stalwarts as Moya Nugent, Arthur Macrae and Maidie Andrews as well as two newer friends from the Singapore ‘Quaints’, Betty Hare and John Mills. When it came to the auditions for crowd and walk-on parts, over a thousand actors and actresses applied; roughly three for every one job that Noël was able to offer. He found these auditions deeply depressing; not only because so many people had to be turned down at a time when unemployment in the theatre was even higher than usual, but also because he realized that many of the ‘lucky’ ones, getting barely thirty shillings a week for non-speaking roles, had themselves been playing major parts on that same stage at Drury Lane not so very long before. Early in the rehearsals Coward discovered to his horror that Cochran had promised three stage-struck society-girls walk-ons in the show; after a long argument Noël only agreed on condition that for each of them two extras were taken on from the ranks of those who really needed the work.