Early in September, rehearsals started in earnest; for the first ten days, as the stage was still full of engineers installing the two extra hydraulic lifts which the technicians had discovered Cavalcade would need, Noël rehearsed with the principals in one of the bars. Many of the scenes had been rearranged or altered or simply abandoned in the months since that first detailed cable to Cochran from New York, and although the Edwardian beach had survived intact, Noël had reluctantly to jettison the idea of having the sunbathers drenched with rain at the end of it, not because Drury Lane couldn’t provide the necessary sprinklers but because the water would damage sets and make the next scene-change impossible. This was the first scene Noël had to rehearse with the full company, and when the engineers had finished building the lifts he found four hundred people on the stage patiently waiting for his first instructions. Daunted by the sheer number of them, Noël found a way of simplifying the production; he divided the crowd into units of twenty people, each with its own leader, and then gave everybody a colour and a number. The captain of each unit took charge of the others, and in blocking the larger scenes Noël was able to call out from the dress-circle: ‘Would number seven red kindly cross down to number fifteen yellow-and-black stripe and then shake hands?’ At first, in spite of all that organization, the whole thing was unutterably chaotic and Noël was severely tempted to leave four hundred people mingling inanely on the stage and go home to his studio in Gerald Road.
But he forced himself to stay, and gradually out of the confusion some sort of order emerged. Noël encouraged the crowd to improvise their own bits of business, forbidding only any marked over-acting, and the result was the gradual emergence of a whole stage-full of cameo performances that somehow managed to be near-perfect in period and style, whether for the beach scene or Queen Victoria’s funeral or the scene at Victoria Station which was complete with a full-scale if recalcitrant steam engine. George Grossmith, then managing director of the company that ran the theatre, attended one of these rehearsals and announced that he was worried because Cavalcade, unlike most shows at the Lane, did not have much to offer the children at Christmas time. ‘We shall,’ replied Noël, ‘be putting in a Harlequinade.’
After a week of endless, crisis-ridden dress rehearsals, Cavalcade had its first public performance at Drury Lane on October 13th 1931, soon after Britain came off the gold standard and a few days before the General Election threw out the Labour Party to return a true-blue National Government in a mood of near-hysterical patriotism. In the light of such fervour, Coward had a hard time explaining afterwards that the timing of Cavalcade was nothing more that a happy coincidence, and that he had not written this ultra-jingoistic epic to cash in on the national mood of the moment. Quite apart from the fact that Cavalcade had been conceived a full year earlier, Noël had been so involved in its elaborate production that he was barely aware of the election at all, let alone the likely result of it. He was, as always, bleakly uninterested in politics of any kind.
From Cavalcade’s opening toast ‘To 1900’ it followed the lives of the Marryot family and their servants through to the New Year’s Eve of 1929, when another toast was offered:
JANE: ‘Now, then, let’s couple the future of England with the past of England. The glories and victories and triumphs that are over, and the sorrows that are over, too. Let’s drink to our sons who made part of the pattern and to our hearts that died with them. Let’s drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let’s drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again.’
But Cavalcade did not end there; instead Coward returned to the bright young things of the Twenties, now ageing somewhat and in a night-club ‘dancing without any particular enjoyment; it is the dull dancing of habit’. A singer begins to intone the only contemporary song that Coward wrote for Cavalcade:
Blues, Twentieth Century Blues, are getting me down.
Who’s escaped those weary Twentieth Century Blues.
Why, if there’s a God in the sky, why shouldn’t he grin?
High above this dreary Twentieth Century din,
In this strange illusion,
Chaos and confusion,
People seem to lose their way.
The last scene of all, which followed that, was a darkened stage on which different sound and lighting effects gave a general impression of complete industrial and social chaos until it all faded and at the back of the stage a single Union Jack shone through the darkness. Thereupon the lights rose again slowly on the entire company singing ‘God Save The King’, and the curtain fell on the first night to tumultuous scenes of theatrical and patriotic fervour, amid which Noël addressed the audience from the stage: ‘I hope this play has made you feel that, in spite of the troublous times we are living in, it is still a pretty exciting thing to be English.’ The cheering redoubled, and as the curtain fell for the last time half the orchestra were reprising songs from the show while the other half were doggedly re-playing ‘God Save The King’.
The first night of Cavalcade was an unquestionable triumph and the cheers that rang through Drury Lane are still remembered by people who were there. But for Noël, sitting in the stage box, the evening had come within a hair’s breadth of being a total disaster. Early in the first act, during the first complicated scene-change, too many of the cast crowded on to one of the downstage lifts and it jammed; there followed a delay which was timed backstage at four and a half minutes, but which felt to most of the audience like four and a half hours. Dorothy Dickson was in the stalls:
‘The orchestra kept playing a repetitive period waltz (“Lover of My Dreams”) that Noël had written as a parody of the popular tunes of 1900, and then they played some of the old war songs. People began to sing them softly – then they stopped, embarrassed lest the people sitting next to them should think that they were old enough to remember them. We all turned to watch Noël in the stage box, to see if he knew what was happening, and then the gallery became restless and started to clap derisively.’
Many years were to pass before Noël could listen to that music again without shuddering. But during the wait in the box, knowing they were being watched, neither Noël nor Gladys dared to move; Jack Wilson, sitting directly behind Noël, put a hand on the shoulder of Coward’s dinner-jacket and discovered it was already soaking wet with sweat. Backstage Danny O’Neill’s crew were struggling frantically with the lift, and someone estimated it might take up to two hours to work it free. Then, just as Noël was about to walk down on to the stage and make some kind of announcement, the lift freed itself and Cavalcade went ahead. But the delay, and in particular the feeling of suppressed panic that it caused among the company, affected the rest of the performance to such an extent that at the end of the evening, in spite of all the applause, neither Coward nor Cochran were at all certain that they had a success. Cochran, in fact, went to bed convinced that the whole undertaking had failed, and that the reviews next morning would be terrible. He was wrong. By ten o’clock in the morning, when Cochran tried to phone the box-office at Drury Lane to see if they were doing any business, all the phones were busy and a queue already stretched out of the foyer down towards the corner of the Aldwych.
Coward had a triumph, but not perhaps for the reasons he had hoped. Cavalcade was hailed as having great patriotic appeal rather than as a good play: the reviews all carried such headlines as ‘Coward’s Call to Arms’ or ‘A Message to the Youth of the Nation’. In this context, Noël’s curtain speech about it being ‘a pretty exciting thing to be English’ only added to the general impression and misconception that this was what Cavalcade was all about. In fact, Coward had intended there to be rather more to it than pure patriotism; but the audience had chosen to see his play in a different, more jingoistic light and Coward was still the first and the quickest to adapt to what was wanted of him; hence his curtain speech on the opening night.
; Nearly forty years later, with Coward no longer the Zeitgeist, it is possible to see that Cavalcade was dedicated not to pure patriotism but to the wider concept of Duty that runs through most of Noël’s work: duty not only to country but to family, friends, talent, circumstances, ideals – a duty, in fact to behave correctly in all situations, a duty that Coward has always seen as a condition of life itself.
Two weeks after the opening of Cavalcade, on the election night of October 28th 1931, King George V with Queen Mary and the entire Royal Family went to Drury Lane. The performance ran smoothly, Coward was presented to the King in the Royal Box during the second interval, Mary Clare was cheered by stalls and gallery alike when she spoke the final toast, and at the very end the entire audience rose to join the cast in singing ‘God Save The King’: during the applause that followed,
‘The Queen drew back a little, leaving His Majesty in the front of the box to take the ovation alone. He stood there bowing, looking a little tired, and epitomizing that quality which English people have always deeply valued: unassailable dignity.’
Noël had been in the theatre for almost exactly twenty-one years, and in that time he had come a long way to this night. It was even rumoured that, as a result of Cavalcade, a grateful monarch would bestow a knighthood on him, perhaps during the interval of that election-night performance. Nothing of the kind happened though, and over the years a number of theories ranging from the implausible to the unprintable have been put forward to explain why Coward has never yet become Sir Noël. One school of thought suggested that Noël, offered a knighthood during the run of Cavalcade, had jokingly told a friend that ‘for a success like Cavalcade the least one should get is a peerage’. Apparently his remark got back to the Palace officials and that was the end of that. A more likely solution lies in Coward’s reaction when, on another occasion, he was offered the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Commander, R.N.V.R., and decided to turn it down: ‘I felt strongly that my name, my reputation and my friends alone would get me wherever I wanted to go.’
But even Noël began to be alarmed by all the fervour surrounding Cavalcade; he realized that somewhere under it his play had almost entirely disappeared from view, and worse still he realized that it was his own curtain-speech about England which had encouraged audiences to start off on this wrong track; instead of a play about family life with two or three restrained, understated, brief but well-written scenes like that aboard the Titanic, it was being acclaimed as a theatrical rendering of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ by all save a few critics in the intellectual weeklies who saw the whole thing as an unnecessary descent into jingoism, a wily commercial trick conceived, written and produced by Coward in a spirit of cynical mockery with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
To escape the blame and the over-effusive praise alike, Noël decided that the time had again come for him to sail away; with Jeffery Amherst, his perennial travelling companion, he set off on board ship, bound this time for a lengthy exploration of South America. There seemed, at that moment, nothing else to do; Noël was sure of his purely theatrical motives in writing Cavalcade, and though evidently nobody else was, it still seemed unlikely that in terms of stage success he could ever hope for anything better in his career than the night the King had come to Cavalcade. And so what now? Coward had not the remotest idea, but at any rate the journey through South America would provide a rest, another change of pace, and a chance to think again about his career; already he realized he had been a daring young man for so long that the trapeze was entirely stationary.
Coward was out of England for nine months, and while he was away St John Ervine again turned his Observer theatre column over one Sunday to a discussion of roughly the same thoughts that had begun to trouble Noël as he sailed from Boulogne aboard a German-Spanish cargo boat on a leisurely journey to Rio de Janeiro. Did Coward, in his work, have a distinct philosophy that went beyond the desire to entertain, and if so what was it? In the last two decades he had written twenty-three plays and revues, most of which had further involved him as either an actor or a director or both. For Ervine, Coward was then ‘a figure of his age, a faithful representative of a part of the spirit of his time. If we wish to understand some of the youth who grew to manhood in the War, we must take a good look at Mr Coward, in whom the gaiety and the despair of his generation are exactly mingled ... what our dramatist has is an emotion about life, the emotion of an exceedingly sensitive and generous nature. That is all. He has no faith, at present, in life here or hereafter: he is a hedonist who has no hope of finding what he diffidently seeks – enough excitement to pass the time ... he will do well to guard against the allegory by Mr Max Beerbohm in which a man became like the mask of himself because he had worn it too long.’
But Noël’s moments of introvertive doubt were ever short-lived, lasting usually until whatever ship he happened to be aboard reached the next port of call. From Rio de Janeiro he and Jeffery travelled overland through South America and for the first few weeks Noël was happy not to have to think about another play or indeed anything beyond the brief lyric for a song that more or less explained his present condition:
The world is wide, and when my day is done
I shall at least have travelled free,
Led by this wanderlust that turns my eyes to far horizons.
Though time and tide won’t wait for anyone,
There’s one illusion left for me
And that’s the happiness I’ve known alone.
Reaching the Argentine early in 1932, Noël’s sightseeing and his peace of mind were simultaneously interrupted by a telegram from Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in New York: CONTRACT WITH THEATRE GUILD UP IN JUNE WE SHALL BE FREE WHAT ABOUT IT?
‘It’ was a plan that Coward and the Lunts had first formulated all those years ago in New York. One day, they had said, when they were all stars in their own right and happened to be simultaneously free, they would act together in a play of Noël’s:
‘We had met, discussed, argued, and parted again many times, knowing that it was something that we wanted to do very much indeed and searching wildly through our minds for suitable characters. At one moment we were to be three foreigners. Lynn, Eurasian; Alfred, German; and I, Chinese. At another we were to be three acrobats, rapping out “Allez Oops” and flipping handkerchiefs at one another. A further plan was that the entire play should be played in a gigantic bed, dealing with life and love in the Schnitzler manner. This, however, was hilariously discarded after Alfred had suggested a few stage directions which, if followed faithfully, would undoubtedly have landed all three of us in gaol.’
But now, at long last, the Lunts were free, Noël was free and the venture was possible; the only snag was that Noël still had not the vaguest idea about a play of any kind. For the rest of his travels with Jeffery through Patagonia, Chile, Peru and Colombia he tried desperately to think of a situation for their three characters, and failed dismally. No period, no place, no event offered the right setting for them until, sailing on a Norwegian freighter from Panama north to Los Angeles, Noël suddenly found the idea he was looking for; it then took him ten days, working mornings only, to write Design for Living.
Back in England, soon after the opening of Cavalcade and in good time for the Christmas book trade, Hutchinson published a volume of Coward’s ‘Collected Sketches and Lyrics’. It was prefaced by some general reflections on the nature and the problems of being one of Cochran’s revue writers, constantly at the mercy of a flexible running order and so ‘usually dragged, protesting miserably, into a cold office behind the dress circle and commanded to write then and there a brief but incredibly witty interlude to be played in front of black velvet curtains by no more than four members of the cast (the principals all being occupied with quick changes), without furniture as there is no time to get it on and off, and finishing with such a gloriously funny climax that the audience remain gaily hysterical for at least a minute and a half in pitch darkness’.
At the beginning of Feb
ruary 1932, the Hollywood film version of Private Lives reached the Empire in Leicester Square. This, the first Coward ‘talkie’, was not, according to The Times, a suitable play for the screen – if only because there was no way of pre-judging an audience’s laughter in the cinema, so the film’s timing was invariably just wrong. Those members of the audience at the press preview who noticed how very closely Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery resembled Gertrude Lawrence and Noël in their playing of the balcony scene might not have been surprised to learn that during the New York run of Private Lives the stage performance had been photographed, as had Cavalcade in London, for the benefit of actors and producers in Hollywood.
In America the film of Private Lives had already proved so successful at cinema box-offices that when Noël got back from South America to Los Angeles and hence Hollywood, he found no difficulty in selling to the Fox Film Corporation the screen rights to three more of his plays: Cavalcade (which fetched a hundred thousand dollars) Hay Fever (which was never made) and Bitter-Sweet (which was not in fact filmed in Hollywood until ten years later, and then by MGM, though there was an earlier English version). On that profitable visit to Hollywood Noël also sold to Paramount the rights to make a talking picture of The Queen Was in The Parlour.
17
1932–1933
‘Throughout the Thirties I was a highly publicized and irritatingly successful figure, much in demand.’
Returning to England in the spring of 1932 Noël found himself, not entirely accidentally, on the same transatlantic boat as Alexander Woollcott, who later described the experience in a letter to Beatrice Kaufman:
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 23
