A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  ‘Noël is the only gamester I ever knew with my own wholeheartedness. We played backgammon or Russian Bank all the way over. I had never before crossed the Atlantic without once laying eyes on the darned thing. The other passengers were mysteriously angered by this singleness of purpose. They would stop by and say: “Don’t you two ever tire of that game?” or “Still at it?” or, in the case of the German passengers they would merely say “Immer?” to each other in passing. We finally devised an effective rejoinder, merely singing in duet:

  We hope you fry in hell

  We hope you fry in hell

  Heigho

  The-merry-o

  We hope you fry in hell.’

  While he was waiting for the Lunts to be ready for Design for Living, Noël went back to Charles Cochran with the idea for another revue, this one to be made up of the songs and sketches that he had written since This Year of Grace! four years earlier. They included ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, ‘Children of the Ritz’, ‘Mad About the Boy’ and a wealth of material that he had written during the nine months he’d been out of England. But Coward was determined that this next production would be all his own work: not the usual amalgam of writers, composers and lyricists all brought together under Cochran’s ample banner, but instead a one-man revue of which he would be sole author, composer, lyricist and director. The numbers would not include the traditional ballet or slapstick set-pieces, nor the usual lavish panoramas of old Spain or New Mexico; instead they would be intimate, unspectacular and witty with rather more concentration on the words than the sets. But even that did not guarantee enough autonomy for what Coward had in mind; he decided also that the cast would include no stars of the Lawrence/Lillie calibre, whose special talents demanded special material which they then moulded into their own peculiar style, but instead less celebrated actors and actresses who could be shaped by Noël into what he wanted for each number. The only other artist involved with Noël in the creation of this revue would be Gladys Calthrop, who was again to design the sets and costumes.

  Cochran was understandably appalled; quite apart from the realization that it would no longer be his but Coward’s 1932 Revue, he genuinely believed that the best revues were not the work of one man but of several: he was also worried that many of the numbers Coward showed him (in particular the sketches about radio and the press, the two songs in the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ vein – ‘Children of the Ritz’ and ‘Debutantes’ – and a mournful ditty about the wife of an unsuccessful touring acrobat) were either too downbeat or else too satirical to form the basis of a successful revue in the early Thirties. But Coward at this moment in his career, with Cavalcade still running at Drury Lane and the successes of Private Lives and Bitter-Sweet still fresh in the public memory, was in a very strong position indeed; Cochran realized that in spite of his many doubts the offer of a new Coward revue was one that no sane impresario could then afford to turn down.

  Gradually the new revue was cast, with Ivy St Helier, Joyce Barbour, John Mills and the American comedian Romney Brent leading a company of almost a hundred people that also included in two very minor parts a young South African singer called Graham Payn who was to become Noël’s constant companion in the years to come. The revue still lacked a title, though ‘Here’s to Mr Woollcott, God Bless Him’ had already been suggested by Coward’s recent fellow passenger; in the end it was called simply Words and Music.

  At the end of July it went into rehearsal and a month later, like all the Coward-Cochran revues, it opened for an out-of-town trial at the Opera House in Manchester. Throughout the rehearsals Noël had worked frenetically but systematically to ensure that every gesture, every move in every number was orchestrated to the overall theme that he wanted; in this way he superimposed a precise pattern on to every aspect of the production which guaranteed Words and Music the absolute unity he had never managed to achieve in past revues. Arriving for the first rehearsal, the company had been amazed to find that, contrary to all revue practice, the running order of Words and Music was already planned and typed as were the scripts for all the sketches. From then on, it was rehearsed to all intents and purposes like a play, with none of the usual last-minute alterations in the placing and timing of numbers.

  Because of this the first performance went smoothly enough, and the notices next morning glowed with an almost unanimous enthusiasm. The Manchester critics liked the unity of Words and Music, and they all welcomed the satire, not a commodity that had hitherto been very apparent in Cochran’s revues. But the chaos and confusion so conspicuously lacking from this first night arrived rather unexpectedly on the second, when, shortly before the curtain was due to rise, the conductor and musical director of Words and Music abruptly resigned after a disagreement with the management. At ludicrously short notice, as there was nobody else who could possibly do it, Noël was faced with conducting an orchestra for the first time in his life through a long and difficult score. The fact that he had written the music did not make conducting it very much easier, but he and the orchestra managed to struggle through, though not without some casualties; Noël took the number ‘Something to do with Spring’ so fast that its singers, Joyce Barbour and John Mills, found it quite impossible to keep up. Eventually, giving up the unequal struggle, they staggered off into the wings cursing and exhausted.

  After two weeks at the Opera House, Words and Music moved to the Adelphi Theatre in London, not the smallest of theatres and possibly ill-suited to what was (despite the size of the cast) essentially an intimate revue. Brian Howard wrote in his diary after the first night ‘I have always felt that Coward’s music could have been written by some tremendously shrewd bird’, but the London notices were generally ecstatic, and it was David Fairweather in Theatre World who summarized the case for the show: ‘this revue strikes a definitely new note in conception and execution; where others rely on big “names” who struggle valiantly to overcome the handicap of uninspired material, this one takes a few clever people little known to the general public, and makes them into stars through the brilliance of the sketches and songs entrusted to them. In short, Words and Music is an overwhelming success of brains in a desert of mediocrity.’

  But audiences were not so sure; perhaps because it came under the Cochran banner they found the revue unexpected and not always the escapist entertainment they were looking for. Business was very good for the first few weeks but then it began to fall away badly and Words and Music survived for barely twenty weeks. It was the first of the joint Cochran–Coward productions not to show a profit, and although they got some of their money back on a brief post-London tour, Cochran’s original doubts about the financial success of the revue had proved to be justified.

  Once Words and Music had opened, Noël had very little more to do with it; instead he spent the early part of the autumn working on Spangled Unicom, a fairly innocuous parody of modem verse which still affords a few laughs and would not at the time have disgraced an issue or two of Punch. But it betrayed signs of hasty preparation and suggested that for its author the joke had run out shortly before the end of the book. To go with the cod biographies of his ‘poets’, Noël used an unbelievable batch of old photographs which he had bought some years earlier in a London junkshop. But he had failed to realize that though the people involved would obviously now be dead, their families were still very much alive and not best pleased to find photographs of their dear departed adorning a mocking parody of this nature. It was with some difficulty and a certain amount of payment that he avoided actual lawsuits.

  Soon after the publication of Spangled Unicorn Noël did voluntarily involve himself in a legal action over Oranges and Lemons, the sketch about two old women going to bed in a boarding house that Coward had written for On With the Dance in 1925. He claimed, successfully, that though he had given permission for it to be used in a variety bill called Non-Stop Revels in the summer of 1932, he had not realized that the script would be altered to include ‘unpleasant suggestions and some unsavoury wo
rding such as to damage the reputation of the author’. The sketch was put back to its original form for the rest of the run.

  Oranges and Lemons was not, fortunately, the only example of Coward’s work to be revived during 1932. Gatenby Bell formed a touring repertory group known as ‘The Noël Coward Company’ whose intention was ‘to present the work of this brilliant author under his own supervision’. During August Noël approved the casting of a troupe that was led by Kate Cutler and included a young, moustached and generally unknown actor called James Mason. The company opened at the Malvern Festival Theatre early in September with a repertoire that included Private Lives, Hay Fever, Fallen Angels and The Vortex, presented at the rate of two plays a week. Noël wrote an introduction to the company in their first programme:

  ‘The Noël Coward company sounds strangely important and significant to me ... The repertory includes most of my work of the last fourteen years, and when I remember all those rehearsals, and dress rehearsals, and first nights, and the cheers and boos, triumphs and failures, nostalgic tears dim my old eyes and a certain hoary tenderness wells up in my heart, not only for the plays themselves, but for the people who are going to act them. I do hope that they and the public will enjoy them as much as I did.’

  The Noël Coward Company toured the provinces until the end of the year, when it disbanded never to re-form; but for Coward to have written enough successful plays by the age of thirty-two to justify the founding of an entire company devoted solely to his work was a not insignificant achievement, and one that could only be claimed by two other playwrights in the English theatre: Shakespeare and Shaw.

  In September, after a run of eleven months in which it had played to around seven hundred thousand people, Cavalcade closed at Drury Lane; Coward was at the last performance together with Adrianne Allen and her husband Raymond Massey, and as the cheers died away he made a short, sad speech of farewell to the company. Six months later Cavalcade was to reopen as a film at the Tivoli, but as a play the last words on it came from a critic who was at that final performance: ‘It may not have read very well, but by God Cavalcade played well!’

  In private as in public, Noël’s life was still totally bound up in the theatre; the explanation of his long and close friendship with Gertrude Lawrence is that in many ways he was very like her, and it has been said of Miss Lawrence at this time that she only really came alive when she was acting on a stage. One suspects that for Noël too the only real existence lay in a theatre, whether he was there as actor, director, composer, lyricist, playwright or merely as a compulsive member of almost every first-night audience in London, Paris and New York. At this time more than later, his life and his home were in the theatre. True there was Goldenhurst, where Coward spent most weekends entertaining innumerable friends and playing a mean game of croquet, and there were his mother and his close friend Jack Wilson, but they and everything else around him in these years came second to his overpowering and all-consuming interest in the theatre. His friends, with the exception of such already distinguished novelists as Rebecca West and G. B. Stern, were equally tied to show-business in one form or another, and though Noël was prepared to take time off (primarily to read and to travel) he admitted that he was nowhere else remotely as happy as in a theatre. In a romantic, artistic, financial and practical sense he belonged to the theatre, and there were times in the Thirties when one could have been forgiven for thinking that it belonged to him.

  Mrs Coward, with the lodging house in Ebury Street already far behind her, began to enjoy the richer life of Goldenhurst; one of Noël’s pilot friends from the local flying club took her up one afternoon in his two-seater plane for a trip over Kent. When they landed, after looping the loop, Noël asked his mother nervously whether she had enjoyed an experience that would have made stronger and younger women flinch: ‘Enormously, dear. I always used to swing quite high as a girl.’

  Words and Music left a legacy of useful royalties in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and ‘The Party’s Over Now’ which continue to pay off to this day, but long before it closed at the Adelphi Noël had already turned his mind back to the comparatively legitimate confines of Design for Living. At the end of 1932 he returned to New York and started to work on it with the Lunts.

  Design for Living is perhaps the closest that Coward has ever come to writing a black comedy; it is a curious, untypical, amoral and often touching drama which lies outside the mainstream of Coward’s comic writing because it is simultaneously more philosophic and less carefully structured than any of his other major comedies. And yet there are similarities: like Fallen Angels, like Hay Fever and like Private Lives, Design for Living is about a group of people who find it impossible to live together and equally impossible to live apart. In this case they are a threesome, Gilda, Otto and Leo, who discover that contrary to popular belief, a trio is company and indeed the only way that they can survive. Noël constructed his play on a strictly three-cornered basis: Gilda loves Otto and Leo, both of whom love her and are devoted to each other. Any attempt by Gilda to exclude either Otto or Leo or both is doomed to failure, and at the final curtain all three realize that their design for living has inevitably to be triangular.

  Coward himself describes their problem vividly if a trifle fancifully: ‘these glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves. Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness, and equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising one another’s wings.’

  But because the idea of a triangular alliance has about it something vaguely immoral, though the most that these three characters do together onstage is to laugh uproariously at the final curtain, American reaction to the play was somewhat guarded. About the acting of the Lunts and Noël though, there was no doubt whatsoever: Richard Lockridge in the New York Sun found it ‘as happy a spectacle of surface skating as one might hope to see. They skate with fantastic swoops and little nonsensical shouts and a fine abundance of animal spirits, sometimes on very thin ice’. One or two critics came close to describing it in the words of Gilda’s wronged husband as ‘a disgusting, three-sided erotic hotch-potch’, but Brooks Atkinson for the New York Times could see that though Design for Living might be decadent, it was also a play of ‘skill, art and clairvoyance, performed by an incomparable trio of comedians’.

  As if to ward off the accusations of immorality that he knew would come, Coward makes it clear that his characters are artists (Otto paints, Leo writes plays and Gilda decorates interiors) living in a world of their own that has little in common with, and cannot be invaded by, ordinary mortals. But their world does allow them to tilt at some already familiar Coward windmills, notably London theatre critics, inane journalists, the problems of ‘second-hand people’ to be found at country house-parties, and the fatuity of polite conversation at social gatherings of the upper classes. Above all else, this vehicle for three players, all known intimately to the author and all cast by him long before the actual play was written, is simply about three people who happen to love each other very much.

  In the character of Leo, the playwright who suddenly has a success, Noël wrote himself a part that bore a more than passing resemblance to his own character and to the way he lived his life in the years immediately after The Vortex:

  LEO: ‘It’s inevitable that the more successful I become, the more people will run after me. I don’t believe in their friendship, and I don’t take them seriously, but I enjoy them ... They’ll drop me, all right, when they’re tired of me; but maybe I shall get tired first.’

  After one initial row over who should have which dressing-room (each was determined that the other should have the best) Noël and the Lunts got along as superbly as they always have; ‘there was no rivalry between us,’ said Alfred Lunt, ‘but nor did Noël really try to direct either of us – we moved aro
und different places on the stage from night to night.’ To relieve the tension of the first night, as Miss Fontanne was waiting in the wings to go on at the beginning of the play, Noël crept over to wish her luck. ‘If the enemy were at the gates of Goldenhurst,’ remarked Miss Fontanne, ‘you’d send your own mother out to face the guns.’

  Design for Living was an immediate success on Broadway, though as it played in one of the seasons following the slump people were not too keen to hand over good money at the box-office. Alfred Lunt, asked by the box-office manager whether it was all right to accept cheques, decided against it; ‘but,’ he added, ‘we’ll take anything else in payment – chickens, turkeys, eggs, whatever they’ve got.’

  Playing together night after night, Noël and the Lunts found they were so precisely tuned in to each other’s wave-lengths that they could alter lines and even the whole mood of a performance without disconcerting the others in the least. One night, in the drunk scene that ends Act Two, Noël and Alfred began to speak each other’s lines, at first unintentionally; rapidly they realized their mistake, but having made it they continued through to the end of the act in each other’s parts without disturbing either the play or the audience in the least.

  During the time that Noël was in America with Design for Living, his brother Eric had returned to England and was living with their mother at Goldenhurst. She found him drawn and emaciated by an intestinal disease that he had contracted in Ceylon and from which he never managed to recover. After a prolonged and painful illness he died in the spring of 1933 at the age of twenty-eight; his death came as a great blow to Mrs Coward who retained for the less successful of her two sons a deep devotion. Noël, told of Eric’s death while he was playing in New York, arranged for his mother and her sister Vida, now nearly eighty, to join him there after the funeral; but Coward himself could not feel great sorrow for a brother whom he had barely known in adult life and with whom he had had remarkably little in common.