Design for Living dosed on Broadway at the end of May 1933, and because the Lunts were committed elsewhere Noël abandoned any immediate plans to take it to London. At the end of their last matinée on Broadway, the infinitely painstaking Lynn Fontanne told Noël with some delight that after months of experiment she had finally discovered the correct way to execute a particularly tricky piece of business in the last act. ‘Isn’t it a little late for that now?’ queried Noël. ‘Not at all,’ replied Miss Fontanne, ‘there’s always tonight.’
Coward’s stock in America at this time was very high indeed; apart from the Broadway success of Design for Living which made him something in the region of £12,000, the Hollywood film of Cavalcade, already billed as ‘The Picture of the Generation’, was proving an enormous success at cinemas all over the country. In Pittsburgh it broke the local record by taking nearly sixteen thousand dollars in a single week. The film was an amazingly accurate reproduction of the play, with Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook now playing the Marryots and some of the original cast still intact.
In New York Noël was given a thousand pounds to sing on his own ten-minute radio show, and the offer was not an isolated one; but in spite of his heady commercial success he decided to return to London soon after Design for Living closed, having first sold the film rights to Paramount. English theatre enthusiasts were already able to read the play in its published version, but it was to be six years before they could see it on the stage and then without either Coward or the Lunts. Just before Noël left New York, for one memorable Sunday-night performance, he and Lynn and Alfred Lunt were to be found as the guest stars at the Ringling Brothers’ Circus. They rode once round the ring, seated regally on massive elephants, waving graciously to a faintly bemused audience.
By the time Noël got back to England with his mother and Aunt Vida, two films of his plays were on simultaneous release there: Cavalcade, which in its first three London weeks played to a hundred thousand people, and Tonight is Ours, an ultra-romantic Hollywood concoction which had Claudette Colbert and Fredric March embroiled in a lush screenplay that bore a vague, passing resemblance to The Queen Was in The Parlour. Noël even managed to recognize a few of his original lines in it. Cavalcade, which had been filmed by Fox at a cost of three hundred thousand pounds, was ecstatically if jealously reviewed in London: C. A. Lejeune for the Observer complained that it was ‘the best British film that has ever been made, and it was made in America ... Our own producers ought to go into corners and kick themselves. Why in the world couldn’t we have produced it in our own studios?’ Fears that Hollywood would tamper with the play proved entirely groundless, though Noël was not always so lucky in this respect.
All his life, Coward once complained, he has been plagued by reporters demanding why he has never repeated the success of Bitter-Sweet. It was not for want of trying; twice in the Thirties he attempted lavish, romantic and escapist musicals set in the not-too-distant past, but neither achieved anything like the lasting success of Bitter-Sweet. The first attempt was made soon after Design for Living when Noël, back home at Goldenhurst in the summer of 1933, began to think about a possible vehicle for Yvonne Printemps, undisturbed by the fact that at that time she spoke barely a word of English. Watching her on the stage in Paris, Coward had been enchanted by her singing voice, and he felt sure that she could learn enough of the language to cope with whatever plot he could come up with. The result, some months later, was a romantic, sentimental comedy with music set in Regency Brighton and called Conversation Piece. But the score did not come without a struggle:
‘I was working at Goldenhurst. I had completed some odd musical phrases here and there, but no main waltz theme, and I was firmly and miserably stuck. I had sat at the piano daily for hours, repeatedly trying to hammer out an original tune or even an arresting first phrase, and nothing had resulted from my concentrated efforts but banality. I knew that I could never complete the score without my main theme as a pivot and finally, after ten days of increasing despair, I decided to give up and, rather than go on flogging myself any further, postpone the whole project for at least six months ... I felt fairly wretched but at least relieved that I had had the sense to admit failure while there was still time. I poured myself a large whisky and soda, dined in grey solitude, poured myself another, even larger, whisky and soda and sat gloomily envisaging everybody’s disappointment and facing the fact that my talent had withered and that I should never write any more music until the day I died. The whisky did little to banish my gloom, but there was no more work to be done and I didn’t care if I became fried as a coot, so I gave myself another drink and decided to go to bed. I switched off the light at the door and noticed that there was one lamp left on by the piano. I walked automatically to turn it off, sat down, and played ‘I’ll Follow My Secret Heart’ straight through in G flat, a key I had never played in before.’
While Conversation Piece was still unfinished on the piano and the typewriter, the British and Dominion Film Company released a screen adaptation of Bitter-Sweet directed by Herbert Wilcox who had cast his wife, Anna Neagle, as Sari. The film abandoned the last act of Coward’s play entirely, but left the petite Ivy St Helier in her original part as Manon; when, some time later, Miss St Helier broke her leg in two places it was inevitably Noël who enquired ‘Did it have two places?’
The film opened simultaneously in New York and in London, where it was introduced at the Carlton cinema by a stage show of almost unprecedented inanity in which a gentleman in fancy dress, who had recurring trouble with his shoulder straps, strode around the stage declaiming inferior couplets which eulogized Noël and made vague allusions to the story of Bitter-Sweet while behind him the pages of an enormous programme were slowly and mechanically turned. The male ushers of the Carlton then strode on dressed as Austrian soldiers to proclaim in cracked voices their undying affection for Tokay.
But the film, considered as such and not as an adaptation of Noël’s play, was less terrible than might have been expected, and although Coward was not exactly happy with it at the time, he thought back almost fondly to it a decade later when he’d seen what the combination of Hollywood, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald managed to do with the same basic material.
18
1933–1935
‘Czar of all the Rushes.’
Just before Christmas 1933, with Conversation Piece virtually complete, Noël took the script with him to Paris; there he and the actor Pierre Fresnay, who was later to marry Yvonne Printemps, spent day after day going through the play with her, teaching her the English language in general and her part as Melanie in particular. Often, she came close to giving the whole thing up; her English was too bad, she said, for her ever to be able to get through the part in public. But Fresnay persisted, patiently teaching her the words and the music while Noël offered suggestions and encouragement whenever he could; Conversation Piece had been written expressly for her theatrical charms, and Coward realized that to do it without her would be all but impossible. While they were in Paris, Noël and Yvonne also sang together for the then French President and Madame Lebrun at an embassy ball; a day or two later, leaving Fresnay to reassure his friend and to work with her, Coward returned to England with plans to start full rehearsals early in January.
In the meantime, while Yvonne was still suffering huge doubts and writing incessantly to Coward asking him to abandon the whole project or at the very least to release her from it, Noël turned his attention briefly to another song. This one was not intended for Conversation Piece at all, and in fact it remains one of the few lastingly popular Coward songs that did not have its origin in one of his shows. Instead it was a light but nonetheless heartfelt reply to the countless eager mothers whose endless letters, now reaching Noël at the rate of almost one a day, begged him to find parts for their respective daughters in whatever he happened to be staging next. In an open reply to one for all, he wrote:
Regarding yours, dear Mrs Worthington,
Of We
dnesday the 23rd,
Although your baby,
Maybe,
Keen on a stage career,
How can I make it clear,
That this is not a good idea?
For her to hope,
Dear Mrs Worthington,
Is on the face of it absurd,
Her personality
Is not in reality
Inviting enough,
Exciting enough
For this particular sphere.
Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington,
Don’t put your daughter on the stage,
The profession is overcrowded
And the struggle’s pretty tough
And admitting the fact
She’s burning to act,
That isn’t quite enough.
But though the song, which Noël recorded soon afterwards, sold well enough and served him admirably for cabaret appearances during and after the war, as a plea it was a total failure: so far from discouraging maternal ambitions it actually encouraged dozens of other Mrs Worthingtons to write in about their daughters, each letter dismissing the song as a gay little joke before going on to ask about the chances for their own girls, and each mother equally convinced that the song couldn’t possibly be intended for her at all. ‘The road of the social reformer,’ remarked Noël sadly as the letters continued to pour in, ‘is paved with disillusion.’
In the first week of 1934 Yvonne Printemps at long last found the courage to sign for Melanie in Conversation Piece, and Noël began rehearsals in London almost at once. The large cast included two men who subsequently became Hollywood stars, Louis Hayward and George Sanders, and one of the ladies of the chorus was Valerie Hobson. Noël himself directed, and the costumes and sets were as almost ever in the hands of Gladys Calthrop. Rehearsals were more than usually fraught, not only because Yvonne was still in grave trouble with her English, but also because Romney Brent, who played opposite her, became more and more convinced as the days went by that he, a youngish American comedian, had been hopelessly miscast as the middle-aged, bitter and cynical French adventurer whom Coward had created in the character of Paul, Duc de Chaucigny-Varennes. Eventually, only a few days before they were due to open cold at His Majesty’s Theatre, Brent insisted on being released. He returned to America and Noël, against the advice of Cochran and a fair number of his friends, took over the part himself.
To consider any of Coward’s plays on paper rather than in performance is usually to underestimate his theatrical achievement, and nowhere is this more apparent than with Conversation: it appears to be the loosely-organized, slackly-written saga, which was once uncharitably described as ‘Son of Bitter-Sweet’. But in production Conversation Piece stemmed from and then revolved around the performance of Yvonne Printemps, who like Evelyn Laye in the American Bitter-Sweet carried it through on the first night to a tremendous success which started on a personal level and then radiated from her to encompass the rest of the company. Without her, it is doubtful whether Conversation Piece would have survived at all; the plot is less conspicuous than in Coward’s earlier musical romance and rambles still further, the songs (with the memorable exception of ‘I’ll Follow My Secret Heart’) are also not up to the standards of Bitter-Sweet and there was little that the other members of the cast could have done to fill in their underdeveloped characters. As Paul, Noël was efficient but wooden; he himself later admitted this and also that his plot bore some pretty remarkable anachronisms, not the least of which was an English packet-boat sailing blissfully for the French coast in the middle of the Napoleonic wars.
But the reviews that mattered at the box-office, the ones in the popular dailies, were all excellent and before long Conversation Piece was breaking the theatre records and playing to standing-room only at almost a thousand pounds a night. Yvonne Printemps’ English did not improve spectacularly during the season, but it was no mean tribute to her that by the end of it the rest of the company spoke fluent French. About eight weeks into the run, Noël began to suffer his usual restlessness at playing a single part night after night for any length of time, and he decided temporarily to leave the cast. He was replaced by Pierre Fresnay, who had the advantage of correct nationality for the part and an already close friendship off-stage with his leading lady; by all accounts he gave a considerably more relaxed portrayal of the Duc de Chaucigny-Varennes.
Meanwhile Noël, who had by this time added a taste for management to his passionate involvement in every other aspect of theatrical production, decided that in future he would present his own plays and others in a new partnership with his friend Jack Wilson. But to make himself a more independent and, finally, an entirely self-contained unit as actor-author-manager-composer-lyricist-director he had first to break away after nine years from the man who, perhaps more than any other, had helped his career in the English theatre – Charles Cochran:
‘My dear Cocky,
‘If you were a less understanding or generous person this letter would be very difficult to write; as it is, however, I feel you will appreciate my motives completely and without prejudice.
‘I have decided after mature consideration to present my own and other people’s plays in the future in partnership with Jack. This actually has been brewing up in my mind over a period of years, and I am writing to you first in confidence because I want you to understand that there would be no question of forsaking you or breaking our tremendously happy and successful association for any other reason except that I feel this is an inevitable development of my career in the theatre.
‘Particularly I want you to realize how deeply grateful I am for all the generosity and courage and friendship you have shown me over everything we have done together ... but above all, dear Cocky, I want to insist upon one important fact which, sentimental as it may seem, is on my part deeply sincere, and that is that without your encouragement and faith in me and my work it is unlikely that I should ever have reached the position I now hold in the theatre, and that whatever may happen in the future I feel that there is a personal bond between us which has nothing to do with business or finance or production. Please understand about all this and continue to give me the benefit of your invaluable friendship.
Yours affectionately, Noël.’
For Cochran, Coward’s decision to break away meant a considerable financial loss for the future; but he took it well, and ended their partnership by presenting Noël with a Georgian snuffbox inscribed, in what must have been the understatement of the year: ‘For Noël, in memory of a not altogether unsuccessful association.’
The new management was formed in John C. Wilson’s name, and involved him and Noël with the Lunts in a partnership that was launched in March 1934; their first production was an American comedy by S. N. Behrman called Biography. Like Behrman’s The Second Man in which Noël had played during 1928, this was a smooth, literary and sometimes cynical comedy of American manners; and although Noël had doubts about the play and no intention of acting in it himself, he did seem a natural and obvious choice to direct it. Ina Claire repeated her original Broadway performance, and opposite her, as the editor who persuades her to write her autobiography and so provides the driving-force for the rest of the action, Noël cast Laurence Olivier. With a company that also included Frank Cellier they opened during April to reviews that were mixed; none was altogether bad, but a fair number of critics were uncertain about what to make of a light comedy which had been so evidently designed primarily for a Broadway rather than a West End audience. Noël’s name on the posters was not an advantage, since the critics came expecting a Coward comedy and found something rather less effervescent. The result was luke-warm press criticism and an altogether disastrous run; by the end of the first week the cast were on half salaries, and a few weeks later Biography closed, having signally failed to live up to its original success on Broadway. The John C. Wilson management was off to a depressing and deeply improfitable start.
It is some indication of No�
�l’s standing in the profession at this time, and of how far he had come since the days when the press set him up as the angry young rebel against du Maurier’s grand old man of the theatre, that when Sir Gerald died in April 1934 Coward was asked to replace him as President of the Actors’ Orphanage. Noël held the job until 1956, twenty-two years in which his work for the children involved the planning of innumerable garden parties and midnight matinées to raise funds, and also, when the war came, the organization of the wholesale evacuation to America of those who were under fifteen.
Thus Coward was already a distinguished member of the stage establishment; the fury of the mid-Twenties, when in prefaces to his plays he had campaigned for theatrical reform with a zeal that would not have shamed Bernard Shaw, had already been mellowed by time and success into a kind of benign endurance. When, in London and New York during 1934, the first volume of his collected Play Parade was published, the preface merely offered a gentle snub for the critics, delivered as from a very great height:
‘I find it very interesting nowadays, now that I have fortunately achieved a definite publicity value, to read criticisms and analyses of my plays written by people of whom I have never heard and whom I have certainly never seen, and who appear to have an insatiable passion for labelling everything with a motive. They search busily behind the simplest of my phrases, like old ladies peering under the bed for burglars, and are not content until they have unearthed some definite, and usually quite inaccurate, reason for my saying this or that. This strange mania I can only suppose is the distinctive feature of a critical mind as opposed to a creative one. It seems to me that a professional writer should be animated by no other motive than the desire to write, and, by doing so, to earn his living.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 25
