A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  When he was at Goldenhurst, working on the rest of Tonight at Eight-Thirty, Noël had a cable from Alfred Lunt saying that rather than be a partner in the John C. Wilson management he had decided to accept an offer to become a director on the board of New York’s Theatre Guild. Noël’s cabled reply ran: ‘CONGRATULATIONS DEAR GRANDPA DO BE GOOD AND SWEET AND READ EVERY SCRIPT CAREFULLY AND SEND US ALL THE ONES THE GUILD TURN DOWN THEY ARE USUALLY THE BEST.’

  Later in the summer Noël was involved for the second time on the outskirts of a lawsuit. This one was brought against Cochran by the Parnell-Zeitlin management who charged that by selling Hollywood the film rights of Cavalcade and allowing the film to be shown in the English provinces, Cochran had broken a contract which gave them the sole rights to present Cavalcade outside London. Not unexpectedly, the film’s success had hit touring profits badly for the stage show, and Cochran together with the Drury Lane Theatre Company had to pay Parnell-Zeitlin damages of five thousand pounds.

  By the end of August Noël had finished all nine of the Tonight at Eight-Thirty plays and it was decided that, after rehearsing first with Gertie at Goldenhurst and then with the full company in London, they would open under the banner of the Wilson management at the Opera House in Manchester in mid-October; then, after a nine-week tour of the provinces and a brief Christmas holiday they would open in London at the Phoenix Theatre early in the January of 1936.

  During the various provincial, London and Broadway runs of Tonight at Eight-Thirty the sequence and arrangement of the plays was altered frequently in a kind of permanent repertory, and even the title went through such local variations as Tonight at Seven-Thirty for theatres outside London and Today at Two-Thirty for matinées. But the triple bill that launched the whole series in Manchester consisted of We Were Dancing followed by The Astonished Heart and then Red Peppers. Of these, We Were Dancing was really no more than a curtain-raiser, an acid little comedy about a woman deciding in the cold light of dawn that she will not after all be eloping from her marriage. It was set on the veranda of the country club at Samolo, a mythical island in the South Seas that Coward invented for this play and then used again as the setting for a musical, Pacific 1860, for a later comedy, South Sea Bubble, and also for his novel Pomp and Circumstance. The last play, Red Peppers, was the least ambitious of the three but in many ways the most popular and the most successful of all the plays that made up Tonight at Eight-Thirty. Here Coward managed with accuracy, tinged by a certain sentimental affection, to recapture the flavour of tatty music-hall acts struggling to survive in bad touring dates; not only the words of Lily and George Pepper but also their musical numbers (‘Has Anybody Seen Our Ship?’ and ‘Men About Town’) suggest that Coward had a very sharp eye and ear for the routines of the old music-halls and that he was able to recreate them evocatively.

  Halfway through the first week of Tonight at Eight-Thirty in Manchester Coward brought in the second triple bill; this started with Hands Across the Sea, a light comedy about the confusion of a London socialite when she is suddenly faced with the arrival of two colonial guests and a Maharajah who might have religious objections to Douglas Byng. It was designed primarily as a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence, and Coward still finds he cannot think of the play, ‘without remembering the infinite variety of her inflexions, her absurd, scatterbrained conversations on the telephone, her frantic desire to be hospitable and charming, and her expression of blank dismay when she suddenly realized that her visitors were not who she thought they were at all. It was a superb performance in the finest traditions of high comedy, already now over and done with forever but as far as I am concerned never to be forgotten.’ In the play she was married to a naval commander, and although Coward denied that the characters of Lady Maureen and Commander Peter Gilpin were in any way based on his old friends the Mountbattens, there were, to say the least, certain superficial similarities.

  Fumed Oak, the second play in this cycle, was set in the suburban surroundings of a very different social milieu; it was a comedy of domestic revolt based on the ‘worm will turn’ formula that had proved both useful and successful for Maugham in The Breadwinner. In Coward’s play the worm was Henry Gow, an ageing, moustached, down-trodden and browbeaten family man who finally abandons his overbearing wife, snivelling daughter and bullying mother-in-law to start a new life abroad. For Noël, Henry Gow was unlike any other character he had ever attempted to write or play, and perhaps for that reason he enjoyed doing Fumed Oak more than any other play in the repertoire.

  Taken together with his later full-length play This Happy Breed, Fumed Oak serves as a useful reminder that Coward is not solely capable of writing about the rich and glamorous predecessors of the Beautiful People among whom the vast majority of his early plays were set. Nevertheless the last play in this second Tonight at Eight-Thirty collection was a return to romantic musical fantasy called Shadow Play in which Noël and Miss Lawrence, impeccably dressed, danced in the moonlight and generally exuded overpowering charm through a rather transparent account of a marriage being retrieved from the brink of collapse. ‘It is very much easier to be witty if you are writing about educated people,’ Coward once told a journalist who accused him of being a playwriting snob, ‘and besides the British public have always rather liked things about the upper classes,’ a fact of theatrical life that Wilde discovered before him. But class-consciousness apart, Shadow Play (though not by any means the best of the bunch) retains a certain technical interest for Coward’s use on the stage of such highly cinematic techniques as flashbacks and disconnected scenes played quickly in pools of light to make up the theatrical equivalent of a montage.

  These then were the first six plays of Tonight at Eight-Thirty, and alternating them Coward toured the provinces throughout the autumn of 1935. In Birmingham, their last date before Christmas and London, We Were Dancing was replaced by Family Album, a mock-Victorian comedy about a missing will which provided a few good laughs and some better parts for those members of the cast who had until now fared rather less well than the two principals. At the end of a tour which had made just over twenty-six thousand pounds at the box-offices, the Tonight at Eight-Thirty company broke up for Christmas.

  Noël, taking Jeffery Amherst with him, went for a brief Scandinavian holiday first to Stockholm, where they met Greta Garbo, and then on to Copenhagen where he accidentally crushed one of his fingers in the door during a New Year’s Eve party given by Prince William; when at the beginning of January Noël opened in Tonight at Eight-Thirty at the Phoenix Theatre in London it was with a heavily-bandaged hand. Nevertheless, the two triple bills, opening in successive weeks, were rapturously received by glittering first-night audiences that included the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson. The reviews varied from the disappointed to the besotted; the majority were excellent for the stars but scathing for the plays.

  To both Coward and Gertrude Lawrence the plays offered countless opportunities for virtuoso solos and duets which they clutched with both hands, but for Coward as author and director and composer and lyricist as well as actor it was beyond doubt the best showcase for his varied talents that he has ever managed to build. Tonight at Eight-Thirty seemed dedicated to the idea that there was nothing in the theatre that Coward couldn’t do; ‘I wonder,’ mused one member of the audience after seeing him in all six plays at matinée and evening performances on the same day, ‘what he is like on the tightrope?’

  Early in the London run of Tonight at Eight-Thirty the death was announced of King George V; he had come to the throne as Noël was rehearsing The Goldfish, and the twenty-five years of his reign had spanned the whole of Coward’s professional career. Theatres were closed on the night of his death, and the atmosphere of deep mourning in which they reopened made the jokes about bereavement in Family Album seem in execrable taste; it was therefore hauled out of the repertory and replaced by We Were Dancing, the play that had originally been a part of the first bill on tour.

  Later in the run Noël found time to i
nvolve himself more closely in the affairs of the Actors’ Orphanage; on close inspection he had discovered some curious discrepancies and legal irregularities in the way the Orphanage was run and, not content to be a nominal President involved only in the annual garden-party, Coward organized a boardroom putsch which in spite of some severe opposition from other members of the committee, succeeded in putting the Orphanage on to a basis of business efficiency rather than sentimental charity. The whole manœuvre took about a month and a vast amount of energetic lobbying; but by the end of it Coward was so caught up in the atmosphere of the boardroom that he wrote Star Chamber, a vindictive and highly satirical account of a committee meeting at which leading actors and actresses try to organize a nameless charity, constantly breaking off the discussion to pose for press photographs or to sort out the chaos caused by the collision of their own egos. The play was added to Tonight at Eight-Thirty in place of Hands Across the Sea, but it only survived for one matinée performance in the course of which Coward discovered that what had been funny and outlandish and true in real life was signally less hilarious when transposed to the already unreal atmosphere of the stage, where the over-theatrical chaos seemed merely normal.

  After the first two cycles of Tonight at Eight-Thirty had been playing for twelve weeks, Gertrude Lawrence was taken suddenly and violently ill and the theatre had to be closed for the rest of the month of April because (as in Private Lives) Noël found himself unable to continue playing without her. For Miss Lawrence, the months surrounding Tonight at Eight-Thirty were among the most difficult of her life. Shortly before rehearsals began she had been declared bankrupt, and although her friend Robert Montgomery lent her the money to invest in the plays so that she could hope for a reasonable share of the profits, that alone did not bring in enough to get her out of the wood. So while she was appearing with Noël she also accepted a film offer from Alexander Korda to play opposite Charles Laughton in Rembrandt. The strain of filming every day and then acting at night in different plays proved too much for her, and led to the breakdown which briefly closed Tonight at Eight-Thirty. Gertie persistently refused to recognize the implications and inconveniences of bankruptcy; after one particularly expensive shopping spree during the run of the Coward plays her agent, Bill O’Bryen, asked Noël if he and Jack Wilson would join him in a joint attempt to explain to Gertie the facts of a bankrupt’s life. They all arranged to meet for supper after the show one night at O’Bryen’s house. ‘Gertie,’ predicted Noël, ‘will be in one of three moods. Either she’ll be very angry and break all the furniture, or she’ll be very tearful and make it all wringing wet, or she’ll just sit there with her hands on her lap and say that she doesn’t understand. I only hope to God she doesn’t understand.’ In the event, she failed to show up at all.

  When Tonight at Eight-Thirty reopened, Joyce Carey joined the cast in place of Alison Leggatt who had also been taken ill; but when Gertrude Lawrence had fully recovered and returned the two other plays that Noël had written were rehearsed and added to the repertoire in early May, forming with the reinstated Family Album three cycles of three plays each of which was then played alternately until the end of the London run with the cast slogging through two different cycles on matinée days. One of the new plays, Still Life was to reappear in an extended version ten years later as Noël’s screenplay for one of the best British films of the immediately post-war period, Brief Encounter. As a matter of record, of the nine plays in Tonight at Eight-Thirty all but three were later filmed in one form or another.

  With the repertory at last complete, Tonight at Eight-Thirty ran on at the Phoenix Theatre until the end of the third week in June, to achieve a total of just over a hundred and fifty London performances. Ivor Brown, summing up for the Observer, noted that Coward, ‘the man who used to write very slight long plays, has now composed very full brief ones.’ Sir Seymour Hicks, in the audience for one of the last performances, had been so impressed by Noël’s achievement that he presented him with one of his most treasured possessions, a sword which once belonged to Edmund Kean.

  For Noël, the stage partnership with Gertrude Lawrence had again been a magical if intermittently tempestuous affair; their acting together was a kind of private relationship in which the audience were allowed to participate sometimes, almost vicariously, and there was no competition between them though there were the occasional rows. During February he had cabled his friend Jack Wilson in New York, ‘EVERYTHING LOVELY STOP CRACKING ROW WITH GERTIE OVER HANDS ACROSS THE SEA LASTING SEVEN MINUTES STOP PERFORMANCE EXQUISITE EVER SINCE,’ and in March, by which time it had been arranged that Wilson would also present the plays on Broadway in the autumn, another cable from Noël, in mock-fury, ran: ‘VERY SORRY FIND MY ENGAGEMENTS WILL NOT PERMIT ME APPEAR UNDER YOUR BANNER IN AMERICA UNLESS I GET FURTHER 58 PER CENT OF THE GROSS FOR ARDUOUS TASK RESTRAINING MISS LAWRENCE FROM BEING GROCK BEATRICE LILLIE THEDA BARA MARY PICKFORD AND BERT LAHR ALL AT ONCE.’

  By now Coward was already deep into an almost lifelong habit of sending frequent telegrams in verse winging around the world via Western Union to mark various occasions in his and friends’ lives that ranged from the festive to the unprintable. In the middle of June 1936, to take an example from the former category, the University of Wisconsin bestowed an honorary doctorate of letters on the distinguished American actress Katherine Cornell:

  DARLING DARLING DOCTOR KITTY,

  THOUGH QUITE REASONABLY PRETTY

  THOUGH UNDOUBTEDLY A STAR, DEAR

  PLEASE REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE, DEAR.

  WHY, IN LIEU OF ALL YOUR BETTERS,

  SHOULD YOU HAVE DISTINGUISHED LETTERS?

  THIS COMES FROM THE JEALOUS SOEL

  OF YOUR SOMEDAY DOCTOR NOËL.

  At the end of June 1936, with Tonight at Eight-Thirty finished in England and his Orphanage theatrical garden party safely behind him, Noël agreed that in the lull before taking Tonight at Eight-Thirty to America he would direct a new play in London for the John C. Wilson management. This was Mademoiselle, a comedy originally written for the French theatre by Jacques Deval. It opened at Wyndham’s in mid-September to a reception that was something less than rapturous, but managed to run successfully through the autumn until the Abdication knocked the bottom out of theatre business all over London.

  That summer, not for the first time in his adult life, Noël had been seized by a fervent desire to paint; the results were not always artistically triumphant, but he did manage to sell at least one of his works to G. B. Stern:

  ‘Noël sold me the painting for £1. 18. 6d. The sum shows clearly enough that bargaining took place, and that his original valuation was two pounds. He demanded, further, that it should be insured for not a penny less than £4,000. It really might be a good deal worse: a rather solid yet Whistlerish effect of dark blue archways across the Seine at night. He called it “Where the Bee Sucks”.’

  Immediately after Mademoiselle opened in London, Noël left for New York and the American production of Tonight at Eight-Thirty. Just before their Boston opening, Noël decided as a joke to send Gertrude Lawrence a good luck telegram signed Fiorello la Guardia, then Mayor of New York. Accordingly he dictated it over the phone, ending with the signature.

  Telephonist:

  But are you really Mayor la Guardia?

  N.C.:

  No.

  Telephonist:

  Then you can’t sign it Mayor la Guardia. What is your real name?

  N.C.:

  Noël Coward.

  Telephonist:

  Are you really Noël Coward?

  N.C.:

  Yes.

  Telephonist:

  In that case you can sign it Mayor la Guardia.

  After the tour, Noël brought Tonight at Eight-Thirty in to New York where the reviews were remarkably similar in tone to those in London almost a year earlier; the general critical feeling was again that Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were quite superb but that the plays were rather less of a triumph. The New York première w
as an eventful first night, not only because of the usual crowds who turned out to welcome the Coward-Lawrence partnership back to Broadway. Lucius Beebe, a reporter with the Herald-Tribune, agreed as a publicity stunt for a Fifth Avenue jewellers to wear a diamond gardenia in his lapel worth fifteen thousand dollars. During the first interval it was stolen, not in fact for publicity purposes, by a kleptomanic English lady of noble birth who only returned it after considerable police persuasion.

  Soon after Tonight at Eight-Thirty opened at the National, a cable from Lorn in London about the King’s abdication caused Noël to issue on behalf of his company a brief and dignified statement of unswerving loyalty to the Crown. But privately the news depressed him greatly; Edward VIII had been if not a close friend of Coward’s then at least more than a casual acquaintance, and in private life the ex-Prince of Wales had stood for that section of high English society with which Noël had long been associated. The King’s abrupt departure from the throne seemed therefore to fragment a social order whose members had until now found no reason to suppose that it would not be secure, for some years to come.

  Early in 1937, while Noël was playing Tonight at Eight-Thirty in New York and living in the apartment on 52nd Street and the East River that he’d only recently bought from Alexander Woollcott, the London Sunday Express began to serialize his autobiography Present Indicative, and a few weeks later the whole book appeared in both London and New York. Covering the period of Noël’s life until the end of 1931, it was, wrote St John Ervine in the Observer, ‘the book of a man who according to his capacity has taken the measure of life and does not shrink from coping with it’; a number of other critics wrote of Coward admiringly if improbably as ‘the richest man in the English theatre today’. But Cyril Connolly, reviewing for the New Statesman, took a less flattering view of Coward as revealed by himself in the book; after dismissing Present Indicative as ‘almost always shallow and often dull’ Connolly went on to wonder: