A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  As soon as he landed in New York, where Jack Wilson was waiting for him as ever, Noël got involved with his old friend in planning the cabaret for a massive Relief Ball at the Astor Hotel, designed to raise money for the allies; elsewhere in New York he found the American theatrical and social scene almost totally unchanged. The war was still three thousand miles away, and Broadway life continued in much the same way as it had on his last visit a year earlier. From New York Noël travelled on to Washington, where in dinner-party conversations with such distinguished political commentators as Joe Alsop and Walter Lippmann he found to his considerable relief that the isolationist views expressed publicly by many Americans at this time were not necessarily shared by all. Although there were those Americans who still believed that whatever happened in Europe was no concern of theirs, Coward noted and related back to London a strong feeling among the few leading politicians he met in Washington that their country’s ultimate participation in the war was inevitable, and moreover that they would be fighting not to solve some distant internal European squabble but for an issue which affected the future of world peace in general and of western civilization in particular.

  In Washington, Coward was invited to see F.D.R. himself who was charming, non-committal, but entirely prepared to summarize for Noël the conflicting emotions in America both for and against the isolationism that was rampant there at that time. Like Churchill on Coward’s evening at Chartwell a few months earlier, Roosevelt also insisted that Noël should sing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ to him. Noël was fast beginning to think of that song in much the same way that a brush salesman thinks of brushes: useful as a door-opener but ultimately unrewarding after years of close and repetitive contact.

  The song was, however, destined to achieve almost international significance a few years later when, at a dinner party given by Churchill on board H.M.S. Prince of Wales in honour of President Roosevelt on the evening following the signing of the Atlantic Charter, the two world leaders became involved in a heated argument as to whether ‘In Bangkok at twelve o’clock they foam at the mouth and run’ came at the end of the first refrain or at the end of the second. It was Roosevelt who got it right; told later by Coward that he’d been wrong, Churchill murmured, ‘England can take it.’

  Before he returned to New York, Noël ran into Richard Casey, the Australian Minister whom he’d first met with a delegation of Dominions visitors at Arras when he was singing there in the concert with Maurice Chevalier during the winter. Casey now suggested, though at this time without any firm or practicable plan, that Noël should do a concert tour of Australia, singing out there for the Red Cross and for troops in training. In principle Noël agreed, though he was still unwilling to commit himself to the role of the forces’ entertainer and in any case he seriously doubted whether Stuart would ever allow him to go even if he really wanted to; Australia was then even further removed from the front line than the United States.

  Back in New York, Noël took time out from his quasi-official duties to persuade a dithering Gertrude Lawrence that it would in fact be a good thing if she went into the Moss Hart-Ira Gershwin-Kurt Weill musical Lady in the Dark; a bit of friendly finger-wagging which cannot be said to have altogether harmed Miss Lawrence’s theatrical career, as Lady in the Dark ran almost uninterrupted throughout 1941 and then well into 1942.

  In the early morning of the day that Wilson’s huge Allied Relief Ball was scheduled, May 10th 1940, news reached New York that the Germans had invaded Holland; sickened and frightened and worried, Noël and Jack decided nevertheless that they had no alternative but to go ahead with it. Among the guests that night were Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, who had just opened Romeo and Juliet on Broadway to some of the worst reviews either of them ever received. ‘My darlings,’ murmured Noël in welcome, ‘how brave of you to come.’ The next morning, Coward wanted to return directly to the Paris office, but a cable from Strathallan there told him that everything was still under control, and another from Stuart in London told him that he might well be of more use if he stayed in America and continued to report back from there. Obediently, if reluctantly, Noël stuck to his orders and travelled on through Chicago and the midwest to San Francisco and Los Angeles talking all the time, tapping public and private opinions and compiling a furtive list of those Americans definitely opposed to a policy of isolationism.

  Meanwhile the war news from Europe got progressively worse until, in the midst of meetings in California, Noël could bear it no longer. A week before the evacuation of Dunkirk he flew back from Los Angeles to New York, intending despite Stuart to return to his Paris office. But waiting for him in New York Coward found a telegram from London informing him that with the coming of Churchill’s new coalition government Sir Campbell Stuart had been ousted from his job, and that Stuart’s intelligence organization was now in the charge of the new Minister of Information, Duff Cooper. Noël cabled Cooper, whom he had known for some years, asking what he should do; the reply was non-committal, suggesting that Coward should make up his mind for himself about whether or not to return, but adding that in Cooper’s opinion he might possibly be of more use where he was. Despite their long friendship, Cooper retained throughout the war certain doubts about Noël’s usefulness in any capacity even faintly outside the realm of pure entertainment, and he was by no means alone among officials in this.

  Noël, after considerable thought, decided that without explicit official backing from the British government and without any specific assignment from Cooper, there was really very little more he could do in America. After some frantic string-pulling he got himself on to a Clipper leaving for Europe at the beginning of June. In the meantime, faced with mounting press and radio hysteria about the future of his native land, Coward found time amid the comparative peace of New York to reconsider his position. He wanted so much to return to England, he decided, partly because of the desire to be near his mother and at least some of his old friends in a time of considerable peril, but mainly on account of a deep, emotional, thoroughly sentimental and totally unquenchable patriotism for England, his country right or wrong, and everything that it stood for: ‘I loved its follies and apathies and curious streaks of genius; I loved standing to attention for “God Save The King”; I loved British courage, British humour, and British understatement; I loved the justice, efficiency and even the dullness of British Colonial Administration. I loved the people – the ordinary, the extraordinary, the good, the bad, the indifferent – and what is more I belonged to that exasperating, weather-sodden little island with its uninspired cooking, its muddled thinking and its unregenerate pride, and it belonged to me whether it liked it or not. There was no escape, no getting round it, that was my personal truth and facing up to it, once and for all, I experienced a strong sense of relief.’

  A couple of days after the evacuation of Dunkirk, Noël found himself back at the White House for dinner, again at the invitation of President and Mrs Roosevelt. While he was there, F.D.R. questioned him deeply about the national characteristics of the British, their resilience and their blind faith in the impossibility of being conquered by the Germans. None but the British, Roosevelt told Coward, could have transformed a full-scale military defeat like Dunkirk into a shining spiritual victory.

  Then, a day later than scheduled, Noël left La Guardia on the Clipper bound for Lisbon. In mid-flight the captain told them that Italy had entered the war; on arrival in Lisbon, Noël still planned to catch the first train to Paris and then wait for instructions from London unless he had to evacuate his staff from the Place de la Madeleine right away. As there were no trains out of the Portuguese capital until the Sud Express the following morning, Noël spent the night in a Lisbon hotel. The next morning, as he was leaving for the station, he was summoned to the office of Sir Walford Selby, then British Ambassador to Portugal. Selby explicitly forbade Coward to return to Paris; his embassy, he said, had been unable to contact their French equivalent for ten days and the situation in Paris was
obviously very grave indeed. Selby added that he would get Coward on the first available flight to London, and that from there he could return to Paris and help with the evacuation of his office; but for Noël to try to get into France overland would be directly opposed to his express and official advice and highly dangerous into the bargain. Noël took Selby’s advice, and the Sud Express left Lisbon that morning without him. It arrived in Paris just twenty-four hours before Hitler.

  Noël stayed in Lisbon for the next two days awaiting a London flight, and while he was there the ambassador persuaded him to speak to the British Club; Noël gave them an impassioned speech about how England would survive, ending perhaps a shade over-dramatically with the toast from the end of Cavalcade. He departed for London the next morning; en route his plane touched down at Bordeaux, where he learnt that the Germans had entered Paris. Noël suppressed an immediate, lunatic desire to board a train to the capital and find out what had happened to his office and his flat, to Strathallan and to Coley; instead he rejoined the plane and left France on the last civilian flight out of the country for five years. A few months later, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein dedicated to Noël a song entitled ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’.

  Back in London, Coward discovered that when the Germans were within a couple of days of Paris both Coley and Strathallan, together with the rest of the office staff, had managed to get out; though Coley took with him everything he could manage to carry, he had to abandon most of the contents of the flat in the Placé Vendôme where, as Coward thought, they remained for the benefit and possible edification of the occupying Germans. It was not until after the war ended that Noël discovered his faithful French maid had cleared out the entire flat and taken all his belongings to her own home where she walled them up in one of the bedrooms before swearing a statement in front of the local notary to the effect that if anything happened to her, Mr Coward should be informed that his possessions were safely hidden and could be had for the ripping down of a wall.

  In the month that followed, Noël traipsed round London looking for a job; with the fall of France his intelligence posting was obviously at an end, and nobody, it seemed, had anything else to offer him apart from a couple of B.B.C. wartime broadcasts to America. Duff Cooper suggested that he should return to the States in an unspecified role just looking for information; other friends suggested he should become an entertainments officer, take a minor desk job at the Ministry of Information, or go into the R.N.V.R. as an information officer. All were perfectly viable possibilities, but in none did Coward feel that he would be used to the best of his potential wartime value; and though he tried every friend in a high place that he could possibly find, none of them could or would do any better for him.

  Eventually, when nothing else seemed possible and it became apparent that no official in wartime England was exactly crying out for the services of Mr Coward, he decided to take Duff Cooper’s suggestion as the best of a bad bunch. At the beginning of July he went back to America armed with nothing more than a hazy and unspecific Ministry request that he should try to elicit more opinions from American politicians and newspaper editors.

  But during the five weeks that he’d spent in London Noël had not only been trying to sort out his own future; he had also persuaded his mother and Aunt Vida to move out of the city to the comparative safety of North Devon, and then managed to get most of the Goldenhurst furniture into storage before his house was taken over by the army. An equally pressing problem in these weeks had been the question of what to do with the sixty children in the Actors’ Orphanage who were then under fifteen and who, the Orphanage committee had decided, should be evacuated to either America or Canada. Noël managed to rally a group of the English colony in Hollywood, led by Dame May Whitty and the likes of Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks, Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock, who discovered that although California did not offer the immediate hope of a home for the children it would be possible to find them a billet somewhere on the east coast. One of Noël’s more clearly defined tasks on his arrival in New York was to sort out precisely where the children were to go; another far easier one was to find and congratulate his beloved Gertrude Lawrence who, on July 4th 1940, had married Richard Stoddard Aldrich the manager of the Playhouse at Dennis on Cape Cod where she had recently been playing in a summer stock revival of Private Lives. Noël, hearing of the marriage, cabled her from London:

  DEAR MRS A. HOORAY HOORAY

  AT LAST YOU ARE DEFLOWERED,

  ON THIS AS EVERY OTHER DAY

  I LOVE YOU, NOËL COWARD.

  Coward sailed from Liverpool for New York on the Britannic, which was already crammed with evacuee women and children; on his arrival he went straight to Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador to Washington, since his one definite instruction from Duff Cooper had been to see about the possibilities of forming some kind of organization to counteract the anti-British propaganda which the Nazis were then attempting to spread throughout America. But Lothian considered that any such organization would be out of the question for the time being, and at his request Noël returned to the social round, interviewing senators and journalists and arguing about isolationism with usually courteous hosts. He sang songs, went to endless Rotary luncheons, told stories about England in wartime, and generally made himself as pleasant as possible since that seemed to be the most important part of an image-building assignment.

  Only once did his façade of unremitting charm come close to cracking, and that was when, in California, he was treated to a fifteen-minute diatribe about the awfulness of the English by ex-President Herbert Hoover. Restraining the impulse to reply in similarly outspoken terms about America’s uninvolvement in the war, Noël travelled on through the rest of the summer from city to city on a bland, fact-finding and deeply frustrating tour which he was the first to recognize as inordinately futile. He did, however, manage one definite achievement: the Orphanage children were settled blissfully into the Gould Foundation just outside New York, where they were treated throughout the war with such care and devotion in surroundings of such unknown luxury that, come the end of the war, many of them were highly reluctant to return to England; of those that did, a fair proportion later returned to marry Americans.

  One week-end during his American travels, Noël went to stay with Alexander Woollcott at his summer home on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont; there he found Moss Hart, still negotiating with Gertrude Lawrence over Lady in the Dark. Later Hart recalled: ‘Noël had been to bombed London and back since our last meeting, but it was not of war he spoke as he stepped out of the launch and we shook hands. “Gertie signed the contract yet?” he asked quickly. “No,” I answered, and the amount of emotion I apparently managed to get into that one word sent him roaring with pleasure up the path and into what I can only describe as a tribal war dance.’

  As the summer passed, Noël began to recognize a modification in the American attitude; the invasions of Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium, the retreat from Dunkirk and then the fall of France had resulted in a flurry of American activity leading up to the autumn election that reinstated Roosevelt on a platform of increased wartime aid for Britain. In October, by which time Noël was again wondering what he could possibly be going to do next, his friend Richard Casey the Australian Minister in Washington made a firm offer to send him out to Australia and New Zealand as a guest of the Dominion governments to make broadcasts there about the British war effort and to give concerts for training camps, the Australian Red Cross and war charities. It was the first firm offer of a job that Noël had been given since Sir Campbell Stuart had sent him over to Paris thirteen months earlier, and the first chance of an official and dignified wartime posting he’d yet had; Noël, after first checking with Lord Lothian at the embassy in Washington who seemed almost immoderately relieved to be losing him to the other side of the world, leapt at the Australian opportunity.

  Before leaving America, he returned briefly to New York and prepared to install his mother and Aunt Vida in his
apartment on East 52nd Street; at Noël’s request they had now left England altogether and evacuated themselves to New York. Then, in mid-October, he travelled overland to San Pedro in California where Marlene Dietrich, already an old friend, saw him sail away on board the Monterey in the general direction of Australasia; he had decided to travel there by boat rather than plane in order to give himself the time to write a series of wartime broadcasts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

  After Honolulu, the Monterey made an unexpected detour via Japan and the China Sea before docking at Sydney; the Pacific was not yet at war and their crossing was supremely peaceful until they reached Yokohama. There the Japanese immigration office refused to allow any of the English passengers on the Monterey to go ashore; Noël, an inveterate sightseer, was not prepared to be deterred from that even in wartime. Disguising himself apparently quite plausibly as an American seaman, he spent an uneventful evening ashore with the crew exploring the night-clubs and brothels of Yokohama before returning safely to the ship and the realization that he had, in fact, run an unnecessary risk which was not only foolhardy but would have made some pretty salacious copy for those English newspapers that were already gunning for him.