A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  In England, where Bea Lillie and Vic Oliver were now touring Army camps with some of the Tonight at Eight-Thirty plays, sections of the press had started to enquire how Noël had managed to spend so much of the war so far in the comparative safety of first America and now Australia; a number of articles (later there was to be one by John Gordon in the Sunday Express entitled ‘The Wandering Minstrel’) hurt Noël deeply by suggesting that he was pulling rather less than his wartime weight, which was debatable in view of his public relations efforts and of the apparent unwillingness of the Information Ministry to let him do anything more. Curiously, the one criticism of Noël’s wartime activities which could have been levelled with fairness and accuracy was the only one that no paper actually raised; in his speeches all over the world urging help for the British war effort, Noël was preaching the self-sacrifice that he personally had signally failed to practise when himself a soldier in 1918. The defence for that lay only in the way that Noël’s character and conscience had matured and developed in the twenty-one years that separated the end of the first war from the beginning of the second.

  From Yokohama the Monterey sailed to Shanghai, where Noël made a defiantly anti-Japanese broadcast and then stayed overnight in the Cathay Hotel suite where he had written Private Lives almost exactly eleven years earlier. Between Shanghai and Manila he then got down to writing the series of broadcasts he was to give from Sydney and Melbourne. These were later published in Australia and England under the collective title Australia Visited 1940 and, as so often with his own work, it was Coward himself who provided the most accurate review of them: ‘they were simple in style, not pompous, injected with a little humour here and there, generally innocuous and I fear a trifle dull.’

  In fact there were a total of eight major broadcasts, ranging in themes from ‘The World at War’ to ‘The Spirit of England’; they tended to be sententious and often didactic, yet they were undoubtedly heartfelt and buried in them among the finger-wagging, the sentiment and the sometimes hopeless idealism was a great deal of common sense about democracy, propaganda and the shape of things past, present and to come, all of which suggested that Coward had not kept his head as firmly buried in the sand throughout the nineteen-thirties as had many of his English theatrical contemporaries.

  Arriving in Sydney in November at the start of an Australasian tour which was to last until the beginning of February 1941, Noël got a rapid indication of the kind of work he was in for over the next few months; ‘at his first reception’, reported the Sydney Telegraph, ‘Mr Coward shook hands with 794 women and 21 men.’ To launch his tour, which now had the official blessing of both the Governor General, Lord Gowrie, and Prime Minister Menzies, Noël gave a press conference in Sydney at which he came up instantly, though not for the first time, against the problem of a public identity which had dogged him persistently and irritatingly since his first great success with The Vortex in 1924. The gulf that separated Coward himself from the image that the press had given him was, in peacetime, unimportant and often highly profitable; if reporters wished to think of him as a well-groomed, witty, sophisticated, occasionally decadent and neurotic but undoubtedly talented playboy. who was given to tossing off aphoristic light comedies before breakfast, dressed only in a silk dressing-gown and a cigarette holder, then that was all right by him and usually quite acceptable at the box-office. But now, in wartime, it did not sit so lightly on his shoulders; the Sunday Express had already suggested that ‘his flippant England – cocktails, countesses and caviare – has gone, and a man of the people more in tune with the new mood of Britain would be a better proposition as a roving ambassador’, and the Daily Mirror had accused Coward in no uncertain terms of being ‘stilted and undemocratic’.

  Although he could discount most of these press attacks, Coward himself desperately wanted to be taken seriously by the Australians: ‘no matter,’ he told them, ‘how light and flippant it is frequently my profession to be, now, when we are fighting so grimly for the freedom of civilization, the desire to make a contribution – however small – towards our ultimate victory is stronger in me than any other incentive I have ever known.’

  In the seven weeks that Noël spent in Australia before travelling on to New Zealand, he visited Adelaide, Perth, Fremantle, Canberra, Brisbane, Launceston, and Hobart in Tasmania, as well as Sydney and Melbourne. With him went a secretary, a road manager and an accompanist whom he had picked up in a Sydney night club. Apart from broadcasts, and hospital and club visits, he did a series of concerts all over south and western Australia which raised a total of nearly twelve thousand pounds for war charities and the Red Cross. Most of the shows went excellently, and Coward’s fears that the Australians mightn’t take kindly to some of his more sophisticated, nightclub-oriented songs proved unfounded save in one training camp for soldiers outside Melbourne where the diggers, raised to heights of anti-British fury by the two local newspapers that opposed Menzies’ pro-allied government stand, jeered Coward before he had even managed to belt out the opening words of ‘Mrs Worthington’.

  After a final concert in Sydney, which raised an additional two thousand pounds for the bombed-out victims of the London blitz, Noël had a brief Christmas holiday in Canberra with the Governor General and Lady Gowrie, and then sailed on to New Zealand early in the January of 1941.

  If Noël had learnt anything from these, the first of countless troop concerts that he was to give all over the world in the course of the next four years, it was that although obviously happier with the more urbane and mixed audiences to be found in the theatres and cinemas and church halls of town and cities, he could actually cope with an audience consisting solely of servicemen in a camp. For them, he was hardly a routine entertainment; a blithe, middle-aged Englishman with no real voice and a red carnation in his buttonhole must have come as a fair shock to troops already used to blonde singers and good, bawdy comedians as their wartime entertainers. But Coward found that he could, given average luck, hold most of them for up to an hour though he never really discovered for his own peace of mind whether this was a tribute to his dynamic stage presence or to the natural courtesy and good-humour of most servicemen.

  New Zealand, despite a visibly slower national tempo and the assignment to Noël of a desperately jocular A.D.C., was an almost equal triumph for him; there were highly receptive military and civilian audiences, streets lined with cheering people, and packed receptions at town halls on both islands. The only minor disasters were the Lady Mayoress of Wellington who drove Noël, white with fury, out of her official reception by telling him that in her view ‘The Stately Homes of England’ was unpatriotic and an insult to the British people, and, later on the tour, an over-enthusiastic mother who stuck her baby through the open window of Noël’s moving car to have him kiss it, thereby coming within a hair’s-breadth of breaking the child’s back.

  From Auckland, Noël travelled back to America and overland to Washington, where Sir William Stephenson the Canadian millionaire whose British Security Co-ordination represented British Intelligence in the U.S., offered him a new secret service assignment. However, within a few hours of Noël’s acceptance, this was nipped in the bud by Churchill himself who decided to alter Stephenson’s entire plan and to have it executed without Noël. ‘A greater power than we could contradict,’ Stephenson told Coward, ‘has thwarted our intents.’ At the beginning of 1941, therefore, Noël found himself back in London with yet again no idea of what he could possibly be going to do next, and worse still with no indication from sources official or otherwise that anybody much cared. The day after he returned, Noël gave a press conference in Gerald Road to tell reporters precisely what he had been doing abroad since war broke out, and to remind them hopefully that whereas they were entirely at liberty to criticize his abilities as an entertainer, they really had no right at all to criticize his private character as ‘unsuitable for war work’ without some kind of proof.

  A few days after Noël had re-installed himself in Gerald
Road, the whole of his office there and most of the studio apartment at the side of it was blown to bits in a blitz. Noël, returning from a dinner party in time to pick up a few of the pieces, realized that it would be some time before he could live there again, and therefore moved rapidly into a room at the Savoy. When, three nights later, another bomb blew in the doors of that hotel’s Grill while he was dining there, it was Noël, together with Judy Campbell, who leapt up on to Carroll Gibbons’ bandstand to entertain the bemused customers with spirited renderings of ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. The other diners, faced with a choice of staying to be sung at or leaving to face the blitz, not unnaturally stayed where they were and enjoyed themselves hugely. In gratitude, the Savoy moved Noël next day into a river suite for the same price that he had been paying for a single room.

  Early in May, after a sad visit to Goldenhurst to see how the army were looking after it, Noël and Joyce Carey travelled down to Portmeirion for a week beside the seaside in that mock-Italian village on the coast of North Wales. But the ‘holiday’ was not, in fact, anything of the kind. Although at the outbreak of war exactly twenty months earlier Noël had sworn that he would not write another play until it was all over, he had soon begun to think that this was, though undoubtedly patriotic and well-intentioned, perhaps a rather meaningless gesture. By the time he sailed for Australia in the previous year he had already been working intermittently in America on an unproduced and generally unsatisfactory comedy called Time Remembered. A few months later he had said in one of the Melbourne broadcasts ‘of course I cannot guarantee that a time will not come in the war when suddenly something goes snap and cascades of bright witticisms tumble out of me like coins from a fruit machine when the three lemons come up together’.

  By now, it had been two years since Coward had completed anything at all on paper except memoranda and the Australia Visited broadcasts, and in talking to Joyce Carey the first morning on the beach at Portmeirion the three lemons suddenly came up together. The result, six days of solid writing later, was the completed script of Blithe Spirit which, when put into immediate rehearsal and production ran just three short of two thousand performances in the West End: a record broken in the whole history of the English theatre by only three other productions, Chu Chin Chow, The Mousetrap and Boeing Boeing.

  In Noël’s original concept of the play, Madame Arcati had been a small part designed for his beloved friend Clemence Dane who at that time expressed a vague desire to act; but in the actual writing of Blithe Spirit the character developed to the point where this eccentric medium became central and crucial to the comedy. Apart from that major development, once the play was committed to paper in those six days at Portmeirion Noël made no changes in the first draft whatsoever beyond the correction of typing errors, and in production only two lines of Blithe Spirit were ever cut. The fruit machine had paid out rapidly and in full.

  22

  1941–1942

  ‘This is the story of a ship ... and of the Fleet in which we serve.’

  Returning to London from Portmeirion with Joyce Carey and the completed script of Blithe Spirit, Noël immediately began to think about casting. He believed it was probably the best comedy he’d yet written, and found little difficulty in negotiating a co-production by H. M. Tennent and the John C. Wilson management; their plan was that Noël himself would direct an English cast going into the bomb-damaged but still serviceable Piccadilly Theatre, while Wilson would present and direct an American company in New York early in the fall. For Charles Condomine, the henpecked author at the constant mercy of wives living and dead in Blithe Spirit, Noël cast Cecil Parker; Elvira, his first wife and in many ways the best part of them all, was played by Kay Hammond, a superb and glamorous light comedienne who had established her reputation in French Without Tears a few seasons earlier. Fay Compton created the part of Condomine’s second wife, Ruth, and Margaret Rutherford, in one of the most successful and characteristic roles of her career, played the zany, improbably psychic, bicycling Madame Arcati.

  While Blithe Spirit was in rehearsal, the M.G.M. film of Bitter-Sweet opened in lurid technicolour at the Empire in Leicester Square. It was, in Noël’s considered opinion, ‘vulgar, lacking in taste and absolutely untrue to my original story’; all of which was fair comment but did not prevent the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette Macdonald vehicle making a vast amount of money and killing for the next two decades all the hopes that Noël had nurtured of reviving the original.

  After two out-of-town weeks in Manchester and Leeds, Blithe Spirit opened in London on July 2nd 1941 to loud acclaim. The only dissenting voice came from the dress-circle, when an indignant lady announced that it was rubbish, rude to spiritualists and should be taken off immediately. Though Graham Greene for the Spectator found it ‘a weary exhibition of bad taste’ the rest of the reviews were exuberant, and the feeling was that here Coward had written an ideally escapist entertainment, flippant and careless about death yet funny and sturdy enough to be a constant source of joy and hilarity to wartime theatregoers, Not for the first time in his career, though perhaps for the last, Noël had written a play which was exactly what the theatre-going public wanted at precisely the moment they wanted it most.

  In fact, judged purely at the box-office, Coward was probably right in thinking of Blithe Spirit as the most successful of all his plays, and even Allardyce Nicoll has accepted it as ‘a minor comic masterpiece of the lighter sort’. But it lies well outside the mainstream of Noël’s earlier comedies, if only because we are not here faced with a closed, self-perpetuating group of central characters coping with themselves and an alien world round them. The end of the Thirties, the coming of the war and the two years that Coward had spent away from any prolonged stints at the typewriter seemed to have changed if not his style then at least his sense of development; there is more of a plot in Blithe Spirit than in any of his comedies of the late Twenties and Thirties, and it undoubtedly marks the beginning of a new period in his work as a playwright. From now on his plays were to have much less in common with each other; all the old recurrent themes, the immorality and ultimate futility of the bright young things, the witty central characters battling almost incestuously with each other and fending off an unamused and disapproving outside world, all ended with the Thirties. Instead, Coward’s comedies of the Forties and Fifties all exist, whether successfully or not, independently and (with the exceptions of Relative Values and Quadrille) in their own right, without back-references to current social mores or the accepted conventions of high-society behaviour.

  Soon after Blithe Spirit opened at the Piccadilly, Noël was standing on the platform of a London railway station on the morning following a particularly bad blitz:

  ‘Most of the glass in the station roof had been blown out and there was dust in the air and the smell of burning. The train I was waiting to meet was running late and so I sat on a platform seat and watched the Londoners scurrying about in the thin sunshine. They all seemed to me to be gay and determined and wholly admirable and for a moment or two I was overwhelmed by a wave of sentimental pride. A song started in my head then and there and was finished in a couple of days. The tune was based on an age-old English melody that had been appropriated by the Germans and used as a foundation for “Deutschland über Alles”, and I considered that the time had come for us to have it back in London where it belonged. I am proud of the words of this song; they express what I felt at the time and what I still feel:

  In our city darkened now, street and square and crescent,

  We can feel our living past in our shadowed present,

  Ghosts beside our starlit Thames

  Who lived and loved and died

  Keep throughout the ages London Pride.’

  While Noël was still staying at the Savoy wondering what to do or where to go next in the war, he was approached by Filippo del Giudice, the Italian producer who a few years later was to set up the film of Olivier’s Henry V. Del Giud
ice, together with Anthony Havelock-Allan offered Noël the chance to make any film he liked; if he would agree to write and act in it for them, their Two Cities film company would give him complete control over subject, cast and director as well as putting up all the money needed to finance it. Noël was not unnaturally flattered that the film men should set such store by the value of his name, but he had grave doubts; his experience of filming had so far been limited to The Scoundrel and a youthful appearance in Griffith’s Hearts of the World, neither of which he’d been entirely happy about, and as an author he considered that his work (with the possible exceptions of Cavalcade and Private Lives) had been totally destroyed by transference to the silver screen.

  Nevertheless, he could hardly fail to have appreciated the opportunity that was being offered to him; he told del Giudice that if he could find a suitable theme for a film then he would certainly think hard about it. Neither Coward nor del Giudice had long to wait; the following evening, dining with Louis Mountbatten who had just returned to England after the sinking of H.M.S. Kelly off the island of Crete, Noël became fascinated by the story that Mountbatten told of his command. Coward began to realize that here, if he could only write it honestly and without too much sentimentality, was the storyline for a film which could combine a patriotic wartime salute to the navy with a drama involving a cross-section of humanity under severe pressures: the kind of human mosaic that he knew he had been able to put together with considerable accuracy and success in Cavalcade twelve years earlier, with, this time, the added advantage that he could draw deeply on his considerable knowledge of and love for the workings of the Royal Navy. Thus was born the idea for In Which We Serve, the film which was to take almost all of Coward’s time and energy for the next twelve months and which ultimately became the only other product of Coward’s working life to equal the ambition, the scope and the eventual patriotic success of the epic that was Cavalcade.