This time, however, the problems were even greater; in the first place neither Mountbatten nor the navy wanted the story of the film to be identifiable with him or the Kelly in any way at all, since the Admiralty would obviously take a poor view of that kind of publicity and individual glorification in wartime. Mountbatten and H.M.S. Kelly did, of course, inspire In Which We Serve, and the character that Noël played in the film, Captain Edward Kinross, bore some pretty close resemblances to the then head of Combined Operations (Noël even wore Mountbatten’s old cap in some sequences) but officially the film was to be the story of no one man and no one ship; instead In Which We Serve was to be a generalized, dramatized, fictionalized account of ‘a destroyer’ and its crew from commissioning to sinking. On those conditions, realizing the film’s potential propaganda value to the navy in time of war, Mountbatten agreed to give all the help he could; he even allowed survivors from the Kelly to appear in the film and to act as technical advisors.
Without Mountbatten’s help, it is doubtful whether In Which We Serve would ever have got further than Noël’s typewriter; as soon as it was announced that Coward was to start work on a naval film, gossip columnists began to wonder in print whether he was exactly the right man to do it considering that he’d never been in the navy, and there was a good deal of early unrest in government and film circles. But the navy itself, prodded into helping by Mountbatten’s evident enthusiasm, offered Noël considerable technical and logistical help in the planning of it; without their anonymous support In Which We Serve might well have lost the authenticity and realism which made palatable the film’s more fervently patriotic moments.
Noël started work on the first draft of a script right away, and within a very few weeks there was already enough on paper to let del Giudice’s Two Cities company start setting it up; Noël was to co-direct the picture himself, as well as writing it, composing the music and playing the lead; the other director was to be the young David Lean, on his first major film assignment.
During this preparatory stage, long before it got anywhere near the studio floor, In Which We Serve was almost totally defeated by Jack Beddington, Director of the Films Division at the Ministry of Information. He it was who read Noël’s first draft outline and decided that as naval propaganda the story was thoroughly unsuitable, since it showed a British ship actually being sunk by the enemy. The fierce pro-British patriotism and the absolute confidence of naval invincibility in the face of utter disaster that permeated every line of Noël’s script had apparently eluded Mr Beddington, who also found it impossible to accept that a serving officer would pardon a man guilty of desertion in the way that Coward’s captain pardoned the young stoker in the film – even though Noël assured him that this episode was not wholly fictitious.
But threatened with this ministerial disapproval, the first of countless official hurdles that the film had to overcome at various stages in its production, Two Cities were tempted to abandon the whole venture. Fortunately for Noël, Mountbatten happened still to be in England: ‘When everything was going wrong I rang Mountbatten to ask for his help. He told me to come straight round to his house. When I got there he was in the bath, so I sat on the lavatory seat and told him all my problems. He then sorted them out.’ Mountbatten instantly got official Admiralty clearance for the film from Sir Tom Phillips, the then First Sea Lord’s immediate deputy. Armed with that, it was not difficult for Noël to put Mr Beddington in a very uncomfortable position indeed, and the objections withered rapidly; Mr Beddington did, however, write to Noël when In Which We Serve first opened in London, to assure him that the film was both effective and moving. Coward did not reply.
By the end of September 1941 In Which We Serve was well under way. Gladys Calthrop was supervising the design and building of countless sets including the lifesize replica of a destroyer on Stage Five at Denham Studios, which would become H.M.S. Torrin for the film, while Noël had already started to cast a company of actors chosen primarily from the theatre. Celia Johnson was to play his wife Alix and among the members of his crew were John Mills, Bernard Miles, Richard Attenborough and Michael Wilding. Although shooting was not due to start for another four months, Coward had already seen enough of the workings of the British film industry in wartime to realize that the only hope for his picture was absolute efficiency and clarity of purpose at all times; he decided therefore to do a second draft of the script incorporating all shooting instructions, set requirements and other contingency planning so that the final version looked not unlike the plans for a major nautical manœuvre. But before starting on it he wanted a brief holiday to absorb once again the atmosphere of the navy.
During the next three or four weeks, he visited first H.M.S. Nigeria and then H.M.S. Shropshire where he saw if not enemy action then at least the continuing naval traditions of bridge and wardroom and mess. The atmosphere of relaxed formality which Noël had found so attractive on his visits to the navy during the Thirties had, not unnaturally, now disappeared into the grim activities of war but he could still see the navy’s appeal for a writer; on board ship, even now, there was a complete, isolated and artificial community with every social stratum represented in microcosm. The feeling was of a small country town whose inhabitants were now bound together in a common endeavour springing not from a grandiose concept of ‘King and Country’ but rather from a much simpler and more immediate need to preserve their community at all costs; and that feeling of a ship’s inherent unity was the most important theme of Coward’s script for In Which We Serve.
His memories refreshed and he himself again deeply imbued with the atmosphere and spirit of the navy, Noël went back to his studio in Gerald Road, which had at long last been cleared of its bomb damage, to start the final draft of the film script. In the meantime the Lunts had resolutely turned down the American production of Blithe Spirit, but with a cast headed by Clifton Webb, Peggy Wood, and Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati, it had toured and opened to considerable success on Broadway where it was to last for the next eighteen months. Noël himself had also been heard in America at this time singing such numbers as ‘London Pride’ and his new Home Guard parody ‘Could You Please Oblige Us With A Bren Gun?’ at the special request of Henry Morgenthau Jr on a coast-to-coast radio programme sponsored by the U.S. Treasury. During the preparation of In Which We Serve, that programme, together with occasional troop and station concerts in England, was to be the extent of Noël’s war work; because of the film he had reluctantly to decline, at least for the moment, an offer from Field-Marshal Smuts to do a series of troop concerts in South Africa. The shooting schedules made this an impossibility until the end of 1942 at the earliest, and in fact various later projects delayed his arrival in Johannesburg until the beginning of 1944. In the meantime he struggled on with the script for his film.
One morning soon after his return to Gerald Road, Coward’s work on In Which We Serve was interrupted by the arrival of two police officers bearing summonses from the Finance Defence Department. In a state of some shock, Noël learnt from them that he was liable to be fined a possible total of over twenty thousand pounds for having broken currency regulations by keeping and spending money in the United States after August 1939 when new laws had made it compulsory to declare any money held overseas to the Treasury and illegal to spend any of it without prior permission. Noël claimed then, and has maintained ever since, that he knew nothing of any such laws and had never been told of them by his accountants in either England or America. He had kept a dollar account in New York since the days of The Vortex, and the royalties from his plays and songs, together with money from the current Broadway production of Blithe Spirit were still being paid into it by Jack Wilson; moreover when Noël had been in the States on unofficial business for the Ministry of Information in 1940 he had spent thirty thousand of his own dollars travelling around the country because he had nothing else to live on. But his ignorance of the law seemed a pretty thin defence at first, and Noël was only too aware of the damag
e that a well-publicized court case, whatever its outcome, would do to his relations with Mountbatten and the Admiralty over In Which We Serve. The charges could not, in short, have been made at a worse time.
Immediately after the policemen left his studio Noël got himself a lawyer, the eminent Dingwall Bateson, who advised that he should plead guilty; the maximum fine if he pleaded innocent and was found guilty could go up to over £60,000 but Bateson thought that with a plea of guilty Coward could get away with the minimum of £5,000. Noël, deciding that the publicity would be unsavoury either way, was about to accept Bateson’s suggestion when, out of the blue, he received a letter from George Bernard Shaw pointing out that whatever the lawyers and the judge had to say, ‘there can be no guilt without intention’ and ending ‘therefore let nothing induce you to plead Guilty’.
Coward, severely opposed by Bateson and his barrister, Geoffrey (‘Khaki’) Roberts, stuck to Shaw’s advice; the case came up at the end of the month, and after an unsuccessful attempt by the prosecution to prove that Noël had been in America solely for his own enjoyment and safety rather than for any unofficial ministerial business, the judge grudgingly let him off with a fine of only £200 which, as the minimum assessment had been £5,000, was taken by the defence to be more of an award than a penalty.
But Noël was not through yet; a week later he was summoned to appear before a court at the Mansion House to answer related charges about keeping undeclared dollars in the United States. On this occasion he was fined a further £1,600 before finally being released; but the two trials were, surprisingly enough, played down in the press and they did no lasting harm to In Which We Serve. They did, however, cause Noël to get his business affairs into rather better order by sacking one firm of accountants and drastically reorganizing the terms of his partnership with Jack Wilson. At the end of it all he cabled Bernard Shaw: ‘DEAR GBS THE RESULT OF MY HAVING FOLLOWED YOUR ADVICE IS ONLY TOO APPARENT STOP I AM ETERNALLY GRATEFUL TO YOU NOT ONLY FOR YOUR WISDOM BUT FOR THE DEEP KINDNESS THAT PROMPTED YOUR MOST OPPORTUNE AND VERY REAL HELP.’
A number of his friends wrote to Noël at this time expressing indignant sympathy for what had happened to him; among them was Rebecca West: ‘I can’t quite see what more you could do for your country, except strip yourself of all your clothes and sell them for War Weapons Week, after which your country would step in and prosecute you for indecent exposure.’
Meanwhile Blithe Spirit was continuing to prove itself a goldmine, not only in London but also in America. Noël at this stage was firmly refusing all Hollywood offers for the film rights because, as he cabled Jack Wilson, ‘ALL MY PLAYS EXCEPTING CAVALCADE HAVE BEEN VULGARIZED DISTORTED AND RUINED BY MOVIE MINDS AM NOW MIDDLE-AGED AND PRESTIGE AND QUALITY OF MY WORK ARE MY ONLY ASSETS FOR THE FUTURE THEREFORE HAVE DECIDED HENCEFORWARD NEVER TO SELL FILM RIGHTS UNLESS I HAVE ABSOLUTE CONTROL OF SCRIPT DIALOGUE CAST TREATMENT DIRECTOR CAMERAMAN CUTTER AND PUBLICITY CONVINCED PRESENT UNAVOIDABLE LOSS IS FUTURE INEVITABLE GAIN.’
But Noël’s refusal strained relations between himself and his partner, and the legal need to reorganize the alliance with Jack Wilson on a more businesslike footing didn’t make them any easier; on top of that, Jack was also having to cope with Noël’s mother who was still in New York but now determined to get back to England and her beloved son. Wilson did all he could to help, as did Noël from the other end, but transatlantic travel for private reasons in the winter of 1941–2 was not easy to arrange. So Mrs Coward, now seventy-eight, stayed on in New York, suffering acutely from the loneliness and homesickness which were beginning to affect her health. Soon after the court cases, when Noël was still worried about their effect on In Which We Serve and struggling to get the script ready for the first day of shooting, Mrs Coward had written to him from New York suggesting that he should join her there and stay well clear of England until after the war, especially after ‘the way the government had behaved’ over his finances. Noël’s letter in reply to hers was furiously indignant, but it was also the closest he came to an actual statement of his wartime beliefs. The letter was posted the morning before Pearl Harbor, and it ran in part as follows:
‘You don’t seem to realize why I have done what I have done since the War began. The reason I want to do all I can for my country has nothing to do with governments. One of the privileges which we are fighting for is to be able to grumble about our governments as much as we like ... I am working for the country itself and for the ordinary people who belong to it. If you had been here during some of the bad blitzes and seen what I have seen or if you had been with the navy as much as I have, you would understand better what I mean. The reason that I didn’t come back to America when I really could have if I’d tried hard enough, or go to South Africa in September as the South African Government wished, was that in this moment of crisis I wanted to be here experiencing what all the people I know and all the millions of people I don’t know are experiencing. This is because I happen to be English and I happen to believe and know that if I ran away and refused to have anything to do with the war and lived comfortably in Hollywood as so many of my actor friends have done, I should be ashamed to the end of my days. The qualities which have made me a success in life are entirely British. Cavalcade, Bitter-Sweet, Hay Fever, everything I’ve ever written could never have been written by anybody but an Englishman ... I feel very ashamed of many of the people I know in America for their attitude over this war. It is theirs as much as ours and they have allowed us to fight it for them for over two years ... if I didn’t feel that in every way I was doing my best to help in what we are fighting for, I would never forgive myself and would probably never be able to write another good play in all my life ... England may be a very small island, vastly overcrowded, frequently badly managed, but it is in my view the best and bravest country in the world.’
During the endless and depressing winter that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, Noël became totally wrapped up in his work at Denham Studios. As soon as the two currency cases were over, and he found to his vast relief that they were not going to affect the future of In Which We Serve, Noël moved into a damp cottage near the studios and, with Gladys Calthrop who went to join him there, he continued to work intensively on the elaborate and often tricky preparations for the picture. By now steeped in an atmosphere of naval heroism, he was invited by the Green Room Club to propose the toast to Esmond Knight at a special matinée staged in London during January 1942 to mark Knight’s courage and the partial loss of his eyesight in the action between H.M.S. Hood and the Bismarck.
During these weeks, when Gladys was living and working side by side with Noël in the same artistic relationship they had built up during the preparations for Cavalcade a dozen years earlier, she heard of the death of her only son Hugo who had been killed fighting in Burma. She had been devoted to him, but demanded no pity. Without even a pause, she continued her work with Coward, now perhaps even more fervently than before.
Coward was in no doubt of his film’s potential importance to both himself and the navy: ‘it will,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘be the best thing I have ever done ... a naval Cavalcade that is absolutely right for this time.’ On February 5th 1942, after seven months of punishingly hard work drafting different versions of the script, testing the actors and make-up and complicated technical effects, arguing about a total budget of only £200,000, and wondering whether the whole project would ever get off the ground, shooting started on In Which We Serve. For the next twenty weeks Coward, together with his cast, crew and technical advisers from the navy, sweated through the picture from seven-thirty in the morning until after eight at night. Some days, two hundred and fifty sailors on loan from the Admiralty would appear on the set to play the crew of the Torrin; other days Noël and Bernard Miles and John Mills would spend up to their necks in a tank of oily water filming the sequences that involved the Carley float. These provide the backbone of the film, for it is while the captain and the few survivo
rs of his crew are clinging to the float for dear life in the hope of being picked out of the sea after the Torrin has been torpedoed, that they remember their families and their private lives which have until now been dominated by their ship. As they hang on, exhausted and wounded, the film flashes back to show them with their loved ones and then to show through the eyes of her crew the ordeals and the achievements of H.M.S. Torrin from the time of her commissioning until the disastrous end to this her last battle.
The ship and the crew are archetypal, and in Coward’s film they stand as obvious symbols for the eternal, indomitable fighting spirit of his beloved navy, ‘the fleet in which we serve’. In one of the film’s early montage sequences Noël does, however, allow himself a moment in which to get his own back on the Beaverbrook press, which had in recent months been particularly disparaging about his war efforts. Soon after Chamberlain’s declaration of war is heard on the soundtrack, H.M.S. Torrin is pictured steaming out of harbour fresh from her commissioning. A tracking shot moves slowly down the side of the ship to the muddy water below, where floats a tattered copy of the Daily Express bearing its headline ‘No War This Year’. With this one shot Noël made an implacable enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, then in the war cabinet and determined not to have his newspaper mocked in this way. In the next few months Beaverbrook tried, consistently but unsuccessfully, to have the film banned.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 32
