At the time of In Which We Serve Richard Attenborough was still a student at RADA, and this was his first film: ‘I arrived on the set for my first day’s shooting, well-nigh terrified. No one seemed to know who I was or what I was meant to be doing; then this figure approached. ‘Good morning,’ he said, ‘you’re Richard Attenborough, aren’t you? You won’t know me, my name’s Noël Coward.’
As an actor, Coward still found the business of filming a repetitive and irritatingly fiddly affair, but as the film’s producer he ran the set with an iron efficiency and a constant will to work that thoroughly disturbed some of the more union-minded members of his crew, who found their tea breaks severely threatened. One day during April, with half the film already in the can, the King and Queen with their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret were brought down to Denham by Mountbatten to inspect the production. Noël was thrilled by their presence, and performed the whole of his captain’s ‘Dunkirk’ speech in three short takes while the royal family stood at the side of the set to watch. The King had already read the script of In Which We Serve, and he told Coward that in his view it was ‘a very good and appealing way of dealing with the subject ... although the ship is lost, the spirit which animates the Royal Navy is clearly brought out in the men, and the procession of ships coming along at the end to take its place demonstrates the power of the Navy.’
By late June the whole of the picture was in the can save one last shot of Noël standing on the bridge which proved in the event to be near-fatal for him;
‘A replica of the bridge of the destroyer had been placed on the edge of the large outside tank at Denham Studios. Above it, a few hundred yards away on a scaffolding, were perched the enormous tanks filled with thousands of gallons of water. On a given signal a lever would be pulled, whereupon the tanks would disgorge their load down a chute, and overturn and capsize the bridge with me on it... I looked at the flimsy structure on which I was to stand and then up at the vast tanks and said “No” ... In no circumstances would I either do it myself or allow any living creature to stand on the bridge until I saw what the impact of water would do to it. Finally, after some grumbling at the time waste, they gave in to my insistence and ordered the signal to be given. The whistle blew and we all stood back and watched. There was a loud roar as the water came hurtling down the chute, and, in a split second there was nothing left of the bridge at all. It was immediately obvious that anyone standing on it would have been killed instantly.’
But by the end of the month even that shot was safely on film, and apart from some dubbing and post-synchronization during July Noël had come to the end of In Which We Serve.
A few months earlier he had decided that after nearly a year inside the frustrating routine of a film studio, he would like above all else to get back into the live theatre; and as there was no sign from any official quarter that his services might be needed anywhere for anything, he agreed with Binkie Beaumont of H. M. Tennent to spend the autumn and winter touring the provinces with a repertoire of three of his own plays: Blithe Spirit, which had not so far been seen outside London, and the two he had been forced to abandon in rehearsal at the outbreak of war, Present Laughter and This Happy Breed. He had not appeared on the stage as an actor since his nervous breakdown had ended the run of Tonight at Eight-Thirty in New York so abruptly during the March of 1937, and to feel his way back into the routine he agreed that during the August of 1942 he would replace Cecil Parker for two weeks in the London production of Blithe Spirit at the St James’s.
Noël was delighted to be back in a theatre; the joy of acting out a whole play to a receptive audience, and of hearing laughter and applause again after months of playing disconnected scenes to the dispassionate technicians on a studio floor, more than compensated for the vague pangs of guilt with which he acknowledged that his determination at the outbreak of war not to act again until it was all over had wavered and cracked in less than three years. His ideas about performing ‘useful wartime tasks’ had all been officially frustrated, and after some unrewarding brushes with the administration and the press in his quasi-diplomatic roles he was only too happy to be back in command of his home territory in a theatre. He even managed to persuade himself that his original wartime plans had been ludicrously over-patriotic and that he was really being most useful by simply carrying on with his peacetime occupations to the best of his ability.
Early in the fortnight that Noël played for Cecil Parker at the St James’s, he heard that the Duke of Kent had been killed in an air crash in Scotland. It came as a bitter shock; the Duke had been a close and long-standing friend of Noël’s from the time when he went backstage after London Calling! in 1923 until the last few months when Coward’s cottage near Denham had been very close to the Kents’ country home and Noël had been a frequent visitor there. Coward was ill-prepared for this sudden news; between the wars he had been lucky enough never to lose a close friend through death and he had forgotten, in the years since Philip Streatfield and John Ekins had died, how much pain it could cause him. It was with considerable difficulty that Coward played on through Blithe Spirit, with its light treatment of death, for the rest of his short stay in the London production.
In the meantime, while Noël was casting and rehearsing a company to appear in his three plays on tour, and campaigning on the side for a committee who wanted to get London’s theatres open on Sundays, Jack had cabled him from New York that his mother was still chafing to get back to him in London. She had, however, flatly refused to travel by boat, and was instead on a permanent standby waiting for a place on a Clipper that might take her as far as Lisbon. Often during the summer of 1942 she would set out for the airport, only to return dejected to her apartment the next morning after failing to get a seat. Wilson did, however, send more cheerful news about Blithe Spirit which had won the American drama critics’ award for the year and also a ‘best performance’ award for Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati. Roughly half the producers in Hollywood were still bidding for the film rights in spite of Noël’s veto, and a New York radio station announced they would like to use the character of Elvira as the heroine of a new soap opera which they planned to run for several years with Janet Gaynor in the lead. Coward’s reply was curt: ‘IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER STOP SUGGEST THEY GET SHAW’S PERMISSION TO USE SAINT JOAN.’
After innumerable false starts Jack managed to get Mrs Coward on to a Clipper bound not for Lisbon but better still for Ireland, and she was back in London with her son just before he started off on the provincial tour in September. As she wanted to stay in London, and as Goldenhurst was in any case still requisitioned, Noël settled her with her sister Vida into one of the old mansion flats that border Eaton Square, and that became her home until she died a decade later.
During the week of September 20th 1942, Noël and his company opened Blithe Spirit in Blackpool at the start of a tour which was to take them from Inverness to Bournemouth via twenty-five different theatres in the next six months. Of the three entertainments that made up this travelling Play Parade, Present Laughter was by far the most self-indulgent; like Hay Fever it is a comedy about the ‘theatricals’ that Noël still knew and loved so well, but this time written with the sole intent of providing, in Garry Essendine, a whacking star role for its author. Over the years the play has nevertheless proved a well-oiled and perfectly satisfactory vehicle for a number of other actors, most recently Nigel Patrick and Peter O’Toole. Essendine is in many ways the middle-aged projection of the dilettante, debonair persona first accorded to Coward after the success of The Vortex in 1924; he is a witty, tiresome, self-obsessed, dressing-gowned figure who struts through the play like an educated peacock. But at the end of the first act there is a revealing moment when Essendine, and through him Coward himself, is called upon to give some advice to an angry young playwright:
GARRY: ‘... to begin with, your play is not a play at all. It’s a meaningless jumble of adolescent, pseudo intellectual poppycock. It bears no relation to the thea
tre or to life or to anything ... If you wish to be a playwright you just leave the theatre of tomorrow to take care of itself. Go and get yourself a job as a butler in a repertory company if they’ll have you. Learn from the ground up how plays are constructed and what is actable and what isn’t. Then sit down and write at least twenty plays one after the other, and if you can manage to get the twenty-first produced for a sunday night performance you’ll be damned lucky!’
From the West End sophistication of Present Laughter to the South London suburbia of This Happy Breed was a very long jump indeed, but one that Coward made as playwright and as actor with consummate agility. This Happy Breed as a domestic Cavalcade, the saga of one lower middle-class family and their various personal trials and successes through the twenty years that separated the Armistice from Munich. From his childhood, Noël had known Clapham commoners like these ‘I was born somewhere in the middle of the social scale, and so got a good view of both upper and lower reaches’) and a tendency in his writing to make them over-articulate was more or less offset by the accuracy with which he depicted the changing pattern of their family life through one generation; This Happy Breed is a microcosmic impression of what England was like for one family at one time, in which action comes second to dialogue and in which the ultimate heroine is England herself.
In a dramatized and faintly sentimentalized form, this play goes to the root of Coward’s social instinct; though blithely uninterested in politics, and actively hostile to politicians through the late Thirties and early Forties, he retained an unshakeable faith in the ability of his fellow-countrymen to muddle through whatever befell them, led only by common sense and their own natural instinct for survival.
At the end of the first week of Coward’s tour, by which time This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter had all been seen for two nights each in Blackpool, Noël and Gladys and Joyce returned to London for the world première of In Which We Serve. The reviews were ecstatic; Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times felt it was ‘the best film about the war yet made in this country or in America’, and when it opened in New York a few weeks later, critics there were equally impressed. Bosley Crowther for the New York Times thought it ‘one of the most eloquent motion pictures of these or any other times’. In the Academy Awards early in 1943, Coward was given a special Oscar for his ‘outstanding production achievement on In Which We Serve’, and as a first venture for him as a film producer it was beyond doubt a remarkable triumph both technically and artistically. With that one patriotic film, made of and for its uneasy time, Noël cleared himself of the suggestions that his war work had been less than adequate. The picture became, as Mountbatten had always known it would, the navy’s most successful piece of wartime propaganda.
23
1942–1944
‘I saw much homesickness and loneliness but no bitterness; much suffering but no despair, and shining through it all the same unconquerable spirit.’
The tour that had started in Blackpool in September ground on through the autumn and winter of 1942; each of the three plays, Present Laughter, This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit, was performed for two days in every town, and on the seventh day the whole company piled themselves and their sets and costumes into such civilian trains as were running on wartime Sundays and trekked on to the next date. They were received everywhere with open arms and excellent reviews, and it is evident that the standard of writing and production in these three plays was considerably higher than that of most entertainments on prolonged tours of Great Britain at the beginning of the fourth year of the war.
For Noël it was a wearing but happy period in his working life, though he still had vague doubts about whether roiling them in the aisles in Newcastle was a sufficient contribution to the war effort. He was, however, faintly reassured to discover that a great many other actors were doing much the same thing, and indeed the English provincial theatre has never again been as active as it was between 1939 and 1945. In some towns, notably Inverness, the Coward troupe played in ill-converted cinemas, and at others the size of the theatres varied from only a couple of hundred to well over a thousand seats. The performances started as early as six in the evenings to let audiences catch their last buses home, and at the end of each play Noël would give a brief but apparently riveting curtain-speech about the dangers of careless talk in wartime. This he would illustrate with gruesome examples, entirely of his own imagining, about the terrible things that could happen if people talked too much.
Later on, as the tour moved slowly south through England, he and Judy Campbell, still dissatisfied with what they were doing for the war effort, decided to give a series of hospital and munition factory concerts in each town they visited. These were not a success; arrangements were perfunctory, microphones failed, audiences were often sparse, the songs were over-sophisticated and often deeply unsuitable, and worst of all the factory performances had to be scheduled for the lunch hour, at which time there was nothing the ravenous girls wanted to do less than listen to a couple of London cabaret singers in concert. After a few weeks Noël realized he could not carry on doing the lunch-hour concerts as well as eight performances of three plays a week, and as the concerts were seldom rapturously received they were hardly worth the nervous breakdown he felt sure they would provoke in him before very long; by Christmas he had therefore abandoned them, though he did do a few troop concerts in Scotland early in 1943.
By this time In Which We Serve had gone on general release all over the country and was doing Noël a power of good; there was even the suggestion, as there had been after Cavalcade, that the film would win Coward a knighthood. But the court cases over his American currency, coming at the precise and embarrassing moment that they did. possibly scotched any of those hopes. The film’s value as propaganda was, however, taken for granted, and the Ministry of Information which had originally been so opposed to the whole affair now began to wonder whether Noël could repeat its success with a film dedicated this time to the glory of the army. David Niven, then seconded to the Director of Public Relations, approached him with the idea of a military film along similar lines, but Coward realized at once that to attempt to repeat the success of his beloved In Which We Serve would be foolhardy, and that a failure so soon afterwards might considerably harm his now glowing celluloid reputation. There was little doubt that he had made the best film yet released about World War II; its triumph had even managed to obliterate the memory of We Were Dancing, a ludicrously romantic saga starring Norma Shearer and Melvyn Douglas which M.G.M. had based vaguely on Noël’s play of the same name, and which they had released a few months before In Which We Serve.
For his old friend Alexander Woollcott, misquoting fervently from Private Lives, In Which We Serve marked the highest achievement of Noël’s career:
New York City, November 12, 1942.
Dear Noël,
There isn’t a particle of you that I know, remember, or want. But my hat is off to you after seeing In Which We Serve. I’ve seen three or four good movies in my time. This is one of them ... a really perfect thing. There was no moment of it from which I drew back or dissented. I went away marveling at its sure-footedness and realizing that all the ups and downs of your life (in particular the downs) had taught you to be unerring for your great occasion. All your years were a kind of preparation for this. If you had done nothing else and were never again to do anything else they would have been well spent.’
Such was Woollcott’s enthusiasm for the picture that he volunteered to broadcast a series of radio trailers for it, turning over his fee from United Artists to the British War Relief. But this was to be the last letter that Noël ever received from Woollcott, who died suddenly after a heart attack in New York on January 23rd 1943. Their last meeting, at Alec’s home on Lake Bomoseen early in 1941, had been a friendly if rather wary occasion; both men were by then fully accustomed to being stage centre at all times, and each found a certain difficulty in having to share the attention of the other guests. For a
ll that they remained on excellent terms, and after a friendship that had lasted nearly twenty years Alec’s death came as a severe shock to Coward.
Meanwhile other tributes to the film were pouring in by almost every post; Richard Hillary, to whom Noël had written in praise of The Last Enemy, replied that In Which We Serve was the best film he’d ever seen and a splendid piece of propaganda as well; Brendan Bracken at the Information Ministry found it ‘a rousing success’; Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office wrote that it made him ‘moved, proud and ashamed – proud of the Royal Navy, ashamed to be sitting at a desk myself, and moved because I damned well couldn’t help it’; and for Jan Masaryk at the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry it was ‘everything that we needed so badly at this very moment’.
Considerably cheered by all that, Noël continued his tour through a bitterly cold winter; when the company got to Hull at the end of November there was no heating in the hotels and Noël had to get a doctor’s certificate before the manager would allow him to light a fire. But by the time they reached Leicester early in the New Year he had solved that problem too; an entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary for February 20th 1943 reads:
‘Noël Coward was staying at the Grand Hotel having a new play (sic) tried out at the Leicester Theatre. I entered his sitting-room as he was having his bath. A valet was opening endless scent bottles and folding clothes. There was a large apparatus in the corner in front of which Noël, clad only in a triangulo, seated himself with an expression of intense desire and submitted himself to five minutes of infrared, talking gaily all the while. So patriotic he was, so light-hearted, and so comfortable and well-served. He is a nice, nice man.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 33
