In December 1944 Noël agreed, although he still deeply disliked and distrusted the whole organization, to do some work for ENSA; together with a motley crowd of strolling players led by Bobby Howes and Josephine Baker, he sang first at the Marigny Theatre in Paris, then in Versailles and lastly at a huge music-hall in Brussels. It was in the course of one of these concerts that Frances Day solemnly presented her drawers to Field-Marshal Montgomery, who behaved with commendable decorum.
In Paris, after the first joys of the liberation, Noël found an uneasy atmosphere of recrimination, shame and bitterness at what had happened in the years of the Nazi occupation. Sacha Guitry was only one among many figures of the prewar French theatre who were now accused of collaboration with the Germans; ‘worse things than bombardment,’ wrote Noël in his diary, ‘can happen to civilians in wartime,’ and from that thought grew the idea for Peace in Our Time a play which Coward wrote in the following year about what might have happened to Londoners under an imagined Nazi occupation of the city.
While he was in Paris Noël started to get his flat in the Place Vendôme back to order; soon after the liberation a friend had written to him describing the way it looked after four years of use by the Nazi High Command:
‘The place has been occupied by what must have been a particularly unpleasant pair of Gestapo hounds, never properly house-broken. The filth is indescribable ... the carpets in the dining room bear an historical and chronological record of the gastronomic, alcoholic and purely colic history of the inhabitants ... there are too some remarkable stains on the bed, notably on the brown satin headboard which, if my deductions are correct, are a remarkable commentary on the acrobatic agility of the occupants ... I might add that there are also three pictures missing.’
Having made his peace at least temporarily with Basil Dean and ENSA, Noël returned to London from Brussels and did a similar patching-up job at the Stage Door Canteen, a servicemen’s entertainment centre presided over by Dorothy Dickson on the derelict Lyons’ site next to Simpson’s in Piccadilly. Noël had originally refused to have anything to do with this, pleading that he was too busy elsewhere, but on Christmas night 1944 he suddenly appeared there and sang his way through the best part of an hour. He was also still doing the occasional broadcast, either talking about some aspect of his tours or singing songs over the transatlantic circuit to America.
In their last issue of the year, the weekly Tide published the results of a literary competition in which readers were asked to elect an English Academy of forty members to compare with the Académie Française. The historian G. M. Trevelyan polled the most votes, followed closely by H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, John Masefield, Somerset Maugham and most of the Sitwells. Towards the bottom of the list, with a total of eighteen votes each, came a group which consisted of H. E. Bates, James Agate, Lord David Cecil, his father-in-law Desmond MacCarthy, C. S. Lewis, Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward.
By the middle of January 1945, Noël had decided to shelve the idea of a Drury Lane operetta, at least for the moment, and to concentrate on the revue which he planned to stage the moment that peace was declared. With this in mind he went back to Tintagel in Cornwall where he’d found absolute relaxation after his bout of jaundice two years earlier, and began slowly to work out some of the numbers. He had found a title, Sigh No More, but little else, by the time he had to return to Paris to inaugurate a new stage door canteen there in an opening gala which also featured Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich.
Then, at the beginning of May, with the surrender of Germany only a matter of days away, Noël dined privately one night with Winston Churchill and Lady Juliet Duff: ‘Emotion submerged us and without exchanging a word, as simultaneously as though we had carefully rehearsed it, we rose to our feet and drank Mr Churchill’s health.’ Less than a week later, on May 8th 1945, Noël celebrated V. E. Day at home in London with his mother and with the cast of Blithe Spirit which was still playing at the Duchess.
1945 was to be a rather mixed year for Coward; it got off to a bad start with the film of Blithe Spirit which The Times described as ‘no more than a coloured photograph of the play’ and which came as a considerable disappointment after the excellence of the same production team’s In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed nor was the film any more successful in America, where it was subjected to some misleadingly sexy posters and an orgy of tasteless publicity. In the gossip columns there still lingered a certain distaste for Coward’s wartime activities though J. B. Priestley was among those who took the trouble to defend him in print. Noël himself, though convinced in his own conscience that throughout the war he had in fact done the right things both artistically and patriotically, was now in his own mind uncertain about what to do next. He realized, sooner perhaps than did many other actors and playwrights returning from the war, that the demands and conditions of his profession had altered drastically; the world of 1939 was already a long way into the past, and what had been good enough for the theatre then might well be a disaster six cataclysmic years later. On the other hand, Coward had both Blithe Spirit and a glossy revival of Private Lives with John Clements and Kay Hammond still running successfully in London as nightly proof that a little light escapism never did anyone any harm at the box-office; believing, therefore, that in revue also the mixture as before might still prove a tonic, he staged Sigh No More as an only slightly modified version of the pre-war Cochran-Charlot revues.
A few weeks after the end of the war in Europe, the allied authorities in Germany published copies of a Nazi blacklist which named those people in England who’d been marked down for arrest and probable execution if the German invasion had succeeded. High on a distinguished list of political and literary figures were the novelist Rebecca West and Noël himself. ‘Just think,’ wrote Miss West on a postcard to Coward the day after the list was made public, ‘of the people we’d have been seen dead with!’
During the third week of August, Sigh No More moved from Manchester, where it had opened, into the Piccadilly Theatre to reviews that were no more than mildly favourable in the main; where Coward was concerned the critics seemed to be marking time, uncertain where if at all he would fit into the pattern of the postwar theatre and unwilling to commit themselves so soon.
It had been at the first dress-rehearsal of this particular revue that Noël had taken the choreographer Wendy Toye on one side to remonstrate with her about a young dancer who’d inadvertently forgotten his codpiece; ‘for God’s sake,’ Noël told her, ‘get that young man to take that Rockingham tea service out of his tights.’
But if the reviews for Sigh No More did not exactly offer the enthusiastic welcome home that Noël might have hoped for, those for Brief Encounter a few weeks later were more than adequate compensation: in short they were raves. C. A. Lejeune for the Observer considered it ‘not only the most mature work Mr Coward has yet prepared for the cinema, but one of the most emotionally honest and deeply satisfying films that have ever been made in this country.’ Celia Johnson, making her third Coward film in as many years (In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed had been the first two) played the middle-aged housewife who accidentally meets and falls in love with Trevor Howard as an equally married family doctor; the film is the story of their brief, subdued and ultimately hopeless affair, played out mainly in the waiting-room of a dingy small-town station against an atmosphere of stifling provincial conformity.
Brief Encounter was perhaps the best example of Coward’s technique of writing against the action, in that his characters said one thing and patently meant something quite different; one love scene was played with the doctor talking throughout about preventive medicine until Laura abruptly said ‘You suddenly look much younger’, which cut right through the barriers and forced them to talk about themselves at last. The tight-lipped, understated and terribly English anti-romanticism of Coward’s dialogue laid itself wide open to a hilarious American parody by Mike Nichols and Elaine May some ten years later, but in retrospect David Lean’s sen
sitive direction and the performances of his two stars has assured the film a place among perhaps less than a dozen classic love stories of the screen. Viewed now, Brief Encounter commands interest and admiration for the naturalism of its acting and its photography; the screen historian Roger Manvell has noted that in this film for the first time English audiences were faced with people on the screen who looked and behaved more or less as they would in real life, and Lean’s technique set a pattern of postwar realism in the English cinema which was to be followed for some years to come.
Early in the run of Sigh No More its star, Cyril Ritchard, developed laryngitis and Noël did his now familiar if still unnerving leap into the breach to play his sketches and sing his songs for two September performances while Ritchard was recovering his voice. But once that brief excursion on to the boards was over, Noël spent the rest of 1945 amid the comparative peace of White Cliffs, a house overlooking and indeed practically in the sea at St Margaret’s Bay, near Dover, which he bought to live in until Goldenhurst became habitable again; successive requisitions had wreaked a certain havoc on Noël’s old home, and it was not until five years after the war ended that he managed to get the money and the permits to put Goldenhurst back into shape. As soon as he was demobilized from the R.A.F. Cole Lesley returned to Noël’s service, acting now as his secretary. Mrs Coward was still living at the flat in Eaton Square, but Gladys Calthrop bought a house directly above White Cliffs and with Joyce Carey and Clemence Dane coming down for most week-ends, Noël’s private life eased back into the same routine created by the same people who, in the years before the war, had surrounded him at Goldenhurst. Only Jack Wilson was missing; during the war he had established a career for himself as a successful producer and director in America, and he now found it impossible to leave it behind in order to return to Noël in England.
By the end of 1945, with Sigh No More doing less than adequate business at the Piccadilly where it survived only a few more weeks, Noël was already hard at work on a new romantic operetta: it would be his third since Bitter-Sweet. This now had a title, Pacific 1860, and was taking hesitant shape as a love story about a world-renowned singer falling in love with a younger man on Samolo, the mythical island in the South Seas that seems to have owed a certain amount to his memories of both Hawaii and Jamaica. During the winter Noël took the time out to work on some of the short stories which eventually made up his Star Quality collection, but it was Pacific 1860 that occupied most of his working life at this time. Originally he had planned the operetta for His Majesty’s, a theatre that would have been ideally suited in size for the kind of entertainment that Noël had in mind. But when His Majesty’s proved unavailable, Prince Littler offered Coward the chance to reopen the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, which since it was bombed in 1940 had only been used as the headquarters of ENSA.
Though it was technically far less suited to Pacific than His Majesty’s, Noël realized that Drury Lane was not a theatre to be turned down lightly even if it did mean expanding his operetta to a larger scale and running the risk that the Lane’s bomb damage would not be repaired in time to re-open in the autumn of 1946. It was now clear that his score would once again need a leading woman singer capable of carrying most of the numbers in the way that Peggy Wood (in Bitter-Sweet) Yvonne Printemps (in Conversation Piece) and Fritzi Massary (in Operette) had carried the Coward operettas of the past. But this time the need was for a different kind of star: still a romantic heroine, but one capable of playing in a lighter and rather more cheerful convention. Before long Noël’s choice fell firmly on to Mary Martin; after some hectic transatlantic negotiation she agreed to make her London début in Pacific 1860, and Noël, together with Gladys Calthrop who was once again his designer, began to tailor the production to their newly-acquired star.
Work on Pacific 1860 continued at White Cliffs throughout the spring and summer, but Noël had to greet Mary Martin and her entourage at Southampton with the gloomy news that a permit to repair the bomb damage at Drury Lane had been unexpectedly refused; that there was now little likelihood of opening there before the very end of the year at the earliest. By approaching Aneurin Bevan in person, Noël did manage to get the permit through, but he still had to delay all rehearsals for a month.
At the beginning of November Noël started to direct a company of nearly a hundred in Pacific 1860, now due to open at Drury Lane on December 19th; but from the first week of rehearsal onwards almost everything that could possibly go wrong with the show proceeded balefully to do so. In ideal conditions Pacific 1860 would not have rated as the best of the Coward musicals, but many better productions would have collapsed similarly under the problems it faced that autumn at Drury Lane. Rehearsals were constantly interrupted by the need to repair and replace various parts of the stage, the seats were only put back into the auditorium three days before the first night, and Coward’s ambitious plans for a full week of dress-rehearsals (which had been feasible for Cavalcade, his only other production at the Lane) had to be abandoned as totally impracticable; nor was it possible to open Pacific 1860 anywhere outside London in the hope of polishing some of its rougher moments during a tour, as provincial theatres were already into the beginning of their pantomime season.
Worse still, during the last week of rehearsals Noël and Mary Martin gradually began to realize simultaneously that even for an entertainer of her undoubted and flexible talent she was hopelessly miscast, and was having to struggle with a part originally constructed for a heavier and older soprano. Rows about costumes developed into more serious arguments about the show itself, and a feeling of impending doom began to permeate Drury Lane. In the bitter cold, since permits to reinstall the theatre’s heating system had been held up, the company struggled through two hasty and sketchy dress-rehearsals which served only to leave a frozen and depressed author-director with the conviction that there were a thousand things still wrong with Pacific 1860 and that he had neither the time nor the opportunity to get even a dozen of them right in the few days before the first night. But if Coward was chilled in the stalls, the company on stage, dressed as for a gay love story set in the tropical heat of the South Seas, could barely manage to make themselves heard through the chattering of their teeth.
For Noël, the last few days of rehearsals were one of the unhappiest periods he had ever known in the theatre, and the notices after the first night bore out his premonitions of absolute disaster. Pacific 1860, which might have scraped by in easier times, had everything going against it including the icy weather which made any enjoyment at Drury Lane distinctly hard to find. Nor was the operetta helped by great expectations; this was, after all, the show that was to reopen London’s finest theatre after a six-year gap, and audiences were expecting something pretty splendid. What they and the critics got was an innocuous, vaguely pleasant entertainment, strong on its score (which was another determined attempt by Coward to return the light musical theatre to some of its former glory) but rather weaker on its book, lyrics and performances. The songs had an undeniable, deliberately nostalgic charm, but reviews of Pacific 1860 were hallmarked by disappointment. The most that any morning paper could find to say of the music was that it was ‘faintly reminiscent of Ivor Novello’. Nevertheless, the advance booking had been excellent, and for the first few weeks a respectable number of people turned up to shiver at Drury Lane each night; soon though, the notices and the fuel crisis began to take their inevitable toll and although Mary Martin played on doggedly through the next four months, the last two were in Noël’s phrase ‘more of a convulsive stagger than a run’. The production lost a total of twenty-eight thousand pounds.
Coward himself rapidly closed his mind to a resounding and unfortunate flop, a discipline that he had cultivated from his earliest days in the business, and decided to retrieve his reputation with a brisk revival of Present Laughter at the Haymarket in the spring. Soon after Christmas he treated himself to a winter holiday at Palm Beach in Florida, and by the time he returned to London it was cle
ar from Prince Littler’s office that Pacific 1860 would have to be withdrawn in April. Although a failure, it had not done Mary Martin any lasting harm, and a few years later she was to draw capacity audiences into the same theatre with South Pacific; but Noël’s postwar image had undoubtedly been tarnished by it. His reputation was suddenly made to seem both shaky and irrevocably dated, an irrelevant survival from a bygone era, and his work appeared only safe in revival. Though occasional new plays of his, most notably Relative Values and Quadrille, did achieve success in the Fifties, it seems reasonable to consider that the failure of Pacific 1860 marked the beginning of a slump in Coward’s professional standing from which he did not totally recover until the National Theatre revival of Hay Fever eighteen years later. But long before Pacific 1860 Noël had become immune to most press reaction whether good or bad: ‘if I had really cared about press notices,’ he wrote to a friend in 1946, I would have shot myself in the Twenties.’
While he was again playing Garry Essendine in the revival of Present Laughter, Noël put the finishing touches to Peace In Our Time, the play about a German occupation of London which he had started to write the previous year. It was a curious drama, not strictly comparable to any other of Coward’s plays though it shared with This Happy Breed a belief in the unconquerable common sense, patriotism and ultimate imperturbability of the British middle class: one of its characters even quoted the ‘This England’ speech at some length. Set constantly in the saloon bar of a Knightsbridge pub called The Shy Gazelle, Peace In Our Time was an attempt to telescope character-impressions of Britain under five years of increasingly harsh enemy occupation into two acts and eight scenes. Like This Happy Breed the new play was an episodic mixture of melodrama, sentiment and occasional comic relief; but the result was heavier and ultimately perhaps less satisfactory. A friend called Ingram Fraser who had been in Paris towards the end of the war advised Noël on the technicalities of a resistance movement, and in writing the play Coward was heavily influenced by what he personally had seen of Paris since her liberation:
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 36
