‘There was in postwar France an atmosphere of subtle disintegration, a certain lassitude and above all the suspicion of collaboration ... there was an epidemic of malicious denunciation, some of it justified and a great deal of it not ... I began to suspect then that the physical effect of four years’ intermittent bombing is far less damaging to the intrinsic character of a nation than the spiritual effect of four years’ enemy occupation. This in time led me to wonder what might have happened to London and England if in 1940 the Germans had successfully invaded and occupied us.’
But the press did not take kindly to Noël’s dramatic speculations; Peace In Our Time, directed by Alan Webb ‘under the author’s supervision’, opened in Brighton during July 1947 and then after some drastic rewriting went into the Lyric Theatre a week later to generally terrible notices. Though Harold Hobson led a small band of determined admirers, Beverley Baxter in the Evening Standard was sure enough that they were wrong to head his notice ‘Crisis for Coward’. A large cast headed by Elspeth March and Bernard Lee also included such names of the future as Alan Badel, Kenneth More and Dora Bryan, and on this occasion the actors emerged with considerably more credit than the playwright: ‘It was,’ wrote Alan Dent, ‘like watching thirty-six competent swimmers paddling about in six inches of water.’ The reaction from the critics was largely one of pained surprise; Coward was simply not expected to turn up with this kind of problem play, and his style seemed somehow ill-suited to its content. In the event, Peace in Our Time had an unspectacular but hardly shameful run first at the Lyric and then the Aldwych theatres. Its interest, like that of PostMortem, now lies in the light it throws on Coward as a writer of serious plays although this side of his work was still so little known outside England that Harold Clurman could solemnly write from New York in 1947: ‘All Noël Coward’s plays reveal a state of mind in which contempt and indifference to the world have been accepted as a sort of aristocratic privilege.’ It would be difficult to find plays expressing less ‘contempt and indifference to the world’ than This Happy Breed or Peace In Our Time, which was actually running in London at the time.
As soon as Peace In Our Time had opened in London Noël left for America; his intention was to visit a number of old friends including Jack Wilson and the Lunts, to inspect Tallulah Bankhead who was touring the land with Private Lives and to negotiate a possible revival of Tonight at Eight-Thirty. In the meantime another of Coward’s plays of the Thirties, Point Valaine, flickered briefly at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage; its first night there was enlivened by an indignant playwright called Townley Searle who insisted that Coward had stolen the title from one of his early dramas and who in retaliation showered the auditorium with leaflets of protest. Among generally bad notices was one by Graham Greene who raised the issue of Coward’s handling of ‘common speech’. This was a debatable point which could also have been related to both This Happy Breed and Peace In Our Time:
‘Mr Coward was separated from ordinary life early by his theatrical success, and one suspects that when he does overhear the common speech he finds himself overwhelmed by the pathos of its very cheapness and inadequacy. But it is the sense of inadequacy that he fails to convey, and with it he loses the pathos.’
The Embassy company, led by Mary Ellis and Anthony Ireland, wanted to transfer Point Valaine to the West End in spite of the notices, but in a cable from New York Noël firmly declined the offer: ‘I HAVE,’ he wired, ‘NEVER REALLY CONSIDERED THAT THIS PLAY WAS QUITE GOOD ENOUGH.’ While he was in America Noël also declined the offer to play opposite Gertrude Lawrence in the revival of Tonight at Eight-Thirty, although after some hesitation he did agree reluctantly to let Graham Payn play his parts. Coward himself was due to return to England early in October, but instead he stayed on in New York to take over the production of Tonight at Eight-Thirty,‘for the sake,’ as he put it in a cable to Lorn Loraine, ‘of all concerned.’ This revival of six of his one-act plays, for a coast-to-coast tour which lasted through the winter of 1947–8, was in many respects ill-cast and ill-conceived; nevertheless, it brought Noël as director together again with his beloved Gertrude Lawrence and it gave his protégé Graham Payn the daunting opportunity to play the Coward parts under the author’s own direction.
As soon as the tour opened Noël returned to London to spend Christmas with his mother and to be a guest at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Then, early in January of 1948, he sailed back to America; this time he took Lorn with him and they caught up with the tour of Tonight at Eight-Thirty in San Francisco where Noël took over for a few performances while Graham was off with influenza. It was the last time he was ever to appear on the stage with Gertrude Lawrence. In February the tour came to an end and Tonight at Eight-Thirty opened at the National Theatre on Broadway; there it signally failed to repeat its original triumph at the same theatre in 1936. It was in fact the short-lived disaster that Coward must have foreseen when he originally refused to play in the revival, and four weeks later it closed amid deep company depression and swiftly falling business; the plays were simply out of tune with the postwar times, neither old enough to have a period charm nor young enough to have any contemporary relevance.
It had now been just three years since the end of the war in Europe, and of the six productions with which Coward had been connected in that time only the revival of Present Laughter could have been considered a success. The time had come, Noël decided, to return to Jamaica.
25
1948–1951
When the storm clouds are riding
Through a winter sky,
Sail Away.
Noël had meant to return to Jamaica ever since the end of the war; now he did so, taking Graham with him in an attempt to cheer them both up after the collapse of Tonight at Eight-Thirty on Broadway. For the three months he planned to stay there Noël rented Goldeneye, the house that Ian Fleming had recently built overlooking the north shore on the old donkey race-track at Oracabessa. Like Coward, Fleming had also fallen in love with Jamaica during the last months of the war, and on the island over the later years a firm friendship developed between the two writers which was to last until Fleming’s death in 1964. But their friendship grew despite Goldeneye rather than because of it; Noël found the house ‘perfectly ghastly’ and lost little time in renaming it ‘Golden Eye, nose and throat’. Fleming charged him fifty pounds a week for the privilege of staying there through the spring of 1948, a rental which Noël considered ‘altogether too much for bed and board in a barracks. There was no hot water in those days. Only cold showers. We were manly and pretended to like it. But I did get tired of the iron bedstead and the pictures of the snakes he had plastered all over the bedroom wall and the banquette you sat on at the dining table which was so narrow it bit into your bottom, and the cushions that felt as if they had been filled with chipped steel.’ James Bond’s ideas about creature comforts, it would seem, were not shared by his creator.
At Goldeneye Noël painted a good many blue Jamaican lagoons and also started work on Future Indefinite, the second volume of his autobiography which (leaving a gap of nine years after the end of Present Indicative) picked up his life again in 1939 and carried it through the war years to 1945. In the meantime his reputation as a revivable playwright in America had been retrieved from the disaster of Tonight at Eight-Thirty by Tallulah Bankhead who had by now made Private Lives resolutely her own eccentric thing and planned to take it in to New York during the autumn under Jack Wilson’s management. Noël’s own thoughts were turning back to films; he planned to star in an adaptation of The Astonished Heart, one of the few remaining Tonight at Eight-Thirty plays that had not yet been transferred to celluloid. But he was in no immediate hurry to return to England, particularly as a falling lump of chalk from the Kent cliffs had made a nasty hole in the roof of the house at St Margaret’s Bay; while they were waiting for that to be repaired, Noël and Graham stayed on at Goldeneye and looked around the island for a house to buy, since Noël by
now had every intention of making Jamaica his winter home.
Finding nothing that they liked for sale in Jamaica, they eventually decided to have a house built about a mile down the coast from Goldeneye in the direction of Port Maria. Cash was short at the time, and to raise the money for the land Noël cabled Lorn Loraine to sell his ageing Rolls Royce which fetched the best part of a thousand pounds.
Noël returned via New York to England at the end of June to find an invitation from Herbert Morrison to join the planning council of the Festival of Britain projected for three years later; he accepted this unarduous committee task, and, once the annual garden party for the Actors’ Orphanage was over, started to work on the expanded version of The Astonished Heart. But there was little likelihood of getting that into production before the middle of 1949, and in the meantime Noël, not noticeably one to shy at trying something new, decided to play in a French adaptation of Present Laughter which was due for production in Paris during the autumn. The French language did not present a grave problem for Coward, since he’d picked up enough of it during the months he was working there at the beginning of the war to master the adaptation of his play which had been made by André Roussin and Pierre Gay. They had translated it as ‘Joyeux Chagrins’, a direct rendering of the comedy’s first English title (‘Sweet Sorrow’) and it went into rehearsal in Paris at the end of September with Noël as both director and star.
Brave but not foolhardy, Coward planned to give the play and his accent a brisk try-out in Brussels before taking it in to the Théâtre Edouard VII in Paris early in November. Rehearsals were less fraught than he had anticipated, and encouraged by the thought that Present Laughter was also doing excellently in Australia while in New York Tallulah Bankhead had made a triumphant success of Private Lives, Noël worked on Joyeux Chagrins through October. Appearing on the French stage for the first time as an actor he got generous reviews for both his accent and his play, in which most critics saw the natural successor to the Boulevard comedies of their recent past. He played in Joyeux Chagrins through to Christmas and then set off again with Graham for Jamaica.
Arriving there at the end of a year in which detailed ground-plans had been airmailed back and forth across the world, they found a flat-iron shaped building duly erected on the land Noël had bought near Port Maria. With grave misgivings and a few desultory sticks of furniture they moved in to what has been, with certain modifications and considerable improvements, Noël’s Jamaican home ever since. Money was still very scarce indeed, and even a cheque for three thousand pounds from his English account via Lorn Loraine in London did not seem to meet the costs of fitting and furnishing the new house. Noël cabled in reply:
‘DEAR KINDLY, GENEROUS AND LOVING LORN,
SO GRATEFUL AM I THAT I CANNOT SPEAK
THAT YOU SHOULD YIELD SO MUCH FROM PLENTY’S HORN
I SHAN’T NEED ANY MORE TILL TUESDAY WEEK.’
But Private Lives continued to prove a goldmine for royalties; while Tallulah Bankhead carried it through into 1949 on Broadway, Margaret Lockwood and Peter Graves took it on a fourteen-week tour of the English provinces. Even so, any money that it brought in to Noël was rapidly going out again on the cost of building in Jamaica, and Coward was already looking ahead keenly to the five thousand pounds that he’d been guaranteed for his work as the author and star of The Astonished Heart. He had also agreed some months earlier to write a new comedy for Gertrude Lawrence, and in the last few weeks of this Jamaican spring a play called Island Fling gradually took shape in his mind; in the event Gertie never starred in it, and seven years were to elapse before it reached London as South Sea Bubble.
Noël got back to England to find himself swathed in provincial revival: both Private Lives and Bitter-Sweet were on lengthy tours, although neither of them ever reached London. Noël himself started to work almost immediately on The Astonished Heart, which was also to star Celia Johnson and Margaret Leighton. By this time Cineguild, his old wartime film unit, had split up and Noël was left to make the film for Sydney Box at Gainsborough Pictures with Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough as co-directors. It was not a success, and one is left to reflect that it might have worked better had Coward been able to keep Cineguild intact.
Towards the end of 1949, with The Astonished Heart already in its editing stages, Noël went to Plymouth to see a revival of Fallen Angels with Hermione Gingold as Jane and Hermione Baddeley as Julia; he was deeply horrified by what he found. The Hermiones, at the suggestion of Peter Daubeny their producer, were sending up Fallen Angels sky high. Noël was not amused; but despite a furious confrontation backstage at the Plymouth Theatre he failed to persuade either of them to modify their performances or tone down the parody, and in his absence the two ladies settled into the Ambassadors’ for an eminently successful London run of three hundred performances. That Coward did not take kindly to seeing his play mocked, altered and riddled with new double-entendres was understandable enough; on the other hand, as Miss Gingold was quick to point out:
‘Fallen Angels is not yet old enough to be revived as a period piece for its curiosity value... and yet its big scene where the two women get drunk no longer shocks or scandalizes as it did in 1925; so much of the punch has gone. We decided the play would only work if acted as a romp, rather than as a light comedy.’
If Miss Gingold didn’t have theatrical justice on her side, she was at least able to claim a precedent: in New York the Tallulah Bankhead Private Lives had been a similar send-up of the original, in which the audience were asked to laugh at rather than with the play. When Noël saw that production for the first time he admitted that it worked alarmingly well, though in this case also there is no doubt that if he’d realized how his play was going to be treated in time to stop it, he certainly would have done so. Indeed he went so far as to write a letter to the New York press agreeing with most of the criticisms of Miss Bankhead.
As there was little else he could do about them, Noël closed his mind to both revivals, took the royalties and went back to Jamaica where he celebrated his fiftieth birthday with Graham and Joyce Carey at Blue Harbour, the name now given to the house he had at last finished building on the north shore. There, through December and January, Noël worked on a new musical which he called Ace of Clubs. He seemed delighted with the result, and posted the finished script back to Gladys Calthrop in London so that she could start sketching the set and costume designs.
Early in February 1950 Noël returned from Jamaica by way of New York where The Astonished Heart opened to grudging reviews and initially rather disappointing business; back in London at the end of the month he heard that Val Parnell had turned down Ace of Clubs on the grounds that though the score was quite good enough the book really wasn’t, a view entirely borne out by the critics when it was presented later in the year by Tom Arnold. All in all it was a depressing return for Coward, as the London première of The Astonished Heart at the Leicester Square Odeon in March provoked a further series of terrible reviews. John Gassner, however, began to see a parallel between Noël and the character he played in The Astonished Heart:
‘(As a playwright) his values are those of a Harley Street doctor who knows that the old virtues of clean living and plain thinking – home, hearth, exercise and good diet – are the best no matter how often his profession keeps him in touch with the aberrations.’
At the box office Noël’s name was currently something less than magic, but Ace of Clubs opened in Manchester in mid-May and then made its way slowly into London according to a familiar Coward pattern of excellent reviews on tour followed by a rather less enthusiastic critical welcome in the West End.
After Bitter-Sweet (Victorian), Conversation Piece (Regency), Operette (Edwardian) and Pacific (Victorian-Colonial), Ace of Clubs was a determined effort by Coward to come up to date with a story full of gangsters, black marketeers, tough chorus girls and stolen jewellery. But as his first contemporary musical it was a considerable disappointment.
A few days
after Ace of Clubs opened in London, Noël returned alone to Blue Harbour where he wrote the rest of Star Quality, his second collection of six short stories, and also started to work on a light drawing-room comedy which opened in London a year later as Relative Values. In less than two months at Blue Harbour he finished the stories and then flew back to New York, where Goddard Lieberson at Columbia records had invited him to make a recording of his 1933 Conversation Piece. The recording was a success, once Noël had convinced a sceptical conductor and arranger that although he still couldn’t write a note of music his ear was good enough to detect an oboe which was playing B flat when it should have been playing B natural.
With the Festival of Britain now only a matter of months away Noël’s absence abroad forced him to resign from the organizing committee, though when he went back to Blue Harbour he did turn his mind to a song called ‘Don’t Make Fun of the Fair’ which could hardly have been designed to cheer the hearts of the other committee members; his only other contact with the Festival had been to refuse unhesitatingly the offer of a festive revival of Cavalcade at the Harrow Coliseum.
Coward stayed on through the spring at Blue Harbour, where an otherwise peaceful and happy existence was shattered by the news from England that Ivor Novello and Charles Cochran had died within a few weeks of each other. Both men had been known to him since the very beginning of his adult career in the theatre, and their deaths early in 1951 marked for Coward the end not only of valued personal friendships but also of an era in the English theatre. A few years later he was to note that ‘the worst thing about growing old is watching your friends die off’ but already at only just over fifty Noël was beginning to feel out of touch with his country and its theatre. The failures of the last four years, from Pacific 1860 to Ace of Clubs, had planted in his mind a fear that what the public wanted was no longer what he had to offer, and Novello’s sudden death seemed to leave Noël alone, the last survivor of the theatrical triumphs of the Twenties and Thirties. ‘There is a small measure of consolation,’ Noël wrote from Jamaica, ‘in the thought that Ivor died at the height of his triumphant career and will never know the weariness of age nor the sadness of decline.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 37
