With another Café season launched, Noël turned back to the rehearsals of Quadrille which he directed ‘with grateful acknowledgement to Miss Fontanne and Mr Lunt’, implying that a certain amount of the production originated with the Lunts themselves. While they were in rehearsal, Graham Payn opened in The Globe Revue, a new Tennent production which included two of Noël’s songs; but the heyday of intimate West End revue, to which Noël had first contributed thirty years earlier, was now beginning to draw to a close and this was to be the last revue featuring any new Coward material.
A few days after Noël ended his season at the Café, Quadrille started an eight-week tour at the Opera House in Manchester. Reviews on tour were excellent for the Lunts and the Beaton décor, though somewhat more guarded about Coward’s script.
On September 6th, six days before the London opening of Quadrille, a telegram from New York told Noël of the sudden death of Gertrude Lawrence. He had last seen her in the previous May when he was on his way home from Jamaica; then they had lunched together in New York and talked about the possibility that she would at last play his Island Fling in London when the Broadway run of The King and I came to its end. Now she was dead, lights were dimmed that night outside theatres throughout London and New York, and Coward was left to collect a few memories of the actress who had been his loving and beloved friend both in the theatre and out of it for almost exactly forty years:
‘We first worked together as child actors in the Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool, in 1912; since then, whether we have been acting together or not, we have been integrally part of each other’s lives ... I wish so very deeply that I could have seen her just once more playing in a play of mine, for no one I have ever known, however brilliant and however gifted, has contributed quite what she contributed to my work. Her quality was, to me, unique and her magic imperishable.’
The London first night of Quadrille brought for the Lunts a batch of rave reviews and for Noël some of the most vitriolic press reaction that even he had ever encountered; the Daily Telegraph found the play ‘an empty trifle’, and Kenneth Tynan remarked that it was ‘comedy gone flabby, comedy swollen with sentiment, tugging at heart-strings which have slackened long ago with tedium. It is also comedy predictable, comedy suspenseless, comedy which is all situation and no plot. Quadrille suggests Oscar Wilde rewritten on a Sunday afternoon in a rectory garden by Amanda McKittrick Ros.’
It is difficult to discover precisely what in Quadrille beyond a reversion to the old critical distaste for the work of Coward led to this onslaught: though not by any means one of the great light comedies of our time, and rating somewhere below the best half-dozen of Coward’s own, it is nonetheless carefully constructed and endowed with that tender, retrospective charm that has been the saviour of many lesser plays. Here for the first time Coward tried, with intermittent but sometimes considerable success, to contain within a play his deeply pro-American feelings. In the character of Axel Diensen, played by Alfred Lunt, is an amalgam of the characteristics that made America great in the late nineteenth century; a bearded pioneer of the railways, Diensen talks of his native land in lengthy speeches whose patriotic lyricism would not have disgraced Walt Whitman.
But in any case the reviews were bad only for Coward, not the Lunts; their magic remained untarnished by the notices and within days of the September opening at the Phoenix Quadrille was sold out until Christmas. Throughout the autumn Noël remained in England, deciding reluctantly that in spite of some more tempting offers from hotels in New York the time had still not come to try his cabaret luck in America. Within a week of the Quadrille attacks, he had come in for another batch of unenviable reviews on account of Meet Me Tonight, a rather shaky film package of three of his plays from Tonight at Eight-Thirty. In spite of a star-studded cast the film was generally considered to be an artistic disaster, perhaps because the best plays of the Tonight at Eight-Thirty bunch had already been filmed elsewhere and those that were left had proved more difficult to adapt; but contrary to popular belief at the time, Coward had not been involved in their conversion.
In the first week of 1953 Noël left London for his usual Jamaican winter, having first decided that in the spring he would return to the stage opposite Margaret Leighton in a Tennent production of Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart. This would be the first time he had ever played in Shaw, and indeed the first time for more than twenty years that he had appeared on the stage in the work of any author other than himself. He treated the assignment with predictable thoroughness, and as soon as he arrived at Blue Harbour began to learn one of the longest parts in the Shaw repertoire: ‘There is no seagull in Jamaica that does not now know that play by heart. They heard my lines daily for three months.’
While the seagulls and Noël were thus occupied, he also found time to finish the second of his autobiographies, Future Indefinite, and to entertain another visitor to Blue Harbour, Clemence Dane, the playwright and novelist who on account of her fondness for the ocean became affectionately known to the household as Moby Dane.
Returning to London early in April, Noël went straight into rehearsal under Michael MacOwan’s direction for The Apple Cart; he arrived at the first reading word-perfect, thereby thoroughly disconcerting a distinguished cast. But, despite this head start, he did not find Shaw easy to play: ‘I knew the words, but it took me a while to discover how to say them; playing Shaw is a question of remembering your scales, because you can’t do a long Shavian speech in a monotone.’
Early in rehearsals a young actor playing one of the smaller parts told Coward that he was again reading Present Indicative; ‘that’s right dear boy,’ replied its author, ‘always keep abreast of the classics.’
After a trial week in Brighton The Apple Cart opened at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket a month before the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. Coward’s notices varied only from excellent to grudgingly good; it had been a bright idea to revive Shaw’s comedy about the place of the monarchy in the scheme of things political at a time when people were for once actually thinking about the monarchy, and even the epilogue about America’s desire to rejoin the Empire had a kind of relevance in the spring of 1953. The climate of critical opinion, particularly among the Sunday papers, suggested that Shaw had found an able interpreter in Coward, and The Apple Cart settled down to enviable business for the three months to which Noël had as usual limited his appearance. Early in the run, conducting a party of visitors back to the stage door after the show, Noël turned a corner to come upon the bearded Laurence Naismith, in his shirt-tails and little else, making a backstage phone-call; ‘that,’ Coward told his amazed guests, ‘is our Miss Pringle – such a hairy girl.’
Later in May Noël returned to the Café de Paris where he sang after The Apple Cart every night for the four weeks on either side of the Coronation. On the night of the Coronation itself, after his appearances at the Haymarket and the Café, Noël also sang at a celebration ball given in the restaurant of the Savoy Hotel which was so gala that the menus were printed on white satin. As his appearance there was timed for only fifteen minutes after he was due to finish at the Café, and as Noël was convinced that at that hour the streets of London would still be thronged with crowds of merrymakers, he arranged for a car complete with police escort to get himself and Norman Hackforth from the Café to the Savoy in time. Accordingly they were solemnly transported from Leicester Square to the Strand with police outriders and sirens to blast them through streets by now totally deserted: they achieved the journey with roughly thirteen minutes to spare. Earlier in a long day, Noël had watched the Coronation procession making its way down the Mall, and in particular the hugely enchanting Queen Salote of Tonga who was sharing her open coach with a rather small attaché from the Tongan embassy. ‘Who,’ someone asked Noël as they watched, ‘is that in the coach with Queen Salote?’ ‘Her lunch,’ he replied.
Later in June Quadrille came to the last of more than three hundred performances at the Phoenix, and soon afterwards
Noël brought his own season at the Café de Paris to a close, though not before a memorable night when one of the diners at the Café was the musical comedy star Elsie Randolph. An old acquaintance of Coward’s, she sent him a note hoping that he would join her for a drink after his performance and initialled it E.R. It was therefore with some uneasiness that Miss Randolph looked up a few moments later to find a party of the royal family at a table nearby.
At about this time an assessment of Noël written by Tynan for the Evening Standard, concluded:
‘Coward has been accused of having enervated English comedy by making it languid and blasé. The truth, of course, is the opposite: Coward took sophistication out of the refrigerator and set it bubbling on the hob. He doses his sentences with pauses as you dose epileptics with drugs. To be with him for any length of time is exhausting and invigorating in roughly equal proportions. He is perfectly well aware that he possesses “star quality” which is the lodestar of his life. In his case, it might be defined as the ability to project, without effort, the outline of a unique personality which has never existed before him in print or paint. Even the youngest of us will know in fifty years time exactly what we mean by “a very Noël Coward sort of person”.’
After The Apple Cart closed, Noël started to work on a new project: a musical version of Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. The score for this occupied him for the rest of 1953, but shortly before Christmas he set off for Jamaica; there, at Blue Harbour, he completed the last of more than a dozen numbers which, together with what survived of Wilde’s original play, made up After the Ball.
Coward did not, however, plan to produce After the Ball himself, and he remained in Jamaica while it went into rehearsal in London; then, at the end of March 1954, by which time Future Indefinite was due for publication, he returned to England. The autobiography of Coward’s war years seemed to come as a vague disappointment to most critics though The Economist saw that throughout Future Indefinite Coward was making a consistently valid statement about his later self:
‘He is painfully expatriated ... success faithfully attends him, the eminent appreciate him, Royalty thanks him, audiences applaud him; but he remains somehow uneasily not “in”, not orientated, uncertain of his proper role; a figure at once more complex and more sympathetic than one would conjecture him to realize.’
After The Ball had started its pre-London tour at the Royal Court in Liverpool on the first day of March 1954; for the next twelve weeks, as it wound its way around England to some pretty uncomplimentary reviews, the director Robert Helpmann and later Coward himself made some extensive alterations to the production, adding and cutting whole numbers, breaking it into three acts instead of two, getting a new conductor and rearranging the orchestrations. Then, in the middle of June, it reached the Globe Theatre in London to notices that were mixed roughly six to four against the show.
The real trouble with After the Ball seems to have been that Coward failed to find a way of inserting his songs into Wilde’s tightly constructed plot without slowing the action down to a near-standstill. But his name at the box-office still proved a useful counterweight to the critics and his musical survived for a not entirely discreditable total of one hundred and eighty-eight performances.
Noël himself went on to the Café de Paris, where for one night only he introduced his already legendary friend Marlene Dietrich; he then planned to set off in early July for Cap Ferrat and a brief summer holiday at the home of another old friend, Somerset Maugham. But on the first of July Mrs Coward, who was now ninety-one and had been ailing for some time, died peacefully at her flat in Eaton Square. Noël who had remained singularly devoted to his mother throughout the fifty-four years of his life, was deeply distressed; although her death was an eventuality for which he had been prepared, it came as a great and bitter sorrow to him. ‘She was always there when I wanted her,’ Noël was later to say of his mother, ‘and never when I didn’t, which meant that I always wanted her. She was the one person who could always tell me outright when something I had written was bad. She never lied to me.’ Coward was now left with no close relatives whatsoever.
Within a few days of his mother’s death Noël was back at work, recording a new album of his Café de Paris songs for Philips; then, towards the end of July, he went for his delayed holiday with Maugham at Cap Ferrat. The ‘old party’, as Maugham had long since christened himself, was now eighty and Coward found himself one of a rapidly diminishing band of friends whose company Maugham still found tolerable; artistically, socially and in the pattern of their private lives the two writers had a great deal in common, and as Coward approaches his seventies he even grows to look curiously like pictures of Maugham at the same age. They had first met as early as 1917, and at a time when Noël was just about to start his career as a playwright he found in Maugham ‘one of my immediate gods of the theatre’. It is indeed arguable that Coward’s debt to Maugham is considerably greater than to any other of his predecessors; in Our Betters it is possible to see the beginnings of The Vortex, in The Breadwinner the model for Fumed Oak, and a number of Coward’s short stories seem deliberately based on the style of the writer who was called ‘The Master’ before him.
But although their careers and their ideas often overlapped, although they had similar beliefs about light comedy in the theatre, and although Coward spent a fair amount of time at the Villa Mauresque over the years, he never really got to know Maugham very well:
‘He was a complex man and his view of his fellow creatures was jaundiced to say the least. He of course had his friends and his loves, and I myself am indebted to him for nearly fifty years of kindness and hospitality, but I cannot truthfully say that I really knew him intimately. He believed, rather proudly, I think, that he had no illusions about people but in fact he had one major one and that was that they were no good ... Willie had little faith in the human heart perhaps because, having started his career as a medical student, he was unable to regard it as anything but a functional organ.’
Returning to England in September, Noël started the last of his four consecutive seasons at the Café de Paris, where Milton Shulman found him ‘blinking in the spotlight and looking like a totem pole in a dress suit ... here was an immaculate monument reminding the middle-aged audience not only of what they were but of what they had become.’ For what proved to be Coward’s farewell season in London cabaret (a year or so later the Café was taken over by Mecca Dancing) he sang his way through the repertoire that had been so well tried and tested down the years, adding to it only another rewritten version of a song by Cole Porter and a new song of his own about the redoubtable Mrs Wentworth-Brewster to whom life called in a bar on the Piccola Marina.
Early in November, while Coward was still jamming the tables at the Café, Alfred Lunt directed Quadrille for New York with himself and Lynn Fontanne playing their original parts. For the Times Brooks Atkinson found it no more than ‘a pleasant charade’, but Broadway audiences seemed to have little objection to mildness overtaking the Lunt-Coward partnership, and the American Quadrille ran on well into 1955.
At the end of his Café season Noël at last began to feel that he was ready to face an American nightclub audience; he had been offered $40,000 a week to appear at the Desert Inn, Las Vegas, for a month of the following year. While he was still thinking the offer over, although one suspects for that salary remarkably little thought was required, he stayed at Blue Harbour and began work on a new comedy about modern art which emerged two years later as Nude With Violin.
Early in 1955, while Noël was still in Jamaica, Lorn Loraine embarked on a lengthy series of meetings in London with Coward’s lawyers and accountants in an attempt to sort out a tax position which had already become very nasty indeed, and which left Coward not for the first time in his life owing rather more to the Revenue than he actually had to hand at that particular moment. His theatrical disasters of the late Forties had indeed led to a bank overdraft that was currently running at around £19,000. Still,
there was always the hope that Las Vegas would solve that problem, and by May the contract for the Desert Inn was already signed and sealed.
A month later Noël arrived in Nevada to start rehearsing with an American accompanist since the union restrictions there made it impossible for him to have Norman Hackforth to play for him again. In an effort to improve the condition of his voice Coward, a lifelong heavy smoker, even tried to give up cigarettes for a few days; finding though that this actually made him considerably more husky, he rapidly abandoned the attempt. Noël was apprehensive about how his ultra-English material would go over to an American gambling audience; but at forty thousand dollars a week he was getting more than Las Vegas had ever paid to an entertainer with the single exception of Liberace, and Noël noted sharply that ‘for that kind of money they can throw bottles at me if they so choose’.
They didn’t. With a repertoire of songs ancient and modern that was largely unchanged from his last stint at the Café, Coward opened his season at the Desert Inn on June 7th 1955; and although the first of fifty-six shows that he was to give there twice nightly for the next month was somewhat strained on account of his ferocious nerves, by the second house at midnight he had relaxed sufficiently first to ensure and then to enjoy one of the greatest personal successes of his life. A headline in Variety told the story in its own inimitable way: ‘Las Vegas, Flipping, Shouts “More!” as Noël Coward Wows ’Em in Café Turn.’
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 39
