A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  At the age of fifty-five, armed with little more than that increasingly oriental face, some ageing songs and an irrepressible talent to amuse, the man once christened ‘Destiny’s Tot’ by Woollcott had pulled off another major triumph. The only sadness was that neither Woollcott nor Gertrude Lawrence nor any of the other major figures from Coward’s past were at Las Vegas to see the consummate artistry with which it was done.

  27

  1955–1958

  ‘The world has treated me very well – but then I haven’t treated it so badly either.’

  Noël continued to sing twice nightly to what he later described as ‘Nescafe Society’ at Las Vegas for the next month, missing only a couple of performances when his voice began to give out and Gordon MacRae agreed to take over. Once he got his voice back Noël was determined to keep in good trim for the rest of the season, and took up a series of elaborate vocal exercises; other guests at the Desert Inn were surprised and occasionally alarmed to hear deep mooing sounds issuing from his suite before every performance. Coward found Las Vegas ‘endlessly enthralling, like a vast cruise ship with everything so organized you never have to think for yourself’ and his success there was almost unprecedented; Wilbur Clark, owner of the Desert Inn, told the local paper that ‘until a couple of months ago I’d never heard of this guy Coward – but he’s doing O.K.’, something of an understatement in view of the daily queue for returns which stretched the whole length of the Inn. Even more important, from Clark’s point of view, was the fact that Coward’s audience tended to become a gambling audience later in the evening; a valuable characteristic, since earlier attempts to import ‘legitimate’ stars to Las Vegas had resulted in audiences who wouldn’t be seen dead near a one-armed bandit.

  In the middle of July 1955 Coward bade a fond farewell to Vegas and went home to Goldenhurst a considerably wealthier man than when he left it. During the summer, he stayed in England to turn in a brief, brisk and profitable performance as Hesketh-Baggott, the dapper head of the employment exchange who sends Passepartout to work for Phileas Fogg at the very beginning of the Mike Todd all-star film of Around the World in 80 Days. The dialogue for this scene was written by Noël himself. At this time he also negotiated a contract worth five hundred thousand dollars to do three coast-to-coast television shows for C.B.S. during the autumn and winter of 1955–6. Negotiations for these Coward spectaculars were carried out at some length with American television executives who used to write on paper headed ‘From the Desk of ...’ until Noël started replying ‘Dear Desk’.

  Coward also received two other offers at this time, both of which he turned down; one was the part of Professor Higgins in a musical to be called My Fair Lady, and the other was the part of an English soldier, subsequently played by Alec Guinness, in a film to be called The Bridge on the River Kwai. Perhaps not since Olivier turned down Journey’s End a quarter of a century earlier had an actor chalked up such memorably misplaced refusals, but in retrospect Coward remained commendably calm and unremorseful; it was indeed he who suggested Rex Harrison to the producers of My Fair Lady.

  In October Coward returned to New York to make his debut on American television in its first full colour spectacular, an event he shared with Mary Martin; their joint appearance was sponsored for C.B.S. by Ford and entitled ‘Together with Music’. Forty-one rehearsals went into the making of it, and even then Coward wasn’t satisfied: ‘We’re still doing it on our nerves – I want it done on technique.’ For ninety minutes, live and in colour, the two entertainers sang together and alone through most of Coward and much of Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein. The show cost Ford a cool five hundred thousand dollars but was undoubtedly worth every cent of it; Margot Fonteyn and William Faulkner turned up in the studio to watch, and the New York Times considered that Coward, in spite of some initial stiffness, ‘can write off this occasion as one of the triumphs of his career ... it was a knock-out’. The next morning, after he had seen the notices and been rung up by what seemed like every viewer in New York, Noël cabled Lorn Loraine in London: ‘COMPARED TO THIS, LAS VEGAS WAS LIKE A BAD MATINÉE AT DUNDEE.’ Via television America had apparently rediscovered Coward at a time when in his own country he was a prophet without much theatrical honour.

  After Christmas with Lorn in Jamaica, Noël flew back to Hollywood where he was to do the television of Blithe Spirit for C.B.S. early in January; he himself played Condomine with Lauren Bacall as Elvira, Claudette Colbert as Ruth, and Philip Tonge, his old friend from early days as a child actor, playing Doctor Bradman. Rehearsals were somewhat fraught on account of Miss Colbert’s difficulty in learning a lengthy part; reports from the studio floor offered the following star exchange:

  Colbert: ‘I’m sorry, I knew these lines backwards last night.’

  Coward: ‘And that’s just the way you’re saying them this morning.’

  Colbert: ‘If you’re not very careful I may throw something at you.’

  Coward: ‘You might start with my cues.’

  But Blithe Spirit was all right on the night, in spite of a certain nervousness on the part of its Ford sponsors who seriously considered some of the dialogue too racy for a television audience; predictably Coward refused to cut any more of his play than had already been sacrificed to a seventy-five minute time slot, noting sharply that ‘People who object to the language in Blithe Spirit are crackpots, and Mr Ford should be happy if they don’t buy his cars. They would be a menace on the highways.’

  From Hollywood Noël went back to Jamaica, stopping off on the way for a careful look at Bermuda; already it was becoming clear from Lorn in London that in spite of his recent American successes Coward was still in deep financial trouble at home, and his legal advisers were suggesting that to take up residence abroad might be the only way out. For tax purposes Bermuda was then more suitable than Jamaica, and accordingly on this visit Noël began to look around for a possible house. The one that he found, after considerable searching, was Spithead Lodge in Warwick, a house that had once belonged to Eugene O’Neill and had been the birthplace of his daughter Oonagh, later Mrs Charles Chaplin.

  Before taking it over Noël returned to Jamaica, from where he wrote to Lorn instructing her to sell both Goldenhurst and the studio flat in Gerald Road, since two English homes for a man planning to settle in Bermuda were patently an extravagance he would have to do without. He also wrote to the Actors’ Orphanage asking them, in view of his determination to live abroad, to release him from the Presidency that he had held without a break since April 1934. The Orphanage accepted his resignation reluctantly and elected Laurence Olivier in his place; Coward had been, in Tyrone Guthrie’s words, ‘not only a dignified figurehead but a man who regularly visited the children, made sure that the beds were clean, that the slops were emptied, the stairs swept, the meals adequate and that the orphans felt that their president really stood in loco parentis.’

  While Noël was still abroad, South Sea Bubble, the play he had originally written for Gertrude Lawrence, opened at the Lyric Theatre with Vivien Leigh now in the lead; thirteen days later on May 8th 1956, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court and launched a revolution which was to affect the shape of the English theatre for the next ten years. Osborne, in fact, was to shake up the theatre of the mid-Fifties in precisely the way that Coward had shaken up the theatre of the mid-Twenties with The Vortex, though of the two Coward’s play probably came as the greater shock to his audience.

  It was a critic on The Times who first saw a connection between the two writers: ‘widely acclaimed as the most exciting play of its year, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger appears very like The Vortex which established Mr Coward as the sympathetic voice of another postwar generation. It has the same air of desperate sincerity... the heroes of both plays are neurotics, but they suffer, and when an author can convey that suffering on the stage is genuine, it matters not how thin-spirited the sufferer; we are moved.’

  South Sea Bubble, however, fai
led to move anybody much; The Times considered it ‘a minor but not unpleasing Coward’ while most of the other reviews jumped through the inevitable hoops labelled ‘superficial’, ‘hollow’ and ‘brittle’.

  In New York during May, Coward and Edna Best had a considerable success with the third of his C.B.S. television specials, This Happy Breed; Noël again played Frank Gibbons, in what the New York Post considered to be ‘the most impressive performance of his career’. A few days later, after returning to Blue Harbour, he took part in Ed Murrow’s ‘Small World’ television hookup; the other guests were Siobhan McKenna in Dublin and James Thurber in New York, but the programme seems to have turned into something of an evening with Noël Coward. He talked to, or rather at, Murrow about his painting (‘Touch and Gauguin’), his notion of comfort (‘good books, agreeable people and first-rate plumbing’), his reflections on Las Vegas (‘one of the most respectable towns I’ve ever known; people are so preoccupied with gambling they’ve no time for the major vices’), his thoughts about American television (‘it is for appearing on, not for looking at. I don’t trust ratings, which I’m sure I could boost if I had the forethought to marry Grace Kelly or commit a really thorough trunk murder before my performance’), and finally his reflections on the first fifty-six years of his life (‘the world has treated me very well, but then I haven’t treated it so badly either’).

  After the Ed Murrow show Noël returned to New York for a one-night stand with André Kostelanetz at Carnegie Hall, where he found the musical courage to conduct the New York Philharmonic in some of his own music; he then flew to his new home in Bermuda for the first time. In London, Lorn was selling up his property; his two cars had already been sold and at an auction during the summer a collection of seven paintings went for a total of just over ten thousand pounds. Goldenhurst proved far harder to sell than either the London studio or the paintings and eventually went for just over five thousand to the only man who’d put in a bid for it.

  But in spite of all the sales, it was still not public knowledge that Coward had given up his English residence to settle in Bermuda; that particular storm did not break until the middle of September when Tennent’s decided to present John Gielgud in the most recent of Coward’s plays, Nude with Violin. Like South Sea Bubble this too had undergone a number of rewrites, as the choice of a leading player veered from Rex Harrison to Yvonne Arnaud before ultimately settling on Gielgud; it would be the first time that Sir John had worked with Coward since the days when he followed Noël into The Vortex and The Constant Nymph thirty years earlier. On this occasion Gielgud was also to direct the play, with a cast which included Kathleen Harrison and Patience Collier, on the understanding that Coward would ‘supervise’ the production during its pre-London run at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin.

  The choice of Dublin was not made by chance alone; Noël’s tax position was now such that although he owed nothing to the Commissioners, a single day on British soil could put him in their debt to the tune of about twenty thousand pounds. In the whole of 1955, although he’d only spent a total of eight weeks in England, his tax bill had come to just £27,000; he had paid it out of the Las Vegas earnings, but realized fairly swiftly that he could ill afford to go on like that. ‘I am not a businessman,’ he told the Sunday Express, ‘my brain is my fortune and at fifty-six I have got to tread pretty carefully.’

  Thus his decision to live outside England from now on, one which caused him a certain amount of pain, was based on the need to avoid taxation in the future (as an emigré he only became liable for forty per cent of his taxes) rather than to escape paying what he already owed, though that nice distinction rapidly disappeared in the hail of press abuse which rained down on Coward when the story broke at the end of September. A few days before the world première of Nude with Violin in Dublin, Coward left Bermuda for New York where in a brisk forty-eight-hour stopover he caught up with no less than five films including War and Peace. From New York he sailed to Paris and then joined a plane flying direct to Dublin, provoking as he did so a storm of journalistic protest. On what one can only assume to have been a slow news day the Daily Sketch took half of their front page to announce ‘Coward Cocks Snook By Air’ and followed it with a front-and-back page spread and a map to prove that every county Coward’s plane flew over was saving him three thousand pounds in taxes. The implication throughout was that it was money already owed. Following hard on that, a Socialist member of Parliament solemnly rose in the House to utter one of the most remarkable non sequiturs of our time: ‘Noël Coward has said he loves his England, but just can’t afford to live in it. What about our wartime experiences?’

  Within a day or two of Coward’s arrival in Dublin the story had reached hysteria proportions. On independent television, Rediffusion’s ‘This Week’ turned itself over to a ponderous discussion of whether or not Coward had the right to live how and where he chose.

  Although across the whole spectrum of the press the attacks on Coward were marginally outnumbered by the letters and articles published in his defence, the attacks received more prominence and in a curious, insidious way they hurt him considerably. The decision to sell off all his property in England and to live abroad for the rest of his life had not been taken lightly or indeed willingly; it was not so many years since he had written ‘I belong to this exasperating weather-sodden little island ... and it belongs to me whether it likes it or not’ and there is no reason to believe that an invidious tax position could have destroyed overnight the links that had been forged between Coward and his country over more than half a century. He was, and he remains, tremendously English; and to be told in so many words that he was ‘disgracing his country’ was not a charge that he found easy to shrug off.

  On the other side of the coin, this massive bout of publicity could just be seen as a testimonial to Coward’s continuing celebrity value, and it certainly did the business for Nude Violin a fair amount of good; the cast played to standing-room only in Dublin after a rough first night at which the gallery showered the stage with paper darts made of the programmes. Noël stayed in Dublin for the two weeks that his play was there: ‘I arrived to find that Gielgud had directed it with such loving care for my play that he’d forgotten his own performance, so I helped a little with that.’

  Leaving Nude with Violin to complete its tour and go into London without him, Noël returned to Spithead Lodge in Bermuda; the tax authorities had accepted his decision to settle abroad, but stipulated that to show proof of his intention he should spend the rest of 1956 and virtually all of 1957 out of England. After that, he would be allowed up to twelve weeks a year in Britain without prejudice to his emigré status.

  Nude With Violin opened in London at the Globe Theatre, a few yards up Shaftesbury Avenue from the Lyric where South Sea Bubble was still in residence, early in November 1956; the reviews tended to be good for Gielgud, who was making only his second stage appearance in modern dress since the beginning of the war, but chilly for Coward’s play. ‘Billed as a comedy,’ said the Evening Standard,‘it emerged as a farce and ended as a corpse.’ Noël was not missing much by remaining in Bermuda. Yet despite bad notices his play proved durable enough to survive three changes of leading man at the Globe and to last there for the next year.

  For Christmas Coward went back to Blue Harbour; he stayed in Jamaica for the rest of the winter, working on a new, as yet unproduced, play called Volcano, doing a fair amount of painting, and starting work on a novel which he set in Samolo, using some of the characters from South Sea Bubble. He also reached the decision to play Sebastien in Nude With Violin in New York before the end of 1957.

  In London again early in June for the two weeks allowed him by the Inland Revenue, he planned to visit some old friends, and also to put Michael Wilding into Nude With Violin in place of John Gielgud who was leaving for Stratford-on-Avon. “I shall stay,’ Coward told Alan Brien, ‘in the Oliver Messel Suite on the top floor of the Dorchester. All that luxury is not really me but doubtless I
shall be able to rise above it. Thanks to the vilifications poured upon my head in recent months I am now as famous as Debbie Reynolds, which is most gratifying.’

  But back in England the shouting about his taxes seemed to have subsided at last, and the story of his finances was allowed to die a natural death. Relieved and delighted, Noël turned back to Violin; he did, however, have mixed feelings about the replacement of Gielgud by Wilding who, he noted later, ‘brought to the play large audiences, immense personal charm and startling inaudibility’. While he was in London Coward also paid a visit to Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court, which he found ‘electrifying ... Osborne’s is a great gift, though I believe it to be composed of vitality rather than anger’.

  Early in the autumn Noël started a pre-Broadway tour of Nude With Violin at Wilmington in Delaware, both directing and playing the lead. When the company reached Philadelphia, Coward offered a local reporter some thoughts on the gradual destruction by Americans of the English language: ‘I ask you: words like “hospitalized” and “togetherness” and “trained nurse” – absurd. What in heaven’s name would be the use of an untrained nurse?’

  Nude with Violin opened on Broadway in November to generally tepid reviews; Walter Kerr started his Herald-Tribune review: ‘It is delightful to have Mr Noël Coward back in the theatre. It would be even more delightful to have him back in a play.’ Nevertheless they did reasonable business throughout that winter in New York, and in February Coward brought in Present Laughter to alternate with it. He then took the two plays out to California for a brief tour, but before the company left New York for San Francisco, the National Association of Plumbing Contractors solemnly presented Noël with a plaque ‘for his kind words about plumbing on the Ed Murrow Show’.