Coward got considerably better reviews on the West Coast than he had in New York, and he played both his comedies to splendid business in San Francisco and Los Angeles until the end of March. Then he returned to Blue Harbour in Jamaica to start work in one of the few fields still entirely fresh to him: ballet. He had been commissioned by Anton Dolin to compose something new for the tenth anniversary season of the London Festival Ballet which was coming up in the following year. Dolin had left Coward with a wide and generous brief, asking only that the result should be fairly typical of England in general and of London in particular. Through the rest of the spring and early summer of 1958 Noël wrote the score for London Morning, a ballet set outside the gates of Buckingham Palace where, as the composer himself has said, remarkably little actually happens: ‘soldiers and children and American tourists pass by, some rain falls because in London some rain always falls, some bells chime because in London bells always chime, and the Palace guard is changed because in London the Palace guard is always changed at precisely the same time on every morning of every day of the year.’ The theme of the ballet, in so far as it had one, was that it was still exciting to go to London to see the Queen; but there were moments in London Morning when one might have been forgiven for thinking that the work had been commissioned by American Express rather than the Festival Ballet.
With London Morning almost complete, Noël started to work on a play; not, for once, a new play of his own, but instead an English version of a Feydeau farce, Occupe-toi d’Amélie, which Vivien Leigh had asked him to adapt as a vehicle for her. It was not a task which Coward much enjoyed; he found it difficult and frustrating to work with another playwright’s plot, he was out of sympathy with the complex farcical convention in which Feydeau had worked it, and he admitted to Lorn Loraine in a letter that his adaptation was ‘only barely limping along’. Later in the summer, leaving Amélie on the typewriter, Noël went to stay with some friends in the South of France; Winston Churchill was also on holiday there, and Noël discovered to his considerable relief that the old man did not share the feelings of the English press about his emigration to the West Indies; ‘Save what you can,’ was Churchill’s only comment.
Back in Bermuda and only a few months away from his fifty-ninth birthday, Noël began to consider his own position, both in the theatre and outside it:
‘When I was one-and-twenty I was ambitious, cheerful and high-spirited. I had never heard of the Death Wish and was briskly unaware that I belonged to a dying civilization. Today this dubious implication is pitched at me from all directions. Despair is the new religion, the new mode; it is in the books we read, the music we hear and, very much too often, in the plays we see. Well, I am no longer one-and-twenty but I still have no preoccupation with the Death Wish. I am still ambitious and cheerful and not offensively high-spirited and still unaware that I belong to a dying civilization. If I do, there really isn’t anything I can do about it and so I shall just press on with my life as I like living it until I die of natural causes or an H-bomb blows me to smithereens. I knew, in my teens, that the world was full of hatred, envy, malice, cruelty, jealousy, unrequited love, murder, despair and destruction. I also knew, at the same time, that it was full of kindness, joy, pleasure, requited love, generosity, fun, excitement, laughter and friends. Nothing that has happened to me over the years has caused me to re-adjust in my mind the balance of these observed phenomena. I do become increasingly exasperated however when in my own beloved profession all that I was brought up and trained to believe in is now decried. Nowadays a well constructed play is despised and a light comedy whose only purpose is to amuse is dismissed as “trivial” and “without significance”. Since when has laughter been so insignificant? No merriment apparently must scratch the set, grim patina of these dire times. We must all just sit and wait for death, or hurry it on, according to how we feel. To my mind, one of the most efficacious ways of hurrying it on is to sit in a theatre watching a verbose, humourless, ill-constructed play, acted with turgid intensity, which has received rave notices and is closing on Saturday.’
28
1958–1962
‘In the Sixties, regardless of evil portents, prophetic despair and a great deal too much writing on the wall, I managed to write one or two fairly cheerful musical comedies.’
By early in the November of 1958 Coward had completed his adaptation of the Feydeau farce, which in view of the obvious impossibility of ‘Occupy Yourself With Amelia’ he had retitled Look After Lulu; a mild bout of pneumonia kept him in Bermuda for the rest of that month, but as soon as he had recovered he left Spithead Lodge to start negotiations for the production of the farce on both sides of the Atlantic. Noël went first to New York, where he saw Tammy Grimes in cabaret and instantly persuaded her that she should star in the American Lulu, and then to London where it was arranged that Vivien Leigh would open in the English production at the Royal Court during July.
The choice of the Royal Court was a curious one; since George Devine had taken it over in 1955 it had been essentially a writers’ theatre, concerned with the discovery of new talent and, since the success of Look Back in Anger there in 1956, dedicated to a school of playwrights (Arden, Jellicoe, Simpson, Delaney, Wesker, Livings) who in their theatrical style, ideas and intentions stood about as far removed from Coward as was artistically and socially possible. However the box office takings at the Court had been shaky of late, and Devine, realizing that he needed a money-maker if he was to continue the experimental work he wanted to do there, settled reluctantly for what looked like an assured success. Later he grew marginally more enthusiastic about Look after Lulu and having persuaded Tony Richardson, then the Court’s other artistic director, to produce it, Devine himself agreed to play one of the parts.
The other production of this Feydeau-Coward farce got off to a less auspicious start: in spite of the joint and separate efforts of Coward and its director, Cyril Ritchard, Look After Lulu opened in New York at the beginning of March to a distinctly chilly reception and only lasted on Broadway for a meagre thirty-nine performances. Undaunted by the experience, Coward flew back to Jamaica. ‘Remember me?’ asked a woman he encountered at the airport, ‘we once met with Douglas Fairbanks.’ ‘Madam,’ replied Coward, ‘I often find it hard even to remember Douglas Fairbanks.’
Now that the furore over Noël’s tax problems had finally subsided and showed no sign of blowing up again, he was beginning to have second thoughts about Bermuda as a place of residence; in the three years since he had bought Spithead Lodge there he had discovered that it signally failed to hold for him the near-magical attraction of Jamaica. To Coward, Bermuda now appeared to be a tight and overcrowded little island imbued with the atmosphere of an English golf club and too many clipped hedges. When he also discovered that his house there had become a landmark for guides taking busloads of tourists around the island, he decided that the time had come to sell up and move again; thus while he was staying in Jamaica in 1959 he happily accepted an offer of just over twenty-seven thousand pounds for Spithead Lodge and signed away the Bermuda property forever. But the tax problem remained; Jamaica was still not feasible as the permanent foreign base that he needed to satisfy the Commissioners of the Inland Revenue, and accordingly Noël began to look through the property columns for another house in either Switzerland or the South of France.
Having sold Spithead Lodge Noël stayed at Blue Harbour for the rest of the spring, using his time in Jamaica to work on a new play about a group of actresses in retirement which emerged a year later as Waiting in the Wings. In April, with this already virtually complete, he agreed to play Hawthorne, the suave spymaster from MI5 in the film of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. Most of Coward’s scenes were shot in Havana itself, where Noël was directed by Carol Reed in this his first film (with the exception of his guest appearance in Around the World in 80 Days) for almost a decade. Coward managed to steal a fair amount of the picture from its star Alec Guinness, and enjoyed the experience enor
mously: ‘although the theatre is my first love, I’ve found certain films fascinating and this was one of them. I had to unlearn all my stage technique; I’m not a very adroit film actor, not technically, and Carol had to stop me overdoing any of my facial expressions. “Remember,” he would say, “in this shot your lower lip is a foot wide.” I was still playing it all to the back of the gallery.’
From Cuba Coward flew back to London and completed his studio filming for Our Man in Havana. In June, looking through the property columns of the Daily Telegraph, he found the house he had been looking for, a highly suitable and attractive chalet overlooking Lac Leman just nine miles above Montreux at Les Avants, where Noël lives to this day for the best part of every year. Friends and near neighbours around Les Avants include Adrianne Allen, Joan Sutherland, Charles Chaplin and, slightly further up into the mountains, David Niven and the Burtons.
London Morning opened in London at the Festival Hall in the middle of July to a generally hostile press; Clive Barnes for the Spectator found it ‘as predictable an entertainment as all-in wrestling ... it takes place in front of Buckingham Palace and has everything except Christopher Robin who must have been saying his prayers when it was cast.’
But by the end of the 1950s recent and bitter experience had made Coward glacially immune to bad notices; in any case by now his thoughts were far removed from the ballet and back with Look After Lulu which opened its pre-London tour at Newcastle a few days after the première of London Morning. During the London rehearsals for Lulu, John Osborne is said to have wandered into the Royal Court, seen Vivien Leigh rehearsing on its stage with Anthony Quayle and Max Adrian, and assumed that in some nightmarish way he had been suddenly transported from Sloane Square to the heart of Shaftesbury Avenue. The idea had been for the Court to conquer the West End; instead it seemed that the reverse had happened.
The morning after Lulu opened at the Royal Court, to bad notices and a certain amount of journalistic shrieking about the betrayal of avant-garde values in Sloane Square, Coward flew to Athens for a fortnight’s cruising around the Greek Islands aboard an Onassis family yacht. Then, tanned and rested, he returned to London to find that Look After Lulu had survived its notices and that business at the Court had in fact been good enough to justify a transfer to the West End in September; there Lulu played to adequate business at the New Theatre, just one more in a long line of Coward comedies which nobody liked except the public.
In the autumn Noël went back to Switzerland with Cole Lesley and settled into the chalet at Les Avants which had been redecorated and furnished with the best of what still remained from Goldenhurst, the studio in Gerald Road and Spithead Lodge; one downstairs lavatory was entirely wall-papered with the sheet music of Coward’s songs. In October, Frank Sinatra wired from Hollywood to ask Noël’s price for a guest appearance on his network television show; ‘ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS,’ replied Coward, ‘PLUS MY EXPENSES AND THE RETURN AIR FARE FROM GENEVA.’ Mr Sinatra did not pursue that particular enquiry any further.
At the end of the year, on the verge of his sixtieth birthday Noël returned to London to do another film; this was Surprise Package, a gangster comedy produced and directed by Stanley Donen and scripted by Harry Kurnitz from an Art Buchwald story. With that parenthood and a cast led by Yul Brynner, Mitzi Gaynor and Coward himself as a benign if impoverished ex-King of Anatolia, the film should have been all right; it was, however, to emerge as one of the major celluloid disappointments of 1960. Surprise Package remains to date the sole film in which Coward sings and dances, albeit only in a rather halting title sequence shared with Miss Gaynor. To say that he steals the picture would imply that there was something of value in it to be stolen; at the very most, he was involved in petty pilfering.
Noël’s arrival at the age of sixty, in December 1959, provoked from a New York paper the thought that ‘there is a generation growing up which does not know Coward, which never knew the world he pictured and pilloried, which thinks the characters in his plays artificial and shallow. That in itself is evidence of his success, for that is exactly the world that Coward was showing us. He was writing better social history than they realize – perhaps better than even he realized at the time.’ The birthday also prompted a few autobiographical thoughts from Coward himself:
‘I am now more of a perfectionist than I used to be; I take pride in being a professional. I don’t write plays with the idea of giving some great thought to the world, and that isn’t just coy modesty. As one gets older one doesn’t feel quite so strongly any more, one discovers that everything is always going to be exactly the same with different hats on ... if I wanted to write a play with a message, God forbid, it would undoubtedly be a comedy. When the public is no longer interested in what I have to write, then it will be brought home to me that I am out of touch: not before. Nowadays though I find that I rather enjoy my downfalls; to me it’s acridly funny when something flops that has taken me months to write and compose. In private I suppose I am a tremendous celebrity snob, and by celebrity I don’t mean Brigitte Bardot but people of achievement like Somerset Maugham or Rebecca West. Looking back through my life I find that my personality only really changed once, and that was when I was twenty-four and I became a star and a privileged person. Yet to my inner mind I’m much the same now as I was before The Vortex; I’m as anxious to be good as I ever was, only now time’s wingéd chariot seems to be goosing me. It doesn’t bother me that I don’t write in England any more. I love England but I hate the climate and I have absolutely no regrets about having left ... looking around me I deplore the lack of style and elegance in most modem plays; I long for the glamour of great stars who used to drive up to the stage door in huge limousines. In my younger days I was tremendously keen to be a star and famous and successful; well, I have been successful for most of my life, and if at this late stage I were to have another series of resounding failures I believe I could regard them with a certain equanimity.’
Just after Christmas Our Man in Havana opened in London and New York to a press that had reservations about the picture but was universally delighted with Coward’s part in it. Hawthorne was the first and remains thus far the best of the roles that Noël has played on the screen as a character actor: the highlights of a memorable performance included the solemn caution with which Coward closes a door made only of bamboo shoots in a futile attempt at security, the quintessential wagging of that distinguished left index finger as he recruits the recalcitrant Guinness in a Cuban gentlemen’s convenience, and Reed’s superb establishing shots of Coward striding through the back streets of Havana complete with furled umbrella and Eden hat, a figure at once correct, commanding and deeply-absurd.
But Noël was already back at Les Avants when the film opened, and he stayed there through the rest of the winter working on the final chapters of Pomp and Circumstance, a light novel about the islanders of his beloved though mythical Samolo which had occupied him intermittently for the past three years. A bout of phlebitis early in the spring of 1960 kept him immobile at the chalet for six weeks (‘my right leg turned bright pink and I had to be carried about like a parcel’) but it did give him the time he needed to finish the book and to revise Waiting in the Wings. Then, fully recovered (‘I am now scampering about the house like a sixty-year-old waiting eagerly for the first joyous signs of syphilis’), he arranged for the publication of this his first and so far only published novel, dedicated it to Nancy Mitford and sold the pre-publication serial rights across Europe and America for a solid fifteen thousand pounds. ‘It is so light and insignificant,’ he wrote to his publisher, ‘that you will have difficulty in getting it between hard covers.’ After a celebratory holiday in Morocco he flew back to London and there set up a production of Waiting in the Wings, with Sybil Thorndike, Lewis Casson and Marie Löhr for later in the year.
Waiting in the Wings marks a new and possibly final development of Coward’s talent as a playwright, and as such it belongs in a group with his 1965 trilogy Suite in
Three Keys; after the light comedies of the Fifties, his latest play cut deeper and came closer to tragi-comedy: a curious, highly theatrical and often very effective blend of drama, pathos, humour and occasionally maudlin sentimentality. It was based on the gathering of a group of old actresses living out their enforced retirement at a home called The Wings in moods that ranged from open hostility, anger and bitterness at having to exist on charity, to contentment or at least fairly placid resignation. ‘The play as a whole,’ wrote Coward in an introduction to it, ‘contains the basic truth that old age needn’t be nearly so dreary and sad as it’s supposed to be, provided you greet it with humour and live it with courage.’
The new play, Coward’s fiftieth, was turned down by H. M. Tennent (the management which had presented virtually all of his work in London since the war) and when it eventually reached the Duke of York’s in September under Michael Redgrave’s auspices, it opened to cheers from the first-night audience followed by a mixed, sometimes vicious and for once generally unjustified press. Often in the past it could have been said that the critics were wrong about Coward, either because they failed to understand what he was trying to do or else because they failed to realize that the public would still want to see it; but they had often also erred on the side of generosity, and Waiting in the Wings is perhaps the only example of an important Coward play that was severely underrated by a large section of the press and that suffered at the box-office as a result. It is a comedy built on an essentially sad premise, and it proved perhaps for that reason not to be immune to critical attack in the way that Private Lives or even Nude With Violin had been.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 41
