A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  In London the first night was little short of triumphant; curtain calls were taken amid loud cheers from a capacity house, and the only discordant note was struck by a Daily Express reporter who asked Noël as he left the theatre whether there was any truth in the rumour that he’d had his face lifted several times. Yet from the reviews that appeared in at least five papers the following morning, it seemed that the whole evening had been the theatrical fiasco of all time.

  The journalistic objection is readily apparent; here at the beginning of the forward-looking Sixties, almost five years after the arrival of Osborne at the Court, was a drama by Coward who’d been around as a playwright for the last forty years about a lot of old actresses who’d been around for even longer. It is, however, a pity that only a handful of the Sunday and weekly critics bothered to look any closer. There are, it is true, moments when the play becomes undeniably mawkish; on the other hand there are also moments of near-Chekovian dignity and a melancholy insight into the problems of growing old and lonely which far transcend the theatrical limits of The Wings. But it was perhaps the mixture of the two which made it such an unpalatable offering for most critics; in any case Waiting in the Wings played to capacity for its first three months on the advance booking alone, but then went into a sharp pre-Christmas slump from which it never really recovered. Including tours before and after the London run, it survived for a total of nine months on the stage.

  The notices for Waiting in the Wings hit Coward very hard indeed; not since Peace In Our Time had any play involved both his intellect and his emotions so totally, and in the fourteen intervening years he really had managed to make himself almost as impervious to press criticism as he claimed to be. The seven plays and musicals written and produced in this post-war period had served with varying success to keep the pot boiling, but none of them had meant a great deal to him personally; they were part of a continuing, by now almost automatic professional process. In Waiting in the Wings, however, Noël was writing about characters he knew and loved well, members of a profession for which he retained an intense devotion. In Pirandellian fashion the borderline between truth and drama was blurred by the fact that a home for old actresses not unlike the one in the play did then exist at Ivor Novello’s old house in Berkshire, and by the fact that one or two of the actresses with smaller parts in the play found themselves in real life facing alarmingly similar situations.

  Ironically Noël emerged far better from the reviews for Surprise Package which opened in London a few days later; to an actor who had played Shaw’s King Magnus and won, the role of an urbane ex-King in a Yul Brynner film was not exactly arduous. The general critical impression was that other actors should now be as cautious about sharing films with Coward as they had hitherto been about sharing them with children and dogs.

  In October 1960 Pomp and Circumstance was published on both sides of the Atlantic. It was not rapturously received. Quentin Crewe for the Sunday Express saw it as final proof that Coward had ‘signed off from the world around him’ and most other English reviews echoed the feeling that it was hopelessly dated, though in America this was translated by critics into an endearing quaintness. In fact Pomp and Circumstance does not display Coward’s prose in as favourable a light as many of his short stories whose format seems better suited to his particular brevity of expression; the novel’s shape owes a certain amount to Nancy Mitford’s technique of first-person narration, hence presumably its dedication, and it tells a story which though diverting enough would undoubtedly benefit enormously were the author to read it aloud in those measured, precise mocking tones. To borrow a literary definition from Graham Greene, Pomp and Circumstance is not so much a novel as an entertainment.

  Shortly after its publication in England, while both Waiting in the Wings and Surprise Package were running in the West End, Noël flew to New York where he defended the escapism of his novel at a literary luncheon: ‘I am well aware of what is going on around me, but at a time when the present is overshadowed and the future less assured than ever, the gift to amuse is not to be dismissed too contemptuously ... I do not wish to prove how sad life can be to those who already know it only too well.’

  By Christmas Pomp and Circumstance was already in the American best-seller list where it was to stay for the next twenty-six weeks, and Coward was back at Blue Harbour, where he allowed himself to be photographed in a red smoking jacket up to his ankles in the breaking surf clutching a cup of tea, a memorable picture which subsequently appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere above an advertisement from the Jamaican tourist board expounding the joys of their island.

  Early in the new year, having in the meantime declined the offer to play Humbert-Humbert in the film of Lolita, Coward finally committed to print his growing distaste for the contemporary English theatre; three consecutive January issues of the Sunday Times carried diatribes in which he aimed first at the playwrights of the new wave, secondly at the actors of the ‘scratch and mumble’ school and thirdly at the critics who encouraged both. Coward’s attacks were delivered as from a great height, in tones of near-papal authority, and their main argument was contained in the last paragraph of his first article:

  ‘Consider the public. Treat it with tact and courtesy. It will accept much from you if you are clever enough to win it to your side. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry and make it think, but above all, dear pioneers, in spite of indiscriminate and largely ignorant critical acclaim, in spite of awards and prizes and other dubious accolades, never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.’

  In the second article Coward switched his attack from the writers to the actors, laying into them for destroying the magic of the theatre by paying too much attention to the Method and not enough to their personal appearance offstage; and in a concluding onslaught he turned on the critics, his oldest enemies, whom he accused of ‘favouring dustbin drama to the exclusion of everything else. The prevalent assumption that any successful play presented by a commercial management in the West End is automatically inferior in quality to anything produced on a shoe string in the East End or Sloane Square is both inaccurate and silly. It also betrays an attitude of old-fashioned class-consciousness and inverted snobbism which has now become obvious to the ordinary playgoer.’

  Replies to this tripartite onslaught came from Bernard Levin (‘like Canute, Coward howls for the wave to recede and leave his kind in peace’), Kenneth Tynan (‘the bridge of a sinking ship is scarcely the ideal place from which to deliver a lecture on the technique of keeping afloat’) and Robert Bolt who concluded the argument on behalf of the playwrights of his generation: ‘We are truly sorry our first effort at a vintage of our own should taste so nasty to a cultivated palate. It doesn’t taste so good to us. But it can’t be helped. We think that other bottle is quite, quite empty. It was Mr Coward who had the last of it.’ John Osborne, asked for his view of Coward, was nothing if not magnanimous: ‘Mr Coward, like Miss Dietrich, is his own invention and contribution to this century. Anyone who cannot see that should keep well away from the theatre.’

  A few years later, when the shouting had died away, Coward was asked what had really prompted him to write those articles:

  ‘Well, I was getting awfully sick of this emphasis on the underprivileged and proletariat on account of it being entirely a misrepresentation of fact. No people in the world have a better time than the English. If you go round a few pubs in the East End or Chelsea, or anywhere you like, they have a ball. They come around and scream and enjoy themselves, and then we go to the Royal Court Theatre and we see people who lack communication with each other, who are miserable, who are trying to break through this terrible social barrier – they don’t do any such thing. They’re as merry as grigs, all of them. Obviously there is a certain amount of poverty and disease and unhappiness, but not nearly as much as in other countries. The Welfare State is doing very nicely, thank you.’
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  Noël spent the rest of the winter at Blue Harbour working from six in the morning until midday every day on the words and music for Away, his first original musical since the disastrous Ace of Clubs more than a decade earlier. By the end of February the score was complete, and he returned to New York to start auditions. While he was there, dining one night at Sardi’s, two mid-western ladies stopped at his table and asked for an autograph; this, however, failed to enlighten either lady since his writing is not of the clearest. Finally, after considerable scrutiny, one of them made sense of it; ‘Oh,’ she told her friend in tones of ringing disappointment, ‘it’s only that guy who’s always being photographed with Marlene Dietrich outside theatres.’

  Sail Away was scheduled to open in New York during the autumn of 1961, the first of Coward’s musicals ever to have an American rather than an English première and the first new musical of his to be seen in New York since Conversation Piece had opened on Broadway a quarter of a century earlier. In the intervening years first Guys and Dolls and subsequently West Side Story had changed the whole shape of the American musical theatre, and Coward was well aware that he was entering the most expensive, overcrowded and competitive field that Broadway had to offer. In these months he commuted between New York, London and Jamaica, rethinking different drafts of the script and inspecting other musicals of the time. While he was in New York he was taken to see Camelot, which he felt was ‘like Parsifal but not nearly so funny’.

  In July Sail Away went into rehearsal in New York with Coward himself directing, and early in August it opened at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. The general impression after its first night was that the audience, which included Jacqueline Kennedy, the Lunts, Danny Kaye, Judy Garland and Richard Rodgers, sparkled rather more than the show in its current shape, and a vast amount of work was done to it on the road. Early in October the show arrived on Broadway, whose critics Coward had always felt would give the show a better chance of success than those in London: ‘I’ll never write another musical for the West End,’ he told the New York Times. ‘The critics there never even notice the music. Here in New York they take their light music much more seriously, and the whole production expertise on Broadway is something we simply don’t have in London. I know that if Sail Away were opening in England now the critics would insult me mercilessly, and why should I go through torture? At my time of life I don’t need to, so can you blame me for gearing my new musical to a country where at least I am accepted on my merits?’

  A few weeks after Sail Away opened on Broadway to critics who were not all that kind, Noël departed for Jamaica with Graham Payn who had flown out to New York for the first night. While they were at Blue Harbour a cable told them of the death in New York of Jack Wilson, who had been Coward’s manager and one of his closest friends in the central period of his life. That friendship, however, was now a thing of the past. Professionally Wilson’s place had been taken over by the Charles Russell-Lance Hamilton partnership, though Sail Away proved to be the last Coward show managed by them before that friendship also collapsed in a welter of acrimonious financial and personal disagreements.

  Back in England early in 1962, Noël was the guest of honour one Sunday at a dinner given by the Gallery First-Nighters’ Club; beginning his speech ‘Desperately accustomed as I am to public speaking,’ he continued; ‘You ask my advice about acting? Speak clearly, don’t bump into people, and if you must have motivation think of your pay packet on Friday.’

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  1962–1966

  ‘This, dear boy, is the beginning of the Noël Coward Renaissance.’

  Under Noël’s direction Sail Away opened its English run in Bristol at the beginning of June 1962, and came into London a fortnight later; the main musical opposition to it in the West End at the time was Lionel Bart’s Blitz which, proclaimed Coward, was ‘twice as long as the real thing and just as loud’. In many ways, and in spite of Coward’s earlier doubts, Sail Away fared better in London than it had in New York and the notices, displaying an eagerness to welcome the increasingly rare sight of a stage musical by a home-grown composer, were marginally better than they had been on Broadway.

  John Whiting, the playwright who was then also drama critic for the London Magazine, used Sail Away as the starting point for an affectionate essay about Noël: ‘We have had him with us now for sixty glorious years: we had better accept him. That extraordinary piece of landscaping which he uses for a face, and the dying dove which he pretends is a voice, are always hinting nowadays that he is forgotten, old-fashioned and unloved. That he is forgotten is demonstrably untrue ... that he is old-fashioned is another matter: Sail Away is the bluntest thing to have struck the West End theatre for many a year... but is he unloved? Speaking as one twenty years his junior, all I can ask is: who doesn’t love his youth? For that is what Coward is to men of my age: Private Lives, Conversation Piece, Operette, Tonight at Eight-Thirty, The Scoundrel and all those songs we sang to our girls driving back in the red M.G. from the Thames pub on a summer night in 1936.’

  Sail Away did not, predictably, set the town on fire any more than it had in New York; but it ran on comfortably through the rest of 1962 while Noël went back to Switzerland to work with Harry Kurnitz on The Girl Who Came To Supper, a new adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s coronation year comedy The Sleeping Prince. This had already been unsuccessfully reincarnated once as a film called The Prince and the Showgirl, but Noël was now employed to supply it with music and lyrics for a Broadway production in 1963. In October, with more than half of that score already completed Coward flew to New York en route for another winter in the Jamaican sun; while he was there, Somerset Maugham published in Show magazine some fairly unsavoury memoirs about his ex-wife Syrie. Garson Kanin noted Coward’s reaction at the time:

  ‘Noël is one of the many who take the position that Maugham’s behaviour is reprehensible and unforgivable. He declares that he, for one, wants nothing more to do with W.S.M. ... he adds that a man who is capable of writing in this way about his former wife and about his daughter is capable of anything and might in the next week or month publish other material detrimental to others around him... “The man who wrote that awful slop is not the man who has been my friend for so many years. Some evil spirit has entered his body. He is dangerous, a creature to be feared and shunned” ...’

  It was the end of an old friendship, though Coward did visit Maugham once more before he died three years later: ‘He was infinitely pathetic.’

  Early in the spring of 1963, Noël flew to Paris for a few days to film a ‘guest star’ role in an altogether inadequate Audrey Hepburn-William Holden comedy called Paris When It Sizzles. Coward’s performance in this suggests that he closed his eyes to the script, clenched his teeth and kept thinking of the money; although he didn’t exactly save the picture it remains impossible to think of anyone who could have done so.

  From Paris he went to London where, his views about contemporary playwrights having somewhat mellowed in recent months, he agreed to put up a thousand pounds to help back the film version of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Then at the beginning of May he set off for Australia by way of Hong Kong, writing the first of a new group of short stories as he travelled. ‘What,’ asked a reporter when Coward arrived in Melbourne, ‘is your idea of a perfect life?’ ‘Mine.’ Noël had not been back to Australia since his wartime tours in 1940, and on this occasion he only stayed there for a week to see an all-Australian cast safely launched in Sail Away; then, as he was leaving Melbourne to complete the round trip back to America by way of Singapore, a lady reporter enquired whether he’d tell her something he’d learned in Australia. ‘Kangaroo,’ was the reply.

  When Noël reached Singapore he found a cable from Lorn Loraine telling him that Ladies’ Home Journal had offered seven and a half thousand dollars for his latest short story, Mrs Capper’s Birthday, and asking Noël to cable back his instructions, ‘NO INSTRUCTIONS,’ wired Noël happily as he set sail for San Francisco via Yokoh
ama and Honolulu, ‘JUST GRAB IT.’

  While he was abroad, James Roose-Evans’ Hampstead Theatre Club production of Private Lives transferred to the Duke of York’s where it was to run for the rest of the year. In retrospect the ‘Noël Coward Renaissance’ which hit London in the following year can be seen to have started with the unexpected success of this revival, and there is something biographically satisfying in that, like the first production of The Vortex, it too should have been launched in Hampstead. A fair number of critics came to this production of Private Lives without having seen the play before (the last London revival had been the John Clements production in 1944) and their reaction was one of delighted if bemused discovery: ‘Can it be,’ wondered one critic, ‘that we have underrated Coward all these years, and that Private Lives so far from being a badly dated relic is in fact the funniest play to have adorned the English theatre in this century?’

  The Girl Who Came To Supper opened in Boston at the beginning of October to good notices, travelled north to Toronto where the theatre was larger and the reception less enthusiastic, and then went into New York by way of Philadelphia early in December; while the show was on tour President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, throwing into horrifyingly tasteless topicality a number about royal assassinations which Coward had written for the musical and called ‘Long Live The King – If He Can’. It was instantly hauled out of the show forever, and replaced by ‘My Family Tree’, a number that had first turned up as ‘Countess Mitzi’ in Coward’s Operette almost thirty years earlier.

  On Broadway The Girl Who Came To Supper opened to a generally dismal press; Walter Kerr was of the opinion that Kurnitz and Coward should ‘have let sleeping princes lie’ and the New Yorker found that ‘all the operatic foolishness of this piece is disheartening’. But the musical did have one triumphant, show-stopping sequence involving Tessie O’Shea as Ada Cockle, a character invented by Coward to belt over a medley of street songs that he wrote for her in an affectionate parody of the Edwardian music-hall. These songs represented Coward at somewhere very near his musical and lyrical best; but they were not enough to save an otherwise rather clumsily adapted show from a disappointing run on Broadway, and The Girl Who Came To Supper remains the only one of Coward’s eight musicals that has never been seen in England.