Isn’t it gorgeous? He is going back to Hawtrey today to say that he has perfect confidence in me and that I am throughly natural and unaffected etc: oh I am a star!!
Noel Coward, undated letter to Violet Coward
ON 7 March 1915, ‘entirely to please Mother’, Coward was confirmed at Holy Trinity Church, the imposing Georgian edifice on the northern edge of Clapham Common. He later told Robin Maugham that the clergyman instructing him for confirmation had ‘groped’ him. Noel had firmly removed his hand. ‘There’s a time and place for everything’, said Coward. ‘And if I ever want a bit of fun I’ll let you know.’ He added, ‘I’ve despised the Cloth ever since.’1
Coward, remarked Esme Wynne, was ‘dead from the neck up’ as far as religion was concerned. The issue became such a source of contention that Noel and Esme agreed to draw up a ‘Palship Contract’, one clause of which forbade any discussion of religion. Coward’s attitude hardened as he grew older. He often took the opportunity, in his plays and prose, to snipe at its practitioners and its hypocrisy; perhaps it was the early loss of beloved friends that induced this lack of faith. Philip Streatfeild had contracted a virulent form of pulmonary tuberculosis and, like his fellow officers at Pinewood, was facing death. Unable to complete his training, getting progressively worse during the spring of 1915, he had been sent to a nursing home in Croydon, coughing blood. Yet even from his sickbed, Streatfeild could do his friend a favour. The previous year, when Noel and Philip had been holidaying in Cornwall, they had met an interesting family in Polperro. Mrs Astley Cooper had taken her son, Stephen, and his friend, Peter Ward, on holiday there: the two boys had met Philip and Noel, and become good friends. Stephen and Philip took to patrolling the cliffs, and fishing with Noel and Peter, while Mrs Astley Cooper, an amateur artist and a patron of the arts, took a lively interest in Streatfeild’s work. After the party had dispersed under the cloud of war, they had kept in touch and Mrs Astley Cooper visited the Croydon nursing home where Streatfeild was in the last stages of consumption. Thinking to help her young friend, she ‘made that senseless observation, though I saw he was dying “Is there anything I can do for you?” He said, “Will you take Noel Coward home with you, he is delicate and wants taking care of.” ’
It was thus because of a promise to Streatfeild – but also because she found his fifteen-year-old friend interesting – that Mrs Astley Cooper invited Noel to stay with her at Hambleton, her large estate near Oakham in Rutlandshire. Violet Coward saved up for a return ticket, but when she took Noel to St Pancras she left her handbag on the tube, and with it the money. She rushed to a nearby pawnshop with her diamond ring to pay for the journey. Her son appreciated the gesture, for this was an introduction to an entirely new society. Deep in the heart of the English shires, Hambleton Hall stood high on a hill, a self-important late Victorian stone mansion in parkland grazed by decorative sheep. Yet the war touched even this pastoral idyll, as the hall was soon to be taken over as a military hospital. In anticipation of this, Mrs Astley Cooper was living in the manor house in the grounds, a smaller building but still possessing twelve bedrooms.
The country-house routine had hardly changed since the nineteenth century. Early-morning tea arrived with thin slices of bread and butter, eaten while the maid made up the fire. At breakfast proper, a huge selection of fish, meat and fruit greeted the guests, and the morning might be spent following the hunt. This was Cottesmore country, packed with stately homes, and dominated by Belvoir Castle, home of the Dukes of Rutland (whose glamorous daughter, Lady Diana Manners, would become a friend of Noel’s). After a picnic lunch and more hunting, they returned for high tea, then retired to their rooms, where there were log fires and their evening clothes were laid out. Cocktails and dinner followed, a custom which required stamina to retain consciousness to the end, such was the consumption of alcohol. Noel, no great drinker later, appreciated its social function here. Descending the polished staircase in evening clothes and new patent leather shoes, as if coming on stage, Noel revelled in the luxury. It was a realisation of another life altogether; Mrs Astley Cooper recalled Noel’s particular surprise at ‘the brass hot water cans’. She felt maternal towards this waif: ‘Some weeks in the country, good food, and a fixed determination on my part to keep him out of doors the whole time (it was early spring) restored his health.’
Philip had recommended the trip, not just for Noel’s physical health, but so that he could ‘profit by the astringent wisdom’ of his hostess. Evangeline Julia Astley Cooper was an eccentric and colourful character, as was her brother, Walter Marshall, the builder of Hambleton, whose motto was ‘Do As You Please’. Marshall had died suddenly in 1899, leaving Hambleton to his younger sister because she shared his independent way of thinking. Although a Catholic convert, Mrs Astley Cooper was ‘totally unshockable, and rather like a man in her interest in matters intellectual’, says the current owner of Hambleton Hall, Tim Hart. She collected ‘rather weird friends’, recalls her granddaughter, ‘I remember my father asking her why she bothered with “all these pansies from London’ ” – many of whom were also Catholic. Among the friends she invited were C. K. Scott Moncrieff,2 translator of Proust; and the conductor Malcolm Sargent. James Lees-Milne was a later visitor; he thought Mrs Astley Cooper not ‘particularly intellectual . . . essentially a country woman, well read . . . and kind to the young whom she cherished if they responded to her particular wry, no-nonsense kind of humour . . . She was just a tyrant with a heart of gold.’
Scott Moncrieff worked on his Proust translation at Hambleton, with Mrs Astley Cooper’s help, and wrote a poem to her which he published as a dedication in Swann’s Way; he added a handwritten stanza in her own copy, ‘Five years have passed, and I am come/ To bask once more beneath your lime –/ A sense of duty keeps me dumb/ I may return another time.’ Scott Moncrieff was a complex character, also caught up in Wilde’s set. A Catholic and a dedicated spiritualist, he was Scottish-born, dark and handsome with a moustache; he was also impecunious and quarrelsome. As a poet and writer, Scott Moncrieff was closely associated with the Uranians and was known as the author of Evensong and Morewesong, ‘a bravely obscene story of adolescent fellation’. Badly wounded in the war, Scott Moncrieff attempted to seduce the poet Wilfred Owen while on leave.
Coward was already reading Wilde, Laurence Hope and Omar Khayyam, a result of his acquaintance with Philip Streatfeild and Sydney Lomer; through Mrs Astley Cooper and Scott Moncrieff he learned of Proust, although he did not read the author until much later. But it was a smart name to drop, and Coward used it as a barometer of intellectual and unconventional tastes (he also later named his cat after him); Act Two of Easy Virtue opens with its ‘scarlet woman’ heroine reading Sodom and Gomorrah by Proust. However, Noel encountered the works of another author at Hambleton who was to be of greater influence: Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. Coward found a copy of Saki’s new book Beasts and Super-Beasts on a hall table, and stayed awake into the early hours reading it.
The writer’s elegantly tailored short stories, sometimes just a page in length, were society-set vignettes or more sinister tales, but usually featuring brilliant, cynical and well-dressed young men, a world already threatened by the changes of the war. Coward later wrote in appreciation of his literary hero: ‘His articulate duchesses sipping China tea on their impeccable lawns, his witty, effete young heroes Reginald, Clovis Sangrail, Comus Bassington, with their gaily irreverent persiflage and their preoccupation with oysters, caviar and personal adornment, finally disappeared in the gunsmoke of 1914.’ His métier was pre-Wodehousian high comedy of an epicene Edwardian style; he was famous for sayings such as ‘She was a good cook as good cooks go, and as good cooks go she went.’
Coward never met his hero. Munro was killed on the Western Front in November 1916, and Beasts and Super-Beasts was the last collection of stories published in his lifetime. Like Streatfeild and Scott Moncrieff, Saki celebrated a cult of youth: Martin Green writes in Children of the Sun that his fiction was ‘full of both insolent scorn for the mature figures of English civilization and a romantic-ironical fondness for its young and beautiful boys. “There is one thing I care for, and that is youth,” Munro said.’ Such themes – the predominance, almost arrogance of youth – would inform Coward’s dramas, and Saki’s style permeated his comic work, in short stories, verse, and plays from I’ll Leave It to You onwards; the echo of the older writer’s sardonic humour is heard over and over again in his successor’s quips. Saki’s few plays seem maquettes for Coward’s (particularly his country-house drama, The Watched Pot). More specifically, the novel When William Came, a fantasy of Britain under German occupation published in 1914 (when fears of invasion induced a crop of such stories), was ‘shamelessly borrowed’ for Coward’s own Occupied Britain play, ‘Peace in Our Time’ (1946).
Saki became a role model for the young Coward; it was as though he had inherited the elder writer’s mantle. The homosexual but very English sensibility of Saki’s fiction, with its decorative young men fencing words with colonels, archdeacons’ wives, society ladies and their daughters, and the clash of generations and sensibilities (highlighted at Hambleton, where the aesthetes met the hunting hearties) provided dramatic and comic dynamic for both writers. In Coward’s early comedy The Young Idea, country orthodoxy is satirised in Saki style. Noel willingly admitted his influence, extolling Saki’s virtues when his works were republished posthumously: ‘His stories and novels appear as delightful and, to use a much abused word, sophisticated, as they did when he first published them . . . High comedy was undoubtedly his greatest gift.’
Mrs Astley Cooper was a Saki figure come to life. She had given up her first love, hunting, because of her obesity. ‘A massive, shapeless lump of a woman’, she was too fat to get in and out of her bath without the aid of her butler, Fred, and ‘draped scarves over all mirrors’, Coward recalled, ‘because she said she could find no charm in her own appearance’. Instead ‘she took up the chase of conversation, as it were, the thrills and spills of talk, finding her excitement in a more cerebral way’. She was ‘very witty and acerbic’, recalls her granddaughter, able to put anyone down with a sharp retort. She ruled Hambleton; her husband Clem was ‘dotty’, and lived in the dining room where the children would tie a rag lead to him and pretend he was a hunting dog.
It was an unconventional household, and could well have been the inspiration for Coward’s 1924 play Hay Fever, as Mrs Astley Cooper maintained. Her family ‘enjoyed a sort of amateur Follies’, which were performed for the benefit of house guests. Her children’s similarity to Sorel and Simon Bliss of Hay Fever (Stephen Astley Cooper was, like Simon, an artist), or Sholto and Gerda Brent of The Young Idea, reinforces her claims as a model for Coward’s comedies. ‘I have gone to see most of his plays’, she wrote in 1938, ‘because it amuses me to hear my remarks put into the mouths of the actors. He used, when staying with me, to carry a little black notebook in which he put down everything I said. I told him he would never reproduce it in any play, but he did more or less, and I think that his best plays, such as Hay Fever, were those in which the conversation of Hambleton predominated . . . somebody once said, “The play was very amusing, but no one ever talked like that.” A companion said: “On the contrary, I know the family from whom it was all taken down.” ’
Hers is a vivid image – that of the young boy following his hostess about the house, scribbling her bon mots in his notebook. It was not an entirely one-sided affair, however: Coward, as a clever, even presumptous young boy of fifteen, seemed far in advance of his years. His talent, and the ease with which he fell into gracious living, made him an amusing and desirable guest. He sang for his supper, and received return invitations as a result. Noel often revisited Hambleton Hall, and when the house became a convalescent hospital later in the war, was summoned by Mrs Cooper to entertain her recuperating troops. Her granddaughter remembers Noel’s performance on the flat roof of a farm building, for the benefit of local village children. However, Mrs Astley Cooper hints that the young Coward sometimes outstayed his welcome; he ‘came perpetually down afterwards, and always behaved as though he were the son of the house, rather to the annoyance of my husband’.
Whatever its dramatic influence, Hambleton was pivotal to Coward’s progress. It identified a social goal, a standard to which he could aspire now that he knew what life among his ‘betters’ was like. He could, and would, live among these people, accepted by virtue of where he was going rather than where he had come from. He knew that this was the life for which he was destined, and achieved it by hard work and application of the talent he possessed. But respect was another matter. The rarefied strata he aspired to remained equivocal about such ambition, which was seen as slightly vulgar: ‘A gentleman disguised his abilities as much as he disguised his emotions,’ wrote Noel Annan, ‘not to do so was to show side and drop one’s guard.’ These were engrained notions that Coward would have to deal with for much of his life.
To Esme Wynne, Coward was ‘frightfully ambitious’, even then. ‘He was full of determination and willpower, and made his name through that determination . . . He knew he could get there and would get there.’ She recalled that Coward was ‘rightfully annoyed’ when people said of him, ‘ “He’s clever – and knows it.” He always logically commented “How do they think I could be clever and not know it?” ’
*
Back in the real world the war was progressing at a rate of inches, with death the only advance. At least death came quickly on the Western Front; it took five months for Philip Streatfeild to die of tuberculosis of the lungs. His father was with him when he died, on 3 June 1915, at the nursing home in Croydon.3 Coward deals with the event in one sentence in his autobiography, having described his visit to Hambleton: ‘He died the following year without ever realising to the full the great kindness he had done me.’ It is a brief epitaph; perhaps he was too hurt, even twenty years later, by the memory.
In his will dated 2 November 1914 (eight days before he enlisted) Streatfeild directed his executor, his brother William, to pay ‘my friend Noel Coward of 50 Southside Clapham Common SW the sum of £50 free of legacy duty’. However, in a codicil dated 16 April 1915, he instructed, ‘I hereby revoke the legacy of fifty pounds bequeathed to my friend Noel Coward’, whether because he and Coward had fallen out or because Streatfeild had ‘advanced’ his friend the money is not clear. Tuberculosis could induce great changes of temper, as Noel’s later friend, G. B. Stern, wrote of her tubercular hero, Giles Goddard, ‘overwrought, in a sort of spiritually unreasonable state’. Another possibility is that Streatfeild’s homosexual proclivities had been uncovered by Coward’s family, and that Noel had been dissuaded from the association (as he was not yet sixteen years of age, it was a potentially scandalous situation).
*
On 4 October 1915 Coward returned from Lee-on-Solent where he had been staying with his Aunt Vida. He was met by Esme Wynne; keen to hear each other’s news and gossip, they went off to tea. That autumn and winter Noel and Esme were practically inseparable, more especially now that Coward was bereft of Streatfeild’s company. It was an enjoyable routine. Esme called for Noel, or vice versa, and they took the tube to town to eat lunch at Frascati’s and take tea at the Elysée, if solvent (at Maison Lyons, if not), with theatre in the afternoon or evening. Alternatively, they stayed at Noel’s, working on their latest co-production, a dance or a drama, which occasionally saw public performance in charity concerts. One such was on 30 October 1915, when they appeared on a varied bill designed to enhance patriotic feelings, although the Coward-Wynne collaboration, a duet and dance entitled ‘Monkeys’, seemed unlikely to fire notions of king and country.
The war was beginning to affect the theatre, and not for the worse. Entertainment, both for troops on leave and civilians seeking escape, was at a premium; by 1915 unemployment among actors had been cut by nearly fifty per cent. For both Coward and Wynne it was a period of relatively full employment; the productions staged had become increasingly escapist, and the fairy play was more popular than ever. On 14 December Noel and Esme began rehearsing together for the fourth season of Where the Rainbow Ends at the Garrick. Coward, too old for his original part of page boy, was engaged as the dragon-man, the Slacker, a ‘short but showy’ part which involved much blue and yellow make-up and some green sequins stuck on his eyelids. The dress rehearsal on Christmas Eve ‘went off beautifully’, Esme noted. The theatre was a hard taskmaster; both teenagers had to rehearse on Christmas afternoon, and the play opened with a matinee performance on 27 December.
Another old friend was in the cast: Harold French was playing Crispian, and his voice was breaking. Noel had been through this trauma earlier that year and, although upset by the change, had come to accept it. (Unlike his mother: ‘One of the saddest things in life’, she wrote, ‘is when a boy who has a beautiful voice loses it for good and all! I shall never forget how unhappy I was when he cracked on a high note and never sang as a boy again’, a telling indication of her wish to keep him a boy.) Noel consoled his friend, ‘You may never sing “Oh for the Wings of a Dove” again, but think how impressive you’ll be when you have a go at “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep”.’ At sixteen, he was already dispensing advice with the voice of authority. ‘Now that your . . . er . . . voice has dropped, you’ll have to try and get juvenile parts and you’ll need a decent wardrobe’, Noel advised. ‘Go to my man’, he said airily, giving French the address of a tailor off the Strand, ‘mention my name’. When Harold protested at the cost, Noel told him to pay in monthly instalments: ‘You don’t have to say which month. But no hanky-panky, he’s got to be paid sometime.’ French did as he was told.
Despite food shortages and the precarious blackout, life in wartime London was fun for Noel and Esme, enjoying the freedom of the city and being in a successful production. On New Year’s Day 1916, the cast of Where the Rainbow Ends celebrated with a harlequinade after the matinee. The following week Noel and Esme went to the Golders Green Empire to see Charles Hawtrey in The Compleat Angler. Coward and Wynne were not the best-behaved theatre-goers, ‘the rest of the programme was awful, and we giggled lots’. Nor were they forgiving in their criticisms – The Peddler of Dreams at the Vaudeville was ‘a terrible amateurish performance, so boring – we could hardly sit through it . . . the Principal was as camp as Hell’.
In early January the pair were offered auditions for a touring production of Brandon Thomas’s well-worn favourite, Charley’s Aunt, due to begin soon after Where the Rainbow Ends closed. Cecil Barth was responsible for the production, and they both went to see him on 11 January. Esme thought Barth ‘rather swinish’, but they accepted his invitation to see Charley’s Aunt that evening. ‘Were so bored . . .’ noted Esme tartly. They went back to Barth (‘more swinish than ever’) the next day, to read their parts. It was arranged that they should see Mrs Brandon Thomas (widow of the play’s author) at her house in Gordon Square. Unlike the swinish Mr Barth, Mrs Thomas was ‘charming and quite approved of us’, and terms were arranged.
Coward and Wynne celebrated with tea at the Criterion, assured of two pounds a week, every week, for the near future. The following evening they went to see Sydney Lomer: now a major, he entertained Noel and Esme in his ‘wonderful’ house, filled with ‘gorgeous books’. Lomer was particularly charming to Esme, and asked to keep a book of her poetry to read later. The following week Wynne wrote to him, and Lomer invited them both to lunch at the Royal Automobile Club, to discuss their work.
The Charley’s Aunt tour began at Southampton. Noel, Esme and her mother had digs at West Marland Terrace, close to the Grand Theatre. The Brandon Thomas Company ‘had been going the rounds for about twenty years . . . They were all old, old men who had grown into their part, and elderly ladies.’ Wynne was to play Amy; Noel, the eponymous Charley. This was not a lavish production. Both had to supply their own clothes, and Noel was taken aback to discover that his flannels had shrunk to the length of cycling knickers. In Southampton they loitered on the pier, reading ‘nonsense novels’ to each other (Esme bought Noel ‘un petit livre d’amour’); and explored the Common where they trespassed on an army camp, ‘were rude to two soldiers and retired with dignity’. Nearby, on the shores of Southampton Water at Netley, was the huge military Royal Victoria Hospital, full of casualties from the war. The cast of Charley’s Aunt was to entertain the troops, and drove there, crossing the Itchen by the Floating Bridge. Noel and Esme performed ‘Nonsense Rhymes’ and the second act of Charley’s Aunt; afterwards they took tea in the officers’ quarters, ‘overlooking the waters and long stretches of lawn and dark pine trees. The sky was grey and pink and a big splodge of gold showing between the pines.’
Such outings were a bonus of a tour. The New Forest was close by, and Coward and Wynne rambled in Lyndhurst, lunching hungrily in the Crown Hotel. They admired the huge yew tree on the green at Bolton’s Bench, ‘and then we went into the forest and heard the stillness of it all and rubbed our faces on the soft moss and I picked ferns and red and green ivy and baby leaves. The smell was earthy and good.’ It is odd to imagine Noel communing with nature, but such was the influence of Esme. The next week they returned to London, to open in Croydon. They travelled by bus, sitting on the open top deck, talking endlessly; quite often their discussions would over-heat: ‘He behaved like a fool’, Esme wrote in her diary. She was undergoing the stress of a love affair with one of the cast, nicknamed Babs, while ‘poor Noel had a dreadful disappointment as S. L. [Sydney Lomer] wrote to say he couldn’t put him up . . . Podge very depressed on bus’. A few days later Noel arrived at the theatre ‘in new suit and intense state of depression – had a row with him – made it up and we came back together on top of a car philosophising on love and life sitting perched on our make-up boxes on a snow covered seat – then we saw how funny it was and shrieked . . .’ Such arguments, born of fervent adolescent emotion, were minor dramas in themselves, their mutable relationship a rehearsal for future Coward productions.
On the Hammersmith leg of the tour, which began on 28 February, Wynne first mentions John Ekins, whom Noel had introduced to her. Ekins was the handsome, fresh-faced son of the rector of Rame in Cornwall, the same age as Coward, with whom he had appeared in the 1915-16 production of Where the Rainbow Ends. He was currently playing in Anthony in Wonderland, a Hawtrey production at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre. Sharing a mutual ambition and sense of humour, he and Coward had become close, as did Wynne and Ekins; Esme later confessed to a ‘little tendresse . . . we might just have married one another’, she admitted, acknowledging that this created a certain tension between the two older friends: ‘Noel was inclined to be jealous especially of John Ekins’s good looks and popularity.’
If envious of Ekins’s looks or talent, Noel did not allow this to stand in the way of their relationship, which probably thrived on healthy competition, as did his friendship with Esme. When Ekins eventually persuaded his parents to let him live in London to pursue a stage career, the friendship intensified, despite John’s rapid success in getting parts for which Noel had tried. The three friends indulged in a great deal of ragging, throwing stinkbombs and generally annoying the populace. But Coward and Ekins were also up to other tricks: they had taken to petty theft. Shoplifting is a daredevil game many adolescents play, but for Noel, who never did things by halves, the targets were the luxury goods he could not afford to buy but felt like owning. He and John strolled into Hawes and Curtis, the Savile Row tailors, and casually walked out with a selection of shirts and ties.
Coward later admitted to Robin Maugham that he had been ‘an almost compulsive thief’ as a teenager, his brazenness utterly lacking shame. He once went to Fortnum & Mason’s, picked up a suitcase, and took it along Piccadilly to Hatchards the bookshop, where he filled it up. On another raid, he found himself being watched by a shop assistant. ‘Really!’ said Noel. ‘Look how badly this store is run. I could have made off with a dozen books and no one would have noticed.’ Such behaviour terrified the law-fearing Wynne, especially when, on her way with Coward and her mother to see her father in the City, they stopped at a bookstall, ‘and suddenly saw him take a book and fly, with the bookman after him . . . my mother nearly had a fit’. Coward seemed not to care about getting caught. ‘Noel had no fear of anything. I expect he knew in his heart of hearts that he would say something funny, and make the policeman laugh, you know? He was so assured.’ His lightfingeredness made shopping trips painful for Esme, although he did pay for the ‘futurist pyjamas’ they acquired one Saturday together with some matching tulle, costumes for their Shadow Dance, which they auditioned (with Gwen Kelly as chaperone) at the Hippodrome for the producer of a new show. ‘Both dressed in same room – were so amused’, Esme noted.
The Charley’s Aunt tour continued in the Midlands, interrupted occasionally by the ‘Zepp hooter’ announcing Zeppelin bombing raids. In Chester there was a minor crisis when they were told that they were staying in a ‘bad house’, as Esme put it, ‘and Mr Barth made me write a note to say I was not returning’. Coward maintained it was a brothel, although Wynne denied it. Whatever the truth, they were swiftly moved out the following morning, and went to spend the rest of the day sculling on the river. There they saw ‘two lovely young boys in black and white sweaters’ who kept their canoes in the woods. In a phrase reminiscent of Philip Streatfeild’s Uranian tributes to radiant young boys, Coward and Wynne dubbed the pair ‘Golden Youth’, and went back the next day, discovering that they lived in a tent on top of a hill. Whether either pursued this acquaintance further is not known, but their intimacy was greater because of such shared desires. They seemed unable to spend time away from each other, even sharing digs after Noel had argued with his housemate, Arnold Raynor, the juvenile lead. Coward ‘hated being on his own. He had to be on his own at first, then in the end we thought, well, bother the thing, if we can’t talk with our friends and have any sort of life outside the theatre then we must give notice.’ They got their own way. ‘I don’t mean we shared bedrooms or anything,’ added Esme hastily, ‘we had two bedrooms and a sitter, which you want on tour, you see. But we could go on talking. Whereas when we were segregated poor Noel sat in his horrible rooms and I sat in my horrible rooms with no one to talk to.’ ‘We even had baths together,’ Noel recalled, ‘it seemed affected to stop short in the middle of some vital discussion for such a paltry reason as conventional modesty.’
Both had their share of admirers, usually men in uniform. In Nottingham, they received a note from ‘two subs in front’ – the ever-present sub-lieutenants, who had a reputation as ‘stage door johnnies’. ‘Noel interviewed them. We refused to see them but they were in the front row of the stalls and looked rather pets’; while on the train back to London from Blackpool, ‘officers began trying to talk and we allowed two Military and one Naval to do so’. So deigned the haughty stars, neither yet eighteen.
When the tour reconvened in Torquay, they found a secluded cove on Babbacombe beach and took all their clothes off ‘and sat on a rock and let the water run over us, then we raced about the rocks and danced on the cliffs in the nude – it was so lovely and our figures looked so pretty against the green and blue’. Only later would Noel note that ‘their aesthetic eyes’ were blind to the fact that Esme’s hair went unbecomingly straight when wet, and that his back was covered in spots. Then in Bristol Noel underwent a strange and sudden religious enlightenment when a storm sent him into ‘black nostalgia for Mother and the dear familiarity of my bedroom at Clapham Common’. This was taken seriously by the ethereal Esme, who saw it as an epiphany of sorts. She reminded Noel of it in later years, ‘I wonder if you remember us standing in a field during that awful Charley’s Aunt tour, realizing (as I see it was, now) Power. We admitted to each other that we felt within us the power to achieve anything, and your integrated wish was to have the world at your feet, theatrically speaking . . .’ This near-supernatural revelation (as Wynne saw it) seemed to prove that Coward’s ambition could not be contained.
The tour proceeded with pitifully small audiences and various rows. In Wolverhampton Coward had a stand-up fight with Arnold Raynor, who had become exasperated by his fellow actor’s sometimes vexing behaviour. ‘He knocked Noel about horribly . . . great hulking cad’, wrote Esme accusingly. Noel, ‘poor child, came home covered with bumps’, and the next day felt ‘very feverish and sleepy’. It was a great deal livelier than what went on onstage, where Coward’s performances were less impressive, accordingly to Wynne. ‘He was a very bad actor in his youth; it took a long time to make Noel a good actor . . .’
Charley’s Aunt gave up the ghost on 3 June, leaving Coward and Wynne thankful but jobless. In the search for employment, Noel felt he lacked facility at auditions, even when accompanied at the piano by Aunt Kitty (who had returned from Toronto, deserted by Uncle Percy). However, soon after Esme was recommended for a part in A Pair of Silk Stockings, he was able to announce – as they lay out in a hammock Noel had fixed on the tiny balcony at 50 Southside – his new role in The Light Blues. He had secured it only after a certain persistence, as Coward’s friend Lord Amherst remembered: ‘He went to a call for people to join a musical run by Cicely Courtneidge and her husband [Jack Hulbert], and they were rehearsing and put Noel in the chorus. Noel said “Oh no, I’ve got to have a part” and stamped his foot and went off. Sure enough they gave him a small part.’
The Light Blues was a two-act musical comedy by Mark Ambient and Jack Hulbert concerning ‘the excruciating adventures of a jolly actress called Topsy Devigne’. Noel played an Edwardian ‘dude’ in morning clothes, top hat and false moustache, with Cicely Courtneidge as Topsy, in an extravagant pink dress. Coward enjoyed the three-week tour, but was crushed when Robert Courtneidge, Cicely’s father, flew at him when he discovered the boy doing ‘saucy’ imitations for the amusement of the cast. Cicely Courtneidge consoled him with a pat on the back and ‘you mustn’t mind father’. To Miss Courtneidge, Noel appeared to be ‘very tall, skinny not good-looking and rather spotty, wasn’t the sort of bloke you’d take to at all, but my goodness, was he clever!’
The Light Blues opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 16 September ‘with the mark of death emblazoned upon it’. The phrase had a certain macabre aptness, as the Zeppelin raids on London began that night and were an obvious disincentive to audiences to negotiate blacked-out streets as dangerous as falling bombs. It ran for just two weeks, leaving Noel to seek his first and last engagement as a professional dancer, an occupation with definite gigolo overtones. But as Cicely Courtneidge had observed, Noel at sixteen was not a seductive figure, ‘too gangling and coltish to promote evil desire in even the most debauched nightclub habitues’. With a girl named Eileen Dennis, he sashayed across the floor of the Elysée Restaurant (later the Café de Paris) performing a slow waltz, a tango, and ‘a rather untidy onestep’. It was a decidedly disappointing introduction to decadent nightlife.
His next role combined his singing and dancing skills; he was engaged as a Sandhurst cadet for Cecil Aldin’s and Adrian Ross’s The Happy Family. The play also featured Fabia Drake, cast in the lead role of Babs; Noel was to play her ‘young man’. She recalled that Coward ‘had rather “stuck-out” ears and . . . extraordinary powers of application’; it was Drake who gave Noel an inappropriate nickname which nonetheless stuck: ‘Cowardy Custard’. A critic wrote that Coward ‘combined the grace and movement of a Russian dancer with the looks and manner of an English schoolboy’; Noel kept the cutting until it yellowed with age. Esme, back from her latest tour, judged it a ‘topping show’. The triumvirate of Coward, Wynne and Ekins resumed their old routine, seeing Chu Chin Chow, ‘that gorgeous spectacle . . . a riot of colours’ but a ‘paltry plot’; and its burlesque by Alice Delysia and Leon Morton in Pell Mell. They might have forgotten that there was a war going on, had they not been regularly woken by air raids, and had Noel not turned up to tea with ‘a nice sub [lieutenant] called Herbert Edward Clark’.
Ten days later Coward finished in The Happy Family, leaving him free to concentrate on writing with Wynne. Although Esme was reading Walt Whitman and Nietzsche, their first literary collaboration was a book of light sketches and stories which they called Parachutes, parachutes being an innovation of the war. So assured of its quality were they that the manuscript was sent to John Lane, who invited the co-authors to tea. According to Wynne, ‘quite an illustrious company were assembled; he introduced us as a young couple with a promising future [the pair were often mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend] . . . We were told, however, that . . . Parachutes suggested . . . we would do better work in a short time and that the Bodley Head would rather wait for more mature work from our pens.’ Such professional encouragement prompted Noel and Esme to begin writing curtain-raisers under the unattractive joint nom de plume of Esnomel. The initial idea came from Wynne, but Coward took it up avidly, and they were soon swapping ideas in his room at Clapham.
Noel had meanwhile been to stay with the Ekins family in Cornwall, where he and John went to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth, ‘very casual and grand in our carefully pressed navy blue suits and coloured silk socks’. The Ekins household was ‘one of the nicest . . . I have ever known’, Coward remarked. Their contentment seemed idyllic: Mr and Mrs Ekins, John, and his two sisters, Christine and Audrey – the picture of a happy family, to which he perhaps unfavourably compared his own. But even here were intimations of mortality; Audrey was tubercular, and the boys used to have tea parties in her bedroom to cheer her up. It was not the only sadness the family were to suffer. John Ekins joined the Royal Flying Corps as an air mechanic and on 20 April Noel received a letter from him; he had a day’s leave, could they meet for a matinee? But in the same post was a letter from Mrs Ekins saying that John had died on 17 April at the Military Isolation Hospital in Aldershot, from spinal meningitis.
It was a profound shock to Coward, his second experience of the death of a close friend in as many years. He went to the matinee alone, but began to cry and had to leave. The tube ride home was interminable as he conjured up memories of his friend. ‘It took a long while for my unhappiness to disperse’, he recalled twenty years later, ‘and even now I feel a shadow of it when I think of him.’ The loss of two of his closest friends subjected Coward to the grief which affected most families in England during that war. Esme, a serious believer, had her faith to sustain her. Noel, cynical before his time, had none, and was perhaps insensitive to that of others. The Ekins family suffered further loss. ‘Tragedy certainly descended swiftly on that gentle, harmless rectory. Within a year or so Christine, the healthy elder daughter, had married and died in childbirth, and there was only Audrey left to linger on for a few months. Mr and Mrs Ekins live there still and Christine’s daughter is with them, but even so the house must feel empty.’
Coward’s pessimism seemed to manifest itself in a youthful disregard for authority; not only did he not believe in the law, or in God, but he had no faith in country either. Esme maintained that she and Noel were ‘terrifically pacifist, in the First War – not pacifist as I afterwards became through understanding, but the sheer unintelligence of it. We used to go with our . . . nice young men to the Carlton hotel, and then the next minute that nice young man is blown up sky-high, and everything gone . . . And we lost our darling John Ekins . . .’
In their reaction to all this destruction, Coward and Wynne were driven by the arrogance of adolescence. Esme thought they were ‘horribly stridently detestably young!’, making a cult of their youth. Later they conceived a magazine ‘which was to be by youth for youth and about youth and its name, quite simply, would be Youth – and we its editors’. They even got as far as choosing paper, type and printer for the venture, but money prevented their going further. ‘We were as rebellious, defiant and disillusioned as intelligent youth is in any age, but I think we had more justification for our cynicism, bitterness and intolerance . . . Not for a moment were Noel and I deceived by the claptrap and jargon of patriotic fervour that was doled out from press, pulpit and stage.’ She recalled a heated discussion they had with the novelist Coningsby Dawson, ‘then a patriotic young officer’, whom they had met at John Lane’s. He took them to eat at a restaurant, the Rendezvous. Their awe at lunching with a novelist ‘turned to indignation when we realised that he was on the side of the war mongers; we had imagined him more intelligent then it occurred to us that he could not be far off thirty, the age we hated only less than we hated war’.
Coward and Wynne continued to work on the book for John Lane. Another manuscript had been returned ‘from the ungrateful editor of “Smart Set” ’, noted Wynne, but they persevered with burlesques, and ‘arrangements’ for their joint literary effort. They also saw a new film from the United States which caused a sensation when it opened in London. As they left the theatre on 11 May, having seen D. W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance, neither could have known that by the summer Noel would be working for that exalted director.
*
Griffith’s Hearts of the World was the story of a French village as it changed hands in the course of the war, a propaganda film to persuade the United States to come in on the Allied side, the director having been invited to England by Lord Beaverbrook, then minister of information. Although America had entered the war the day before the premiere of Intolerance, Griffith went ahead with Hearts of the World. Lillian and Dorothy Gish came over from the States, and in London casting began for minor roles: Coward’s ubiquitous presence in agents’ offices around town secured him a role, for the respectable sum of one pound a day.
Coward was summoned to Staunton in Worcestershire on location, to make his film debut. There was a disturbingly early morning call, and the application of a layer of bright yellow make-up for the benefit of the black and white cameras. It was a brief appearance. Miss Gish recalled, ‘In one scene the French girl I was playing packed her possessions and left home just a few minutes ahead of the approaching Germans. This young actor was supposed to help me by pushing the loaded wheelbarrow toward the camera instead of away from it. I am sure that if Mr Griffith had not been so preoccupied with such a responsible assignment, he would have perceived the boy’s extraordinary talent.’ Coward got on well with the Gish girls and, characteristically, with their mother (also appearing in the film), who used to wait for her girls in a carriage and pair at lunch, and Noel was invited to join them. (He later referred to his film experience in I’ll Leave It to You, in which Sylvia becomes a movie actress, and talks of ‘that day in the middle of the village street, when I had to do three “close ups” on top of one another’. ‘It all sounds vaguely immoral to me’, comments her mother.)
Cinematic success was followed by another Manchester appearance in Dorothy Brandon’s Wild Heather. The indications were that the engagement would not be exciting: minced haddock on toast and a throat infection confirmed Coward’s opinion that Manchester was ‘a beastly hole’. There were also worries about home; Noel asked Violet to wire him if the air raids went ‘anywhere near our delectable residence . . . I shall probably hear that Clapham has been razed to the ground.’ However, free after the second act of Wild Heather, he would run round to the Palace Theatre to catch Ivy St Helier and Clara Evelyn playing their piano duets. The two women gave him useful tips on ‘the value of “authority” in a piano entertainer’, and ‘some good striking chords to play as introduction to almost any song’; Noel ‘profited a lot from that afternoon’. The advice allowed him to develop musical techniques for gaining his audience’s attention in the same way that Hawtrey’s tuition had directed his acting abilities.
His career was accelerating rapidly. Gilbert Miller, the producer, appeared in Manchester, having been advised by Hawtrey to see Noel’s performance. Coward was flattered by the attentions of this ‘dark enthusiastic American’ who sent for him at the Midland Hotel. ‘My Dear he had come down specially to see me in Wild Heather’, Noel told Violet, ‘and he said I was really splendid and that I hadn’t half enough to do!’ Miller offered him a part in a new production at the Garrick, The Saving Grace, in which he was ‘absolutely certain I should make my name! . . . He says it is a Terrific part and I have to play with Marie Lohr! Isn’t it gorgeous?’ he gushed. ‘He is going back to Hawtrey today to say that he has perfect confidence in me and that I am throughly natural and unaffected etc: oh I am a star!!’ It was, he wrote later, ‘the real start of my name being known’.
Manchester also introduced Noel to Ivor Novello, the handsome idol of many a female – and male – theatre-goer. Novello’s career was in the ascendant, and as singer, actor, film star, composer and playwright, he and Coward would later be seen as rival talents. The Welsh-born Novello (his real name was the more prosaic David Davies) was six years older than Coward, and his first success, Theodore & Co., written by himself, had opened at the Gaiety Theatre in September 1916 and run for eighteen months; his patriotic ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, a plaintive war song, became a huge hit with soldiers and their sweethearts everywhere.
Coward was eager to meet this handsome new star, and had a mutual friend in Bobbie Andrews, who had rivalled Philip Tonge for the status of best-known boy actor. Andrews was a good-looking young man, who became Novello’s lover and eventually his heir. Coward persuaded Andrews to effect an introduction, but found the reality of meeting a hero disappointing. They met on the pavement outside the Midland Hotel, where Noel’s ‘illusion of this romantic handsome youth . . . drooped and died and lay in the gutter’. Novello’s face was yellow and unshaven, he was dressed in a shabby overcoat with an astrakhan collar and wore a battered brown hat; Noel could as easily have mistaken him for a busker and thrown him some coins. Novello invited him to see his musical Arlette, and afterwards they took tea in his rooms at the Midland. As Novello shaved and changed for dinner Coward watched him transformed into the matinee idol. He experienced a serious pang of envy: ‘I just felt suddenly conscious of the long way I had to go before I could break into the magic atmosphere in which he moved and breathed with such nonchalance.’
But further advancement arrived in Manchester in the shape of the composer and impresario Max Darewski. ‘Nearly mad with excitement’, Coward wrote, telling his mother that he was collaborating with Darewski on a new song. The lessons of Clara Evelyn and Ivy St Helier were being put to good use. ‘I wrote the lyric yesterday after breakfast, I hummed it to him in the Midland lounge at 12 o’clock, we at once rushed up to his private room, and he put harmonies to it, there were some other people there, when they sung it once or twice, Max leapt off the piano stool and danced for joy and said it was going to take London by storm! We are putting the verse to music this morning’, reported Noel, who said the song – ‘When You Come Home on Leave’ – a patriotic number which sought to capitalise on Novello’s hit – was to be published the following week, and in all probability sung by Lee White or Phyllis Dare. ‘I shall probably make a lot of money out of it’, he maintained airily. Another number, ‘Bertha from Balham’, was to be placed with Margaret Cooper, a performer he much admired.
‘You see he is one of the most influential men in town,’ Noel said of Darewski, ‘he owns three theatres, at least I am beginning to make my way, really Manchester has been astonishingly lucky for me . . .’ More than ever, Coward was determined to become a truly brilliant star.
1. In Coward’s story ‘Me and the Girls’, the protagonist, a dying homosexual actor, recalls his childhood: ‘I shall never forget those jovial wet-handed clergymen queuing up outside the stage-door to take us out to tea and stroke our knees under the table . . . I once got a box of Fuller’s soft-centres and a gramophone record of Casse Noisette for no more than a quick grope in a taxi.’
2. Charles Keoch Scott Moncrieff, writer and journalist, an army captain during the war. In his Who’s Who entry he listed under recreation ‘nepotism’. He also translated the work of Pirandello, another perceptible influence on Coward.
3. The younger Streatfeild family believed that Philip died of typhoid, contracted while in a French camp, but his death certificate indicates otherwise. If the contraction of tuberculosis was blamed on Coward, the family may have sought to disguise or dismiss the fact of their son’s death.