They want me to play in this new comedy here in February – such a good gesture to refuse it for my own play, altogether I’m a riot!
Noel Coward to Violet Coward, Paris, 1922
COWARD’S ticket home was generously provided by another of his New York friends, Gladys Barbour, whose husband arranged for a free cabin on the SS Cedric. On a snowy October day in 1921 the ship docked in Liverpool; Noel’s homecoming was ‘unspoiled by anticlimax’, he recalled, the Ebury Street bungalow en fête, and Violet elated, although her son detected strain behind her joy. Coward had to readjust to the old tensions of fragile family fortunes and constant job-searching, as well as coping with the low spirits which followed his exciting sojourn in the New World. It was not a happy time: 1922 began with financial complications, involving ‘borrowings, mortgages on my beloved piano, pawnshops, black moments of distress, brokers’ men’, and, for Noel, ‘worst of all, days when even Mother’s invincible spirit came near to being broken’.
The family were near penury. John Dempsey, later a masseur on the Cunard Line, recalled that Coward had become friendly with a deck steward, Jimmy Wallace (‘we called him Nellie Wallace’). ‘In the early Twenties, when Noel Coward was on the rocks, when he was really struggling, Jimmy Wallace used to go round to his house with coal for his fire.’ Seemingly, Noel’s luck had deserted him. There were no takers for his own plays or for his performance in others’, although he was commissioned to adapt a French play for Dennis Eadie for £100. ‘I was in the awkward situation of being too well known to be able to accept little jobs, and not well known enough to be able to command big ones.’ But what worried him most of all was that his mother might become seriously ill. Her fortunes were intimately tied in with his – emotionally, as well as financially – and desperation sent Coward back to Ned Lathom for help. He handed over £200 without demur, giving it rather than lending it: ‘it was too dangerous a commodity . . . to pass between friends’. £150 paid off immediate debts; with the rest Coward whisked his mother off to the country. Gladys Calthrop and he discovered a suitable cottage at St Mary-in-the-Marsh in Kent, where they were soon installed, together with a black mongrel from Battersea Dogs’ Home.
Coward had fallen in love with the countryside during the two weeks they had spent searching for Violet’s holiday home. Cycling within a twenty-five-mile radius of Dymchurch, they discovered the beauty of Romney Marsh – wetlands under expansive skies, the colour of the landscape ever-changing: grey-green sea, silver-green watermeadows, gunmetal skies turning vivid amber in the sunset. (‘Too red. Very affected’, Coward quipped.) St Mary-in-the-Marsh looked across the marshes to the sea wall, where Napoleonic martello towers studded the coast; to the west was New Romney, its square church tower rising out of a clutch of trees. On evening rides Noel and Violet paused in the twilight and watched the narrow band of the sea fade into the marsh mist that rose from the dykes. This ‘darkening country . . . lamps twinkling in cottage windows, bats swooping down from the high trees, and the lighthouses flashing all along the coast’ was an echo of the land around Meon where Coward had spent his boyhood holidays.
Another link with his youthful past came in the shape of Coward’s heroine, E. Nesbit, whose fantasies of Edwardian children and their magical adventures he reread throughout his life. Nesbit was a Bohemian figure with a history of younger lovers (among them Richard Le Gallienne, lover of Wilde) and a prodigiously unfaithful first husband, Hubert Bland. She had remarried T. T. Tucker, ‘The Skipper’, and they lived nearby in a couple of brick huts named The Long Boat and The Jolly Boat. Coward showed her his plays, which she discussed seriously. He later told Nesbit’s biographer, Noel Streatfeild (a distant relation of Philip Streatfeild), that Edith was ‘absolutely charming, with greyishwhite hair and a rather sharp sense of humour’. But she was no ‘sweet old lady’, recorded a subsequent biographer. One day Coward was late for tea, and she was ‘throughly annoyed’ with him; on another occasion, Nesbit took a dislike to Violet. According to another biographer, Coward ‘thought all the more of her for showing her feelings so openly’, but Cole Lesley records that ‘from then on [Noel] referred to Miss Nesbit as stuck-up’.
It was a part of England thick with literary and eccentric figures. Nearby, in the quaint medieval town of Rye, lived another writer with whom Noel had been on ‘nodding terms’ since 1919: E. F. Benson, author of the sensational Dodo (a society skit on Margot Asquith), who had published his first Mapp and Lucia saga that year, 1921, tales of parochial snobbery much to Coward’s taste, with their mannish women and effeminate men. (In the 1950s, when the books were out of print, Coward lent his name to a petition which included the names of Nancy Mitford, W. H. Auden, Michael MacLiammoir and Gertrude Lawrence, claiming, ‘We will pay anything for Lucia books’.) Benson, later mayor of Rye, lived in Henry James’s former abode, Lamb House, where he wrote in a Georgian ‘garden room’, and took his telephone calls in a special panelled room.
A more eccentric pair of writers also moved to Rye: the lesbian couple Miss Radclyffe Hall (whose scandalous Sapphic novel, The Well of Loneliness, was published in 1928) and Una, Lady Troubridge (widow of Admiral Troubridge), whom Noel probably met through their mutual friend, Teddie Gerrard.1 Hall sported a cropped hairstyle and men’s suits, and liked to be addressed as John by her more feminine girlfriend. As figures out of Benson’s fiction, the pair maintained a spiky relationship with him partly because as campaigning lesbians they did not approve of Benson’s undeclared homosexuality, considering it a disservice to ‘the cause’.
Noel relished this exaggerated band, whose cliques and feuds informed his skittish prose satires of A Withered Nosegay, Chelsea Buns and Spangled Unicorn; but as a friend, he was closer to Sheila Kaye-Smith, who lived nearby, and whose novels set in rural Sussex inspired Noel’s love of the area. Coward spent most of the spring of 1922 there; their cottage, propped up against the village pub with views of ‘unlimited sheep’ from its bedrooms, lay across the road from the church. There, in the churchyard, leaning on a tombstone, Noel wrote The Queen Was in the Parlour, whose ‘passionate love-scenes and Ruritanian splendours’ were a far remove from the surroundings which nurtured it.
In May, the Kentish lull was broken by an upswing in Coward’s fortunes when Nelson Keys and George Grossmith performed one of his numbers, ‘Bottles and Bones’, at a Newspaper Press Fund matinee at Drury Lane. Another was used in The Co-Optimists, ‘A Pierrotic Entertainment’ at the Palace Theatre. Noel’s skit ‘The Co-Communists’ reflected more revolutionary sentiments in a witty song, ‘Down with the Whole Damn Lot!’, sung by (among others) Stanley Holloway:
Down with the idle rich!
The bloated upper classes.
They drive to Lord’s
In expensive Fords
With their jewelled op’ra glasses.
A contemporary list of social ills is sarcastically challenged: the daily press, ‘the bold Sinn Fein’, ‘the modern dance’ and the Garrick Club.
Matters continued to improve with the Little Theatre’s production of Coward’s one-act comedy The Better Half. As usual, the playscript had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing; the reader was George Street – drama critic and author of The Autobiography of a Boy – who was typical of the writers used by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. He considered it ‘a very bitter little comedy, a clever, one-sided and exaggerated litle satire . . .’ In luxurious Mayfair, Alice is sick of her husband’s priggishness and wants to provoke him ‘to a little human brutality’. When she succeeds, she calls him a bully, and leaves him ‘with a woman as aspiring as herself’, going in search of a more ‘human’ husband. The cynical manipulation of and by lovers became a rich vein for Coward, although the play’s inclusion in a Grand Guignol season had the Clarion hoping that the ‘little play will not breed a little tribe of Rochesters’. Noel thought the play ‘too flippant’ to compete with the terrors which preceded it on the bill, but ‘it . . . served the purpose . . . of keeping my name before the public’.
*
With theatrical success, Coward’s social life improved. One weekend was spent with Lady Colefax at Oxford, where she was entertaining ‘young people’, her son, Peter, having just graduated. Sibyl Colefax, one of the most successful hostesses of the day, was unashamed in collecting celebrities, although the ‘bouncing Michelin figure’ of Elsa Maxwell, who arrived in gales of laughter, became a yet more egregious wooer of society. Maxwell was certainly noticeable, with a large, bovine face supported by an equally oversized body. As she sang her song, ‘Tango Dream’, ‘a young man with an unusual, almost Mongolian countenance’ watched her intently. Noel introduced himself; the fact that he knew her song (already ten years old) impressed Elsa: ‘the youngster obviously had gone to the trouble of learning something about me’.
‘I loved her at once’, Coward wrote, ‘ . . . all her boastfulness and noise and shrill assertiveness . . .’ The outcome of his encounter with Elsa was an extended if uneven friendship that lasted for more than thirty years; the short-term prospect was a party the following Tuesday. Here he found ‘social and Bohemian graces tactfully mixed’, and a tall, elegant woman with jet-black hair, Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, known as Dickie. She had met the San Francisco-born Maxwell in Durban (where Elsa was playing the piano at the Edward Hotel), and brought her back to London in 1912. They had spent much of the war in New York, helping the English war effort and socialising. Elsa liked to mix in high society; Dickie was born to it. She came from a wealthy Scottish family2 (she was a cousin of socialite Daisy Fellowes) and her father had died young, leaving her the family fortune. Fellowes-Gordon held the purse-strings for her profligate friend, and provided her with good counsel. Herself a singer (she had trained with Caruso, although her ambition did not match her talent), Dickie recalled that Elsa ‘could have made a fortune from her songs, but she didn’t have the sense to do that’.
Their friendship was a mystery to some: contemporary rumour had it that the pair were lovers, but the idea of Fellowes-Gordon – whose heterosexual lovers included Napier Alington and the Duke of Alba – as a sexual partner of Maxwell’s remained contentious. ‘A tall, stunning girl’, Maxwell described her, ‘the best and most helpful friend I have ever known . . . Dickie . . . had the beauty and sharp wit that were to make her one of Europe’s femmes fatales, a role she attained without half trying’.
It was from hostesses like Sibyl Colefax that Maxwell learned the art of throwing parties, and the usefulness of clever young men like Coward. She began modestly in her two-roomed apartment in a converted stable, with a party which cost thirteen shillings and sixpence for twelve guests. Maxwell and Fellowes-Gordon had sought Coward’s help with the guest list, inviting Diana Cooper, Viola Tree and ‘a faunlike young man’, Oliver Messel, the designer. The royal attraction (always one ingredient) was Princess Helena Victoria, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, escorted by Napier Alington. She ‘sat on the floor . . . ate hard-boiled eggs and sausages and had the time of her life laughing at the antics of . . . Noel Coward, Bea Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, and Ivor Novello’.
Both women were impressed by Coward, although Dickie was not convinced of his talents: ‘He danced quite well, he sang a song fairly well, he played the piano very badly indeed – plink, plonk, plink! But he was very entertaining.’ She and Maxwell decided to take their new friend with them to Italy, where Elsa was already rallying society to the Venetian Lido, and was to organise a party for the Duke of Spoleto. When Coward pleaded poverty, Maxwell said he would go as their guest. Not that Elsa was footing the bill; as she observed, ‘Dickie was so open-handed with money that I knew she would not object to an added starter on the excursion.’
As a Mecca for the beau monde, Coward found Venice much to his liking. In this fantasy setting, frivolity prevailed; Fellowes-Gordon recalled Oliver Messel’s speciality was a creative mime show. ‘He did an Italian tart with an English colonel, behind a screen. You would have absolutely sworn they were two people. And then he’d do a child being given an enema, and you’d’ve sworn that was true too!’ Hugo Rumbold was another acquaintance, fond of cross-dressing. One night he had Dickie turn out her entire wardrobe (‘including my underwear, he was that particular’) – in his search for the perfect costume as an ‘eccentric Spanish authoress’.
Noel also discovered the ‘myriads of feuds and scandals and small social rumpuses’ of Venetian society. When Elsa Maxwell sent her guest list for the Spoleto party to the duke’s equerry, it was returned with Noel’s name crossed off. Elsa blamed an Italian socialite, Dorothy di Frasso, who had been worsted by Coward’s wit at another gathering. Enraged, Maxwell informed the equerry that there would be no party without Mr Coward, and ‘within the hour, my original list was returned without an omission’. On the night of the dinner, Maxwell met di Frasso. It was an uneven match of weights. ‘I told her to take a flying jump in the Grand Canal and tried to implement the suggestion by grabbing her hair. We were separated before we set a new style in coiffures.’
Notwithstanding Maxwell’s spirited defence, the incident pointed up Coward’s precarious position. His clever comments did not always amuse, and he was not always accepted as an equal, or even as an amusing diversion. In later years, he was the centre of attention, but was he an equal, or merely a toy? Coward relied on hostesses such as Elsa Maxwell, Sibyl Colefax and Mrs Astley Cooper for introductions; without them, he would never have been on first-name terms with royalty and heads of state. Even so, he trod a fine wire with the ease of an adept social acrobat. Later, as a celebrity in his own right, such upper-class resorts as Venice became the meeting places for Noel and his chums. Freed from the restrictions of home (where his sexual desires were proscribed), Venice was the stage for wild hedonism. But for the moment, a burgeoning career, London and The Young Idea beckoned.
*
Coward had cast himself as Sholto in the production, much against producer Robert Courtneidge’s will. Noel’s argument was that he had not written such a good part for anyone else to play; Courtneidge’s that, at twenty-two, he was too old for it, and far too sophisticated in profile. ‘What he really meant, of course, was that I was not a good enough actor for it.’ But Noel got his way.
However, the play’s fate depended on the Lord Chamberlain’s office. George Street considered it ‘a clever and amusing comedy, but the atmosphere of it is more or less vicious and some of it in bad taste . . . Cicely has a lover, Rodney . . . It is not quite clear how far they have gone, but the atmosphere of the house and its guests is of the “fastest” sort . . . As a satire on that sort of English society which is immoral as well as stupid and rather vulgar Acts I and II are quite good. But the taste . . . is certainly bad and unpleasant.’ Coward waited with bated breath: could he stage his play or not? ‘The censorship’, ruled Street loftily, ‘is not an arbiter of taste, except when bad taste amounts to indecency, and there is nothing of that sort . . .’ The play was licensed on 7 September 1922.
The Young Idea opened in Bristol on 25 September and toured for six weeks. Awaiting a London theatre, Coward cabled Ned Lathom in Davos, where he was recovering from a bout of tuberculosis. Lathom’s reply summoned his young friend to consolidate plans for a new Noel Coward venture. The 3rd Earl of Lathom, Edward Bootle-Wilbraham, whose generosity had already helped Coward out of difficulties, was a colourful character. His grandfather had been Lord Chamberlain to Queen Victoria, and the Lathom fortune was largely associated with charitable works. This pale and willowy earl changed all that. He deserted the Lancashire family mansion for the dower house, Blyth, which he rebuilt, complete with a swimming pool and steps crowned with crystal banisters; guests were greeted by scented oil burnt on heated spoons, massed banks of luxuriant flowers, and the best food and wine money could buy. Extravagance was the keynote for this Firbankian figure, who would hire a railway carriage to send a footman to London for a box of chocolate almonds from Charbonnel & Walker, and dictate long letters which were then sent as telegrams. His love of perfume often took him to Floris in Jermyn Street, to buy ‘Tantivy’ or ‘Mimosa’, and he once told the manager that Paris had created a new scent called ‘Suivez Moi, Jeune Homme’ – ‘a dangerous phrase, on his lips’, remarked Beverley Nichols.
Lathom was irrevocably stage-struck, and spent a fortune financing masques in which his friends appeared lavishly and fancifully dressed at his expense. He invested professionally in the theatre too, on private productions of plays banned by the Lord Chamberlain, and wrote three dramatic works of his own. John Gielgud, who recollected him as ‘a delightful friend’, said that Lathom’s own efforts were often staged as Sunday evening performances, but did not make the commercial theatre ‘except on one occasion when the play failed’. (Fear, produced in 1927.) Gielgud was a frequent guest at Lathom’s London home in Cumberland Place, ‘a dream of decadent luxury’, where he first met stars such as Marie Tempest and Gladys Cooper. Indeed, it was at one of Lathom’s parties that Jeffrey Amherst had first met Noel.
The ingenuity of his extravagances rivalled the Bright Young Things’ antics of the later Twenties: a fancy-dress party at the Tower of London; a ‘come-as-the-person-you’d-most-like-to-sleep-with’ party at Cliveden; a nursery party, where guests dressed as babies and were wheeled in prams. But for all his outrageous frivolity, Lathom provided promising and attractive young men like Coward with important support early in their careers, by social connexion and creative encouragement. Sadly, Lathom would have an unhappy end: ‘he squandered his entire fortune by his generous habits’, Gielgud recalls. He married Marie Xenia Tunzelman in 1927, but the couple lived apart; Lathom died from consumption in 1930, aged thirty-four, alone in a St John’s Wood flat, attended by a valet to whom he owed money.
It was by courtesy of this ever-obliging aristocrat that Coward set off for Europe again. On 28 November he arrived at the Hotel de Londres in Paris, and wrote to Violet, assuring her of his safe crossing and a ‘divine lunch’ at the Ritz. There were plenty of friends to look after him: Elsa and Dickie took him on a tour of Parisian nightlife, and introduced him to the Irish-born couturier Edward Molyneux. Noel dined with him the following night after dancing at Claridges. Captain Molyneux had been wounded in the war, losing the sight of his left eye; tall and elegant, he would turn his ‘good side’ to the camera, seldom looking at it face on. Like his designs, he was not extrovert in character; his work relied on subtle tailoring and simple shapes. ‘Clothes must avoid the overdressed, the obvious, the showy,’ he observed, ‘also they must wear well.’
Fashion was not Molyneux’s only venture; in partnership with Elsa Maxwell, he opened a pair of nightclubs. Maxwell had persuaded the designer he would help to sell his clothes by attracting a chic clientele to the nightspot (Poiret was already operating a similar club). The first, at 7 rue des Acacias, was called the Acacia; here the young American dancer Clifton Webb was a star of the floor show. The second club, Le Jardin de ma Soeur, featured Josephine Baker and was described by Anita Loos as ‘the most elegant place in which to greet the Paris dawn’.
Parisian life was exciting. Elsa and Dickie also introduced Noel to three eminent French dramatists, all apparently eager to have him play in a new production, an offer Coward grandly turned down: ‘such a good gesture to refuse it for my own play,’ he told his mother, ‘altogether I’m a riot!’ Coward arrived in Davos-Platz on 2 December, to ‘thick snow, glorious mountains and bright sunshine’. He spent three weeks alone with Lathom and his sister, Barbara, before other guests arrived. ‘Ned looked better,’ he recorded, ‘but he still had coughing-fits from time to time’; it cannot have been pleasant to witness Lathom’s state of health, recalling as it did, Philip Streatfeild’s death.
Davos – the model for Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain – was a last resort of hope for TB victims, but among the dying Coward got on with the business of living. ‘I am to do all the music for the new Charlot revue,’ he told Violet on his first day in Davos, ‘with a few extra songs interpolated, also all the words – isn’t it thrilling – It will probably open in March at the Prince of Wales’s, with Maisie Gay and Gertrude Lawrence!’ Lathom’s largesse attracted many influential people of the theatre, including André Charlot, the impresario and presenter of revues whose displeasure Coward had incurred back in 1918; it must have been satisfying for Noel to be reintroduced to Charlot under such circumstances. Lathom had financed his previous production, A to Z, and now decided on a new revue combining their talents. ‘It’s his solely and entirely’, Coward told his mother. ‘Charlot is on salary as Director and Producer! My music will cause a stir I hope . . .’
Charlot was summoned, and Coward played his music to the impresario, who was ‘delighted – he sat without a smile and then took me aside and said they were all good – so that’s that. I now quite definitely enter the Ranks of British Composers! I am excited as the music is good . . .’ He set to work, rising early and working all morning, submitting the fruits of his labours to Lathom and Charlot in the afternoon, when, in ‘a series of cigar-laden conferences’, London Calling was born. Noel realised the size of the task, and agreed that Charlot could call in another writer if necessary (Ronald Jeans was eventually brought in to write the book for the revue). Charlot was keen for Coward to play the lead, if Courtneidge would release him from The Young Idea; and £30 a week was promised ‘to start with and so much more as the New Editions are produced’.
Coward chose a choreographer, Laddie Cliff, and Molyneux had already begun designs for the costumes.3 Molyneux would always dress Coward’s leading ladies: ‘It is a promise [he] made to me when he first started in haute couture’, Noel maintained years later, and he particularly looked forward to stunning the audience in ‘The Russian Blues’ ‘with the most marvellous Molyneux Russian Ballet costumes coming on in a sort of a dream Parade!’
For Maisie Gay, there would be ‘a divine burlesque musical comedy song – very vivacious, with full chorus. She is to wear a full wig and very “bitty” clothes and look quite 55’; followed by her parasol dance ‘with the male chorus – falling once or twice on her fanny – it’s one of the wittiest burlesques I’ve ever done’, he claimed modestly. Gertrude Lawrence was to sing ‘Prenez Garde, Lisette’, ‘Tamarisk Town’ and ‘Carrie Was a Careful Girl’, ‘with full chorus in lovely Victorian dresses, all very demure’, and ‘two duets with me’. The production, which Coward estimated would cost £7000, would open in April; before then, Charlot would pay for Noel to travel with him to New York for two weeks ‘in search of new ideas’. The business side of all of this Noel left to his agents, Curtis Brown, ‘because I know nothing about Revue Terms’ – an ignorance which would cause problems later.
With so much uncertainty (and much riding on Courtneidge’s goodwill), Coward was nervous. Molyneux would not arrive at Davos until Christmas Eve, and Noel had to stay on to see him. A painful letter to England told Violet her son would not be back for Christmas, his first away from home: ‘please write and say you won’t be disappointed – it really is only a matter of sentiment and you really will be sensible about it. I know you will . . .’ (This letter also made clear how far Coward’s earnings were supporting his family: ‘Let me know how much Daddy wants for the Laura debt. I can manage Ten Pounds and at a frightful pinch fifteen . . .’)
On 8 December they set off for Berlin. ‘German is a terribly funny language to listen to – I get weak at moments and laugh in people’s faces!’ he wrote. He found Berlin ‘gayer than anywhere – even Paris’; raging inflation meant that an English half-crown would buy dinner with champagne ‘at any of the best hotels . . . I’ve never felt so rich’. He saw Fritzi Massary (‘the greatest living German musical comedy artiste’) in Madame Pompadour, and had his chance encounter with his Sirocco model. He enjoyed the risqué entertainments of the nightclubs: raucous jazz, satirical cabaret and overt homosexuality were commonplace in smoky dives. One such club provided the inspiration for his song ‘Parisian Pierrot’, written after Noel saw a cabaret number by a ‘frowsy blonde, wearing a sequin chest-protector and a divided skirt . . . with a rag pierrot doll dressed in black velvet . . .’ The performance of this sub-Dietrich diva was ‘unimpressive but the doll fascinated me. The title “Parisian Pierrot” slipped into my mind, and in the taxi on the way back to the hotel the song began.’ It was not the last Coward number to be born in the back of a cab.
The party left Berlin on 18 December to return to Davos, where a trainload of glamorous guests arrived from Paris: Elsa and Dickie; Edward Molyneux; Clifton Webb,4 star of the Acacia Club who became a close friend of Coward’s; Maxine Elliott, the American actress famous for having been Edward VII’s mistress; Dick Wyndham, painter, writer and bon viveur; and the beautiful actress Gladys Cooper.
‘I’m sunburnt and healthy’, Noel reported, ‘and I’ve never felt so well – I never wear a vest during the day a shirt and coat are enough . . . Yesterday I went driving with a German Baroness right up the mountain opposite . . . I’ve just come in from skating at which I’m becoming quite roguish, doing figure eights mostly on my fanny but then vive le sport! Ned is perfectly sweet – he suddenly bought me the most lovely tortoiseshell cigarette-case the other day. The leading men in the revue will be Clifton Webb and Morris Harvey (if possible) . . . Morris is very amusing and anyhow the best dancer in the world. The hotel is full of Spaniards who teach me marvellous Spanish rythms [sic] on the Piano – and shriek and gesticulate wildly! . . . Ned and I have bread sauce with everything . . .’
Noel did not charm everyone, however: Gladys Cooper accused him of overweening conceit when he compared himself to Shaw and Maugham. That was like comparing herself to Bernhardt or Duse, she said; to which Noel riposted that ‘the difference was not quite as fantastic as that’. But with the arrival of this crowd, the hotel became, ‘with abrupt thoroughness, a resort’, and ‘Ned’s Christmas guests, it is unnecessary to remark, were far and away the star turn’. None more so, he might have added, than their youngest member.
1. Una Troubridge notes in her 1923 diary, ‘30 Oct . . . Teddie and Jo Carstairs arrived at 11.30 [p.m.] – without Etheline [Teddie’s girlfriend] and stayed til 1.30 when we were glad to see the last of them.’ The Canadian-born Jo ‘Toughie’ Carstairs (1900–93) was a famous lesbian of her time, a millionaire motor-boat racer sporting tattoos and a blonde crew-cut. She settled at Whale Cay, a Bahamian island where she hoped to install her then lover, Marlene Dietrich.
2. She was born two days after Russell Coward, her birth being announced in the same edition of The Times in 1892.
3. Violet had recommended Edith Nesbit’s daughter as costume designer, but Noel replied, ‘I’m sure no daughter of Nesbit could make anything in the least “chic” and one can’t jeopardise one’s chances of success by promiscuous charity . . .’
4. Clifton Webb (Webb Parmlee Hollenbeck) (1893-1966), Indiana-born actor, singer and dancer who had come to London in 1920 to appear at the Pavilion. Charlot wanted him in the revue: ‘I said of course, providing that I was indisputably in the superior position! Aren’t I a deal!’ Coward told his mother.