It’s inevitable that the more successful I become, the more people will run after me. I don’t believe in their friendship, and I don’t take them seriously, but I enjoy them. Probably a damn sight more than they enjoy me! . . . Let them all come, they’ll drop me all right when they’re tired of me; but maybe I shall get tired first.
Leo, Design for Living
ON 13 October 1926 Coward ignored doctor’s orders and, with Jack Wilson, left for New York. Departure from England was a wrench, not because he missed the premiere of one of his plays (The Rat Trap, unsuccessfully produced by Norman MacDermott at the Everyman) but because even at the age of twenty-six, Noel was mother-sick. ‘I did hate leaving you so dreadfully,’ he wrote from the Olympic at Cherbourg, ‘and I cried for half an hour with Jack trying to comfort me . . . Oh dear, I really ought to have got over being a mother’s boy by now, but I never shall!’ Jack Wilson also wrote to Violet, thanking her for her hospitality during the past six months and adding, ‘Please believe that I’ll do all I can to keep Noel well and happy – he doesn’t like much home life but mine is open to him and Mother would be very honoured and happy to have him with us all . . .’
Despite high seas, the crossing restored Coward’s equilibrium; sleeping twelve hours a night, he became ‘superior and healthy, if a trifle apprehensive!’ Syrie Maugham (now separated from her husband, and opening new shops in Chicago and New York) and her daughter Liza were on board for diversion. Once in New York, he and Wilson moved into the Ritz, but soon moved out again, Coward complaining that it was too noisy and expensive. The city had expanded rapidly in the last years of the boom, ‘about twenty new buildings have shot up into the air since last year, and five million more motor cars, consequently one can’t move anywhere’. They found a suite at the Gladstone on East 52nd Street. ‘All New York has rung me up and welcomed me so I feel very cosy’, he told Violet. Soon he was out with Laurette Taylor and Gertrude Lawrence (about to open in Oh, Kay!). Gladys Calthrop was ‘very gay’, busy designing two productions for Eva Le Gallienne; Jeffrey Amherst was now a theatre critic, and invited Noel to first nights for off-the-cuff pointers. He was also taken to Iolanthe, which confirmed his deep dislike of Gilbert and Sullivan.1
Noel and Jack set to work on ‘This Was a Man’. They opened an office within Basil Dean’s office at 1674 Broadway, ‘with Noel Coward Inc on the door in gold letters’, he bragged. ‘It’s very cheap so we’re going to keep it permanently – we must have somewhere to put our papers and contracts (all three!)’, and having his own office made Noel feel ‘extremely business-like and prosperous’. Nigel Bruce and Auriol Lee were engaged for the play, and Francine Larrimore was persuaded to play the ‘unattractive’ part of Carol; she was ‘small and red-haired and very sexy and as far as I can gather, has already made plans about every man in the cast’. Coward considered it ‘a very good cast indeed’, and ‘it looks like a success’.
Basil Dean was producing the play ‘beautifully’, but rehearsals were painstakingly slow, partly because Dean terrified Nigel Bruce. Bruce in turn drove ‘everybody completely mad by being completely and abjectly stupid and trying far too hard and not listening to what he’s told’. There were tears from Larrimore and tantrums with Auriol Lee, who ‘snapped in and out like a jack-knife’. Noel was glad to escape for the first weekend in November, which he spent on Long Island ‘in an enormous house party with all the Vanderbilts and Astors and Shuffle bottoms – altogether Society’s pet’ – a scenario which later surfaced in his short story ‘What Mad Pursuit?’.
He was besieged by old acquaintances seeking work, including Philip Tonge, who had come to America with his actor parents some years previously. Noel was enjoying himself, ‘I love being here and I’m taking everything very easily and being a good boy.’ Linda Porter was in town, ‘and we’re all having grand fun’, meeting up with the Webbs, Clifton (now an actor) and his ever-present mother, Maybelle. One afternoon Jack took Noel to a Yale versus Princeton football game, ‘marvellous stuff and terribly exciting – 65,000 people all screaming their heads off!’ Jack lost control in the excitement and hit Noel on the head every time his team scored. There were more sophisticated pleasures when a party was given for him, at which George Gershwin played ‘and we all carried on till one o’clock’. There was even a reconciliation of sorts with Osbert Sitwell, in New York to publicise his novel Before the Bombardment: ‘I wrote him a note saying that as we were both in a Foreign Country we ought to put an end to the Feud.’ But Osbert suggested (‘quite pleasantly’) that Noel should apologise publicly to Edith ‘in all the papers! I gave him an old-fashioned look and explained gently that he was very very silly indeed which he seemed to understand perfectly and we talked very amicably. It really was becoming a bore because he wasn’t being asked anywhere poor dear owing to my popularity being the greater!’
*
‘This Was a Man’ eventually opened on 22 November at the Klaw Theatre. ‘The first night was fashionable to a degree. Everybody who was anybody was there, that is, they were there up till the end of the second act, after which they weren’t there any more.’ Noel, Jack and Gladys sat with ‘neatly arranged first-night faces’ as their customers left; as if to show unconcern, they got ‘bad giggles’. Coward thought his audience had been expecting ‘something very dirty indeed’ after the play was banned in England, ‘and they were badly disappointed. Francine Larrimore was very good and [A. E.] Matthews too tho’ he forgot most of his lines. Nigel Bruce who has never understood what it was all about from the first was all right but extremely dull and Auriol was good but also dull. For some unknown reason they played it so slowly that there was time to go round the corner and have an ice-cream soda between every line.’
Coward told Violet, ‘I find on close reflection that I am as unmoved by failure as I am by success . . . a great comfort’, but added defensively, ‘I like writing the plays anyhow and if people don’t like them thats their loss!’ His confidence in the play evaporated, to be replaced by recrimination. He blamed Dean’s direction, ‘ . . . if the writing of it was slow, the production was practically stationary.’ The after-show party, given by Schuyler Parsons, turned out to be more of a success than the play itself, partly because of the arrival of celebrated Queen Marie of Romania, with her son and daughter.
Coward subsequently disowned ‘This Was a Man’ as ‘primarily satirical and on the whole rather dull’. The play ran for a pitiful thirty one performances. Brooks Atkinson called to mind Coward’s intention to write seriously for New York or Berlin and contribute only ‘pleasant little trifles’ for London: ‘the tone of “This Was a Man” is obviously serious. But the drama is trifling. Possibly Mr Coward has confused his audiences.’2
The play’s failure affected Coward’s already precarious health. He enjoyed New York less and less; the noise became an insistent irritation; he felt ill and lacked energy. He left the city after the opening, and spent Thanksgiving Day at Jack’s parents’ house in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where the Wilsons made a fuss of him. Noel was generally ‘irritable and unhappy’, but the Greenbriar Hotel at White Sulphur Springs – home to high society for two hundred years – had a calming effect: ‘It’s a most luxurious hotel in the mountains of West Virginia’, with ‘mountains rushing up into the sky and wild gurgling torrents dashing along like one o’clock’. He and Jack rode along mountain trails (‘The horses are very mild and sweet if a little flatulent’), and he spent the afternoon working in the out-of-season peace to finish The Marquise, written with Marie Tempest in mind. ‘As there are several illegitimate children in it I doubt if Lord Cromer will care very deeply for it!’ He told Violet that he intended to send it to the Lord Chamberlain’s office under another name, ‘as they all seem so down on me in England’. On 9 December, Coward returned to New York, ‘to worry about Fallen Angels again’ (he had been trying to cast a US production), and to see the last performance of ‘This Was a Man’. He also intended to start work on a new revue, but his plans were thrown into doubt by a yet more serious threat to his health that winter.
He explained to Violet that he had been feeling ‘nervy’ before he had gone to White Sulphur Springs, ‘just like I did in London’. When he got back to New York, the symptoms worsened, ‘I began to ache in every limb and have headaches.’ After sleeping for eleven hours, he woke up ‘dead tired with my legs aching as tho’ I’d walked ten miles’; depression hit him ‘without warning, melancholia . . . like a thick cloud, blotting out the pleasure and colour from everything’. The indication was clinical depression, with unpleasant symptoms of a ‘bursting head that . . . felt as though it were packed tightly with hot cotton-wool; a vague, indefinable pain in my limbs when I lay down to rest, a metallic discomfort as though liquid tin had somehow got mixed up with my blood-stream, making sleep impossible and setting my teeth on edge’.
A specialist found nothing ‘organically’ wrong, but said that Noel was ‘in a bad way as far as nerves are concerned. He said I have been living on nervous energy for years and now it has given out and that I must go away at once!’ Coward was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a reprise of the mental illness that had struck him in 1918. With the recommendation that a long sea voyage was the best way to recuperate, he planned a two-month trip, to take him farther from home than he had ever been. ‘I feel I must get away from all the people I know for a while,’ he explained to his mother, ‘not only from the point of view of health but for my work as well. From now onwards I’m not going to work so hard anyhow – Jack will have charge of all contracts and things and I shan’t think about anything.’ He reassured Violet, ‘I wouldn’t take this drastic step unless I’d thought it out carefully . . . it really is the only thing to do . . .’ Coward had to flee the claustrophobia of his self-created world; if he stayed too long (as Graham Greene observed elsewhere), he might discover how thin the ice was beneath his feet.
*
Coward celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday quietly in New York and, two days later, he and Wilson left for San Francisco. Jack had insisted on accompanying him that far; he was against the idea of a solo trip. They stopped off to see Syrie Maugham in Chicago, where she had opened a shop in partnership with Elizabeth Arden and a local architect, David Adler. They lunched and dined together, and Noel ‘went quietly to the Theatre and straight back to bed and felt perfectly awful’. Noel and Jack travelled on in the company of the Magees, Florence and John. San Francisco was ‘fresh but not cold, the streets . . . steep like Edinburgh with divine shops and Chinatown right in the middle of everything!’ Diana Cooper and Iris Tree (still touring with The Miracle) were also at the hotel, the Fairmont, and with Max Reinhardt they had a ‘grand party’ on Christmas Eve, at which Paul Robeson sang. Cooper wrote, ‘Noel Coward is on the edge of a nervous breakdown which he proposes to have in China.’ She lacked tact, and was said to have told Coward, ‘I saw your play and I didn’t laugh once’, to which Noel replied, ‘How strange. I saw yours, and laughed right through it.’ Her taste was also lacking on this occasion; she wrote of Robeson’s performance, ‘His voice is amazingly beautiful and soft, but niggy-wiggs have no accent or bone or grit and it doesn’t stir one.’
At four o’clock on Christmas Day, Coward sailed for Hong Kong on the President Pierce (which Noel naturally renamed ‘Peirce’). A quayside band played as Jack (wearing Noel’s fur coat which he was taking back to New York) waved ‘with a very forced, gay smile, then as I couldn’t see any more I went below to my cabin’. He arrived in Honolulu on New Year’s Eve after a bad six-day voyage which exacerbated his nervous condition. Almost hysterical and fearful for his sanity, he persuaded the ship’s doctor to give him a sedative. He landed on the island with a temperature of 103 degrees, and realised he could not undertake the world tour he had planned; once again, all his arrangements had to be altered. Luckily, friends of the Magees, Walter and Louise Dillingham, had been alerted to his predicament, and had him met off the boat by their Japanese chauffeur, complete with the traditional Hawaiian lei.
Walter Dillingham had married Louise Acton (a cousin of Harold Acton) in 1910, at the Actons’ villa, La Pietra, in Florence. On their return to Honolulu the Dillinghams built their own pastel-pink La Pietra on Diamond Head (designed by David Adler, Syrie Maugham’s partner), complete with Venetian terraces and statues. The house was known to the press as ‘an international celebrity centre’, and Coward was comforted to discover that his hosts were ‘very rich and very nice and are virtually King and Queen of Honolulu’. The energetic Louise Dillingham whisked Noel off to La Pietra, where Coward was plunged into a lunch party; dizziness sent him reeling from the table and back to the Moana Hotel. The Dillinghams arranged for a charming doctor, Paul Withington, who put Noel to bed for three days and told him it would be at least a month before he could go on with his trip. The Dillinghams sent him to their country ranch at Mokuleia, at the foot of the island’s highest mountain; Withington drove him there, through banana and cane plantations. It was a tropical paradise: camellias and roses grew wild, and a coral reef guaranteed safe bathing off the beach. After supper, he and Withington stripped for a moonlight swim: in that blood-warm sea, balm to a bruised soul, virtually any trouble could be forgotten.
‘The colouring of course is beyond belief, just like Robinson Crusoe’, Noel enthused, captivated by the ‘deep blue ocean – bright green lagoon – dazzling yellow sand – enormous cocoa palms and scarlet hibiscus everywhere’. As a young boy, he had avidly read South Sea Island romances, and acknowledged that these books ‘injected into me the first insidious drops of that wanderlust which has lured me in later years to so many remote corners of the world’. That lure was the sensual freedom of tropical climes, where few clothes were needed, and the restrictions of society were even fewer.
Coward stayed there for several weeks, looked after by the French caretaker and his wife. He spent the time sea- and sunbathing, and writing a song inspired by his contentment, ‘A Room with a View’. The restoration of peace brought reflections on his recent successes. Coward saw most of the world as ‘greedy and predatory, and if you gave them the chance, they would steal unscrupulously the heart and soul out of you without really wanting to or even meaning to’; he also realised that ascending stars descended just as quickly. His true friends – whose loyalty did not depend on the box-office receipts of his last play – were to be valued. It was another epiphany of sorts, comparable to the moment of revelation he had had years before when touring with Esme Wynne. It left Coward more than ever aware of the instability of his calling, and the need to temper his public profile with a private assertion of self.
*
Still suffering exhaustion, Coward would not appear on stage at all during 1927. But when he arrived back in New York, met by Jack Wilson and Gladys Calthrop (‘both looking much younger and nicer then when I had left them’), everything seemed better; even the Olympic (which was the sister ship to the SS Titanic) had been repainted. On it, Noel and Jack sailed home to England, Goldenhurst and Violet.
He discovered that The Marquise had opened successfully at the Criterion, with Marie Tempest, her husband W. Graham Browne and a young actor named Godfrey Winn, the ‘flashy young man’ who became better known as a journalist. The play was a triumphant return to form for Coward. Set among the aristocracy of eighteenth-century France (with dialogue irredeemably 1920s England), it is a high comic tale of Eloise, the middle-aged former lover of taciturn and puritanical Raoul, and Esteban, a happier man. It romps along, employing familiar Coward devices (on her arrival, Eloise says, ‘The château seemed so large from the outside, but there, moonlight is very deceptive, is it not?’, a line reused in Private Lives; and the inebriated Raoul’s wild talk of debauchery compares with similar scenes in Design for Living and Fallen Angels). Raoul and Esteban fight a duel for Eloise’s favours, while she delivers a running commentary, ‘Really, considering your joint ages, you’re doing magnificently.’ She makes the two friends embrace, then confesses that they were the only men she loved: ‘in this depraved age it’s rather humiliating to admit it, but it’s true’. Honour is restored when Raoul admits he loves her, and asks her to marry him.
It is a spirited, funny and fast-moving play, a deft crowd-pleaser. Coward arrived in London the day after it had opened, and found that it was exactly as he had imagined it, back in his White Sulphur Springs room. Marie Tempest ‘brought to perfection the art of playing comedy with repressed laughter in her voice’, exactly right for the part of Eloise. Although the Morning Post thought Coward ‘still cannot write an effective love scene; his imagination is defeated when he cannot be flippant about the mating of true lovers’, it found the play ‘delicious and done with dexterity and delicacy’. It ran for 129 performances. ‘Wasn’t The Marquise delicious?’ wrote G. B. Stern to Esme Wynne-Tyson. ‘All his old sparkle and lightness back again. And I’d been getting so depressed over Easy Virtue and The Queen Was in the Parlour – the latter my godchild, damn him!’
*
With a playwright as popular as Coward had become, it was only a matter of time before his works were taken up by the growing movie industry and, early in 1927, his other costume drama, The Queen Was in the Parlour, was filmed. Coward made tentative forays into the medium in the late 1920s, having sold the rights of The Queen Was in the Parlour and The Vortex to Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Films. The former was made in conjunction with the German company UFA, at their studios in Berlin, starring Paul Richter and directed by ‘Jack’ Graham Cutts, who had made the sensational Cocaine in 1921 (a title the censors insisted be changed to While London Sleeps).
Given the different requirements of stage and screen, and the rivalry between them, the film of The Queen Was in the Parlour was surprisingly well received. ‘Another satisfied screen author is Mr Noel Coward,’ noted a contemporary journal, ‘whose “The Queen Was In The Parlour” . . . was privately shown last week. Mr Graham Cutts has made a remarkably expert film of this royal romance. Although not lacking in his characteristic faults, an over-prolonged dance-room scene, and some ice-rink diversions which have nothing to do with the story, it is by far his best film. The photography is beautiful, the settings lavish, while in Lili Damita a genuine new “star” has been found . . . Miss Damita, who is French, was discovered, quite accidentally, in a Paris cabaret.”3 The critic declared it ‘a definite success’, and ‘a welcome change from the standardised fare which Hollywood is . . . providing’.
In 1927 the British film industry was emerging from a period of depression, and was keen to find new material; writers such as Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells were being tempted to work for the screen. Two years previously, Coward had been commissioned to write titles for productions by Michael Balcon, which probably led to Balcon’s production of The Queen Was in the Parlour. Coward’s interest in films was primarily financial; he agreed with Basil Dean (who was venturing into the business) that the medium was not yet an art – it was still referred to by some as ‘the poor man’s theatre’.
There were two other film adaptations of Noel’s plays during the 1920s, when companies waited a year or less before filming a successful stage work. London was dotted with studios, the most advanced being that at Poole Street in Islington, started by Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures) in 1920, and equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, housed in a former power station, on land owned by Lord Alington. It was subsequently taken over by Michael Balcon and Gainsborough Pictures, who made some of the best-known British films of the period there. To this rather dingy part of east London came the glamorous figures of Betty Balfour and Ivor Novello, the only homegrown British film stars of the period. Novello was under contract to Gainsborough, earning up to £4000 a picture. He and Isabel Jeans starred in The Rat (‘the story of an Apache’), filmed at Islington in 1924 from a screenplay written by Novello and Constance Collier (under the pseudonym David L’Estrange). Novello was typecast for the part with his sultry good looks, dark eyes and artfully dishevelled hair; a British Valentino. Two years later, attracted by the money and quick work, Noel supplied the subtitles for a sequel, Return of the Rat: The Count, a man of more cash than consequence, who kept his heart in his trouser pocket along with his other small change.
The same year (1927) Gainsborough’s version of Easy Virtue appeared, starring Isabel Jeans, produced by Balcon and directed at Islington by Alfred Hitchcock, already one of Britain’s highest-paid and sought-after directors. Balcon claimed that this was Britain’s retort to the criticism that its film industry aped America, failing to develop its own style, as Germany had done. ‘Easy Virtue is the answer: a country house play with country people . . . the future of the cinema lies in the hands of the young writers,’ he concluded portentously, ‘and Mr Coward, as one of the most brilliant of them all, is a notable newcomer to British films.’
There was, however, a considerable problem in adapting Noel’s dialogue to the then silent screen; its spirit was entirely lost in one-line titles. Hitchcock tried to overcome this by stressing the visual dynamic of the story, but in so doing changed the story line considerably. The film opens with Larita accused of adultery by her estranged husband; she flees to the Riviera, and there meets John Whittaker. Hitchcock’s characteristic humour was evident even then: to show that the newlyweds have left France for England, a French poodle on one of their trunks is exchanged for a British bulldog. The climax comes with a second divorce trial, in which Larita’s address to the press photographers – ‘Shoot! There is nothing left to kill’ – was believed by Hitchcock to be one of the worst lines of dialogue he ever wrote.4
Coward was aware of the problem, but the box-office lure of his name on the credits encouraged directors to adapt his work. Michael Balcon later said, ‘It was no doubt wrong of us to seek to bask in the reflected glory of people like Noel Coward; we followed trends and did not try to make them,’ In early 1928 Adrian Brunel was commissioned to film The Vortex. Brunel had set up Minerva Films in 1920 in partnership with Leslie Howard. Having seen The Vortex, he had his reservations about filming it, not only because it was difficult to put across visually but because of its subject matter. The strict British Board of Film Censors was even less likely than their stage counterparts to take a positive view of drug-taking and sex on film.
Jeffrey Bernard, ‘Wardour Street’s ace salesman’, was sent to argue the case with the censors, and returned triumphant. ‘It’s OK, except that the mother mustn’t have a lover, and, of course, her son mustn’t take drugs.’ A new script was written. ‘When Noel read the script he was speechless for a moment,’ Brunel recalled, ‘and then let out a torrent of criticism that even the telephone couldn’t stop.’ The script was changed, but was still unrecognisable, ‘We took the risk of letting the mother have a platonic boy-friend and the son very nearly take to drugs!’ Coward screen-tested to reprise his stage role on screen, but eventually Ivor Novello was cast as Nicky; Willette Kershaw, a fey American actress who seemed to subsist on vegetable extract pellets, was engaged as Florence. Brunel was in the Austrian Tyrol shooting The Constant Nymph with Novello and Frances Doble when an executive demanded The Vortex, and it was edited in his absence. This, and some hastily written ‘peppy’ subtitles, resulted in an unsatisfactory product.
The film was released in March 1928 to equivocal notices, and the failure of this new attempt at bringing Coward to the screen underlined the inherent problems: as film historian Rachel Low observed, ‘epigrams depending on a throwaway delivery looked merely facetious in the portentous pause of a title’. Unlike Hitchcock’s attempt, Brunel’s film had not made a successful leap from one medium to another. ‘At all events the loss of dialogue and the absence of action were fatal to the film’, Low wrote.
It was not until the advent of the talkies that a convincing film could be made from a Noel Coward play. (Talking pictures had arrived with The Jazz Singer in 1927, but two years later, Coward remained doubtful: ‘I’m not interested in them at present’, he told an American reporter. ‘So many of them sound as if the speaker’s palate had been cut.’) As Balcon learned to his cost, sound was vital to Coward’s work on screen; in 1928 he commissioned Noel to write Concerto, a costume romance for Novello. The script ‘cried out for music’, and despite having agreed to pay Noel £1200 (in monthly instalments of £100), Balcon suggested calling the film off. Coward agreed, and returned the money. This honourable gesture brought good fortune; Noel reused the Concerto plot profitably for his most successful musical, Bitter Sweet.
*
In the wake of his recent illness and his absence from the stage, Coward sought home comforts, and decided to buy Goldenhurst outright, ‘at a ridiculously small price’. The house became his country retreat, and the venue for weekend parties for the great and good of London theatre and society.
All ‘family horrors of sentimental value’ were banished to Violet’s and Vida’s bedrooms, and Syrie Maugham was summoned to provide an appropriate interior. Local antique shops were searched for suitable fixtures; a trip to an auction at nearby Herstmonceaux resulted in the pillaging of a seventeenth-century Cornish tin ‘Winged Time’ allegory, and a large Grinling Gibbons wood carving, intricately baroque, which were hung on Goldenhurst’s walls, now rendered fashionably pale. ‘Syrie’s’ supplied a sofa long enough to accommodate five or six posteriors, and the curtains and coverings were in pale green and beige. Another whimsical touch was Coward’s songsheets pasted along a connecting corridor, at the end of which was the Big Room, with two grand pianos back-to-back. With bare white plaster, exposed beams, and open fireplaces, Noel now had a stylish set for his impromptu performances, or home movies of his travels and the Mickey Mouse cartoons he loved. He even stage-managed the approach to his new home; as his later neighbour, Patricia Frere, noted: ‘The house [was] . . . practically on the road, with a farm gate entrance. Noel bought the wood behind [so] you went in by another entrance . . . this nice drive through the woods to the house. It was a better arrival point.’
This island of West End sophistication amid the rural idyll of the Romney Marshes might have caused local concern, but Mrs Frere and other neighbours ‘took him for granted. No loud parties – nobody would’ve heard if there had been. He was awfully good to people. He gave the farmer, whom he scarcely knew, quite a big tract of land, which he would’ve bought, but he gave it to him.’ By such good neighbourliness Coward eased himself into country life; not that he seemed to take much notice of the environment; as one visitor, Katharine Hepburn, recalled, ‘It was nice, but it was Noel in the country, you know. He wasn’t interested in the country. It was just like the city, only the temperature was different.’
Old cine films bring Goldenhurst summers to life in flickering black and white, the stars at their ease in casual wear and shorts, cavorting on the Kentish lawn, showing off for the camera. Noel, in pale linen and narrow espadrilles, larks about boyishly, revelling in the freedom of his home and the confidence of the host. But guests could sometimes prove difficult. Elsa Maxwell and Dickie Fellowes-Gordon came over from Paris, Dickie bearing ‘a big jar of French coffee, because I knew English coffee was so bad. When we arrived and I gave it to Noel, he said, “Oh dear, I do hope Dickie isn’t going to be difficult this weekend!” ’, Thus did Dickie earn her nickname, ‘the Black Bitch’.
In summer 1927 Coward and Wilson toured Europe: Vienna (‘fearfully grand’); Budapest (‘huge and flat and hot and stupid’); and Achensee, in the Austrian Tyrol, ‘far far too crowded with pot-bellied Germans in mustard-coloured plush hats with Alpenstocks tramping about everywhere’. They left the next day, ending up at Lac d’Annecy above Aix-les-Bains, with a ‘sweet little terrace and balconies outside our rooms looking across at the most lovely mountains’. ‘I’ve never felt so well in my life,’ he wrote home, ‘travelling agrees with me. We’ve been everywhere second class and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves – not being grand is somehow a tremendous comfort for a change . . . It’s quite the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. We have our own little boat and bathe from it all day. We’re very sunburnt and I feel marvellous.’
From Aix they went south, to Edward Molyneux’s luxurious villa, La Capponcina, on Cap d’Ail. It was another outpost of the international set, who worshipped the sun and descended on one another’s summer residences in a succession of house parties. Molyneux had opened a salon in Monte Carlo to capitalise on this lucrative new market of the Côte d’Azur. Coward turned ‘ebony’ on a balcony with views of mountains to the left, Monaco ahead, and ‘deep blue sea’ to the right, intermittently working on his new revue. Syrie Maugham was down too, and came to lunch at La Capponcina, responding with an invitation to weekend at her own villa nearby.
But the weekend was fraught with tension, partly because of Syrie’s strained relationship with her husband, now spending most of his time with Gerald Haxton. Also there were Beverley Nichols, then writing plays and music; Frankie Leverson, a dancer who had taught the Prince of Wales; and Doris Delavigne (later Castlerosse), another sexual adventurer, former flatmate of Gertrude Lawrence and supposed model for Private Lives’ Amanda. As the guests assembled for dinner, Gerald Haxton tried to shock Syrie by telling her how he had seduced a twelve-year-old girl in Siam for a tin of condensed milk. Afterwards they all went to the casino, and Haxton got very drunk. Back at the villa, Nichols, investigating gurgling noises from Haxton’s room, found him naked on his bedroom floor, covered in thousand-franc notes and his own vomit.
According to Nichols, it was not only Haxton whose behaviour was reprehensible. Perhaps encouraged by the dissoluteness of his fellow countryman, Jack Wilson sneaked into Nichols’s bedroom in the early hours of the morning, and tried to make love to him. Coward burst in, looking like ‘the wrath of a thousand Chinese gods’; coldly, he ordered Wilson to leave, and accused Nichols of having invited him in. In a letter to Cole Lesley in 1976, Nichols wrote, ‘ “Did Noel ever tell you the true story of what happened between Jack and myself chez Syrie, . . . or rather, what did not happen? It is a very strange story and I have an uncanny feeling that it clouded my relations with Noel for the rest of our lives . . . he never forgot it, nor did I – though my conscience is as clean as a newly polished whistle. Jack behaved like every variety of bitch.” ’5
Although his involvement with Jack was, like most of Noel’s romances, understood to be an ‘open affair’, the manner of Wilson’s attempted seduction of Nichols, who was a rival of Coward’s in other respects, was hurtful and coloured their future relations. Tellingly, Wilson was not included in plans to go to Biarritz with Edward Molyneux, and returned to London, where he busied himself with less dangerous affairs.
*
On 13 September, Coward returned to England, to find Gladys Calthrop back from America, ‘with a hard black hat and mumps’, caught from Eva Le Gallienne with whom she had just fallen out. Noel had lamented the temporary loss of his designer, and had work for her to do. He had written a new play called Home Chat (after a women’s magazine of the same name), inevitably set in Mayfair society. Janet Ebony is discovered in a train crash to have been sharing a wagon-lit with Peter Chelsworth, much to her husband’s and her family’s dismay; they refuse to believe the couple’s innocence, so she determines to play the vamp, allowing herself to be discovered in Peter’s flat, supposedly making love. The play ends as Janet really does go off with a lover – but the assembled and chastened company are now so convinced of her original innocence that they do not believe this either.
In Home Chat, comedy disguises deeper themes; Coward’s couples strain to communicate: ‘We none of us ever say what we really mean’, Sorel complains in Hay Fever. Nor did Noel. Whatever meaning there might be in his dramas is hidden because he could never write directly about his own experiences. Conventional morality is replaced by Cowardian morality: a self-constructed code of conduct based on traditional values of duty, discipline and loyalty, yet compromised by a homosexual lifestyle and sensibility (hence his anger at Wilson’s betrayal). It is not surprising that his dramatic worlds were upside down, considering the inverted emotional acrobatics required to create them. In Home Chat, flippancy rules, everything is false, hypocrisy and suspicion are rife; it is a play almost cynically concerned with the futile chase of sex.
He seems to have been concerned as to how the play would be received. It was sent to the censor (under its original title To Err Is Human): ‘This reads like a Noel Coward play’, wrote George Street, indicating that it had been submitted under another name, as Noel had told Violet he might do with The Marquise in an attempt to avoid prejudice. ‘It is an amusing light comedy and the main part of it, though risky in a way, might well pass, but a characteristic immoral twist is given at the end . . . The main idea, an innocent woman pretending to be guilty, is not pretty but is certainly not a fatal objection.’ Lord Cromer passed the play on 27 July.
The production went ahead, under Basil Dean’s aegis, with Madge Titheradge as Janet (Coward had written the part with her in mind). Perhaps because of similarities to ‘This Was a Man’, he claimed a presentiment of Home Chat’s failure. Rehearsals proceeded with ‘sinister smoothness’, and on the opening night his suspicions grew as the audience seemed restless. He writhed in his chair, ‘sniffing disaster and seeing no way of averting it’. As the curtain came down, there was booing from the ‘cheaper parts’, although one witness disputed this: ‘The curtain rose several times because of the mild applause, and then Noel was ill-advised enough to take a call . . . there was no dissent until he came on stage.’ Coward went out to support his cast, since Basil Dean was nowhere to be seen. He bounded on to the stage ‘with my usual misguided valour’, booing began, and someone shouted ‘Rotten!’ ‘We expected better’, called someone else, to which Coward replied, ‘So did I’, and left the stage. The notices were not as bad as Coward maintained, but many took the line of the Westminster Gazette, that ‘ . . . the gallery was right. We expected better.’
Coward later maintained that Home Chat was his least favourite work, ‘a thin little play . . . I wrote it without taking enough trouble. When you have a failure, it’s always your fault, nobody else’s fault. But actors do a certain amount of damage.’ He tended to apportion blame, and in this case he was probably right to do so; the play was ‘very slowly directed by Basil Dean’ and hampered by an elderly actress (probably Nina Boucicault) who forgot her lines. ‘It was a little better than bad but not quite good enough, and that was that.’
Coward escaped to Europe for two weeks to avoid the reverberations of the flop. He sensed an anti-Coward feeling in the air and he was not wrong. James Agate came to his defence in a broadcast on the BBC, stating his belief in the young playwright’s work. But such support could not stem the incoming tide.
*
Given the failure of Home Chat, which ran for just thirty-eight performances, the precipitate production of Sirocco can be seen, in hindsight, as rash, and indicative of the arrogance Coward readily acknowledged. The play had been written in 1921, and revised for production; it was nearer 1924’s The Vortex than 1927’s Home Chat in content, substance and style. Dedicated to Mrs Astley Cooper, its title derives from the sirocco wind of the Alassio region, said to drive the unwary insane – which should have warned audiences that this was no comedy.
The play relied on notions of foreign passion; its portrayal of the British in 1920s Italy evokes an atmosphere similar to that of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908),6 in that it introduces the closeted, buttoned-up sensibilities of the English to the sensual, free living Italians; a clash of cultures which, in Sirocco, produces conflict.
Sirio Marson, half-English, half-Italian but with Latin looks and temperament, seduces Lucy, a young English wife left temporarily in Italy by her husband. When he arrives to reclaim her, he accuses Lucy of ‘glorying in your – your – degradation’. She retorts that he wants her back for the sake of his good name, not for love, shouting, ‘We have no tie of any sort but the memory of a short service in Church . . . We’ve been bored, bored, bored’ – the cri de coeur of her generation. But she now realises that ‘free love’ is ‘hateful and sordid and cheap’. Sirio is effete, unserious, immature; a contrast to the post-war woman, who wants to be liberated. As Sirio leaves, she exults, ‘I’m free – free for the first time in my life’, then, burying her face in her arms, cries, ‘God help me!’
The play thus ends in a desolate cry of despair; or at least that was Coward’s intention. But his desire to shock seems to have overcome his better judgement, and the play predictably aroused the censor’s attention; the original copy sent to Lord Cromer’s office is thick with blue pencil. Lines such as an Italian exchange – ‘Sirio: Guardo dove vai bastardo incretinito. Giuseppa: Un bastardo sei te, figlio, d’una cagna’ – had the censors reaching for their dictionary.7 But while Street noted the violent love scenes and bad language, he thought it ‘hardly an immoral play, as the sinful ménage comes to grief’. As did the play itself.
Sirocco ought to have been a Josef von Sternberg film, with artfully directed carnival scenes and the seductive Marlene Dietrich to enliven matters; but it was anchored to the London stage, and Ivor Novello was cast as Sirio. Novello had not been impressed when Coward had shown him the script two years previously, but was talked into the part by the playwright and Basil Dean. He seemed to enjoy rehearsals, ‘behaving on the whole gaily, as though he were at a party’. His co-star, Frances Doble, was however ‘frankly terrified from beginning to end. She looked lovely, but, like Ivor, lacked technique.’
On the evening of 24 November 1927 Noel set off with Violet, Gladys and Jack Wilson, ‘elaborately dressed and twittering with nerves’, for what would be his most humiliating night in the theatre. Coward’s first impression was of restlessness in the house, then during Novello’s love scene with Doble, the gallery burst out laughing, compounding uproar with sucking sounds whenever the couple kissed. What Coward had written to shock came over as farce. The Evening Standard commented, ‘It was understandable that the gallery should have laughed a good deal . . . a love scene that consists of few words and many kisses is almost more than the silliest parts of the house can stand.’ Matters worsened; catcalls ‘and various other animal noises’ punctuated every other line, reaching to a crescendo in the final act. As the curtain fell, even Violet’s deafness had been penetrated. ‘Is it a failure?’ she asked her son wistfully.
Against Dean’s advice, Noel went onstage. He shook Ivor’s hand, and kissed Frances Doble’s; as he left, the booing increased in volume. Prickling, Coward returned centre stage, bowing and smiling at the wolf whistles and catcalls which he weathered for seven minutes. Frances Doble, called for by the crowd, received the first friendly applause of the night. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the happiest moment of my life’, she said, somewhat bizarrely. Noel heard Ivor ‘gurgle’, and broke into laughter himself. The booing started all over again, and the curtain came down for the final time. Raymond Massey claimed that he saw at least three fist fights between Coward baiters and supporters. Even getting out of the theatre was hazardous. Coward was warned not to leave by the stage door where a hostile crowd awaited him. This fixed his resolve, and he marched out, to be spat at. ‘The next day I had to send my evening coat to the cleaners’, he said, with a wryness worthy of Wilde, with whose varying fortunes Coward may have felt some sympathy. Noel sought to rise above it all; he ascended in the tiny lift to Ivor’s Aldwych eyrie, where the critic Edward Marsh joined him and Novello for supper. Marsh was impressed ‘by the dispassionate courage, free from all trace of self-pity, with which the two routed aspirants, neither of whom would have been surprised to be told that he was irreparably done for, discussed the failure and its causes’.
The press was also up in arms. The notices, said Noel, had not one good word for the play, with only two exceptions: a defensive piece by Edgar Wallace, and a review by the Observer’s St John Ervine. Ervine acknowledged Coward’s display of courage at the first night as ‘wholly admirable’; he saw the play as a ‘tract’ against ‘cinema romance’, and insisted it was not pornographic; he added that Novello had given ‘the best performance that I have yet seen him give in any play’. The Sketch disproved Coward’s contention of uniformly bad reviews, ‘Just as the third act was the making of The Vortex, so it was the salvation of Sirocco . . . The scene in which the lovers part . . . is magnificent.’ But the impression was of a monumental flop; the next day, half the presold tickets for the next three performances were returned.
Coward dramatised the event as ‘the most abysmal failure I have ever had’. He had been proud that the play ‘was completely different . . . from anything I had done hitherto’; but afterwards realised it was ‘only passably written and poorly constructed’. He considered it ‘badly directed by Basil Dean and inadequately acted by Frances Doble and Ivor Novello’. This was ungracious, and blaming Dean meant an acrimonious end to their relationship. Coward held aloof. ‘My first instinct was to leave England immediately’, but this would be an admission of defeat. He decided to be in evidence for a week, and then to go to America, trusting that a year’s absence would make British hearts grow fonder. He appeared at his usual table in the sheltering stained-glass emporium of the Ivy, then, after a few days of toughing it out, escaped with Jack Wilson to Europe, rather than to America. They stayed at Neuilly with Edward Molyneux in the designer’s ‘quiet, lovely little house’; rural peace was a relief after the trauma of recent days. He told Violet that their lives were ‘very simple . . . sleeping 12 hours a night’. But he remained depressed and ‘exceedingly upset’ by press coverage of his failures.
It seemed that there was no halfway point for Coward with the media. He came to realise that they sought to polarise opinion; in their simplistic world, things were all good, or all bad – this is what sells papers. As a playwright, he knew that drama required conflict; stars were built up, then demolished, and were seldom realistic figures. This was the nature and the price of fame. But it did not alleviate the frustration, nor did it stop Coward coming to the decision, made when in Paris, that he would never give another interview. Yet the quandary remained: his image and his career were dependent on the publicity.
He and Jack spent Christmas at St Moritz, where they celebrated Noel’s twenty-eighth birthday. They went tobogganing and skating all day, and Noel felt ‘marvellous’. At the end of December, he returned to what still seemed a hostile territory, but the new year would bring his greatest success yet.
1. Coward would not have been pleased with his entry in The New Grove Dictionary, which asserts that the pair were ‘obvious influences’ on his work, and judges him a ‘latterday Gilbert and Sullivan’.
2. Coward sanctioned a German production the following year, adapted by Rudolf Kommer and produced by Max Reinhardt, at the KomÖdie Theater in Berlin on 25 November 1927, retitled Die Ehe von Welt, where it ran for seventy performances. In January 1928 it was put on in Paris, where Edward Stirling’s English Players kept it in repertory for five years.
3. Actually Damita had already starred in two films by G. W. Pabst. She later married Errol Flynn (who nicknamed his wife Tiger Lil) and was said to have had an affair with Marlene Dietrich.
4. Yet Lindsay Anderson commented that Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue was ‘almost as prodigious an accomplishment’ as Ernst Lubitsch’s adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1925.
5. Nichols used the incident in his published indictment of Maugham’s behaviour towards his wife, A Case of Human Bondage, but substituted Haxton for Wilson and Maugham for Coward.
6. It is perhaps no coincidence that Noel used Forster’s title for one of his songs; a knifing scene in the play also recalls Forster’s novel. It is tempting to see a comparison between Forster and Coward as middle-class mother’s boys, homosexual, dealing with contemporary cultural issues of class, sex and society.
7. George Street noted the ‘long string of abuse. I do not understand it, but the Lord Chamberlain no doubt will. Of course few people in the audience will.’ However, Lord Cromer’s holidays on the Italian Riviera had not resulted in a grasp of the language. Sir George Crichton had to write to Sir Hubert Montgomery, ‘Dear Hubert, Could you possibly get one of your knowledgeable people in the Foreign Office to give us a translation of the Italian [in] the enclosed play. It would be very kind if you would do this for us as no one here knows a word of Italian.’