I believe in doing what I can
In crying when I must,
In laughing when I choose
Heigho, if love were all
I should be lonely.
‘If Love Were All’, Bitter Sweet
IN late summer 1927 the Lunts had arrived from the United States, where they had finished their run in The Second Man, a comedy by a new American writer, S. N. Behrman. Keen to involve Coward in a British production of the play, they gave an impromptu runthrough of the piece in his drawing-room. Noel promptly acquired the rights, seeing himself as ‘Clark Storey’, a novelist torn between two women, described as a ‘cynical, intelligent dilettante’. To those who did not know him, perfect typecasting for Noel Coward.
Coward had learned his lines for the play in St Moritz, cabling Dean from Paris, where he was delayed: CROSSING SUNDAY IF POSSIBLE WORD PERFECT ANYHOW FIRST TWO ACTS. In London, he rehearsed with costars Zena Dare, Ursula Jeans and Raymond Massey. Dare recalled that it was ‘a very sophisticated, chic play – rather avant-garde for 1927’. She had not been on stage since her marriage in 1910 and found it difficult to readjust, ‘constantly breaking into tears during rehearsals’. Coward took her aside and told her it could not continue, ‘After all, if you were working for the Post Office you couldn’t behave like this, could you?’ She was invited to Ebury Street, where they worked together. ‘His patience and forbearance were terrific,’ Dare said, ‘and of course I did get better.’
Behrman arrived from New York, and met the company at the Playhouse Theatre. ‘Noel was in great form’, he wrote; ‘he’d been, the night before, to the Pantomime and he did an imitation of Miss Florrie Ford, the principal “boy”. He described her: beyond middle age, corpulent, with a garish voice and a garish smile. He became Miss Ford . . . he sang Miss Ford’s song, “If your fyce wants to smile well LET IT.” Miss Ford’s smile was cosmic. Noel “let it” amply before all of us.’ Behrman was amazed at Coward’s technique at rehearsals, running through the words so fast that it was like listening to a play in a foreign language. ‘Noel must have felt this because he called out to me, “We’re probably going too fast for you but don’t worry about the tempo – our audience will understand us.” The third act began with Noel reading some pages he had just written, crushing them up and throwing them in the waste-basket while he stigmatised them, “Trash, trash, trash”. When he’d read this, he confided to us, “Don’t be surprised if there’s a little burst of applause when I say that” ’ – a reference to recent events. There were rumours that Coward was the real author, anonymous because of the Sirocco débâcle; with its elegant use of language and simple plot, involving just four characters, The Second Man seemed to bear his imprint; but he admitted he had not contributed one word to the production.
The play opened on 24 January. Behrman noted the difference between the cultural and social position of the theatre in New York and London. ‘The actors’ dressing rooms were, after each performance, lively and entertaining social centers where you could meet the most brilliant figures in London society.’ Even the players were socially elevated: Zena Dare was the daughter-in-law of Viscount Esher; Raymond Massey the younger brother of the governor general of Canada. Coward was astounded when Behrman asked, ‘Who is that man? He seems to be well connected.’ ‘Well connected!’ cried Noel. ‘It’s Prince Arthur of Connaught! Queen Victoria was his grandmother.’
Notices for the play were good, and between performances, rehearsals began for Coward’s new revue for C. B. Cochran. Noel had offered to release Cochran from their contract, but the latter reasoned that after two failures Coward would be motivated to make the revue a success. Soon Cochran was announcing to the press, ‘What I have seen of this revue “book” is some of the most brilliantly witty work Coward has ever done.’ Lorn Loraine contributed the title – This Year of Grace!; all Noel had to do was to write the music. One of the first songs to be put down on paper, with Elsie April’s help, was ‘Dance, Little Lady’. As sung by Sonnie Hale and Lauri Devine, it was a reprise, in both tempo and sentiment, of ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, and like that song, it was a critique of the archetypal flapper:
Dance, dance, dance little lady,
Youth is fleeting – to the rhythm beating
In your mind.
Dance, dance, dance little lady,
So obsessed with second best
No rest you’ll ever find.
In a dance-mad era, incessant movement took the place of intelligent thought, and Coward’s admonishing voice was apposite:
But I know it’s vain,
Trying to explain
While there’s this insane
Music in your brain.
The song even had a ‘patter’ section, which showed the influence of black music heard when Noel was in the States:
When the saxophone
Gives a wicked moan,
Charleston hey hey,
Rhythms fall and rise,
Start dancing to the tune,
The band’s crooning –
Full of internal rhymes, the sequence is virtually an early rap.
Its 78-rpm pirouette seemed innovative, but Beverley Nichols – himself a composer – claimed that ‘the first eight bars revealed themselves as identical with a charming Edwardian ballad’. Coward admitted the plagiarism, ‘but I didn’t realise this when it came into my head, and now it’s too late to do anything about it’. Anyway, this was no wistful period piece, but a harsh attack on modern life:
And when the lights are starting to gutter
Dawn through the shutter
Shows you’re living in a world of lies.
Perhaps influenced by his visits to Berlin cabarets and their contemporary satire, Coward had uniquely injected the social criticism of his plays into an English revue song.
The show also featured another potential hit song, for which Noel would always be remembered, ‘A Room with a View’, written in Hawaii, now sung by Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale and Adrienne Brune. As both dramatist and composer, Coward’s success in revues lay in his ability to create vivid scenes to accompany his songs. At rehearsals he was at pains to realise them, applying strict theatre discipline even to these flimsy sketches. Sheilah Graham, then a Cochran ‘Young Lady’, recalled a rehearsal in Soho. ‘No, no. That’s not the way to do it! Let me show you’, Coward told her. ‘He took me in his arms. “Now, look at me as though you were disdainful of me . . .” ’ Unsure what disdainful meant, she ‘promptly turned my most dazzling smile on him’. ‘Oh, my God’, said Noel. ‘Let’s go on to the next scene.’
The mixture of contemporary reality and glamorous fantasy in This Year of Grace! gave the revue formula a Coward twist. The opening number was set in a tube station, with disgruntled passengers vexed by a street urchin whistling an insinuating dance tune, the equivalent of today’s overloud personal stereo; but so infectious is the rhythm that the passengers soon join the dance. There were pertinent jokes: a booking-clerk and newspaper vendor chat: ‘What we want in England is more and better birth control’, says Harry, when Charles, ‘a very exquisite young man’, enters. ‘All right – you’ve won,’ says Fred, ‘I’m all for birth control.’ Charles buys a ticket for Queen’s Gate, and Fred remarks, ‘’Arry, that’s wot the Russian Ballet’s done for England.’ In the Lido scene, the Venetian playground of the rich was contrasted with the mundane English version (the world of Noel’s childhood holidays): ‘There’s sand in the porridge and sand in the bed/ And if this is pleasure, we’d rather be dead.’ The style of the show was underlined by the chic decor of Gladys Calthrop, Doris Zinkeisen and Oliver Messel. Messel’s designs for ‘Dance, Little Lady’ included bizarre papier-mâché masks, pop-eyed and open-mouthed, worn by dancers in shiny suits surrounding an intimidated Lauri Devine. Set to a saw-edged soundtrack, it was one of the great mises-en-scène of 1920s musical theatre.
The revue ran for 316 performances, earning Coward the immense sum of £1000 a week in royalties, and further income from sales in their thousands of the hit songs in sheet music and gramophone records. Noel was restored to grace, and his audience delighted in the selfreferential jab of the number ‘Any Noel Coward Play’, in which an actress declared, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the happiest moment of my life’ to boos and catcalls. However, acclaim was not universal. Writing in the London Mercury A. G. MacDonnell, author of England, Their England, noted, ‘This Year of Grace is, without exception, the dullest revue it has ever been my misfortune to see. There was hardly a single scene, situation, line, or gesture that was amusing. Of the farfamed “Coward wit” there was not an iota, or, if there was, it ought not to be far-famed . . . As for the lyrics, they were innocuously neat and harmless except for one tiresome mannerism. Mr Coward has apparently just discovered the internal rhyme and uses it ad nauseam.’
MacDonnell was representative of elder critics frustrated by what they saw as a talent wasted on frivolity: ‘If he turns his mind and his energy and his industry a little more to thought and study . . . he may yet live down his colossal success’, MacDonnell wrote later. Yet, bound up in his Englishness, he could not but acknowledge the extraordinary nature of the phenomenon, in a comment predicated on notions of class and the outsider: ‘In the last hundred years only Disraeli and Wilde and Shaw have started from nothing and conquered England as Mr Coward has conquered. It is curious that he is the first Englishman [sic] to do so.’
*
Characteristically, Coward would confound the expectations and exhortations of the critics. His next musical left Jazz Age stridency behind, and adopted an altogether more whimsical genre, signalled by a number in This Year of Grace!, ‘Teach Me to Dance Like Grandma’:
I’m getting tired of jazz tunes
Monotonous,
They’ve gotten us
Crazy now . . .
Teach me to dance like Grandma used to dance
Sixty summers ago!
The idea of an operetta occurred to Coward in the early summer of 1928, when he and Gladys Calthrop were staying with her solicitor, Ronald Peake, in Surrey. Mrs Peake put on a record of Die Fledermaus, which sparked romantic associations in Noel’s imagination. Inspired by The Merry Widow and other Edwardian musicals, he thought sentiment might make a welcome (and profitable) return to the London stage after the brittle subjects of recent years. Once again he tapped into the spirit of the times: Viennese romantic songs and books, a return of the waltz, even the longer dresses being worn by women in the late 1920s all heralded this revival. But for the moment, Coward put his imagination on hold: he had learned to allow for the fermentation of his ideas.
When The Second Man finished its run, Cochran and Archie Selwyn (the producer-manager) tried to persuade Coward to go to Broadway that autumn with This Year of Grace!, with Beatrice Lillie taking Sonnie Hale’s place. Noel liked the idea, and he and Cochran set off on the Mauretania for a reconnaissance expedition. ‘I can never stay away from New York long’, Coward told reporters, lounging in his Ritz Carlton suite wearing pyjamas ‘that included two vivid blending colors’. ‘It’s a fact that I feel at home when I reach these shores.’ Did he prefer American audiences? ‘Oh, decidedly. Your New York audiences are marvellous, simply marvellous. They are so “welcoming”. They want you to be good instead of bad. They are waiting for you to be good.’
He renewed old acquaintances and, through Constance Collier, met Jed Harris, ‘the new phenomenon of Broadway . . . an extraordinary creature with an authentic flair for the theatre’ – and therefore of great interest to Coward. He thought Harris ‘one of the most interesting selfdevouring egos’ he had ever encountered, and reminded Noel of a praying mantis.
Harris had produced Broadway in 1927, ‘a melodramatic production depicting gangster violence in a Broadway night club’, and The Royal Family, which Coward later directed, as Theatre Royal, in London. Harris went on to produce The Green Bay Tree (1933); starring Laurence Olivier, it was the first major Broadway play to deal with homosexuality. He was ‘a man of considerable reputation with the ladies despite his rather sinister looks’, Katharine Hepburn recalled; ‘Laurence Olivier said he used Jed as his model for Richard III – a terrifying creature.’ Harris’s friends included Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, hard-drinking and fast-living Manhattan men, far removed from the genteel world of the West End theatre. The relationship between Harris and Coward was not lacking a certain rivalry. Harris’s son recalled a later meeting, when his father ‘was looking for an actor in London for The Green Bay Tree . . . He had been going around the theatre, he’d seen Shakespearean productions and said he was very tired of seeing English kings played by English queens. Anyway, they were talking together about affairs, and my father asked if he had ever slept with a woman. There was a pause, and Noel said to him . . . “It would be like going to bed with a porpoise.” ’ S. N. Behrman later noted a divide between the two men: had they quarrelled? ‘Not at all,’ said Coward, ‘we just don’t speak to each other. The truth is, you know, I am harder and more sophisticated than Jed.’
On Broadway, Coward saw Harris’s production of Coquette, in which Helen Hayes ‘tore our emotions to shreds’. Manhattan provided one of the ‘richest two weeks’, from a theatrical point of view, he had ever spent; and all on an expense account. However, he and Cochran failed to find suitable performers for This Year of Grace!, so they took the boat home. The Berengaria was crowded, and they had to share a cabin: ‘Although we both viewed this prospect with slight apprehension,’ noted Coward, ‘it turned out to be extremely cosy.’ The enforced intimacy gave them ample opportunity for chats after lights-out, and Noel, who was working on the first act of Bitter Sweet, read it to Cochran, whetting the showman’s appetite to stage the operetta.
*
Back in London, family arrangements changed again. With their son a wealthy man, there was now no need for the Cowards to run a boarding-house; indeed, it was embarrassing that they did. Noel retained his rooms in Ebury Street as his London pied-à-terre, and Arthur went to Goldenhurst to look after the gardening, a duty uncomfortably shared with Aunt Vida. Meanwhile, Violet drove her new car into the window of a grocer’s shop in Ashford. Coward wrote about these happenings as a comic interlude, but matters soon took a more serious turn.
Erik, Noel’s seldom-seen brother, was now twenty-three, and had drifted from job to job. ‘His assets were little above average’, wrote Coward coolly, admitting that his shadow ‘lay heavily’ on his sibling. In truth, Erik annoyed Noel and knew it; his visits to Goldenhurst were timed not to coincide with his brother’s. Yet he was similar to Noel in many ways, and one shared aspect was their sexuality. Erik’s intense friendship with his cousin Leslie Makeham is obvious from photographs of the two with their arms around each other (Erik a less handsome version of his brother, Leslie decidedly better looking). They spent all their time together; playing golf, visiting Norfolk, affecting Noel’s style in dressing gowns and tanning themselves in the sun. Both worked in the City, often side by side; but Erik, like his brother, yearned to travel.
His prospects were discussed ‘at length’ by the family, and it was agreed that he should go to Ceylon in autumn 1928 as a tea planter – the empire still called its sons and daughters to far-flung colonies. On 1 July Erik wrote to Violet from Bognor Regis, where Arthur had arrived with a letter and ‘news of the general fracas which once more seems to have arisen through no fault of mine . . . Noel is apparently prepared to provide £350 providing he hears nothing further on the subject . . . It’s kind of Noel to be so liberal’, Erik conceded, ‘ . . . but his hardness so gets the better of him that he trusts nobody and nothing that is not a stone cold certainty. I know he has a pretty poor opinion of me . . . But he will receive a pleasant surprise one of these days . . .’ Erik arrived in Ceylon in late August. There, high in the mountains above Kandy, where even the weather seemed English, he made friends with Eric Halsey and his wife, and stayed at their bungalow in Matale; photographs show him sitting on a verandah, looking the part in pith helmet and shorts. He spent three years working there until illness, already manifesting itself that October with bad stomach pains and fever, forced him to return home.
Back at Goldenhurst, further domestic friction exploded when Jack Wilson planned to rebuild the abutting barn as family accommodation, leaving the house to him and Noel, out of range of the bickering Cowards. The family objected, hinting that Noel was embarrassed for them to be seen in front of his ‘new-found “grand” friends’. ‘As my new-found “grand” friends that year consisted solely of Bobbie Andrews, who had come down for a couple of weekends,’ maintained Noel, ‘this argument seemed unjust.’ The result was that Coward and Wilson had the barn converted for their use. The finished building was then coveted by the family, who promptly used it to entertain their own ‘new-found “grand” friends’ when Noel was away.
It is strange to think of the Cowards sharing a house with their son’s lover; Noel’s friends certainly found it odd. Dorothy Dickson, another of Cochran’s starlets, recalled visiting Goldenhurst one weekend: ‘There were two houses and the father and auntie lived in the house next door. They were – excusez-moi – rather common . . . I saw the father the first time I went down there. I never saw him again. I thought, “Well either he’s too old to speak, or he just doesn’t know enough about the theatre” – we were all talking and so on. I just got the impression that he was really very ordinary and not at all [likely to have produced] a genius such as Noel Coward.’
But same-sex couples were no novelty in that part of the country. Following in Coward’s footsteps, Gladys Calthrop had moved into a converted mill in Aldington, the nearest village to Goldenhurst. The stream still ran under the drawing-room, and prompted the name ‘Wuthering Depths’ from Coward. She was later joined there by her new girlfriend, Patience Erskine.1 With Calthrop and other figures such as the actress Jeanne de Casalis and the publisher Erica Marx2 in the area, Coward had ‘a little circle of friends’ to hand, according to Patricia Frere, who had met Noel when her father, Edgar Wallace, wrote his positive review of Sirocco; her husband Alexander was a director of Heinemann, Coward’s publishers.
The Freres came to live in the area a few years later, and Patricia remembered Goldenhurst as a ‘beautiful old house, really very old . . . he built on to it, but with very good taste, building at an angle. His father and mother lived in the old part, and he lived in the new bit. They were pretty separate. Anything could go on in Noel’s part of the house. It was divided by a big “playroom” as the Americans call it . . . with a table always ready for chess, and another for backgammon, and jigsaw puzzles.’ One evening she and her husband had been invited to dine with Coward; after drinks in the new part of the house, Noel announced, ‘It’s quite a long way to the dining-room. I intend to take a box lunch with me.’
‘His mother we loved,’ Patricia Frere said, ‘a killing old girl. Perfectly outspoken . . . Say anything in front of anyone. His father – well, Noel was very good to him, [but] he was a stupid old boy . . . I don’t even remember what Arthur Coward looked like . . . I only met him about twice in my life. He was tucked away.’ As were Aunts Vida and Ida; ‘You knew they were there, but they didn’t appear.’ Some perceived a degree of embarrassment for Coward about this encumbrance of relations; John Gielgud found Noel’s parents ‘very tiresome. His mother was pretty stupid, and his aunts were impossible. He was sort of ashamed of them.’
But Coward had more painful problems: he was suffering from haemorrhoids, and needed an operation. Visitors to the nursing home where he was operated on hedged uneasily around his ‘complaint’, much to his amusement. The news was important enough to warrant an item in the New York Times: ‘Noel Coward Operated On; Dramatist Stricken in London – “This Year of Grace” Postponed.’ Coward recuperated in the South of France, near Cap d’Antibes, where he was photographed sunbathing with Beatrice Lillie, about to star in the American production; she with Eton crop, in pyjamas and embroidered waistcoat; he in dressing gown, bathing cap and espadrilles, looking frail. But Noel returned to work on the show with vigour, taking a six week dancing course to limber up, combined with rehearsals in the gloomy Poland Rooms. He also wrote new numbers for the show, among them the song ‘World Weary’, the result of his enervating postoperative interlude. The song showed a certain frustration with the theatrical world, a mood which perhaps led Coward in a new direction that year, when he made a tentative foray into the realms of Bloomsbury. Or did they come to him?
*
Coward first met Virginia Woolf in January 1928 at Sibyl Colefax’s house in the King’s Road. A month later Woolf confessed to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, that she had fallen ‘in love with Noel Coward, and he’s coming to tea. You cant have all the love in Chelsea . . .’, she insisted, ‘Noel Coward must have some.’ Having seen This Year of Grace!, she wrote telling him that some songs ‘struck me on the forehead like a bullet. And what’s more I remember them and see them enveloped in atmosphere – works of art in short . . .’ Woolf apparently encouraged Coward in his desire to write fiction: ‘I think you ought to bring off something that will put these cautious, creeping novels that one has to read silently in an arm chair deep, deep in the shade.’ This was praise indeed from so stern a critic. She elaborated enthusiastically to her sister, Vanessa Bell, ‘He is in search of culture, and thinks Bloomsbury a kind of place of pilgrimage. Will you come and meet him? He is a miracle, a prodigy. He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint – He rescued his whole family who kept boarding houses in Surbiton, and they are now affluent, but on the verge of bankruptcy, because he spends so much on cocktails. If he could only become like Bloomsbury he thinks he might be saved.’
Bloomsbury gathered quite uncharacteristically around Coward’s flame. Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West also met him at Lady Colefax’s salon, and he subsequently invited them to dinner. ‘Noel very simple and nice’, Nicolson recorded in his diary. ‘He talks of the days when his mother kept lodgings in Ebury Street and he himself had a top back room. Gradually he began to make money and took the top floor for himself, finally descending to the first floor and ejecting the lodgers. “As I rose in the world I went down in the house.” Completely unspoilt by success. A nice eager man.’
Noel’s eagerness to stress his humble origins seems to have been designed as a play to the egalitarian Bloomsberries. His relationship with Woolf continued erratically throughout 1928, with a certain amount of soul-baring from Coward. ‘I have been lunching with Sibyl to meet Noel Coward; and I enjoyed it’, Woolf told Roger Fry. ‘He says the English theatre is so degraded that he will not produce any serious work here in future. He says the middle classes make his life a burden. Old women in Gloucester write and abuse him for immorality. Lord Cromer can force him to leave out any sentence, or ban the whole play. He says they are infinitely more civilised in America and Berlin. So he is off to produce his plays in New York. There he makes £1000 a week, and he can say what he likes . . .’
Woolf was not surprised to receive a letter from Coward later that year, an unashamed panegyric upon her latest book, Orlando, a tale of a sex-changing hero/heroine based on Vita Sackville-West. ‘I am still hot and glowing with it’, Noel wrote fervidly from Manhattan. ‘At the risk of sounding insincere’, he was ‘completely at your feet over it . . . Oh I do so congratulate you and thank you for the lovely “unbuttoned” feeling you’ve given me and I hope to God it will last . . . . If ever I could write one page to equal in beauty your “Frozen Thames” description . . . I should feel that I really was a writer. Please when I come back to England let’s meet and talk a good deal . . .’
This surprising relationship had sufficient novelty to continue for some time; Coward’s reservations about intellectuals were put aside for the favours of the famously so. His courting of Woolf was unabashed but it is also evidence of Coward’s aspiration to become a more serious writer than his public perceived him to be.
*
Towards the end of October Coward returned to New York, where Cochran was already setting up the production of This Year of Grace! During the try-out week in Baltimore, a combination of Noel’s preshow nerves and Beatrice Lillie’s ‘devilish’ behaviour created a crisis. Lillie was ‘uppish, temperamental, tiresome, disagreeable, inconsiderate, [and] insufferable’, complained about the quality of her material and refused to speak to Cochran. Coward, unable to stand any more, took a day off and the final rehearsal had to be managed by Cochran – not entirely the professional behaviour expected of the author.
The revue opened at the Selwyn Theatre on Broadway on 7 November, relaunching Coward in New York. He and Lillie appeared socially inseparable at charity balls and fashionable nightclubs, providing the American papers with ample fuel for romantic speculation. The pair were endlessly asked to sing ‘Lilac Time’, and a midnight benefit performance arranged by Archie Selwyn was a highlight of the season. To Cecil Beaton, also in the city, Coward was enjoying ‘the triumph of his New York career’. He met Noel at a lunch party given by the publisher of the New York Evening Post, Mrs Schiff, where he found his rival ‘very charming and gracious’ towards him, ‘which was touching and I liked him for it, but although he talked hard . . . the entire time he didn’t succeed in saying anything amusing or clever. He was extremely badly dressed in trousers too short and his face was sweating at every pore.’
Beaton’s comments on Coward’s sartorial sense were ironic, considering their subsequent meeting on the boat back to England the following April. Severely seasick, Cecil emerged on deck after two days of ‘semi-coma’ to find Noel and Venetia Montagu. ‘At once they attacked me. “Why do you write such malicious articles? Why do you say such nasty things about Mr Coward?” ’ (Beaton had continued scathing about Coward’s career, saying in 1925 after seeing Fallen Angels, ‘I do think the play will help to ruin old Coward. It is quite definite that he won’t live long. People will get so tired of him.’)
Coward ‘showed more aplomb, investigating me out of a detached curiosity’. But as the pair mimicked the photographer – ‘Oh, it’s too, too luvleigh!’, accusing him of flamboyant gestures, an ‘undulating’ walk and ‘conspicuously exaggerated’ clothes – Beaton felt ‘speechless with inferiority’. Yet Coward agreed to sit for a sketch by Beaton, for which he went to Noel’s cabin. ‘We’ve been absolutely beastly to you,’ admitted Coward, ‘ . . . let’s hope you’ve learnt a lesson. It is important not to let the public have a loophole to lampoon you.’ Noel explained how ‘he studied his own “façade” ’ carefully, ‘his voice . . . was definite, harsh, rugged. He moved firmly and solidly, dressed quietly . . . “You should appraise yourself”, he advised. “Your sleeves are too tight, your voice is too high and too precise. You mustn’t do it. It closes so many doors . . . It’s hard, I know. One would like to indulge one’s own taste. I myself dearly love a good match, yet I know it is overdoing it to wear tie, socks and handkerchief of the same colour. I take ruthless stock of myself in the mirror before going out. A polo jumper or unfortunate tie exposes one to danger.” He cocked an eye at me in mockery.’3
Coward had learned what was acceptable; his advice, part of the selfdefence mechanism of a homosexual man, was not to look queer. Crucial in Beaton’s account is the final mocking gesture; with that raised eyebrow, Coward betrayed the fact that he had overcome (or outwitted) prejudice, and that Beaton had not. The security of his place in the meritocracy allowed Coward to assert his rebellious character and he never lost his childlike propensity for anarchic wit. When a chorus girl from This Year of Grace! fell ill after drinking hooch in a speakeasy, Cochran announced pompously, ‘Every one of us is an ambassador for Britain. We have a duty to uphold our country’s reputation . . .’; Coward replied in a stage-whisper, ‘Rule Britannia!’ During one performance, Alexander Woollcott, sitting with Harpo Marx, ostentatiously opened a newspaper as Coward began to sing ‘A Room with a View’. Noel responded by giggling, ‘then rallied and cooed the rest of it in baby-talk which sent an exasperated Woollcott storming out of his box’. Coward’s maturity often seemed tenuous, from his use of baby talk (especially with the intimate ‘family’), to petulant tantrums when crossed. Kenneth Tynan wrote of him, ‘I submit . . . that infantilism may be the essential cocoon within which certain kinds of talent need to flourish. It is a virtue, not a fault, in Coward that he never discarded – and was never embarrassed by – his childhood . . . Whether by genetic luck or environmental good judgement, Noel Coward never suffered the imprisonment of maturity.’
This Year of Grace! continued to play to packed houses; so good was business that Coward was persuaded to remain in the production after his usual three-month maximum. New York was fun, with Woollcott’s Sunday breakfast parties at his apartment, at the secluded ‘dead end’ of the East Fifties, overlooking the East River. These parties were attended by the Round Table stalwarts, with the portly Woollcott sitting ‘in grandeur in a comfortable armchair, unshaved, in his bright green pyjamas with all the fly buttons undone, marshalling the guests as a ringmaster’. Coward stayed in the city throughout January and February, fielding press enquiries about his marital status: ‘ “I’m afraid I’d make a frightfully inadequate husband. You see, I like being alone so much. Besides, I’m too much the egotist.” ’ He worked on songs for Bitter Sweet, one of which famously came to him on a taxi ride, the insistent melody of ‘I’ll See You Again’ triumphing over the beeping horns of the gridlocked New York traffic. Coward had intended to ask Gertrude Lawrence to play Sari, but her voice was not strong enough; Evelyn Laye, his second choice, was not available (she blamed Cochran for the fact that her husband, Sonnie Hale, had fallen in love with Jessie Matthews, his co-star in This Year of Grace! Laye told Coward, ‘I’d rather scrub floors than work for him again’).
Soon afterwards, Coward ran into Peggy Wood4 in the lobby of the Algonquin. He had known her since his first visit to the States – she was a friend of Teddie Gerrard, Cecile Sartoris and Lester Donahue – but had not heard her sing. They repaired to his studio at the Hotel des Artistes; Noel was impressed by her voice and her ‘lack of “star” manner’, and promptly offered her the part. Wood was engaged by Cochran ‘on the assurance from Mr Coward that I had not grown fat in the ten years since he had last seen me play on Broadway’.
The author and producer returned to England in the spring to search for a male lead. They followed various tips in Germany and Austria, and a young man was discovered whose name was Hans Unterfucker. Despite Coward’s mischievous desire to see it writ large on West End billboards, they returned to London, and found George Metaxa ‘who had been available all the time’. Metaxa had appeared in Cochran’s last revue, Wake Up and Dream; thirty years old, he had been chef de cabinet in the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture, and now specialised in playing exotic foreign noblemen. The part of La Crevette posed no problem: Coward had written it for Ivy St Helier, his mentor from Wild Heather days. A diminutive and idiosyncratic character actress and singer, her tragi-comic mien was the perfect foil for the romance at the heart of Coward’s piece. Noel read and sang the completed work to Cochran, who announced to his general manager, Hal Lewis, that Bitter Sweet would provide his old-age pension. Rehearsals began at the end of May, with a huge cast assembled for the ballroom scenes. Using a microphone, Coward directed operations from the dress circle, as though he were back with his toy theatre in Clapham; productions such as Bitter Sweet and the revues were realisations of his childhood fantasies, adult versions of the peg-dolls and cardboard scenery. The artifice excited Noel, the super-reality of the theatre, epitomised by the ideal love of the romantic musical.
Bitter Sweet opens in the gay clatter of modern high society; Dolly Chamberlain, a well-bred English girl, leaves her lover to elope with a musician, just as Lady Shayne had eloped, fifty-four years previously. The scene change from 1929 to 1875 is practically a cinematic dissolve to the production’s great hit number, ‘I’ll See You Again’, sung by Peggy Wood and George Metaxa. Reprised at the end, the song summed up the nostalgic tone: the simple sentiment of love represented by the haunting tune is the theme of the play, and its set-pieces and period scenes assert fantasy, rooted in a dim memory of an unlived past. Although modern tastes would find the love and despair too artificial (‘Oh God!’ says Dolly, ‘I’m so utterly, utterly miserable’), contemporary audiences, who expected formality, saw them as effective emotional scenes. The show’s heart-tugging sentimentality was underlined by what Alan Jenkins called a ‘terrific risk’ on Coward’s part: the killing-off of his hero in a duel on stage. ‘Even though the tragic mood is softened by the jazzy up-to-date last scene, the lump in the throat does not quite depart.’
‘People are tired of speedier and speedier shows’, Coward said on the production’s American opening. ‘After all, a chorus girl can only wave her arms and legs about so much.’ The antithesis of the mid-1920s cynicism of previous Coward shows, Bitter Sweet, with its swirling waltzes, lavish costumes and luxurious sets, was a panacea to the woes of world depression. Theatre audiences had not seen its like for years – a spectacle of melody and colour which swept all before it.
Yet within the songs of Coward’s musical were sentiments as bitter sweet as its title. Most autobiographical of all was the sublime ‘If Love Were All’:
I believe the more you love a man,
The more you give your trust,
The more you’re bound to lose.
Although when shadows fall
I think if only –
Somebody splendid really needed me,
Someone affectionate and dear,
Care would be ended if I knew that he
Wanted to have me near.
But I believe that since my life began
The most I’ve had is just
A talent to amuse.
Heigho, if love were all!
Bitter Sweet was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office on 28 June 1929, with George Street commenting drily, ‘there is very little to quarrel with. Noel Coward is in a sentimental, not a salacious mood.’
The first night – in Manchester, as was customary with Cochran’s shows – was ‘riotous’. The reviews were ‘almost incoherent’ with praise, and the three-week run was immediately sold out. The London first night was something of an anticlimax – the audience was fashionably cool, although they thawed by the finale. Coward refused a curtain speech, saying he made these only when his audience booed. The notices evinced ‘rather grudging patronage’, as if regretting their effusiveness over This Year of Grace! and embarrassed that Coward had followed one hit with another. The Evening Standard talked of ‘the common-placeness of popular musical comedy . . . steps away from the rarer and more delicate form of light opera’. ‘It would be too bad’, Coward observed acidly, ‘if I were encouraged to believe that there was anything remarkable in writing, composing and producing a complete operetta.’ Coward had written it ‘tongue in cheek’, alleged some critics. ‘This was not “real Coward” ’, wrote W. J. Turner. ‘Inept as the incidents of old fashioned musical comedy were, it would not be possible to find in the annals of Daly’s Theatre anything more preposterously unreal than this.’ It had ‘finally smashed’ his ‘hopes of Mr Coward, for a more inane and witless composition never left the pen of a distinguished author’.
Coward’s suspicion of the press (and particularly of the Beaverbrook papers, which he considered had waged a vendetta against him ever since Sirocco) was illustrated by an annoying incident on the first night. During the duel scene, Hannen Swaffer, Gordon Beckles and Ewatt Hodgson, dramatic critics of the Express group, performed a mock fight with their umbrellas. Cochran complained to Beaverbrook, but Noel knew that would do no good. However, James Agate saluted Coward’s achievement as ‘a thundering good job . . . a thoroughly good light entertainment’. The theatre-going public agreed, embracing it with enthusiasm. Despite the rise of the cinema, the theatre was still a major source of entertainment; many homes had pianos and, as with Coward’s previous musical efforts, sales of sheet music, gramophone recordings and the published work brought a sizeable income; they also promoted Coward as a household name outside the audience catchment area of the West End, and spread his fame and the popularity of the show throughout the country.
It was difficult to ignore the production, appearing as it did in every medium. Cochran commissioned Max Beerbohm to do a series of Bitter Sweet caricatures. ‘Max took a great liking to Noel Coward himself and was enchanted with the play’, wrote David Cecil. ‘Its nostalgic evocation of the Victorian and Edwardian epochs chimed deliciously with his own backward-looking daydreams.’ Beerbohm would also have appreciated the wit of ‘Green Carnation’, which poked fun at the very group of ‘greenery-yallery’ aesthetes the venerable dandy personified:
Faded boys, jaded boys, womankind’s
Gift to a bulldog nation
In order to distinguish us from less enlightened minds,
We all wear a green carnation.
It was Noel’s comment on the Uranian decadents, purveyors of a camp sensibility he eschewed. The homosexual overtone was an ‘open secret’; the audience privately understood, but pretended otherwise. The blatant descriptions (‘Our figures sleek and willowy,/ Our lips incarnadine,/ May worry the majority a bit’) puzzled the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Street’s report muttered that ‘the “green carnation” young men in Act III might be offensively bi-sexual but that is not indicated’, and Lord Cromer thought ‘the “Green Carnation” young men may be very objectionable’, but it was allowed to pass. Perhaps its concluding refrain reassured the censors,
We feel we’re rather Grecian,
As our manners indicate,
Our sense of moral values isn’t strong.
For ultimate completion,
We shall really have to wait
Until the Day of Judgement comes along
which signalled disdain for the more obvious members of the homosexual fraternity. The song also contained the line, ‘We are the reason for the “Nineties” being gay’. (In ‘Mad About the Boy’, the idol has ‘a gay appeal/ That makes me feel/ There’s maybe something sad about the boy’.) Although modern usage of ‘gay’ is seen as a recent development, it was certainly employed in theatrical circles in the 1940s (Kenneth Williams uses it in his wartime diaries); and in 1936, Stephen Tennant quotes from Far from the Madding Crowd, ‘What kind of person is he?’ ‘Oh Miss – I blush to name it – a gay man’, regarding his former lover, Siegfried Sassoon. As the 1920s had its own code words for homosexuality (two of the most common being ‘musical’ or ‘so’), the usage of ‘gay’ may well be older than is assumed.
As great a success as Bitter Sweet was, not everyone was convinced. Ethel Mannin thought its music ‘the essence of all the musical-comedy staleness and all the Blue Danube sentimentality ever orchestrated’. But such views Coward saw as killjoy; let the country wallow a little – bad times are just around the corner.
*
Given the success of the British Bitter Sweet (it ran for a remarkable 697 performances, outdone only by Blithe Spirit’s tenacious wartime stretch), it was obvious that Cochran would ask Coward to agree to an American production, in association with Archie Selwyn and Florenz Ziegfeld. This became a fait accompli when Evelyn Laye proved available (he had his reservations about Peggy Wood’s performance); Laye would surely guarantee Broadway success. She had realised how ‘small-minded and foolish’ she had been to turn down the role, and anyway was broke, having lost £10,000 on the stock market. Elsie April put her case to Coward and Cochran, and she was immediately engaged. As the British show would continue, an entirely new cast was required for New York, and so Coward, Cochran and Calthrop set off for the South of France to find a new Carl, but neither the Riviera nor Paris yielded a suitable lead. However, Princess Jane di San Faustino – one of Noel’s ‘new-found “grand” friends’ – came up with a Roman; rather short in the leg but with nice long eyelashes. He’d do, said Noel, and was booked. Cochran and Calthrop returned to London, and Coward went off to Avignon to stay with the Bolithos.
Noel had met William Bolitho at one of Alexander Woollcott’s parties on his last New York trip. South African-born, Bolitho had fought in the war, which ‘tortured and all but broke him’; he was the only one to escape from a trench cave-in on the Somme in 1916, saved by a passing English soldier, who pulled him out by the feet. He had become a journalist and when Coward met him had just published an acclaimed psychological study of five mass murderers (such as Burke and Hare), Murder for Profit, which Noel had read with fascination. Bolitho was tall, blond and blue-eyed, with a strong Afrikaans accent, and Coward took an immediate liking to him. They dined together in New York at the Plaza, and Bolitho described the encounter in his column for the New York World.
He felt he was ‘watching the embryo of an authentic great man; in fact, the tadpole of a genius’. ‘On the one hand, negatively, he is unprepossessing, which will save him from the mantrap of romanticizing himself. He has a low forehead – so he will never be tempted to aim for the Nobel Prize, nor feel the fatal duty of making the world a better place. He has good, easy-fitting manners, which shows he has escaped the social distemper fatal to so many Englishmen who have worked their way up, the malady, for example, from which the promising genius of Wells, Kipling, Hardy, Wilde, never properly recovered. Coward has an intact core of hard-bitten, unashamed, touring actor on which all his graces can build securely. Most of all, my suspicion, or confidence, is attached to the look of his eyes . . . a certain quality, a glint rather than a gleam . . . like the refraction of light from a polished steel cutting surface . . .’
When not in New York, Bolitho lived at La Préfète, near Avignon, with his Viennese wife Sybil, tending their ‘English garden oasis’. Coward spent much of his stay in the swimming-pool, while Bolitho finished what was to be his last book, Twelve Against the Gods. He appeared only at mealtimes, conversing ‘with fire and grace and beauty . . . Of all the minds I had ever encountered,’ Noel wrote, ‘his, I think, was the richest and most loving.’ It was intellectual stimulus to rival that of Bloomsbury. In New York, Coward had told Bolitho of a ‘rather neurotic’ novel he intended to write, about a young man who commits suicide out of boredom. The writer told Coward, ‘almost sharply, “Be careful about Death, it’s a serious business, big and important. You can’t go sauntering towards Death with a cigarette hanging from your mouth!” ’ Coward heeded the reproof when he wrote his play Post Mortem, dedicated to his friend; the advice was also prescient – Bolitho died two years later of peritonitis.
Coward said he was ‘turned . . . inside out’ by Bolitho. He ‘stimulated the best of my ambitions, readjusted several of my uneasy virtues, and banished many meretricious ones’. Bolitho’s piece on Bitter Sweet was ‘one of the very few journalistic excursions relating to myself that I have ever wished, proudly, to keep’. Bolitho wrote of the quality the play had: ‘You find it faintly when you look over old letters the rats have nibbled at . . . there is a little of it, impure and odious, in the very sound of barrel-organs, in quiet squares in the evenings, puffing out in gusts that intoxicate your heart. It is all right for beasts to have no memories; but we poor humans have to be compensated.’ Noel returned to London ‘strongly elated and bursting with gratitude’ to his philosophical mentor, ‘for the strange new pride I found in myself’.
The encounter made the rehashing of the Bitter Sweet material for America seem tedious; the only consolation was working with Evelyn Laye. Peggy Wood and Ivy St Helier crept into rehearsals to see how their counterparts were doing. ‘We saw just part of it’, but they agreed that ‘apart from Evelyn . . . Noel had to take . . . all those he’d rejected for the London production’. The result was, according to Wood, a second-rate version; she asked Coward why he didn’t wait and let the London cast do it. He explained that he was afraid New York would have copied his show by then; he had to get in first.
Cochran was unable to go to New York, and Coward was left in charge, helped by Jack Wilson. There was a two-week try-out in Boston, with a full Sunday evening rehearsal at which the awful truth dawned: the Roman tenor’s English was unintelligible and his acting was hopeless. Why this had not been discovered during the weeks of English rehearsals is unclear, though it may have been a result of Coward’s professed boredom with the proceedings. Dickie Fellowes-Gordon had a different version of the story, claiming that it was she and Elsa Maxwell who were responsible for the tenor’s discovery: ‘We found him a marvellous leading man who was Italian, from a small orchestra in Venice. He was good-looking, his English wasn’t too bad, no worse than Metaxa . . . but they [Coward and Jack Wilson] took a dislike to him, because he was too masculine. He wanted a woman and that annoyed them. So they dragged a very unattractive man out of the chorus and got rid of him.’ Coward claimed to feel ‘desperately sorry’ for the unwanted Roman, his dismissal now inevitable. Gerald Nodin, who had understudied the part in London, was chosen, the wrong type for the part, but ambitious enough ‘to make the utmost of himself’ (a subtextual joke of Coward’s; as Hugues Cuenod, who sang in the production, notes: Nodin was ‘a very good-looking chap who went through the company like a pack of salts’).
The Boston show was a hit and when the production opened on Broadway on 5 November, police had to be called to cordon off Sixth Avenue. It was a brilliant affair – literally – as floodlights illuminated arriving celebrities and flash bulbs popped ceaselessly. It was Evelyn Laye’s American debut. ‘Noel – who I knew was secretly as nervous as I was – came in with a little ornamental box which, when he pressed a spring, released a mechanical bird. “There you are, ducks,” he said. “I wanted to be the first to give it to you!” . . . “the bird” is the symbol of the audience’s loud disapproval.’ But, Coward told his mother, Laye was ‘the most triumphant success I’ve ever seen. When she made her entrance in the last act in the white dress they clapped and cheered for two solid minutes and when I came on at the end they went raving mad. Reporting that Laye was ‘weeing down her leg with excitement’, Coward complimented his mother, ‘How right you were about Evelyn – she certainly does knock spots off the wretched Peggy!’5
What Noel called ‘probably the most distinguished first night ever seen in New York’ reverberated beyond its auditorium. The following night he took Elsie April and Cissie Sewell (Cochran’s dance instructor) to see Whoopee as a reward for their ‘having worked like dogs’. During the performance its star Eddie Cantor stepped forward and announced, ‘the greatest theatrical genius alive to-day’, and the spotlight fell on Coward. ‘I had to stand up and bow to me great American Public!’ he exulted. ‘All this . . . in the middle of somebody else’s show!’
The New York Times noted that Coward had, ‘in bland defiance of the New York custom, not only appeared for a curtain call . . . but . . . responded with a few words. Mr Coward . . . [is] to embark on a trip around the world . . . in a week or so, linger a few days in Hollywood, and then sail for the East. He will be joined in Tokyo by Jeffrey Holmesdale [Amherst], who used to write pieces about the theatre for the New York World, and together they will venture deep in Japan and China. Mr Coward may be gone for a long time.’
*
With Bitter Sweet’s American launch secured (it ran for 159 performances), Coward could look forward to his Far Eastern tour. He privately thought that the American Bitter Sweet did not match up to the London original; still, his name was in lights on Broadway, his photograph was in the New York Times, and the success of the show remained untarnished by more important news – the crash of the New York stock market. ‘Everybody is losing millions, poor old Syrie [Maugham] has lost practically all she had, but it really serves them right for gambling’, he purred. He thanked God that Jack had invested only in gilt-edged securites ‘and never speculated so I’m perfectly safe, but it really is horrible, people hurling themselves off buildings like confetti!’ The atmosphere in New York encouraged Coward’s travel plans. His escape had been planned ‘under a general sense of futility’ after his encounter with William Bolitho; it was time to recharge his batteries. On the Saturday before he left for California, Gertrude Lawrence threw a leaving party, and presented him with a tiny gold notebook from Cartier’s – a reminder that he was to write a play for them both.
Coward left New York on 17 November ‘in a blaze of glory’, taking the train via Chicago to Hollywood, where more parties in his honour were promised by Charlie Chaplin, Ronald Colman and Marion Davies; movie moguls had put their cars at his disposal, hoping to lure him to their studios. ‘God forbid, but I shall use the cars and probably wee wee in them’, he told his mother in another infantile reversion. He spent ten hectic days under what Scott Fitzgerald called Hollywood’s ‘anxious sunlight’. The glare seemed to induce a paranoid state; his impression was that he had been ‘whirled through all the side-shows of some gigantic Pleasure Park at breakneck speed’. Post-Bolitho, the values of the place affected and even threatened him. Hollywood was an immovable force to be resisted, its attractions too obvious and fleeting. A chaotic series of parties engulfed Coward in an all-consuming culture which claimed any celebrity for its own; he went driving down Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson discussing dentistry, and played tennis at two in the morning with Charles MacArthur, under ‘artificial moonlight’, after which they dived fully clothed into a floodlit pool. Laura Hope-Crews appeared spectrally from behind a fountain, whispering, ‘Don’t be frightened dear – this – THIS – is Hollywood!’ And that was enough to induce a permanent aversion to the place.
Coward sailed from San Francisco on the President Garfield on 29 November, on his most extensive travels to date, and certainly his most expensive (costing more than $7500). But it was also a long-awaited escape from everyone and everything – even from Jack, whom he had left in Chicago. That Noel was to meet Jeffrey in Tokyo may well have been irritating to Wilson, who realised that Coward still had an emotional attachment to Amherst.
Coward considered his future: he had achieved fame and success, but how long would they last? He was only as good as his next show – the perpetual dilemma of the successful artist. Until now, his youth and nervous energy had provided the impetus; now that he had got it all, what next? Watched by the media of two continents, Coward (who would be thirty in two weeks) needed to consolidate his position. The situation was as brittle as one of his comedies; it might all fall apart like a house of cards if he lost the delicate balance. His experience of Hollywood sharpened his sense of doubt, but he saw this feeling of dissatisfaction as a good sign. ‘Perhaps my uneasiness was the true indication of my worth,’ he wrote later, ‘the inevitable shadow thrown by thin facility; a deeper mind might suffer more . . . There seemed no criterion by which I could judge my quality, or rather so many criteria that they nullified each other.’ Until now, ‘there had been no necessity to look either to the right or the left . . . success was the goal – “Noel Coward” in electric lights. Now I found the electric lights so dazzling I couldn’t see beyond them . . .’
Coward accepted that ‘nobody . . . could find my own truths for me’, and concluded that the voyage, in cutting him off from that world, might answer a few questions. ‘It would be enjoyable to return to my startled friends with, in addition to the usual traveller’s souvenirs, a Strindbergian soul.’ But like his dalliance with Bloomsbury, that was a pose: a man of artifice become a man of intellect. In trying to find himself, Coward found only other masks to wear.
1. Gladys had recently conducted an affair with Mercedes de Acosta, much to Eva Le Gallienne’s dismay. Patience Lina Erskine was a scion of the Earls of Buchan; an amateur mathematician, she was devoutly uninterested in the theatre world.
2. Erica Marx ran the Hand and Flower Press, which published Robert Greacen’s The Art of Noel Coward.
3. When Beaton published his diaries, Coward made a belated apology: ‘ . . . I, who usually pride myself on my psychological judgement, cannot believe I was such an ill mannered clot to you so many many years ago. Happily it was many many years ago and Time and a great many Tides have obliterated it, but oh dear! It’s a sharp lesson . . .’
4. Having begun her career as an opera singer, Wood later appeared in the 1965 film of The Sound of Music as the Mother Abbess, singing ‘Climb Every Mountain’.
5. Laye replaced Wood in the English production in November 1930, when the Tatler noted that Miss Wood had been ‘ordered a rest’.