Let’s make the most of the whole business, shall we? Let’s be photographed and interviewed and pointed at in restaurants! Let’s play the game for what it’s worth, secretaries, fur coats, and de luxe suites in Transatlantic liners at minimum rates! Don’t let one shabby perquisite slip through our fingers! It’s what we dreamed many years ago and now it’s within our reach.
Leo, Design for Living
DESIGN for Living had arrived in New York before Coward, and the Lunts were already being besieged by theatre managements keen to snap up this starry three-hander. A great quantity of flowers and champagne were sent as inducements, but the independent producer Max Gordon was the successful applicant – he hadn’t sent so much as a Hershey bar. Gordon had endeared himself to Coward with his intelligent comments on Private Lives; Coward was not to know that Gordon had no capital at all, and had to raise it on the back of the promise of Design for Living.1
Coward returned to England in the spring of 1932, to be greeted at Goldenhurst by an ever-growing menagerie: two dachshunds called ‘the Coconuts’, a Sealyham, two cocker spaniels, a mongrel and his cat, ‘Proust’, all cared for in his absence by a special doggy domestic. He settled down to work on his new revue for Cochran. At one of the early auditions he was surprised by the assurance of a fourteen-year-old South African boy, thrust on to the stage by his mother to sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ in a pure treble while executing a brisk tap dance. ‘My mother said Mr Coward might not give me enough time so I should do the tap dance while I sang’, says Graham Payn. ‘Noel was so astonished that he said, “Better give the boy a job!” ’ This stage mother, Sybil Payn, was a more professional and driven version of Violet; the boy, Graham Philip Payn, a handsome edition of Noel at that age. Payn was engaged as a pageboy and urchin street-singer, to perform in ‘The Midnight Matinee’ and ‘Mad About the Boy’ respectively. Sybil Payn’s insistent promotion of her son forced his retention in Coward’s memory, but not for quite the right reasons. Joe Mitchenson, Coward archivist and friend, tells that Payn went backstage on the first night ‘and said, “My mother doesn’t think I’ve got enough in this show,” and Noel said, “Oh, I think we’d better cut your second number – it’s not all that strong.” He wasn’t having a youngster telling him he hadn’t enough to do in the show.’
Coward could now call the shots with Cochran, and decided he would drop the over-choreographed and over-designed traditions of a Cochran revue. Noel fixed the running order of the scenes and sketches, and announced his title, Words and Music. The production, direction and casting were to be as he ordered; Gladys Calthrop had designed Cavalcade single-handed, and could surely cope with this revue. Cochran was annoyed by the lack of co-operative spirit in his old collaborator, but success had given Coward the upper hand, and he remained adamant. Cochran, who had been instrumental in that success, assumed the unsatisfying role of theatre manager. He thought Words and Music ‘a jaded, sulky piece of writing with overtones of bitterness . . . It may have been an interesting Coward revue, but it was not a Cochran revue.’
Cochran’s opinion was vindicated by the relatively short run of Words and Music, which opened in Manchester on 25 August and in London on 16 September, where it played for just 164 performances – far short of the two years Coward had anticipated. And yet it was an excellent showcase of Coward’s talents: from the sophisticated opening of ‘Debutantes’: ‘Shall we escape the strange “ennui”/ Of civilised futility?’, to ‘Children of the Ritz’, the revue dazzles with irony. These are the Bright Young Things, post-Depression:
In the lovely gay
Years before the Crash
Mr Cartier
Never asked for cash
Now shops we patronised are serving us with writs
What’s going to happen to the Children of the Ritz?
followed by ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, sung by Romney Brent, wearing a leopardskin solar topee and clerical collar.
The great hit of the show, ‘Mad About the Boy’, opened outside a cinema at night, with traffic and music blending Gershwin-style. The audience saw women – housewife, schoolgirl, typist, servant-girl, streetwalker – all gazing at stills of a matinee idol. The reality is revealed; the star himself, ‘in an elaborate dressing-gown and having his nails manicured. His feet are in a mustard bath and he obviously has a bad chill. He also wears pince-nez, as, off the screen, his eyes are weak. His secretary stands beside this shadow of an idol with a pile of “Fan Mail”. He tosses the letters casually aside merely saying gloomily, “Send a photograph, send a photograph”.’ There is a hint of femininity about the boy, perhaps apt considering the homosexual interpretation inevitably put on the song.2 Besides the Cagney story, another rumour was that Coward had written it as a serenade to Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who is mentioned in it. ‘Although Noel loved the young Fairbanks,’ an American paper said years later, ‘Doug definitely didn’t love him back, although the two men became good friends.’ The song could also have been a comment on matinee idols who appeared heterosexual – not just Ivor Novello, but stars such as Valentino, Astaire, Robert Taylor, Cary Grant and Errol Flynn.
Of the other numbers, a Journey’s End burlesque – a musical version of Sherriff’s play – was not perhaps in the best of taste (the Lord Chamberlain’s office thought that ‘this sort of “gala” edition of a fight in the late War might offend public opinion’). With former Quaint John Mills as ‘Harry Happy’ to underline the skit, it was virtually a parody of Post-Mortem. The note of self-reference and satire continued to the revue’s finale, when street cleaners were heard to remark, ‘You’d never think there was a Crisis, that’s wot I say – you’d never think it, not for a moment you wouldn’t’, another ironic comment from the creator of Cavalcade.
The critics appreciated Coward’s tougher approach; the Sketch thought that Words and Music had single-handedly ‘rehabilitated’ the revue. The Times said, ‘in this revue his satirical pieces have . . . the active fierceness which is the distinction between genuine satire and empty sneering’. Once again, it seemed, Coward had delivered the goods, but the ticket-buying public did not agree – a reminder that critical acclaim by no means ensures popular success.
*
Behind the scenes of his public life, Coward was experiencing family problems. Reports from Ceylon indicated that Erik’s illness had worsened, and the doctors insisted he return to England. Although he had suffered bad stomach pains for nearly four years, Erik thought that all he needed was ‘a sea voyage and good food and rest’. He left Columbo for home on 13 July. Coward was shocked when he saw his younger brother. ‘He seemed to have shrunk to half his normal size, his face was gaunt and drawn and it was obvious he was very seriously ill.’ Noel arranged for him to be admitted to a private nursing home in Portland Place, run by Almina, Lady Carnarvon, and sought the best medical advice. The president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lord Moynihan, examined Erik, and diagnosed testicular cancer, so far advanced that there was no hope of survival beyond six months.
Noel had the responsibility of breaking the news not only to his parents but to Erik himself. Knowing that Erik was waiting to hear, Coward conspired with Almina Carnarvon to tell his brother that he was suffering from hyperplasia of the abdominal glands, which could explain the symptoms; Erik was ambivalent, but accepted the verdict. Noel suggested he recuperate at Goldenhurst. ‘I also, in a moment of inspiration, told him that he could repay me by making an accurate and detailed index of all my gramophone records.’ As Dickie Fellowes-Gordon recalls, not all the family were so sensitive to the young man’s condition, ‘Auntie [Vida] used to hint to this poor soul that he’d “better make the most of this” before they could stop her.’
One effect of this tragedy was to exacerbate Noel’s antipathy to religion, particularly on his mother’s behalf. ‘Everything is so tragic and cruel for you, and my heart aches dreadfully for you but that’s no good either except that it proves even to me (who didn’t need much proof) how very much I love you. The next letter I write to you won’t be like this at all, it will be crammed with gay description. This sort of letter only makes us both cry and that’s sillier than anything. I’m saying several acid prayers to a fat contented God, that Father in a dirty nightgown who hates you and me and every living creature in the world.’
*
On 28 September the Court Circular of The Times announced, ‘Mr Noel Coward has gone abroad for several weeks. He intends to have a complete holiday and no letters will be forwarded.’ He was off with the navy again, having recently renewed his friendship with the Mountbattens. Lord Louis Mountbatten was now stationed in Malta, and invited Noel to join him in Greece on the HMS Queen Elizabeth.
Coward left London for Paris, where he spent a few days with the Mendls and Lord Lloyd at the Villa Trianon. It was a peaceful stay, and Noel realised how physically exhausted he had been by recent events. His mind was still full of home, and he wrote Violet pained letters of sympathy, ‘I’m trying to take your advice about not thinking of you but it’s very difficult and I find I think about you all the time.’ He then embarked on the Orient Express, but it was a far from luxurious journey; he had to sleep standing for two nights, ‘jogging along’ through a hot and dusty Serbia. At Salonika he was met by ‘several angry Greeks’, and the after-effects of severe earthquakes. Finally, he was ferried to Lemnos, to meet the Queen Elizabeth.
Coward was always a welcome guest of the Mountbattens, even when he said he was ‘disgusted at the size [Mountbatten’s] tummy had got to’, as the naval commander wrote. Noel put him on a diet, ‘No potatoes, no bread or pastry (only Ryvita), no butter, no sugar, chocolates or sweets etc. In a fortnight it reduced my tummy girth by an inch and in a month I expect to be lovely and slim.’ Mountbatten was an easy-going friend, and the two enjoyed each other’s company. The Queen Elizabeth sailed to Egypt and, after a few days, back to Genoa. Coward returned to England, but his few days at home were unhappy, as he knew that he was probably leaving his brother for the last time; Violet’s grief was transparent. On 23 November he left for New York on the Empress of Britain. His transatlantic trips were now deluxe affairs; on this occasion he occupied a suite furnished in waxed maple, pink brocade furniture and apple-green shaded lamps, with a miniature bar, cheval glasses and a twenty-foot private deck. When he disembarked in New York, reporters noted Mr Coward’s procession towards the gangway, ‘scattering largesse among a posse of stewards, waiters and boot boys who lined his path’.
He moved into an apartment at 2 Beekman Place, overlooking the snowy East River, with Katharine Cornell and her husband, Guthrie McClintic,3 among his new neighbours. Work began on Design for Living almost immediately; ‘bliss’, Coward told his mother, because the Lunts were ‘so utterly sure and concentrated on what they’re doing there’s no work for me at all except to try to be good in my own part!’ The rest of the cast were capable, including Philip Tonge, making a brief appearance as a reporter in Act Two. ‘He’s very good in it’, Noel reported, adding: ‘It does seem funny when I look back and remember how much in awe of him I was, life certainly plays very strange tricks on people.’
Gratifyingly, New York reassured Coward of his fame. ‘The Press fall over themselves to say nice things about me and I’m altogether New York’s white-headed boy.’ Parties abounded, and theatre visits, ‘some of them very good, particularly a musical by Jerome Kern called Music in the Air which is divine’. His heart was heavy, however. ‘I couldn’t be so silly as to wish you a Happy Christmas,’ he wrote to his mother, enclosing money for her present, ‘but please buy yourself something completely unnecessary and think of me when you’re doing it.’
The cast left for Cleveland on 30 December, where their first week was already sold out. ‘Somehow, by a sort of underground telegraph,’ reported the local paper, ‘word had filtered through that it would be very, very naughty.’ Noel reported, in an encouraging and rare letter to Erik, that ‘the play is a wow here and we have to have extra chairs in the aisles at every performance. We’re all very good I think, I so wish you could see it.’ Coward told him that the film of Cavalcade had opened in New York, and was a great success; the first night was a ‘super riot! The notices are quite incredible, I’ve never seen so many superlatives. They’ve kept it completely English and just like the play and Jack who was there said it was the most moving thing he had ever seen when the enormous Broadway First Night audience rose to its feet and cheered at God Save the King! They’re sending me a special print of it to Pittsburgh where I shall have a private showing . . . All my love to you and hand out some to everybody else and get well soon. Your heroic National-Minded Patriotic Bro.’
*
Design for Living was Coward’s 1930s update on the morals he had examined in The Vortex. In its way, it is more shocking than the drugs and boy-love of the earlier play; barely below the surface are hints of bisexuality and free love that go unchallenged within the Bohemian lifestyles of the protagonists. But the gloss of sophistication served, as it so often did, to divert attention from darker themes.
The world of the play is the international beau monde, a transatlantic high society dressed by Molyneux and furnished by Syrie Maugham; the title was redolent of Le Corbusier and Bauhaus chrome, as precise a period reference as The Vortex was for the early Twenties, and modernism – in the guise of scientific, medical and psychological theory – underpins the facetious wit of the piece. In an artist’s garret in Paris, Gilda, a thirty-year-old woman of definable chic, banters with the art dealer Ernest Friedman; we are soon aware that the play is concerned almost entirely with sex. ‘All the hormones in my blood are working overtime’, Gilda tells Ernest. ‘They’re rushing madly in and out of my organs like messenger boys.’ Gilda ought to marry Leo, the writer, but is equally attracted to Otto, the painter. The symmetry of the various couplings that follow – Gilda and Otto, Gilda and Leo, Leo and Otto, Gilda, Leo and Otto – is an elegant dance of sexual confusion, more than farce yet not serious drama. From Paris to London, from London to New York, the characters pursue each other across the Western world, blithely unaware of a real world beyond their modern interiors, tailormade and flash-fire epigrams.
Coward’s ironic design for living revisits the atmosphere of the Ritz bar, a flexible ménage à trois in which the superficial rules and flippancy is all. Love is a dirty word, morality is absent. Who cares what Mrs Hodges, the token representation of the lower classes, thinks, confronted with behaviour which she cannot approve or understand? The author’s stance – shocking for the time (it was not surprising that Coward evaded the Lord Chamberlain by producing it on Broadway) – leaves the audience up in the air at the play’s conclusion, as the three participants embark on a shared sexual life.
A pivotal scene – as far as self-revelation by the author is concerned – is when Otto and Leo, temporarily spurned by Gilda, get drunk together and fall into each other’s arms:
Leo (haltingly): The – feeling I had for you – something very deep, I imagined it was, but it couldn’t have been, could it? – now that it has died so easily.
Otto: Thank God for each other, anyhow!
Leo: That’s true. We’ll get along, somehow – (his voice breaks) – together –
Otto (struggling with his tears): Together –
Teasing and blatantly flirtatious, in the light of Coward’s homosexuality and Alfred Lunt’s bisexuality, this loaded charade had implications for any spectator aware of Noel’s sexuality; the overall tone of Design for Living was unmistakably homosexual. Even Gilda, with her mannish good looks, could be an effeminate man. John Lahr, in his percipient critique of the play, writes, ‘Coward’s comic revenge at the finale is the victory of the disguised gay world over the straight one.’
Hand in hand with the overt sexuality is the dominant theme of celebrity, and how to deal with it. We are among a professional meritocracy led by a playwright (Leo), a portraitist (Otto) and a society decorator (Gilda), each in successive scenes attaining their goals (just as the Lunts and Coward had promised themselves all those years before). However, their race for fame and fortune is at the root of their essential dissatisfaction, distancing them from their original enjoyment together in poverty. Leo/Noel embraces fame, yet realises the artifice of it all; he comments ‘grandiloquently’, ‘It’s all a question of masks, really; brittle, painted masks. We all wear them as a form of protection; modern life forces us to. We must have some means of shielding our timid, shrinking souls from the glare of civilization.’ Leo and Gilda read the reviews of his first night. ‘It’s a knockout! It’s magnificent! It’ll run a year’, exclaims the author. ‘Change and Decay is gripping throughout’, he reads from the Daily Mirror, ‘ “But” – here we go, dear! – “But the play, on the whole, is decidedly thin.” ’ ‘My God!’ says Gilda, ‘they’ve noticed it.’ It sums up Design for Living’s reflection of its author: plays within plays, a disregard for convention or serious opinion, the inversion of principles; a rebellion of its own.
The early days of Design for Living’s American tour were not entirely happy.4 Jeffrey Amherst, Gladys Calthrop and Daan Hubrecht had sailed across on the Bremen for the opening. ‘The house [was] full, great excitement. But with the fall of the curtain after Act One, Noel stormed off the stage in a blind rage. It was a serious comedy. The oafs had laughed all through the first act, he’d be damned if he would go on with the play. Alfred Lunt was near to hysterics, Lynn Fontanne was in tears.’ Calthrop shook her finger at Coward, ‘reminding him that . . . it was the public who paid his salary, and . . . if he insisted on writing funny lines he must expect the audience to laugh’.
The run was also affected by depressing news from home. Noel wrote from Pittsburgh, ‘Oh Darling, a very sad letter from you to-day. I do wish I could do something but I know there’s nothing to be done. Christmas must have been awful, and New Year’s Eve! It really is amazing how much human beings have to bear sometimes. How wonderful if he could die quietly in his sleep. I am so glad the nurses are nice and that he doesn’t suspect anything. Bear up my darling, perhaps in the long run he will turn out to be lucky after all! Anyhow he could never go through what you’re going through. Snoopie.’ Two days before Design for Living was to open in New York, Coward received a telegram telling him that Erik had indeed died in his sleep. Coward’s reaction was to send for his mother (and Aunt Vida) immediately; they arrived in New York ten days later.
Design for Living was well received, the American critics perhaps impressed by the rumour that Lunt, Fontanne and Coward were receiving the highest salaries ever paid to a trio of leading actors in a Broadway play.5 Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times thought Coward ought to have ‘cut the cackle and come to the main business, which is his brand of satire and comedy’, but when he did it was with ‘remarkable dexterity’; in an ‘impish mood’, Noel was ‘enormously funny’.
Coward decided to break his rule and play in Design for Living for another two months. He rented a cottage at Sneden’s Landing, on the banks of the Hudson River, again with Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic as neighbours. The cottage was fairly primitive, but only thirty-five minutes from Broadway. Violet and Vida stayed with him, delighted at being among his smart friends.
Coward’s high profile could cause problems, however. Celebrity kidnapping threats were fashionable after the abduction and murder of the Lindbergh baby, and Coward was advised to employ a ‘delightful’ private detective named Tommy Webber, ‘bulging with armaments’. This was perhaps justified; that year, a twenty-six-year-old English actor named Frederick Manthrop was arrested in New York after demanding $2000 ‘under threat of death’ from Coward and a Mrs John Sloane. And Elsa Maxwell recounted how she and Noel had been followed by ‘four shabby men in an enclosed delivery van’ from West 47th Street to the Empire State Building, where they ‘made enquiries about Mr Coward and drove away only after three building guards drew pistols to escort Mr Coward and Miss Maxwell to their car’. ‘They weren’t kidnappers but celebrity hunters’, said a spokesman for Mr Coward. ‘They were a bunch of kids from Jersey over to see the stars. They had been following Tallulah Bankhead, too. Really, it’s rather embarrassing to Mr Coward.’ Like a modern-day pop star, Noel was often pursued by obsessive fans, and would satirise the type in Present Laughter, in the character of Roland Maule.
After three months of Violet and Vida (quite long enough) Coward saw his mother and aunt off for England. Design for Living ended, and after the closing-night party at the Waldorf-Astoria and a playful poke in the ribs from Tommy Webber’s pistol, Noel left for Bermuda, to cruise on HMS Dragon. His host was Captain Philip Vian, a contemporary of the Prince of Wales at Osborne and later an admiral of the Fleet: tall, ‘with piercing blue eyes and extremely aggressive eyebrows’, Vian exploded on first introduction, ‘What the hell are you doing on board this ship?’ Coward replied, with some degree of embarrassment, that he was ‘exhausted, over-worked and on the verge of a nervous breakdown and had joined the ship in order to be nursed back to health and strength and waited on hand and foot’. Vian responded by inviting him to drink gin in his cabin. ‘At the risk of infuriating him by my theatrical sentimentality,’ wrote Coward, ‘I must flatly admit that I am very fond of him indeed.’
He ended up in Trinidad, and began to work on a new musical play. Told of a romantic island off the coast, he arrived at Point Balaine’s one hotel, run by a former sailor and his wife, to whom Noel took an immediate liking. A two-floor wooden building, with outlying bungalows, its atmosphere was pure Somerset Maugham, with whirring ceiling fans, lush tropicality and the only contact with the outside world a motor launch. Coward exploited the setting in his next play, Point Valaine (announced as Point Balaine in the US press), also written with the Lunts in mind. His other effort, Conversation Piece – a Regency fantasy inspired by The Regent and His Daughter by Dormer Creston – was for Yvonne Printemps, wife of Sacha Guitry and star of the Parisian stage, although, by the Thirties, somewhat past her peak.
Back at Goldenhurst he worked on the score for Conversation Piece, asking Cochran to keep it secret, but soon the newspapers discovered the next project of Britain’s brightest playwright. A hit song was needed, and he obliged with ‘I’ll Follow My Secret Heart’, one of his most indicative lyrics:
I’ll follow my secret heart
My whole life through,
I’ll keep all my dreams apart
Till one comes true.
What stars may fade
Above,
I’ll follow my secret heart
Till I find love.
For Coward, whose love was necessarily secret, it was a statement of intent.
He finished the score in November, and spent the pre-Christmas period travelling to and from Paris, trying to persuade a reluctant Printemps to take the role. She agreed, then changed her mind, in true prima donna style. By January she was rehearsing, in her charming fractured English, and played with aplomb through attendant crises, such as the death of one of her dogs in Paris, whose final gasp she heard on a rare trans-Channel telephone call in her dressing-room.
A ‘polite, but faintly raffish play’, Conversation Piece was basically a vehicle for Coward and Yvonne Printemps, its songs, glamorous costumes and mime scenes an attempt to replicate the success of Bitter Sweet. The ‘Regency Vogue’ fashion of the times gave it a chic reference point, and Coward’s sugary fantasy had a satirical edge to sharpen it for modern audiences. When it opened at His Majesty’s Theatre on 16 February 1934, James Agate thought it ‘confused’, but admitted that the wit, ‘when we are allowed any’, was ‘at once unexpected, mordant, and bitter-sweet’. Beverley Nichols wrote in his diary, ‘I have given up facile criticisms . . . of his work and gratefully accept his charm, his sturdy avoidance of anything “shymaking” and his supremely brilliant direction. His performance was remarkable but left me with a sense of strain.’
The production saw the final breakdown of the relationship between Coward and C. B. Cochran. There had been disagreements over the casting: Cochran had approved of Printemps – indeed, he maintained it had been his idea to use her, not Coward’s; but when Noel took the lead, Cochran considered it a mistake: he felt it would take his attention from the direction of the play, that his French accent would sound too English against Printemps’, and that Coward ‘lacked the romantic quality the part needed’. With the success of the piece, all seemed forgiven. On the first night, Cochran gave Coward a present, as he usually did: a Georgian snuff box, large enough to serve as a cigarette case, inscribed, ‘In memory of a not altogether unsuccessful association’. It was the epitaph to their friendship.
Two weeks later Cochran received a letter from Coward, ‘I have decided . . . to present my own and other people’s plays in the future in partnership with Jack . . . This is . . . the result of our increasing activities in New York . . . where we have bought interests in several productions of other managements and, as you know, have controlled and virtually presented several of them.’ Coward flattered, ‘Without your encouragement and faith in me and my work it is unlikely that I should have ever reached the position I now hold in the theatre . . .’ Cochran’s reply was constrained, ‘As you say, the development you refer to was inevitable, and I wish you and your associates the best of good fortune. Meanwhile, believe me, Yours as ever, CBC.’
Coward was hurt by the formality of CBC’s reply; for his part, Cochran was bitter about Coward’s curtailment of their relationship. His biographer James Harding claimed that a more vindictive man might have ‘taken a malicious pleasure in the fact that none of Coward’s later musical shows ever succeeded as well as those . . . in the grand days of their partnership . . . Without Cochran’s flair and intuition an essential ingredient was missing.’ Harding maintained that Coward ‘always believed . . . that Cochran had cheated him’.
*
Life was again presenting Coward with a set of choices and another period of change; even beyond the unstable environment of the theatre, a state of ambivalence prevailed in his relationships.
Coward had kept up his friendship with Virginia Woolf by post, and now wrote another fan letter, ‘This is just to tell you how very much I loved “Flush”. It is quite exquisite and the most marvellous picture of an age. I do, with all my heart, congratulate you on a very difficult job most tenderly and beautifully done.’ Sibyl Colefax’s relentless hospitality brought the two together again, ‘on a cold foggy night’ in January 1934. Woolf had written to her nephew, Quentin Bell, ‘ . . . I have to dine with Colefax tonight to meet Noel Coward whose works I despise but they say hes very good to his old mother. And Sybil [sic] wont take no, even in the fog . . .’ Woolf reported back on the evening, saying that Coward ‘called me Darling, and gave me his glass to drink out of. These are dramatic manners. I find them rather congenial . . . Then he played his new opera on Sybils grand piano and sang like a tipsy crow – quite without self consciousness. It is about Brighton in the time of the Regency – you can imagine. I am to go and see him in his retreat. He makes about twenty thousand a year, but has several decayed uncles and aunts to keep; and they will dine with him, he says, coming out of Surbiton, and harking back to his poverty stricken days. So he has to combine them with the half naked nymphs who sing his parts, which is difficult.’
Woolf felt she was on display, and that Coward was party to Colefax’s manoeuvres. ‘ . . . Colefax writes that she is furious. Cant believe that its not a personal insult that I wont roast myself and fry myself talking to her and Noel Coward. Lord – what dusty souls these women get!’ Colefax reproved Woolf for ‘insinuating that her dinner was merely a snob dinner to bring celebrities together. The truth was Noel [Coward] adores me; & I could save him from being as clever as a bag of ferrets & trivial as a perch of canaries.’ Post-Cavalcade, it seemed that Woolf no longer thought Coward capable of salvation; his ubiquitousness as a celebrity turned her against him. Later in the year, she dined with Clive Bell, Aldous Huxley and the Kenneth Clarks. ‘Talk at dinner about . . . Noel Coward . . . at Monte Carlo, laying his hand on A[ldous]’s arm: this is divine – a Jazz like the rest. The variety of his gifts: but all out of the 6d box at Woolworth’s. Beating & beating & beating – an omelette without eggs, said A. Nothing there: but the heroic beating . . .’
E. M. Forster also met Coward at Colefax’s in 1935; Stephen Tennant recorded Forster’s account of ‘a lunch party with Sibyl and Noel Coward talking awful drivel – he said the stupidity of the whole party was indescribable – he imitates Noel C. The sometimes patronising reaction of the intelligentsia gave Coward good reason to despise its more egregious offenders. Jeffrey Amherst tried unsuccessfully to introduce Noel to Roger Senhouse, and maintained that ‘in those days Noel was inclined to fight shy of anything he thought highbrow and he looked askance at Bloomsbury. He took against those rather esoteric productions in little theatres by obscure authors. Slightly petulantly one day he announced he would write a Russian play for the Pitoeffs and their Compagnie des Quinze (who were really only thirteen). “It will be played entirely in the dark and will be titled Seven Pass while the Lentils Boil.” ’
Coward was acutely aware of the social and intellectual distance between him and the mandarins of Bloomsbury. Many years later, he read Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey. ‘It’s a fascinating picture of the Bloomsbury lot’, he admitted. ‘If Mother had been able to afford to send me to private school, Eton and Oxford or Cambridge, it would have probably set me back years. I have always distrusted too much education and intellectualism; it seems to me that they are always dead wrong about things that really matter, however right they may be in their literary and artistic assessments . . . My good fortune was to have a bright, acquisitive, but not, not an intellectual mind, and to have been impelled by circumstances to get out and earn my living and help with the instalments on the house.’
Strachey himself was equivocal about Coward, and unimpressed by his work in the early Twenties. They had a chance meeting later. ‘I met you a few years ago’, Noel reminded Bloomsbury’s high priest. ‘Rather a nice interval, don’t you think?’ Strachey replied.
1. Max Gordon maintained that Coward had contacted him, rather than the other way around, offering him the play on hard terms: 10 per cent of the gross for the three leading actors, and 10 per cent for Coward as author. Noel and the Lunts would put up $20,000, but Gordon would have to raise the further $30,000 required.
2. For the 1938 New York revue Set to Music, another verse was added, to be sung by a businessman in his office: ‘Mad about the boy,/ I know it’s silly,/ But I’m mad about the boy,/ And even Doctor Freud cannot explain/ Those vexing dreams/ I’ve had about the boy . . .’ The verse was cut by the management, who considered it too daring.
3. Guthrie McClintic, 1893-1961, actor, producer and director, was born in Seattle and married to Katharine Cornell, 1898-1974, the glamorous German-born actress.
4. This was also the case offstage: the emotional tangles of the play were reflected in real life, as, staying with a family in Cleveland, Noel fell hopelessly in love with the young son of the household.
5. Tickets for the first night of Design for Living were $11, $9 more than the average. Coward’s weekly salary was reported to be $5000, while the Lunts each received $7000. The discrepancy was because Noel was also getting a 10 per cent author’s royalty.