Free from love’s illusion, my heart is my own; I travel alone.
Noel Coward, ‘I Travel Alone’
IN March 1934, Noel Coward, Jack Wilson, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne formed a partnership as Transatlantic Presentations Inc., initially to produce S. N. Behrman’s Biography. It was a ‘friendly agreement which provided that thereafter all were eligible for partnerships in any stage venture in which any one of them was involved’. Funds were paid into production accounts in London and New York for the purpose; ‘the extent of the participation of any of the four in any one play is elastic, depending upon the relative enthusiasms of individual partners for the play in question’.
Coward was not enthusiastic about appearing in Behrman’s comedy of American manners, but its similarity to his own work (it concerned a much-courted portrait painter) suggested that he should direct it. He cast Ina Claire and Laurence Olivier in the leads, and although business was initally good, largely due to the draw of Coward’s name, its disappointing run boded ill for one half of Transatlantic Presentations, the new Noel Coward-John C. Wilson company, set up to replace Noel’s arrangement with Cochran. Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, the rising young theatrical impresario in charge of the production, pronounced it a ‘ “dis-ah-ster” . . . he lengthened the vowel into a moan of despair’.
Financing his own productions proved a mixed benefit for Coward: the increased control was welcome, but all depended on persuading others to invest, no easy task. Dramatists had an advantage over producer-managers: they could write a number of plays and absorb the failure rate without having risked their own money. But Coward was now reinvesting in himself, a gamble which might lead to greater profits or might plunge him into debt. Profits made on one production could be wiped out by the failure of another, but Coward was to some extent insured against such loss; even if his plays took only a few hundred pounds a week, he was entitled to his stipulated percentage of the gross receipts; as he pointed out when he was congratulated on some newly acquired property, ‘Yes, it was bought entirely out of my failures.’
Coward was intending to appear on Broadway that year in another playwright’s work, that of Keith Winter, with whom he was romantically involved. Winter, six years Coward’s junior, had been a schoolmaster before his play, The Rats of Norway, set in a Northumbrian preparatory school, achieved success in 1933. Directed by Raymond Massey, it starred Gladys Cooper and Laurence Olivier in what the American reviewers would call ‘a turgid affair concerning repressed and misdirected sex impulses in an English school’.
Fair-haired, fresh-faced and earnest-looking, Winter had planned to become an ‘acrobatic dancer’ until a rugby injury ‘dispelled my dreams’. Oxford-educated, Winter, who was a friend of G. B. Stern’s, was not a typical companion for Coward, but their affair was intense and apparently tempestuous. After the success of Winter’s The Shining Hour in 1934 – again with Gladys Cooper, a tale of jealousy set in a Yorkshire farmhouse – Coward agreed to appear in his third play, The Ringmaster. But illness would prevent Coward from fulfilling his promise and it was not produced until the following year, with Laurence Olivier as the bitter and sardonic wheelchair-bound protagonist, not a part with which Noel would have been happy. It was perhaps a lucky escape for him, as the play closed within a week. Considering the speed with which Noel plunged into his next romantic intrigue, it seems that the affair with Winter ended abruptly and unhappily; there is no further mention of him in Coward’s extant diaries or letters, nor does he allude to their relationship. (Winter later became a film scriptwriter, working on Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes in 1948, and in Hollywood as a contract writer. He died in New Jersey in 1985.)
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Coward had other commitments in 1934; that April he accepted the presidency of the Actors’ Orphanage charity, and decided to play a more active role than had his predecessor, Gerald du Maurier. The orphanage, Langley Hall, was home to some who were not really orphans but illegitimate children of members of the theatrical profession, often with living parents who could not afford to look after them or did not want to. A distinct stigma attached to the place; Roy Williams, who was there from 1929 to 1940, has only recently been able to admit it. He tells a fascinating tale of Noel rescuing a modernday Dotheboys Hall. ‘When I went in 1929 [aged five] it was a pretty awful place, really Dickensian and badly-run . . .’ A teacher named Austin ruled with the cane, and just before Coward’s first visit had given some young offenders an unprecedented twenty-four strokes; the school had risen in protest, the children going ‘on strike’. Noel was ‘horrified to discover that former presidents had . . . just let it run under this awful character, Mr Austin’. He took direct action, and in 1938 the school moved to Silverlands in Chertsey, Surrey, with a new headmaster, and ‘the place became much kinder. We also became co-educational. Before, if a boy was seen looking at a girl, that was cause for him to be punished . . . it was very daring for that time – not many orphanages, or private schools even, became co-ed.’ Coward also introduced school uniforms, and trips to see the Lord Mayor. ‘Then there was the Theatrical Garden Party [which raised funds for the orphanage], to which the Duke and Duchess of Kent were always dragged along.’ Coward would travel down with Lorn Loraine, often bringing other committee members, such as Evelyn Laye; he even prevailed upon Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who donated a home movie camera to the school.
Uncharitable tongues had it that Coward’s attentions were not entirely altruistic; Roy Williams thought it possible that ‘he did it in the hope that this would be his contribution to charity and society and that there might be some reward for that . . . and when he realised there wasn’t going to be any, his interest dropped’. As with any high-profile celebrity, there were many approaches to Coward from charities and individuals. His employee Bert Lister said that Lorn Loraine ‘saved him a lot of money. She used to forward the begging letters he got – at least ten a week – to the charity offices on Queen Anne’s Gate. And they were grateful because they wanted customers. It saved Noel thousands.’
Nor was his vigorous approach entirely popular at the orphanage: ‘I think Noel hurt some committee members’ feelings, like C. Aubrey Smith. He wanted to be a working president . . .’ There were other problems too; although Williams recalls no sexual indiscretions by the staff, Cole Lesley noted that one master appeared rather too interested in the girls’ evening baths. When he began comparing them to ‘pretty little pink seals’, he was urged to take another post.
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The film of Design for Living also appeared that year, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and scripted by Ben Hecht. Starring Gary Cooper (in Coward’s role), Miriam Hopkins and Frederic March, it ignored the subtleties of the play in favour of a straightforward romantic triangle. The characters were Americanised, and their names changed – Gilda became Gilda (pronounced ‘Jilda’) Farrell; Leo, George Curtiss; and Otto, Thomas Chambers. Cooper’s slow-speaking masculine manner, even when clad in well-cut suits, could not convey the sophistication of Leo; nor did Lubitsch intend him to. The result was innocent and ‘larky’, with no relevance to Coward’s original themes. There had been, wrote one critic, ‘a partial cleansing for the screen of a stage story notorious for its wealth and variety of moral code infractions’. So little remained of Noel’s original script that Hecht joked, ‘There’s only one line of Coward’s left in the picture – see if you can find it.’ Variety judged it ‘an improvement on the original’ – impudence made bearable for the author by the £10,000 fee.
In the meantime, Coward was back in Malta with the Mountbattens. Edwina Mountbatten was still recovering from the bad publicity of her libel action against the People, which claimed she’d had an affair with Paul Robeson. She denied even having met Robeson, a lie which hurt the black actor and singer. Society gossip about the two was rife, and was made worse by the high-profile court case (forced on the Mountbattens by Buckingham Palace). Coward sympathised with Edwina because, bizarrely, Essie Robeson, Paul’s wife, had believed herself to be in love with Coward himself. The Robesons first met Coward in 1926, probably introduced by their mutual friend Rebecca West. ‘The play was trash,’ wrote Essie when she saw The Vortex, ‘but he emanated a sweetness and personality right over the footlights.’ According to Essie’s diary, she saw a lot of Coward during the winter of 1930-1, when he was the recipient of her woes about her marital difficulties with Robeson. His attentions are evident from a letter Robeson wrote to Essie in January 1931: ‘I had a talk with NC. We talked frankly as he said he knew all the facts . . . He was noncommittal, and rightly so. After all, his business with you is your concern, not mine . . .’ Robeson’s biographer, Martin Duberman, found ‘no evidence of a sexual affair . . . Nonetheless, the oblique reference in Paul Robeson’s letter leaves the matter in doubt.’
Essie and Noel ‘stopped traffic’ when they arrived together at the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People)1 annual ball at the Savoy. ‘Noel danced with me often. He was conspicuously attentive . . . to the confoundment of all those present.’ The young black woman was flattered by the attentions of the most eligible young playwright-about-town, and there was reflected glamour in the dalliance for him too. But their relationship, although intimate, was probably platonic, and Coward may well have become embarrassed by her attentions, although not as embarrassed as Edwina Mountbatten by stories of association with Essie’s husband. It was said she had come out to Malta to evade the continuing rumours, but even there the officers’ wives knew of the affair and there was a distinct coolness towards her.
Coward left Conversation Piece on 23 April, and joined the Mountbattens at the Villa Medina in Malta, with King Alfonso of Spain and a thirteen-year-old Prince Philip, future Duke of Edinburgh. The lavish lifestyle of the Mountbattens suited Noel. He enjoyed the sun and the warm, clear water, zooming about on the Lizard, Mountbatten’s green motor boat, attempting to water-ski and picnicking on the rocks at Gozo. He wore little but brief shorts and a hat he had bought in China. Coward’s thank-you letter epitomised the flirtatious relationship he maintained with Mountbatten:
I couldn’t have enjoyed my holiday more . . . Please ask Peter [Murphy, Mountbatten’s great friend] not to foul the guest cabin in any beastly way because I do so want to use it again . . . Please be careful of your zippers, Dickie dear, and don’t let me hear of any ugly happenings at Flotilla dances, Love and kisses, Bosun Coward
(I know Bosun should be spelt ‘Boatswain’ but I don’t care!)
Coward had promised Cochran he would return to Conversation Piece to rally a flagging box office in the latter part of the run, and he reluctantly went back to London. But after just twelve performances Noel collapsed mid-performance and was operated on the next day for acute appendicitis. With no pressing work until the autumn, and in need of further convalescence, Coward decided on another holiday, the summer being closed season in the theatre. Chartering a yacht, the Mara, and a crew, Coward set sail for Cannes. Aboard was a new friend, a handsome young actor named Louis Hayward.
They had met two years previously when Hayward was appearing in Another Language at the Lyric Theatre. In late 1933 Coward had cast him as Simon Bliss in a revival of Hay Fever at the Shaftesbury Theatre, and subsequently as the Marquis of Sheere in Conversation Piece, where the young actor made a definite impression in tight white breeches and kiss-curl coiffure. Ten years younger than Coward, Hayward (whose real name was Seafield Grant, but whom Noel called ‘Sugar’) had been born in Johannesburg. He had appeared frequently in the West End in parts suited to attractive young men and had also begun a successful film career in Britain. Coward found him irresistible; a sequence of photographs in Noel’s album show Hayward riding and leaping fences, romantic in shirtsleeves and breeches.
But what ought to have been a romantic cruise ended in disaster. Having sailed along the Italian coast, they anchored off Corsica at L’île Rousse, where a violent storm blew up while they were ashore, breaking the yacht against the rocks; Noel and the crew had to walk twenty miles to find help. In his memoirs, Coward dramatises the scene with a ‘fainting French Captain’, and himself taking the boat’s wheel, ‘upheld by gin and my ex-appendicitis truss’. In fact, Hayward and he merely waded out to the wreckage the following day to retrieve what they could. Noel had lost his typewriter, passport, money, clothes and, more importantly, the manuscript of his autobiography.
Much was made of the incident in the press on both sides of the Atlantic; it was always good to maintain one’s public profile, especially if the story could be elaborated. Newspapers reminded their readers that the world’s most renowned contemporary playwright had only recently recovered from an operation during which he was ‘in a critical condition for several days’. Friends had visions of a distrait Noel returning shoeless, but he was snapped in Paris looking suave in a spotted cravat, with not a lock of hair out of place. Of the fact that Louis Hayward had been on board (a scenario straight out of Home Chat), no mention was made.
The usual debonair Mr Coward arrived back in London to produce Theatre Royal. George Kaufman’s and Edna Ferber’s comedy, like Hay Fever, portrayed a histrionic family, this time the Barrymores, a veritable stage dynasty. Marie Tempest, Madge Titheradge and Brian Aherne2 were cast, but Aherne was contracted in Hollywood. Until he could be released – in time for the London opening – Laurence Olivier would take the part on tour. Despite receiving £100 a week, Olivier was not pleased, but did it as a favour for Coward. However, he was so successful that Coward persuaded him to take the play into the West End. It looked set for capital city success, provided the strange Indian character who came onstage in Edinburgh, muttering mock Hindi, didn’t cause the entire cast to break down in giggles when they realised their director had made an unscripted entrance.
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On 2 November Coward and Edwina Mountbatten were photographed at Southampton Docks, she in leopardskin coat and hat, he in smart suit with a cigarette in his fist. Coward had been invited by the Governor-General of Canada, Lord Bessborough, to stay with him at Government House in Ottawa; Lady Louis was still feeling the backlash of her libel suit, and vanished from society for the next few months. They were joined by Bessborough’s wife and young son, who had been on holiday in England, and were good friends of the Mountbattens.
From Canada, Coward went to the Lunts’ farm in Wisconsin, to discuss the new project, Point Valaine; the three of them arrived in New York on 19 November. Jack Wilson had negotiated for Noel the purchase of a house at Saco Hill, Fairfield, Connecticut, which he had seen while its former tenant, Edna Ferber, was still living there, and from this new base, Coward began work on rehearsals for Point Valaine, the fourth production he directed that year. New York had not been starved of Coward during his absence. Home Chat had opened in Brooklyn (with Philip Tonge among the cast), and Conversation Piece opened at the 44th Street Theater with Yvonne Printemps, where it played for six months to packed houses, despite Brooks Atkinson’s calling it ‘passing dull’. And on 27 October, Noel was heard for the first time over the American airwaves (so the New York Post maintained) when WABC transmitted a Coward entertainment from London.
Of Point Valaine, Coward wrote that he was ‘honestly attempting to break . . . new ground by creating a group of characters and establishing an atmosphere as far removed as possible from anything I have done before’. The play was certainly a new departure for him, evoking Maugham in its heady tropical atmosphere, with the thwarted passions of a female hotel owner, her Slav lover and various other guests. As if to stress the difference between this and earlier, more innocuous offerings, Coward sprinkled his play with bad language – ‘bastard’ and ‘bloody’ – this was an American production, and not subject to Lord Cromer’s blue pencil. There is also a sexually ambiguous male couple, and a visiting writer, Mortimer Quinn, perhaps an evocation of the play’s spiritual father, Somerset Maugham, a man whom Coward would see as increasingly bitter even as he plundered the world for material. ‘ . . . I always affect to despise human nature. My role in life is so clearly marked: cynical, detached, unscrupulous, an ironic observer and recorder of other’s people’s passions. It is a nice façade to sit behind, but a trifle bleak . . .’ He also avers, ‘What discourages me most is confusion. The dreary capacity of the human race for putting the right labels on the wrong boxes.’
The play is an unsatisfactory piece which fails to explore the questions it raises. It was to be a vehicle for the Coward–Lunt–Fontanne talents, but the Lunts were reluctant to appear in it, and Lynn predicted it would run no longer than six weeks. ‘Nonsense! Absolute nonsense!’ said Coward. Yet his leading lady’s premonition was confirmed on the first night by a ‘soggy and comatose if not actually hostile’ audience. The Lunts were received coolly when they came on; Coward, Wilson and Calthrop sat at the back ‘and watched the play march with unfaltering tread down the drain’. Dickie Fellowes-Gordon was there with Elsa Maxwell: ‘the public didn’t like it. They didn’t like the Lunts not being perfect, and neither of their characters were very nice . . . There was a big party afterwards and he said “Oh darlings, what a flop!” ’ It was the only failure of the Lunts’ joint career.
Coward admitted that the play was written ‘out of the innocent desire to create two whopping good parts for the Lunts, which I did, and failed to write a good enough story to show off these parts. The result was half-hearted, neither comedy nor tragedy . . .’ George Jean Nathan thought it ‘the kind of thing . . . Maugham might ironically write to order for Hollywood, provided that Hollywood paid him $100,000 in advance, plus agent’s commission, and provided, in addition, that he was recovering from a prolonged jag and had a slight touch of the ‘flu . . . It is impossible to believe that Mr Coward, a fellow of some humour, could have written such zymotic bilge with a straight face . . .’ The only actor to get good reviews was Louis Hayward, whom Coward had imported to play Martin, a handsome young aviator. When the play opened on Broadway on 16 January 1935, he was singled out for praise, a personal success which helped launch Hayward in Hollywood.
Coward, too, was beginning to find the silver screen an interesting prospect. He needed the money, as a letter written by Lorn Loraine to Violet Coward indicates: ‘We have got to go very, very easy on money and economise rigidly wherever it is possible’, she warned. ‘Mind you, I am pretty sure the shortage is only temporary and would never have arisen if it were not for the fact that all Noel’s personal earnings have to go into a special tax account as soon as they are received . . . Both the bank accounts have overdrafts and there is very little coming in just now – a good deal less than has to go out.’
The Scoundrel (originally entitled Miracle on 49th Street), which Coward agreed to film in the early weeks of 1935 for a fee of $5000 (less than he would have earned in Hollywood, but he was promised a share of the profits), was written by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, a team already celebrated for The Front Page, successfully filmed in 1930. Hecht was also responsible for the Design for Living script, for which Coward presumably forgave him. In 1935 Hecht and MacArthur took over the Astoria studio in Long Island City:3 one of the few East Coast studios remaining, it was close to New York, and therefore ‘a holiday from Hollywood’. The two writers committed themselves to produce, write and direct four films, but the ‘Astoria Experiment’ became an excuse for ‘a two year party that kept going seven days a week’. Hecht and MacArthur stuck up life-size female nude photos in their offices, hired prostitutes as secretaries, and had large lunches sent from plush Manhattan restaurants. In this schoolboy atmosphere, Coward made his first serious appearance on film. The result won Hecht and MacArthur an Academy award, and is the one movie of any interest made during the Astoria experiment.
Noel’s decision to infiltrate a medium he had previously scorned may have been prompted by the financial rewards, but he maintained otherwise for the benefit of the press. ‘What really induced me to try them’, he said when asked why he had suddenly decided to make films, ‘was because I wanted the experience . . . I might be terrible. I’ve taken some screen tests and I don’t think I’m quite at ease yet in front of the cameras . . .’ This pleading evaporated as soon as the Coward confidence was asserted; his performance for The Scoundrel remains a unique record of the charisma he possessed, then at its devastating height. Part of the reason for the impression he made may have been the control he had over the film’s production; Hecht and MacArthur’s delight at having secured Coward made them accord him consultancy rights on each scene before it was shot. He did not add or alter dialogue; he was eager only to see the ‘rushes’ at the end of each day to judge his performance. The literary flavour of the screenplay had attracted him, and cameos by Alexander Woollcott and Edna Ferber introduced a Round Table atmosphere, stressed by Manhattan location shots (such as a scene filmed in the Hapsburg House restaurant). The film also derived visual strength from the camerawork of Lee Garmes, who had shot Morocco, Dishonoured and Shanghai Express for von Sternberg.
Shooting began on 23 January. Coward’s first scene, as an egotistical publisher, Anthony Mallare, has him emerging from the shower, making his screen debut proper naked (though half-hidden), his wiry body wet and his dark hair hanging over his face in an angular fringe. As he slicks his hair into its appointed place, and dresses in a sharp double-breasted suit and bow-tie, the image is focused: Noel Coward appears, theatre idol, would-be screen god. As a ‘literary Don Juan’, Mallare seduces a young poet, Cora Moore (played by Julie Haydon): ‘Before telling a woman I love her, I rattle my tail six times . . . ’, he says. ‘ . . . I regard heaven as unfit for all women under forty’, he quips, laughing languidly to himself. For the first time an audience had a chance to see his facial mannerisms close up, his barely extant upper lip drawn into a supercilious grimace. It contributes greatly to the air of urbanity Coward exudes in The Scoundrel; a svelte panther in Brooks Brothers and a carnation.
Cora’s boyfriend, Decker, tries to shoot Mallare, but the bullet bounces off his cigarette case. Yet Mallare gets his just deserts when his plane crashes; in stormy seas, his drowned body floats, and Coward’s voice intones that his spirit will not rest until he finds one person to cry for him. A phantom in a black leather coat, he searches the bleak streets of the soulless city, and finds Cora looking after the desperately ill Decker, who shoots Mallare and then himself. This time the bullets pass right through Mallare, and Decker falls down dead. Mallare appeals to God, ‘I want no mercy for myself, none, but I do ask for them. Give them back what I took . . .’ Decker comes to life; Cora turns to Mallare, tears in her eyes, thanking him; Mallare looks to heaven – he is saved.
The Scoundrel is high drama, an odd mixture of German expressionism and Hollywood glamour, but Coward succeeds in transcending fantasy with a convincing, if camp, performance. It established him as an unlikely hearthrob: American newspapers anticipated that ‘Noel Coward’s feminine following . . . will soon be nationwide. For he’s in the movies now!’4 (The newly formed Legion of Decency did not think so, condemning the film. Even in America, Noel discovered, there was no escaping the righteous.)
Coward was equivocal about the experience, and was frustrated by the filming process. ‘The picture was made quickly and fairly efficiently; most of its speed and efficiency being due to Lee Garmes, the cameraman’, he wrote. ‘The direction of Charlie MacArthur and Ben Hecht was erratic, and I, who had never made a picture before, was confused and irritated from the beginning to the end . . . I made a success in it and so did everyone concerned, but I still wish that it and they and I had been better.’ Some critics thought the film too full of ‘unpleasant characters . . . a pretentious straining for bizarre effects’; but others judged it ‘a singularly adult picture, a most devastating study of New York literary celebrities’, which ‘builds to an end as emotional, as mystic, and as forceful as any motion pictures have yet offered us’.
The Scoundrel received a muted response in America, although its idiosyncratic character guaranteed continued showings in ‘art house’ cinemas. Modern critics have called the film ‘Coward’s finest screen performance’, claiming that ‘he is perfectly cast, and brings to the part an icy composure and malevolent charm’; it remains a resonant evocation of the actor’s charisma, despite his reservations. ‘I thought I was very good,’ said Coward years later, ‘in the parts I was dead.’
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Coward set off by train for Hollywood, where he made friends with Ruth Chatterton and Joan Crawford, and found a floodtide of film offers. He was to make a second film for Hecht and MacArthur (Down to Their Last Yacht, into which he had ploughed his share of the profits on The Scoundrel), and was being considered for the part of the Trappist monk in David Selznick’s The Garden of Allah, co-starring Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich saw The Scoundrel in California and noted the good work of ‘her’ cameraman, Lee Garmes. She later rang Coward in England to congratulate him on his performance (‘I act with an incredible swiftness once my feelings are involved’), but when she gave her name, Coward hung up. Dietrich called back and quickly ‘said a few words about his film’, quoting part of the dialogue. Noel explained that he ‘was afraid of . . . a certain kind of practical joker and had believed that someone using my name wanted to play a dirty trick on him. We talked for a long time and were friends from then on’, Dietrich wrote.
Dietrich had a magnetic attraction for Coward, as for many of her homosexual fans: they were ‘kinder, nicer than “normal men’ ”, she said. ‘Our relationship repeatedly astonished me, because my interests were completely different from his. I was neither brilliant nor especially witty, so I didn’t like invitations to soirées. I didn’t belong to his milieu. I had other habits, shunned the limelight, and didn’t view the world as he did. Despite all that, we were inseparable.’
Their friendship grew: Dietrich became Coward’s glamorous cab service, picking him up or dropping him off on his visits to Hollywood or New York, and they shared each other’s intrigues and romances. Marlene was sought for her opinion of a dress rehearsal, ‘Marlenah! I must not appear effeminate in any way. Do be a dear – watch out for anything that could be considered less than “butch”, if you see me being at all “queer”, tell me immediately.’ But their relationship remained demarcated by each other’s star quality. Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, commented, ‘For Dietrich, it was his style, brilliant success, and the “Noel Coward”, as he lived his own creation of himself, that was her “chum”. The sensitive, vulnerable, serious man, so easily lonely, hidden so well beneath the throwaway charm – him, she never took the time to find . . . If she had . . . it would have confused her.’
Through Dietrich and other film stars, Coward gained an insight into the film industry which confirmed its dubious attractions. In 1935 he nearly succumbed to a lucrative few years in the movies, when the monolithic giants of the Californian dream industry tried to ensnare him. But Edna Ferber advised, ‘What is there in it for you? You are a writer. Go away and write.’ Without even staying to see the result of the screen test he had done for Irving Thalberg, and abandoning the proposed Hecht–MacArthur film, Noel sailed for Honolulu on the Tatsuta Maru. He restarted his autobiography, and after joining up with the Dillinghams in Honolulu, sailed on to China, and thence to Japan and Bali.
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Coward was due to deliver Present Indicative to the New York publisher Nelson Doubleday that autumn; he was also working on a series of one-act plays, nine altogether, to run in varying order on three consecutive nights at the theatre. It was a bold idea, risky and innovative, to be called Tonight at 8.30. By late summer he was back at Goldenhurst, describing to Gertrude Lawrence the elaborate new vehicle he had created for their talents. The playlets not only had wonderful roles for both of them but their variety would avoid the dreaded boredom. He had finished writing all ten by the end of August, and rehearsed them with Lawrence in Goldenhurst’s Big Room. Then followed full cast rehearsals in London, to open in Manchester and with a nine-week provincial tour before opening in London.
Coward’s serious work of recent years invested Tonight at 8.30 with maturity. The most successful piece was ‘Still Life’, a tale of suburban extra-marital love which gained classic status as the 1945 film Brief Encounter. In ‘Still Life’, the roles of the buffet manageress and the stationmaster are more prominent as a happier, working-class counterpoint to the doomed affair between the doctor and the housewife who meet by chance on a railway platform; that Laura’s and Alec’s love is seen as superior to the working-class affair perhaps illustrates Coward’s endemic snobbery. ‘The Astonished Heart’ also involved extra-marital relations, with an acclaimed psychologist reluctantly drawn into an affair, leaving his wife distraught; the play ends with his suicide. But it lacks ‘Still Life’s’ empathy, and the Cowardian dialogue which elsewhere delighted in its formality here seems stilted.
A third playlet, ‘Fumed Oak’, is ‘an unpleasant comedy’, in which a browbeaten husband asserts himself in a devastating speech and slaps his wife. Only occasionally witty, its characters are ‘nothing more than a music-hall joke’, again at the expense of the working classes, as well as being evidence of Coward’s stereotyping of women as harridans who oppress men. (The silliness of the conventional women in Coward’s work crosses class barriers: Doris in ‘Fumed Oak’ has her upper-class equivalents – Mrs Whittaker in Easy Virtue and Sybil in Private Lives. Bound by their (heterosexual) prejudices, they are inferior to the mannish Amanda and Larita, and are the bane of men’s lives.) ‘Ways and Means’ is another ‘light comedy’ – a pair of unlucky casino gamblers, Toby and Stella, conspire with a burglar to restore their fortunes; while ‘Shadow Play’ concerned more Mayfair marriage crises, with three good Coward songs and a decidedly experimental fantasy scene (‘Small talk, small talk, with other thoughts going on behind’5).
Of the comedies, ‘Hands Across the Sea’ is one of the most successful, an unmistakable caricature of the Mountbattens; Noel was using his society friends as fodder for his imagination. Lady Maureen Gilpin is ‘a smart, attractive woman . . . nicknamed Piggie by her intimates’ who insists that her reluctant husband – Commander Peter Gilpin (‘tall and sunburned and reeks of the Navy’) – help entertain unexpected visitors. The forgotten guests recall the bad-mannered Bliss household of Hay Fever. ‘Everyone’s making such a noise’, says Piggie to the telephone. ‘The room’s filled with the most dreadful people.’ It is one of Coward’s funniest pieces and in the opinion of Terence Rattigan was ‘the best short comedy ever written’.
‘Red Peppers’ is a pure music-hall joke, an excuse for Coward and Lawrence to send up the theatre of their youth with basic humour (the Lord Chamberlain objected to ‘farting’ and ‘raspberries’), and was the outright populist piece of the collection. ‘Family Album’, ‘a sly satire on Victorian hypocrisy, adorned with an unobtrusive but agreeable musical score’, was spiked when George V died; its black jokes about death necessitated replacement with ‘We Were Dancing’. This tropical love tangle set on the fictitious South Sea island of Samolo, is ‘little more than a curtain-raiser’. The orphan of the suite, ‘Star Chamber’, reverted to the theatre for its setting, with various actors at a meeting of the Garrick Haven Fund (mirroring some of the excesses of the administration of the Actor’s Orphanage). It did not appeal, and was performed just once, for a Saturday matinee.
*
Tonight at 8.30 (‘We Were Dancing’, ‘The Astonished Heart’ and ‘Red Peppers’) opened in Manchester on 15 October 1935. In his programme notes, Noel suggested that the ‘short play, having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or overpadding’, deserved resurrection. ‘From our point of view behind the footlights . . . the monotony of repetition will be reduced considerably, and it is to be hoped that the stimulus . . . the company . . . will derive from playing several roles instead of only one will communicate itself to the audience.’ His ploy worked. The production took £26,000 in nine weeks in the provinces before it opened in the West End.
The tour was suspended for Christmas, which Coward and Jeffrey Amherst spent in Scandinavia. Back in her home country was Greta Garbo, the reclusive superstar, and (to the tabloid public) putative lover of Noel Coward. The pair had probably met through George Cukor, and by January 1936 the New York Times was printing rumours of an affair. Such publicity was not unwelcome as it diverted attention from their individual predilections. Noel saw Garbo’s reclusiveness as a silly pose; it was not an attitude he would tolerate. About to enter a Christmas party, Garbo balked, ‘Believe me, Noel, I really and truly cannot go in, I cannot face it.’ ‘Yes you bloody well are going in’, said Noel, ringing the bell and pushing the actress into the house. As with Marlene Dietrich, he flattered her artfully, and appeared eligible without being too eligible. ‘My little bridegroom’, the inconstant, teasing star jokingly called Coward, saying she ‘wished the newspapers were right’.
Tonight at 8.30 opened in London at Bernstein’s Phoenix Theatre, which Noel now regarded as ‘his own’. ‘The Astonished Heart’ was sandwiched between the period whimsy of ‘Family Album’, and the theatrical pastiche of ‘Red Peppers’. What would the critics say to this new form of entertainment? The Observer (in the voice of Ivor Brown) thought the ‘variety of the programme . . . a tribute to Mr Coward’s interest in experiment. The presentation of it is a real piece of work.’ The Times did not think much of ‘Family Album’ or ‘The Astonished Heart’, but acclaimed ‘Red Peppers’ as the ‘theatrical success of the evening . . . a robust end to an otherwise slim or perilous entertainment’. The Daily Mail called it ‘second-rate entertainment’.
Once again, the critics and the public diverged in their opinions, as box-office business continued to be good. If the press had found Tonight at 8.30 an untidy mix, they were wrong, Noel declared. ‘I love criticism,’ he said, only half in jest, ‘just so long as it’s unqualified praise.’
*
On 20 January, George V was on his death-bed, the wireless silent save for a ticking clock. That evening, Tonight at 8.30 carried on regardless, but at the end, as the audience was about to leave, Coward came out front in his dressing gown and announced the king’s death. The photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer was there: ‘He signalled for the orchestra to strike up and the entire audience stood to attention (including my friend who was a dedicated communist) and led by Noel Coward sang the National Anthem. I couldn’t help thinking at the time that [he] must have been in his element . . .’
Tonight at 8.30 continued its run, with the usual arguments between Coward and Lawrence. When it was agreed that Jack Wilson would present the show in the States, Coward cabled: EVERYTHING LOVELY STOP CRACKING ROW WITH GERTIE OVER ‘HANDS ACROSS THE SEA’ LASTING SEVEN MINUTES STOP HER PERFORMANCE EXQUISITE EVER SINCE. Lily Taylor, then wardrobe mistress for H. M. Tennent, said, ‘ “Oh, they hated each other! Noel hated her!” She said Gertie couldn’t care less about anything, and she spent all her money and had a very jolly time. She was a lovely woman, and everybody adored her. But of course, Coward was beastly to her . . . he did scream at people . . .’
As others close to the Master testified. Leonard Cole went to work for Coward in 1936. Then aged twenty-seven, he worked as a shop assistant in Kent. Slight but presentable, Cole was living in a bedsit in Chester Row in London when a series of coincidences led to his being told that Noel Coward was looking for someone to work for him. The following Monday Lorn Loraine interviewed Cole at Burton Mews, and called Coward for his approval; Cole was engaged as a cook-cumdogsbody for a probation period, and Noel took little notice of his new employee, save to remark on his rather mincing walk. But soon Cole distinguished himself by providing good feed-lines. ‘What would you say to a little fish?’ he asked one lunchtime. ‘I should say Good Morning, little fish’, replied Coward.
Noel’s trust in ‘Coley’, as he became, grew, and Cole’s absolute loyalty to the point of subservience made him the perfect factotum. The change in Cole’s name came about partly as a result of his wish to be seen as something more than a ‘cook-valet’. By altering his surname to his Christian name, ‘Cole’, which Coward called him, became a more acceptable appellation.6
His ability to deal with the often erratic behaviour of his master soon made Cole an indispensable member of the team, but his first experience of those darker moods must have been terrifying. Coward’s temper had always been thin, and he had not grown out of his childish tantrums; he was quite capable of throwing himself face down on a sofa or bed and beating the cushions with his fist when people or plans thwarted him. Cole records cries of ‘I wish I were dead’ and ‘What am I to do?’ as Coward lay supine – often naked – wallowing in self-pity. His status and celebrity allowed him to get away with it, but that did not make the behaviour acceptable to those who witnessed his irrational fits of pique. Cole Lesley admitted to his master’s selfishness: ‘It was total, but if he only thought of himself and getting what he wanted when he wanted it, this was because he very genuinely believed other people did, or should do, the same and were fools if they didn’t.’
His selfishness would approach megalomania, born of early success and an artifical life within the theatre. ‘He was . . . a vain man’, Rebecca West said. ‘He talked constantly about himself, thought about himself, catalogued his achievements, evaluated them, presented to listeners such conclusions as were favourable, and expected, and waited for applause.’ (Though she added, ‘His sensitivity knew this and was shocked, and he regularly rough-housed his own vanity by considering himself in a ridiculous light. This he did for the good of his soul.’) That Coward could not countenance opposition is well-attested, and a vicious instinct for revenge was apparent in his black list and its victims. Age did not assuage this ill-temper, and as the Twenties and Thirties gave way to a less certain future, these characteristics assumed greater importance.
*
Tonight at 8.30 ran for 157 performances, and once more Coward was a social lion. Harold Nicolson recorded an evening at Sibyl Colefax’s. ‘After dinner, Rubinstein plays some Chopin . . . After Rubinstein has played three times, the King crosses the room towards him and says “We enjoyed that very much, Mr Rubinstein.” I am delighted at this, since I was afraid that Rubinstein was about to play a fourth time. It is by this time 12.30 and the King starts saying good-bye. This takes so long that at our end of the room we imagine that he has departed, and get Noel Coward to sing us one of his latest songs. The King immediately returns on hearing this, and remains for another hour, which is not very flattering to Rubinstein.’
In June Coward took off again, for Venice and the Lido. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound brought his boat in (photographed on deck in shorts, Coward’s arm resting chummily on the admiral’s shoulder), and Noel and friends – Doris Castlerosse, Ivor Novello, Douglas Fairbanks and Lady Ashley – went aboard for parties. Lady Castlerosse and Coward were given an open guest list by Sir Dudley and Lady Pound for one party. Castlerosse confided, ‘Noel, I have a dreadful feeling we’ve asked too many queer people.’ Coward reassured her, ‘If we take care of the pansies, the Pounds will take care of themselves.’
At Goldenhurst, weekends were ‘gilded’ that summer. The air show at nearby Lympne was celebrated with a party to which Godfrey Winn brought a new actress, dark-haired, ravishing and sharp-eyed, whom Coward took to at once – Vivien Leigh, who had recently become Laurence Olivier’s lover. One minor actor visiting assumed a major role: Alan Webb, the new focus of Coward’s romantic attentions. The affair with Louis Hayward had ended bitterly; Noel later wrote that it was ‘emphatically not one of the happier episodes of my life’. Hayward’s capacity to make Coward jealous had been well demonstrated when he had a shipboard romance with Natasha Paley, Jack Wilson’s wife-to-be. Hayward subsequently married Ida Lupino, the British film actress and director. Many years later, when Coward was filming at Television City in Hollywood in 1956, Hayward was making a TV series of The Saint on a stage next door; the bitterness had evidently endured, ‘Noel wouldn’t even walk over and talk to him’, recalls Charles Russell.
As with Hayward, Coward provided his new boyfriend with work, in supporting roles in the Tonight at 8.30 plays. Alan Webb was thirty, son of Major Albertoni Webb, and had trained at the Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth (doubtless part of his appeal to Coward) but took up acting instead. John Gielgud remembers Noel’s relationship with Webb, ‘Alan Webb was his best critic, in my opinion . . . Webb was a very caustic and brilliant actor, much under-rated. He was one of the few who dared to oppose Noel.’ ‘Short, masculine, a little rough but definitely camp’, Webb was another of the dark and handsome types Coward fell for. Theirs was a passionate affair which lasted for much of the rest of the decade.
*
On 15 September 1936 Coward’s production (for Transatlantic Presentations) of Jacques Deval’s Mademoiselle opened at Wyndham’s Theatre, with Isabel Jeans, Cecil Parker, Madge Titheradge and Greer Garson. The play did well and with this success behind him Noel sailed to New York, where he and Gertrude Lawrence were to star in Tonight at 8.30. For Lawrence, the departure was near-permanent; she would only once work in Britain again.
Coward had bought Woollcott’s Riverside apartment in the Campanile co-op at 450 East 52nd Street as his new Manhattan pied-à-terre, and there he prepared to take his nine-play show on the road. They opened in Boston, and at the National Theatre on Broadway on 24 November. Critics thought the production a hit-and-miss affair, not least because of pot-luck of the scheduling; Brooks Atkinson advised his readers to ‘consult your . . . favourite astrologist’ before they visited the box office. Coward had stressed to reporters that it would be a limited season; more limited than he knew – he was stricken with laryngitis. At first he missed only a couple of nights, but soon broke down again. His doctor advised that he was suffering from ‘overwork and nervous exhaustion’, and told him the show could not go on.
He had in fact suffered another nervous breakdown, necessitating his return to England. It is noteworthy that Noel never wrote about this period of his life: Present Indicative ends in 1931, Future Indefinite begins in 1939, and there is only a fragment of a third volume, Past Conditional, covering 1932 to 1933. It was a time of personal instability. Jack Wilson’s infidelities had introduced a note of distrust; Coward had his extended family, but love eluded him. His affair with Louis Hayward had ended painfully and now Alan Webb proved difficult to deal with, taunting Coward by bragging of other liaisons.
Such were the pressures that led to this fresh failure of nerve; Coward’s façade of bravery, the glittering exterior he presented to the world, crumbled. This fragile sensitivity was a trait of his fictional characters: Nicky Lancaster; Amanda and Elyot; Gilda, Otto and Leo, and the entertaining quarrelsome dialogue was in real life the evidence of emotional instability. Creativity goes hand in hand with such hypertension; it can tip over into mental instability, as it did with Coward. His breakdowns were escape routes from stress, as were the bouts of foreign travel; the depressive who travels to avoid ennui. That remained the prescription. After returning to England in time for the coronation of George VI (Edward VIII having abdicated, to Coward’s satisfaction), Noel took Alan Webb for a holiday in Nassau, where he had been so happy with Jack in 1931. The arrival of Joyce Carey, and the restorative light and sun, helped to disperse the recent gloom.
*
The rest of the summer was divided between Goldenhurst and Gerald Road, gathering his latest reviews. Present Indicative had been published in March, and reprinted twice within the year. These memoirs, written with style and panache, had the effect of consolidating Coward’s personal myth, which is what certain friends alleged it to be. Esme Wynne-Tyson accused Noel of exaggerating and falsifying parts of his early life; his account of her receiving stolen goods vexed her, and she considered that he wrote merely for effect, with little regard for the truth.
It was as though Coward were conforming to the convention of the first novel as memoir, blurring fact and fiction. Events were jumbled, chronologies ignored, and certain key people misrepresented or omitted. He had not set out to write truth; he was an entertainer and there was no room for pedantry or facts if they slowed the action. Like the Hollywood scriptwriters he professed to despise, Noel edited his life story and presented the highlights: tragedy and drama were there, overlaid with British phlegm. Oddly enough, the one fact which could have been most damning – his homosexuality – was not disguised. Anyone with any knowledge of the theatre world or its rumours could have read between the lines of Present Indicative and made the connections. Nothing is overtly stated – that would have risked legal recourse and, perhaps worse, social estrangement – but there is no mention of an emotional relationship with a woman, save for the closest and most enduring emotional tie in his life, between himself and his mother. His readers did not expect a warts-and-all memoir; biographies of the time (and particularly autobiographies) were cloying and vapid. Coward presented a memoir mercifully free of these faults.
The distinguished novelist and playwright St John Ervine, writing in the Observer, was fascinated. He approved Coward’s courage, integrity, fortune and fame, yet could not envy him, ‘ . . . I doubt if he has had a tenth of the happiness he must seem to the majority of people to possess.’ Present Indicative was a revelation to the critics; Coward was not the man they had thought or hoped. ‘I am amazed and disturbed at the slenderness of his intellectual resources,’ wrote Ervine, wondering if Coward had ‘ever read a great book, seen a fine picture or a notable play, listened to music of worth, observed a piece of sculpture, or taken any interest in even the commonplaces of a cultured man’s life’.7
The two men were friends. Years earlier, Coward had written to Ervine thanking him for a letter of praise, ‘I can’t tell you how very much I appreciated your letter and I’m awfully glad to have proved to you that my real ambition is to write good stuff and not fritter away my talents on flippant nonsense.’ Aware of the critic’s stern demands, he had also said in a letter appreciative of Ervine’s The Wayward Man, ‘When I read a novel like yours it makes me despair of ever writing myself because my imagination doesn’t feel strong enough to reach things which have not actually happened to me – and constant repetitions of Parisian coquettes having cocktails in the Ritz bar are apt to become a bore.’
Ervine and Coward had continued to correspond, Ervine often publishing positive notices of Coward’s plays. But the playwright had not lived up to Ervine’s expectations, and he saw Coward’s facile smartness as a direct result of the war, in the aftermath of which ‘glibness was all’. His proposed antidote was that Coward ‘should become an industrial life insurance agent in Huddersfield, living exclusively on his commission from premiums, and refusing vigorously to speak to anyone with an income of more than ten pounds a week. I think he’d grow if he did that. He must grow. We need a developed Coward.’
Ervine’s optimism was not matched by other critics of Present Indicative. Despite its wide appeal (the book sold 33,000 copies in its first year of publication in America), critical opinion generally despaired of there being anything deeper in the Coward psyche, and Cyril Connolly’s review was perhaps the most incisive, and damning. For Connolly, the book was ‘almost always shallow and often dull’, leaving a picture ‘carefully incomplete, of a success . . . a person of infinite charm and adaptability whose very adaptability, however, makes him inferior to a more compact and worldly competitor in his own sphere, like Cole Porter’. The ironic self-deprecation of Coward’s memoirs did not deflect Connolly’s attack; he found ‘an essentially unhappy man, a man who gives one the impression of having seldom really thought or really lived and is intelligent enough to know it. But what can he do about it? He is not religious, politics bore him, art means facility or else brickbats, love, wild excitement and the nervous breakdown. There is only success, more and more of it, till from his pinnacle he can look down to where Ivor Novello and Beverley Nichols gather samphire on a ledge, and to where, a pinpoint on the sands below, Mr Godfrey Winn is counting pebbles. But success is all there is, and that even is temporary. For one can’t read any of Noel Coward’s plays now . . . they are written in the most topical and perishable way imaginable, the cream in them turns sour overnight – they are even dead before they are turned into talkies, however engaging they may seem at the time. This book reveals a terrible predicament, that of a young man with the Midas touch, with a gift that does not creep and branch and flower, but which turns everything it touches into immediate gold. And the gold melts, too.’
Coward found Connolly’s piece ‘venomous and . . . inaccurate to the point of silliness’; upsetting and incomprehensible. Its tone of condescension marked the end of Noel’s flirtation with the English literati. Recently, Osbert Sitwell had announced in the Sunday Referee that ‘Mr Coward, with his frisky tea-shop dialogues, has gained among nitwits a certain reputation for wit’, and Brian Howard declared, ‘I’ve always felt that Mr Coward’s works could have been written by some tremendously shrewd bird, especially the music.’ Coward nurtured his distrust of the bluestockings and beauty-lovers; the names of Mr Connolly and others were entered in his little black book.
Despite the personal nature of Connolly’s attack (particularly the reference to Noel’s nervous breakdowns as due to ‘love’, which seemed to derive from private knowledge) and the questionable judgements about his plays, there is truth in his assessment of Coward’s life as being predicated on success. There was always the proud boast that he was the man who wrote Cavalcade/Bitter-Sweet/Private Lives, a self-affirming mantra. By such boasts, Coward confirmed what Connolly had written: he was defined by his fame. It was, after all, what Noel Coward had been invented for.
1. Coward and Beatrice Lillie were among the first of their profession to volunteer for a benefit show for the Negro Actors’ Guild on 11 December 1938, helping to raise $25,000 for ‘the ill and needy of the profession’.
2. Brian Aherne (1902–86), British actor who had been in the 1913 production of Where the Rainbow Ends, and who later became a close friend of Coward’s, as well as a lover of both Dietrich and Garbo.
3. Jack Wilson had worked at the studios as an assistant director before he met Coward, and was probably instrumental in the casting of his friend and client in the film.
4. ‘In my private fantasy, I am Noel Coward: brilliant, witty, adored by women’, wrote Alan Jenkins of his youthful self in 1930. ‘I do not yet know that he is homosexual: when I find out, the shock lasts for two days.’
5. Citing this, Kenneth Tynan later claimed that Harold Pinter derived his ‘elliptical patter’ from Coward.
6. Vivian Matalon said, ‘I remember reading one of his books, and he referred to Coley as “my personal servant”. ‘I thought, “What an awful thing to write about anybody” . . . I later asked Coley, and I said, “Did that hurt you?” He said, “More than I can tell you” . . . I think he [Coward] thought that’s what he was . . .’
7. T. S. Eliot remarked, ‘I doubt if Mr Coward has spent one hour in contemplation of the study of ethics’; to which Noel replied, ‘I do not think that would have helped me; but I think it would have done Mr Eliot a lot of good to spend some time in the theatre.’