Much faith is needed to believe in the Immaculate Conception and I find that even more is required for me to believe in my own sixtieth birthday. I still think of myself as irrepressibly precocious, and capable of anything.
Noel Coward, Plays and Players, December 1959
IN May 1958, Coward set off to satisfy a longing he had felt for France. A week later, he was installed at Edward Molyneux’s house, La Vieille Ferme, in Biot, visiting the casino at Cannes, and winning £500. It seemed a good omen for a future life in Europe. ‘I dream nostalgically of Switzerland in snow . . .,’ he wrote, ‘my heart is definitely leaning to the older world.’
The ageing superstars of international society still paraded across the continent in a sometimes desperate attempt to keep up appearances. In Paris the previous year, Coward had found the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton ‘not very drunk but weaving’ in her Ritz suite. Coward had not approved of Cary Grant’s short-lived marriage to Hutton. Now he listened to the world’s richest woman read her poems of loneliness, despair and unrequited love. ‘She is a tragic epitome of “Poor Little Rich Girl” ’, capable of ‘great kindnesses but her money is always between her and happiness.’
Others had taken drastic steps to address the problems of growing old. Coward went to stay at the Villa Mauresque, where Somerset Maugham – now eighty-three, his face a cracked and desiccated old plum – lived in isolated splendour with Alan Searle, who had replaced the reprobate Gerald Haxton. Maugham was still able to dive off the board into his pool, and to gossip endlessly; age would not alter that propensity. But the old man’s bitterness seemed remote in the Mediterranean sun: when he had seen Maugham the previous summer, Coward had been ‘deeply impressed by the charm of old age when it is allied to health and intelligence’. In fact, Maugham had been injected with animal protein by a Swiss doctor, Professor Niehans,1 and professed to be revitalised by the treatment. Robin Maugham recalled his uncle announcing, ‘ “Ner-now, Noel Coward is coming to stay . . . and I derdon’t want him to know I’ve had a goat” . . . That night Noel leaned forward to me. “I must tell you that your uncle really is a remarkable man,” he said. “This afternoon he took me for a walk up the mountainside, and there he was hopping and skipping from boulder to boulder like a mountain goat.” There was an awkward silence.’
Coward and Maugham attended the Frank Sinatra Gala at Monte Carlo, organised by Grace Kelly, at which Noel introduced Sinatra in French. The event was ‘ghastly but successful’, and Noel was not feeling goatlike; he refused to dance at the gala ‘because I even hate walking’, he explained to another guest. ‘I resent having to put one foot in front of the other.’
He discussed his future movements with Cole Lesley. He now found Bermuda dreary and suburban, and thought Jamaica ‘on the turn’; he would begin serious house-hunting in Europe. ‘The life here appeals to me and the climate is temperate. I would not like to live here all the year round, but then I have never liked living anywhere all the year round.’ His dissatisfaction with his current situation came as no news to others. John Gielgud thought ‘he was never the same after leaving England, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. I think that tax business, and the way people reacted to it, shocked him . . . He wasn’t much good as a tax exile. He didn’t do a lot with his money. His houses were commonplace, the food dreadful, the decoration pretty amateurish.’
On Coward’s return to New York, the Herald-Tribune rang for a progress report. ‘It’s my musical year’, he claimed, talking of plans for his ballet for the Festival Ballet company. He also planned an adaptation of another dramatist’s work; perhaps an unwise venture, in the light of After the Ball’s fate. Again in conjunction with Cole Lesley, Coward translated Feydeau’s Occupe-toi d’Amelié, renaming it Look After Lulu. A belle époque boulevard farce, it had been successfully filmed in 1949 by Claude Autant-Lara; for his production, Noel appointed Cyril Ritchard, Sigh No More’s star, as director; Cecil Beaton, fresh from his success with My Fair Lady, as designer. His first choice for Lulu, Shirley MacLaine, was not available, and Carol Channing refused to play a ‘prostitute’; instead Roddy McDowall and Cyril Ritchard recommended a new starlet, Tammy Grimes. Described by Brooks Atkinson as possessing ‘pointed features’ and a ‘squeaky voice’, Grimes recalls that Coward came to see her cabaret act, and asked her to play Lulu. ‘I said, “I’ll do it.” He said, “Don’t you think you’d better read the script first?”, and I said “It’s not necessary. It’s better than this!’ ” Meanwhile, Coward was riding around New York on the back of Roddy McDowall’s Lambretta. ‘He was a wonderful insulter’, recalls McDowall, who was accused of having ‘very common hair’ and of using Noel’s fame. ‘ “Stop trying to climb to success on my shoulders”, he used to say.’
Before Look After Lulu rehearsals, Coward returned to England, celebrating his fifty-ninth birthday by a visit to the theatre with Vivien Leigh. Leigh was drinking heavily, and attacked Noel ‘violently’ for not casting her in Look After Lulu, but the day ended happily with a party thrown by Gladys Calthrop at the house in Cadogan Place which she shared with Jeffrey Amherst. Beatrice Lillie, Joyce Grenfell, Peggy Ashcroft, Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall and Gladys Cooper toasted their friend’s health, a somewhat premature gesture; days later, Coward was struck down with pneumonia. His doctor forbade visitors and telephone calls, and he spent Christmas largely on a diet of beef broth. Having recovered, he flew with Cole Lesley to Geneva. It was now only a matter of time before he would be back in Europe on a semi-permanent basis. He registered as a ‘subsidiary resident’ (subsidiary to Bermuda, where he remained domiciled), which enabled Coward to open a bank account at Crédit Suisse, and thereby to operate more easily in Europe, earning money tax-free. Loel Guinness advised him to buy a substantial property to convince the Swiss authorities that he intended to live there.
Coward liked Geneva, ‘I don’t really mind settling there . . . It’s very near everywhere else . . . attractive in its own right and has much to recommend it.’ The reasons for living in Switzerland – its nearness to everywhere, the tax advantages, and so on – were hardly better than those for buying Spithead Lodge (which he was now determined to be rid of). Despite his professed love of travel, he had come to regret the lack of a stable home. For that, he had only himself to blame.
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Coward had decided to accept a part in Carol Reed’s film of Our Man in Havana. Playing a British agent, he would receive £1000 a day plus expenses; the engagement was for thirteen days. ‘Knowing Carol’s reputation for working over schedule I think I ought to get at least £20,000 out of it.’
There was also time to see Graham Payn in his new part in Brouhaha, ‘a great success. God knows, he had earned it. This, I am sure, is the turning point.’ No sooner was one problem resolved than another arose, in the shape of Vivien Leigh. She was in despair after Olivier had left her, escaping from her unstable behaviour. John Osborne thought Coward ‘possibly more helpful than anyone. His cold eye saw quite correctly that Vivien must reconcile herself to the divorce Olivier was set upon . . . Unlike most of the spectators to the whole miserable indignity of their situation . . . he appeared not to stoop to the silliness of “taking sides”.’
Coward brought the same ‘cold eye’ to bear on other heterosexual relationships, including Osborne’s amatory intrigues. The same objectivity had made him a dramatist, although increasingly this facility seemed not to be employed; it had last surfaced in his unproduced Volcano, perhaps his most intense examination of marital relationships since Private Lives. Coward’s ability to create such works had noticeably declined; he preferred to concentrate on lighter subjects. In New York for the opening of Look After Lulu in New Haven, he was spotted with Ritchard, discussing the production over lunch. ‘Both men were dressed in opulent dark suits with snow-white handkerchiefs peeping from their breast pockets, white shirts and dark ties . . . “It’s r-r-r-really the most innocent play,” said Mr Ritchard, “but it’s got the façade of utter and complete naughtiness . . .” ’ ‘Everyone was convinced that with Cyril directing a play of mine there would be the most ghastly rows’, Coward told the reporter, but maintained, ‘Everybody is as happy as a bird dog.’ Privately, Coward had his reservations about Ritchard’s direction. The first week went well, taking $29,000 in six performances, but when it opened in New York the notices were bad.
Once again, Coward had to face failure. As with Wilde, the comic styles clashed; the plot of Look After Lulu was situation comedy, enough to stifle any subtlety of Coward’s. Ròddy McDowall felt ‘at odds about Lulu . . . Feydeau was a playwright of action, of total farce, and Noel is high comedy, not farce . . . the two of us were having dinner in New York, and I asked him how he managed to survive well over a decade of rejection, from the critics, from every quarter . . . “It’s very simple,” he said, “they’re wrong.” That attitude was . . . wonderful, but the pain must have been enormous.’ A ‘supreme theatrical redundancy, a burlesque of a burlesque’, wrote Kenneth Tynan. ‘Either Mr Coward has fallen among sycophants too affectionate to gainsay him,’ observed Tynan all too accurately, ‘or he has at his fingertips an open-and-shut imposture case.’
After six weeks of declining business, Look After Lulu closed. ‘The general consensus of opinion is that Cyril over-directed it, that Tammy didn’t quite come up to expectations and that Roddy, although an excellent actor, is not intrinsically a comedian’, decided Noel. Ignoring the fact that his cast had pleaded with him to cut the text, he blamed the usual factors: the destructive influence of New York critics, and the stultifying effect of theatre coach parties. Oh, and ‘it was a bit common and lacked coherent style’.
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Retreating to Jamaica to lick his wounds, prior to the shooting of Our Man in Havana, he was joined by Alec and Merula Guinness. ‘Naturally he chose the dates for our visit,’ Guinness wrote, ‘so I found it a little odd to come across a reference to us in his published diaries (a book I suggested to my favourite bookshop would be more suitable on the fiction tables than the non-fiction) saying, just before our arrival, that he hoped we wouldn’t stay too long.’
To Guinness, Coward’s existence seemed predicated on the unreal. When Guinness’s watch, shaving gear and fountain pen were stolen from their bedroom, Cole Lesley ‘nearly had a fit – not about our very minor losses but for fear we might tell Noel. “The master mustn’t know! Promise you’ll never tell him!” . . . any attempt at recovery would cause trouble in the village and there was Noel’s reputation as a kindly and tolerant employer to be considered.’ Later, on the bumpy drive up to Firefly, Noel ran over a goat. ‘He burst into tears, handed over the driving to someone else, and remained greatly dejected for the next few hours. Ten shillings was sent down to the goat’s owner. “Give them ten shillings for a goat,” one of the guests said, “and they’ll stand in the road throwing their children under the wheel of the car.” “I shall never, never drive again!” Noel said, which brought an audible sigh of relief all round.’
Lance Hamilton reinforces Guinness’s impressions. ‘Blue Harbour was beautifully run, mostly by Cole . . . whatever disturbances occurred, and quite a number . . . did, were kept well below the surface . . .’ Coward expected ‘everything to be absolutely one hundred per cent . . . if the tiniest thing goes astray, there is a crisis. The moment he wakes up he expects a smiling attendant to appear with breakfast . . . if the attendant does not appear on the instant, that is a crisis. If guests are late in arriving, or for meals, that is a crisis. Or if guests are late in leaving, that is a double crisis.’
Coward and the Guinnesses flew to Havana, where they were accommodated ‘in a very gilded hotel and given vast over-decorated suites: Noel’s suitably furnished as a Mandarin’s palace’. This was shortly after Castro had taken over from the dictator Batista, ‘and the city was full of excitement and chaos. Rich American businessmen were withdrawing rapidly and there were no tourists . . . Men in the streets would often stop us, pull up a trouser leg to show scars from electric shock torture inflicted by Batista’s police, and then laugh, saying, “Viva Fidel!’ ”
Coward found Carol Reed a ‘charming, courteous and meticulous director’, whose instructions to Noel to play down his expressions and mannerisms would have been useful during The Astonished Heart. Shooting went well; they met Ernest Hemingway with Graham Greene, and were invited to dinner at his house. After eating, Hemingway beckoned to Guinness. ‘ “Come in here,” he growled, “away from the others.” He led the way into his study. “I can’t bear another minute of Noel’s inane chatter. Who’s interested in a bunch of old English actresses he’s picked up from the gutter? Not me. If he wags that silly finger once more I may hit him.” ’
‘I have just finished a new play which is all about old English actresses and will have little or no American appeal’, Coward told Nancy Mitford, chiding his ‘darling pen pal’ for her ‘wicked subversive Americaphobia . . . without America we should have no Coca-Cola, no Marilyn Monroe, and hardly any really good literature about sex’. He had been busy with his own literature: ‘I think I shall dedicate [Pomp and Circumstance] to you . . . [it] is two-thirds done so be prepared.’ In New York, he read his new play, Waiting in the Wings, to Katharine Cornell, Guthrie McClintic and the actress Nancy Hamilton; these Americans, at least, were suitably enthusiastic.
Back in England, he saw Vivien Leigh twice, and A Taste of Honey once, ‘a squalid little piece about squalid and unattractive people. It has been written by an angry young lady of nineteen [Shelagh Delaney] and is a great success.’ Noel professed to find the exponents of the kitchensink style dull at best, whereas John Osborne was positively offensive. The World of Paul Slickey, his musical about a gossip columnist, was ‘appalling from every point of view’. Osborne observed that at the curtain-call, ‘John Gielgud was booing, not waving. So was Coward.’ That summer Coward and Lesley went to Geneva to view properties. Most were highly priced because of the favourable tax position, but Leslie Smith had spotted a chalet advertised in the Telegraph. Coward found the house ‘roomy but fairly hideous’, with wonderful views: below, Lac Léman, with Montreux, Vevey and Lausanne to the west, and on the far side of the lake, Evian and the French Alps. The vista was partly obscured by tall trees which Coward subsequently felled; Ian Fleming commented that only Noel could buy a house in Switzerland without a view, to which he replied, ‘On the contrary – it overlooks a wonderful tax advantage.’ The owners were about to retire to Hindhead, and had been offered £12,000; could Noel match it? He could, and did.
His Chevrolet arrived, shipped over from Jamaica, and he and Cole set off for Monaco, where he won FFr 600,000 at the casino. Such a windfall would prove useful in Switzerland, where the decoration of Les Avants had begun. ‘We have made ourselves dizzy and quite hysterical trying to choose chintzes, carpets, wallpapers.’ Cole Lesley told Leslie Smith ‘that the Master was going mad, spending far too much, and he’d had to cut down on the expenses without Noel knowing’. Lesley substituted haircord carpet for Coward’s choice, ‘Noel wasn’t to know that it was cheaper – he liked it just as well.’
The house – later immodestly dubbed Chalet Coward (or even, in sillier moments, Shilly Chalet) – was filled with the trademarks of a Coward interior: two baby grand pianos, his X-frame chair, and the tin Wings of Time, fixed above the drawing-room mantelpiece where they would provide a visual prop for subsequent photo sessions. The theme was theatrical; a screen was covered in old photographs of Edwardian actresses, and the lavatory was papered with songsheets of Noel’s hits. Upstairs were two floors of bedrooms: Graham’s immediately above the sitting room, and Noel’s above that. His bedroom had the air of a hidden retreat in the eaves (a reminder of Coward’s childhood attics); a clever panel of mirrored doors concealed a study with views across the valley, to the lake and Alps beyond. Even the bathroom had a theatrical effect with blue and white striped pelmets, and a vivid blue shower of ultra-modern design, with jets playing from the sides. But as with Firefly, the views dominated the interior: the sitting-room’s french windows opened on to a sunny balcony, and the lambent alpine light, unfiltered by smog, shone into this newest Coward residence. At sixty, Noel had found a house that would be home.
It seemed odd that he should end up in this most genteel of communities. The Swiss efficiency and the chocolate-box landscape made it an almost artificial setting; it may have been this which most appealed. Les Avants, teetering above Montreux, was also somewhat inaccessible, and the mountains provided a defence, physical and symbolic, against the uncertain modern world. It was no coincidence that the lower slopes of the Alps bore a resemblance to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, for mountains meant remoteness, seclusion and a physical isolation from the clamorous hordes.
Coward returned to London in June, to see Graham Payn and tell him about the new house. Payn had not been happy in Jamaica, preferring city society to island isolation. It sometimes seemed that there was little to keep them together, as they pursued different lives and lovers; yet, whenever he was in England, it was Payn whom he saw first. Coward recorded that they had taken ‘a great shine to the East End and we drive down and go to different pubs’, where Noel was impressed by ‘the exquisite manners of true Cockneys’. According to one close friend, Noel’s East End expeditions were for liaisons of a basic earthiness; he was feasting with panthers, as Wilde had done. He even liked the fact that many of these men did not know who he was. A companion on one such trip recalls that when they introduced themselves to the two men they had picked up, one said that the only Noel he knew was Noel Coward. Coward admitted his identity, but the man refused to believe him, even after he had produced his driving licence.
Noel’s part in Our Man in Havana was completed on set at Pinewood, and the film was released early the following year. Coward was the perfect incarnation of a British secret agent, impeccably (if surreally) dressed, exchanging secrets in a lavatory with the taps running; ‘as inconspicuous as a hippopotamus in a tank of goldfish’, wrote C. A. Lejeune, but she dismissed the idea that Noel ‘stole the show’: ‘Coward, a practised showman, plays him with all his skills precisely as required. It is as stupid to say that he steals the film as to claim that the man with the loudest laugh is the life and soul of the party.’ When the Daily Mail praised him at the expense of Guinness and Carol Reed, Coward conceded, ‘I am very good, the picture is very slow in parts and Alec is dull at moments.’ His excellent reviews heralded a renaissance of his film career, and raised the fees he could charge – an easy way to earn large sums, and a significant source of income for Coward in later life.
After rehearsals in Barcelona (where Noel enjoyed the wild parties that the cast and its entourage threw) and Lausanne, the London Morning ballet was produced at the Festival Hall on 14 July. Noel’s excursion into ‘serious culture’ was unsuccessful; Peter Williams, the designer then working with Anton Dolin, said it looked more like a Cochran revue than a ballet. The Times described it as ‘a succession of varied characters passing outside Buckingham Palace – schoolgirls, teddy-boys, ladies of easy virtue, nuns, a spiv and his family, an old man in his bathchair, and others. The atmosphere is frankly artificial and it is out of date too – so is the music, much of it penned in the reign of our previous queen.’ The visual impact was its greatest asset, resembling one of Coward’s crowd scene paintings, and unfortunately, just as two-dimensional.
On 20 July Look After Lulu opened in Nottingham, produced by Binkie Beaumont, starring Vivien Leigh and directed by Tony Richardson,2 who rang John Osborne. ‘He pleaded, “I mean, you’ve got to come up. Noel’s determined to be WITTY. All the time.” I did go, and saw what he meant immediately, but didn’t fail to be somewhat transfixed.’ Osborne saw Coward from the creative distance between Look Back in Anger and The Vortex. Coward represented the old world, as did Beaumont. But Coward was an artist, and to Osborne, Beaumont was the enemy, lashing out at dramatists, ‘especially the rich and famous’, with his ‘lizard tongue’. At the after-show supper, Beaumont said, ‘with a gleam of satisfaction, “Of course, Noel’s quite uneducated” ’. To Osborne, sitting next but one to Coward, it seemed ‘a clumsy piece of treachery, a fair example of the reverence for academic skill and a classic misapprehension of its link with creative imagination’.
A week later the production opened at the Royal Court Theatre. It was brought in as a ‘sure-fire’ hit (an attempt to keep the otherwise radical Royal Court in business3) but as the critic Irving Wardle wrote, ‘it failed to do the trick and became a byword among experimental companies on the folly of selling out for fairy gold’. Harold Hobson killed with kindness: ‘The trouble is that Mr Noel Coward is too witty and Miss Vivien Leigh too beautiful: for the kind of play that Look After Lulu is, beauty and wit are as unnecessary as peach melba at the North Pole.’
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In deference to the modern age, Coward turned to television and tried his hand as an interviewer. He was engaged for a projected series of conversations with the ‘great figures’ of the twentieth century. Noel was not quite sure that the first subject, Darryl Zanuck, the American producer, deserved such promotion, but the pilot film was successful. However, the prospect of a whole series alarmed him and even £120,000 in fees could not sway his decision. ‘To do something I wasn’t really enthusiastic about would be idiocy, and I should . . . do myself a great deal of harm.’ His wisdom was rewarded by a new film role, in Columbia’s Surprise Package, for which he would receive £35,000 plus expenses. Stanley Donen (dancer-turned-director of Singin’ in the Rain) was directing this story of an American gangster (played by Yul Brynner) who tries to steal an exiled monarch’s crown from a Mediterranean island. Mitzi Gaynor was his girlfriend; Noel (predictably, after his Apple Cart role) was the king. Coward enjoyed filming with Donen, who was less of a taskmaster than Carol Reed. Brynner banned journalists from the set, allowing only Robert Muller to interview Coward, and the result was run in the Daily Mail ahead of Noel’s sixtieth birthday. ‘He denies that his creative energy is finally beginning to flag’, wrote Muller. “I am as anxious to be good as ever”, said Coward. “Time’s winged chariot is goosing me.’ ”
Coward finished the film on 9 December, two days ahead of schedule, and went to Paris to conserve the days he was allowed to spend in England. Here the seemingly ageless Marlene Dietrich was appearing in a one-woman show at the Olympia (now pinning her skin up under her wig to ease the crow’s-feet around her eyes, validating Coward’s Café de Paris quip that ‘nowadays sex is a matter of lighting’). ‘She has developed a hard, brassy assurance and she belts out every song harshly and without finesse. All her aloof, almost lazy glamour has been overlaid by a noisy “take-this-and-like-it” method which, to me, is disastrous.’ Star quality depended on mystique as well as performance; ‘they would have loved her more if she had been more remote and not worked so blatantly hard’.
At the end of December, Noel moved into Les Avants, and staff were engaged. A Parisian cook called Marcel arrived with his soi-disant wife, with whom Noel foresaw problems; less so with a charming Italian butler named Piero. Over Christmas Coward dined with the Queen of Spain (sister of the flamboyant Marquess of Carisbrooke), now living in exile in Lausanne. She requested Noel sit on her left, which flattered him; Broderick Haldane, the photographer, found it extraordinary that this most famous man of theatre should be so impressed by the mere fact of a defunct royal title. Then Vivien Leigh arrived for Christmas, and spent most of it sobbing on Cole Lesley’s shoulder. Coward had to deal with three door-stepping journalists, whom he ‘utterly cowed . . . with excessive good manners’ and a pre-lunch drink. In the New Year, he travelled to England for Lady Pamela Mountbatten’s marriage to David Hicks, at Broadlands, where the coach taking guests from the house to Romsey station was trapped in snow, resulting in the spectacle of Noel Coward and titled friends getting out to push. Such exertion could not be blamed when, on his return to Switzerland, phlebitis struck his right leg. The British press delighted in reporting the gruesome details, speculating that the blood clot ‘may break up and portions be swept away by the circulation to lodge in other vessels’.
Under threat of a stroke, he was given strict instructions to rest – no visitors, no telephone calls. Unable to walk, Coward was carried about by Piero the butler, even on and off the lavatory. Enforced indolence encouraged Coward to finish his novel, Pomp and Circumstance, and by mid-February he was able to walk unaided. But his phlebitis returned, together with a congested lung; it seemed as though his body was beginning to fail him. This was the longest period of illness he had yet experienced, and it gave him a ‘curiously detached feeling . . . I find the idea of going about again, travelling to different places, going to theatres, seeing people, etc., quite extraordinary, as though it were something I didn’t know anything about.’ Increasingly, Coward came to accept ill health as part of his life; his unwillingness to take exercise, stop smoking or eat better seemed a gesture of defiance in the face of old age.
‘Noel Coward – the prisoner of a legend’, announced the Guardian’s W. J. Weatherby in yet another commemorative article; while his name continued to attract audiences, his reputation was unable to change with the times. Coward was well aware of the problem and was seriously considering the future. He expressed his thoughts in a confidential letter to Charles Russell, who wanted him to appear in a new television spectacular, this time with Ethel Merman. Coward demurred, for a number of reasons; one was his phlebitis, which remained a serious threat. He had been told ‘that it was time for me to withdraw a little from the public side of my life and devote my energies to writing and composing and avoiding quite so much physical exertion’. He also felt he had ‘done’ television. ‘I have always prided myself on my capacity for being just one jump ahead of what everybody expects of me, which is the principal reason that I have never paid a return visit to Las Vegas, any more than now I would pay a return visit to the Cafe de Paris . . .
‘It has always been a problem in my life to choose what to do next. . . . I have watched my contemporaries continuing, almost desperately, to do the same thing, and . . . although I am sure I would do the Spectacular with Merman professionally and possibly brilliantly . . . many, many of the people looking at me would be saying “Isn’t he wonderful . . . to be doing that at his age.’ ” He announced his intention to ‘write one more good musical, several more good plays and a few more good books. By doing this my whole legend will be properly consolidated, and everything that takes me away from this, whatever the money involved, I think at this stage would be a mistake . . . If a really wonderful part in a film comes along I will accept it; apart from this I wish to stay quiet for quite a while and make as few public appearances as possible.’ It is clear that Coward still felt sufficiently in control of his career to manipulate matters to that all-important end: the proper consolidation of his ‘whole legend’.
In March 1960, still feeling ‘a little wobbly’, he flew to London, then to Paris to see Dietrich (‘tired and staggeringly beautiful’). A third stop was Tangier, with its beach scenes reminiscent of the film he had just seen, Suddenly Last Summer. Dietrich noted that although, like Somerset Maugham, Noel liked picking up boys on Moroccan beaches, ‘at least he does it politely, sotto voce’. But Coward disliked the seamy side of the city. David Herbert, expatriate social leader of what Cecil Beaton called ‘the oriental Cheltenham’, showed him around, and Rupert Croft-Cooke entertained him with local gossip. Yet Tangier’s delights were ‘not for me. There are too many cliques and feuds and, of course, too many people.’
Travelling allowed him time to reconstruct Waiting in the Wings, due to open in Dublin on 8 August. Before leaving England, he had discussed the play with Sybil Thorndike, and hoped her enthusiasm would translate into acting in it. His choice for director was Frith Banbury. ‘He asked me to direct Waiting in the Wings, the most ghastly sentimentalising of old age, which I loathed, really, when I read it . . . We all know how hideous old age can be, and to pretend it’s like that – no.’ Banbury turned the play down. Coward’s romanticism was far removed from the trends of contemporary theatre but when, that May, he saw The Care taker, he suddenly realised, ‘I’m on to Pinter’s wavelength. He is at least a genuine original . . . The Caretaker, on the face of it, is everything I hate most in the theatre – squalor, repetition, lack of actions, etc. – but somehow it seizes hold of you . . . Nothing happens except that somehow it does. The writing is at moments brilliant and quite unlike anyone else’s.’ So impressed was he that in 1963 he agreed to put up £1000 to help finance the film of The Caretaker. He described Pinter as ‘a sort of Cockney Ivy Compton-Burnett’; when they met, they discovered a surprising amount in common.
‘What he liked was a kind of objectivity of the stage’, said Pinter, who saw a shared desire not ‘in expressing ourselves, but in expressing objectively and as lucidly as possible what was actually taking place in any given context’. Their dramatic humour was not as far apart as it may have seemed; odd-sounding names and disembodied lines uttered in an idiosyncratic British manner – Tynan compared Pinter’s ‘elliptical patter’ to Coward’s stylised dialogue. Both dramatists relied on emblematic figures – polar opposites socially, but representative and evocative. Pinter said that Coward’s ‘class of people who never seem to need to earn any money . . . wasn’t intended to be an accurate representation of a given class . . . [it] was an abstraction, a world which became his own, the world of Noel Coward, and can therefore be seen only as a fiction . . . that’s a marvellous achievement, to have created your own world . . .’ Maggie Smith later observed that Coward’s characters ‘whirled around in his head all the time’; like Buss’s painting of Dickens and his creations, the casts of Noel’s plays awaited their fate in their creator’s world.
Their realisation required co-operation and sometimes compromise. Coward had trusted few people as he did Binkie Beaumont, but by 1960 relations with his producer had soured. Ever since Beaumont had behaved ‘badly and greedily’ over the US production of Nude with Violin (he wanted 2 per cent of the gross takings, and a share of subsidiary rights, quite unheard of), Coward had felt Beaumont was taking advantage of him. Now there was disagreement over changes to Waiting in the Wings; Beaumont asked Noel for a complete rewrite, which the author refused. His reaction was to turn to Michael Redgrave’s theatrical (and amatory) partnership with the American producer Fred Sadoff. The swarthily handsome Sadoff had been a founder member of the Actors’ Studio, but regarded himself as a jack-of-all-trades. Added to this, Redgrave’s inexperience in production made for technical and administrative delays calculated to infuriate Coward, who was soon regretting Beaumont’s absence. But then he learned of a new example of Beaumont’s perfidy.
Gladys Cooper asked Coward why he had written a play about retired actresses without a part for her. ‘I explained that I had written it for her but that Binkie had told me she had turned it down without comment.’ Coward was shocked, and was left wondering if the report that Edith Evans had ‘loathed’ the play could be a lie, too: ‘It’s not very nice, is it?’ The reasons for Beaumont’s behaviour are lost in the tangle of jealousies and envy rife in the enclosed world of the theatre, but he told a mutual friend that Noel’s relentless promotion of Graham Payn (who was to star in Waiting in the Wings) made him decide he could no longer work with Coward. If this is so, there were better ways of ending the relationship than in mistrust and deceit.
*
In June Coward recorded the theme tune he had written for Stanley Donen’s film The Grass Is Greener, while allowing the use of ‘Mad About the Boy’, ‘I’ll Follow My Secret Heart’ and ‘The Stately Homes of England’ as background music. He was rewarded with a fee of $15,000, ‘not to be sneezed at’. Unfortunately, the production was disappointing: the Hollywood Reporter said, ‘It’s too bad Coward couldn’t have written the wisecracks too.’
Work on Waiting in the Wings with its director, Peggy Webster, and its producers (and investors) Sadoff and Redgrave, was held up, Noel thought, by Redgrave’s inefficiency. There was a ‘real blazing row in the course of which Peggy and I roared at him, banged the table and generally frightened the fuck out of him’. Sadoff proved a more amenable impresario, and able to help cool some of the on- and offstage battles. ‘Sybil gives a really great performance’, wrote Coward, ‘and so, to my joy and relief, does Graham. I’ve never seen him so relaxed and charming.’ The play opened in Dublin on 6 August, with a cast of veteran actors and actresses – Sybil Thorndyke, Lewis Casson, Marie Lohr – and a clutch of lesser names resurrected to populate his comedy about the sort of nursing home for which they were all too often destined.
Waiting in the Wings is the perfect set-up for Coward’s comic ‘types’, and for theatrical in-jokes. But ‘beneath the froth of some of its lighter moments, the basic truth [was] that old age needn’t be nearly so dreary and sad as it is supposed to be, provided you greet it with humour and live it with courage’. Once again, details anchor the piece in Coward’s autobiography, the author rewriting history as if to root himself in its reality. The inefficient theatrical charity committee that runs The Wings is obviously based on the Actors’ Orphanage; and the modern world is chastised for its presumption in parries at contemporary theatre: ‘An honest bit of blood and thunder’s a lot more healthy and entertaining than all this creeping about in the pitch dark and complaining.’ As ever, the tabloid press is attacked; a journalist, Zelda, seems ‘quite a well educated young woman, it’s curious that she should write so abominably’. Her boss is Lord Chakely, ‘a barking old tyrant’, at whose ‘social conscience’ Coward also takes a poke. Such comments did not encourage good reviews.
Coward considered the play contained ‘two of the best scenes I have ever written’; and its critical battering may have contributed to its being one of the last stage plays he wrote. For him, it was a ‘serious play on a theme which . . . remained an intrinsically sad one’; John Lahr saw it as ‘a resonant metaphor for his own fears of ageing and of being put artistically out to pasture’, Coward’s ‘most powerful and passionate post-war play’. By addressing his own late middle-age preoccupations, Coward was looking to his own mortality. Lahr notes, ‘Death is what’s really waiting in the wings.’
Some found Coward’s attitude cynical. Charles Heriot wrote in his reader’s report for the Lord Chamberlain’s office, ‘There is a heartless sentimentality about this piece that I find very distasteful. Mr Coward is the last person in the world to write a whimsical, hint-of-tears comedy about a home for aged and indigent actresses . . . There is an emetic hint of patronage about the whole thing as if he were saying “Poor, funny old cows! I might make something out of their quaint little ways . . . ‘”
Waiting in the Wings opened in London on 7 September. ‘I have never read such abuse in my life . . . I was accused of tastelessness, vulgarity, sentimentality, etc. To read them was like being repeatedly slashed in the face.’ Not even the performances were praised, which, considering the reputation of some of the cast, was additionally galling. ‘There is a lot of old shop talked and a lot of old songs sung, and it gets more nauseating . . . as the evening wears on’, wrote T. C. Worsley. A lone defender, Harold Hobson, thought it would ‘give a great deal of quiet and legitimate pleasure to many theatregoers’, and, claiming special knowledge, said that far from being the cynical man he was held to be, Coward had devoted ‘his time, his talent, and his money to helping those of his colleagues less fortunate than himself’. Business was healthy, but Noel was sorry for his elderly company. ‘This ghastly cold douche . . . cannot but have laid them low inside.’ But he found some personal consolation in the acidity of the attacks, ‘I suppose it is foolish to wonder why they hate me so. I have been too successful too long.’
Back in Les Avants, heavy demands were made on his reserves of sympathy. Margaret Leighton came to stay, in the throes of divorcing Laurence Harvey, and Noel despaired of ‘these silly ladies’ who ‘muck up their lives’, regretting the time when women ‘just stayed put and, as a general rule, got their own way and held their gentlemen much longer. It really isn’t surprising that homosexuality is becoming as normal as blueberry pie.’ Then Clifton Webb’s mother, Maybelle, died. Webb had been inordinately attached to her; but Noel thought ‘the late sixties is rather late to be orphaned’. When Webb rang in floods of inconsolable tears, Coward threatened him, ‘Clifton, if you don’t stop crying, I shall reverse the charges.’
Another visitor was Lionel Bart, the composer and lyricist whose Oliver Noel had admired. ‘He is a curious creature, not actually very prepossessing looking but rich with talent and a certain Jewish-looking charm.’ Bart recalled that Coward ‘called me out of the blue and invited me to his home’. Bart thought it was one of his friends playing a joke, and said, ‘Noel who?’ ‘Coward, you Cockney cunt’, came the reply. Bart ‘spent a weekend listening to some very good advice and the very first rendition of his work on Sail Away, which he played . . . at the piano. Noel lent him a large sum, and remained a close friend, dispensing advice on his love life. Bart represented new blood, the sort of contemporary success which Coward hoped for in his forthcoming production.
*
In November 1960, Pomp and Circumstance was published; it had been a long time in the writing. ‘Rattling around loosely in the novel form was enjoyable – and quite a change’, Coward told the Saturday Review. ‘I don’t think I was too verbose . . . I wrote the book in bursts, and for a while I was a little discouraged with the progress. But God came along and gave me . . . phlebitis, which kept me in bed, and I could do nothing but write.’
The novel was clearly influenced by Nancy Mitford, to whom it was dedicated; like her later novels, it was a weave of fact and fiction, a roman-à-clef of high society. It is set in Samola, a territory by now so convincing that Coward could have exploited it as E. F. Benson did his town of Tilling. Here are stock Cowardian characters, archetypes transported from Weybridge to the Caribbean, with a smattering of sexual inverts (like the local lesbian pair, Daphne ‘one of the boys’ Gilpin and Lydia French). Such references were seen by reviewers as an attempt to modernise his work; they did not know that there were such models even in Coward’s earliest writing.
Coward had been reading Proust, whose influence can be detected in his prose: ‘a sort of gentle nostalgia made up of homesickness and remembrance of things past . . .’ The book is concerned with the changing modern world, as the use of Elgar’s title suggests, but it refuses to be serious. As Coward told reporters during its gestation, the book was ‘not in the least significant and it has absolutely no message’. Given the seriousness and introspection of current literature, this was a minor rebellion in itself.
In November Coward returned to Les Avants, and was visited by Vivien Leigh and Jack Merivale, her new lover; he called on the Nivens, who had recently moved to Glion, a train-ride away up the mountain. At the end of the month, he met Binkie Beaumont in New York. ‘He was amiable and gossipy and I didn’t really care for him any more.’ Noel suddenly saw ‘all the pallid little wheels whizzing round: the fear of me, the lack of moral courage, the preoccupation with money, etc., and there it was, clearly and unmistakably the end of a long friendship’.
After a launch party for Pomp and Circumstance, he flew to Jamaica to celebrate his sixty-first birthday with a party arranged by Blanche Blackwell and Morris Cargill. Cargill had staged a firework display, and a misdirected rocket let off by ‘some Jamaican cretin’ avoided blinding the Master by inches only. He was not amused. Blackwell remembers Coward being ‘touchy about certain things’. ‘He hated to be made fun of. I remember Mrs Cargill was to bake him a birthday cake, and she told me she’d iced an upside-down baking tin instead. I knew Noel wouldn’t like this . . . but she went ahead and did it anyway. As soon as Noel went to cut it, he just left the party . . . He was very annoyed.’ His thin temper had not improved with the years.
He was ‘now definitely beyond middle age’, as the mirror confirmed. His hair had receded to the back of his head (although he would never have recourse to a wig. ‘I shall never wear a toupee, Monica, however bald I get’, says Garry Essendine, ‘ . . . I intend to grow old with distinction’). His face had deepened rather than aged; the maquette for the Chinese sage of his later years was there even in his youthful visage. That the sleek head was increasingly bald hardly mattered; the emollient smoothness was merely enhanced. The effect was that of an elderly Jamaican lizard sunning itself on a shoreside rock. The diamond confidence and animal grace seemed untarnished by his stoop and the tendency to a paunch, but the eyes betrayed a flicker of insecurity. In the bluster of activity with which he surrounded himself was a sense of evasion from the final certainty of loneliness, acknowledged in lyrics such as ‘I Travel Alone’. Even in his sixth decade, rest or retirement were as far away as ever; there was still the desire for the smash hit, the refusal to accept limitations. To have come this far, and still have so far to go, must have been unsettling. It explains the irrationality of some of his actions, in the recent past and in the near future.
1. Professor Paul Niehans used a derivative of goat or sheep placenta as a rejuvenating therapy, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Pope Pius XII were among those who received the injections. It was not an entirely new technique; in Private Lives, Amanda and Elyot discuss cow and monkey gland injections.
2. Richardson (1928-91), stage and film director, was part of the 1950s-1960s British scene, with films such as Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey and Tom Jones. He married Vanessa Redgrave, daughter of Michael.
3. Osborne, visiting the theatre, saw Vivien Leigh, Anthony Quayle and Max Adrian rehearsing and assumed that by some freakish nightmare he had been ‘suddenly transported from Sloane Square to the heart of Shaftesbury Avenue’.