Who would have thought the landmarks of the Sixties would include the emergence of Noel Coward as the grand old man of British drama? There he was one morning flipping verbal tiddlywinks with reporters about ‘Dad’s Renaissance’; the next, he was . . . hanging beside Forster, Eliot and the OMs, demonstrably the greatest living English playwright.
Ronald Bryden, New Statesman, August 1964
RETURNING to Switzerland, Coward heard welcome, if surprising, news. A modest revival of Private Lives in a Hampstead theatre ‘has had rave notices! Some critics even praised the play!’ James Roose-Evans had recently directed the play at the Pitlochry Festival in Scotland, where its success encouraged him to take it to London. Some vital changes resulted when a friend (who had sat next to Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon in a restaurant) told Roose-Evans, ‘They talk exactly like Elyot and Amanda!’ He decided to ‘update the play, to take it out of its period, and also to have a young cast’.
Roose-Evans’s revival sparked off a re-examination of Coward forty years after his first West End success; his modernisation of Private Lives signalled that it was time to look at Coward’s work anew. His approach was free of preconceptions. ‘It’s fatal to start imitating Coward’s style. There’s a rhythm there, a very strong musical structure – the laughs are built in, into the way you speak the dialogue. But you’ve got to play it for real people, then the laughs will come.’ It was also important to cast young people, ‘It’s a romance as well’; he recalls tours with actors too old to roll around on the floor.
One problem was getting the production reviewed, partly because the Hampstead Theatre Club was far from the West End nexus. Harold Hobson’s notice would be of inestimable value, and the director wrote him an impassioned letter, asking him to come to the first night. When Hobson’s review appeared, the general manager of the theatre rang Roose-Evans in Wales and said, ‘Can you come back straightaway? Noel Coward is flying to England for three days, he has dinner with the Queen Mother . . . We’re laying on a special performance . . .’ RooseEvans recalls, ‘It was like the arrival of royalty. The audience were all seated by 2.15. At 2.20 this limousine purred up across this bombsite and out stepped [Coward]. All the cameras started clicking and the journalists scribbling. He was in his seat at 2.25, with his programme. And the play began.’
In the first interval, Coward insisted on going into the tiny backstage green room, and announced that he wanted to be photographed with the two leads, Rosemary Martin and Edward de Souza. ‘He embraced them and laughed and the cameras all clicked, so then they went triumphantly through that extraordinary pas de deux which Act Two is. Then at the end there were shouts for him, and he stepped onstage and took a curtain call with them.’ Coward told Peter Bridge, the impresario, ‘I want you to bring this in.’ Bridge rang Roose-Evans ‘and said “If I give you Coral Browne and Ian Carmichael and one or two others, would you do it?” I said “No. The whole point is doing it with young people, and I also owe it to these young actors. They’re not names, but they’ve created this production.’ ” Instead, Michael Codron bought it. ‘We ran at least a year . . . and the rest is history . . . Of course he didn’t fly in just to see us,’ Roose-Evans conceded, ‘dinner with the Queen Mother was just as important!’
Noel wrote that it was ‘very well done on the whole but not, I fear, quite elegant enough’. He was indeed more concerned with dinner with the Queen Mother, unaware of the ground-breaking nature of the production. But when he learned of the successful transfer to the West End, he realised that those who masqueraded as ‘theatre critics’ had seen the light: ‘What about the notices for Private Lives?’ he wrote to Joyce Carey. ‘Fancy them at last finding out that it is a good play! If Binkie had put it on with a West End cast they’d have torn it to pieces . . .’
In May Coward and Lesley went to Australia, where he worked on the Australian production of Sail Away, starring Maggie Fitzgibbon, ‘really . . . excellent and warm and lovable, but of course the brilliance of Stritchie is lacking’. Advance sales were excellent, and by 9 June he was back in the ‘blessed, glorious, tropical heat’ of Singapore and the Raffles Hotel, having left Lesley in Australia. He had time to observe, with a writer’s eye, some of Singapore’s odder characters. A ‘heavily tattooed, bearded sailor with a parrot’ and his friend called ‘Biscuits’ (‘because his name was Crawford’) would populate one short story; another vignette was in the hotel bar: ‘I saw this woman, a sort of terrible old thing she was, and with her was this younger woman with thick lens glasses, obviously a travelling companion of some sort. She was flitting around every which way, responding to orders. I kept studying her and wondering about her. I thought she should be wearing contact lenses. I got to wondering what would happen to her if the older woman suddenly died.’ The scene surfaced in his story ‘Pretty Polly Barlow’, in which the death of her aunt leaves Polly a rich girl. Transformed from dowdy shopgirl to femme fatale, she falls in love with a sailor, ‘a snub-nosed, ginger-headed Yorkshireman’.
He returned to Jamaica, and added more verses to Not Yet the Dodo – a word picture of the English middle classes, a dying breed in the reality of the modern age:
A diminishing few
A residue
Of unregenerate characters who
Despite two wars and the Welfare State
And incomes sadly inadequate
Still, summoned by Sunday morning chimes,
Walk briskly to church to say their prayers
And later, in faded chintz
armchairs
Read of divorces, wars and crimes
And, shocked by the trend of world affairs
Compose
In cosy, post-prandial doze
Tart letters of protest to The Times.
He also edited the book of what had been Faster than Sound and was now High Spirits. To those who were surprised that he had not written it, he said, ‘I simply couldn’t do it; after creating a script that worked so well in one form, I couldn’t tear it apart and put it back together in another. I don’t mind tearing apart and revising drastically a new script of mine that is in the process of being staged for the first time, but I couldn’t tamper with Blithe Spirit.’ He was confident that Martin and Gray had ‘done a fine job of giving the play a new form but retaining its spirit and much of the original dialogue. It will be a pleasure to direct it.’ Edward Woodward was to play the male lead; Beatrice Lillie, Madame Arcati; Tammy Grimes, Elvira; and among the ‘singing-dancing ensemble’ was a new actor named Ronnie Walken, later to change his first name to Christopher.
It was a busy summer for a sixty-three-year-old. At the end of August he arrived back in New York to work on The Girl Who Came to Supper. The musical was an escape from the sometimes strained modernism of Sail Away, although its songs were typical Coward fare, from ‘I’ve Been Invited to a Party’, sung by Florence Henderson (as a cross between Eliza Doolittle and a Twenties debutante); to ‘Sir or Ma’am’, Roderick Cook’s advice to the princess on English etiquette; and the somewhat clichéd Cockney singalongs of ‘London Is a Little Bit of Alright’ sung by the voluminous (in voice and girth) Tessie O’Shea. José Ferrer played the prince, and the sets and costumes were provided by Oliver Smith and Irene Sharaff (Oscar-winning costumier for The King and I and West Side Story).
Rehearsals were fraught, but Coward stayed in the wings for the sixty-fifth major production he had been involved in since 1920. He would have preferred to have been rehearsing all day, but old age and its effects were being keenly felt; he had just had his last tooth removed, ‘so wobbly that it was becoming a menace’, and a new dental plate fitted which, ‘thank God . . . has made no difference whatever to my speech’. (Noel was inordinately proud of his dentures; Rex Harrison and his fourth wife, Rachel Roberts, dining at the 21 in New York, watched Coward commend a new set to his partner by transferring them to his side plate to admire the craftsmanship.) Coward’s concern during rehearsals was to keep Layton from ‘over-directing’ the show. The first runthrough confirmed his fears, ‘Too much movement, too many props and everybody overacting like mad and trying to be funny.’ Noel lost patience, and in a fit of pique, he let fly at his director and ‘flounced out’, refusing to go back the next day. ‘He really blew up at me’, says Layton, admitting that he was trying too hard to ‘put his stamp on everything’. Coward thought him ‘cursed by a sort of personal insecurity and is afraid of credit being taken away from him. As he is really richly inventive and talented, this is plain silly.’ Their relationship suffered as a result; the following year, Coward wrote, ‘I have lost faith in his talent.’
The Girl Who Came to Supper opened in Boston ‘to a rapturous reception. The next morning rave notices and it is so far quite palpably a smash hit.’ According to Layton, it was set to storm Broadway, having been ‘very successful out of town. We were coming in like My Fair Lady. Then of course tragedy hit. I happened to get a bad case of hepatitis. They had to take the show into New York without me and, even though we were in pretty good shape, all the pins started to shake a little bit. Then we came to New York and Kennedy was assassinated. And you know the original first number of that show? “Long Live the King”. And it was staged with assassins all over the theatre, believe it or not.’
It opened on 8 December to a ‘glittering, star-spangled audience’ and a ‘brilliant performance’ from the cast. The notices were good, except for the New York Times, which thought that ‘the glamour and romance seem imposed, as if by an effort of will’. ‘Elegant, charming and delightfully cast’, said the New York Morning Telegraph. Like Rex Harrison, Jose Ferrer couldn’t sing, ‘but . . . talks fascinatingly and invests the role and the evening with a kind of ripe grandeur, wry and somehow reluctant lubricity . . . [Florence] Henderson sings with a voice of gold and wide range . . . Irene Browne makes the Queen Mother a delicious flutter-brain and Mr Coward provides the lot of them with a sheaf of songs, including a hilarious and brilliant number in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of George V.’
Coward returned to Jamaica for his sixty-fifth birthday in happy mood. But after Christmas, despite $92,000 worth of business, audiences were dwindling for The Girl Who Came to Supper. Joe Layton partly blamed the Kennedy tragedy, ‘We opened so soon after, it was really the demise of the show . . . I think that broke his heart, because the potential was great.’ Noel was in New York in the snowy days of January, watching it inch towards early closure. One consolation was that High Spirits seemed to be going well, and he had faith in the cast, ‘If Beattie really delivers, which I believe she will, we shall probably have a real smash hit.’ But within a week Lillie was driving him mad; she was ‘as much like Madame Arcati as I am like Queen Victoria’. Lillie, at seventy years of age (and with a drink problem), was no easier to deal with than she had been thirty-four years previously, in This Year of Grace!
Rehearsals were difficult. At one point Coward challenged Tammy Grimes on her pronunciation of ‘pretence’. ‘You’ve pronounced it two ways’, he complained. ‘Well, what’s the difference?’ asked Grimes. ‘One is British and one is definitely American’, said Noel. ‘Which one is British?’ she enquired. ‘The correct one!’ Coward retorted. Then Graham Payn, who was co-directing, was overtaken by acute pain in his left buttock and thigh, and the company left him in traction. ‘This was not only miserable for him ‘but highly inconvenient for me to be deprived of my assistant director during the time I needed him most’. They opened in New Haven, ‘a nightmare’. Coward wrote, ‘Beattie fucked up the whole business in so far as the book was concerned, but managed to make a great success at the expense of the play, the cast and my nerves.’ Good notices ensued, and the tour sold out for three weeks in New Haven, and three in Philadelphia, but the stress was getting to Coward. The Girl Who Came to Supper closed on 14 March, and he developed a painful stomach ulcer, caused, he said, ‘by the ceaseless irritation of Beattie not knowing a word culminating in a hideous scene with John Philip [her lover]’.
When a reporter had asked Coward how old Lillie was, he found the question impertinent, and answered sarcastically, ‘She’s seventy-five and completely mad!’ Unfortunately, two young fans reported the remark to Philip. That night, Coward was sitting in an armchair on the set, delivering his opinion of the performance, when from the darkened wings ‘came a strange, high-pitched voice. “That’s right, Mr Noel Peirce Coward. You tell ’em, Mr Noel Peirce Coward.’ ” John Philip emerged ‘like a Phantom of the Opera’, and the cast stood aghast as he launched a verbal attack, telling Noel, ‘You’re old enough to be my mother’, and threatening to ‘tie your balls behind your back’. Coward remained calm. Philip stalked off, but as a parting shot, he turned back and shouted, ‘Beatrice Lillie loves me!’ Noel said quietly, ‘Then she must be mad.’
Matters did not improve. In Philadelphia, Tammy Grimes suffered from exhaustion and was hospitalised, as was Coward when his ulcer got worse – although the Passevant in Chicago said there was no ulcer. Then, partly because of the friction between Lillie and Coward, and partly because of his illness, the show’s producers asked if he minded Gower Champion, fresh from his success in Hello, Dolly!, taking over as director. Champion achieved some ‘minor miracles’, but Coward later spoke bitterly of ‘betrayal’ by Lillie, and the episode effectively ended their friendship.
The production opened on Broadway on 7 April, and was a success. It ran for 373 performances in New York, becoming one of the sell-out musicals of the season. Tammy Grimes projected the waspish quality Elvira required; Edward Woodward was whimsically phlegmatic as Charles; but Beatrice Lillie stole the show as Arcati. ‘Even if High Spirits had no other attractions – and it has a stageful – it would be a cause for celebration. It has brought back Beatrice Lillie’, said the New York Times; “a thoroughly satisfying score’, the Journal-American; ‘a brassy spectacular’, the New York News.
*
Noel retreated to Jamaica for a rest. The island was much changed since its declaration of independence in 1962; as Ann Fleming told Evelyn Waugh, ‘An effort to boost deservedly failing tourist traffic is the inauguration . . . of a Bunny Club . . . for a vast sum you can sit next to an untouchable Bunny and are waited on by footmen. Perhaps the footmen are touchable, more appealing to Chinese Nell.’ She explained her remark, ‘Noel Coward is known as “Chinese Nell” in this island – rather sinister?’
Coward eschewed the charms of Hugh Heffner’s club; he had other concerns. He sanctioned plans to take High Spirits to London, possibly with Graham Payn as assistant director, another attempt to find him useful employment. He was beginning to despair of his friend’s career; Graham seemed ‘quite incapable of doing anything at all. He is, I fear, a born drifter. He just wanders through his life with no impetus and no genuine ambition. I know his theatrical career has been a failure, but there are other ploys to go after. He sleeps and sleeps and the days go by. I love him dearly and for ever, but this lack of drive, in any direction, is a bad augury for the future. I am willing and happy to look after him for the rest of my life, but he must do something.’
‘He tried to educate me,’ said Payn, ‘tried to make me read better books, which he said was a lost cause because I wouldn’t read properly . . .’ Payn is defensive about his self-confessed lack of ‘star quality’. ‘I thought the best thing to do was to get on and work. He tried to say to me, “You can perform with more confidence and more authority on stage. Come on, why do you get so nervous?” I don’t know why I got nervous. But I did, and that was no good . . . I think he minded more than I did – I think he longed for me to be a star.’ Coward reached the conclusion that ‘something must be done’; nothing could be.
High Spirits was still playing to capacity crowds in New York. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t do that famous “Noel Coward musical nose-dive” after three months.’ There were no signs of this, and he could depart for London to enjoy ten days of theatre. In confirmation of the renaissance, Laurence Olivier had plans to produce Hay Fever at the National Theatre, putting Coward’s work in repertory with Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht and Chekhov. It was the first time the National had revived the work of a living dramatist. Coward was invited to direct Hay Fever, with ‘a glorious cast’, including Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Derek Jacobi and Lynn Redgrave. He was, he admitted, ‘very excited’ about the prospect. With Bernstein’s Granada Television producing four of his plays (Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, The Vortex and Design for Living) that autumn, and his new collection of short stories (Pretty Polly Barlow) about to appear, Coward felt that Beverley Baxter’s famous criticism of the Forties – ‘Did Noel Coward Survive the War?’ – could be consigned to the dustbin of redundant quotes. He was also fully solvent; as a Swiss resident, his earnings were paid into his Crédit Suisse account with a minimal 7.4 per cent tax (as opposed to the 50 per cent company tax he was obliged to pay on monies earned in England).
Life at Les Avants was enlivened by a glamorous, if eccentric encounter. Geoffrey Johnson arrived at Geneva airport, and was impressed that Noel had come to meet him; he was in a state of high excitement. ‘You’ll never guess who was on the same plane as you’, Coward said. ‘Garbo. We had a reunion, and she’s coming for a drink next week.’ The Swedish star, by now almost an obsessive recluse, was staying with the Ahernes, and came to Chalet Coward for drinks. That evening Coward was dining with Adrienne Allen and her guests Phyllis Monkman and Bobbie Andrews, and he persuaded Garbo to join them. Johnson found himself ‘in this Mercedes convertible with Garbo and Noel Coward, and he was driving! . . . The sun was setting, and we drove from Les Avants to Glion – it’s terrible that road, sheer drops on either side – and he’s speeding along, the two of them in the front. I was in the back, and he’s talking a mile a minute to her. I thought “We’re going to go right over the side of this cliff” . . . I could just see the headlines – “Coward and Garbo Killed in Auto Accident – with Unidentified American”.’
When they arrived, Garbo swept through the room with only cursory introductions to the other guests, and went to sit on a porch swing. Phyllis Monkman approached her. ‘She screwed up all her courage and said “Miss Garbo, I just wanted to say I saw Camille last week in London . . . at a revival and it’s brilliant, it’s as great as it ever was.” Garbo said “No” [covering her face] like Monkman had said something really terrible . . .’ Noel witnessed the scene, and marched over, his finger wagging. ‘ “Don’t you ever do that to anybody again! You were a great star, and whether you like it or not, you’ve got to face it” . . . He really laid her flat . . . she was quite shaken.’ The next day Coward flew to Rome; the Ahernes and Garbo were also on board. Noel noted that they travelled tourist, ‘presumably because La Divina feared recognition in the more sophisticated atmosphere of the first class. She needn’t have worried because no one recognised her at all.’ Noel, however, was recognised, and was whisked through customs and immigration ‘at record speed’, leaving Brian Aherne with the luggage and Garbo and Mrs Aherne in the lavatory.
In Rome he visited the Spoleto Festival for ‘an orgy of “culture” ’, seeing Nureyev and Fonteyn in Raymonda. Nureyev seemed like ‘a curious wild animal, very beguiling and fairly unpredictable’; during dinner he actually bit Coward, ‘but it was only on the finger and didn’t draw blood’. Alan Helms was also in Spoleto, visiting Luchino Visconti. He introduced Coward to the film director. When Noel had gone, Visconti turned to Helms and said, ‘Fascinating man – who was he?’ ‘Each had understood that the other was famous’, says Helms, ‘even though . . . neither of them knew what for.’
At Les Avants, he heard news of Ian Fleming’s death, ‘a horrid but expected sadness. He went on smoking and drinking in spite of all warnings.’ His wife Ann, who had never really liked Jamaica, abandoned Goldeneye soon after and returned to London. Life in Jamaica, and the high society of the Forties and Fifties, seemed further away than ever.
*
At Chalet Coward, he received the imperial presence of Edith Evans. They read through Hay Fever together. ‘She is, of course, perfectly brilliant. I can’t wait to get into rehearsal.’ It was an optimistic opinion which (as with so many of Noel’s pre-production pronouncements) would be swiftly revised. On the first day of rehearsals, he told the company, ‘I’m thrilled and flattered and frankly a little flabbergasted that the National Theatre should have had the curious perceptiveness to choose a very early play of mine, and to give it a cast that could play the Albanian telephone directory.’ But as the rehearsals went on, Evans’s age became a problem. Coward felt he was ‘doomed to sit patient and still, watching elderly actresses forgetting their lines’. Dame Edith was well aware of her predicament, as her companion, Gwen ffrangcon-Davies (then sixty-eight), discovered when they journeyed to Manchester for the opening. Evans was going through her lines, and came to the scene where Judith Bliss defends her flirtatiousness to her children: ‘Anyone would think I was eighty the way you go on.’ She stopped, and said, ‘But I am nearly eighty. I’m seventy-six. I can’t play this part.’
In Manchester Evans took to her room and refused to leave it. Coward was summoned, and informed Evans that she was ‘a disgrace to herself, the theatre and Christian Science’. Evans bestirred herself, but the audience invited to the dress rehearsal had to be sent away. Maggie Smith (who thought she should have had the part) stood in as Judith. The stage manager, Diana Boddington, recalled, ‘Maggie just sent up Edith’s performance something rotten. The mimicry was unbelievably funny. We were all – Noel, Larry, everyone – laughing so much we were lying around on the floor.’ Evans ‘tottered insecurely’ through the opening night on 19 October, ‘drying up, mistiming and cutting lots of important lines’, but ‘the play and the brilliance of the cast got us through’.
Hay Fever opened in London on 27 October. The night was triumphant, and the next day excellent notices confirmed Coward’s return to favour. Maggie Smith said it was as though he had never been away, ‘There seemed to be no generation gap with Noel, he just seemed to leap right into the Sixties, it didn’t seem to make any difference that the play had been written all those years before.’ With her Sixties backcombed approximation of a Twenties bob and a modern delivery to match, Maggie Smith was the visual personification of the production; and indeed, in her camp way, threatened to outclass Dame Edith.
Derek Jacobi, playing Simon Bliss, thought Edith Evans ‘not the most generous of actresses. She was certainly hideous to us youngsters, giving us notes and summonses and tellings-off and I think to a certain extent Maggie was standing up to her for everyone else in the cast.’ This she did by playing ‘Baby Love’ by the Supremes full volume in the dressing-room next to Evans’s, depriving the dame of sleep and making her too tired to cause trouble in the evenings. Jacobi also recalls being summoned by Coward to his Savoy room, there to be asked, ‘Tell me one thing. Are you circumcised?’ Jacobi replied that he was not. ‘Derek, you will always be a fine actor’, said the Master, ‘but you’ll never be a great actor until you are circumcised.’ The significance of this escaped Jacobi, he had to admit. ‘Freedom, dear,’ said Noel, ‘freedom!’
After the success of Hay Fever came the London opening, on 2 November, of High Spirits, with Cicely Courtneidge and Marti Stevens. The audience were ‘wildly enthusiastic; all notices horrible’. The Sunday Telegraph thought that against the sublime achievement of the original, High Spirits was ‘grossly over-weighted with conventional songs, derivative dances . . . and a series of performances of such brashly confident incongruity . . . that the whole caravan soon grinds to a halt in clouds of steam and smoke’. ‘The piece is grotesquely unfunny, acted with sledge-hammer clumsiness, and, with its unmemorable music, it is an appalling bore’, said the Sunday Times. Timothy Gray and Hugh Martin had ‘properly bought it’, wrote Coward. ‘Considering their insensate obstinacy from the very beginning, I cannot feel altogether sorry.’ And considering Noel’s initial enthusiasm, this was not a generous reaction.
He returned to Les Avants exhausted, and spent the next few days in bed. He received news of the larger world: ‘High Spirits is hobbling along convulsively. Hay Fever more and more triumphant. Pretty Polly Barlow has so far received one abusive notice from a ghastly young squirt called Julian Jebb in the Sunday Times and two other rather patronising ones.’
Coward’s latest volume contained three lengthy short stories. ‘Pretty Polly Barlow’ drew on his Singapore stay; ‘Mrs Capper’s Birthday’ is This Happy Breed/’Fumed Oak’ territory (a younger Mrs Capper appears in ‘Peace in Our Time’), a meandering observation of an aged cleaning lady; but the best story was one of Coward’s most emotive. Noel wrote to Rupert Croft-Cooke, ‘I was delighted and touched by your letter about “Me and the Girls”. Of course I need hardly tell you it is also one of my favourites. It is based half on life and half on fiction. (The actual prototype is still alive and high kicking!)’ A dying gay cabaret entertainer reviews his life from his hospital bed, ‘I was never one to go off into a great production about being queer . . . I don’t see that it’s anybody’s business but your own what you do with your old man providing you don’t make a bee line for the dear little kiddies, not, I am here to tell you, that quite a lot of the aforesaid dear little kiddies didn’t enjoy it tip-top. I was one myself and I know.’ (A reference to Noel’s own youthful introduction to sex.) The tone prefigured that of Coward’s last dramatic works: ‘To hell with what might have been’, says Banks. ‘What has been is quite enough for me, and what will be will have to be coped with when the time comes.’
The book was not well received; the literary critics, unlike their dramatic counterparts, were not reassessing Coward, and did not appreciate the silken artifice of his slender creations. By Christmas 1964, Coward was complaining that it had ‘not one really good notice’, so he reviewed it himself. ‘I know “Me and the Girls” is good, also “Mrs Capper”. “Pretty Polly” is less interesting, being more conventional in theme, but it is at moments very funny and eminently readable. The battle, of course, will never end until the grave closes over me, and then! oh dear, the balls that will be written about me.’
*
Coward’s sixty-fifth birthday, in December 1964, found him on a return visit to Capri. Gloria Magnus still ran her restaurant on the Piccola Marina, where he lunched with Payn and Lesley. But out of season Capri was ‘not only quiet but moribund’, and walking up and down cobbled streets hurt his legs; he felt decrepit and cross. His age had been underlined by the deaths of Edith Sitwell, Cole Porter and Diana Wynyard that year; Churchill was also dying. ‘I suppose it’s just as well really,’ Coward remarked, ‘ninety years is a long, long time.’
In London, Coward cast a revival of Present Laughter, with Nigel Patrick as Garry Essendine; Phyllis Calvert, Maxine Audley, Richard Briers and Graham Payn were to play his extended family. Noel was still a hard taskmaster. When he saw the finished production, he thought it ‘all apparently very good but badly gabbled’; after two rehearsals, matters were rectified. Maxine Audley recalled ‘the end of Act Two when Joanna and Gary are canoodling on the sofa, getting closer and closer . . . Noel said “No, no . . . watch me Paddy [Nigel Patrick].” And he came up . . . and did the scene with me, and . . . he was much sexier, much more smoochy and tender.’ Audley told him so, to which Coward replied, ‘I know’.
He returned to Jamaica for the winter, to await the Queen Mother. In a mirror image of Pomp and Circumstance, this royal visit, far from being a secret, was ‘the talk of the island’. Firefly was vetted by security police, who inspected the tiny black-tiled bathroom at great length, ‘and . . . left sadly shaking their heads, which worried us considerably’, said Cole Lesley. Her Majesty arrived and was introduced to Coward’s favourite cocktail, the potent vodka-based bullshot, of which she had two ‘and was delighted’. Lunch, which had threatened to be a disaster when the lobster mousse melted, was rescued by Noel’s chilled pea soup and ‘cocomania’, his version of the local curry, made in a coconut. After lunch she insisted on visiting Blue Harbour, ‘which had not been frisked, to the security men’s horror’. When she drove off, she ‘left behind her five gibbering worshippers’.
Coward got on with work. A new collection of stories, Bon Voyage, was sold by Curtis Brown to McCall’s for $12,500, and by mid-March Coward had written the first act of his new play, A Song at Twilight, suggested by David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm (then living at Rapallo), in which the ageing dandy is visited by Constance Collier. ‘I thought how funny it was’, wrote Coward. ‘There was Constance, Max’s old flame, coming to see him again, only now she was still full of vitality and he of course wasn’t, so she absolutely exhausted him.’ He added, ‘My play is more sinister, and there is Maugham in it as well as Max.’ By the end of March he had finished it, and was pleased with the result: ‘I really think it’s a rouser.’ He intended to play the lead, Sir Hugo Latymer, and, as companion pieces, he wrote Shadows of the Evening and Come into the Garden, Maud. The retrospective tone of the trilogy was reflected in real life: Clemence Dane had ‘tied a purple nylon scarf round her head, slapped on some lipstick, and sent for Dick [Addinsell] and Victor [Stiebel]’ for a farewell party and died the next day. ‘Well, that’s one more old friend gone.’
In London, Coward began filming for Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, starring Laurence Olivier and Anna Massey, in which he played a grubby landlord. He told Roddy McDowall, ‘I play an elderly, drunk, queer masochist, and I am in no mood for any wisecracks about typecasting so there.’ Dressed like a tramp, he also carried a chihuahua ‘crooked in my arm. It just lies there comatose but quivering. I can’t stand things that quiver . . . It only has one piece of action . . . it had to wave, but it couldn’t do it. I said to it, “You will never make another Lassie.’ ” Much of the filming was done in a garage in West London, and the director did not particularly appeal either: ‘a real bully who never let up’, said Olivier, ‘a heavy-handed egotist [whom] Noel Coward and I didn’t like much’. Other duties included a recording of Sheridan’s The Critic, and a check on Hay Fever: ‘The cast as good as ever with the exception of Maggie [Smith] who was overplaying.’
He was interviewed by Clive Hirschhorn for the Sunday Express, and revealed his dismay at the modern world. He spoke of his ambivalence towards his native land, ‘I am England, and England is me. We have a love-hate relationship with each other. It’s everything I stand for, but day by day the place changes.’ He claimed the English had ‘such huge chips on their shoulders these days . . . Today everyone here is so damn rebellious . . . Take modern youth, for example. All this insufferable long hair . . . Long hair is all very well if it hangs loosely on brocade, or silk or velvet, but it somehow seems all wrong when it’s supposed to offset some smelly sports shirt . . . Our system of values is all wrong now. Elegance is a dirty word.’ (’I detest the youth of today’, Hugo Latymer protests in A Song at Twilight. ‘They are grubby, undisciplined and ill-mannered. They also make too much noise.’) Hirschhorn asked about his reputation. ‘I’m an enormously talented man, and there’s no use pretending that I’m not’, Coward said. ‘My name was a household word before I was twenty-five. I have always had a natural facility for entertaining others, and this has never deserted me.’ But surely his brand of comedy was out of date? Not at all. ‘The lower classes like nothing better than to adore the upper classes . . . They enjoy striving to be what they aren’t, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they’ll ever reach those dizzy heights. They’re dreamers, and this keeps them happy. How else can you account for the continuous popularity of my plays amongst people who will never see the inside of a tasteful drawing room?’
The way he expressed himself illustrated how out of touch he was. To maintain that stiff upper lip in the Britain of the mid-Sixties was not only foolhardy, it was virtually impossible. It seemed he was fast becoming a caricature of himself. Or was he just teasing? It was difficult to know; Coward played his part too well. ‘Youth always makes too much noise,’ Carlotta, replies to Latymer’s lament, ‘their world is more shrill than ours was.’ Back at Les Avants, Noel heard news of the Beatles’ MBEs, which had war veterans sending their medals back in disgust. ‘Some other decoration should have been selected to reward them for their talentless but considerable contributions to the Exchequer.’ A week or so later, he saw the noisy youths in concert in Rome. ‘The noise was deafening throughout’, and he was unable to hear ‘a word they sang or a note they played, just one long, ear-splitting din’, with the fanatical audience ‘like a mass masturbation orgy’.
Coward went backstage to see the group, and was told by Brian Epstein to go to their hotel. There he was told they would not see him, ‘because that ass David Lewin had quoted me saying unflattering things about them months ago’. Lewin had interviewed Coward shortly after he had met Lennon and McCartney at one of Alma Cogan’s Kensington parties, and had recorded Coward as saying, ‘The Beatles, those two I met seemed nice, pleasant young men, quite well behaved and with an amusing way of speaking. Of course, they are totally devoid of talent. There is a great deal of noise. In my day the young were taught to be seen but not heard – which is no bad thing.’ Coward insisted their publicist find one of the group, and she returned with Paul McCartney, to whom he explained ‘gently but firmly that one did not pay much attention to the statements of newspaper reporters. The poor boy was quite amiable and I sent messages of congratulation to his colleagues, although the message I would have liked to send them was that they were bad-mannered little shits.’
His social life remained ‘violent’; from the company of a royal queen at Sandringham, where Coward and the Queen Mother sang a duet of ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’, to the tribute of another in cabaret, when Danny La Rue sang a Coward melody, ‘beautifully done’. Maxine Audley had suggested they see the show, ‘It just so happened that that night they went to John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me, and I thought, “Oh, God, there’s a drag scene in that!” I thought two in one evening might be too much for them. Luckily, for me . . . he’d loathed the John Osborne play, and within five minutes of Danny’s show starting he turned to me and said “The perfect antidote!’ ”
A Patriot for Me, set in fin-de-siècle middle Europe and based on the case of the homosexual lower-class Hungarian Jew and spy, Colonel Redl, ‘a brilliant man and a fascinating character’, had aroused the ire of the censor. To circumvent the Lord Chamberlain, the Royal Court had been turned into a theatre club for the run. The lavish drag scene was a visual climax of the play, when Redl attended a ball full of Viennese homosexuals, its host declaring, ‘This is the celebration of the individual against the rest.’ But it seemed that Osborne was attacking homosexuality (as weak betrayal), just as he challenged its sway in the West End theatre (particularly the ‘gay mafia’ of Binkie Beaumont – and, by association, Coward). Noel found it ‘muddled, undisciplined writing’, with ‘interminable scenes and acres of appalling bad taste . . . Osborne has missed all the main points. The “drag” scene is so embarrassing that we could hardly look at the stage.’
Coward summoned the playwright to dinner at his rented flat in Chesham Place. Osborne was ‘subjected to a light finger-wagging about my personal and sexual life over a very, very light omelette . . . His second or perhaps third question was “How queer are you?” . . . The fatuous game was afoot, and I played it feebly. “Oh, about 30 per cent.” “Really?” he rapped back. “I’m ninety-five.” That was it.’
Coward’s London trip also had a more narcissistic agenda; he had decided to have his face lifted. After three hours on the operating table, he had a ‘claustrophobic panic’ when he came round; but after ‘lots of heroin’ everything was fine, ‘underchin jowls now completely gone’. But there was a frisson of fear; the surgeon’s assistant told him he had ‘died’ under the anaesthetic. ‘My heart stopped beating for forty-five seconds! . . . They had to hit me very hard with their fists, which . . . accounts for the chest pain and panic I suffered when I came round.’ Thus revitalised, he returned to Les Avants to finish Shadows of the Evening, ‘one of the best plays I have ever written’, with excellent parts for himself, Irene Worth and Margaret Leighton. But Leighton would take the part only if her husband, Michael Wilding, could come too – a scenario Coward dreaded. Beaumont and Coward decided to ask Lilli Palmer instead.
While staying with the Nivens at Cap Ferrat that summer, Coward called on Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, where he read A Song at Twilight to Robin Maugham, who ‘nearly fainted’. ‘He was deeply impressed but agitated because people might think it was based on Willie! Actually it isn’t, although there are many similarities.’ Coward was disingenuous in protesting the obvious comparison; he certainly did not read the play to Maugham (it was perhaps no coincidence that A Song at Twilight was performed three months after Maugham’s death, on Coward’s birthday, 16 December 1965). Had he done so, however, there is little to suggest that Maugham would have understood the implications. According to Coward, Maugham was ‘wretchedly, pathetically grateful’ for his visit. ‘He is living out his last days in a desperate nightmare, poor beast. He barely makes sense and, of course, he knows his mind has gone. I managed to cheer him a bit and certainly helped poor Alan [Searle] who is going through hell.’
When Maugham had adopted Searle as his son in an attempt to disinherit his daughter Liza, Coward saw Maugham as ‘devoured by retrospective hate of poor Syrie’. Shortly after, Maugham published ‘his disgusting autobiography’ in an American magazine. ‘It really is beneath contempt, and crucifies the wretched Syrie. I don’t think I want to see him again.’ Looking Back had caused outrage among Maugham’s friends. He had approached Alexander Frere with plans for Heinemann to publish the book, but when Frere read the manuscript he was shocked at what seemed to him the ramblings of a madman, and thought he owed it to his old friend not to publish. He alerted Doubleday, who also turned it down. Maugham was furious, and disowned Frere as his literary executor. Coward told Garson Kanin,1 ‘The man who wrote that awful slop is not the man who has been my friend for so many years. Some evil spirit has entered his body.’ ‘Coward channelled his indignation in the direction of what he did best’, said Maugham’s biographer, Ted Morgan. ‘He did to Maugham what Maugham had done to Hugh Walpole in Cakes and Ale, but posthumously.’
A Song at Twilight, like the other two plays in what became known as A Suite in Three Keys, is set in the luxurious Beau Rivage hotel at Lausanne. The setting is a deluxe limbo peopled by his ageing characters, with the eavesdropping presence of Felix the waiter (a ‘startlingly handsome young man’) the constant in all three pieces; he is the audience to these vignettes of Cowardian drama, with their still incisive dialogue, dextrously twisting and turning meaning as a composer might a melody.
Sir Hugo Latymer, an elderly writer, lives with his long-suffering wife, Hilde, and is nervously awaiting a visit from an old lover, Carlotta. Latymer is cynical, manipulative and self-concerned; as Carlotta later comments, ‘You are remodelling your public image. The witty, cynical author of so many best sellers is making way for the Grand Old Man of Letters.’ He has written an autobiography in which he is nice about nobody, ‘the most superlative example of sustained camouflage’. ‘Why the constant implications of heterosexual ardour?’ asks Carlotta. ‘Why those self-conscious, almost lascivious references to laughing-eyed damsels with scarlet lips and pointed breasts?’ It was a sin of which Coward was not guilty, and he was drawing attention to the fact. Hilde goes off to visit Liesel, whom Sir Hugo describes as a ‘weather-beaten old German lesbian’,2 leaving Latymer and Carlotta to dine alone, served by Felix. ‘He really is most attractive, isn’t he?’ says Carlotta, ‘those glorious shoulders’. It seems she is trying to trap him into admitting his desires, and is a prelude to her announcement that she has Latymer’s old love letters to Perry Sheldon, ‘the only true love of your life . . . You’ve been homosexual all your life, and you know it!’
Carlotta argues against the stigma of homosexuality: ‘We are living in the 1960s, not the 1890s.’ The reference to Oscar Wilde is a reminder of how far Coward had come – from his pre-First World War experiences, when homosexuals still suffered the backlash of the Wilde trial, to the permissive Sixties, when his preferences were about to be legitimised (although not, he contested, accepted). His experience of a sexually proscriptive society informed his work even now; Morris Cargill thought Coward was always afraid of legal action: ‘What stuck in his craw was the Oscar Wilde trial. [He might have cited the Pemberton Billing case, too] . . . He told me once “I’m not going to court”. He was absolutely petrified about that sort of thing . . . That ate into his soul.’
Carlotta insists that the law ‘has become archaic and nonsensical’. Hugo replies, ‘Maybe so, but even when the actual law ceases to exist there will still be a stigma attached to “the love that dare not speak its name” in the minds of millions of people for generations to come. It takes more than a few outspoken books and plays and speeches in Parliament to uproot moral prejudice from the Anglo-Saxon mind.’ Coward had objected to A Patriot for Me; Osborne had not ‘got it right’; A Song at Twilight readdressed the question. Yet he was still hiding behind a screen; his protectiveness about his private life even served to hide his intellect, says Cargill. ‘I told him, “Noel, your plays are fine, they’re first-class. But they’re not nearly as good as what you could write” . . . It was a façade . . . this business of “only a talent to amuse” – he was determined that all the world would ever see of him was his plays and his songs. Even when he wrote his autobiographies, he never said anything about himself at all . . . He was a brilliantly clever man, he had a fine mind – but he wasn’t showing that to anybody.’
In A Song at Twilight, Coward seemed to address Cargill’s reservations; there is a sense of his intellect coming out of the closet, an exposition of his innermost feelings, and of what he really could do. Coward told William Marchant, ‘A Song at Twilight is far and away the best-constructed play I have ever written, and when I played it I knew as an actor that as a writer I had served myself very well; there is an almost mathematical precision to it that in no way detracts from the reality of it. It is the first play I have written whose theme was not attacked in at least one quarter as being flimsy or superficial.’ Only now, when they least expected it, did he confound the critics’ expectations. Of A Suite in Three Keys, The Times wrote, ‘For all their determined glitter and the authentic disclaimers of any purpose beyond entertainment, Noel Coward’s plays are among the most earnestly moral works to be found anywhere in modern drama.’
No one who read the play or saw it performed could fail to consider its comments on Coward’s sexuality. But his remarks to the contemporary press indicate his unwillingness to apply the play’s themes personally; he dodged the issue. ‘It is perhaps the most serious play I have ever written’, he told Hugh Curnow in an interview in which, for the first and last time, he spoke ‘on the record’ about a sexuality he shared with his protagonist. ‘It is . . . a subject that only lately has come into circulation because only lately have we been able to discuss it openly. And it’s very lucky that we can; homosexuality has permeated the whole of history. It’s a fascinating subject and must be handled, I think, with taste. A compassionate homosexual play defeats its object if it makes it repellent.’ Thus Coward is both Carlotta (espousing acceptance) and Latymer (requiring concealment); at the end of his life and his last play, he remains firmly behind the mask. ‘One’s real inside self is a private place,’ he declared in 1969, ‘and should always stay like that. It is no one else’s business.’
A Song at Twilight concludes by drawing together the greater themes of Coward’s life. Love, rather than sex, is more important, Latymer tells Carlotta; hence the reason for his heartbreaking affair with Perry Sheldon. ‘I should have thought that even your cheap magazine mentality would have learnt by now that it is seldom with people’s characters that one falls in love.’ As with Jack Wilson, Sheldon’s alcoholism is seen as part of the reason for the end of the relationship; but here it is blamed on Latymer, as perhaps Gerald Haxton’s dissolution reflected on Maugham.3
Some found the portrayal of Latymer’s sexuality unconvincing, and Coward’s intentions unclear. A later criticism of A Song at Twilight by Alan Brien noted that it ‘tells us nothing about what it is like to be a homosexual in an unsympathetic society. We learn that Hugo’s wife has known all along and that his mistress was never deceived. But what about the rest of his friends, his associates in show business and literature? Did he have only one male lover? If “A Song At Twilight” was not written to demonstrate the strains, the misunderstandings, the comedy and the tragedy of the double life – then what is its purpose?’
Coward might retort that he did not write plays with a message. It is the tone of A Song at Twilight which is its most affecting aspect. As with his later short stories, a sense of detachment pervades the trilogy of A Suite in Three Keys: Coward is reviewing past lives – his own, those of people he has known; characters in his dramas and those of a greater world. He is the puppetmaster still, and the hotel provides a perfect setting, its rooms echo human frailty and failings, played out as he looks on. Here is the tragedy of Hugo Latymer’s life (what Coward might have been); the happier death of George Hilgay (to which Coward looked forward); and the comic characters of the American Conklyns (the objects of Coward’s wit). Elsewhere in the ethereal hotel are Amanda and Elyot, on their honeymoon terrace; or Gilda, Leo and Otto, fighting over each other’s affections; or Nicky Lancaster, a dissolute and aged Dorian Gray. A Suite in Three Keys is the conclusion of the spectacle of Coward’s life, the final exploitation of his art; a coda to the dance, a last attempt to entertain.
Shadows of the Evening also concerns a reunion. The publisher George Hilgay has six months to live, and his former wife and current mistress call a truce to help him. To Hilgay, as to Coward, religion is no panacea, ‘I’m quite content to die believing only in life itself . . .’; and he defies ‘treacly compassion’: ‘I’m going to die – I’m going to die – and, what is more, I’m going to die alone, because everybody dies alone.’ The final speech is his, and Coward’s, epitaph: ‘Every schoolboy has to face the last day of the holidays. That is how I feel now. I still have enough time to recapitulate a few past enjoyments, to revisit the cove where we had the picnic, to swim again into the cave where we found the jellyfish, to swing once more in the wooden swing and to build the last sandcastle.’ From a man whose bedside reading remained the works of Nesbit, it is a sharp reminder of his deep nostalgia for his short-lived boyhood. When reviewing Cole Lesley’s memoir, Tynan wrote, ‘What Mr Lesley shows us in his later chapters is a superbly preserved middle-aged child . . . the most pampered, debonair, hardheaded, professional boy on earth. Whether by genetic luck or environmental good judgement, Noel Coward never suffered the imprisonment of maturity.’ From infant prodigy to aged artist, the gap of the past closed; Coward seemed to concertina time. It is apposite to repeat Tynan’s view that Coward had been Slightly in Peter Pan in 1913, and wholly in it ever since.
The last of the trilogy was the slightest. In Come into the Garden, Maud, a bourgeois American woman faces social disaster when a dinner party for minor royalty is threatened by a dropped-out guest, and she pleads with a friend to fill the gap. It is an essay on snobbery; while the matron is caught up in petty social dilemmas, her hen-pecked husband is making love to the friend; like the ‘hero’ of ‘Fumed Oak’, he rebels against his insufferable wife. This ‘light comedy’ is the sorbet of the meal, a delicate flourish to complete Coward’s final dramatic menu.
1. After Kanin’s biography of Spencer Tracy appeared, Coward told Ginette Spanier he dreaded the day when Kanin would pull down from the shelf the file marked ‘C’.
2. Like Mercedes de Acosta, Liesel is a Hollywood scriptwriter.
3. Latymer’s letters are evidence of his cruel denial of help to the dying Sheldon. ‘Masterpieces of veiled invective’, says Carlotta, ‘pure gold for your future biographer’. Coward had been alerted to the potential power of correspondence when Maugham wrote him an ‘outspoken and moving’ letter when Gerald Haxton died. None of Coward’s own love letters appear to have survived.