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Mad about the Boy

music and words by Noël Coward

ALTHOUGH IT IS OFTEN SUNG as a love song, not least in Dinah Washington’s famous, smouldering recording, ‘Mad about the Boy’ is really anything but. The boy in question is a matinee idol, as the first verse makes plain, and it’s not one person who’s mad about him, it’s at least four.

Noël Coward (1899–1973) wrote the song for the satirical revue, Words and Music, which opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London in September 1932 and, in addition to ‘Mad about the Boy’, introduced ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ to English audiences, the latter having been heard in New York the previous year. In 1939, Words and Music itself went to Broadway, now called Set to Music and starring Beatrice Lilley.

Revues – a mixture of sketch and song – were ensemble pieces, and it followed that so were some of the musical numbers. ‘Mad about the Boy’ is very much in this mode, its four verses and choruses sung by a society woman (Joyce Barbour), a school girl (Steffi Duna), a ‘cockney’ (Norah Howard) and a ‘tart’ (Doris Hare), queuing outside a cinema to see a movie starring the boy they’re all ‘mad about’. Talking pictures were only five years old in 1932.

‘On the Silver Screen / He melts my heart in every single scene,’ sings the society woman; ‘When I do the rooms / I see ’is face in all the brushes and the brooms’ sings the cockney, evidently a domestic maid. The tart sees him in the faces of her clients, though she admits ‘I’m hardly sentimental: / Love isn’t so sublime. / I have to pay the rental / And I can’t afford to waste much time.’

For Broadway, Coward added a fifth character, a closeted business man, who has undergone psychoanalysis but nevertheless still finds himself ‘mad about the boy’. Among his best lines are: ‘When I told my wife, / She said, “I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life!”’ and ‘People I employ / Have the impertinence to call me Myrna Loy’. The verse was never used.

Both Coward’s humour and pathos depend, rather like Cole Porter’s, on rhymes, and here he finds a raft of them for the opening line of his chorus, which is the song’s title. The society woman admits the sleepless nights she’s ‘had about the boy’, even though she finds ‘traces of the cad about the boy’. (Five years later, in Rodgers and Hart’s ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, Ginger Rogers would sing that she’d ‘never been to a party where they honoured Noël Ca’ad’.) The schoolgirl, who has traced a photograph of the boy’s profile and finds a ‘slight / Effect of Galahad about the boy’ is also convinced that A.E. Housman ‘wrote the Shropshire Lad about the boy’. The cockney maid has ‘got it bad about the boy’ and ‘’ad a row with Dad about the boy’. The tart, who thinks ‘there may be something sad about the boy’, is ‘in some strange way … glad about the boy’.

The song was recorded at least five times in its first year and found success beyond its theatrical rationale. In performances by individual singers it was truncated and has been ever since. Over the years, recordings have tended to include the first verse and chorus, sometimes with the final chorus, sometimes the two choruses without the verse, though Beatrice Lillie recorded the schoolgirl’s verse and chorus without the others.

The song’s success is doubtless as much to do with the lovely, bluesy melody, as with the words. The chorus begins not in the tonic (C major), but with a half diminished seventh on the supertonic. We don’t reach the home key until the fifth bar, and even then C major seems to want to be C minor as the melody rises through an E flat, its effect immediately undermined by an A natural. In the very next bar, the music lands on an especially bluesy F sharp diminished chord (on the word ‘sleepless’ in the first chorus). So there’s a delicious unease about the song, a musical ambiguity matching the lyrical ambiguity. It was always possible to hear the lyrics of the first and last choruses as those of a reasonably straightforward love song – you could, after all, walk ‘down the street’ without being a prostitute – but if you knew the song’s theatrical context, there were deeper levels of meaning.

From the beginning the song has carried with it the suggestion of homoeroticism. The word ‘gay’ in this context might not have been in common parlance in 1932, but for those in the know that line in the fourth chorus, ‘he has a gay appeal’, meant only one thing. And then there were rumours about the subject of the song, about the boy himself. Was he Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power or James Cagney? There’s little evidence that Coward had anyone in particular in mind.

More than two decades after Coward’s death, a recording was found of him singing ‘Mad about the Boy’ with piano accompaniment. Perhaps it was a demo, but he does it well. In a high tenor voice merging seamlessly into an expressive falsetto, he sings the society woman’s verse and chorus and the tart’s chorus with its line about the boy’s ‘gay appeal’. Stylistically, it’s very much of its time, Coward making use of a swooning portamento, slowing down to make the most of these moments, for example, the vertiginous dive down a fifth (complete with vibrato), at the end of the first verse on the words ‘like a silly fool I fell’. At the start of the chorus, he sharpens some of the thirds we’re used to hearing as flat and bluesy. It’s a beautiful performance, both funny and touching, a combination of ‘pose and poise’, as Time magazine once wrote of the man himself.

The recording seems to have been made for His Master’s Voice in 1932, the year of the song’s first performance. This was the year that Phyllis Robins, Anona Winn, Cecile Petrie, Elsie Carlisle and Gertrude Lawrence all recorded it, and Ray Noble’s orchestra made their instrumental version; it was also the year Coward recorded several other songs from Words and Music with Noble’s orchestra. But HMV would appear to have rejected his recording of ‘Mad about the Boy’. It had its first release in 2002.