Philip Hoare’s hefty 1995 biography of Noel Coward is vast, encyclopedic and immensely enjoyable. It feels like it tells you every detail you ever wanted about The Master’s life and yet manages at the same time to be brisk and pacey and immensely readable.
The central take home is Coward’s awesome drive from the earliest age to be a star, a success, to take London’s theatreland then New York’s Broadway by storm, and how this fed his relentless drive to network, know everybody, work the room, schmooze and socially climb climb climb, baby. One minute he’s occupying the poky attic in his mother’s Pimlico boarding house, the next he’s hobnobbing with the greats of British theatre, dining with Somerset Maugham, hanging with Tallulah Bankhead, his understudy is John Gielgud, and then it’s off across the Atlantic to party with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, get to know Ben Hecht and Katherine Hepburn, then a luxury liner back across the pond during which he charms Earl Mountbatten and his notoriously promiscuous wife, Edwina. (Hoare has a gossipy page about the scandal caused by her libel case against People magazine which accused her of having an affair with the Black actor Paul Robeson.) He writes a musical with Ivor Novello and his breakthrough play is turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, he performs with a young Laurence Olivier, becoming such good friends with him and his wife that there is speculation to this day about whether they had a homosexual fling. Olivier is on the record as saying emphatically not.
And all this culled from just a few years in the mid-1920s. But Coward’s career was to last another 40 years, as he mined a new historical vein in the 1930s (Cavalcade), then made the great patriotic movies of the 1940s (In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed), then reinvented himself as a cabaret star after the war. At each stage, on every page, we meet a host of characters from each era, from Ivor Novello, Cecil Beaton and Michael Arlen, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, to his bizarrely close friendships with both Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo in the ’30s, and so on and so on, in a never-ending carnival of high grade showbiz gossip.
Coward’s life is like a silver thread guiding us through the glittering worlds of music and entertainment, theatre and film, of his era, as well as the gay underworld scenes in London, New York and select spots around the Mediterranean (Capri, Algiers) and Hoare treats us to and endless supply of fascinating and often hilarious anecdotes. I laughed out loud at the story of American producer Jed Harris in England to cast a production of The Green Bay Tree and going to loads of Shakespeare productions, claiming he was getting very tired of seeing English kings being played by English queens (p.195).
And this is just the socialising and the gossip, before you get to the actual work. Coward’s work ethic was phenomenal and his output prodigious. If this or that play was a disaster, don’t worry darling, there’s always another revue or musical or operetta just round the corner, or a new hit song about to take the gramophone and radio by storm, or a new movie just about to hit the screens, and then there are his books of short stories. And the novel.
He was a phenomenon, able to act, dance, write ravishing musicals, smash hit songs and era-defining plays, and then the great wartime movies. I don’t think genius is quite the right word, but man of phenomenal, extraordinary talents and, above all, the burning, quenchless drive to succeed succeed succeed. As his friend Esme Wynne said, he was:
‘frightfully ambitious… He was full of determination and willpower’ (p.43)
Or as he archly put it in his autobiography:
‘It was a matter of pressing urgency… that I should become as rich and successful as soon as possible.’ (quoted p.63)
Distinctive speech
When a girl, his mother, Violet (1863 to 1954), developed a fever which left her with poor hearing in one ear. This was one reason he developed such an idiosyncratic manner of speech, clearly enunciating every syllable of every word, for her benefit.
Closeness to mother
Violet’s first child, a boy, Russell, died at the age of 6 from spinal meningitis, and this made her especially protective of her second child, Noel (p.10). She cosseted him, and dressed him nicely, and danced attendance. He grew up emotionally spoiled, though not materially, for the family was poor.
Distance from father
Noel’s father, Arthur (1856 to 1937), was a failure. After a series of jobs he became a piano salesman which took him away from home a lot, so was absent during Noel’s boyhood. He was also ineffectual. Eventually he dwindled down to being a sort of servant at the boarding house Violet ended up running.
Suburban
Noel was born in Teddington but the family moved a lot, sometimes out as far as Chobham, living for a while in the Battersea/Clapham area of London, settling in Ebury Street in Pimlico, just north of Victoria Station. I was struck by the fact that next door lived the Evans family, whose daughter, Edith, was to become a dame of the theatre.
He was always aware of his origins in the impoverished lower middle class. Hoare quotes Gertrude Lawrence after they had danced a number in his 1922 review London Calling, standing in the wings and listening to the loud applause and excitedly saying: ‘That’s for us, the two kids from the suburbs. We’ve definitely arrived’ (quote p.119).
Noel
He was named Noel because he was born on 15 December i.e. close to Christmas.
Poverty
When his father’s work petered out, Violet was forced to turn their house in Pimlico into a boarding house, with Alfred helping with the serving and chores. Whenever he made money Noel was quick to pay off the family debts and never lapsed in his attachment to his mother.
But their poverty was easily used as a slur by anyone who wanted to hurt or denigrate him. Before meeting Noel, Cecil Beaton was told his mother was a charlady (p.123). (Compare the universal snobbery against H.G. Wells whose mother was housekeeper at a grand country seat.) For me, it’s this unashamed loyalty to his mother and humble roots which I found the most winning element in Noel’s character, far richer than the so-called wit.
Precocity
What really comes over very quickly is how precocious Noel was and how extraordinarily determined to succeed. He started acting at the age of five and his mother was taking him to auditions and local amateur talent shows before he was 10. At home in Clapham he made a toy theatre and spent the day writing plays for the little puppet figures he made to act out. His first professional engagement was in 1911 at the age of 14, where he appeared in the children’s play The Goldfish in London. By the time he hit his teens he had acted, danced and sung onstage and had a vivid sense of his own potential. He wanted to be a star.
Vicars and sex
He was put off religion by several groping vicars he encountered as a boy. Last year the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to resign after admitting to not doing enough to sanction or report a paedophile vicar. It is a long tradition within the Church of England but also, of course, within the Catholic Church. Noel never respected either.
Homosexuality
He had homosexual experiences before heterosexual ones. Girls were so much more closely chaperoned and protected whereas boys were encouraged to play, share rooms, go camping etc together. And all without the heart-stopping risk of the life-ruining risk of getting pregnant.
(The ever-present threat of pregnancy is echoed a lot later in the book, when Hoare describes Coward meeting the man who was to be the love of his life, Graham Payn, towards the end of the Second World War. Payn had previously been heterosexual and had numerous affairs with chorus girls. But after the third abortion – ‘and they cost £75 in those days’ – he’d had enough and was ready for a change of orientation, p.358. Compare and contrast Kingsley Amis’s horrible depictions of abortion in his early novels, and the squalid abortion scenes in the 1966 movie, Alfie. Gays were well out of the whole thing. )
Uranians
The Uranians was one of numerous names given to late-nineteenth century associations of homosexuals in the arts who wrote about the love of adolescent boys.
Young Noel was introduced to this world when still a boy via the figure of the painter, Bohemian and prominent Uranian Philip Streatfeild. One version of the story goes that Noel’s mother, Violet, was working as a cleaner, cleaning Streatfeild’s Chelsea studios and one day brough along her 14-year-old son. With his eye for adolescent boy beauty, Streatfeild was taken with Noel and asked him to sit for him. Streatfeild introduced to other artists and performers in his circle (which included Robbie Ross, Alfred Douglas and other survivors from the Wilde circle of the 1890s).
Then, in 1914, Streatfeild asked Violet’s permission to take the boy on holiday with him to Cornwall. Knowing Streatfeild and obviously trusting him, and also concerned for her son’s ongoing health issues in the polluted London air, Violet gave her permission and young Noel was whisked off to Cornwall to meet more stylish gay artists who probably included the distinguished painter of young men Henry Scott Tuke. Here he could sunbathe and swim nude, and be worshipped by older men.
Nobody knows whether he had sex with any of these men but it must have shown the impressionable young boy that homosexuality and the wonderfully sybaritic lifestyle these men led, was possible, was a lifestyle option. Here’s a photo of Streatfeild and Noel.
Photo of Philip Streatfeild and a teenage Noel Coward
They were in Cornwall when war broke out in August 1914. Coward just seemed to have a magic touch when it came to making contacts. As soon as the war broke out Coward was sent back to London in the charge of a friend of the group, the novelist Hugh Walpole.
Streatfeild enlisted and died a year later from tuberculosis contracted in the army. He was just 35 (p.44). But not before he’d introduced Noel to other members of his regiment, especially the gay officers, who took part in what sound like orgiastic parties (p.36). Thus began Coward’s lifelong attraction to men in uniform and comfortableness around members of the forces of all classes and all sexual persuasions.
Hambleton Hall
Coward’s social ascendancy began thanks to Streatfeild who, before his death, asked wealthy socialite Mrs Julia Astley Cooper to take Coward under her wing. Mrs Astley Cooper continued to encourage her late friend’s protégé, who remained a frequent guest at her estate, Hambleton Hall in Rutland (pages 39 to 43). Among her guests were notables like CK Montcrieff, the translator of Proust, the conductor Malcolm Sargent, the diarist James Lee Milne and so on.
But young Noel not only met and learned how to talk to high-powered members of the literati, but was also trained in the rhythms and decorum of country house living, numerous details of which were crucial to his plays of the 1920s. Mrs Astley Cooper even claimed, a lot later, that he had a little black notebook with him and took down remarks and whole conversations between the Bohemian members of her family and that these turned up wholesale in plays like Hay Fever and The Young Idea. Hoare says his experiences there were ‘pivotal to Coward’s progress’ (p.43).
Penetrative sex
As to sex with any of these Uranians, his close friend throughout his boyhood, Esmé Wynne, decades later insisted that Noel was not homosexually active as a boy. In fact Hoare broadens this out to the claim that he had a lifetime aversion to penetrative sex (p.34). Much later in the book I laughed at the story that he and American producer Jed Harris were having a late night conversation about sex and when Jed asked him if he’d ever slept with a woman, Noel replied: ‘It would be like going to bed with a porpoise’ (p.195). Well, I dare say porpoises can be sexy 🙂
Saki
At Hambleton Hall Noel picked up from Proust as a name to drop (he later named a cat Proust) but the real revelation was the writings of the camp humourist Saki, real name Hector Hugh Munro. Saki’s humorous contempt for the values of the older generation, his worship of camp young men, yet all drenched with a sentimental fondness for the English countryside and the quirks of English life, all of these were things Noel would adopt wholesale. He never got to meet his hero because Munro was killed in the trenches in November 1916, when Noel was just 17.
Esmé Wynne
Noel had a deep boyhood and adolescent friendship with Esmé Wynne (1898 to 1972). They met at child auditions and in 1914 both appeared in the first production of Clifford Mills’ Where the Rainbow Ends. Soon after Wynne attended Coward’s 12th birthday party and their friendship blossomed. In 1912 Wynne had her first writing success at the age of 13 when her first play The Prince’s Bride was put on for one night by Charles Hawtree at the Savoy, including Coward in the cast. From then on they were inseparable, spending time together whenever possible and writing to each other constantly. In 1915 they were part of the cast which undertook a lengthy British tour of Brandon Thomas’s play Charley’s Aunt.
Between acting appointments collaborated on sketches and songs together and wrote a number of one-act plays under the joint pen-name of Esnomel; Ida Collaborates (The Last Chapter) (staged 1917), To Have and To Hold (not staged) and Women and Whisky (staged 1918). They also got up to teenage pranks.
A very naughty boy…
As an adolescent Noel got into all kinds of trouble. He bit teachers, answered back.
He was addicted to shoplifting, pulling off amazing feats of theft, one time simply walking out of Fortnum and Mason with a suitcase, strolling along to Piccadilly to Hatchards, filling it with books and walking out (p.48). On numerous occasions he nearly got caught and had to leg it. This kind of behaviour associates him much more with the urban tearaways of the working class than the soignée upper classes he realised he wanted to move among.
On page 202 Hoare has a passage describing how Noel, arguably, never really grew up, from the childish tantrums he threw in the theatre or with his ‘family’, to his impish subversive sense of humour, his quickness to ridicule royalty, church of state. Kenneth Tynan is quoted as saying he was never entrapped by maturity (p.202). And Hoare thinks Private Lives shows its protagonists having endless wildish tantrums (p.223).
No education
An important point is that he had little or no formal education. He was educated briefly at a choir school and later received dance lessons, but more or less left school at 11 and had no formal schooling thereafter. Forget university, he didn’t get anywhere near finishing secondary school. Instead The Theatre was his education and his teachers and his life. To this lack may fairly obviously be attributed the legendary thinness of his plays and their almost complete lack of depth or meaning beyond the hour and a half’s distraction they provide.
When he published his first volume of autobiography, Present Indicative, in 1937 the novelist St John Ervine was staggered at its shallowness: ‘I was amazed and disturbed at the slenderness of his intellectual resources. [I wonder if he has] ever read a great book, seen a fine picture or a notable play, listened to music of worth, observed a piece of sculpture, or taken any interest in the commonplaces of a cultured man’s life.’ (quoted, p.276)
Piano
He learned some good striking chords with which to open almost any song to get the audience’s attention (p.54). Although he never learned to play the piano very well. I was struck when he himself admits he was only comfortable in three keys, E flat, B flat and A flat. He joked that the sight of sharps on sheet music threw him into a tizzy (p.14).
First World War
In 1918, Coward was conscripted into the Labour Corp. He bribed his way to a day pass and spent it tracking down every contact he’d made via Streatfeild or Mrs Cooper and eventually persuaded a sympathetic officer to phone the CO and get him transferred to the Artists Rifles. But he was useless. Having not attended school since 1918 he had no sense of discipline and esprit de corps. He developed headaches and insomnia, fell and cracked his head and was sent to a hospital in Camberwell mostly filled with shell shock victims. Esme thought he was malingering and even here he made influential friends, and discovered a way of escaping for evenings back in the West End. In June 1918 he was discharged from hospital and sent back to the Artists Rifles camo in Essex where he was given light duties such as cleaning the latrines. Not surprisingly, he developed psychosomatic symptoms again and again was sent to hospital. This one includes lots of epileptic patients and Noel briefly worried that he was one too. Weeks passed and he drafted a bad novel. Eventually, in August 1918 he was given a discharge. He was free to resume his career in his beloved theatre.
In the 1930s Coward wrote as flippantly as possibly about his period in the army, exaggerating for comic effect the extent to which he had faked his symptoms to escape service. This came back to bite him very hard when the Second World War kicked off, not only among his enemies in Britain but also in the States, where his endless foreign travel in the war’s first few years drew extensive criticism.
Elsie April
In 1922 he met Elsie April who worked with many composers to improve and orchestrate their compositions. She was prodigiously gifted. She had perfect pitch. If someone hummed a tune to her in a noisy rehearsal room she was able to notate, harmonise and transcribe it on the spot. Her biographer credits her with introducing ‘the unusual key changes and poignant angularities of phrase’ to be found in Coward’s mature music. I think I know what he means. If you listen to the songs in Conversation Piece it’s rare that a song stays in the same key for more than two lines and the vocal line often jumps dramatically. Although the orchestration is sickeningly sweet, the actual vocal lines are often strikingly jarring and angular.
Burning ambition
He had an extraordinary commitment to becoming successful and famous. In his discussion of heroin and cocaine a propos of The Vortex, Hoare gives the impression that, although mixing in circles which took drugs, he never did himself. He was not the sort. He never lost control. He was always watching and alert and driven.
He devoted himself to making contacts and social climbing while still a teenager. There isn’t space to describe the extraordinary range of artists, writers, poets, playwrights, producers, designers, directors, other actors, as well as aristocrats and even royalty that he met. On a trans-Atlantic liner he managed to get on first name terms with the Earl Mountbatten and his wife. He became so friendly with the dissolute brother of the Prince of Wales that people speculate to this day whether they had a gay affair!
The family
Noel early gathered around him a coterie of friends and collaborators who became known jokily as ‘the family’. One of the earlier members was the actress Lorne Lorraine who became his devoted secretary for 40 years, and is captured as the long-suffering secretary Monica Reid in Present Laughter, and later friends such as his assistant Cole Lesley (recruited when he was working as a shop assistant in Kent, p.272), and his life partner Graham Payn.
‘Bubbers’ is what he called his sacred afternoon nap.
Backchat and bickering
I was astonished when I first read Noel Coward’s plays at the almost complete absence of the famous wit and humour I’d heard so much about. Instead I discovered almost nothing but argument and bickering rising, from time to time, to really angry exchanges and even, in Private Lives, physical attacks.
This view felt a bit like blasphemy against the great man, and I worried I had profoundly misread him, so it’s reassuring to have Hoare quote so many, many critics and contemporaries who entirely agree with my own reading.
The swift, hard, rattling farcical-comedy, at which he aimed so many shots, is brought to glittering perfection in Private Lives. It is technically a masterpiece – not of writing plays but of writing Noel Coward plays. For, as I think we have discovered by now, Mr Coward’s plot is the contrast between brilliant cosmopolitanism and stodgy Anglo-Saxondom, his standby is Infidelity and his device of stagecraft is the Bicker… (author and critic A.G. MacDonnell, quoted p.213)
The Times wrote of Private Lives that the dialogue ‘which might seem in print a trickle of inanities’ became onstage ‘a perfectly times and directed interplay of nonsense.’
The Observer found the play superficial and that the characters’ ‘style is mainly in their clothes; as conversationalists they are mere back-chatterers‘. Looking up back-chat I find it defined as ‘To respond in a disputative, often sarcastic manner’, ‘rude or cheeky remarks made in reply to someone in authority’, ‘the act of answering back, especially impudently.’
Brooks Anderson: the playwright ‘has nothing to say and says it with competent agility for three acts.’
New York Review: ‘They are only adults under the skin. They are really adolescents on long legs.’ (p.229)
But what did Noel care what the critics said? That year (1930) he was declared the highest paid author in the world. Nothing succeeds like success.
Fame and extraordinary output
The Vortex, written in 1923, performed in late 1924, shot him to fame. Hoare cites contemporaries recording that young people started to dress like him, affect his clipped speech, attempted never to be seen without a cigarette or a cocktail in one hand, wore Cowardesque dressing gowns. Like the earlier fad for Valentino and later crazes over Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles.
The mass media – with the arrival of ever-increasing numbers of newspapers, magazines, radio and silent movies – demands stars and celebrities to write about and he basked in dizzy fame from the premier of The Vortex in November 1924.
And it was followed by a giddy rush of productions, plays, reviews, musicals and some silent movie adaptations of the plays. Old plays he’d written were dusted off and eagerly sought by producers. He turned out new plays at a dizzying rate, alongside songs and music, as well as working on screenplays. It’s a dizzyingly record of work and achievement.
Plays
- Sirocco (1921) (Revised in 1927)
- The Young Idea (1922)
- The Better Half (1922)
- The Queen Was in the Parlour (1922) (first Produced in 1926)
- The Vortex (1923) (first Produced November 1924)
- Easy Virtue (1924) (first Produced in 1925)
- Fallen Angels (1925)
- Hay Fever (1925)
- Semi-Monde (1926) (too rude to be licensed in Britain; first produced in 1977)
- This Was a Man (1926)
- The Marquise (1927)
- Home Chat (1927)
Musicals
- London Calling! (1922, 1923)
- Weatherwise (1923) (first produced in 1932)
- On With the Dance (1924, 1925)
Songs
He wrote lots of songs for the musicals including some wonderful hits, namely:
Failures
But there were failures too. In fact it seemed for a moment like there was a steady decline: after the runaway rave success of The Vortex (1924) and Hay Fever (1925) came two plays which did OK, Easy Virtue (1926) and The Marquise (1927) had been modestly successful. And then two disasters, Home Chat (25 October 1927) and Sirocco (November 1927).
Regarding Home Chat, the Illustrated London News called the play ‘an amusing little trifle on the whole – but it is thin in its material and there are signs about it of hasty and careless composition’.
In the Observer St John Ervine took a similar view: ‘Had Mr Coward spent another week in writing his play it would have been a much wittier one than it is.’
This is very much the view I took of even his most successful plays. Knocked off in a matter of weeks or even days, they all show it in their thinness of plot and characterisation and astonishing lack of wit, of funny or quotable lines. Instead, as I’ve said in my reviews, even his most famous plays basically rely on people getting angry and shouting abuse at each other (true of Hay Fever, Easy Virtue, Fallen Angels, Private Lives).
Anyway, Sirocco did even worse. The first night was a famous theatrical disaster, the worst night of Coward’s professional career, 24 November 1927, pretty much three years to the day after the barnstorming success of The Vortex (25 November 1924). The audience booed and hissed. When he went out the stage door he was spat at. The reviews were uniformly disastrous.
But Hoare draws an interesting point. Coward, he says, realised a great truth from this experience. The media, the press, like to build up celebrities and then knock them down but this isn’t because the press is particularly malevolent. It’s just stupid. In the popular press everything is either black or white, good or bad. You’re either up or down. Coward had had several years of being The New Thing, super-fashionable, adored by his fans. But in the moron press it doesn’t take much to tip you over and as soon as you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom. Black or white. Up or down. And so it was that just a couple of so-so plays led to excoriating notices and the critics (and some of his cattier friends) saying it was all over, Noel was a busted flush (p.189).
Of course he wasn’t, as the next 45 years (he died in 1973) were to show.
Cavalcade
Philip Hoare sees the 1932 extravaganza Cavalcade as a turning point in Coward’s ideas, that he consciously moved on from the provocative and controversial attitudes of the 1920s plays, with their incessant references to cocktails and cocaine, with their clever riffs on infidelity and sexual immorality. Cavalcade‘s sentimental patriotism inaugurated a new feeling of respect and avoidance of controversy. Those bastions of conservative conformism and backward-looking philistinism, the Daily Mail for the lower middle classes and the Telegraph for the pompous upper middle classes, praised it and the Mail even serialised the script/book.
In 1932 Coward was at the height of his success with Cavalcade making a mint with provincial tours of Private Lives and Bitter Sweet all contributing to the coffers. He bought a mews cottage, Burton Mews in Belgravia, and had it gutted into a huge space appropriate for big parties of the great and the good from the worlds of theatre, movies, aristocracy and even royalty.
I laughed when I read, on page 254, Virginia Woolf writing to her nephew Quentin Bell, complaining that she had to go to dinner with Coward, whose work she ‘despised’. Good old Virginia. His ubiquity as a celebrity turned her against him. And Hoare goes on to quote her quoting Aldous Huxley at some dinner describing Coward as beating an omelette with no eggs: beating and beating and beating, but with nothing there, just the action of the beating. That actually gets close to Coward’s essence: a kind of quintessence of pure ambition, with all the plays and songs and revues merely tools, expedients, to raise their author to that level of superstardom. But when you look at the works closely: nothing there except the frantic beating. The subtext of all of them isn’t Queer, it’s Burning Ambition.
E.M. Forster dined with Coward at Lady Colefax’s, a pushy society hostess, and reported that he spent the entire time talking the most awful drivel. You can easily see how, from Forster’s cultured perspective, this would be true. Hoare entertainingly says that for all their differences in style and depth, Forster and Coward were both middle-class mummies boys.
Second World War
The Second World War came at a good time for Noel Coward. After the madcap Twenties and bleak Thirties, the war redefined Britishness and served as an antidote to the disillusion and decadence of the inter-war period. Its revival of the values of empire and Britain’s greatness was congenial to Coward: the quality of fortitude required (and mythologised) by the war neatly coincided with the fortitude displayed by Noel… the values he espoused dovetailed with the Dunkirk / Blitz / ‘Britain can take it’ spirit and he was able to exploit them fully. Cavalcade had announced his patriotism; the films, plays and concert tours of the early 1940s helped cement his image in the hearts and minds of the British public. (p.329)
In fact it was quite a bit more complicated than that and Hoare gives a fascinating account of how unpopular Coward became in the first few years of the war. He was quickly involved in spying combined with morale boosting trips to France, then America several times, then as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. I was struck to learn that he met President Roosevelt not once but twice, on charm offensives to persuade him to support embattled Britain.
But these busy trips don’t seem to have had much practical outcome and mainly generated critical articles in the press and even questions in the House from MPs asking why he was gallivanting round the globe at public expense. Hoare shows how the deliberate misreporting of his activities and hostile press conferences steadily put him off the small-minded, carping tone of British public life, especially the vendetta against him pursued by the Beaverbrook newspapers, namely the Daily and Sunday Express. Coward got his own back by having a scene in ‘In Which We Serve’ when, after the ship is sunk by Germans, we see a copy of the Daily Express float by with the headline ‘No War This Year’. Lord Beaverbrook was incensed.
There was also an anti-queer undertone. Hoare quotes Joyce Grenfell of all people lamenting in a letter to her mother that Britain should be represented abroad by someone everyone knew was ‘queer’ (p.313) and other commentators, less party to theatrical insider knowledge, still criticised a figure most associated with dainty young things in dressing gowns and slippers mocking all their parents’ values. ‘God, what enemies I must have,’ he wrote in his diary.
When his lovely mews house was bombed out he moved into the Savoy, widely thought to be safe because constructed of steel girders. He overheard a street seller and promptly knocked out the song ‘London Pride’, a popular hit with the people who didn’t read or care about gossip columns and querulous MPs. According to Hoare, a ‘soundtrack to Coward’s war, banal but touching.’
He met Churchill on a number of occasions, lobbying to be given more intelligence work. He was frustrated when Churchill told him not to but to go and sing and entertain the troops i.e. to do what he did best, to entertain and raise morale.
Blithe Spirit
He had been mulling over a comedy about a haunted house, went to stay at Portmeirion in Wales on a brief holiday with Joyce Cary, and wrote Blithe Spirit in just seven days (!). It quickly went into production, opened in the West End on 2 July 1941 and proceeded to break box office records, running for a record 1,997 performances.
In Which We Serve
Soon after Blithe Spirit was premiered Coward was introduced to the producer Anthony Havelock-Allan who was working for Two Cities Films. This company was set up by two Italians, Filippo Del Giudice and Mario Zampi. Two Cities played an important role in British wartime films, producing a series of classics which helped bolster morale including adaptations of Coward’s plays ‘This Happy Breed’ and ‘Blithe Spirit’, along with ‘The Way Ahead’, Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V’, ‘The Way to the Stars’.
Noel was asked for a scenario and drew on the recent incident of his friend Louis Mountbatten, captain of a ship that was sunk. This became the germ of the wartime classic movie ‘In Which We Serve’ where the sinking of the ship becomes a pretext for flashbacks to their civilian lives of a cross-section of the crew, and thereby of British society.
Coward was introduced to the established cameraman Ronald Neame, and the editor and wannabe director David Lean, then 33. He brought with him his loyal set and costume designer, Gladys Calthrop.
On the writing front it’s amusing to learn that Coward’s initial idea of a screenplay, starting off in the Far East and featuring a huge cast, would have ended up with a film 7 or 8 hours long. He had to learn what worked and didn’t work on the job.
On the gossip front, I was a bit amazed to learn that during the production Coward had a passionate affair with the glamorous male actor, Michael Wilding, nine years his junior. Reading a book like this makes you wonder whether any of the actors from the classic era were not gay.
In ‘Which We Serve’ premiered in September 1942. In 1943 Coward was awarded an Academy Award for ‘outstanding production achievement’.
After the film was launched, he embarked on a provincial tour playing his three most recent plays – Present Laughter, This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit – in a package titled ‘Play Parade’. During the day they visited munitions factories and hospitals. When the plays arrived back in London they were triumphant.
Wartime tours
Of the Middle East, then to America for radio broadcasts and to meet Roosevelt (again), a pit stop in Jamaica which he fell in love with, then back to North Africa and then a tour of South Africa, with piano accompaniment from Norman Hackforth and valet and dogsbody by a new employee, the frank and often foul-mouthed Bert Lister. Then is invited by his old friend Mountbatten to tour the Far East, which he does dutifully and exhausts himself, eventually having collapsing and taking R&R in Ceylon.
The film of ‘Blithe Spirit’ opened in April 1945. Coward hated what David Lean had done to it, but it was a box office success.
Post-war
The hectic pace of Coward’s work life doesn’t let up in the immediate post-war years which saw a constant round of revivals of his plays in London, New York and Paris, interspersed with the writing of another musical and a steady stream of new works, which pass almost in a blur.
Jamaica The standout fact is that he fell in love with Jamaica and bought a plot of land on the island’s fashionable north coast, just down the road from Ian Fleming, and had a house built there which was named Blue Harbour. Ironically it was, according to all the guests who stayed, uncomfortable and unhygienic but Coward loved it. The food was, by all accounts, terrible. Said John Pringle:
‘The food was awful, always covered in pickled walnuts… The deserts looked like they’d been made in toilet seat moulds.’ (p.397).
Nudity was almost compulsory, especially round the swimming pool, which some guests found bracing.
The King and I He was offered but turned down the part in The King and I which was then given to Yul Brynner.
Ace of Clubs His musical, Ace of Clubs, was a flop. Hoare implies because his musical director, the immensely talented, Elsie April, had died (1950) and she was the secret ingredient of all his musicals.
Farewell Jack Wilson He finally severed business relations with his former lover Jack Wilson, who had for decades represented him in the US but had become an alcoholic and presided over a run of failed productions.
The Astonished Heart 1950: the film version of ‘The Astonished Heart’, in which he starred, was panned. He had asked Michael Redgrave to play the lead, as the psychiatrist who finds himself torn between wife and lover and ends up committing suicide. But when, in late 1949, Coward saw the rushes, he thought Redgrave was doing it all wrong and squeezed him out of the production. Nonetheless it failed. The original one-act play moves so fast you don’t notice the basic implausibility but stretched to nearly three times the length, the play’s thinness of characterisation became obvious. Variety magazine accurately summarised: ‘While film has a clever veneer, yarn lacks the more basic quality of credibility due to insufficient motivation of the central character.’
Relative Values The next genuine hit was Relative Values (1951), a satire on the Labour government and the new ideas of social equality which the war had seen triumph. It was ten years since he’d written Blithe Spirit. Reviews were mixed but many critics just didn’t like the monologue where the lead character mocks dreams of equality.
Joke Although people go on and on about his tremendous wit, there is in this biography, as in the plays, not a lot of evidence of it. One slight anecdote made me laugh. Walking across Leicester Square with a friend, Coward saw the hoarding for a new film starring Dirk Bogarde and Michael Wilding called ‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’. ‘I don’t see why not.’ Noel said to his friend, ‘Everyone else has.’
Ann Rothermere Interesting that Ian Fleming’s mistress, who he subsequently married, Ann Rothermere, was a real aristocrat, and so quite disdainful of Noel with his airs and graces and painful reminders that he was on first name terms with various Royals. Trying too hard. Arriviste. On the other hand, what do you expect from a boy from Battersea who would never have the genuine, bred-in-the-bone aristocratic hauteur. Coward attended Ian and Ann’s wedding.
Musicals In 1946 his musical, Pacific 1860, had not been a success. In 1951 another musical, The Globe Review, starring his boyfriend Graham Payn, opened to good reviews. Whereas the next play, Quadrille (1952), was panned.
Churchill visited and they spent time painting together for painting, we now learn, had been a hobby of his since boyhood (p.398). He painted local Black men, looking muscular (p.399). You can see quite a few of them on the Noel Coward website.
Cabaret In October 1951 he undertook an experiment, to perform a solo show of songs at the Café de Paris. This was the start of a new type of career. Over the coming years he slipped in more runs of these kinds of performances before, of course, succumbing to the lure of America.
Apple Cart In 1952 he was persuaded to star in a revival of Shaw’s political satire, The Apple Cart (p.400). The musical After The Ball (1953) was badly directed and performed (p.404).
The coronation He watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (2 June 1953) on television. It was the occasion of his most famous quip. As the carriages of visiting dignitaries rolled past one came into view bearing the huge Queen of Tonga beside a small man. When someone asked who the little man sitting beside the queen was, Noel quipped ‘her lunch.’ The only snag with this bon mot is that Coward himself denied actually saying it. He said it was David Niven (p.401).
Nude with Violin He was working on Nude with Violin, a satire on contemporary art which thinks it is all a hoax. It was 30 years since The Vortex and he had become a crusty old reactionary (p.402). Hoare makes the sweeping and controversial statement that Coward might well have been a run-of-the-mill entertainer and playwright if it wasn’t for his outsider status as a homosexual. It was this outsiderness which gave everything he wrote its edge (p.402). Really? What this book shows is just how many other playwrights, novelists, artists and actors were gay as well starting, for example, with Somerset Maugham and Ivor Novello. If it was his gayness which gave him his ‘edge’, why didn’t the other two popular entertainers have the same ‘edge’? No. As a theory or explanation for Coward’s style it’s a non-starter.
One thing which didn’t change was his amazing facility. He wrote Nude with Violin in just over three weeks.
Autobiographies The second instalment of his autobiography, Future Indefinite was published in 1954. There’s a puzzle here. Coward wrote three volumes of autobiography but they left big gaps. Present Indicative (1937) ends in 1931 while Future Indefinite (1954) starts in 1939 and only goes up to 1945. Why the big gap in the ’30s? He was maybe attempting to fill it with the third volume, Past Conditional, which he left unfinished at his death and which only covers 1931 and 1932.
Violet His beloved mother, Violet, died, aged 91. She had been his uncomplaining rock.
Idiotic I noticed this word recurring in ‘Blithe Spirit’ and then noticed it cropping up in quotes from Coward’s diaries or reported speech, in this biography. I think ‘idiotic’ may have been his favourite word.
- ‘This week has been fairly idiotic.’
- ‘I have made one of the most sensational successes of my career and to pretend that I am not absolutely delighted would be idiotic.’
- In 1956 in Paris he met the Duke of Windsor, now deaf, who he found ‘completely idiotic’.
- He was in Jamaica during the filming of ‘Dr No’ which was ‘enjoyable but idiotic’.
- When he learned that half of Hollywood was having Dr Niehans’s rejuvenating injection of goat placenta, he commented ‘They can’t all be idiotic!’
Marijuana We learn that when Laurence Olivier visited Coward, he sought out a neighbour, Morris Cargill and demanded the best ganja. Who knew that Laurence Olivier smoked dope? (p.408)
Jamaica II He moved to a new retreat at a place called Firefly Hill, on the ruin of a lookout tower built by the pirate Captain Morgan (p.397), with a magnificent view of the Blue Mountains sweeping down to the sea, and a sandy beach. He commissioned a local architect to design it but it turned out as ugly as Blue Harbour. According to Ian Fleming its walls all leaked resulting in permanent damp.
Local Jamaican politics inspired him to start what turned into a satirical comic novel, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ (p.409).
Las Vegas American producers came calling, with offers for salaried writing jobs in Hollywood etc but he didn’t want to be tied down. Instead he opted for a 3-week run of performances in Las Vegas, as his friend Marlene Dietrich had done. His usual accompanist was forbidden a visa so he took up Dietrich’s suggestion of using her accompanist, Peter Matz. According to Hoare, Matz rearranged many of Coward’s songs, giving them a more American swing and arrangement. Coward’s success in Vegas owed a lot to Matz (p.410). $15,000 a week. A bit like the Beatles, his set only lasted half an hour, but was enough to wow the crowd with his presence and charisma. The concerts were recorded and edited into the record Noel Coward in Las Vegas.
He was persuaded to play a cameo part in the movie Around The World In Eighty Days in exchange for a Bonnard painting valued at £4,500.
He rehearsed and performed live on TV a musical special, despite fierce arguments with the crass American sponsors (Ford).
Exile His tax affairs became more and more complicated, with him paying tax in Britain, plus supertax, and tax in America as well sometimes. Now that his mother was dead, his last real tie with the home country, his accountant and tax advisers told him to leave. So he sold up everything, the London house and Goldenhurst in Kent, resigned all his positions, and moved permanently to Bermuda. This was because it was in the sterling zone but had different tax laws. In reality he was to spend more and more time in America, especially Hollywood.
1956 ‘South Sea Bubble’ was one of the three works set in his fictional Pacific country of Samola. It is a comedy built around a strong Diana Cooper-Edwina Mountbatten type figure. As long ago as 1950 Coward had asked Vivien Leigh to play it, and in April 1956 she did, to very good reviews. In September he saw the premiere of ‘Nude with Violin’ in Dublin and was, as usual, sniffy about John Gielgud’s performance, but then Gielgud was sniffy about the play.
But the press continued very anti-Coward, publishing cartoons lampooning the great tax avoider and accusing him of unpatriotism – all of which confirmed Noel in his decision to leave the country and made him more reluctant than ever to return. It depressed him but he was cheered up by publication of the ‘Theatrical Companion to Coward’, latest in a series which had covered Shaw and Maugham.
Osborne The first night of John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ on 8 May 1956 sounded the death knell of the old school of drama. It was as radical a breath of fresh air as Coward’s ‘The Vortex’ had been 32 years earlier. The future lay with the Angry Young Men and kitchen sink dramas.
Volcano Coward was working on ‘Volcano’, a play about the storm and stress of a problem marriage, largely based on Ian and Ann Fleming’s marriage with infidelities on both sides.
Bill Traylor He had a disastrous love affair with young actor Bill Traylor who he cast, against advice, in the Broadway run of ‘Nude with Violin’. The play bombed and such as Coward’s insensate pursuit of Traylor that the young actor tries to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, a scandal which was only just kept out of the papers. Coward was miserably unhappy for months, first at lowering his ferocious self-discipline and then worrying that he would never find true love.
1958 He was tired of Bermuda and thought Jamaica was on the turn. He travelled to France and visited Switzerland, realising he wanted to settle in Europe, in a temperate climate.
Cuba He agreed to a bit part in Carol Reed’s film of Graham Greene’s novel ‘Our Man in Havana’. He had Alec and Merula Guinness to stay first, then they all flew to Havana. Here they met Graham Green and Ernest Hemingway. Namedropping doesn’t get much better. Hemingway hated Noel’s affected manner and endless theatre gossip. Quelle surprise.
Switzerland He finally bought a house overlooking Lac Leman. It was to become his final home. It was dubbed Chalet Coward or, amusingly, the Shilly Chalet.
‘Our Man in Havana’ was released on 30 December 1959 and his role was praised. This opened the door for more cameo roles which were to become a useful source of income (p.453).
Meanwhile his attempt at a serious ballet ‘London Morning’, completely flopped, the music and scenario completely out of date. And his play ‘Look After Lulu’, a translation of a Feydeau farce, also bombed, despite starring Vivien Leigh.
1960 His refusal to exercise, give up smoking or eat sensibly began to catch up with him, as he was stricken with various ailments including phlebitis.
Pinter Surprisingly when he saw The Caretaker in 1960 he was thrilled by it and when he met its author, Harold Pinter, they both realised they had a lot in common: the use of incomplete patter or banter as a style; more deeply, a feel for the theatre not as the expression of the self but as an objective medium for expressing any given situation to the full. In 1963 he put up some of the money to finance a movie version.
Waiting in the Wings about a home for ageing actresses, opened in August 1960. It was savaged by the critics, much to Coward’s anger. The times really had changed and he was de trop.
Pomp and Circumstance His novel was published in November 1960. It wasn’t intended to be literature but entertainment and was reviewed as such. I wonder what it’s like.
Sail Away Hoare describes the immense amount of effort which went into not just writing but staging and funding a lavish musical called ‘Sail Away’ which he hoped would compete with the classic American musicals and provide a tidy pension. it did not. Despite bringing in the same choreographer who’d done West Side Story (1957) and the larger-than-life Elaine Strich. It opened to packed houses in London but was similarly panned. By now Coward loathed theatre critics.
- The Girl Who Came To Supper
- High Spirits, a musical version of Blithe Spirit – ran for 373 performances and became one of the smash hit musicals of the season
In the mid to late 1960s his work underwent a revival and a reconsideration. Hay Fever and Private Lives were successfully revived, the National Theatre and then the BBC staged Coward seasons.
He was finally awarded a knighthood in 1970. Apparently Harold Wilson was not too keen, largely because of his brush with the law over tax evasion, but the Royal Family insisted. He was on very friendly terms with Elizabeth, Margaret and their mother.
His health steadily deteriorated. Eventually he could barely walk. He retreated to Firefly on Jamaica where he was looked after by a Black man named Miguel (married, not gay). He suffered from stomach pains, variously diagnosed as cancer or kidney stones. He died one night, collapsing on the bathroom floor, being carried to his bed by Miguel and passing with just this illiterate Black man for company.
Turned out that burial in England was out of the question because of the legal and tax implications. After worrying and consulting friends, Lesley Cole and Graham Payn decided to have him interred in the grounds at Firefly. Later there was a memorial service at the actor’s church in Covent Garden. Several years later a tablet was placed on Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.
He worried about being forgotten but Coward is still very much remembered. His best songs endure and his best plays are regularly revived. He lived on as he would have wanted to. As to soul and an afterlife and all the rest of it, he despised Christian belief. When he left the stage, he left it, and that was that.
Quips
He found it difficult rehearsing with Claudette Colbert for a TV production of Blithe Spirit, leading to several good jokes. When she apologised for fluffing her lines and said she knew them backwards the night before, Noel said ‘and that’s the way you’re speaking them this morning.’
Colbert was sensitive about having a short neck, so took umbrage when Noel quipped to someone else that ‘if she had a neck he’d wring it.’
When asked on the Ed Murrow show to describe the style of his painting (he’d brought one along to show) Noel joked that it was ‘erratic’. In fact his friends called it his ‘Touch and Gauguin’ style.
Omissions
This is an excellent biography and its thoroughness helps it weigh in at an impressive 605 pages long. It seems churlish to say it, then, but in the last hundred pages I had an increasing sense of how much had been left out. Not about Coward himself, but about the context around him. I realised this when Hoare mentioned the premiere of John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back in Anger’ in 1956, and later mentioned Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960). Later he mentions Coward reading Waiting for Godot. Of course Hoare has to stick to his brief of describing Coward’s life, the writing and production of his musicals and plays, his relations with umpteen producers, directors and actors and backers for them all, and then, of course, developments in his private life – mother dies, lovers come and go.
I think it’s that in the first 400 pages of the biography, up to and including the patriotic films he was involved in during and just after the war, there’s an assumption that Coward in some sense represented the wider times, was the new young thing, represented the febrile 1920s, and popular theatre of the 1930s and then managed to strike a national patriotic mood during the war. Working with David Lean and Laurence Olivier represented the peak of his timeliness.
Then some time during the 1950s he loses it. Play after play, musical and ballet, fail or underwhelm. And then, only very casually and in passing, Hoare mentions Osborne, Beckett and Pinter and we suddenly realise, with a jolt, that the outside world has moved on light years beyond Coward’s light cocktail entertainments.
But this had been going on all the time. For example, his close neighbour and friend in Jamaica, Ian Fleming first appears on page 328, during the war, and Coward knows him from 1948 onwards. But it’s only on page 473, and 13 years later, that Hoare even mentions the James Bond books. Yes the first of these had been published back in 1953 and so the success of the almost annual new Bond book must have transformed their relationship. And yet it isn’t mentioned until the biography is almost over.
What I’m getting at is that at moments like this you realise with a bit of a shock how very narrowly and parochially and blinkeredly the biography has focused entirely on Coward. God knows he was so hard working and prolific there’s easily enough material to fill the 600 pages but it’s here, in the closing passages, that you realise that while we’ve been locked in the Coward bunker, the real world outside has been changing at tremendous speed. (Incidentally, Coward had been offered the role of playing Dr No in the movie, but turned it down. Imagine if he’d said yes!)
Best moment
There are lots of memorable moments but the best one must be the scene of the 66-year-old Noel and the Queen Mother singing a duet of ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’ at Sandringham. Hard to beat.
Credit
‘Noël Coward: A Biography’ by Philip Hoare was published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1995. References are to the 1996 Mandarin paperback edition.
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