Noël Coward

• 1. Introduction

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  Noël Coward, the English playwright, composer, actor and singer, once answered a magazine writer's apology with a perfect line. Around his seventieth birthday, a Time interviewer said he hoped Coward had not been bored by so many interviews full of the same old questions. Coward replied, "Not at all. I'm fascinated by the subject." It was a joke, and it was also a fair clue to the man. He wrote more than 65 plays and musicals, though not all were staged or published. He wrote around three hundred songs, a novel, poetry, short stories and a three-volume autobiography. He appeared in about 70 stage productions and 17 films. Yet he started as a boy from the London suburbs with almost no formal schooling. How did that boy rise to the top of English theatre? What did a famously flippant entertainer do when a world war arrived? And why did critics write him off in the 1950s, only to hail him as a grand old man a decade later?

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• 2. Stage Child

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  In January 1911, eleven-year-old Noël Coward saw an advertisement in the Daily Mirror. Miss Lila Field wanted a talented boy of attractive appearance for The Goldfish, an all-children fairy play. Coward joked in his first memoir, Present Indicative, that she would be a fool to miss such a magnificent opportunity. He won the part of Prince Mussel.

  The stage had been calling him for years. He was born on the 16th of December 1899 in Teddington, a south-western suburb of London. He was the second of three sons, and the eldest had died in 1898 at the age of six. His father, Arthur Sabin Coward, sold pianos and lacked ambition and industry, so money was often short. His mother, Violet, was the daughter of a Royal Navy captain and surveyor. She was the ambitious one, and she sent her son to a dance academy in London. Coward called his early obsession "the theatre bug," and by seven he was appearing in amateur concerts. He attended the Chapel Royal Choir School but had little formal schooling. He made up for it as a voracious reader.

  Charles Hawtrey, a leading actor-manager whom Coward idolised, cast him in the children's play Where the Rainbow Ends. The boy performed in it at the Garrick Theatre in 1911 and 1912. In 1913 Italia Conti engaged him for the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, and that year he was cast as the Lost Boy Slightly in Peter Pan. He worked beside other child actors, among them Hermione Gingold, Fabia Drake, Esmé Wynne and Alfred Willmore, later known as Micheál Mac Liammóir. Gertrude Lawrence gave him an orange and told him a few mildly dirty stories. He wrote that he loved her from then onwards.

  At fourteen, Coward became the protégé, and probably the lover, of Philip Streatfeild, a society painter. Streatfeild introduced him to Mrs Astley Cooper and her high society friends. Streatfeild died of tuberculosis in 1915, but Mrs Astley Cooper kept encouraging the young man. He became a frequent guest at her estate, Hambleton Hall in Rutland.

  Hawtrey directed him again in The Saving Grace in 1917. Coward later credited him with teaching technical points of comedy acting that he still used. By then he was also writing songs. The oldest known recording of one is Bessie Jones's 1918 version of "Peter Pan," cowritten with Doris Joel for the André Charlot revue Tails Up!

  In 1918 he was conscripted into the Artists Rifles. Doctors judged him unfit for active service because of a tubercular tendency, and he was discharged after nine months. That year he also had an uncredited part in D. W. Griffith's film Hearts of the World. With Esmé Wynne he wrote his first two plays, Ida Collaborates and Women and Whisky. His first solo play, The Rat Trap, was written in 1918 but reached a stage only in October 1926, at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead. In these years he also met Lorn McNaughtan, who became his private secretary and stayed with him for more than forty years, until her death.

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• 3. Scandal and Success

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  In 1920, at the age of 20, Coward starred in his own light comedy, I'll Leave It to You. After three weeks in Manchester it opened at the New Theatre in London, his first full-length play in the West End. The Observer praised his sense of comedy but warned of a tendency to smartness. The Times was warmer and called the play "a remarkable piece of work from so young a head." It ran for a month and became the first Coward play seen in America.

  The Better Half, a one-act satire about a man and two women, had a short run at The Little Theatre in 1922. The critic St John Ervine advised Coward to leave tea-table chitter-chatter to women. The play was thought lost until a typescript turned up in 2007. It was sitting in the archive of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the official censor of stage plays in the UK until 1968.

  In 1921 Coward made his first trip to New York, hoping to interest producers. He had little luck, but Broadway's smartness and pace rubbed off on his writing. The result was The Young Idea, his first real success as a playwright. It reached London in 1923 after a provincial tour, with Coward in one of the leading roles. One critic noticed the influence of Bernard Shaw. He also complained of being wedged among exuberant friends who greeted each joke with "That's a Noëlism!"

  The Vortex, in 1924, brought his first great critical and financial triumph. It follows a nymphomaniac socialite and her cocaine-addicted son, played by Coward himself. Audiences found its picture of sexual vanity and drug abuse among the upper classes shocking. Some read the drugs as a mask for homosexuality. Kenneth Tynan later called it "a jeremiad against narcotics with dialogue that sounds today not so much stilted as high-heeled." Producers still hesitated, so Coward raised the money himself. During the run he met Jack Wilson, an American stockbroker who became his business manager and lover. Wilson managed his affairs well at first, then abused his position to embezzle from him.

  Demand for new Coward plays soared. In 1925 Fallen Angels amused and shocked audiences with two middle-aged women slowly getting drunk while they waited for their mutual lover. Hay Fever, from the same year, was the first of his plays to win a lasting place in the mainstream repertoire. It follows four egocentric members of an artistic family who casually invite acquaintances for a country weekend, then bemuse and enrage each other's guests. Some writers have seen Mrs Astley Cooper and her set in the family. By the 1970s The Times was calling it a "dazzling achievement" that, like The Importance of Being Earnest, was pure comedy with no mission but to delight.

  By June 1925, Coward had four shows running in the West End. The pace broke him. He collapsed while starring in The Constant Nymph and was ordered to rest for a month. He ignored the doctors and sailed for the US to begin rehearsals for This Was a Man. In New York he collapsed again and recovered in Hawaii.

  Sirocco, in 1927, was his biggest failure of the decade. It deals with free love among the wealthy and starred Ivor Novello. Theatregoers showed violent disapproval at the curtain calls and spat at Coward as he left the theatre. He later said his first instinct was to leave England at once, but that seemed too craven and too gratifying to his enemies. Of Novello he once remarked, "the two most beautiful things in the world are Ivor's profile and my mind."

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• 4. Boom Years

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  By 1929, Coward was one of the highest-earning writers in the world, with an annual income of £50,000. In terms of 2020 values, that is more than £3 million. He thrived through the Great Depression, producing hits that ranged from huge spectaculars to intimate comedies.

  The spectaculars came first. Bitter Sweet, an operetta from 1929, tells of a woman who elopes with her music teacher. It ran for 697 performances in the West End between 1929 and 1931. Then came Cavalcade at Drury Lane in 1931, which followed two families across thirty years. It demanded a huge cast, gargantuan sets and a complex hydraulic stage. Its 1933 film adaptation won the Academy Award for best picture.

  Private Lives, in 1930, was the intimate counterpart. Coward starred alongside Gertrude Lawrence, his most famous stage partner, with the young Laurence Olivier in the cast. The play sold out in London and New York, and it was a highlight of both careers. Coward disliked long runs, so afterwards he made a rule of starring in a play for no more than three months at any one theatre.

  Design for Living, written for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, pushed further. Its theme of bisexuality and a ménage à trois was so risqué that Coward premiered it in New York. He knew the British censor would never let it through in London.

  He also wrote, directed and starred opposite the French singer Yvonne Printemps in the operetta Conversation Piece. Its notices were excellent, but the run ended after 177 performances when Printemps left to honour a filming commitment. The cast of more than fifty means it has never been professionally revived in London.

  With Lawrence he then wrote, directed and starred in Tonight at 8.30, a cycle of ten short plays presented in different combinations across three evenings. One of them, Still Life, was expanded into David Lean's 1945 film Brief Encounter. Between 1929 and 1936 Coward also recorded many of his best-known songs for His Master's Voice, and they have since been reissued on CD.

  His last two pre-war plays were both written in 1939. This Happy Breed is a drama about a working-class family. Present Laughter is a comic self-portrait built around an egomaniac actor. Neither reached an audience until 1942, when Britain was already at war.

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• 5. Wartime Service

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  "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death I don't think we have time." That was Coward's verdict after running the British propaganda office in Paris at the start of the Second World War. He had abandoned the theatre to seek official work. Afterwards he worked for British intelligence, using his celebrity to sway American public and political opinion toward helping Britain. The British press attacked him for his foreign travel while ordinary people suffered at home, and he could not reveal that he was acting for the Secret Service.

  In 1942 George VI wished to award Coward a knighthood for these efforts. Winston Churchill talked the king out of it. Mindful of the public view of Coward's flamboyant lifestyle, Churchill cited a £200 fine Coward had received in 1941 for breaking currency regulations.

  The Nazis had their own list. Had Germany invaded Britain, Coward was scheduled to be arrested and killed, because he appeared in The Black Book alongside Virginia Woolf, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, C. P. Snow and H. G. Wells. Coward said he would have laughed at the idea. Rebecca West, another name on the list, sent him a telegram calling them "the people we should have been seen dead with."

  Churchill thought Coward would serve the war effort better by entertaining the troops and the home front than by spying. He told Coward to go and sing to them when the guns were firing, because "that's your job!" Coward was disappointed but obeyed. He toured, acted and sang across Europe, Africa, Asia and America. He wrote and recorded songs such as "London Pride" and "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans."

  German bombs wrecked his London home in 1941, and he moved into the Savoy Hotel. During one air raid on the neighbourhood, he joined Carroll Gibbons and Judy Campbell in an impromptu cabaret to calm the captive hotel guests.

  His biggest war project on screen was the naval drama In Which We Serve. Coward was writer, star, composer and co-director, working alongside David Lean. He played a naval captain modelled on his friend Lord Louis Mountbatten. The film was popular on both sides of the Atlantic and earned him an honorary certificate of merit at the 1943 Academy Awards. Lean went on to direct film versions of three Coward plays.

  His most lasting wartime work, though, was Blithe Spirit, from 1941. A novelist researches the occult and hires a medium. A séance brings back the ghost of his first wife, and chaos follows for him and his second wife. It ran for 1,997 consecutive performances, a record for a West End comedy, and 650 performances on Broadway. Coward toured it in 1942, in rotation with Present Laughter and This Happy Breed.

  Not every tour went smoothly. In his Middle East Diary he wrote that he was less impressed by "some of the mournful little Brooklyn boys" lying in tears with nothing worse than a leg wound or a fractured arm. The New York Times and The Washington Post protested. The Foreign Office urged him not to visit the United States in January 1945, and he did not return to America during the war. After it, he imagined a very different outcome in the play Peace in Our Time, set in an England occupied by Nazi Germany.

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• 6. Cabaret and Comeback

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  Sigh No More, in 1945, was Coward's last original revue. He later grumbled that the title, which he had thought of first, turned out to be the best part of the show. It ran for 213 performances in 1945-46. The musicals that followed fared worse.

  Pacific 1860, a lavish South Seas romance, ran for 129 performances. The show that took over its Drury Lane stage, Oklahoma!, ran for 1,534. Coward admired Oklahoma! enormously. His friend and biographer Cole Lesley wrote that he nonetheless did not learn its lesson, that songs should advance the story. Lesley added that Coward habitually slipped in one showstopper unrelated to the plot. Operette, from 1938, had already closed after 133 performances, and Coward called it over-written and under-composed.

  Ace of Clubs, set in a contemporary Soho nightclub, managed 211 performances. Coward was furious that it was not a real smash. After the Ball, a musical version of Lady Windermere's Fan, lasted 188 performances and was the last musical he premiered in the West End. His final two, Sail Away and The Girl Who Came to Supper, opened on Broadway. Sail Away, set on a luxury cruise liner, was his most successful post-war musical, running 167 performances in New York and 252 in London. The Girl Who Came to Supper closed after 112.

  His post-war plays, among them Relative Values, South Sea Bubble, Quadrille and Nude with Violin, were only moderately successful. Grief added to the strain. Charles Cochran died in 1951 and Gertrude Lawrence in 1952.

  Then the 1950s offered a surprise. Coward turned the stage manner he had sharpened entertaining troops into a cabaret act, first at the Café de Paris in London and later in Las Vegas. Kenneth Tynan watched him pad down the celebrated stairs and raise both hands like a benediction. Tynan wrote that Coward's lines came out with the staccato, blind impulsiveness of a machine-gun. The 1955 Las Vegas act was recorded live as Noël Coward at Las Vegas, and Variety reported that the city shouted for more.

  CBS then commissioned three 90-minute television specials for the 1955-56 season. The first, Together With Music, paired Coward with Mary Martin. The others were Blithe Spirit, with Claudette Colbert, Lauren Bacall and Mildred Natwick, and This Happy Breed, with Edna Best and Roger Moore. Reviews were excellent, though the audiences were only moderate. In 1953 he had also played King Magnus in Shaw's The Apple Cart during the Coronation season, opposite Margaret Leighton.

  He turned down many famous offers in the 1950s and after. He declined to compose a musical version of Pygmalion, two years before My Fair Lady, and he refused the king in the original stage production of The King and I. He also passed on Colonel Nicholson in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. Asked to play the title role in Dr. No in 1962, he answered, "No, no, no, a thousand times, no." He also declined the role of Humbert Humbert in Lolita.

  The comeback began with a hit revival of Private Lives in 1963, in London and then New York. Coward called the revival of interest "Dad's Renaissance." In 1964 he directed Hay Fever for the National Theatre with Edith Evans. He was delighted that the company had chosen an early play and given it a cast that could play the Albanian telephone directory. A 1968 Off-Broadway Private Lives starred Elaine Stritch, Lee Bowman and Betsy von Furstenberg. The poster used an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Coward rather than any of the cast. The New Statesman marvelled that he had become the grand old man of British drama.

  In between, Suite in Three Keys in 1966 became his final stage success. Coward wrote it as his swan song as an actor and said he would like to act once more before folding his bedraggled wings. In one of the three plays, A Song at Twilight, he abandoned his customary reticence and played an explicitly homosexual character. He was too ill to take the trilogy to Broadway, and Hume Cronyn starred in two of the plays there under the title Noël Coward in Two Keys.

  He also won new popularity as a film actor, in Around the World in 80 Days, Our Man in Havana, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Boom! and The Italian Job. By the end of the 1960s, arteriosclerosis was causing bouts of memory loss that troubled both Suite in Three Keys and The Italian Job. He retired from acting immediately after the latter. He was knighted in 1970, received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement the same year, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1972 the University of Sussex gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters.

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• 7. Private Life

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  Graham Payn, a South African stage and film actor, was Coward's most important relationship, from the mid-1940s until Coward's death. Coward featured Payn in several London productions, and Payn later co-edited Coward's diaries with Sheridan Morley. They were published in 1982.

  Coward never publicly acknowledged that he was homosexual, following the convention of his times. He considered any sexual activities, when over-advertised, to be tasteless. Even in the 1960s he wryly remarked, "There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don't know." In 1953 Kenneth Tynan came as close to acknowledgment as print allowed, calling him a congenital bachelor. Coward nonetheless urged his secretary Cole Lesley to write a frank biography once he was safely dead.

  Other relationships included the playwright Keith Winter and the actors Louis Hayward and Alan Webb. The composer Ned Rorem published details of their relationship in his diaries. Coward also had a 19-year friendship with Prince George, Duke of Kent. Biographers differ on whether it was platonic. Payn believed it was, though Coward reportedly admitted to the historian Michael Thornton that there had been "a little dalliance." When the duke died, Coward said he suddenly found he had loved him more than he knew.

  His friendships with women were lifelong. They included Esmé Wynne-Tyson, his first collaborator and constant correspondent, and Gladys Calthrop, who designed sets and costumes for many of his works. The actress Joyce Carey was another, as was Marlene Dietrich, whom he called his loyal and lifelong amitié amoureuse.

  Colleagues also remembered his generosity. Stories circulated of how he quietly paid the debts of old theatrical acquaintances who had no claim on him. From 1934 until 1956 he was president of the Actors' Orphanage. There he befriended the young Peter Collinson, became his godfather and helped him start in show business. When Collinson became a successful director, he invited Coward to play a role in The Italian Job.

  In 1926, Coward bought Goldenhurst Farm in Aldington, Kent, and made it his home for most of the next thirty years. It is a Grade II listed building. In the 1950s he left the UK for tax reasons and was harshly criticised in the press. He settled first in Bermuda, then bought houses in Jamaica and in Switzerland, at Chalet Covar in Les Avants near Montreux. His neighbours included Joan Sutherland, David Niven, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards in Switzerland. In Jamaica they included Ian Fleming and his wife Ann. Coward witnessed the Flemings' wedding, though his diaries record exasperation at their constant bickering.

  His politics were conservative but not unswervingly so. He despised Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany. He also split sharply with Churchill over the abdication crisis of 1936. Churchill backed Edward VIII's wish to marry Wallis Simpson. Coward thought the king irresponsible and told Churchill that England did not wish for a "Queen Cutie." In religion he was agnostic, writing that to the question of believing in God he could say neither no nor yes.

  Even his name was a small battle. Coward insisted that the dots over the e in Noël were the language's doing, not his. "Otherwise it's not Noël but Nool!" he said. Many publishers and newspapers, including The Times, printed it as Noel anyway.

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• 8. The Master and His Legacy

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  "Why am I always expected to wear a dressing-gown, smoke cigarettes in a long holder and say 'Darling, how wonderful'?" Coward once asked. The answer lay in an image he had built with care. He first wore a dressing gown onstage in The Vortex and reused the look in Private Lives and Present Laughter. Having risen from a suburban boyhood into high society, he resolved to travel through life first class. Yet he warned Cecil Beaton to tone down his outfits, because the public must not be handed a loophole to lampoon him. He told Time that he had acted up like crazy and done everything expected of him. Time concluded that his greatest gift was projecting "a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise."

  His clipped diction had a quieter origin. His mother was deaf, and he developed a staccato way of speaking so she could hear him. It also helped him get rid of a slight lisp. His nickname, "The Master," began as a joke and became true, he said. Asked by a journalist why he was called that, he replied, "Oh, you know, jack of all trades, master of none."

  Critics took longer to see the substance. Cyril Connolly wrote in the 1930s that the plays were so topical that the cream in them turned sour overnight. In 1964, Tynan predicted that even the youngest of them would still know in fifty years what was meant by a very Noel Coward sort of person. John Osborne said Coward was his own invention and contribution to his century. By the 1960s, critics noticed emotional depth and pathos under the witty dialogue and Art Deco glamour. At his death, The Times placed his plays in the classical tradition of Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw. In a late-1999 poll by The Stage, readers ranked him second only to Shakespeare among those who most influenced British entertainment.

  His songs travelled further than his plays. The Noël Coward Society, using publishers' and Performing Rights Society figures, ranks "Mad About the Boy" first, followed by "I'll See You Again" from Bitter Sweet and "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." He was no fan of Gilbert and Sullivan yet was strongly influenced by them. Terence Rattigan called him the best lyricist of his kind since W. S. Gilbert. Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Elton John, Paul McCartney and the Pet Shop Boys are among the many who recorded his songs.

  Parody and tribute followed. Monty Python and Round the Horne imitated his style, and Daniel Massey, his godson, played him in the 1968 film Star! Coward was an early admirer of Harold Pinter and backed the film of The Caretaker with £1,000. Pinter returned the compliment in 1976 by directing the National Theatre's revival of Blithe Spirit.

  Coward died of heart failure on the 26th of March 1973 at his home, Firefly Estate in Jamaica. He was 73. He was buried three days later on the brow of Firefly Hill, overlooking the island's north coast. At a memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields on the 29th of May 1973, John Betjeman delivered a poem, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier read verse, and Yehudi Menuhin played Bach.

  The tributes outlasted him. Angela Conner's statue of Coward was unveiled in the foyer of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1998. The Albery Theatre, originally the New Theatre where his first West End play opened, reopened on the 1st of June 2006 as the Noël Coward Theatre. On the 28th of March 1984, the Queen Mother unveiled his memorial stone in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. When Graham Payn thanked her for coming, she replied, "I came because he was my friend."

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