A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Read online

  Sheridan Morley

  A Talent to Amuse

  A LIFE OF NOEL COWARD

  “Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.” KENNETH TYNAN (writing in 1953)

  Noel Coward, ‘the master’, is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of twentieth century entertainment. Prodigiously talented, he blazed a trail through theatre, film and song on both sides of the Atlantic. In the theatre he wrote hit plays like The Vortex, Private Lives, Hay Fever, Cavalcade and Blithe Spirit. On film he wrote the war classic In Which We Serve and the timeless love story Brief Encounter. His songs, which number into the hundreds, include ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, ‘I’ll See You Again’, ‘A Room with a View’, ‘The Stately Homes of England’ and ‘Mrs Worthington’.

  His greatest creation may even have been himself – what Time called ‘a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise’. This led to his increasing celebrity on American television in the 1950s and in a series of wildly successful one-man shows in Las Vegas, not to mention his popularity as a character actor in the last decade of his life. But as this shrewd biography shows, Coward also suffered, throughout his career, from accusations that he was squandering his gifts for the sake of superficial acclaim. Was his merely ‘a talent to amuse’? Rather than allowing such a claim to stand, this biography reveals the man as an innovator, enduring influence and immortal in the worlds which he sought to conquer.

  ‘Highly readable … a valuable addition to the growing body of Cowardiana.’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘Admiring but judicious’ New York Times

  But I believe

  That since my life began,

  The most I’ve had is just

  A talent to amuse. …

  Bitter-Sweet, 1929.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Epigraph

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Sources and Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Titles by Sheridan Morley

  Copyright

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Copyright Page

  Prologue to the 1985 Edition

  Like a first child, a first book is the one you worry about the most: others may turn out better or brighter in the end, but the first is the one whose conception and gestation and arrival you never forget. It is now getting on for twenty years since A Talent to Amuse first appeared in print, and although since then I’ve published more than a dozen other titles, this is the one that still matters most to me. I remember the room in Paddington where I started typing it; the house in Dulwich where I finished it; the smell of the proofs; the morning the reviews appeared (in those far-off days that was still the morning of publication, which gave the event an immediate theatricality I much enjoyed and much miss in today’s world of delayed and staggered press reaction) and the sudden, marvellous, magical realisation that a book which in preparation nobody else seemed terribly excited about was in fact going to be the one that everybody wanted for Christmas.

  This biography was written over a three-year period from 1966, and it happily coincided with the last great change in Noël’s professional and private fortunes: when I began writing, he was still widely, if wrongly, regarded as an exiled relic from some prewar world of lost glamour. A couple of months after the book came out, at the time of his seventieth birthday, he was given (by a Labour government) the knighthood that established him as the grand old man of the British theatre. The renaissance had come, and unlike most he had lived to see it himself.

  Because I come from a family of actors, and because my son Hugo, who was born during the writing of this book, became the last of Noël’s many godchildren, there has developed a curious but unchangeable theory that I too must have known Coward from childhood. In fact we first met in 1964 when I was twenty-three and working as a newcaster and scriptwriter for ITN. This being by definition an evening job, I used to spend some of my mornings writing arts-page profiles for The Times – a job I am happily still doing twenty years later.

  The Arts Editor of The Times in those days was a marvellously avuncular figure called John Lawrence, of whom it was always said that once, left in charge of the Obituaries during a holiday period, he had run by mistake one for the then Duke of Norfolk who subsequently telephoned in understandable indignation to correct the error. ‘But, Your Grace,’ replied Lawrence, ever a careful man, ‘may I first of all establish precisely from where you are now telephoning?’

  He always knew precisely from where I was telephoning: the flat in Paddington, to ask if there was anybody in town he would like interviewed. One morning the news was that Noël Coward had come to London to start auditioning for a National Theatre revival of Hay Fever which he was himself to direct: ‘He’s getting on a bit now,’ said Lawrence, ‘and hasn’t had a success in a long time, but he’s just the sort of chap for our readers and I think you might like him.’

  I had never met Coward before, and was almost totally unprepared for what I found. At that time, popular legend had it that he was more or less finished – a sixty-four-year-old writer of old-fashioned drawing room comedies, hopelessly out of touch artistically with the post-Osborne theatre, and equally out of touch socially with the country he had abandoned for financial reasons a decade earlier. I think I expected to meet a rather embittered old gentleman somewhere halfway from Somerset Maugham to the Duke of Windsor, living on his memories and surrounded by albums of photographs by Cecil Beaton. What I actually found, in the opulent surroundings of the river suite at the Savoy, was a blithe and sprightly spirit leaping around in his shirtsleeves organising not only the Hay Fever casting, but also rehearsals for a musical called High Spirits which was to open in the same season and a forthcoming film appearance in an Otto Preminger thriller. Yet he remained courteous enough and relaxed enough to give an inexperienced and uneasy journalist an interview of such elegance, charm and wit that almost every one of the hundreds, if not thousands, I have done since has inevitably seemed something of an anti-climax.

  The result of that first meeting was, as I recall it, an appallingly patronising profile for The Times in which I suggested that the old master still had a spark or two of life in him, and remarked mildly that one or two of his plays perhaps deserved a better fate than to be held up as examples of everything that Kenneth Tynan and the Royal Court had been erected to destroy. It was not, at the time, a distinctly popular view, but the more I began to think about and read Coward, the more convinced I became that the history of British entertainment in the first half of this centur
y was essentially the history of his own career – from child actor through revues and musical comedies to patriotic epics like Cavalcade and such classic comedies as Private Lives and Blithe Spirit – and that is before you even start to think about the cabaret songs or the movies like Brief Encounter or the poems or the novel or the short stories or the paintings or the productions he staged.

  I rapidly became obsessed with Coward, but it was a curiously unfashionable obsession for the mid-Sixties: indeed I was solemnly told by one magazine editor that my future as a drama critic looked decidedly shaky unless I stopped talking about Noël and started talking about Wesker pretty damn quick. Yet the tide was already on the turn: the decision by Olivier to make Coward the first living British dramatist to have a production at the National might have been regarded by many as just the repayment of an old debt (since Olivier had been given one of his first great West End successes in Private Lives) but it undoubtedly started a slow process of canonisation.

  By the time Hay Fever had opened, I had already started to think it was curious that there had only ever been one attempt at a Coward biography (a slim and wildly inaccurate volume published in 1933) and that his own autobiographies gave no account at all of the years 1931–39 or 1945 to the present. So I wrote to him suggesting that it was about time somebody wrote his life, and that on balance he might do worse than me. In my innocence of publishing customs, I also suggested that as it was his life we were talking about, he would of course be entitled to a cut of the proceeds – if there were ever to be any – which at that time did not appear altogether inevitable.

  Noël replied at once: yes, he agreed that it was about time for a biography and that my ‘curious fascination’ with his work probably qualified me to write it. As, however, I had never written a book, he suggested that perhaps I would like to send him a couple of trial chapters about his childhood: if he approved of them, he would open up his files and give me his friends’ telephone numbers. I went away and wrote about the first quarter of the book, sent it to him and was duly summoned to another meeting at the Savoy at which he gave me his approval to go ahead, as well as access to a vast number of scrapbooks that his mother had kept since his earliest appearances in school plays.

  I told him I was hoping to write a critical theatrical biography, rather than a fan book or a cuttings job, and that I wanted to talk to his enemies as well as his friends. He seemed to approve of that, and made only one reservation: there was to be no mention in the book of his homosexuality. His private life had, he said, always been just that: it had never been allowed to affect his work, and his reason for not wanting it made public in his lifetime was purely pragmatic. Noël was still living on his royalties, and in difficult times these tended to come from records and anthologies of short stories as well as from theatres. His audience was not, he reckoned, exclusively made up of a post-war generation prepared to allow the artist absolute sexual freedom: his followers still included large numbers of old ladies and gentlemen who would have been deeply shocked by any homosexual revelations, and at a time when he still needed all the friends he could get, he saw no reason to alienate a whole section of his constituency. It needs to be recalled that the laws on homosexuality had not then been reformed, and that at least one distinguished leading actor, a contemporary and friend of Coward’s, was still living in the shadow of a notorious court case of the early 1950s.

  This book took me two more years to research and write, and although along the way I came to agree with Coward that his private life had indeed played remarkably little part in an existence almost wholly given over to work, I still felt that there needed to be some reference to it somewhere. At last I thought I’d found a way of changing Coward’s mind: in about 1966 the drama and television critic T.C. Worsley, a figure of impeccable Establishment credentials and some literary distinction, published a memoir entitled Flannelled Fools in which he revealed lifelong homosexuality. Empires did not totter, membership of the Garrick was not withdrawn, and at last it seemed that the prejudice was fading. Armed with the book and its very favourable critical reaction in the serious press, I went to stay with Noël in Switzerland and suggested that where Worsley had beaten down the barricades, he too could slip through without too great a scandal. Noël disagreed: ‘There is,’ he said memorably, ‘one essential difference between me and Cuthbert Worsley. The British public at large would not care if Cuthbert Worsley had slept with mice.’

  And that was more or less that, though Noël was always the first to make it clear that his demand for sexual privacy only applied in his own lifetime, and that after he was dead I was at liberty to rewrite this entire book if I so chose. In fact, I haven’t: with the exception of this prologue and an epilogue, I have not altered or added anything for the simple reason that to have changed any of it would have meant changing all of it and there really isn’t the need. As his own diaries (which Graham Payn and I edited for publication in 1982) indicate, his was not a life which lends itself to ‘amazing revelations’ of any kind.

  This was, then, always intended to be a career book and it remains just that. Since its first publication has come one other biography, the late Cole Lesley’s Life of Noël Coward (in America Remembered Laughter) which will give you a better idea of what Noël was like to live with on a day-to-day basis, and I would suggest that the two books need to be considered together as mirror images of the professional and the domestic man. There is nothing else in the field barring critical studies which I have listed in an addition to the bibliography.

  Two decades on, there are of course stylistic as well as tense changes I would make were I starting this book again: but the only and brief section I would actually want to rewrite from the point of view of content rather than style would be in chapter 29, where I deal with Coward’s last full-length play A Song at Twilight. Here I believe, for the first and only time, Noël did allow his private life to surface seriously in his work: though he always maintained that if the play was about anybody it was about either Max Beerbohm or Somerset Maugham rather than himself. In its discussion of the public’s intolerance of homosexuality, it has always seemed to me a lot closer to home than any of the light comedies. As a play it was however not his best, and as autobiography it flew in the face of one of the many maxims which Coward made his own – never complain, never explain.

  This book is by way of being an explanation: when I began it there was curiously little critical or public interest in the craftsmanship of Coward’s plays and songs, in his professional longevity and resilience, or in the way that his work so perfectly reflected the changing social attitudes of the Twenties and Thirties. It was in the hope of arousing that interest that I started to write, and the intention was to chronicle the way in which Coward had kept himself constantly, professionally and uniquely in high definition across half a century.

  Because I had Coward’s approval for the project, I also had access to the hundred and fifty people I’ve thanked in the acknowledgements, many of them alas no longer with us. This book is about their memories as well as my research, and without them it would never have been possible.

  1

  1899–1910

  ‘I was born in Teddington, Middlesex, an ordinary middle-class boy. I was not gutter, I didn’t gnaw kippers’ heads in the gutter as Gertrude Lawrence quite untruthfully always insisted that she did. Nor was my first memory the crunch of carriage wheels in the drive. Because we hadn’t got a drive.’

  So from the very beginning the legend of Noël Coward is destroyed by the facts. One had imagined him born into a rich London family, Mayfair possibly or at worst Belgravia, and one had hoped to find him at a tender age photographed on a bearskin rug murmuring witticisms through a few clenched baby teeth and perhaps a tiny cigarette holder. But no such luck – indeed, no such photographs; though there is one of him aged about two, looking alarmingly coy and another at the age of five in what could well have been an all-midget revival of H.M.S. Pinafore.

  Faced with sta
rting the book in Teddington, Middlesex, one almost envies any biographer of Mr Coward’s life-long friend and frequent partner, Gertrude Lawrence. She at least had the foresight to start life in romantic, impoverished, if (as Coward claims) fictional surroundings. There she was, dancing to barrel organs in the street and putting pennies into fortune-telling machines, one of which was obliging enough to turn out a card reading ‘A star danced, and under it you were born’. All splendid material for a theatrical life story but not, alas, for that of Mr Coward.

  He was born, in ample time for Christmas and the new century, on the morning of December 16th 1899; the Boer War was supplying the headlines, Queen Victoria was eighty, and in Paris Oscar Wilde was living out the last few months of his life in exile. Noël’s mother, who at that time was thirty-six, had been the last of six children of one Captain and Mrs Veitch. The Captain was an archetypal, side-whiskered naval figure with twin passions for the sea and painting both of which were later to be inherited by his grandson; as an artist the Captain was splendid at landscapes but rather less good at depicting people, a problem he overcame by cutting figures out of magazines and sticking them on to his backgrounds. His family consisted of three girls and two boys as well as a faintly dotty relation called Borby who had fallen out of a porthole on to her head early in life and had never been quite the same since.

  By 1883 the Captain’s two sons had died, and two of his daughters had married; the rest of the family (Noël’s grandmother, his mother, Aunt Vida and of course Borby) all moved in that year to Teddington in Middlesex which was then a small, unsuburban Thames-side village where some of the French royal family were still living in exile. There was now not much money left in Mrs Veitch’s household, and by this time no man was left alive to support it, though for a while they scraped together just about enough to keep up the all-important appearances of the time. Their life in Teddington at the end of the last century centred around St Alban’s church opposite Peg Woffington’s cottage in the High Street, and it was there in about 1890 that Violet Agnes Veitch met Arthur Sabin Coward.