A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 4

  But however unsettling the effect on Hawtrey, the effect on Noël was precisely what he had intended; he learnt. He learnt about the theatre, about being an actor and above all he learnt about comedy; Coward credits Hawtrey with everything he now knows about getting laughs in the theatre, and the main lesson seems to have been that before you can hope to get your laughs you have got to help the other actor get his. What Coward thought of Hawtrey, and how much he owes to him, we know, but what Hawtrey thought of Coward is not on record although it may be of interest to note that in the three hundred pages of his autobiography (edited by Somerset Maugham and published in 1924) the only mention of Noël is as one of a list of actors who were in the original company of Where the Rainbow Ends and who subsequently made good in the theatre.

  By now, like it or not and Noël patently did, he was a child actor; one of that small, select band along with Master Robert Andrews, Master Philip Tonge, Master Reggie Sheffield, Master Harold French, Master Alfred Willmore and the others who earned up to five pounds a week for their eager mothers by appearing on the stage at the earliest possible moment. London in those days must have been a socially tight-knit city, and certainly the acting world was of such proportions that everybody knew everybody. Each Christmas there was the massive scramble by boy and girl actors alike to get into one of the seasonal plays or pantomimes, followed by the resultant fury of their mothers if they failed. In fact the children, left to themselves, generally got on very well indeed with one another; but among the parents, and notably among the mothers who used to meet at Lyons Comer House in Coventry Street to discuss the careers of their young, there was – on their children’s behalf – all the massive jealousy and temperament that one normally associates with opera stars.

  Mrs Coward, to her everlasting credit, had some reservations about making her elder surviving son into a child actor; on the other hand the money was undoubtedly needed, and Noël was evidently happy in what he was doing. One evening at about this stage in Noël’s childhood, Mrs Coward went with her sister-in-law Ida to see Anna Eva Fay who was doing her celebrated mind-reading act on the stage of the London Coliseum. She invited questions from the audience and Mrs Coward, sitting up in the gallery worrying about Noël’s theatrical life, sent down a question not explaining what Noël did, but simply saying that it made him very tired and asking whether she should keep him at it. After a good deal of mind-searching and clutching at her forehead Miss Fay announced from the stage that whatever Mrs Coward’s son was doing she should keep him at it, since one day he would be a very great success indeed. Relieved and delighted Mrs Coward hurried home to tell Noël, who had never for one moment doubted it anyway. Ida, who had hoped that Miss Fay would provide an answer to where she had mislaid a roll of barbed wire, was less enthusiastic.

  Before The Great Name folded, Coward was again in rehearsal for Hawtrey and again playing a page-boy, though this time the theatre was the Savoy, the part was a better one, and the play was Where the Rainbow Ends. This, like all Noël’s appearances on the professional stage until he was fourteen, necessitated a visit to the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. There he and his mother, together with the business manager of whatever was the production concerned, would apply for a licence. Usually these were given as a matter of course to child actors, and on the few occasions when a magistrate was brave enough to stand up to Mrs Coward and ask if acting was in her boy’s best interests, he was treated to a lengthy speech in which Mrs Coward explained that if the boy was not allowed to act he would doubtless go into a decline and have to be sent to a sanatorium. Not surprisingly the licence was then granted and Noël returned happily to his work in the theatre.

  It was on December 21st that Hawtrey first presented Where the Rainbow Ends at the Savoy Theatre, and in the opening production of the play that was to become a children’s classic second only to Peter Pan Noël played William, a good part though one that disappears after the first act. That year Reginald Owen who, under the pseudonym of John Ramsey was the co-author, played St George of England and the Savoy Hotel was advertising dinner for 5/– after the show.

  The company seems to have been a happy one except for minor squabbles over the mother of the leading boy, Philip Tonge, who used to wash out her gloves in the dressing-room until some of the other boys, Noël among them, complained to the management which effectively discouraged her. Master Tonge’s leading lady was a child actress called Esmé Wynne; she played Rosamund and became later the first real friend of his own age that Noël had ever had. Hawtrey’s management, concerned by the generally low status of child actors and kept under the strict surveillance of the London County Council, fell over themselves to make the cast feel at home. Thus the life of a child actor with Hawtrey wasn’t at all a bad one, and he noted with pride that many of them looked a good deal better and healthier after the run of ‘The Rainbow’ than when they first came to rehearsals.

  The first night of ‘The Rainbow’ brought with it a cable to Coward from Hawtrey that read ‘Best of luck and I hope a good hard smack. Charles Hawtrey’, referring presumably to some long-forgotten business in the first act. It also brought some good notices: the Referee considered that ‘Master Noël Coward ... also deserves praise’, The Era felt that ‘the role of William the spiteful page-boy was smartly acted by Master Noël Coward’ and The Birmingham Daily Post thought he played a ‘thankless part with much skill and effect’.

  Most of the children in ‘The Rainbow’ came from that source of almost all English stage children, Italia Conti. But Coward, contrary to popular belief, was never a Conti child and though Miss Conti once tried to persuade him that as his part in the play was over by the end of the first act, he might like to join the rest of her team playing hyenas and frogs in the other acts, Mrs Coward decided that her boy’s prestige as one of the principals would definitely suffer if he were to be seen crawling about in a hot hyena skin.

  The run also gave Coward his first taste of direction; once the play had opened, the children (‘all we clever little tots’, in Noël’s phrase) were encouraged by Hawtrey to stage special matinées of their own devising for families and loyal friends. On February 2nd, the sole performance of a one-act piece called The Daisy Chain by Dot Temple, who played Betty Blunders in ‘The Rainbow’ was directed by a twelve-year-old Noël Coward. Later on in the run, when Philip Tonge produced a play called The Prince’s Bride by Esmé Wynne, Noël was billed as the stage manager; it was at this moment, according to Esmé Wynne writing in 1962, that ‘Noël decided to become a playwright and a Man of the Theatre’.

  The beginning of 1912 found Noël out of work once ‘The Rainbow’ ended its Christmas season, but after a few depressing months trailing round agents’ offices and having sixpenny lunches at Lyons he was back at the Savoy, this time appearing as The Mushroom’ in An Autumn Idyll, an artistic ballet arranged and produced by a lady called Ruby Ginner. The ballet was set to music by Chopin, and told of a day in the life of an Autumn Leaf, played by Miss Ginner herself with Mr Alan Trotter as The Wind and members of Miss Ginner’s dancing school as Winter Mists. Noël was intended to supply some of the more lighthearted moments in his role as a carefree mushroom, and he was partnered by Joan Carrol, dressed as a toadstool in bright pink. The really big moment of the ballet was undoubtedly Miss Ginner’s valiant fight with the mists and then her ultimate death as the lights faded, although the effect of this was marred for Noël by the fact that she seemed so much larger and better developed than the mists which vanquished her.

  The Times of June 26th 1912 noted that ‘Miss Joan Carrol and Mr Noël Coward as the Toadstool and the Mushroom headed delightfully a little troupe of various small and engaging fungi.’ It failed to note, however, that Master Eric Coward was also to be seen, though credited in rather smaller type, as one of the small and engaging fungi, and that the Savoy Hotel dinners advertised in the theatre programme had risen monstrously to 5/6d.

  By October Noël was back with Hawtrey, this time at Oswald Stoll’s
London Coliseum in a sketch, number eleven on the current variety bill, entitled A Little Fowl Play. It ran for four weeks although Noël was only allowed to play the matinées as the Bow Street magistrate had refused to licence him for the evening performance in which he wouldn’t have appeared until eleven at night. Hawtrey nevertheless insisted on paying him the full salary while using the assistant stage manager for the evening performances, and Coward would stand nightly in the wings watching and learning. The rest of the bill changed from week to week, so he was able at various times to see George Robey, a Wild West show, and, since one-act plays and ‘straight’ actors were frequently to be found on variety bills, Pauline Chase in J. M. Barrie’s Pantaloon.

  After A Little Fowl Play Hawtrey re-engaged Noël for his original part in Where the Rainbow Ends, which for the Christmas of 1912 had moved to the Garrick Theatre. ‘A plain little boy,’ said somebody watching Noël act at this time, ‘but a pleasant personality.’ The cast for ‘The Rainbow’ was virtually unchanged and the run uneventful except for one memorable night when Philip Tonge, still playing Crispian walked with Noël to Baker Street tube station after the show. On the way Philip decided to tell Noël the facts of life, and Noël returned home in a state of high hysteria. ‘Mother,’ he announced, in a tragic voice, charging into her bedroom, ‘I have lost my innocence.’ Mother laughed gently, broke it to him that he had done nothing of the kind, and made the cocoa. She also suggested that if he was going to be an actor it was probably as well that he had learnt about ‘life’ as early as possible.

  In the spring of 1913, by which time Noël had acquired a bicycle and a gramophone together with several records from a new friend called Parker-Jarvis who lived in Ealing. Italia Conti wrote offering him a three-week engagement with the Liverpool Repertory Company at the inevitable two pounds a week. Noël was to play at Liverpool and Manchester in a new production by a young Basil Dean of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hannele. His mother saw him off from Euston for the trip to Liverpool; on the train were about ten other children due to appear in the production, one of whom instantly caught Noël’s attention.

  ‘She wore a black satin coat and a black velvet military hat with a peak, her face was far from pretty, but tremendously alive. She was very “mondaine”, carried a handbag with a powder-puff and frequently dabbed her generously turned-up nose. She confided to me that her name was Gertrude Lawrence, but that I was to call her Gert because everybody did, that she had been in The Miracle at Olympia and Fifinella at the Gaiety, Manchester. She then gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards.’

  Noël appeared with Gert and Roy Royston and Harold French, all angels in Hannele’s dream sequence; he then played a schoolboy and reverted to an angel at the end of the piece but failed to enjoy any of it very much. He wore short tunics and bare feet and remained deeply homesick throughout, although things did liven up a bit on a trip to New Brighton when Gert hit Miss Conti’s sister over the head with a rounders bat. Miss Lawrence remembered Noël as ‘a thin, unusually shy boy with a slight lisp’ and recalled that on one occasion during the tour of Hannele the two of them were given a large box of peppermints on condition that they shared it with the rest of the cast:

  ‘Noël and I managed to forget this admonition and to eat most of the sweets ourselves in the taxi on the way to the theatre. Soon I began to feel queer. When we went on in the heaven scene, the other celestial beings seemed to float and bob dizzily around me. I stole a glance at Noël. He was positively green. Presently the audience was permitted an unexpected vision of heaven in which two small angels were being violently sick.’

  After a week in Liverpool the Hannele company moved to Manchester where a local magistrate refused to licence the children unless they went to school every day during the week. Accordingly Noël spent four days feeling miserable and hating a large red board school in the Oxford Road; relations with Basil Dean were also somewhat strained. ‘If ever you speak to me again in that tone of voice,’ Noël announced from the stage in the course of one particularly fraught rehearsal, ‘I shall go straight home to my mother.’

  While Noël was away, the family left their Battersea flat and moved to a maisonette called ‘Ben Lomond’ on the south side of Clapham Common. The rooms were bigger than those in Battersea, and Clapham Common had a splendid pond where Mr Coward sailed his model yacht in the weeks when he wasn’t travelling for Payne’s pianos. After the move, and after a few more gloomy weeks hanging around the agents’ offices, Noël found himself at what was then Charles Gulliver’s London Palladium in the prologue to a bizarre spectacle entitled War in the Air. The programme described this (item ten on the bill for the week of June 23rd 1913) as ‘a spectacular object lesson designed to Arouse the National Consciousness to a sense of its Hovering Peril’. The Hovering Peril was attack from the air, and Noël appeared in the prologue as an airstruck child praying, ‘Please God, Bless Mummy and Daddy and Violet and make me a great big aviator one day.’ There followed a massive aerial battle, at least until the third performance when one of the planes swung on a wire into the auditorium, got hitched on to the front of the upper circle, and remained there for three hours with the ‘great big aviator’ on board. For the rest of the week the management abandoned that part of the entertainment.

  But looking back to the programme of this production, the author Frank Dupree seems to have been alarmingly prescient. Writing in 1913, he listed the synopsis as follows:

  The time:

  1915

  Scene 1:

  The Air Office.

  The Declaration of war.

  Britannia must rule the air.

  Scene 2:

  Interior of the Conning Tower.

  The forged despatches.

  The invading fleet.

  The destructive bomb.

  Scene 3:

  The great flight for home and country.

  The wireless message.

  Scene 4:

  Top of the Central Aerial Station.

  The war in the air.

  Poor old London.

  The timely rescue.

  The coming of ‘The Conqueror’

  All in all it was an instructive time for Noël who shared the bill with Cissie Lupino (‘Speciality Dancer’), Nellie Wallace (‘Quintessence of Quaintness’) and Sie Tahar’s Oriental Zienats (‘War tumblers of World-Wide Repute, introducing Marym Sie Tahar, the only real Arabian Lady Tumbler’).

  After the Palladium War in the Air also made brief appearances at the Willesden Hippodrome and the Shoreditch Olympia where Noël would get into costume and make-up as early as possible so that he could stand in the wings watching George Robey, Phil Ray and Beattie and Babs higher up the variety bill which they all shared with a good many performing animals; on one occasion Noël let loose a whole basket of snakes between the matinée and evening performances, to the consternation of Madame Alicia Adelaide Needham and her Ladies Choir.

  3

  1913–1915

  I never cared who scored the goal

  Or which side won the silver cup,

  I never learned to bat or bowl

  But I heard the curtain going up.

  After War in the Air ended its brief tour in the summer of 1913, Noël, now an established if out-of-work actor, wrote around to various theatres in the West End demanding free tickets to their current shows for himself and his mother. Not entirely surprisingly, the request (written on visiting cards printed with the words ‘Master Noël Coward, Mr Charles Hawtrey’s Company’) was frequently turned down, but some theatres made a practice of giving ‘comps’ to resting actors and in this way the Cowards managed to see a good deal of what London entertainment had to offer. ‘Common, dear, and very silly,’ was the not infrequent verdict of Mrs Coward, but Noël, as ever, watched, listened and learnt.

  For their holiday that summer, Noël’s aunts Vida and Borby took a cottage at Lee-on-the-Solent, and the whole family went down there for a month.
In the absence of Uncle George’s Concert Party Noël allied himself with ‘The Poppy Pierrots’ who played twice daily on the end of the pier and allowed him to join them for a couple of songs on benefit nights. By now his musical talent was developing, although untaught, fairly rapidly:

  ‘I was born into a generation that still took light music seriously. The lyrics and melodies of Gilbert and Sullivan were hummed and strummed into my consciousness at an early age. My aunts and uncles, who were legion, sang them singly and in unison at the slightest provocation. By the time I was four years old “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes”, “Tit Willow”, “We’re Very Wide Awake, the Moon and I” and “I have a Song to Sing-O” had been fairly inculcated into my bloodstream. My mother and father were both musical in a light, amateur sense but their gift was in no way remarkable. My father, although he could improvise agreeably at the piano, never composed a set piece of music in his life ... I had no piano lessons when I was a little boy, except occasionally from my mother who tried once or twice, with singular lack of success, to teach me my notes. I could, however, from the age of about seven onwards, play any tune I had heard on the piano in the pitch dark. To be born with a natural ear for music is a great and glorious gift. It is no occasion for pride and it has nothing to do with will-power, concentration or industry. It is either there or it isn’t. What is so curious is that it cannot, in any circumstances, be wrong where one’s own harmonies are concerned.’

  In August 1913, while the Cowards were still at Lee-on-the-Solent, a postcard arrived from Charles Hawtrey inviting Noël to audition for the part of Buster in Never Say Die, a new comedy that was going into the Apollo. Mrs Coward, realizing there had been a delay in forwarding the card, which had been written four days earlier, hurried Noël into a London train and took him straight to the theatre. There they discovered that Hawtrey, in the absence of any reply from the Cowards, had cast Reginald Sheffield for the part. Noël’s bitter disappointment was only partly assuaged by the offer of understudying the character at two pounds ten shillings a week. However, he was still in no position to refuse work and spent the next few months at the Apollo fervently hoping that Reggie Sheffield would fall under a bus, which he didn’t, and in the meantime eating what was left of the asparagus devoured nightly on stage during the second act. At this time money was still desperately tight in the Coward household, and his father was doing rather less successfully in the new piano business than when first he joined Metzler’s; but Noël and his mother managed to make a very little go a long way. Their success at this is vouched for by Gertrude Lawrence, who decided mistakenly when she first met Noël that ‘his people were in a position to give him educational advantages – they were comfortably situated’, though she added graciously that ‘Noël wasn’t snobbish about this’.