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

  In November 1913, Coward left Hawtrey’s company for the third time and, having already played twice in Where the Rainbow Ends, now joined the cast of the other great children’s classic, Peter Pan. For this engagement, which involved playing ‘Slightly’ for a season at the Duke of York’s and then a lengthy tour of outer London and the provinces until the end of March, Mrs Coward managed to beat the director up thirty shillings and Noël’s salary scaled new heights at four pounds a week. The director was Dion Boucicault, then married to Irene Vanbrugh, and Peter Pan was played by Pauline Chase.

  That Christmas Peter Pan ran for matinées only, a new arrangement which led the critic of The Observer to enquire rather prematurely ‘Is this the beginning of the end?’. He did, however, see ‘an excellent “Slightly” in Mr Noël Coward’; another critic wrote ‘The immortal “Slightly” as acted by Master Noël Coward, is quite a young boy and his grave pretence at wisdom is all the funnier’. Also in the production, acting with Noël for the second and in fact the last time was Micheál Mac Liammóir; he was less keen on the latter’s performance:

  ‘I remember thinking that Noël was too intelligent for the part.

  Slightly is the moronic boy, you know, who fell out of his pram or something. But Noël gave his usual rhythmic, debonair, mother-of-pearl brilliance to the part, and he shook the imaginary thermometer much too smartly – I’m sure Slightly would have bungled it. Noël always seemed completely, as they say in the West of Ireland, “fit for any emergency from pitch and toss to manslaughter”. He could have done anything. Yeats’ description of Aubrey Beardsley once reminded me of Noël when Yeats said Beardsley was not only a brilliant artist in that very confined black and white world of his, but that he could also have been a great writer, a great statesman, a great politician. One felt that about Noël. Another extraordinary quality was his intense loyalty, even then, to the theatre; it gave Noël everything in the world he dreamed of or wanted. I wanted vague things beyond, and I went in quest of them and got lost, while he remained perfectly assured; perhaps in his innermost soul he does have moments of doubt, but I can’t really imagine Noël doubting anything.

  ‘He was always quite certain of everything: I remember on the tour of Peter Pan in Glasgow, Noël once told me the facts of life in a dressing-room. And the next week I learned them quite differently from somebody else, so I went back to Noël and we had some giant sticks of Leichner grease-paint which had just been invented and I remember shaking one at Noël rather in the classic way he waggles his own finger at people and saying “It just isn’t true, Noël”. He looked at me for a moment and then murmured, ‘It’s no use your waggling that extremely suggestive piece of greasepaint at me, what I’ve told you is the exact truth.” But I don’t think it was.

  ‘Noël really wasn’t like a child at all – he lacked the quality. I don’t mean he was an unnatural, preposterously precocious, forward or unpleasant child at all. But to other children he seemed totally grown-up. He was decidedly puckish, witty, dry, clipped and immensely competent. I remember once during Peter Pan Noël and I were asked to tea by a horrible old man who lived in Earls Court and I said I didn’t want to go much; Noël said nor did he, but he thought we ought to because it was good for business to be invited out. I looked at him with a kind of religious terror: at fourteen he knew it all.’

  When the run of Peter Pan ended in London, Mrs Coward managed to attach herself to the tour and to get her fares paid by agreeing to look after, as well as her own son, a boy called Donald Buckley who had taken over as ‘Michael’. Buckley shared digs with them in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Birmingham, and also managed to liven up a dull week in Newcastle by catching some sinister lice in his head to Noël’s huge and smugly clean delight. After the provinces the company toured some of the London suburbs – Wimbledon, Hammersmith and then Kennington, which was near enough to the Cowards’ home in Clapham for the entire cast to be invited there for tea after one of the matinées. Of that gathering Noël remembered only that he sang at his guests for some considerable time and that Pauline Chase arrived with her friend, who played the Mermaid, in a sparkling new yellow roadster.

  The tour ended in March and for the next nine months Noël was out of work. He spent the time developing two friendships, the first he had achieved outside the family, one of which remained vitally important to him for many years to come. The first was with an artist called Philip Streatfield, then about thirty, who had a studio in Chelsea and in whom Noël found all the Bohemian charm that he expected of a painter. The second was with an older acquaintance, the girl who had played Rosamund Carey in the first production of Where the Rainbow Ends, Esmé Wynne. During the run of ‘The Rainbow’, when they appeared together and when Noël stage-managed the matinée of Esmé’s first play, the two had taken a hearty dislike to each other; but by early in 1913 this was all forgotten and they built up a long and loyal friendship which led to their both writing consistently, for the first time in their lives – poems in her case, short stories in his. It could perhaps be said (and has been by Esmé) that she started Noël on his writing:

  ‘We quickly formed a brother-sister relationship (I was an only child and he only had a young brother) and from that time onwards until some time after I was married, we were close but entirely platonic friends, having mutual ambitions, acting and writing together, and enjoying each other’s company more than that of any other of our friends. We wrote curtain-raisers in which I acted on tour: I wrote lyrics which he put to music and we collaborated on an unpublished book of short sketches.’

  Noël, for his part, admits a considerable debt to Esmé:

  ‘She egged me on to write ... and she was the spur to my acting ambitions because I was madly jealous of her playing the lead in “The Rainbow” when I only had a small part.’

  So far from finding her ‘pompous, stodgy and slightly superior’, as he had during rehearsals, Noël now found in Esmé a devoted friend with whom to walk, talk, daydream, and even do some light shoplifting while Esmé watched disapprovingly. ‘At that time,’ remarked Esmé later, ‘Mrs Coward left Noël alone a lot – she didn’t blame him for anything, though she knew that he used to shoplift a bit, but instead of backing me up and telling him that he’d be put in prison and have his career ruined, she just used to laugh. She was an amusing, sharp-faced, brave little lady who doted on Noël; to keep him and the family she took on a lodging-house, and I think Noël inherited her tenacity while from his father he acquired a blind devotion to music.’

  Esmé and Noël had more than a little in common; both child actors (Esmé’s mother had been on the stage and her Aunt Mona still was), both romantics, both addicted to exploring the still intimate and often village-like suburbs of London, they were ideally suited to one another. So much so that their friendship even survived the time that Esmé spent in a Belgian Convent and the appalling, self-inflicted nicknames of Poj (Noël) and Stoj (Esmé). To say that they were inseparable would be putting it mildly:

  ‘We even had baths together for the simple reason that we didn’t wish to waste a moment’s companionship and because it seemed affected to stop short in the middle of some vital discussion for such a paltry reason as conventional modesty.’

  Esmé Wynne later married, left the stage and became an ardent Christian Scientist; she is also a determined believer in the power of imagination, and writing in the January 1966 issue of The Layman she noted:

  ‘I have personally witnessed this power (of imagination) in action in the case of an associate of my childhood who became the most famous man of the theatre of his day. I was with him when, during a country walk, he clearly formulated his desire in imagination and expressed it to me in the words “I am going to have the whole theatrical world at my feet”. At that time he was fifteen years of age, plain, with no financial resources except meagre earnings as an actor, a good ear for music, and an ability to play by heart but no knowledge of the theory; his chief asset being a brilliant sense of humour. Yet long befor
e he reached the age of forty he had achieved his ambition and was triumphantly at the top of his world.’

  This vision of Noël in mid-countryside at the age of fifteen seeing his entire future in one sudden, blinding moment of truth may seem a little romantic in retrospect. All the same, both children were by now clearly aware of where their futures lay; Esmé’s wish was to ‘know the truth’ about life, as she herself later described it, while Noël was to be a success, though at the time he was still far enough under Esmé’s woodland influence to be writing short stories about Pan. But the most important thing about their friendship was the boundless mutual admiration and encouragement it afforded. Esmé did, however, find one subject over which even their friendship could never come to terms:

  ‘My interest in religion was tabooed. Noël was totally uninterested in the subject and didn’t want to discuss it. He also felt that any doubts cast on Orthodoxy reflected on the intelligence of his adored mother who, like my own parents, was firmly, unquestioningly and irrationally Church of England. Eventually, to avoid the quarrels that resulted from any attempt on my part to speak on this fundamental interest, we drew up a Palship Contract one clause of which forbade the discussion of religion.’

  Noël’s other teenage friendship, with Philip Streatfield, matured during a holiday in May 1914, when they took a car and drove through the West Country for a fortnight stopping at farms along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall while Philip painted and Noël walked across his beloved beaches. Later that year they were in Cornwall again, staying in a cottage in Polperro, when on the fourth of August war was declared. Immediately, Noël was sent back to London; Philip put him on a train at Truro and gave him into the charge of a fellow-passenger, the novelist Hugh Walpole, who treated Noël to lunch and gave him half a crown when they reached London.

  The war, in its first three years, had no effect on Noël’s teenage life whatsoever; the autumn of 1914 was spent looking for a Christmas engagement which totally failed to materialize, possibly because he had just reached the awkward age: too old and too large for the boy parts and not yet a ‘young juvenile’. But just after Christmas a telegram arrived from Dion Boucicault announcing that A. W. Baskcomb, who was playing his original part of Slightly in Peter Pan, had been taken suddenly ill. A day later, Noël was back in the theatre as Slightly at the Duke of York’s for the second year running, with this time Madge Titheradge as Peter and Holman Clark as Captain Hook. Rival entertainments in London that Christmas included Oscar Asche as a Zulu Chieftain, Beerbohm Tree as Micawber in David Copperfield, and Gerald du Maurier as ‘Raffles’ at Wyndhams. On the allied front near Wimcreux, Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss were giving war concerts while at home the Scala was showing a new film programme entitled, ‘With the Fighting Forces of Europe’.

  After the London run Noël did not work again until the very end of 1915. This was not, though it could well have been, because there weren’t any offers; rather it was because he developed a hacking cough which, a doctor discovered, was caused by a tubercular gland in his chest. Dr Etlinger, an old friend of the family, took Noël into his sanatorium at Wokingham where he lived in the doctor’s own house and for the first of two occasions in his life (the second was the 1939–45 war) came into contact with a lot of men who did not have long to live. Noël was not seriously ill at this time; but he learnt enough about tuberculosis, he said later, ‘not to be fooled by false illusions when the time comes for me to face the truth of dying’. At the sanatorium he wrote some one-act plays which he persuaded the staff to perform, and by the summer he was stronger and healthier than he had ever been before.

  After a few weeks he left the sanatorium, and, to keep his mother happy, had himself confirmed; the ceremony was severely endangered by Esmé, who plagued the Clapham Vicar with unanswerable questions until he was eventually forced to demand of Mrs Coward that she keep the girl away until Noël was safely confirmed in the faith.

  Confirmed but not noticeably more spiritual, Noël went off to stay with some friends of Philip Streatfield in Rutland; the holiday was an unqualified success except for the departure when Mrs Coward, who was seeing Noël off at St Pancras, left her bag on the Tube with what little money she still had after scraping together enough for his ticket. To pay the fare she had to pawn her wedding ring, but luckily her bag was later recovered. Noël spent a few happy weeks in the country where his hostess was a Mrs Cooper who had the unnerving habit of lying flat on her back on a mattress in front of the fire and shooting off witticisms in a kind of petulant wail. Even so the time passed amiably enough, and before long Noël started thinking about Christmas and the 1915/16 revival of Where the Rainbow Ends, now on its fifth consecutive season with only a few of the original company still playing. But Esmé Wynne and Philip Tonge were still in the company and Noël, too old to play the page boy again, was cast as The Slacker’, a cross between a man and a dragon; it was a short, showy part with an ‘exit, laughing hysterically’ which Noël enjoyed hugely and which usually brought a round of applause from the audience.

  4

  1916

  ‘I was a talented child, God knows, and when washed and smarmed down a bit, passably attractive.

  But I was, I believe, one of the worst boy actors ever inflicted on the general public.’

  By the spring of 1916, the effect of the war was at last becoming noticeable in the theatre; entertainment tended to centre on light musicals, as in the second war, or on plays of unassailable patriotism, for which category Where the Rainbow Ends was well qualified. There were more revivals than usual, and the two leading actor-managers of the time had already leapt into the patriotic breach; Beerbohm Tree revived Drake and Frank Benson was giving his Henry V. But most patriotic of all were Boots the Chemists who took a page in the Stage Yearbook for that year to announce ‘No more German Greasepaint! Leichner is completely superseded ... Boots British Grease Paint is the best we ever used’.

  It was at about this time that Noël’s father, still a traveller with Payne’s Pianos, made one of his rare pronouncements concerning his elder son. In the course of a lengthy conversation with Mr Dunkley, a piano maker in Clapham High Street, Coward père announced that in his view the boy was going to be clever. Meanwhile Noël was persevering with ‘The Rainbow’, with his friendship with Esmé, and with the occasional poems:

  ‘I can only assume that the compulsion to make rhymes was born in me. It cannot have been hereditary for neither my mother nor my father nor any of my forebears on either side of the family displayed, as far as I know, the faintest aptitude for writing poetry or verse ... There is no time I can remember when I was not fascinated by words “going together”; Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter, all fed my childish passion, in addition to all the usual nursery rhymes that the flesh is heir to, beginning, to the best of my belief, with “Pat-A-Cake, Pat-A-Cake, Baker’s Man”. I can still distinctly recall being exasperated when any of these whimsical effusions were slipshod in rhyming or scansion.

  ‘Some years later when I was rushing headlong towards puberty I wrote a series of short couplets under the general heading “Vegetable Verse”. These, I am relieved to say, have disappeared completely ... I can recall only two tantalizing fragments:

  In A Voice Of Soft Staccato

  We Will Speak Of The Tomato

  and

  The Sinful AspaRAGus

  To Iniquity Will Drag Us’

  Later in his teens, inspired and at the same time slightly irritated by the feverish industry of his friend Esmé Wynne, Noël decided after a few competitive failures to strike out on a line of his own with songs rather than poems. Being a natural musician, he found it easier to write to tunes jangling in his head than to devote himself to mastering iambics, trochees, anapaests, or dactyls. If a tune came first he would set words to it; if the words came first he would set them to music at the piano, which almost invariably meant changing the verse to fit the tune.

  This process also infuriated Esmé who un
wisely allowed Noël to take one of her rather soulful love poems, beginning:

  ‘Our little love is dying:

  On his head droop lately crimson roses faded quite’

  and set it to music. Noël’s song began:

  ‘Our little love is dying on his head ...’

  But in spite of this their friendship thrived as they began to act more together – first in ‘The Rainbow’ and then in a spring 1916 tour of Charley’s Aunt which lasted four long months. This also gave them the time for a collaboration called ‘Le Rêve de Pierrot’ (words, Esmé Wynne; music, Noël Coward) that included the memorable stanza: