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The author of Design for Living was a master of charm who turned frivolity into something serious. John Lahr, drama critic for The New Yorker, recounts how Noël Coward invented contemporary cool.
"I am England, and England is me," Noël Coward once said.
He wasn’t wrong. He was born on the eve of the twentieth century. As an actor, performer and songwriter, Coward lived to define his time. To imagine England without Coward is like imagining America without jazz. He gave it a pulse, a look, an attitude. His streamlined, deluxe persona—the cigarette holders, the silk dressing gowns, the crisp clipped diction, the amusing malice— was the first sighting of the contemporary notion of cool. Coward, who as a performer was a firm believer in swiftness, was also built for speed: tall, thin, sleek. He was, as Kenneth Tynan observed, "a new kind of human being who had never before existed in paint or in print." Coward was a kind of cultural confidence man: that is, he gave the culture confidence. In 1940, seeking to make some major contribution to the war effort, he approached Winston Churchill for a suitably heroic assignment; instead, Churchill told him: "Go out and sing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ while the guns are firing. That’s your job."
He teased a culture of scarcity with
a show of abundance — big in connection,
big in talent, big in wealth.
Coward wrote over three hundred songs, sixty produced plays, twenty-five films and two superb volumes of an autobiography. By 1925, with the success of his play The Vortex, in which he took the lead, Coward became "the great celebrated glamorous cookie" he’d always dreamed of being. He was dubbed "Noël the Fortunate" by the British newspapers and "Destiny’s Tot" by the American critic Alexander Wolcott. He was The Beatles of his day — Britain’s first modern megastar who understood the mass media and who was also a master of self-promotion. Fame has its root in the Latin for rumor; the sudden emergence of radio, talking pictures and photojournalism allowed Coward to broadcast his talents and his well-worked-out image far afield. He seemed to be everywhere all the time. "My life has been one long extravaganza," Coward said. He’d planned it that way. He was a star by twenty-four, had his first Rolls Royce by twenty-six, his first biography at thirty. By 1929, when three-quarters of the English population was earning one hundred pounds or less, Coward was earning fifty thousand pounds. He teased a culture of scarcity with a show of abundance—big in connection, big in talent, big in wealth.
Coward was an entrepreneur of his moment. He incarnated the Victorian work ethic and postwar disillusion – the old and the new idea rolled into one svelte package. He was the triumphant face of British youth: equal to the elders in sophistication and accomplishment who nonetheless expressed both the new generation’s anxiety and its reckless sense of fun. On stage, in such classic light comedies as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, and Present Laughter, his disenchantment took the form of frivolity; the comedies put on stage a new kind of English person and a new aimless condition—plotless plays for plotless lives. His songs, what he called "pessimism with pep," also captured the metaphysical exhaustion behind the postwar binge and sensationally called it quits with meaning. As he sang in "Twentieth Century Blues" from Cavalcade:
What is there to strive for
Love or keep alive for
Hey, hey, call it a day.
Blues,
Nothing to win or to lose...
In his songs, even more than his plays, Coward dramatized life as a masquerade. "Life is nothing but a game of make-believe," he sang in "London Calling." And elsewhere: "I treat my life like a game."
The same point is acted out hilariously in the middle of the put-ons in Hay Fever, in which the answer to a question posed by one of the bewildered houseguests—"Is this a game?" — earns the resonant answer, "Yes, and a game that must be played to the end." The name of Coward’s game was dissimulation expressed as charm, which is both the subject and object of his plays. In fact, when asked by a member of the press how he would be remembered, Coward replied, "By my charm." To Coward, charm was a virtue, and its own reward, defined as "an extra politeness that is not entirely real."
From the outset, charm was a defining aspect of Coward’s good manners and his star performance: It was a seamless armor that made a show of perfect individualism. "The showman in Coward takes the form of charm, plus excessive volubility," Hesketh Pearson wrote in an early biography of "The Master." "He is ‘charming’ to everybody, and as a consequence he has a host of admirers." Pearson went on: "Also no one who can entertain folk in a constant stream of persiflage is ever likely to want for company, and Noël’s life is almost passed in a prolonged procession through applauding parties." To Coward, charm was a form of non-friction: a way of behaving that negotiated a truce with the world and that simulated intimacy without connection. When Coward was starting out as a playwright, George Bernard Shaw had counseled him "never to fall into a breach of essential good manners"; Coward didn’t. "I have taken a lot of trouble with my public face," he said; he was forever advising others to adopt the same constant vigilance.
Coward claimed never to have slept with a woman. "Not even Dietrich?" Gore Vidal asked. "Especially not Miss Dietrich."
His rock-solid persona hid great areas of vulnerability. He was brash. He was driven. He was self-educated and raised in lower-middle class circumstances that were liable to degenerate, he wrote, "into refined gentility unless carefully watched." But, most especially, Coward was homosexual and claimed never to have slept with a woman. "Not even Marlene Dietrich?" Gore Vidal asked him. "Especially not Miss Dietrich," Coward said. In a society where homosexuality was a criminal act and a jailable offense until 1967, Coward’s charm was a way both to mask and to admit his preferences. Charm teased boundaries while never over-stepping them. His charm was a form of tact. If humor can be said to be the courtesy of despair, then charm is the courtesy of egotism. Coward worked hard not to let his egotism or his sexuality show; the tension between Coward’s actuality and his pukka act is part of the high-camp fun of some of his best satirical lyrics, like that "bloke in the third" in "I Wonder What Happened to Him":
They had him thrown out of the club
in Bombay
For apart from his mess bills exceeding his pay,
He took to pig stick in quite the wrong way....
I’ve never felt the need for being with it," Coward joked. "I’m all for staying in my place." But after World War II, Coward had a hard time maintaining his position at the top of the English worker-beehive. His eleven postwar plays brought him an income but no glory. Instead of being reassuring to the English public, his deluxe persona – and all the reactionary privilege and superiority it implied – was an increasing irritant to a post-World War II generation that was forging a more democratic social ideal and working class heroes. After the opening of his musical Ace of Clubs (1950), Coward was booed on stage. "I really seem quite unable to please," he writes in his diary. Coward fought a rearguard action against the new Angry Young Men. "I cannot understand," he wrote in a 1957 polemic against the New Wave of English drama, "why the younger generation, instead of knocking at the door, should bash the f___ out of it."
Noël Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the original production of Design For Living. |
Coward took himself away from England (first as a tax exile in Bermuda, then Switzerland); he also took his persona on the road as a cabaret act. "I am told continually, verbally and in print, that I am the greatest attraction that Las Vegas has ever had and that I am the greatest performer in the world, etc., etc. It is all very, very exciting." His success ensured Coward’s fame extended into the sixties and kept the spellbinder trapped by the spell he cast. As Coward’s idea of England ossified, so did his antic spirits. Bitterness seeps into his diaries, if not his plays. "Our history except for stupid, squalid, social scandals is over," he writes in 1963. "I despise the young, who see no quality in our great past and who spit, with phoney Left-Wing disdain, on all that we, as a race, have contributed."
Coward, who died on March 26, 1973, lived long enough to see his reputation as a playwright revived in Britain, and to be knighted. The humiliations of old age and his own sadness ("He was one of the saddest men I’ve ever known," the actress Elaine Stritch, who starred in Coward’s 1960 musical Sail Away, told me) have to be read between the lines of his Diaries, which end on a typical Coward note of smug triumph at the Queen’s asking him over lunch whether he’d accept a knighthood. "Apart from all this," he writes, "my seventieth birthday was uneventful." Here, as on stage, Coward took leave of the public he’d entertained for the best part of a century with an understated wink—his sensational form of gallantry.
Excerpted by permission from the author’s introduction to The Noël Coward Diaries (published in the Second American Edition by Da Capo in 2000.)
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