Noel Coward’s shrewd, acid missives

THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD

By Barry Day

Knopf, $37.50, 800 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MURIEL DOBBIN

This remarkable book is a journey into the past in which the reader is guided by hundreds of letters that conjure up the thoughts, the words and the waspishness of the remarkable Sir Noel Coward, entertainment icon.

There wasn”t much that Coward couldn”t do and do well, on stage and film. He was admirably summed up on his 70th birthday by his friend Lord Louis Mountbatten who said there were probably greater painters, novelists, composers, librettists, singers, actors, dancers, comedians, directors and cabaret artists than Coward — but only he could do it all.

Hundreds of pages of letters, expertly edited by Barry Day, offer evidence of Coward”s capacity for wit, charm, and shrewdness spiced by a devastating brand of acid commentary. As Mr Day puts it, “What you see is what Noel got — and gave.”

It also has to be remembered that he had a stunningly successful professional life in an era when being homosexual was neither easy nor acceptable. Sir Winston Churchill was one of those who could not deal with Coward”s personal proclivities, and said so. Yet author Rebecca West said of Coward, “He was a very dignified man … There was an impeccable dignity in his sexual life which was reticent, but untainted by pretence.” And Mr. Day agrees, “He would not have been well pleased to become a gay icon at the expense of his work, or to observe, for instance, a generation of young gay directors giving us Coward plays.”

The decades of letters paint a vivid picture of how Coward lived and laughed and expressed his constant affection for family and friends. The most important of his correspondents for the first fifty four years of his life was his beloved mother, Violet Coward, to whom he wrote once a week. “No sweet little old lady,” notes Mr. Day, “and it is surely no accident that there are so many strong women in Coward plays.”

Described as a “woman of spirit always looking for a way out of the sexual and social prison society had imposed on her” Violet Coward wrote of her joy that she “should have been designed to be the mother of a genius.”

And there is little doubt that she was. Noel Coward rose like a meteor from his middle class beginnings, but never forgot where he came from. His career took him everywhere and his talent was explosive. He was part of a world of celebrities about whom he expressed lavish affection inbetween tearing into them. He could brand Tallulah Bankhead “a conceited slut” and still write to her, “Thank you very much, darling for all your sweetness and your insane generosity.”

He was friend and confidante to Marlene Dietrich when she poured out her woes to him about her troubled love life.

He had a turbulent friendship with Gertrude Lawrence, his costar in “Private Lives” and when she married Richard Aldrich in 1940, she received what became a famous telegram.

“Dear Mrs A hooray hooray at last you are deflowered. On this as any other day I love you Noel Coward.”

Bernard Shaw was among his admirers, especially of the Coward play “Cavalcade” a series of set pieces on the sociology of two British families, similar to the lives portrayed years later in the famous television series “Upstairs Downstairs.” The film based on the play won three Oscars in 1933, and Shaw observed, “With ’Cavalcade’ alone he (Coward) did more for Britain than all the generals at Waterloo.”

Coward drove himself all his life, was often emotionally drained and physically ill, yet his letters poke fun at his problems, and he never stopped doing the work he obviously loved. It took him only two weeks to write “Blithe Spirit” a satrical comedy that ran for four years in London after it opened, and is as hilarious now as it was then.

When World War II came, he worked for British intelligence and received only belated credit for it, perhaps because of the antagonism of Churchill, who reportedly blocked at least temporarily a knighthood for Coward that was endorsed in a personal letter by King George VI.

Several of the best British war films ever produced were the work of Coward, who took a starring role in “In Which We Serve,” the tragic account of a British destroyer and the men who sailed in it. He also produced the poignant romance, “Brief Encounter.” With the end of the war, the world of Coward’s theater changed. Yet even the angry young playwrights of the Fifties and Sixties recognized that Coward’s talent transcended the social change they demanded.

And he never lost his capacity to sum up with a sting. Recalling a meeting with Truman Capote, Coward compared him to “a tiny tendril.” Of a meeting with Elizabeth Taylor, he observed, “She was hung with rubies and diamonds and looked like a pregnant pagoda.” Of actress Gloria Graham he said unkindly she looked as though “someone had slid over her face with very greasy shoes.” Nothing escaped that cold eye, He even wrote of “a new Jamaican houseboy who talked like water gurgling out of a bath.”

Yet one of Coward’s most loyal admirers was Elizabeth “the Queen Mum” who made a special trip to visit him at his home in Jamaica and invited him to visit her at Sandringham. It was the dowager queen who laid the wreath in Westminster Abbey at the thanksgiving service for Coward’s life. When she was thanked, she said simply, “I came because he was my friend.”

Coward must have loved that.

Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.