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, Ill 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 Ive had is just

A talent to amuse.

Bitter-Sweet, 1929.

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 Ive 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 todays 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 Nols 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 Nols 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 Nol Coward had come to London to start auditioning for a National Theatre revival of Hay Fever which he was himself to direct: Hes getting on a bit now, said Lawrence, and hasnt had a success in a long time, but hes 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 century 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 Nol 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