Light Entertainment

FUTURE INDEFINITE (352 pp.)--Noel Coward--Doubleday ($4.50).

After two weeks' work as British propaganda agent in Paris at the start of World War II, Noel Coward decided to report back to London on his progress. On a supersecret telephone, Agent Coward muttered a strictly hush-hush number--to which the operator responded with "a shrill scream of laughter" that set poor Noel's conspiratorial nerves jangling. A few seconds later, however, Coward found himself connected with his superior officer, Dallas Brooks, in London and started to unburden:

"This is Diplomat speaking." "Who?" bellowed Brooks crossly.

"Diplomat," repeated Agent Coward firmly, and pressed on: "I [have] interviewed 'Lion' . . . established successful contact with 'Glory,' [have] not yet been able to get into touch with 'Triumph' j) "What the bloody hell are you talking about?" Brooks roared back.

Coward patiently repeated his spiel, this time "articulating very, very slowly as though I were talking to an idiot child." But Brooks only sighed wearily and said: "It's no good, old boy. I can't understand a word." By the Numbers. Brooks "explained some weeks later . . . that he had been asleep when I rang up and thought I was [someone named] Reggie!" He also tried to atone by teaching Agent Coward a new code consisting "entirely of numbers" and of such awful complexity that "if ever I had been captured by the Gestapo they would certainly have had a tough time getting me to betray it." But by then poor Noel was beginning to realize that he and intelligence were not made for each other.

Winston Churchill had realized this from the beginning. After Coward had pulled up a chair to the Churchill piano and had sung Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington, Winnie said irascibly: "You'd be no good in the intelligence service." He then waved his hand and barked dramatically: "Get into a warship and see some action! Go and sing to them when the guns are firing--that's your job!" Coward wanted to explain that this would be "impracticable, because during a naval battle all ships' companies are at action stations and the only place for me to sing would be in the wardroom by myself." But it was no use. Much as Coward yearned to do "something really constructive" for England, England demanded nothing but Coward's "facility for light entertaining." Future Indefinite, a sort of sequel to Coward's earlier Present Indicative (TIME, March 29, 1937), is Coward's story of how he sang and mimed himself to the verge of laryngitic paralysis from 1940 to 1945.' He sang Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Don't Put Your Daughter to President Roosevelt. He sang them to General Smuts. He sang them to British and U.S.

soldiers and sailors from Beirut to Burma, and he sang them during lunch hours "above the din of crockery and . . . metal plates" to simple factory girls who couldn't understand a word and were "flung into a state of leaden bewilderment" when Coward's teammate, Judy Campbell, trilled "that Arthur Murray had taught her dancing in a hurry and that there was a nightingale singing incessantly in Berkeley Square." Gracious Little Speeches. "It is always difficult," says Coward feelingly, "to convince people outside the world of the theater that performing in public is a dedicated and arduous business. To act a long part in a relaxed manner, to sing a few songs, bow to applause, make gracious little speeches of thanks . . . looks ... so effortless, so easy, but actually it is not." Moreover, as a high-priority celebrity, Coward was followed wherever he went by shotgun bursts of malevolent criticism from the British press. Newspapers never wearied of asking why this crooning playboy should be eternally (and often stylishly) globe-trotting in planes and warships and forever popping up on the steps of distant residencies and embassies.

To this unnerving fusillade, Coward contributed a few detonations of his own.

He enraged the people of Brooklyn by his notorious aspersion on the courage of "mournful little Brooklyn boys" (an "unwarranted phrase" for which he hopes he has "genuinely been forgiven"). On a war-charities tour in the U.S., he contributed around $45,000 of his own U.S. investments to financing the trip--and was promptly hauled into a British court and fined $888 plus costs for breaking currency regulations.

By war's end, Coward had seen enough of the "physical horrors [of] war to last me a lifetime." In intervals between entertaining and earning thousands of pounds for Allied causes, he raised his country's prestige many a notch by making the films In Which We Serve, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter. The only weakness of his account of it all is that too much of the Coward war effort reads like the faded timetable of a long-abandoned railroad and brings dullness into what should be, and often is, a heartfelt, sprightly, modest description of a one-man show.

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