Noel Coward at 70

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Coward, you've referred to the days of festivity surrounding your 70th birthday as "Holy Week." Are you looking forward to it?

NOEL COWARD: It will be a week of hell, not only for me but also for the people who have to sing my praises. I'll be sitting there wearing my tribute-accepting face, which shows me proud but unspoiled by my own success. It is a face I have used since 1920.

It was also, as he has said, the face of a "heavily doped Chinese illusionist" --a perfect Noel Coward characterization of the sort of facial urbanity one wears to prize-givings. At one dinner party, Earl Mountbatten of Burma actually calculated that Coward had written 27 plays and 281 songs, and Sir Laurence Olivier called him "utterly unspoiled." The Coward eyebrows uncocked a bit, the eyes glanced sideways, and the words hummed forth on the wings of a bee: "That's what you think." He rose to reply to the tributes at a midnight gala in his honor: "I am awfully overcome at this moment and, as you see, restraining it with splendid fortitude."

Sir John Gielgud, Lady Diana Cooper and Richard Attenborough dined at 8:30 or thereabouts, and Merle Oberon flew in from Acapulco. The Queen Mother Elizabeth had him round to lunch. Book shops positively blossomed with Sheridan Morley's new Coward biography, A Talent to Amuse. At London's Phoenix Theater, Princess Margaret and Tony joined everyone in singing "Happy Birthday." After which Richard Briers and Susannah York did the balcony scene from Private Lives (currently playing in Manhattan, amid great nostalgia and critical acclaim). Other Coward sketches and songs followed until, at 4 in the morning, the Chinese mask slipped once again. "Thank you all," said Coward, "for making this obviously the most moving theatrical moment of my life."

INTERVIEWER: Wouldn't you have liked to have done more than just amuse people?

COWARD: Dear boy, I have had no great causes. Do I have to? I can't think of any offhand. If I did, they'd be very offhand. I wanted to write good plays, to grip as well as amuse.

The background to last week's celebrations was a retrospective of Coward's career that was unprecedented even for as oft-revived a writer as he is. A parade of his plays and revues flickered past on BBC-TV. The National Film Theater began to spin out a series of his films. Occasions like 70th birthdays tend to bring out hyperbole, and uncritical reassessments blossomed in the press. Some critics went so far as to rank him with Sheridan and Wilde, or to call him England's greatest living playwright. Such judgments overlooked the extent to which Coward's work is sheerly theatrical, meaning not only shrewd in stagecraft but also remote from lives and issues outside the theater. The stage is all his world, and players are the only people on it.

Yet the pitch of last week's praise for Coward was a measure of what he himself calls "the Noel Coward renaissance." He has lived long enough to see himself transformed from a faded relic of some impossibly sophisticated yesterday into a minor classic. After World War II, a new generation viewed him--along with P. G. Wodehouse--as the last, slightly ridiculous vestige of the frivolous '20s. Country houses, stiff upper lips, cocktails-and-laughter-but-oh-what-comes-after and all that. Many of his plays flopped in the '40s and '50s and his fortunes sagged, although with typical resilience he embarked on a successful new venture as a cabaret performer in the '50s.

It was in the '60s that his best work, with its inspired inconsequentiality, seemed to exert not only a period charm but charm, period. Five years ago, a new production of Hay Fever (1924) by Olivier's National Theater Company set off a flurry of revivals and re-evaluations. The times seemed right for a look back at gaiety, and soon the brittle sophisticate of legend, clenching a cigarette holder and dashing off pages of decadent dialogue before breakfast, had become the grand old man of the English theater.

INTERVIEWER: You always gave the press plenty to talk about.

COWARD: Certainly I did. I acted up like crazy. I did everything that was expected of me. Part of the job.

Coward's greatest single gift has not been writing or composing, not acting or directing, but projecting a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise. He had it as a newcomer of 25, when he walked into a fashionable party where all but he were in formal dress, took in the situation at a glance and said reassuringly: "Now I don't want anyone to feel embarrassed." He has it still, dapper in a brown dinner jacket, hand elegantly holding aloft the perpetual cigarette, answering a request for a definition of the perfect life with a single word: "Mine."

The public personality that is built on this sense of style is Coward's one great creation, looming behind all his smaller ones and investing them with special effervescence. This is what John Osborne meant when he said that Coward "is his own invention and contribution to this century." This is what makes it idle to scan the man or his works for the "real" Noel Coward. The mask of supreme entertainer has become the man. With Coward's 70th birthday, the legend is sealed. As Carlyle said of the universe, we had best accept it--as gratefully as Coward does.

INTERVIEWER: I hope you haven't been bored having to go through all these interviews for your birthday, having to answer the same old questions about yourself.

COWARD: Not at all. I'm fascinated by the subject.

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