The Master Entertainer

By T.E. Kalem

He was born nine days before Christmas, so his mother named him Noel. That festive holiday spirit swirled around Noel Coward and his works throughout his life. His plays, musicals, and revues were marvelous parties. To the tinkle of cocktail glasses, he arched the languid magic wand of his cigarette holder and summoned up clever, dashing men and svelte, seductive women who danced divinely, sang bittersweetly and tottered into the tinseled dawn. None of it was remotely real, but it was often great fun, and that suited Coward perfectly to the very day the party ended last week when he had a heart attack in his Jamaican villa at the age of 73. He had never claimed more, nor less, than "a talent to amuse."

Faith. The talent was virtually parthenogenetic, since there was no theatrical tradition on either side of his family. His father was a piano salesman who eked out a precarious living. His mother played the piano passably, and Coward acknowledged that he was linked to her with "an umbilical cord of piano wire." By the time Noel donned his first childish sailor suit, Mrs. Coward had discovered her vocation: stage mother. The average mother is content to believe that her son is bright; the stage mother has a fanatical conviction that her son is a genius. With no discernible difficulty, Mrs. Coward instilled this unshakable faith in Noel.

At twelve he made his acting debut in a play about fairies called The Goldfish. At 17 he had graduated from playing the "juve" and was delivering his lines with that crisp, ironic, haughty precision that an entire generation of actors subsequently learned not to imitate lest they sound like feebly envious parodists. By 20 his first frothy comedy, I'll Leave It to You, was on the boards, and at 25 he had his first smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic, The Vortex. In this play, he portrayed a neurasthenic drug-addicted son with a Hamlet-like fixation on his mother, while she in turn paraded her young lovers before him. The press hurled epithets of "decadent" and "degenerate" at him. He half resented and half cultivated the image, since he shrewdly realized that fiction makes better copy than truth. No newspaper would devote much space to the fact that he worked mercilessly, helped support his mother and collapsed at night from sheer occupational fatigue.

Despite his public image of lounge-lizard torpor, he doted on work. This accounts for his staggering creative output: he composed the music and lyrics for 281 songs, wrote 27 plays, a novel, five books of short stories and two volumes of autobiography. Amazingly, he could not read music. He hummed and whistled his tunes, and then played them by ear. One group of numbers is misty-eyed romantic, starlight-in-champagne (I'll Follow My Secret Heart, Zigeuner, Someday I'll Find You). The other group pinches a satiric nerve with droll spoofery (Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington). As a lyricist, Coward was a direct descendant of W.S. Gilbert, and in the modern musical theater only Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter were his peers.

The plays and musicals ranged over Coward's entire spectrum of talent and taste from the faintly wicked menage `a trois of Design for Living to the spectral fantasy of Blithe Spirit, from whipped cream operettas like Bitter-Sweet to music hall antics like Tonight at 8:30 (with Gertrude Lawrence) from Kiplingesque tunes of glory in Cavalcade to the hilarious battle royal of the sexes, Private Lives. In the film Brief Encounter, Coward even dropped his customary mask of urbane detachment to record a tenderly poignant tale of middle-aged love.

A shaper of the flippant, disenchanted '20s, Coward was wary of the deeper emotions, guardedly dispassionate, compulsively irreverent. He turned the era's alienated mood into a frenetic jazz beat of syncopated escapism. The message: Live for the moment, dance your troubles away, play madder music, drink stronger wine.

The technical counterpart of this in Coward's plays is that he vastly speeded up the tempo of comedy. Relying on single lines of dialogue, he produced instant repartee in which talk became a blindingly fast game of inflective one-upmanship rather than a declaration of meaning or a display of passion. Even within individual lines, he inserted a word or phrase that mockingly deflated the emotion it expressed. Thus Elyot says to Amanda in Private Lives: "You're looking very lovely in this damned moonlight, Amanda." Repeated time and again, this approach almost makes Coward the granddaddy of cool.

He was never cool about the theater, however. It was his cross, his sword, and his crown. He served it with undeviating grace, wit and loyalty. He could not abide anything professionally slipshod on a stage. Once, when a pair of leading actors loafed self-indulgently through a matinee of one of his musicals, he went backstage and tartly chided their performance as "a triumph of nevermind over doesn't-matter."

For more than a decade a British story has been circulating about Noel's arrival in heaven. A vast assembly of angels and archangels are ranged in serried ranks to greet him. The pearly gates swing open and Noel steps forward; the heavens are hushed, waiting for his first words. His eyes sweep upward from stalls to gallery, pausing for a moment at the Royal Box. Then comes the clipped fastidious accent that has so often echoed from the world below:

"Which [pause for effect] . . . Which . . . is God?"

--T.E. Kalem

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