“As clever as a bag of ferrets & trivial as a perch of canaries” – that was Virginia Woolf’s opinion of Noël Coward, after an exchange of sugary compliments in the 1920s. It is a verdict that will be upheld by many readers of this vast, ramshackle book lovingly compiled by Barry Day, the doughtiest of the old sentinels still guarding the Master’s memory.

Coward’s earliest surviving letter was written at the age of seven to his mother: “I had some little boys over yesterday afternoon to tea and dressed up in a short dress and danced to them and sung to them.” He never ceased to be a mother’s boy, and he wrote to her weekly until her death when he was 54. The super-sophistication set in early – “I’ve never met anyone so painfully provincial in my life,” the child actor wrote of a lady who gave him tea in Wolverhampton during a tour – but his letters to his mother are surprisingly infantile, too. “All the Movie Magnates are putting their cars at my disposal,” he wrote from Hollywood in 1929. “I shall use the cars and probably wee wee in them.”

Day prints not only innumerable letters and witty telegrams from Coward, but hundreds of responses, organised by correspondent and linked with a chatty commentary. So a 1943 letter from Duff Cooper about Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans (“If I was still Minister of Information, I should insist upon it being broadcast nightly”) is followed by a note on the BBC’s loathing of the song, which contained both the taboo word “bloody” and the kind of irony bureaucrats distrust. The pages brim with actors’ tantrums, anxious auditions, despairing rehearsals, elation on first nights, drubbings by obtuse critics, and rows with grasping agents. The cacophony is sometimes amusing – “Betty Bacall called Hedda Hopper a lousy bitch and kicked her up the bottie” – and sometimes simply wearing.

Coward corresponded with, and gossiped about, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Gertrude Lawrence, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Anthony Eden, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Lawrence of Arabia, George Bernard Shaw and others. As a letter writer, he was unfailingly effusive, often artful and sometimes insincere – this man who had craved fame from childhood claimed in all seriousness in 1941 that he “always hates publicity”.

Year after year he received fawning hyperbole that helped him to stay a charming, pampered star. “You have done the greatest work any individual has ever done,” the impresario Flo Ziegfeld typically telegraphed. “The theatre cannot die so long as it has a genius like you.” Coward, though, always recognised his limits. “My imagination doesn’t feel strong enough to reach things which have not actually happened to me,” he admitted to a fellow playwright. Challenged by great events, or big ideas, he retreated into surface gloss. Visiting France in September 1939, he reported that, “Paris is beautifully ‘War gay’. Nobody ever dresses and everybody collects at Maxim’s.” Yet he was an old-fashioned, simple-hearted patriot, at heart. A pompous letter to his friend Dickie Mountbatten reveals his anguish during the abdication crisis, and many letters of the 1940s reiterate his desperation to do his “level best . .. until the damned war is won”.

By the age of 60, Coward had become a flirtatious Victor Meldrew. He deplored “H-bombs, television, the general decline in standards and the crushing down of initiative, originality and ambition”. Many new stars seemed pygmies to him. “I am a tremendous celebrity snob, and by celebrity I don’t mean Brigitte Bardot, but people of achievement like Somerset Maugham,” he wrote in 1960. He adored glamour in both performers and stage sets, was “INFURIATED by those bloody little Beatles going to Buckingham Palace”, and denounced kitchen-sink playwrights preoccupied by “rape, incontinence, perversion, sadism, psychopathology and flatulence, both verbal and physical”. Day juxtaposes these fulminations with Coward’s frank correspondence with Arnold Wesker, who in 1962 dared ask him to raise funds for Centre 42, a project to bring culture to the masses: “You are going to waste an enormous amount of your energy and creative talent in coping with mediocre little Bureaucrats and organising a ‘Cultural Revolution’! Do me a favour! Leave those cheerful old girls to enjoy their bingo.” Despite their differences, Coward was a great friend to Wesker, as he was to Harold Pinter, whom he described admiringly as “a sort of cockney Ivy Compton-Burnett”. (When the producer of the film of The Caretaker asked Coward – one of the backers – for his address, the response was “Oh, just write Noël Coward, Switzerland.”)

The Letters of Noël Coward is organised with a delirious enthusiasm that is sometimes hard to follow and, in places, looks like a dress rehearsal for a real book, but it will delight aficionados of theatre nostalgia. “The whole thing is so full of regret,” as Ivor Novello wrote to Coward of Bitter Sweet, “for a vanished kindly silly darling age.”

Master of disguise

Noël Coward (1899-1973) was an unlikely looking spy, but, as Day reveals, he became an unofficial agent as early as 1938, reporting back from tours to Moscow, Paris and the like. By 1940 he was in America, acting as one of security ace Bill Stephenson’s “boys” – along with Cary Grant and Ian Fleming. His flippant exterior, he explained, was the perfect cover. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot...a merry playboy.” So good was the disguise, indeed, that the British press was soon attacking him for being out of the country. The criticism hurt deeply: “I don’t mind scurrilous attacks when I am working in the theatre . . . but this filth that has been heaped upon me is really beginning to get under my skin.” The criticism died down only when he became officially attached to the British War Relief Society.

THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD edited by Barry Day
Methuen £25 pp781

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