AUDIO:
listen to Walter Harris interview Noel Coward
Known even to his peers as the Master, Noël Coward was master of all thespian
trades and jack of none. When I first met him, he did not resemble the image
conjured up by Hermione Gingold in an Alan Melville revue of “Mr. Coward in
his exquisitely flowered dressing gown”. He had asked me to meet him at
Heathrow on a rather dismal November day in 1960, whence he was catching an
early flight to Geneva, en route from his house in Jamaica to another at
Montreux-les-Avants, via the Dorchester.
I would probably not have secured the interview at all — Coward had little
time for them even in the days when interviewing was more about eliciting
information than scoring points — if he had not wanted to talk about his
first novel, Pomp and Circumstance. “I enjoyed writing it; it is a
cheerful book,” he said in his clipped and uniquely cadenced voice, the
sentences rising and flattening at the end.
He had agreed to meet me at the airport at 5.30am, in order, I suspect, gently
to inconvenience me as a penalty for being an interviewer. Heathrow in those
days possessed few permanent buildings apart from the control tower and the
Queen’s Building, which contained the arrival and departure areas. The rest
of the airport was a battlefield of mud and duckboards sprinkled with Nissen
huts.
Coward wore a smattering of beard, a long black coat and a sacerdotal soutane
which made him look like a renegade cleric. The interview, for the BBC’s Today
programme, was brief, but at the end of it I had time to ask Coward if he
would contribute to an ARGO Spoken Word LP about theatre. He agreed, and
told me to ring his secretary, Cole Leslie, to make an appointment for lunch
at Montreux-les-Avants, after which he would express himself on tape.
Graham Payn, an actor and well known to be Coward’s permanent boyfriend — he
inspired the song Mad about the Boy — Coward’s secretary Cole Leslie
and I sat on the veranda with our drinks, watching cows whose legs seemed
longer on one side than the other to accommodate the steep mountainside,
graze and ruminate to the mellow clank of their cowbells. A handsome Italian
boy with rococo buttocks afterwards dispensed an excellent luncheon. I asked
Coward about a famous anecdote about him. He was alleged to have been
sitting under cover from the heavy rain next to his close friend Princess
Marina, Duchess of Kent, prior to going in to Westminster Abbey for the
Coronation service. Opposite them was another queen who had made her way
into the affections of the British public, the vast Salote, Queen of Tonga.
“Noël, who is that little man sheltering under Queen Salote’s umbrella?”
asked his companion. Coward peered through the rain. “Oh, her lunch, my
dear.”
He laughed. “That was said by somebody at White’s, and immediately attributed
to me. That was very flattering of course, except I had intended to visit
Tonga the following winter, and after that of course it was quite
impossible.”
I asked him about another anecdote. “I heard that you were in your stateroom
aboard the Queen Mary when a cub reporter knocked at your door and
came straight in. You were very cross and told him to leave at once. “Please
Mr Coward, I’ve just joined the Pictorial and if you’ll answer
just one question it’ll really help my career.”
Coward was said to have sighed in exasperation. “Very well, what is it then ?”
“What you think of Hollywood, Mr Coward?”
“Hollywood is a place where some people lie on the beach and look up at the
stars, whereas other people lie on the stars and look down at the beach.”
Coward roared with laughter and called me a very rude word which he employed
as a term of endearment. He hadn’t heard the story.
I remember a downstairs loo papered in first folios of Bitter Sweet,
and an airy library at the back of the house where the Master spoke into the
microphone for more than an hour without hesitating or repeating himself
once. He gave his views about the theatre lovingly and with immense
authority. The prime object of the theatre was entertainment and any
playwright delivering a “message” must do so subtly or find his play
confronting an empty theatre. If an “ector” asked what his motivation was
supposed to be, he was brusquely told: “Your cheque at the end of the week!”
To “What do you think of critics?” Coward replied: “I think of them very
little, as a matter of fact.”
Of comedy: “You do not feel a comedy part the way you feel a dramatic one. In
comedy getting a laugh depends upon a hairline of sensitivity. If you’re on
your toes, you can control the audience’s laughter.” It was as important to
be able to quell a laugh as to arouse one, as many young comedians had found
when their punchline was drowned in the first laugh when it should have
inspired a much louder one. Comedy was also much more difficult to play than
drama. Rex Harrison, he thought, was probably the prime exemplar of comedy
timing.
“The late Charles Hawtrey told me everything I know about comedy, and I’m
grateful to him to this day.”
Coward was predictably scathing about jargon. “A lot of time in these dear
democratic days of the theatre is wasted by people giving their opinions. It
would be unwise for the captain of a ship, faced with a storm, to ask each
member of the crew how to deal with it. By the time they had finished the
ship, in my view, would have foundered. A play subjected to democratic
discussion would likewise founder.”
Coward was a profound believer in the impossibility of “feeling a part”. The
essential art of good acting was to be able to simulate emotion. “If an
actor, no matter how good, tries to convince me he feels the full emotion of
the part eight performances a week, he knows I wouldn't believe him.”
On one occasion Coward broke his absolute rule of learning a part at the
beginning of rehearsals, including the emotions to be simulated. If you were
absolutely certain of your part, you could relax in the few evenings before
the show opened, otherwise you dreaded the rising of the curtain in case you
dried up.
Coward, with John Mills also in the cast, was to give three performances of Journey’s
End in Singapore. “I had always wanted to play the part of Stanton,
which was highly emotional.
“However, I had no time to rehearse and settle the character's emotions the
night before the first performance. The result was that I gave one of the
worst performances in the history of the theatre.”
After the conclusion of the interview, he called me a taxi and waved until I
was out of sight. His thespian authority and unique diction still remain
with me. He died in 1973, but no doubt will live for ever in the lively
grace of his work. One of his most famous plays is currently showing again
on Broadway — and here in Berkshire — and if ever there was a man with a
blithe spirit, it was Noël Coward.
Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit is at the Watermill, Berkshire, until
June 27. 01635 46044.
