Private Lives

One thing leads to another. A Talent to Amuse, the seventieth birthday tribute to Noël Coward lately issued on CD—contains a snippet from Act I of Private Lives (1930), played in this instance by the youthful Susannah York and Richard Briers, but originally conceived as a vehicle for Coward himself and his great muse Gertrude Lawrence. It is so good that I have since then tracked down and devoured the whole play. The writing is, of course, brilliant—consistently clever and funny throughout—but encased in the substructure is a rich vein of defiance. “It doesn’t suit women to be promiscuous,” declares Elyot. “It doesn’t suit men for women to be promiscuous!” retorts Amanda with feeling. There is a presumption throughout that all four characters’ social credentials are impeccable. At one point in Act II Amanda refers to performing a “Court curtsey,” so we may assume that she has had occasion to deploy it. On the other hand, Amanda knows that the specter of a second divorce will put them in a “Hell of a mess socially.” There is not the merest hint at the Great War, although we may assume that Elyot and Victor are easily old enough to have fought in it and survived. In other words, there is much here of interest to anyone in search of an essentially Edwardian frame of mind, just as it surely exists in comparable novels by P. G. Wodehouse, Vita Sackville-West, and the work of any number of artists (visual or not) steering a parallel course through the 1920s and beyond. True, Amanda and Elyot profess absolutely no faith in anything. They do not believe in Heaven or Hell, merely, as Amanda puts it, “in being kind to everyone, giving money to old beggar-women, and being as gay as possible.” Even here, however, one detects an echo of much earlier but no less shockingly anti-Victorian frivolities, just as one may see the pompous veneers of Art Deco and fads such as silk dressing-gowns, nightclubs, golf, cocktails, and the gramophone all deriving much nourishment from a root system firmly embedded in the Edwardian decade. Coward himself, after all, served his dramatic apprenticeship to Sir Charles Hawtrey. Two other tiny but telling flecks of detail strengthen this impression and they concern diamonds and flamingoes.

In Act II, warming up to one of their bitter rows, Elyot quizzes Amanda about one of her male friends. “You took presents from him,” he accuses. “Presents? Only a trivial little brooch,” she replies defensively. “I remember it well,” Elyot continues: “Bristling with diamonds in the worst possible taste.” “Not at all. It was very pretty. I still have it and I wear it often,” says Amanda with a hint of provocation. There are a few clues in the play as to whose taste is the more reliable, Elyot’s or Amanda’s. Elyot made sure he saw the Taj Mahal in the moonlight. Amanda always suspected that it might look like a biscuit box. Nevertheless, the question in the mind of this middle-aged art museum curator, so recently and thoroughly immersed in the study of Edwardian diamonds, is this: What might a little brooch, ca. 1930, trivial or not, that is “bristling with diamonds in the worst possible taste” actually look like—one, moreover, that Amanda describes as “very pretty”? Was the lapse in taste somehow connected to the number and concentration of the stones, or in their cutting, setting, size, or even colour—fancy pink, perhaps, or intense fancy yellow, or even blue? Or is the problem located nearer to the form of the jewel, some perch-dwelling parrot, for example, or a spray of fuchsias, a miniature pineapple, or something equally vulgar? Not perhaps an issue to lose sleep over, but it is intriguing, because in the design and manufacture of precious jewels one detects one of the most striking curves of stylistic and market continuity extending from ca. 1905 to ca. 1925 and beyond, as if the Great War had simply never happened. This is one of the most interesting aspects of our exhibition, now barely seven weeks away—Heavens!—in which we have plotted several other such curves, all of which appear to defy many of the more conventional, currently accepted rules of Modernism in art and design.

As for the flamingoes, we also learn in Act II that travel throughout the empire did nothing to diminish the pain of Elyot’s divorce from Amanda. “I saw such beautiful things,” he says wistfully lying next to her on the sofa: “Moonlight shining on old temples; strange barbaric dances in jungle villages; scarlet flamingoes flying over deep, deep blue water—breathlessly, love, and completely unexciting because you weren’t there to see them with me.” “Take me, please,” she gushes, “take me at once. Let’s make up for lost time.” “Next week?” he suggests. “Tomorrow,” she urges. “Done!” And for emphasis Amanda adds: “I must see those dear flamingoes.” So the ne plus ultra of Edwardian aestheticism, with its strong, even insistent art nouveau prompt, our old friend the sinuous flamingo, glides over the waters and right into the heart of the mental and emotional décor of Coward’s scene almost as if nothing had disturbed it over the previous twenty years. It might almost be a direct paraphrase of Edwin Austin Abbey’s bizarre painting here at Yale. How interesting! I wonder if Noël Coward ever met Syd Long. In this respect at least, quite apart from the obvious, they had much in common.

A Talent to Amuse

To usher in the New Year, this morning I have been listening with complete fascination to A Talent to Amuse, a rare live recording of excerpts from the “midnight matinee,” which was staged on December 16, 1969, at the Phoenix Theatre in London in honour of Noël Coward on his seventieth birthday. The show was a marathon, with a cast of almost 200, and ran to 4 o’clock in the morning, but the excerpts here have been perfectly chosen and amount to just a fraction more than an hour and fifteen minutes. The CD has been made possible by the agreement and permission of the performers, their agents and, of course, in many cases, their executors and estates, as well as by the Noël Coward Society and Must Close Saturday Records (www.must-close-saturday-records.co.uk) (MCSR 3048). Dear Richard Warren put me onto this gem just before he died, but I haven’t had a chance to listen to it before now. Silly me, for it is wondrous. Highlights include John Gielgud in his prime reciting “The Boy Actor”; the great Irene Worth playing the brilliantly funny telephone sketch “Early Mourning”; Joyce Grenfell singing “If Love Were All”; Maggie Fitzgibbon singing “Why Do The Wrong People Travel?” and the marvelous Cyril Ritchard doing “Nina”—“She said ‘I hate to be pedantic but I’m driven nearly frantic / When I see that unromantic, sycophantic lot of sluts, / Forever wriggling their guts: / It drives me absolutely nuts!’” As well there are ravishing performances of “Mad About the Boy” by Cleo Laine and John Dankworth—again in their prime; “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart” by Patricia Routledge, and “That is the End of the News,” the batty ensemble from Sigh No More nimbly executed by Avril Angers, Hy Hazell, Stella Moray, and the great June Whitfield. Perhaps most moving of all, Celia Johnson recites “I’ve Just Come Out From England,” lines composed for imperial troops in Cairo, shortly before Noël Coward’s departure for Southeast Asia in 1943, and first printed in the Egyptian Mail. Seventy years is not such a long time, but these lines proclaim an English outlook, mood, and soul that might as well be 700 years farther distant.

Captain Bracegirdle again

I have been consulting the memoirs of the late Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, which contains among much else a lively account of the period 1945 and 1947 when Prince Henry, the Duke, served as Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia. I was especially tickled to discover the following stray reference to Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit (1941), revived on Broadway a few years ago with Angela Lansbury in the role of Madame Arcati, and also to Rear Admiral Sir Leighton Seymour Bracegirdle, K.C.V.O., C.M.G., D.S.O., who was Military and Official Secretary to successive Governors-General from 1931 to 1947:

The holiday over, we returned to Canberra, where at the end of February I report [to Queen Mary] that we have seen “a very amusing coloured film—Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward [1945]. It was shown in aid for “Food for Britain.” The name “Captain Bracegirdle” comes into it, and caused merriment all round. Apparently Noël Coward was staying here [in 1940] while writing the play, and was so taken with the name that he asked if he might use it. We did not know of this beforehand so were completely taken by surprise” [p. 151].

In the third act, Charles Condomine, suffering the ill effects of being haunted by the ghosts of two deceased wives, has an especially sharp exchange with his first, Elvira, about the unsatisfactory honeymoon they spent at Budleigh Salterton, complaining in particular about certain illicit expeditions in a punt with Guy Henderson, and long walks over the moors in the company of a certain Captain Bracegirdle.

There are now two possibilities as to whom Rear Admiral Sir Brian Murray once had in mind (or not) when at Government House, Melbourne, he presented to the Duke of Norfolk his honorary naval aide-de-camp, Warwick Teasdale, as “Captain Bracegirdle” instead—either (1) Commander Warwick (“Braces”) Bracegirdle, D.S.C., R.A.N., which is my reader Rick Cazaly’s quite logical suggestion, or else, more intriguingly perhaps, (2) Sir Leighton Bracegirdle of Yarralumla. Sir Brian, who, I believe, entered the Royal Australian Navy in 1939, would surely have been aware of the identity of both distinguished officers, however it seems unlikely that we shall ever know which one caused his momentary confusion when making presentations to the Earl Marshal of England, or, indeed, if Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit played any part. I rather doubt it.

Sutherland and Coward

In moments of melancholy, when, for whatever reason, the heart requires a little balm, or the spirits need lifting, I reach for my deeply unfashionable recording of songs by Noël Coward that was made in London in 1966 by Dame Joan Sutherland and the National Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Richard Bonynge, with a cameo appearance by Coward himself—now happily available once more on CD (Decca 450 014–2). The combination may sound counter-intuitive, that of the soigné playwright, cabaret artist, show-business all-rounder, and intimate friend of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother on the one hand, and, on the other, one of the most brilliant and technically dazzling coloratura sopranos of our time, a no-nonsense Sydney-sider. Yet it worked then, and I think it still works today. I gather they were neighbors in Switzerland, and were clearly fond of each other. Handled any differently, Coward’s light musical comedy might have been to Joan Sutherland as tap-dancing is to Peter Grimes. Yet the orchestration is lush but not heavy, and even occasionally ironic, so the chemistry is good. True, there are exquisitely unintended moments when certain lyrics mesh somewhat curiously with circumstance, such as the passage at the beginning of “Dearest Love,” from Operette (1938), when, with emphasis, Noël Coward speaks the lines “I saw you turn away, and, for a while, my poor heart drooped and faltered / And then I saw your strange, elusive smile, and all my life was altered.” Generally radiant, and full of warmth, generosity, good humor and common sense, Dame Joan’s smile could hardly be described as strange, or even, for that matter, elusive, even when certain of her roles required such a thing. Still, I think this simply adds to the charm of the piece. Meanwhile Sutherland’s rendition of “This is a Changing World” from Bitter Sweet (1929) combines the full grandeur of her voice, in its absolute prime, with an evidently instinctive lightness of touch, and lifts the whole thing onto an altogether different plane, in other words it sails over the high hurdle labeled art. I find it impossible to come away from all this without a spring in my step, or a sparkle. I suppose other people get the same thing from Beyoncé, Adele, or Lady Gaga, but I rather doubt it.

Her Lunch

From their vantage point in a grandstand outside Buckingham Palace on Coronation Day (June 2, 1953), a companion turns to Noël Coward and wonders aloud: Who is “that little man” sitting in the pouring rain beside Queen Sālote of Tonga in the open landau? Coward’s reply: “Her lunch.”

This myth has proven stubbornly durable and, notwithstanding the racist slur directed at not one but two visiting heads of state (crowned heads, moreover), it still crops up from time to time as an apparently prized example of the wit of Noël Coward, most recently in the late Sheridan Morley’s awful Noël Coward (London: Haus Publishing, 2005, pp. 109–10).

H.M. Queen Sālote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tupou III was born on March 13, 1900, and reigned over Tonga from April 5, 1918, until she died on December 16, 1965. She was the daughter and heir of King George Tupou II and his first wife, Queen Lavinia Veiongo. Queen Sālote’s companion en route from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace that rainy afternoon was H.H. Paduka Sri Sultan Sir Ibrahim IV ibn al-Marhum Sultan Muhammad, Sultan of Kelantan, one of the Federated Malay States, since 1963 the northeastern-most in the mainland portion of the kingdom of Malaysia.

Outside the coronation annexe at the abbey, a footman asked Queen Sālote if she wished to have the hood raised over her landau, but (according to the Queen’s own account, quoted at length by Elizabeth Wood-Ellem in her Queen Sālote of Tonga: The Story of an Era, 1900–1965, Auckland: Auckland University Press, and Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999, pp. 243–44) Sālote was so moved by the enthusiastic reception of the crowd that she declined, and was driven instead smiling and waving enthusiastically through the streets, exposed to heavy rain, a gesture that was much appreciated by tens of thousands of ordinary wet people who had camped out overnight.

The Sultan of Kelantan was seated opposite Queen Sālote, and not beside her. With her normally cold eye for precedence, and from a vantage point by this date diminishing by several notches in the line of succession almost daily, Prince Alice, Countess of Athlone, recalled this unusual seating arrangement, implying a measure of counter-jumping vulgarity on the Queen’s part: “We noticed [at Buckingham Palace] with curiosity and admiration how she manoeuvred herself into her carriage and then sat down plumb in the middle of the seat of honour. A small but magnificently attired sultan who had been assigned to the same coach attempted to take his place beside her, but she put out an arm and majestically waved him into the seat facing her” (For My Grandchildren, London: Evans Brothers, 1966, p. 286).

Later Queen Sālote felt it proper to apologize formally to the sultan for being partly responsible for getting him drenched, but by all accounts His Highness’s response was entirely gracious. At length neither he nor she caught cold.

The miserable little quip about “her lunch” is difficult to trace, but it seems to have circulated widely through the London crowds before the end of Coronation Day, and was immediately attributed to Noël Coward: “‘Oh Noël, that was so funny,’ Dickie Fellowes-Gordon said when next she saw him, but he denied responsibility. ‘I didn’t say it. I wish I had.’” (Morley, p. 401. The tall Scottish singer and socialite Dorothy [“Dickie”] Fellowes-Gordon was the sometime lover and sole heiress of the hostess, gossip columnist and snob Elsa Maxwell.)

The same preposterous “lunch” remark was later ascribed to the moustachioed matinée
idol David Niven, either by Coward himself or more usually by “bystanders.” It is remarkable that since 1953 no Englishman has ever seemed in any way reluctant to repeat it, nor (apart from Coward) even to disclaim responsibility. And few have ever taken the trouble to find out anything at all about its targets. The Sultan of Kelantan served as a deputy judge of the High Court of the Malay States; his eldest son and heir was elected king of Malaysia in 1975.

Queen Sālote was six feet three inches tall, and the sultan was short, so the disparity was principally one of height. However in subsequent iterations of the story, having begun as merely plump, Queen Sālote becomes gradually fatter, and eventually attains mountainous obesity, while the Sultan of Kelantan diminishes to “that tiny little man,” or an equerry, or an attendant, or even at times a faceless, nameless servant. As for her real lunch, the Queen wrote: “After the coronation we were led to an annexe of the Abbey and offered a light meal. It consisted of tea or a cold drink, with sandwiches and cake” (Wood-Ellem, p. 243).

Reports of cannibalism among the Polynesian islanders of Tonga were widespread in the early nineteenth century. At best they were unreliable, and at worst they were entirely fictitious. The practice seems to have existed as a genuine ritual adjunct to tribal warfare and at funerals, but ended with the arrival of Methodist missionaries in the 1820s.

The Tongan archipelago (21° 7’ 60” S, 175° 11’ 60” W) consists of 169 islands, 130 of them uninhabited, that stretch over a distance of approximately 500 miles from north to south. It is roughly one third of the way along a 4,400-mile straight line that stretches from New Zealand to Hawaii. Captain James Cook reached the locality in 1773, on his second circumnavigation, and owing to the warmth of his reception named it “the Friendly Islands.” This was an unfortunate misreading of the annual inasi festival (for the ceremonial distribution of fruits) with which his visit coincided, because in fact the local chieftains planned to kill Cook and his companions but could not agree on a sufficiently punitive method before the Resolution set sail. Six years later the Hawaiian islanders demonstrated greater efficiency and resolve in that regard.

Tonga united as an independent kingdom in 1845 under Queen Sālote’s paramount chieftain great grandfather Siaosi Tupou Maeakafaua Ngininginiofolanga, who at his coronation in Nukuʻalofa—the only such ceremony that has ever been conducted according to Methodist rites—took the name of King George Tupou I, apparently in honor of King George III. The decision was canny because henceforth Tonga shrewdly allied herself to Britain by treaties of friendship and thus, alone among the island groups of the South Pacific, she successfully avoided annexation, the hazards of trusteeship, and the loss of independence. Britain never bothered to install an official more senior than a spectacularly sidelined Foreign Office consul, who, though he reported to the Governor of Fiji in Suva, exercised no executive authority in Tonga.

With considerable dispatch, Queen Sālote declared war on Japan at noon on December 8, 1941 (i.e. 1.00 o’clock in the afternoon on December 7 in Honolulu, Pearl Harbor Day), almost 24 hours before the United States and Great Britain did. Although this ultimately proved not to be Tonga’s Grand Fenwick moment, thanks to the swift action of the U.S. Navy Nukuʻalofa was never attacked or occupied. Under provisions of Queen Sālote’s will Tonga joined the British Commonwealth as an autochthonous monarchy in 1970, and, after a long, ruminative pause for reflection, in September 1999 decided also to join the United Nations. Today Tonga is severely threatened by the prospect of rising sea levels as a direct result of global warming.

Perhaps the neatest commentary on the whole sorry business of Queen Sālote’s coronation lunch occurs in Elizabeth Wood-Ellem’s index: “Coward, Noël, not mentioned.”

Blithe Spirit

One of the great advantages of living near New York City is comparatively easy access to Broadway theater. Last Sunday I went with some friends to see the matinee performance of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre at 225 West 44 Street. This fine revival stars—and the verb is for once deeply appropriate—Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersole, Jayne Atkinson, and Angela Lansbury in the role of Madame Arcati. They receive strong support from Simon Jones, Deborah Rush, and the fine Broadway debutante Susan Louise O’Connor, whose Edith the maid achieves at least one show-stopping moment involving a tray laden with breakfast things.

However, it is Angela Lansbury’s Madame Arcati who has stayed with me for days, like some lingering but essentially benign ectoplasmic manifestation. 

Angela Lansbury is six months older than The Queen, and at 83 (turning 84 in October), she is absolutely astonishing. Margaret Rutherford created this role on the West End stage in 1941, and in 1945 brought it to the screen with Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, and Kay Hammond, directed by David Lean. He was 36; Noël Coward was by then 46. 

In any event, Margaret Rutherford’s was the Madame Arcati of cat hair, tweed, and knitted gloves. Angela Lansbury’s Madame Arcati replaces these with henna, chunky jewelry, and more than a whiff of patchouli. Rutherford was essentially cuddly; Lansbury is far sharper with the dinner guests, and decidedly angular in motion, and delivery. Her fabulous trances involve nervous but sprightly, high-kicking dance maneuvers, with Irving Berlin gramophone accompaniment, on a shallow stage in (at best) semi-darkness—wearing high heeled shoes. Clearly she deserved this year’s Tony, her fifth, and in this regard Angela Lansbury now equals the record previously held by Julie Harris. Bravissima! 

However, what struck me most about Blithe Spirit—which is, of course, an old-fashioned farce, and a very funny one—is how strongly it still holds up as a play. There are at times hints of genuine darkness, and numerous comparatively surprising dashes of domestic sturm und drang, as well as a little wry consideration of the larger themes of credulity, condescension, and death. Noël Coward was a genius, as his very earliest writing for the stage amply demonstrates, as well as a master craftsman of astringent comic dialogue.

If you see nothing else this season (apart from the brilliant revival of Hair), make sure you see this Blithe Spirit.