Many triumphs but ’The Master’ had disasters too

Coward, born in 1899, was seen in the 1960s as old-fashioned, a writer of drawing-room comedies made irrelevant by the post-John Osborne “kitchen-sink” theatre and just as out of touch socially with a Britain he had forsaken a decade ago to avoid tax. But Morley came away impressed by a sprightly spirit busily directing a play, supervising a musical and planning a film appearance. 

Coward’s courtesy, elegance, charm and wit won over the inexperienced and uneasy journalist, and two years after the Savoy encounter Morley embarked on a three-year task to write a Coward biography, publishing it in 1969. The Budapest Times has a 1975 edition, in which the biographer says in a preface that no interview he had conducted subsequently measured up. Dean Street Press, which is dedicated to uncovering and revitalising good books, still has “A Talent to Amuse” in print in 2025.    

The author says the book was written with Coward’s full blessing and he gave enormous help, providing letters, private papers and diaries, and remarkably little interference. The title “A Talent to Amuse” was Coward’s self-description, deliberately modest as a riposte to those derogatory critics who believed he was shallow and flippant, not capable or willing to write more seriously. 

(According to another account, Coward provided a list of his friends and another of his enemies, telling Morley to start with the second first – which would make for a better book). However, Morley says there was a tacit agreement not to delve into his private life unless it had influenced his work. Coward was homosexual, for which you could be jailed, and it was not until 1967 in Britain that the Sexual Offences Act allowed private homosexuality between two consenting adults aged over 21. 

Until then, as Morley records, Coward had to remain conscious throughout his career of the possible harm that public knowledge of his home life might do to his reputation, for his audience was not essentially or exclusively made up of a postwar generation prepared to allow an artist absolute sexual freedom. Readers of “A Talent to Amuse” need to read between the lines about men friends. 

For instance, Coward and fellow playwright Michael Arlen, in New York, “… found themselves, as they had been in London a few months earlier, the twin intellectual heroes of the season… [and] it was rumoured that their relationship was, to put it mildly, unusually close.” After Coward’s death at his Jamaican hilltop house on March 26, 1973, his lifelong friend Rebecca West said in a tribute that “There was impeccable dignity in his sexual life, which was reticent but untainted by pretence.” 

Sheridan Morley’s book thus leaves the way open for one of those “definitive” narratives beloved of biographers but certainly the author is very comprehensive. For a man of such accomplishments, Coward had many setbacks and they are detailed too in what is a laudatory but balanced telling. 

The Budapest Times declares here a long-standing appreciation of Coward’s fine writing, particularly the best of his plays, his short stories and autobiographies. Is there a better line than Charles Condomine’s in the play “Blithe Spirit” when, dealing with the appearance of the ghost of his first wife Elvira and trying to placate his second wife Ruth who cannot see or hear the spirit: “Surely even an ectoplasmic manifestation has the right to expect a little of the milk of human kindness”? And once, asked about God, Coward, a life-long atheist, replied: “We’ve never been properly introduced.”  

Of course, the danger of reading a truthful biography of a respected subject is that it can tarnish your own viewpoint. Still, Coward had so many triumphs that he ultimately rose above the batterings. “The world has treated me very well – but then I haven’t treated it so badly either,” he asserted. 

Noël Peirce Coward was born in Teddington, Middlesex, then a small unsuburban Thames-side village, on December 16, 1899. His father was a not-too-successful salesman of pianos and organs. After Noël’s first five years the family could no longer afford Teddington and moved to a small villa in Sutton. The boy was in a school end-of-term concert in July 1907, singing two songs to the parents. 

Father failed to provide well and the family had money troubles. These worsened in 1908 and they moved again, to Battersea where they took in two paying guests. Noël joined the Chapel Royal School choir and made public appearances at church and school concerts. He wrote a brief drama and in 1910 went to a dance academy. The 11-year-old already foresaw a life connected with the stage. 

Next, an advertisement in the Daily Mirror announced that Miss Lila Field was seeking a “talented boy with attractive appearance to play in an all-children production of ’The Goldfish’”. Mrs Coward, the doting mother of a precocious son, replied at once and after an audition Noël sang his way into playing Prince Mussel at the Little Theatre in January 1911. 

It was something of a breakthrough year, with “The Goldfish” revived at Crystal Palace and The Royal Court Theatre, then Coward was Cannard in “The Great Name” at the Prince of Wales in September and William in “Where the Rainbow Ends” at the Savoy Theatre in December. Similar small parts followed but it was sporadic. The boy was skipping school to rehearse or play in a show but there were depressing months trailing round agents’ offices in search of work.    

Apart from his father’s mostly ineffective sales efforts, war came in 1914, so money remained desperately tight. Noël began writing lyrics and one-act plays. In 1918 he was called up to the British Army and suffered a gloomy nine months, action-free in Britain. That same year he had a minor part in a D.W. Griffith film, “Hearts of the World” but there was another trail of auditions. Still determined to be a composer, lyricist, novelist, actor and playwright, the 1920s at last proved to be highly productive and extremely successful. It was the decade with which he become forever associated. 

In 1924 his play “The Vortex”, in which he played the drug-addicted Nicky Lancaster, a part he wrote for himself, “was an immediate success and established me both as a playwright and as an actor, which was very fortunate, because until then I had not proved myself to be so hot in either capacity”. 

“The Vortex  gave Coward his reputation and his future. When Noël was eight years old, William Somerset Maugham had four plays on in London’s West End, a record that Coward equalled  with three plays, “Hay Fever”, “Fallen Angels” and “The Vortex”,  and a revue, “On with the Dance”,  in 1925. The storms of moral anger stirred by “Fallen Angels”, in which two wives confess to premarital sex, and  “The Vortex” led Coward to remark: “ I may say I really have a frightfully depraved mind. I am never out of opium dens, cocaine dens and other evil places. My mind is a mass of corruption.” 

Morley runs through the battles with the Lord Chamberlain, who until 1968 had the power to license plays, and thus censor them at his pleasure. Also, here are details of the first impoverished visit to New York when Coward didn’t even have the fare home at first, fraught rehearsals, box-office flops, nervous breakdowns caused by over-work, world travels, tax exile in Bermuda and Jamaica, the richest of social lives, tours in the English provinces; in short, the whole giddy merry-go-round,  

And not always liked. Although loving England and looking to do his bit in the Second World War, when Coward was sent to Paris to head a propaganda office the secrecy left him unable to explain his real purpose, and he was accused of leading a frivolous life while armies fought. After Paris fell, he took to entertaining troops in Australia, South Africa, the Mediterranean and Far East. 

It didn’t stop the brickbats. The Observer newspaper noted that: “Coward remains a puzzle. He sees so much – and so little. He has travelled far more than most men of his age and yet, when he writes, it always has to be of the same little world. Dump him anywhere, on any island of the seventeen seas, and he would certainly at once run into somebody known as Tim or Tiny, Boddles or Bims,  and be dining with an Excellency or an Admiral twenty minutes later.  If there were natives on the island he would hardly notice. God put them there, no doubt, to serve dinners to Excellencies.”                                   

Sheridan Morley explores how Noël Coward’s life and home were in the theatre, how nowhere else was he as remotely happy. Career dips in the later years saw him again accused of flippancy, a creator of  light and escapist comedies. But a late new career as a cabaret artist in London and Las Vegas brought riches and accolades. He was knighted in 1970, three years before his death.  

This biography is an accurate and revealing-but-not-fully-revealing account of a multi-talented man who made a rarely equalled and not forgotten contribution to the world’s enjoyment.