All This And Money Too

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31030, 9 April 1966, Page 5

All This And Money Too

[By SIMON KAVANAUGH] r TUE Master is back. After 13 years without him, the London stage once again welcomes back Noel Coward—- “ Old Indestructible”—with a mixture of awe, reverence and cynicism. He is to appear in three of his own plays with Lilli Palmer at the Queens Theatre. His smoothly-wrinkled face, enigmatic as an egg, belies 66 years and a lifetime of poor health; “I’m 25, really, darling,” he says, and means it.

Noel Coward is as impervious to time as to the sneers of the critics and the jealousies of his profession. Every year or so a Coward play is revived in the West End, to be announced amid groans and predictions of doom; every year or so the Master confounds them all. A new generation of aunts and mums rhapsodise over the polished trivialities of wit and plot, and come away chuckling. “I’m the greatest, that’s all," the Clay of the theatre says simply. “I have a superb gift, tremendous talent, and a capacity for hard work. Ever since the age of six I was brilliant.” It is not recorded what he was brilliant at as a six-year-old, but certainly, when just 11, he got a rapturous reception as Prince Mussel in “The Goldfish” at a children's theatre. It was a fairy story, and he has, in a way, been living the part ever since. At 17 he wrote his first play: at 19 he wrote his first produced play. Two years later he was a household name as actor, writer and producer. At 30, the students of Princeton voted him the world’s greatest dramatist—a verdict with which the Master would heartily agree. By then he had made more than £lOO,OOO out of “Cavalcade” alone worth more than five times that today. Bitter Sweet The brittle society characters that he created for the mid-thirties were in the style of both P. G. Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde. Fatuous remarks poured forth in a stream from all of them, but it was brilliant. Later he developed a bitter-sweet cynicism to lampoon the snobs who feted him: The Stately homes of England. How beautiful they stand. L To prove the upper classes. Have still the upper hand. H e became an intimate of British royalty, and wrote: Part of a Royal education is to be resigned to your behind becoming numb. The worst of every coronation Is We always wish we hadn’t come. . . .

He could do no wrong, though nothing was sacred to him except, perhaps, elegance. “Rudeness, uncouthness and untidiness make me want to cry,” he said. “One must be elegant in all things.” Even his voice is uniquely elegant —he once subdued a fierce panther in Penang by talking to it, according to a witness. Apart from the theatre and the good life, the Navy has always been Coward’s great love. While millionaires sailed their yachts in the Mediterranean in the golden summers of the 19305. Coward would

ride past them serenely on the deck of a British warship. He was studying the tastes of the lower-deck for films at the request of a naval cinema board. His studies were so prolonged that questions were asked in the House, but he did his job thoroughly, and when war came, "In Which We Serve” was reckoned to have been worth two battleships as a morale-builder. The sea draws him like a magnet: his frequent round-the-world trips are usually by ship. Once he had a dramatic escape in the Aegean when he left a private yacht to go ashore for an hour or two. While he was away the yacht sank leaving him without clothes, money or passport. Improperly Dressed The only time in his life that he has travelled secondclass on anything was on a river steamer in South America, when the captain refused to allow him in the firstclass section because he was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots. More recently it was a sea-voyage to the Seychelles which caused him to spend six weeks in a Swiss hospital with dysentery, and nearly led to the cancellation of the present London Coward season. He has made so much money that living in England became an embarrassment to him, and within the last ten years he has settled permanently in a hillside villa perched above the lake of Geneva. “I get up every morning, look at the view and think, my God, all this and money too.” He has a white piano and panoramic windows and the most luxurious bathroom in Switzerland, and if the central heating breaks down he complains of “roughing it.” “It makes me sad, really, though,” he says. “I adore England. After all, 1 am England, and England is me. Though ' lately it seems the old country will never be the same again.” Without Talent Of the Beatles, he says: “I met two of them once, nicelybehaved young boys, but quite without talent.” Of the critics: “I don’t need them. I write for Mrs Dokes and aunt Edna.” Of the new vogue in kitchen-sink plays: “Arnold Wesker came to me for money for Centre 42.1 said to him: ‘Not tuppence!’ A play about the history of the trade union movement? Who will rush to see that? Not me." But the Aunt Ednas and the Mrs Dokeses are already queueing outside the Queens theatre.