What Coward had in common with Caine... and the day Greta Garbo asked him to be her ‘bride’

Masquerade: The Lives Of Noël Coward Oliver Soden

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30 ★★★★★

One night during the Blitz, Noël Coward’s Belgravia home was bombed. As he stood in the silence between explosions, his home in ruins, he overheard two young women chattering in the street. ‘The trouble with all this,’ one of them said, ‘is you could rick your ankle.’ As water from the London Fire Brigade rained down, Coward chuckled.

And there you have him. Whatever else he was – and as Oliver Soden’s diligent and detailed new biography makes plain, Coward was many things – he was an engine of comedy. Whatever he was looking at, he saw its funny side. Drug abuse, debauchery, divorce, death – such are the subjects of Coward’s best plays. Yet in every case, those touchy topics are made fodder for fun. As Elyot, the leading man of Private Lives, counsels his beloved ex-wife Amanda: ‘Be flippant. Laugh at everything.’

Such relaxed devilry is usually the result of a privileged background. But despite his silk and satin, cigarette-holder image, Coward wasn’t high-born. His father was a (bad) piano salesman, his mother a boardinghouse landlady. In The Italian Job, Coward’s Mr Bridger lords it over Michael Caine’s Charlie Croker. In the real world, the two men were born not a million miles from each other in down-at-heel South London.

And just like Caine, Coward never stopped working. He knew what it meant to have the wolf at the door. When he wasn’t acting, he was composing. When he wasn’t composing, he was painting. And when he wasn’t painting, he was writing, writing, and writing some more. In the summer of 1935, Coward penned – count them – nine plays.

A few years later he knocked out two of his greatest hits, the stiff-upper-lipped, between-the-wars saga This Happy Breed and the meringue-light comedy Present Laughter, simultaneously. As for the perennially popular Blithe Spirit, he polished it off in eight days flat – and had the show up and running the next month.

As with work, so with life. Coward, who once got a laugh by describing Shanghai as ‘a cross between Brussels and Huddersfield’, was always on the move. Soden does his best to keep us up to speed, but when, in the space of a few pages, he follows Coward from London to New York and back to London and on to Davos, his narrative descends into a breezy travelogue: if it’s Tuesday it must be Brief Encounter. It was this wanderlust, one

suspects, that explains why so much of his work takes place in a dreamy never-never land. Coward’s world is as far removed from the real one as that of P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings. Few of his characters have anything by way of family (and if they do, they don’t care for it), fewer of them have to work for a living, and none of them is committed to anything but sybaritic pleasure.

Masquerade is far from being the first biography of Noël Coward, as Soden is honest enough to admit. His defence is that in the almost three decades since the publication of Philip Hoare’s definitiveseeming Noël Coward, much has come to light of what he calls Coward’s ‘clandestine wartime employment’.

Hmmm. To be sure, Coward dined with Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House during the war. But since the two men spent their time agreeing that Chamberlain was a fool and that Churchill should stick to his guns, it was hardly top-secret stuff. Had it really been hush-hush, Joyce Grenfell wouldn’t have written to her mother lamenting the fact that ‘the man who represents this country should be famous as a queer’.

On which point, Soden also believes the times are ripe for a new biography because ‘the attitudes of society towards Coward’s alternative designs for living and loving have changed utterly’. Indeed they have, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Coward kept his sex life very private.

I was fascinated to learn that Greta Garbo once proposed to Coward – daringly suggesting that he could be her ‘bride’. But otherwise, Soden just relies on the old chestnut about Michael Redgrave spending his last night before going off to war not at home with his wife but in Coward’s bed. (Alas, he doesn’t mention the even older chestnut about Coward spotting a hoarding for the 1954 Redgrave/Dirk Bogarde wartime movie The Sea Shall Not Have Them in Leicester Square and remarking: ‘I don’t see why not – everybody else has.’)

The dearth of new material surely underlies Masquerade’s gimmicky structure. Soden has written the book as if it were a play in several acts, each of them beginning with a cast list and locations guide.

At first this seems like a frivolous Cowardian conceit. But by the time you get to the final act, in which Soden and his rival biographers get together for an archly selfregarding imaginary discussion of their various books, well – let’s just say that it would have tested even Coward’s devotion to flippancy.