‘You Mustn’t Be Serious My Dear’...

At the age of 27, Noel Coward embarked on a world tour. But he arrived in Honolulu nervous and ill, with a 103-degree temperature. Coming off the boat, he was met by a couple he did not know but who were alerted to his condition by a mutual friend. The immensely wealthy couple supplied Coward with a charming doctor and then promptly sent him off to recuperate at their country ranch, a tropical paradise that offered “the deep blue ocean, bright green lagoon, dazzling yellow sand, enormous cocoa palms and scarlet hibiscus everywhere,” as Coward described it.

Except for a brief and miserable army stint in 1918, the adult Coward lived this kind of charmed life. His fame was his calling card, his quick, sometimes scalding wit a tonic to the rich and famous, his style copied by sophisticated people all over the Western world. The index in his 2 1/2-volume autobiography is a compendium of royalty, art and show business luminaries. In between writing plays and songs and performing them, Coward met everyone, traveled everywhere and enjoyed most of it very much.

Born into genteel poverty in 1899, Noel Coward created one of the great lives of the century. His legacy endures: Two new books about him have just been published, and a third, by Graham Payn, a longtime intimate, reissued in paper.

In the thicket of books about the life and work of Coward, Philip Hoare’s “Noel Coward: A Biography” stands out as the most well-documented and objective. While an excellent and reliable reference to the who, what and wheres of Coward’s life, however, the book fails to capture the effervescence of its subject.

Coward was an artist who expressed his best ideas in flippant repartee, making the serious biographer’s task a difficult lot. Critic John Lahr pinned down Coward’s magic in his invaluable book, “Coward: The Playwright” (1982). In his introduction, Lahr notes that when Coward’s plays “aspired to seriousness, the result was always slick. . . . Only when Coward is frivolous does he become in any sense profound.”

“You mustn’t be serious my dear, says Elyot to his former but still adored wife Amanda in “Private Lives,” a virtual manifesto for Coward’s philosophy of life. “It’s just what they want. . . . “All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant.” In that play, Coward puts the enemy argument into the mouth of Victor, Amanda’s dull new husband, who opines, “I fail to see what humor there is in incessant trivial flippancy.”

Coward loved fun, and feared and hated boredom. His best jokes are beyond analysis. One such line comes from “Hay Fever.” Two house guests are nibbling at breakfast before their hosts come in the room, when one turns to the other and says, “This haddock’s disgusting.” This line, noted Coward, never failed to get a laugh.

All of the details carefully accrued by Hoare don’t explain Coward’s humor or his charm, nor do they add up to a deep understanding of a man who kept his sexual nature covert and whose ambition to create an untouchable plateau of fame was one of the first successful such coups of the modern era.

But Hoare has done a scholarly job, and he is correct in noting the enduring popularity of Coward’s comedies with new generations as proof of his greatness. On Nov. 18, a new production of “Present Laughter” opens on Broadway starring Frank Langella and directed by Scott Elliott, one of the hottest young directors in New York. And Coward’s legacy can also be measured by his prominence in less commercial arenas. Witness a new book published by Columbia University Press this month, “Noel Coward & Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits” by Terry Castle.

Castle, an English professor at Stanford, has chosen a curious task: to pair Coward, the most airy of writers, with Hall, among the most heavy-spirited. Both were homosexuals--Coward the more closeted, the one who moved easily in society and who produced a body of work filled with laughter. Hall dressed as a man, called herself “John” and wrote a coming-out book about an anguished lesbian (“The Well of Loneliness”) that caused a scandal when it was published in 1928.

Castle describes their difference very well: “Where he [Coward] is fey, she [Hall] seems driven; when she agonizes, he simply lifts an eyebrow. It’s like comparing a glass of champagne to an aspersion of bitters.”

So, why this book? Castle is intent on proving a heretofore unknown intimacy between the two, a “cross-sex friendship . . . free from the mutual mishandling and complaints seemingly endemic in heterosexual bonds.” But she never gets near proving her questionable thesis. Certainly, the two writers had met each other and shared several friends. Castle also notes that Coward “evidently provided Hall with much-needed behind-the-scenes moral support” during the public furor over Hall’s book. But, characteristically, she offers no evidence of this. “

The third book under review here, “My Life With Noel Coward,” by the playwright’s longtime lover Graham Payn, also uses Coward for validation, in this case to give meaning to a life lived happily in his shadow. First published in 1994, “My Life” proudly displays a fawning obeisance to “The Master,” unabated 14 years after his death in 1980.

Payn makes no apology for living in the reflected glory of Coward, both in life and after “Dad’s” death. He begins by penning a letter to Coward in which he assures his former protector, “You’re still the topic of conversation. They want to know all about you.”

Payn’s book raises inadvertent questions about Coward’s need to be worshiped. However, any Coward fan who can get past this somewhat icky aspect of his character will find “My Life” to be full of charming theatrical anecdotes, delivered both by and to Coward, all written (with Barry Day) in an appropriately breezy style. When Coward visited the Algonquin Round Table, for instance, he took one look at the suited-up Edna Ferber and commented, “You look almost like a man.” Returned Ferber: “So do you.”

Ferber, obviously, understood Coward’s economic recipe for humor, relayed here by Payn: “Wit,” Coward once said, “is like caviar. It should be served in small, elegant portions and not splodged around like marmalade.” Fortunately for Payn and for Castle, Noel Coward had enough wit--and reflected glory--to go around.