Mad About the Man?

In the 1960s, over a rather liquid dinner at London’s Savoy Hotel, Noel Coward was celebrating his birthday with actress Elaine Stritch when the subject turned to death. There was only one thing about death that he feared, the British playwright-composer-actor-novelist-producer and all-around sophisticate told his companion: “I won’t be remembered.”

It was an uncharacteristically somber moment for the legendary wit, who is credited with inventing the useful all-around show-biz terms “darling” and “divine” and wicked song lyrics such as: “The width of her seat/must surely defeat/her chances of success” in warning a mother not to put her daughter on the stage.

Coward has not been forgotten. Two weeks ago, Stritch stood in front of a standing-room-only crowd gathered at Carnegie Hall for a celebration of Coward’s centennial, titled “Mad About the Boy,” and declared, “Wherever he is tonight--having a martini--he should kick himself in the ass for being dead wrong and being such a damned fool.” The remark capped a benefit evening hosted by Diana Rigg and Coward biographer Sheridan Morley that featured Helen Hunt, Edward Albee, Barbara Cook, Sian Phillips and Lynn Redgrave, among others, presenting songs and excerpts from the renaissance man’s novels, films, poems, plays, revues and musicals.

Still, Coward was somewhat right to worry. One hundred years after his birth, his place in mainstream America has substantially diminished since his heyday of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, when the aesthete writer-performer proudly strode two continents with plays like “Hay Fever,” “Private Lives,” “Design for Living” and “Blithe Spirit” all the toast of the West End and Broadway, and his 1942 movie “In Which We Serve” won him a special Oscar. Indeed, in the 1950s, his soigne cabaret act drew Hollywood’s A-list to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, including Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack. He was a favorite, as well, of England’s Royal Family, the darling of the present Queen Mum and her daughter Margaret.

Not bad for a onetime child actor who grew up in genteel poverty in a lower-middle-class South London family. He was a breadwinner for much of his youth and, at age 24, broke through with “London Calling,” a revue of his own making starring Gertrude Lawrence, who would become a lifelong friend and frequent co-star. In 1930, Coward’s “Private Lives,” also featuring an obscure actor named Laurence Olivier, would cement the pair’s reputation as two of England’s Brightest Young Things. Countless revues, plays and novels followed, but Coward, much like Truman Capote decades later, loved to spin a glossy public image of himself as primarily a suave and witty habitue of country estates and glittering parties.

“He was his own best invention,” said playwright John Osborne, whose 1950s kitchen-sink dramas like “Look Back in Anger” were to make the Coward persona seem passe--but only momentarily. By the time of Coward’s death in Jamaica in 1973, Coward had been knighted and was considered one of England’s greatest treasures.

Still, while in recent years nonprofit theaters have frequently presented his work to popular acclaim, productions of Coward’s plays have not fared particularly well on Broadway. One would have to go back to a 1969 revival of “Private Lives” starring Tammy Grimes and Brian Bedford to find a New York revival of Coward that actually turned a profit. And few of his trunkful of songs are heard these days, even in the rarefied air of the cabaret scene. So what has there been to celebrate since earlier this year, when Prince Edward traveled to New York to kick off the Coward centennial by unveiling a bronze statue of the Master--elegant, refined, the ever present cigarette between his fingers--in Gershwin Theatre’s Hall of Fame?

“Talent, unusual wit, sophistication, tremendous humanity, that’s all,” says Stritch, who became a Broadway star when she appeared in the 1961 Coward romantic musical “Sail Away” as Mimi Paragon, a wisecracking shipboard hostess. “If Coward isn’t being done as much as he should, then it’s because we live in a crazy Barnum & Bailey world, when you look at all the crap that is getting produced. Maybe people get a little sore and angry at that kind of knowing humor. They take it as a superiority rather than what it is--a rich talent to amuse.”

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Coward’s prodigious talent has been somewhat ubiquitous, however, this year--the Center Theatre Group’s recent one-night-only “A Marvelous Party” celebrated him at the Mark Taper Forum, while twin film retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music are showing Coward as producer and director (“In Which We Serve”), as screenwriter (“Brief Encounter,” “This Happy Family”), as actor (“The Scoundrel,” “Our Man in Havana,” “Boom”) and as a triple threat in an early live television re-creation of his hit “Blithe Spirit.” His movie work will be enhanced with the release early next year of “Relative Values,” a film adaptation of Coward’s 1951 play about a countess trying to thwart her son’s marriage to a Hollywood starlet. Julie Andrews stars.

Many Coward supporters, like Donald Smith, who produced the Carnegie Hall gala, are hoping that the centennial focus will spark a Coward revival in the U.S. “That’s what these kinds of celebrations are about, to help redress the neglect,” Smith said. “I think some people have the idea that his work was just frivolous period pieces that won’t last. But they are extraordinarily profound universal plays. Even something as light and airy as ‘Private Lives’ is about the loving and the pain of loving.”

The scorecard on recent Coward theatrical ventures has been mixed. Last summer saw a short-lived off-Broadway revue of Coward tunes, “Noel and Gertie,” starring Harry Groener and Twiggy, based on the relationship between the playwright and his frequent co-star Lawrence. Last month, a two-week concert revival of “Sail Away” sold out the 330-seat Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, with Stritch re-creating her starring turn.

Still to come are two lesser-known works by Coward: an off-Broadway revival of two one-acts from his later years, “Shadows of the Evening” and “A Song at Twilight,” under the collective title of “Noel Coward’s Suite in Two Keys,” starring Hayley Mills in her New York debut and Keir Dullea. But the centerpiece of the centennial, for good or ill, is the New York premiere Thursday of “Waiting in the Wings,” an elegiac 1960 comedy-drama about life in an English retirement home, starring Lauren Bacall. In it, a long-simmering feud is reignited between a new arrival, a stage diva (Bacall), and her onetime rival (Rosemary Harris).

“Waiting in the Wings” opens on Coward’s actual centennial birthday with a $2.5-million advance, according to producer Alexander Cohen, and is largely fueled by the presence of Bacall, who is returning to the stage after an absence of more than two decades. While the drama had a short London run in 1960, it has never been done in the U.S., and many who have read it consider it an inferior work. In Boston, where the production tried out last month, the critics said as much in panning the show. Stritch was even more succinct. “Why they would do one of Coward’s worst plays is beyond me,” she said, worried that it might hurt her friend’s reputation more than help.

But Cohen insists that his big gamble, with its cast of 18, re-creates one of Coward’s finest virtues: his theatricality. “This is filled with his passion and love of things theatrical,” he said, “and I think we, as a society and a country, have finally caught up with what this play is saying, tenderly and movingly, about the aged. We haven’t clearly focused on the problem of growing to a point when you’ve finally mastered your craft and then you’re thrown out on your ass.”

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In an interview before the production began its out-of-town tryout in Boston, Bacall herself conceded that “Waiting in the Wings” may not exactly be first-rate Coward, but, she said, “One of Noel’s lesser works is better than most people’s best plays.” She made clear that her return to the stage is fully intended as a tribute to her close friend. “I was crazy about him, as everyone who knew him was, and he was such a man of quality, a quality that is getting rarer and rarer to find, unfortunately,” she said. “Yet I don’t think this is an old-fashioned play at all; I feel very strongly about that.”

In 1956, Bacall starred with Coward and Claudette Colbert in a live television production of the playwright’s smash London and West End 1941 hit “Blithe Spirit.” She recalled the event as “one of the most gratifying and frightening” experiences of her career, not only because it aired live, but also because Coward himself performed in it, as well as directing. “He knew exactly what he wanted,” recalled Bacall. “That’s why he insisted that actors show up for the first rehearsal with their lines totally memorized. The timing, the inflection, gestures, everything was very, very precise with him. That’s what made his plays work, that’s what makes playing Coward such a tremendous challenge for actors. It’s very difficult, especially [for] American actors.”

Indeed, the ability of English actors to meet such precise demands may account for the fact that big-budget revivals of Coward’s works have been much more frequent and successful in London than in New York--including the current production there of “A Song at Twilight,” starring Vanessa and Corin Redgrave and Corin’s wife, Kika Markham. Broadway has seen two flop productions of “Private Lives,” the 1983 debacle starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and the 1992 vehicle starring Joan Collins. Richard Chamberlain flopped in “Blithe Spirit” in the mid-1980s, and even the more welcomed 1996 revival of “Present Laughter”--which won acclaim for Frank Langella’s performance as Coward’s alter ego, self-absorbed matinee idol Garry Essendine--ended up in the red.

Of course, Coward’s work is a frequent presence on the nonprofit stages, with notable productions in Southern California at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, A Noise Within in Glendale, the Pasadena Playhouse and the Old Globe Theatre, among others. But these productions play to subscription audiences and do not have the commercial considerations of Broadway’s commercial theater.

“I do think his great plays have Broadway viability, but they have to be star-driven, with actors who know how to play Coward, and there aren’t many great American actors comfortable with that sort of timing, intonation and style,” said David Richenthal, who produced “Present Laughter.” “Another thing I learned is that, for today’s audiences, even the great Noel Coward requires some judicious editing to be more fruitful. Audiences are simply not used to sitting as long as they did then.”

Directed by Scott Elliott, a young off-Broadway wunderkind, the production underwent a controversial and radical reinterpretation in trying to infuse the ‘30s comedy with a hip ‘90s sensibility, including featuring frontal nudity and making Essendine’s implied bisexuality more explicit. The experiment had decidedly mixed results, Richenthal concedes. “We very much wanted to attract a younger and more expanded audience for Coward, and it may well be that those who do seek out his plays are more traditional.”

“I found that production [“Present Laughter”] appalling and irritating,” said Barry Day, an English-born Connecticut advertising executive who writes books about the theater, specializing in Coward. Day’s latest book, “Noel Coward: A Life in Quotes,” published by England’s Metro Books, will be released in the United States next month. “Yes, he was homosexual, but he was the master of understatement and implication. The last thing he would have wanted in a play of his was someone running around exposing himself. He hated vulgarity and bad language, probably, as he said, ‘because I use so much of it myself.’ ”

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For some, Coward’s work has an inherent Modernism, both in style and content, that has no need of radical reinterpretation. This was, after all, the man who rocked 1930 London with his first play, “The Vortex,” with its themes of drug-taking and promiscuity. Playwright Albee, who participated in the Carnegie Hall gala by reading a Coward poem about his boyhood as a child actor, observed that there was an “awful lot more to Coward than the image of a 55-year-old man in dinner clothes, very sophisticated, urbane, elegant, with cigarette in a holder, looking like James Bond’s gay uncle.”

In fact, said Albee, Coward “was as sure-footed as a mountain goat, [a person] who influenced a lot of us in the precision of his language and his indirection. I’ve also always loved his sense of the ironic. What he was doing may have been a bit fatuous, but he had a real command, and I think a lot of his work will survive an awful lot longer than a lot of other plays.”

Not that Coward was too proud to put himself and his work in the hands of a professional when he was on less sure ground. Day said Coward followed his good friend Marlene Dietrich’s advice to hire orchestrator Peter Matz to create all-new arrangements when he was about to make his Las Vegas debut in the 1950s, with the nightclub act that had first received acclaim at London’s Casino de Paris. “He was a great success,” said Day. “And Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., all of whom were appearing in Vegas at the same time, would end their shows by saying, ‘Now, if you want to know how a song should really be sung, go to the Desert Inn and see Noel Coward.’ ”

Yet, after the planeloads of celebrities went back to Hollywood, Day maintained, Coward continued to attract regular folks with his witty patter, sassy revised lyrics to racy songs like Porter’s “Let’s Do It” and his own heartfelt standards. For all the snobbery and effete manner, Coward could always be counted on to go to the heart of the matter. His songs and plays celebrated bittersweet love in a most entertaining, if complicated, way.

“I love Noel Coward; lyrically, he’s fantastic,” pop icon Elton John said in a recent interview. He performs “Twentieth Century Blues” on an album produced by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys that features covers of Coward songs by Sting, Marianne Faithfull, Paul McCartney and other rock and pop artists. “His songs are extremely difficult to sing; his phrasings, how many words are in a line, are extremely challenging. But there is such great emotion and wit, it’s worth it,” John said.

“The song ‘Sail Away’ always makes me cry. There isn’t this kind of class much around anymore. So when you have a chance to do it, you take it.”

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“Waiting in the Wings” opens Thursday at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 230 W. 49th St., New York. Telecharge: (800) 432-7250