Private Lives

Noël Coward (right) in the Bahamas with Alan Webb

[click to enlarge]

From an article by Noël Coward's biographer Philip Hoare in The Guardian:

In 1931, Noël Coward was the highest-earning author in the western world, celebrated for his scintillating comedies and sensational dramas of hidden love such as The Vortex, Private Lives and Easy Virtue. As well as writing hit songs, musicals, novels and short stories, he painted and, not least, performed. But perhaps the most astounding thing of all is the fact that – at a time when homosexuality was illegal and would remain so for some time – he lived an openly gay life.

It is this that makes a newly discovered photograph album so extraordinary. It shows intimate glimpses from the private life of this towering cultural figure. Apparently compiled in the 1930s by Coward’s closest female friend, Joyce Carey, the album is a remarkable insight into gay lives of the interwar years, lived in plain sight...

...Many of Coward’s guests are highly glamorous theatre women: Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead, Gladys Calthrop. But Coward’s allure extended far beyond the stage: the writers Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf were also his good friends. And then there are all those handsome young men, sporting droopy woollen swimsuits that leave nothing to the imagination.

The mere existence of such images could have brought the punitive weight of the law – and public prejudice – down on Coward’s head. Yet these men were his lovers and he made no secret of it. His relationship with Alan Webb, then starring in Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, was tempestuous, and ended in tears. We see the two men posing on the beach at Nassau in the Bahamas, holidaying there together in 1937...[and] Graham Payn, an altogether less troubling young man, [who] was to become Coward’s longest and most constant companion, and became the executor of his estate when the dramatist died in Jamaica in 1973.

I do love - even more than those glamorous posed publicity photographs taken by flatterers like Cecil Beaton or Angus McBean - having a good old nose at such rare insights into the ordinary lives of our idols.

The whole album went up for auction in London just yesterday - with an estimated sale price of just £500-£800. If I had that kind of money going spare, I might have bid! It sold for £1600 in the end, such is the interest in the great man even after all these years.

And no wonder, when (also quoted by the aforementioned Mr Hoare) we have witticisms such as this to remember him by:

[Nothing stopped] the Master from making a joke of it all. Wit was the great man’s defence. Once, crossing Leicester Square with a friend, he looked up and saw a cinema marquee advertising a new film: Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them.

Coward turned to his friend and said: “I don’t see why not. Everyone else has.”

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16th December 1899 – 26th March 1973)