Noel Coward
From Philosopedia
Coward, Noël (Peirce) [Sir] (16 December 1899 - 26 March 1973)
An actor from the age of twelve, Coward was an accomplished singer and became a major playwright.
He was born in Teddington, Middlesex, England. His parents were Arthur Sabin Coward (1856–1937), a clerk, and Violet Agnes (1863–1954), daughter of Henry Gordon Veitch, captain and surveyor in the Royal Navy. He was the second of their three sons, the eldest of whom had died in 1898 at the age of six. He began performing in the West End at an early age. He was a childhood friend of Hermione Gingold.
A student at the Italia Conti Academy stage school, Coward’s first professional engagement was on 27 January 1911, in the children’s play The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theatres. He was cast as the Lost Boy Slightly in the 1913 production of Peter Pan.
At the age of 14, he became the lover of Philip Streatfeild, a society painter who took him in and introduced him to high society in the form of Mrs. Astley Cooper. She gathered a salon of artists and invited him to live on her property at Hambleton, Rutland, but on the farm rather than in the Hall, due to his lower social class. Streatfeild died from tuberculosis in 1915.
He wrote The Vortex (1924), Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), and Blithe Spirit (1941), all filled with satirical humor and witty dialogue.
His two volumes of autobiography are Present Indicative (1937) and Future Indefinite (1954).
In 1970 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
Reportedly he met writer Edna Ferber when she was wearing a suit similar to his. "You look almost like a man," he told her lightheartedly. "So do you," she replied, knowing of his homosexuality.
British humanists have claimed that he was a non-believer, pointing to many witty pokes at religion which are found in his various works.
Were the Windsors Pro-Nazi?
"The Playboy Was A Spy," by New York Times writer Stephen Koch (13 April 2008), tells that behind his dandyish image, Coward was an antifascist who could be as tough for England as anyone. When war came,
- Coward was sent to Paris as a figurehead in a propaganda office, where he made it part of his cover to mock intelligence work as childish games carried out by inept duffers. When someone proposed leafleting the enemy with speeches from Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, he recalled, “I wrote in a memorandum that if the policy of His Majesty’s Government was to bore the Germans to death I didn’t think we had enough time.”
- Being Noël Coward, he also partied — notably with the recently abdicated pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor and his more intelligent and even more pro-Nazi wife. The Windsors may have looked like Coward’s type, but Coward had always privately despised the former king. In 1936, he wrote, “I’ve known for years that he had a common mind and liked second-rate people, and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.”
- By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed — correctly — that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery.
For the last thirty years of his life, South Africa-born Graham Payn was his companion and, upon his death, the executor of his estate. Payn died in 2005. At their home in Jamaica, they were neighbors of publisher Lyle Stuart.
{AA; Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Summer 1999}
