Courageous Coward

PAUL BAILEY

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward

By Oliver Soden Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30

The public persona Noël Coward first displayed to the world in the 1920s – the clipped way of speaking; the cigarette in its long holder; the tailor-made suit; the martini at hand – belied the fact that he was more often in the lonely company of his typewriter, tapping out a comic masterpiece such as Hay Fever.

Then there were innumerable revue sketches and song lyrics, the controversial play The Vortex, described by Bernard Shaw as ‘damnable and wonderful’, along with forgotten works.

As the Rev Peter Mullen writes on page 15, Coward died 50 years ago, aged 73, on 26th March 1973.

His reputation as a gadfly and man-about-town was sustained by well-timed appearances at posh cocktail parties and his natural gift for the spontaneous witticism that soon became the property of thousands of anecdotalists. It was all part of the show of being famous, as he well knew.

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward isn’t in the cradle-to-grave tradition adhered to by more conventional biographers.

It’s composed of nine parts, beginning with an Edwardian comedy in six scenes called ‘The Rainbow’, featuring Master Noël embarking on a stage career.

That’s followed by an act concerned with the First World War and Coward’s unusual training for the military, which has the title ‘Services Rendered’.

‘Les Années Folles!’, the revue that comes next, is set in the ’20s. And ‘The Mask of Flippancy’, a play in three acts, has Coward writing Private Lives, the sparkling conversation piece that will ensure his lasting place alongside William Congreve and Oscar Wilde as a master dramatist.

‘The Tipsy Crow’, a play with music, which is fifth on the bill, accounts for the hectic years when the ever-industrious playwright, actor and songsmith was revelling in his hard-earned fame.

‘Tinsel and Sawdust’, the war film, shows Coward entertaining the Allied troops in often sweltering temperatures in Africa and the Middle East. He tries his hand at spying, too, besides scripting and starring in the movie In Which We Serve. The morale-boosting This Happy Breed is staged and then filmed.

Before Germany is defeated, when he is becoming a little bored with wartime restrictions, he produces the wonderfully funny Blithe Spirit, taking the rise out of spiritualism and even of death itself. Then comes Present Laughter, providing him with yet another whopping great leading role.

The remaining sections consist of eight short stories, collected under the title ‘The Desert’. They chart his increasing disenchantment with the modern world.

‘The Living Mask’ depicts the chronically ill Coward returning to his beloved West End in style, acting his heart out in three brand-new plays and getting ecstatic reviews, at long last, from the very critics he had come to despise.

Finally – the curtain comes down, as it were, with ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’. Coward’s four previous biographers (Sheridan Morley, Clive Fisher, Cole Lesley, Philip Hoare) met Oliver Soden (and numerous friends of Coward, all dead) to talk about their multi-talented subject.

Soden’s achievement in this bold and ambitious book is to have captured Coward’s personality in all its curious aspects, especially his need for disguise.

The theatre was a hiding place for homosexuals, and it helped that he was stage-struck at an age when most boys are interested in sport.

His mother, Violet, who had lost her first-born to meningitis when he was only six, showered her darling child with affection. With her support, he became a jobbing actor at 11, wearing a bowler hat in The Goldfish, a play for children written and directed by Miss Lila Field. His first words as a professional were ‘Any luck, Dolly?’

Almost a decade later, he was being recognised as a playwright. In I’ll Leave It to You, which was staged in 1919, there’s an indication of the verbal brilliance to come with this exchange:

‘You’ve wounded me to the quick.’

‘I don’t believe you’ve got a quick.’

When Soden praises Coward’s ear for music, it’s not just the songs he has in mind. The staccato dialogue in his comedies is jazz-like in its edginess and inspired repetitions.

He notices, too, how often Coward employs the word ‘gay’, long before it took on its current meaning.

The well-known names are all here. His family of close friends, resembling disciples, with their babyish nicknames, are present and occasionally incorrect in their behaviour. The stage is set from the opening pages. And the show goes on until the end with its star in the spotlight, where he always reckoned – despite doomed

Blonde on blonde TANYA GOLD Love, Pamela

By Pamela Anderson

Headline £20

Pamela Anderson is the Sleeping Beauty of Baywatch, exuding sex and death. Now she has written a memoir whose title amounts to a rebuke: Love, Pamela It means: I can still love.

Baywatch, the TV show about lifeguards at a Los Angeles beach, was the most popular television show in the world, with over a billion viewers in the 1990s. I didn’t watch it but still I knew her: an innocent with a peculiar sweetness of face and charming gaucherie – and the sort of body you see in pornographic films.

She says it herself: she was a child when all this began. She is one of the late-20th century’s noble sequence of tortured pop-art blondes. Because the world has changed, she is writing her own story.

Not many women have been bestselling Mattel dolls – and her memoir reads as though written by a doll that speaks. There is narrative, selfjustification (unnecessary to me, but not to her) and, at the very edges, truth.

She was born on Vancouver Island to characters from Grease: if Rizzo and Kenickie had a baby, it would be Pamela. Her parents were teenage tearaways with style, and almost penniless.

These passages about her youth have an air of menace. I wait for the founding tragedy, and it comes: she was sexually abused by a female babysitter. Her father drowned the family’s puppies in front of her and tried to push her mother’s face onto the stove element. She was raped by a boyfriend, and gangraped by his friends.

She would have had her mother’s life, but she was plucked from the crowd by a camera as if by the finger of God. She was at a football match in Vancouver and the roving camera rested on her.

She started doing advertisements. Playboy telephoned, asking if she would pose for the October 1989 cover. When her boyfriend heard to whom she was talking, he threw a tray of silverware at her head. He was one of the better ones. Men didn’t trust her. They wanted her too much. Was it perhaps safer to be made of paper? Playboy, with its Mansion (she capitalises it) and its ratio of two or three women to one man at parties – she saw Jack Nicholson ejaculating in a mirror –became her ‘family’.

Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, put her on the cover more times than any other woman and called her ‘the DNA of Playboy’. She called him a gentleman though he was really a pimp. But any man who didn’t beat her was a gentleman.

Then came Tommy Lee, the drummer in Mötley Crüe, whom she married after four days’ acquaintance. His courting sounds like stalking, but the 1990s were a different time. Together, they became a tabloid circus. He pointed a gun at a camera crew; as a wedding present, the crew didn’t press charges. He beat photographers. He beat her TV-show producer. He beat her.

She left him, writing of their two sons, ‘We let them down’ – and I want to shake her. I think this is the essential Pamela: the one who blames herself. Tommy and her father bonded over hatred of the paparazzi. They are the same man.

She left the marriage with two boys and the sex tape of an encounter with Tommy Lee. It was stolen and sold, which was criminal, but it was Tommy and Pamela – so who cares?

‘No matter how I tried,’ she writes, ‘the image was bigger than me and always won. My life took off without me.’

She survived, and went to live in France like a woman in a novel, dabbling in left-wing politics and green causes, loving the animals who are obviously an avatar for the child that she was.

Love, Pamela competes with a recent television series about the sex-tape saga, made without her permission: greed again, masquerading as a tribute again.

I would call her book justice – at least women like Pamela write their stories now – but I would not call it writing.

Rather, this book has the flavour of medicine. We might not like it – and I didn’t – but it must be taken.

Tanya Gold is the Spectator’s restaurant critic