Fair-haired Boy

PRESENT INDICATIVE--Noel Coward-- Doubleday, Doran ($3).

At 37 Noel Coward is still the juvenile prodigy of the modern theatre. He does not mind who calls him a prodigy, but he is tired of being considered a juvenile.

Noel Coward's idea is that when success came to him, it was about time, and that there was nothing chancy in its coming. A specialist in unblushingness, last week he unblushingly presented the clever story of his own success. The audience found Present Indicative, like most Coward productions, an entertaining if not altogether endearing performance.

The son of middle-class English parents --his father was a piano salesman and his mother kept a boardinghouse--Noel gave early indications of that instability which marks the born actor. He had tantrums, enjoyed working himself into hysterics over fancied disasters. As a boy he had a good voice, occasionally sang anthems in church: "but I hated doing this because the lack of applause depressed me." At 10 he played his first professional part, in an all-children cast, and knew why he had been born. From then on it was simply a question of finding better and better parts, of having more and more to do with the theatre.

The famed team of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence met when they were both child-actors in the same company.

"She . . . gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards." It was at about this time that one of Noel's fellows imparted to him the facts of life. True to his trade as always, he made a tragic entry into his mother's room, cried: "Mother, I have lost my innocence!" The audience laughed.

While he was growing up, Noel tried a few sidelines--dancing in a night club, super in a cinema--but never strayed far from his chosen path. The War never really found Noel at all.

A spindly sort, he had once been threatened with tuberculosis, knew there was small danger of his being chosen as an A-1 specimen. In 1918 he was finally called up, drafted into a Labor Battalion. One night of that was enough for Noel. He pulled wires, got transferred to the Artists' Rifles.

But Noel was not cut out to be any kind of soldier. He fell down and bumped his head, was sent to a hospital. After some weeks in an epileptic ward he was kindly discharged with a temporary pension. Says he: "I was not in the least scarred by the war. It was little more to me at the time than a dully oppressive background. . . ." But it was a great relief to him to get back to the theatre and real life.

Noel's consuming desire was to be on first-name terms with the great ones of his world, and now he began to see his wish fulfilled. He even crashed county society, found he could play his part there to his own satisfaction. As for the others: "The setting and the dialog were perfect, the character performances superb, and there seemed to be, only every now and then, a suspicion of overacting among the smaller parts." He began to write plays, stories, a novel. When he sold a play to Manhattan Producer Al Woods, he was encouraged to make a trip to the U. S. His five months in Manhattan made him some useful acquaintances but little money.

Noel's first Big Moment came with his first hit, The Vortex. From then on his career as playwright, actor, song-&-dance man, revue writer went from peak to peak.

But it had its valleys too. Once Noel had the unpleasant experience of hearing a third act (of Sirocco) drowned in boos, of being literally spat on by a waiting crowd --In Red Peppers, one of the nine plays in Tonight at 8:30, which closed abruptly in Manhattan fortnight ago when Author Coward took to his bed with laryngitis (TIME, March 22). at the stage door. He gave the crowd a furious look, sent his overcoat to the cleaners. Twice he has tired of it all, taken his shattered nerves on world-weary cruises.

But each time he has come back again with an even bigger success in his pocket. He now considers himself primarily a writer.

''I love acting, and it is only during the last few years that I have become good, although, as yet, limited in scope." What he thinks of himself as a writer he modestly leaves between the lines. He avers that Cavalcade, his most successful play, was written "straight"--not, as often rumored, "with my tongue in my cheek, in bed, probably wearing a silk dressing-gown and shaking with cynical laughter." Like Coward's plays, Present Indicative strikes many a theatrically effective note of frankness. When he was a child-actor in London he used to steal waitresses' fourpenny tips to eke out his meagre lunches.

When well-to-do women invited him to accompany them to Venice at their expense, he was not insulted but accepted gratefully. And when he speaks of a minor operation he had, he says straight out that it was for piles.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.