Sad About the Boy

By Daniel Okrent

Anyone assembling a roster of artistic types who shaped the 20th century aesthetic could do worse than a team comprising Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Hitchcock and Noel Coward. Through some unlikely alignment of the planets, all five were born in the last eight months of 1899, and thus have all been celebrated in this centennial-sodden year.

Oddly, the most protean among them is the least well known today. No other 20th century figure approaches Coward's creative breadth: playwright, actor, composer, lyricist, novelist, stage director, film producer, Vegas "entertainer." His nose for talent was such that he launched Laurence Olivier's career and produced the first four films directed by David Lean. "Success," he once said, "took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor."

His centennial has spawned revivals and observances. In London there have been productions of three of his plays. New York City has seen a sprightly all-Coward revue featuring Twiggy and a terrific concert version of Sail Away, starring Elaine Stritch in the role she created in 1961. On Dec. 16 (Coward's birthday), Lauren Bacall opens in Waiting in the Wings; late winter will bring Suite in Two Keys, starring Keir Dullea (pretty creative casting, given Coward's famous 1965 dismissal of the actor: "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow").

But the culminating event of the Coward year was last week's sold-out gala at Carnegie Hall. Too many celebrators retailed the clever mots that have diminished Coward's reputation to something like that of, say, Fran Lebowitz's, instead of revealing him as the theatrical and musical prodigy he was. Happily, though, the evening was primarily an opportunity for the aristocracy of the cabaret world--led by Michael Feinstein, Barbara Cook and Andrea Marcovicci--to sing the luminous songs on which Coward's legacy should most comfortably settle.

Though Coward, who died in 1973, is intensely beloved by a devoted coterie, the wider audience knows him mostly for his brittle, epigrammatic plays--particularly Private Lives and Blithe Spirit--or for that foolproof cinematic stirrer of the female breast, Brief Encounter. But where his plays and films bear the whiff of a long-gone age, Coward's songs retain their vitality: the frisky list songs that display his wit (Mad Dogs and Englishmen; Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington) and the achingly tender ballads that reveal his unmatched capacity for genuine sentiment (If Love Were All, Someday I'll Find You).

If those titles aren't as familiar as Gershwin's or Porter's, there's reason for it. Historically, standards became standards by dint of three forces: cast albums and revivals of the musicals they arise from; jazz musicians mining the repertoire; and Frank Sinatra. But Coward's musicals are theatrically his weakest work; the harmonic simplicity of his tunes--one of the elements that give them their charm--provides scant inspiration for improvisers. And Sinatra recorded only two Coward songs.

Marcovicci points out that Coward's "language was so extraordinarily elaborate" that it seems all wrong coming from the lips of most pop singers. Impresario Donald Smith, who produced last week's gala, suggests another reason: "Coward himself was the greatest performer of his own works."

Thus is he damned by his own gifts. On the closing night of Sail Away's limited run last month, Stritch told the audience about a conversation from the early '60s. "I asked Noel if he was afraid of death," Stritch recalled, "and he said the only thing he feared was that he wouldn't be remembered." It is his oceanic talent--the range of skills that made him seem, so inaccurately, a dilettante--that has brought Coward's fear to the brink of sad, sad fact.