Charm Page 14

  Noël Coward’s amused view of the world, his great good common sense, his tactics for evading gloom all combined to endow him with his witty charm. Who else, after reading a memoir of life in a convent, could write, as did he, “It has strengthened my decision not to become a nun.” Who else would have thought to call Las Vegas, where he appeared as a star performer late in his career, “Nescafe Society,” or describe the actress Irene Handl as “just a large, breasty, good-hearted hunk of tangerine meat,” or congratulate Gertrude Lawrence for a recent theatrical performance by offering her “a warm hand on your opening.” On first seeing the Venus de Milo, he said, “It’s only what’s to be expected if you go on biting your nails.”

  The word charm crops up perhaps more than any other in The Noël Coward Diaries and in The Letters of Noël Coward. He finds Winston Churchill “ineffably charming.” Irene Dunne is “so attractive and charming.” So, too, Aneurin Bevan. Even the gangsters who ran Vegas in an earlier day he thinks “urbane and charming.” He gives an audition of the score of a new musical he had written to eight ladies who organize theater-going parties, of which he notes: “As I despise and abominate theatre parties this went against the grain, but I persevered in the cause of true art and a healthy advance [of ticket sales] and charmed the shit out of them.” Even charm, though, has its limits, and he writes of a disappointing off-Broadway production of his play Conversation Piece that it is done “pleasantly and gently and is, almost monotonously, charming.”

  What he cannot bear is pretension, and nowhere more than in the theater. The seriousness of Martha Graham makes him laugh. “She really is a bit long in the tooth now to go running about the stage on her knees, and even when she was young it wasn’t a very sensible thing to do.” Meeting Edward Albee he finds him “very intelligent but badly tainted with avant-garde, Beckett, etc. He talked quite a lot of cock.” As for Beckett himself, he writes that, after reading Waiting for Godot carefully, “in my considered opinion it is pretentious gibberish, without any claim to importance whatsoever.” Bertolt Brecht, Eugen Ionesco, and Harold Pinter do not come off any better. Arthur Miller he considers pompous and boring, with a “philosophy that is adolescent and sodden with self-pity,” but then “the cruellest blow that life has dealt him is that he hasn’t a grain of humor.” Of John Osborne and the Angry Young Men, he claims not to understand why “the young generation, instead of knocking at the door, should bash the fuck out of it.” He thought the Actors Studio a bad joke, and his advice to actors was, “Speak clearly, don’t bump into people, and if you must have motivation, think of your pay packet on Friday.”

  Coward could even swear charmingly. When he meets the Irish roughhouse playwright Brendan Behan, he notes, “I think he was surprised that I could say cunt and fuck as easily and naturally as he could.” These same and other similar words appear at various places in his letters and diaries, but are always used with amusing economy and in surprising ways. He goes to a showing of The Prince and the Showgirl, and remarks that “Marilyn Monroe looks very pretty and is charming at moments, but too much emphasis on tits and bottom.” Citing the limitations of his tolerance for the too-lengthy company even of good friends, he writes: “The Almighty, whom I suspect of occasionally being on my side, realizes this with his infinite wisdom, and when he observes me going too far, giving out too much, and generally making a cunt of myself, he firmly knocks me out. I am most grateful to him.”

  Among modern artists, Noël Coward displayed the least distance between his art and his everyday self. He appears to have lived as if he were a character in one of his own plays. Between real life and stage, there was no seam; person and persona were one. Or if they truly weren’t, he kept it beautifully hidden. “Style in everything demands discipline,” he said. The figure he projected in both spheres was that of the sophisticated, elegant, utterly urbane gent, at home everywhere in the world. (He wrote an amusing song, titled “Home,” on the subject.) “If you’re a star, you should behave like one,” he said. “I always have.”

  People were drawn to him, longed to be in his company, sometimes annoyingly so. He wrote in a letter to a friend:

  People were greedy and predatory, and if you gave them a chance, they would steal unscrupulously the heart and soul out of you without really wanting to or meaning to. A little personality, a publicized name; a little entertainment value above the ordinary; and there they were, snatching and grabbing, clamorous in their demands, draining your strength to add a little fuel to their social bonfires.

  His own social bonfire was always nicely stoked. He often found himself in the company of Winston Churchill and the king and queen of England and other social face cards of Europe; the most famous actors regularly shore up in what he once called “violently glamorous” surroundings, which pleased but daunted him not at all. He may have been born into the lower middle class, but, as Balzac avers, an artist is a prince, a natural aristocrat, and it so was for him.

  Noël Coward’s chief rule was the avoidance of boredom for others in whose company he found himself. He remarked of wit that it should be served as if it were “a glorious treat, like caviar, and not spread out like marmalade.” His view of the public nicely encapsulates his social views generally: “Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and again if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, make it think, but above all never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.”

  Along with a talent to amuse, Noël Coward had the gift of perspective. “My sense of my importance to the world is relatively small,” he wrote in one of his autobiographies. “On the other hand, my sense of my importance to myself is tremendous.” (A fine illustration, this, of living out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of keeping two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time!) He claimed to remain “extraordinarily unspoiled by my great success. As a matter of fact, I still am.”

  The test came when the golden faucet of endless success was turned off for him by a changed audience, indeed by a changed culture. After World War Two, his plays about the ideal, foolish, and often snobbish rich lost their appeal. He took even this with good grace, noting in his diary that in his younger days he “was tremendously keen to be a star and famous and successful; well, I have been successful for most of my life, and if at this late stage I have another series of resounding failures, I believe I could regard them with a certain equanimity.”

  This for the most part he did. He had another run as a stage performer, able to sell his sophisticated songs and wit, through the sheer power of charm, even to the coarse audiences in Las Vegas, where he was a great hit. What he took to be the dullness and boredom of the new age, though, remained unacceptable. England itself seemed to him done for: “Our history, except for stupid, squalid scandals, is over,” he wrote in his diary. He thought the Beatles no more than “bad-mannered little shits.” The aristocratic England, to which his charm and talent gained him entry, was on the way out. He spoke of feeling “a core of sadness about England, a sadness mixed with a sort of desolate irritation that a country and a people so rich in tradition and achievement should betray itself and what it stands for by so whole-heartedly submitting to foolish government, natural laziness, woolly thinking, and above all the new religion of mediocrity.”

  Still, Noël Coward claimed to look back on his life “not in anger [but] rather I look back in pleasure and amusement.” In the end he admired “courage and humor more than any other qualities.” If he also admired celebrity, and was not displeased to have been a celebrity himself for most of his life, it was those celebrities with genuine achievement behind them, such as Somerset Maugham and Rebecca West, whom he truly admired and of whom he must, rightly, himself be considered one.

  Following an afternoon with the eighty-three-year-old Somerset Maugham, Coward drove home “in the evening sunlight feeling happy and stimulated and deeply impressed by the charm of old age when it is allied to health and intelligence.” Yet the prospect of
too long a life was not one that appealed to him. Four years before his actual death in 1973, he wrote: “It is possible that I might stagger on to the nineties, which mean nearly another quarter of a century. I cannot say that I find this prospect very alluring. I would prefer Fate allow me to go to sleep when it’s my proper bedtime. I never have been one for staying up too late.” Noël Coward departed the planet at the age of seventy-four, easily the most charming man of his day and one of the most charming human beings, straight or gay, transgendered or hermaphroditic, two or more legged, in the twentieth century.

  Chapter XI

  The Charmingest Generation

  In 2001 the newscaster Tom Brokaw wrote a book called The Greatest Generation, by which he meant those who fought in World War Two. Whether he was right about this or not—the generation of the founding fathers, after all, was not without its greatness either—is arguable. Less arguable is that no generation was more charming than that comprising the great African-American jazz and swing musicians who came onto the public stage in the 1920s and ’30s.

  Grace under pressure was the way Ernest Hemingway defined courage. The black jazz and swing musicians took things a step further and in an often hostile environment, they performed with insouciance, suavity, and wit. To their artistry they brought the extra ingredient of charm. Charm displayed under such exigent social conditions is itself a form of courage.

  The generation of African-American musicians I have in mind is the pre-hard-drug generation, whose key figures were Joe Oliver, Fats Waller, Willie Smith, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Errol Gardner, Bessie Smith, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald, and above all Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The jazz musicians who came after them—Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie—advanced the art of jazz, but charm was not their specialty. Cool, with all its implied distancing of oneself from human contact, was. Drugs may have revealed another world to them, deepening and darkening their music, but drugs also often left many of them snarly and snarky, their music dark, their spirits down. The charmingest generation, while scarcely Rotarian in its optimism, was nonetheless dedicated to delivering happiness through its music and through the personalities of many of its members.

  Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are two men who could scarcely have been more unlike—in background, outlook, style—yet each flourished and left his lasting impress on American culture through a combination of musical genius and very different kinds of charm. Extraordinary as was the talent of both men, each viewed himself as essentially an entertainer—though neither argued when others called them geniuses—and as entertainers their charm went a long way to establishing their fame.

  Edward Kennedy Ellington was born into the black middle class in Washington DC, Louis Armstrong was born in the slums of New Orleans. Ellington’s father worked as first a driver then a butler for a wealthy white Washington, DC, physician. His mother was a high-school graduate—no small accomplishment for a black female of that era—a beautiful woman of natural refinement. Armstrong’s mother worked as a prostitute in New Orleans’ bordello quarter; his father deserted him and his sister early in their lives. Ellington’s mother repeatedly told him that he was “blessed.” (A man certain of his mother’s love, Freud claimed, was a conqueror.) He was, as he allowed, “pampered and spoiled rotten by all the women in the [extended] family.” As his nickname implies, Ellington came across as slightly distant and aristocratic.

  Louis Armstrong was left to fend for himself from an early age. As a young boy, he worked with a Jewish family named Karnofsky, delivering coal to whorehouses, and bringing his wages home to his mother. His style was familiar, down-home. He called everyone Pops; he possessed one of the great natural smiles and over the years acquired a gravelly voice nicely attuned to conveying the good humor that angry blacks would mistakenly contemn as Uncle Tom.

  Duke and Satchmo—the first nickname deriving from Ellington’s elegance of manner, the second from Armstrong’s large, or satchel mouth—the one a gifted piano player and composer, the other unsurpassed on the trumpet and a magnificent jazz and popular singer, the two combined may have brought more musical pleasure than any other performers in the history of our country. And they did it during a time when Negroes, as African Americans then were called, were denied the most basic rights. If later generations wanted clear definitions of charm, these two men, in their different ways, provided it not only in their music and manner but in the examples of their own lives.

  Although Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans and Duke Ellington in Washington, DC, each man had to take to the road to establish himself: Armstrong to Chicago, where he played trumpet in the band of Joe “King” Oliver, Ellington to New York, where he organized his first bands to play at the Cotton Club in Harlem. During the 1960s and ’70s both men were given a bad rap for being insufficiently political, though the FBI kept a dossier on Ellington for his very tenuous connection with popular front groups in the 1940s and ’50s. Armstrong, in later life, was not above scolding fellow blacks for not working together to improve the standing and condition of the race. Somehow, though, all that seemed secondary, if not tertiary and beyond, next to the deep delight they brought through their music and personal charm. “I am dedicated,” said Louis Armstrong, “to the pursuit of happiness.” He, and Duke Ellington along with him, not only pursued it but captured it and purveyed it, to the great and everlasting delight of all.

  Of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby said: “I never met anybody that didn’t love him that ever saw him work or ever has encountered him, had any connection or business with him.” Part of Armstrong’s immense charm was in his ability to treat everyone alike. Playing a command performance in London for King George V, who apparently knew a lot about popular music, he motioned toward the royal box and said, “This one’s for you, Rex,” and went into his rendition of “You Rascal You.” When in Rome, the normally chilling Pope Pius XII asked Armstrong if he and his wife had any children, to which he answered: “No, Daddy, but we’re working on it.” As he called everyone Pops, so Pops became the name by which everyone came to know him. Tallulah Bankhead, as we have seen a tough critic of human personality, said of Armstrong: “I love to talk to him because of his basic sincerity and his very original gift of expression. He uses words like he strings notes together—artistically and vividly.”

  Everyone who ever saw Louis Armstrong perform on stage seems to have remembered it. A great showman, “his personality,” as his biographer Terry Teachout writes “was as compelling as his artistry.” Of that showmanship, the jazz critic Whitney Balliett wrote: “Armstrong’s stage presence—a heady and steadily revolving mixture of thousand-watt teeth, marbling eyes, rumbling asides, infectious laughter, and barreling gait—is as endearing a spectacle as we have had on the American stage.” Everyone who knew him reports that Louis Armstrong was much the same on and off stage. “They know I’m there,” he said, “in the cause of happiness.”

  Armstrong was nonpareil in two lines. He was probably the greatest trumpet player of all time. Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, later Wynton Marsalis, his peers on the trumpet if he may be said to have had peers, all recognized his supremacy on the instrument. He was, according to Whitney Balliett, the first jazz soloist. The composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote of his playing that “his style of improvisation would seem to have combined the highest reaches of instrumental virtuosity with the most tensely disciplined melodic structure and the most spontaneous emotional expression, all of which in one man you must admit to be pretty rare.” As a musician, he was a man with little in the way of disruptive egotism. Dexter Gordon, Milt Hinton, and other great jazz musicians remarked on what a delight it was to play with him.

  Armstrong never would have attained the fame he did if he hadn’t also sung. He acquired his famous gravelly voice through a hoarseness that first came on in his early days when he played in bands on Mississippi river boa
ts. Fletcher Henderson described it as “that big fish horn voice of his.” Terry Teachout says, rightly, that “he sang with a charm that only a critic could resist.” He could take thin, or even dopily sentimental songs—“Hello, Dolly,” or “It’s a Wonderful World”—and by sheer force of style make them irresistible. He sometimes mumbled or otherwise bungled the lyrics, even on his recordings, but it didn’t seem to matter. He could also lightly mock an inane song, the way Fats Waller did, while simultaneously bringing pleasure singing it. He invented jazz singing. He was not the first to sing scat, but the first to turn it into an art.

  Louis Armstrong mated musical genius with personal charm in a manner warm, familiar, ultimately charming. Duke Ellington, pianist, orchestrator, band leader, composer, was, in contrast, more distant yet never cold. No biographer yet has captured Ellington’s interior life, or anything close to it. Perhaps he lacked one. He was a musician full-time, even in his sleep, where new melodies came to him as they did anywhere else he might be.

  If Louis Armstrong could easily charm you, more likely you would feel the need to charm Duke Ellington, from whom the charm of one of nature’s noblemen seemed to pour. Sonny Greer, the first drummer in the Ellington band, called him “the Prince of Wale.” Bill Berry, a cornetist with the Ellington orchestra, said: “Ellington was the kind of guy when he walked into a room a light went on. Armstrong was like that, too. Even if somebody didn’t know who they were they can feel this magnetism.” The very titles of Duke Ellington’s songs and musical compositions exude charm: “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood Indigo,” “In My Solitude,” “Subtle Lament,” “Perdido,” “If It Ain’t Got That Swing It Don’t Mean A Thing.” He gave jazz elegance.