Authors: Thomas Mallon
When cries like these come through a telephone, they tend to fall on ears that turn self-protectively deaf. On paper, they are actually harder to ignore, curtain lines that even now hang in the air.
WITH THEIR
occupational inclination toward zingers and backbiting, theatre people often find that the compulsion to entertain, and compete, extends to their letter writing. What they send to friends must be shapely and sharp; in fact, a letter should feel like its own enclosure, the bright on-purpose prose dancing out of the envelope like photos or cash.
Late in life, Groucho Marx responded to a publisher’s proposal to collect his letters with the following telegram:
YOUR LETTER RECEIVED AND PROMPTLY BURNED. I PREFER NOT TO HAVE STRANGERS PRYING INTO MY MAIL. WOULD DISCUSS THIS IN DETAIL BUT MY SECRETARY HAS A DATE IN FIVE MINUTES—WITH
ME
. Once he relented, a section of the book was called “Friends Abroad.” Its contents show Groucho doing a star turn for each of his correspondents, and all of them trying to top him in his own style.
In 1959, for example, Groucho informs his friend and collaborator Harry Kurnitz, over in England: “If you will tell me precisely when you are coming to Hollywood, I will arrange a party, something small but select, for your degenerate friends … at the moment, I’m leaving the food up in the air—where I’m sure it will be after you eat it.” Five years later, by then in Paris, Kurnitz reports experiencing a surge of nostalgia for Groucho: “a plastic tear which I carry for just such occasions welled up in my eye.”
Some of what looks like imitation is actually the real thing, since so many of Groucho’s latter-day correspondents are the screenwriters who helped make him into himself. Two decades after creating dialogue for
Monkey Business, Horse Feathers
and
Duck Soup
, Arthur Sheekman is still more or less writing it in letters to Groucho: “People ask me if you are as amusing off-screen as on and I—please forgive me—tell them the truth.” Groucho answers Sheekman, also abroad, with the same sort of invitation he gave Kurnitz: “If you ever get back, and would like to have dinner sometime, just say the word and I’ll be at your house …” Like all shrewd entertainers, he professes a wariness of overexposure, even through the mails: “Since you make your living as a writer,” Groucho tells Norman Krasna in March of 1960, “I deliberately have waited two months before answering you. I don’t want to burden you with the Damocles’ sword of a steady correspondence. The next letter you get from me will be three years from now.”
Alexander Woollcott, the
New Yorker
writer and Round Table wit who touted Groucho to the highbrows, was so fat it seems wrong to call him brittle. But brittleness was his trademark mode, so much so that a reader of Woollcott’s letters will be rather stunned by the thoughtfulness of one that he wrote in 1928, at the age of forty-one, to a close friend of his sister, who had just died. He wants to make Julie Woollcott Taber’s deathbed as consolingly vivid as he can for the friend, Lucy Christie Drage, who was unable to be at it. Woollcott’s descriptive success is extraordinary:
She just lay there at rest in a room that somehow began to look like her, with the yellow roses on the table and the blue silk shawl thrown across the foot of her bed. Day by day the years seemed to fall away from her, cast off like garments she no longer needed … If you bent close, you could hear her say “Sweet, sweet.” The lines went out of her face, the gray out of her hair, the pain out of her eyes … One of her last commissions to me was to write you the birthday letter for which she could no longer hold a pen.
Even in his prime—let alone our fading memory of him—Woollcott’s enormous person had been swallowed by his even larger persona, the acerbic reviewer and know-it-all broadcaster who inspired the title character in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
and then went onstage to play it himself. If Groucho’s epistolary stock-in-trade was the seemingly inadvertent insult, Woollcott’s was mock rage: “Listen, you contumacious rat” is how he begins a letter to Ira Gershwin when they’re having a dispute over the proper use of the word “disinterested.”
Woollcott strongly preferred typed letters to handwritten ones, and generally dictated to a stenographer. Filtration was part of the fun. At his remote country place in Vermont, he explained, “I get news of the outside world in the form of telegrams which are telephoned from Rutland to a boatman living on the shore who takes them down in a firm Spencerian hand and gives them to his son to bring over to me in a motor boat. This makes my favorite occupation guessing what the sender really intended to say.”
Compliments were best applied with a backhanded slap to the face. In January 1940, while gloomy over England’s wartime plight, he sent this inverted tribute to Beatrice Kaufman: “From sundry sources I hear an echo of your reproaches about my shortcomings as a correspondent. On this subject I never want to hear a peep out of you again. In times like these it is quite impossible for me to write a letter to anyone to whom I have so much to say. So shut your trap, dear, and let me hear no more from you.” A few years later, following Woollcott’s death from a heart attack suffered in mid-broadcast, Kaufman would be co-editing his letters. While he was
alive, any burst of tenderness they contained had to be packed in the ice of exasperation: “I can’t believe I’ve known you less than thirteen months,” Woollcott wrote to Dr. Gustav Eckstein in November 1937. “It’s ridiculous.”
Back in this period when popular culture actually had some, Noël Coward seemed to create about half of it. He put his own lyrics to his own music, and on the London stage sometimes acted the lead in the comedies he’d written. In gossip columns and on the town, he was so much the apex of sophisticated wit that not having been to “a party where they honored Noël Coward” was one reason, according to Rodgers and Hart, that the lady is a tramp. And yet, Coward’s sophisticated wit had a peculiar come-join-us quality. Even when heard from the second balcony, the high-life repartee of
Design for Living
made the listener feel he was third-row center—and actually belonged there.
Any chance to unpack what Coward described as his “fluffy little mind” reveals, beneath all the brightly colored excelsior, an assortment of sharp and steely tools, a first-rate intelligence that received only the peculiar education to be had while touring the English provinces as a child actor before the Great War. His glamorous adult success sprang from excellent theatrical instincts and a lot of bloody hard work. If love really were all—well, then there wouldn’t have been time for so much of everything else. Coward generally kept his romantic affairs and disappointments within the well-regulated limits he set for his plays, and built up a devoted, long-serving “family” of secretaries and majordomos who kept his spirits high and his show going decade after decade, through the chromium brilliance of the thirties
(Private Lives)
, the butched-up patriotism of World War II
(In Which We Serve)
and the mixture of hits and nostalgia-soaked flops from his long last act, which ended only with his death in 1973, three years after a scandalously delayed knighthood.
Coming after many volumes of his diaries and autobiography,
The Letters of Noël Coward
turned out to be a bit of a swindle, containing as it did about as many letters to the maestro as from him. Such an arrangement may have biographical potential, but the results
can be a terrible jumble; the star seems thrown into a revue that needs lots of cutting and clearer direction. Still, time and again Coward steals back the scene, whether he’s assessing a performance by Deanna Durbin (“she sang ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ with tears rolling down her face as though she were bitterly depressed at the thought”); asking his new fan and correspondent, T. E. Lawrence, Aircraftman #338171, “May I call you 338?”; or defending his latter-day tax exile to a fatuously scolding Laurence Olivier: “I also know, darling, that the best way I can serve my country is not by sitting in it with a head cold grumbling at the climate and the telephone service …”
For all his verve, Coward’s chief epistolary gift turns out to be for careful truth-telling, for giving actors and intimates the firm correction they require, in a manner that risks, but almost always retains, their affections. His audience for this human and literary artfulness includes a deludedly grand Mary Martin: “Please believe that your future career depends on your throwing away your, and above all [your husband’s] exaggerated and grotesque conception of ‘Stardom’ and concentrating on learning, diligently and painstakingly, to be the fine artiste your potential talent entitles you to be.” Marlene Dietrich, lovesick over Yul Brynner, comes in for the same combination of velvet and sandpaper—“Stop wasting yourself on someone who only really says tender things to you when he’s drunk”—and John Gielgud, upbraided by Coward for “overacting badly and using voice tones and elaborate emotional effects,” takes it like a man: “I think it was like you to write like that and I do appreciate it.”
This talent to disabuse is in large part the obverse of Coward’s capacity for shrewd self-assessment. He had a firm sense of his professional skills (“my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head”) and usually took care not to overreach with them. The letter-writing showman sometimes gets his best effects playing against type, as when in the midst of an ill-fated musical adaptation of
Lady Windermere’s Fan
, he reports to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that the voice of the leading lady “to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat.
I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile.”
It was always important to make an impression and then get off. He wrote his biggest hits very quickly
(Hay Fever
, in three days), and he liked them played the same way; in his correspondence, he sometimes reminds one of Balanchine, wishing that the wretched actors and directors and mixed-up friends would take things faster, faster. When he crossed the Atlantic on the
Queen Elizabeth
in 1932, the ship’s bandmaster delighted him by playing only songs composed by the most famous passenger on board. Even so, Coward borrowed the baton and upped the tempo.
FITTINGLY ENOUGH
, on this side of the Atlantic, much of Coward’s epoch was presided over by a president whose cigarette holder often clicked against the stem of his champagne glass. A brilliant radio performer, Franklin Roosevelt, during one first-term broadcast, asked his New Deal constituents to write him with their troubles—a suggestion that wound up sorely taxing the White House mail room, which took to measuring the results with a yardstick. The president’s love-him-or-hate-him personality assured a yield as varied as it was voluminous. One White House secretary culled a list of thirty-one different salutations from the arriving letters. They ranged from “Franklin Dillinger Roosevelt” to “My Pal!”
The variety contrasts with FDR’s own consistency of tone. His policies may have made him a traitor to his class, but his epistolary style betrays only his birthright. Nearly every one of his letters, no matter the recipient, brims with the effervescent serenity of the country gentleman and clubman. In May of 1943, when the time has come to arrange a face-to-face encounter with Stalin, Roosevelt suggests they meet “either on your side or my side of Bering Straits.” Instead of being ranted over in the Jeffersonian manner that we’ll see a couple of chapters from now, enemies are merely diminished, into “that Goering person,” and the “silly Congress,” and, in the case of Thomas E. Dewey, “the little man.” Critics, even the most tormenting, are responded to with an understanding,
seigneurial scold: “So, my dear friend,” he writes America First’s General Robert E. Wood, “stop being disturbed and get both of your feet back on the ground.” It helps that the domestic enemy is what his own set would call “people like us.” When a Mr. Alexander Forbes writes
The Boston Herald
to recommend evasion of taxes earmarked for New Deal boondoggles, Roosevelt remonstrates: “My dear cousin and old classmate, that being your belief, I do not hesitate to brand you as one of the worst anarchists in the United States.”
But he would prefer to congratulate, buck up and enthuse. “Thrilled” and “grand” are favorite words, the exclamation point as much his characteristic punctuation as the question mark was Lincoln’s. If that predecessor’s self-deprecation often has the feel of sincere self-appraisal, Roosevelt’s put-downs of himself are a pick-me-up, a delightful little dividend atop the day’s cocktail of events. He mocks his own “well known voice—the voice that Wall Street uses to inculcate fear in the breasts of their little grandchildren,” and complains to James Farley, the postmaster general, that if recovery depends on women like the overly robust one on the NRA stamp, then “I am agin recovery.” (Even so, “it is a grand stamp,” probably worthy of inclusion in a collection he’s “tickled to death” to be offered by a voter.)
Ever the squire, while in office he continues his interest in the activities of the Dutchess County Historical Society and the landscaping to be done at Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt has the outlook of the generalist, which is what he seeks in others. In appointing a reluctant James Couzens to the Maritime Commission, he assures him that “One of the many good reasons that makes me want you for Chairman is that you do not know the first thing about water shipping, naval construction or design!” Whatever self-doubt he had at the beginning, and whatever weariness toward the end, the written evidence of all the long years in between points to a man who enjoyed being president more than anyone except perhaps his distant cousin, Theodore.
Unlike TR, who could get rather monomaniacal in what he called the “arena,” one part of FDR always seems to be smiling
from the box seats at this fellow so busily engaged below. His correspondence offers fewer surprises, fewer contradictions to the popular image, than any other important president’s. Hidden depths and dark corners are so absent that his enjoyment of the job becomes, like his indiscriminate cheer, something dubious. There are moments when his presidency seems to be an avocation, the desktop puttering of the same gentleman hobbyist collecting stamps.