Born in London on the verge of the new century (specifically, on December 16, 1899) and into a middle-class family of modest means, Noël Coward was, as a youth, at once precocious and unworldly, well-read and witty but almost entirely without formal education, and lacking in any significant interests other than the theater. From the age of eleven he was a working actor on the West End stage; reaching military age toward the close of World War I, he spent a few months in the army, all in England, mostly in the hospital. Then came the armistice, after which there occurred a sociocultural shift that was decisive for Coward’s career: shaken to their roots by the horrors of war, many of the more privileged members of his generation decided, as Coward’s latest biographer, Oliver Soden, puts it in his splendid new book, Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward, “to experience the ensuing decade” with “vivacity,” imbuing

everything from travel to love affairs with a sense of infantile humour and adventure, stripping life of emotional authenticity, as if to bury misery in near-hysterical enjoyment, and to armour relationships against loss by rejoicing in fleeting dalliances and romantic theatrics. Nineteen-twenties high life was to be lived so much on show, was so essentially theatrical, that the stage would become the natural medium in which its excesses could be mirrored and explored.¹

Defined by these young people, the 1920s in Britain—as in America—were an “age of youth,” shaped by “the first generation to create an individual culture, with its own slang, music, and fashion, all quite distinct from its untrustworthy elders, whose decisions had recently proved so calamitous.” And who was more perfectly positioned, gifted, and temperamentally inclined to play a leading role in the formation—and, by turns, celebration and criticism—of the new decade’s manners and mores than Noël Coward, who was recognized at a tender age as an actor, playwright, composer, lyricist, director, and (not least) public personality of remarkable dimensions?

But if you were a Brit—and, particularly, a Londoner—back then, the 1920s belonged to Noël Coward.

Which English-language authors are most identified with the 1920s? Then (as now) most Americans with any knowledge of the subject would probably have named James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Sinclair Lewis, perhaps E. M. Forster, John Dos Passos, Evelyn Waugh, and Aldous Huxley, and above all Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—the latter of whom, in the United States, was of course considered, along with his wife, Zelda, the very embodiment of that brief period of “flaming youth.” Oh, and the decade’s number-one playwright? Eugene O’Neill, hands down. But if you were a Brit—and, particularly, a Londoner—back then, the 1920s belonged to Noël Coward. Novels by Woolf and Waugh and Forster came and went, but Coward the playwright? He was ubiquitous. His first produced stage work debuted four months into the decade, on May 3, 1920; by June 1925, his name could be seen simultaneously on four different London marquees. (Only Somerset Maugham came close to rivaling him.) Partly because Coward’s social exploits and impromptu quips made sizzling copy, no writer, in any genre, got more day-to-day media attention in Britain. And soon enough he was a celebrity in America too. His first visit there, in 1921, proved a revelation: Broadway actors spoke so fast that it took him ten minutes, he claimed, to grasp what they were saying. And he liked it: “It suddenly struck me,” he wrote to his mother (to whom he was famously close), that this, not the languid delivery that was de rigueur in the West End drawing-room comedies of the day, was “the way people actually talk!” It was, says Soden, “a lesson in delivery and dialogue that Noël would carry back to England” and use to transform the London stage.

Because his plays of the 1920s focused on the beau monde, Coward—even though his mother ran a boarding house and his father was a traveling piano-salesman—quickly came to be seen not just as the premier observer but also as the quintessential exemplar of Britain’s upscale youth. His big hits of the decade, by the end of which he was the most highly remunerated writer on the planet, included The Vortex (1924), in which, to quote a Guardian review of a revival staged this year, he “savag[ed] the jazz age’s empty heart” (and, scandalously for the era, depicted cocaine use); his farce Hay Fever (1925), which amiably mocked the pretensions of a self-absorbed theatrical family; and Easy Virtue (1925), a comedy about a rich boy who marries a divorcée. The outlier on this list, Bitter Sweet (1929), is an operetta—even then a rather dated form—set mostly in the late nineteenth century and featuring such Coward standards as “If Love Were All” and “I’ll See You Again.” Also fitting naturally into this group of Roaring Twenties plays, although it opened in 1930, is Private Lives, his ever-popular comedy of manners about a divorced couple who, encountering each other on the French Riviera after having just taken new spouses, find their love rekindling—along with their habit of endless puerile bickering. (Soden notes that the play’s frequent use of the phrase “make love” was controversial because, a year or two earlier, “especially in America, [it] had begun to mean sex rather than courtship.”)

It was during the 1920s that Coward transformed from an unusually gifted novice into the unique sociocultural fixture who later became known as “The Master”—and who, while identified forever with that decade of booze, drugs, eroticism, and all-around excess, himself drank moderately, abstained from narcotics, disdained promiscuity and vulgar display, and, for all the headlines (and lyrics) about marvelous parties and exotic travels, was in fact an artist of extraordinary professional and personal discipline. Soden limns this metamorphosis vividly. Nor can I immediately think of another book that captures 1920s Britain as memorably as this one does, fun facts and all: for example, it was in 1922, Soden tells us, that “the word ‘party’ first began to be used as a verb”; it’s also believed that the use of the word “gay” in its present sense, at least “within homosexual circles,” may also date back to as early as that year; and while British husbands had long been able to secure divorces on grounds of adultery, it was not until 1923 that wives won the same right. Soden points out that while Americans spoke of the 1920s as the Jazz Age, in Britain the decade was more often referred to as the era of “Bright Young People” (or, sometimes, “Bright Young Things”)—a term that has long been thought to have originated a few years into the decade, but that Soden has located in a 1920 newspaper article about (who else?) Noël Coward.

Coward also played a key role in refashioning Britain’s masculine ideal. Since Victorian times, respectable men of substance were expected to be—well—substantial, i.e., broad-shouldered and brawny, like William Gladstone for instance. But it was now the age of silent film and of the rotogravure, and since the camera was said to add twenty pounds, the lean, much-photographed Coward, along with his equally lithe friend and frequent collaborator Ivor Novello, the stage and silent-film star, helped make near-androgynous slimness the new desideratum.

Coward also played a key role in refashioning Britain’s masculine ideal.

The 1920s concluded abruptly, of course, with the 1929 stock-market crash—which, owing to Coward’s conservative approach to investment, entirely spared him. As if to mark the decade’s end, he wrote a play that differed dramatically from its predecessors. Following an extensive trip to the Far East—which enhanced his admiration for the British Empire’s civilizing influence—he created Cavalcade (1931), a patriotic work on a spectacular scale. Covering the lives of the wealthy Maryott family through the century’s first three decades, calling for twenty-two sets and a cast and crew of four hundred, and featuring Coward’s heavily America-flavored tune “Twentieth Century Blues,” Cavalcade, as Soden puts it, marked “a decisive shift, both theatrical and political, in Noël’s work” and earned a rapturous reception from audiences and critics alike; the Hollywood film adaptation, directed by Frank Lloyd, nabbed the Oscar for Best Picture in 1933. (Coward’s first biographer, Sheridan Morley, quotes C. A. Lejeune of The Observer as calling it “the best British film that has ever been made, and it was made in America. . . . Why in the world couldn’t we have produced it in our own studios?”) To be sure, some of those who saw Cavalcade accused Coward—unfairly—of embracing a dangerous pro-war nationalism. On the contrary, the fact was that while many English (and American) writers were responding to the Great Depression by becoming fervent socialists or fascists, Coward—who’d always hated communism, and who recognized Nazism early on as a moral abomination—was growing even more overt in his appreciation for the English way of life and the ancient English liberties. In 1938, when London crowds cheered Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” announcement, Coward reacted with revulsion, despising the prime minister for his craven policy of appeasement—a reaction that he put into the mouth of Frank Gibbons, the paterfamilias (whom he played) in his lovely 1939 play This Happy Breed, which recounts with palpable respect and affection the ups and downs of an ordinary London family during the years between the wars.

When World War II did begin—“perhaps the first event in Noël’s life,” suggests Soden, “which would spur him into seriousness, and lead him to drop his mask of flippancy”—his “urge to serve his country” reached “passionate, even grandiose heights.” His contributions to the war effort, broadly conceived, were manifold: during the Blitz he wrote the anthem “London Pride,” a heartfelt and inspiriting tribute to the city of his birth and the humblest of its residents; he traveled Europe as a spy; he ran a British–French intelligence liaison office in Paris; he served, before Pearl Harbor, as a personal intermediary between Churchill and Roosevelt, each of whom demanded an impromptu performance of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” (later, in 1943, he’d treat them, at Chartwell and the White House respectively, to his tongue-in-cheek new ditty “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”); he personally escorted sixty-eight English children, residents of the Actors’ Orphanage, of which he was president, from mortal danger in Surrey to safety in The Bronx; and he performed at fundraisers in Australia and New Zealand. Then, denied further official war work, and deciding that Blitz-weary first-nighters could use a laugh, he wrote the supernatural farce Blithe Spirit (1941)—a smash on Broadway as well as in the West End—whose protagonist, Charles Condomine, finds himself in a spooky ménage à trois with his current wife, Ruth, and the ghost of his late wife, Elvira.

Then came a masterwork: the magnificent film In Which We Serve (1942), for which he wrote the script and composed the score, in addition to co-directing (with David Lean) and playing the lead role as the commander of a naval destroyer that takes part in the Battle of Narvik and the Dunkirk evacuation. Coward called it his “most important job” ever; many critics rated it the best war movie of all time. That job done, Coward embarked on another fundraising tour, this one taking him to virtually every corner of the non-occupied and recently liberated world, and he capped off the war years by writing and producing the film Brief Encounter (1945), which, directed by Lean and starring Celia Johnson as a middle-class wife and Trevor Howard as the doctor with whom she has a fleeting affair, proved to be one of the great cinematic love stories, unexampled in its subtlety, restraint, and delicacy of feeling.

And after the war? In the 1920s, Noël had been the personification of posh English youth; during the war, arguably, no show-business figure on either side of the conflict had done anywhere near as much to put his talent at the service of his country (in reward for which, by the way, he was unceremoniously hauled into court for violating new rules—of which he was unaware—about international financial transactions). But now? “Peace had brought with it a world in which Noël Coward did not belong,” declares Soden, “and he did not want to.” He hated the socialists who replaced Churchill, hated their welfare state, hated the general decline in manners and culture. He had fought the censors tooth and nail for decades, but when stage censorship in Britain ended in 1968, he hated that, too. He also hated the youth culture of the Sixties. (When he was taken to Fire Island, the gay beach getaway in New York, he was appalled.) In 1949 he settled on the island of Jamaica; in 1956, while retaining his home there, he established official residency in Bermuda, and later he became a Swiss resident to avoid Britain’s punitive tax rates (which applied in Jamaica, a British possession until 1962). In the immediate post-war years, a few of his new plays were winners, but the list of failures was longer; even revivals of some of his earlier hits closed quickly.

For a while he was overshadowed by Terence Rattigan, the author of such sturdy “well-made plays” as The Winslow Boy (1946) and The Browning Version (1948); then along came the Angry Young Men with their working-class dramatis personae and deliberately dreary “kitchen-sink realism,” which made both Coward and Rattigan, not to mention Maugham, look like antiquated back numbers. (Interestingly, these back numbers were all gay, while the angry young rebels were all straight.) As for the other hot new dramas of the period, Coward (who was the son, remember, of a traveling salesman) found Death of a Salesman “boring” (he was bored by Pinter, too) and called Waiting for Godot “pretentious gibberish” but recognized Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as “brilliant”; in 1970, he walked out of Kenneth Tynan’s nude off-Broadway revue Oh! Calcutta! As the years went by, to be sure, he moderated some of these verdicts, eventually mending fences with most of the Angry Young Men, no longer so angry or young; in time, even his boredom with Pinter yielded to admiration.

Interestingly, these back numbers were all gay, while the angry young rebels were all straight.

Meanwhile, responding stoically to the end of his reign as Britain’s top playwright, Coward found other ways to keep busy: he acted in a revival of Shaw’s The Apple Cart, had an annual gig at London’s Café de Paris, wrote his only novel, the fun, frothy bestseller Pomp and Circumstance (1960), and, in 1955, in exchange for a breathtaking salary of $40,000 a week (only Liberace had ever been paid more), took his cabaret act to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas for a month, where he packed them in and reaped, as he put it in his diary, “screaming rave notices.” (In an interview, he called Las Vegas “one of the most respectable towns I ever saw” because “everybody’s so occupied trying to win money that they have no time for the major vices.”) His grand slam in the desert led to a musical special on primetime American television and roles in Hollywood movies—although he turned down the offer to play Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Lolita, a novel he found “disgusting.” In his sixties, increasingly viewed as an honored relic, he saw some of his now-venerable plays very successfully revived, both onstage and on television. (Morley dates Coward’s “canonization” specifically to Laurence Olivier’s 1963 choice of Private Lives as the first work by a living playwright to be staged at the new National Theatre, where Olivier was the artistic director.) Coward became extremely close to the Queen Mother, who visited him in Jamaica, and, thanks in large part, apparently, to the strenuous efforts of his longtime chum Lord Mountbatten, he was finally knighted in 1970—a recognition for which he’d been personally nominated by George VI way back in 1942 but that he’d been denied by, of all people, his hero, fan, and friend Churchill. Perhaps it was because Coward was gay, perhaps it was tax issues, or perhaps Churchill envied the only Briton whose wartime profile came close to matching his own.

Three years after becoming Sir Noël, Coward was dead, barely into his seventies. But what an oeuvre he left behind! He wrote an astonishing number of accomplished plays in a variety of genres, many of them as enthusiastically received on Broadway as on the West End, and not a few of them adapted into popular movies. Admittedly, because he spoke so directly to his own times, some of his works that were among the most lauded at the time can now seem exceedingly dated. The film of Cavalcade, with its historical sweep and nostalgic button-pushing, made a huge impact—and, coming only six years after the start of the talkies, must be reckoned an impressive achievement—but today, unavoidably, feels creaky and sentimental. The coke fiend in The Vortex no longer shocks, but when the intense mother–son relationship at the play’s center (with its echoes of Gertrude and Hamlet) comes to a head in the third act, it still packs a punch. Private Lives, once considered a tour de force about love among the sophisticates (Morley calls it “Coward’s greatest claim to theatrical permanence” and “in many ways a perfect light comedy”), now feels, to me at least, like a relative trifle about two cases of arrested development; as for Hay Fever, Morley’s comment that it’s “one of the great light comedies of this century” when “perfectly played” but can otherwise fall horribly flat might explain my less than bowled-over response to the couple of productions I’ve seen of it.

By contrast, Brief Encounter remains a triumph of powerful simplicity, In Which We Serve is still as solid as an aircraft carrier, and This Happy Breed is terribly dear—every bit as moving, one suspects, as it was when it premiered in 1942. As for Blithe Spirit, when I saw the 1945 film adaptation recently it struck me as nothing more than macabre, but a 1956 cbs television broadcast starring Coward, Claudette Colbert, and Lauren Bacall (which was basically a filmed version of the play, staged in front of a studio audience) worked for me as a clever send-up of the conventions of drawing-room comedies.

Coward’s sparkling though less than massive corpus . . .  places him just a shade below the first rank.

Finally, the songs endure: it’s worth remembering that while Coward’s contemporaries across the pond were creating the Great American Songbook, he was the only non-stateside writer of light music whose output deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as theirs. Where does Coward belong in that hierarchy? In terms of brilliance, versatility, and prolificity he doesn’t quite measure up to the six composers—Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter, and Arlen—to whom Alec Wilder, in his definitive American Popular Song, devotes a chapter apiece. But Coward’s sparkling though less than massive corpus, ranging from classic ballads like “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “Mad about the Boy,” and “Someday I’ll Find You” to still-humorous numbers like “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “The Stately Homes of England,” and “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?,” places him just a shade below the first rank, alongside the estimable likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Harry Warren, and Arthur Schwartz. What’s more, the passage of time, far from dimming the excellence of his songs, has only made it clearer just how precious a part they are of a treasury on which singers and instrumentalists alike continue to draw.

In his prologue, Soden paraphrases Lord Mountbatten’s observation that, “while there were greater comedians, greater novelists, greater composers, greater painters, and so on, only ‘the Master had combined fourteen talents in one.’ ” Another way to make more or less the same point is to say that while America had the smart lyrics of Porter, Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and Lorenz Hart, Britain had Coward; at a time when the American comic stage had authors such as Kaufman and Hart, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and Philip Barry, among others, Britain had Coward; while Hollywood’s most distinguished love stories of the 1940s (and of all time, for that matter) included Casablanca, Waterloo Bridge, and Random Harvest, each, incidentally, with three names on its script, Britain had Brief Encounter, written by Coward—period. The list could go on and on. Even Frank Sinatra himself, who was in a career slump when Coward conquered Vegas, couldn’t have made more of a splash on the Strip in that spring of 1955 than the Master did.

And what of Soden’s Masquerade? Simply put, it’s a book that’s fully worthy of its subject. It’s the fourth full-scale Coward biography; compared to this lively account, Morley’s first, authorized life, A Talent to Amuse (1969), published while Coward was still alive, and the third, Philip Hoare’s Noël Coward (1996), are, for the most part, little more than workmanlike, often reading like cursorily fleshed-out catalogues of Coward’s theatrical credits. (The second biography, The Life of Noël Coward, written with his blessing and issued three years after his death by his loyal longtime secretary Cole Lesley, is charming, evocative, and often less biography than memoir, owing to Lesley’s detailed, delightful—and, at the end, deeply touching—recollections of Coward’s later years.) As Soden notes, his is the first life of Coward to be written after the establishment of the Coward archives, and thus contains a good deal of new information. Also, the times having changed, Soden feels freer than his predecessors to address Coward’s homosexuality explicitly, although he doesn’t offer anything on that front that might scare the horses. (Morley, who admits in the prologue to his book’s 1985 edition that Coward’s sole stricture was not to mention his sex life, says that in any event Coward’s “was not a life which lends itself to ‘amazing revelations.’”) One tiny caveat: Soden has opted for a curious structural conceit, whereby each chapter is identified as a “play” or “revue” or “film” and opens with a cast list. It’s an initially distracting but ultimately harmless stratagem, and it’s the kind of touch that Coward himself might well have found amusing. Then there’s Soden’s title, a reference to the fact that any biographer wishing to understand Coward is faced with the task of penetrating a meticulously constructed façade. True enough—but, then again, true, to an extent, of most actors, and even, it may well be, of more than a few ordinary human souls. But no matter: Soden’s elegant prose, his incisive analyses of Coward’s works, and his grasp of his subject’s complexities add up to a rich, entertaining portrait of a man whom we come away feeling that we know—and like—more than ever.