Product Description

This is the definitive memoir of the private Noel Coward by the only man with the compassionate insight and first-hand experience to write it. Graham Payn, star of many of Coward's shows, shared the Master's professional and private life for thirty years. When Coward kept the rest of the world at bay, Payn remained at his side as confidant and friend. No one else was as privy to Coward's doubts and dreams.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1181462 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.com Review
Graham Payn first met Noel Coward at age 13, when he auditioned for the playwright by tap dancing while singing "Nearer My God to Thee." He became Coward's longtime companion. So perhaps Payn knew better than anyone the personal side of Noel Coward, whose public personae had the trappings of an enchanted life but whose private life has been more difficult to capture. "His manner created distance between himself and those who would approach him." Payn says. This biography helps give a portrait of the playwright and tells of his vast accomplishments. The book should help keep Coward's work alive.

From Publishers Weekly
Payn, who performed as an actor and singer in several Coward plays, lived with the playwright as part of his extended family for 30 years and now administers his estate. Written with Barry Day, an advertising executive, this effusively affectionate memoir of Coward (1899-1973), best known for his sophisticated comedies (Blithe Spirit, Private Lives), is a giddily gossipy account of the luminary's long theatrical career and glittering social life. Renowned actors-Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Laurence Olivier and Lunt and Fontaine-performed in Coward plays and were also friendly with Payn. Drawing on Coward's diaries and his own recollections, Payn reveals some unflattering details and settles a few scores (e.g., Rex Harrison was tiresome offstage, and Beatrice Lillie forgot her lines). The memoir includes a transcript of a 1961 conversation between Coward and Judy Garland, as well as previously unpublished essays by Coward on the theater. Photos not seen by PW.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
While he was alive, Noel Coward the urbane public wit often overshadowed Coward the accomplished writer who was responsible for such twentieth-century masterpieces as Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit. Happily, art, like murder, will out. In the 21 years since his death, Coward's reputation as a playwright has grown. Payn's loving, immensely likable memoir of his longtime friend will not change public perceptions of Coward. It contains no dirt about the man or his unofficial family. The readable, sometimes digressive remembrance does, however, provide an interesting, often tartly witty portrait of Coward during the most difficult years of his life, the period just after World War II when his work and "Cowardy" style was suddenly unfashionable. Students of theater will find especially fascinating the master's previously unpublished essays with which Payn concludes the book; they include Coward's famous series of blistering (London) Sunday Times articles attacking the fashionable "experimental work" of the post-World War II British playwrights. Jack Helbig

Customer Reviews

What A Life, Indeed!!!
Over the course of forty years, South-African-born actor Graham Payn shared the life, love, companionship, and generous wit of that "playboy of the West End world," Noel Coward. This book is a loving and often frank tribute to this great man, who made so many people laugh for so many years, and who, in life as well as on stage, was the very epitome of the word "style". Payn begins with his first audition for Noel and the play Words and Music in the thirties, takes us through the war years, to the decidedly unforgiving (to Noel) fifties, when the critics turned against him en masse, to the triumphant sixties and "Dad's Renaissance" to an adoring public, through Noel's death and the demise of Noel's personal assistant (and fellow biographer) Cole Lesley, up to the present (1993) and the unveiling of a special tribute stone for Coward in Westminster Abbey by no less a person than the Queen Mother. If this book ended after Graham's 250-page-or-so lovely memoir, it would still be worth five stars, but there is more. Much more. In the roughly hundred pages that follow, Payn provides us with the complete Coward writings on theatre, many of which first appeared in the Sunday Times (and which, for my money, prove conclusively that Noel Coward knew more about theatre than any other person who lived in the Twentieth Century). There are also interviews with actresses Judy Garland and Judith Campbell, brief but penetrating portraits on some of the many important figures in Coward's life (including Rex Harrison, the Lunts, and Sir Winston Churchill), and much more. My one caveat that goes with my otherwise-unqualified recommendation is this: please read The Noel Coward Diaries first, so that you get a clear understanding not only of how Noel saw himself, but how he viewed many of the key figures in this book. (Author Payn plays, not surprisingly, a significant part in the diaries.) With these two books by your bedside, you'll have the best and most delicious kind of reading entertainment for many nights to come, and you'll say of Graham Payn's life with Noel Coward: "What a life, indeed!!!"

the wittiest bio of the master
coward's longtime companion graham payn probably comes as close to coward as anyone ever will. he manages to artfully weave the details of his own life with a plethora of new anecdotes -- and old -- about sir noel. the added bonus is the appendices containing previously unpublished coward works, including a tenth play [!] written for "tonight at 8:30".

well worth your time...

Thoughtful, Loving Memoir
Don't read this book unless you want to fall more in love with Noel Coward than you already must be to read the book in the first place. Mr. Payn has assembled a quilt of memoir, unpublished theatre writings by Coward, photographs, a beautiful reminiscence by one of Coward's leading ladies, and a recorded conversation between Coward and Judy Garland. The whole of the book gives a tender, honest, delightful insight into Coward, the people he loved, the perils and pleasures of his work, and the places he most enjoyed. Lovers and students of theatre will find great rewards in these pages.

It is a generous book; Mr. Payn shares with the reader all of the real stuff of knowing Noel Coward so well and for so long. He does not share intimate details of their relationship, but does share his deep love of the man himself. In short, Coward himself was a man who treasured good taste and true sentiment -- and it is fitting that his life-partner should offer this book in his honor.