Gay Icons of the Past #1

PeterRS · May 6, 2021

Half a dozen years ago, I wrote a series of articles for an Australian gay blogsite featuring icons from gay history. Although they were all a great deal longer than the average post here, I thought it might be interesting in these times of enforced stay at home when we have lots of time to read to repeat some of them here.

This morning I was flipping through youtube when I came across a 1970 Dick Cavett show with Noel Coward and his long-time best friends, the actors Lynne Fontaine and her husband Alfred Lunt. Although the programme takes a little time to warm up and Cavett appears overly in awe of Coward, it is a highly amusing episode with Coward showing his usual cutting and often self-deprecating wit. As time passes, many will either have forgotten about Coward and his achievements or not even be aware of them. Many gay men will not even be aware of his long gay affair with one of the most senior members of British aristocracy. So I thought I would start with Coward.

In a 1999 article marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Noël Coward, TIME magazine noted that “no other 20th century figure approached Coward’s creative breadth: playwright, actor, composer, lyricist, novelist, stage director, film producer, Vegas “entertainer”. Audiences adored Coward’s plays, his stage musicals, his wit and his often-cutting repartee. Between the two World Wars, Coward dominated the theatrical profession on both sides of the Atlantic as no one else has done before or since. As TIME added, he did so with “a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise.”

Some of his plays have stood the test of time but few are programmed today. Coward claims his favourite song was "Mad About the Boy" which he wrote for a 1932 revue. Although sung by a girl about her favourite film star, Coward wrote a second unpublished version to be sung by a boy with clear homosexual overtones. Perhaps, though, he is now best known for just one song: “Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the Midday Sun.” It was first performed in New York in 1931. A frequent visitor to Asia, according to his biographer Sheridan Morley, Coward wrote the song whilst driving from Hanoi to Saigon “without pen, paper or piano!”

Yet behind his assured, high society mask, for much of his life Coward was a deeply unhappy man. TIME mentions that Coward was gay. He was also from a very middle-class background. Born in the suburbs of London, at 14 he became the protégé and almost certainly the lover of a society painter, Philip Streatfield. Although Streatfiled was to die a year later, Coward had by then been introduced widely into the high society of the times and quickly adopted its accent and manners.

Entering his teens, Coward started work as a child actor. He had always been interested in the theatre and by age 20 he was writing his own plays. Soon he was to be a huge success in virtually all areas of society entertainment. It was at a performance of his musical revue “London Calling” in 1923 that he met one of his early and longest-lasting lovers. Prince George, Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of Britain’s King George V (and thus uncle to the present Queen). They began a clandestine affair. During the Roaring Twenties, the scandals surrounding the very bisexual, drug-taking Prince George were legendary. Even after his marriage, one commentator at the time noted, “He is not safe in a taxi with either sex.” The British Security Service once reported that George and Coward had been seen cavorting through the streets of London “dressed and made up as women!” Their on-going relationship was to last for two decades. Only death parted George from “dearest, darling Noël”. In 1942 George was killed in an air crash in Scotland. Coward wrote in his diary, “The thought that I shall never see him again is terribly painful.”

In public Coward was a master of the one-line quip, often cutting and always trotted out spontaneously. One evening walking across London’s Leicester Square, a friend drew his attention to the huge advertising hoarding above the Odeon Cinema –

Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde

in

The Sea Shall Not Have Them

Bemused, Coward turned to his friend and exclaimed, “I can’t think why ever not, dear boy. Everyone else has!” In the movie business, Redgrave was known to be bisexual and Bogarde homosexual, although neither came out during their lives.

In another famous Coward quip. he was standing on a balcony overlooking the procession of carriages passing en route to the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Beside him was his young nephew. In one carriage was a monstrously overweight woman. Noël’s nephew was curious.

“Uncle Noël! Who is in that carriage?”

“That, dear boy, is Queen Sālote of Tonga.”

Pointing to her tiny slim Prime Minster sitting opposite, the nephew was equally curious.

“And who is the little man with her?”

“That, dear boy, is her lunch!”

Given his enormous success in the years between the World Wars and the patriotic film he wrote as part of the national war effort “In Which We Serve”, it was assumed that Coward would be awarded a knighthood. He was not. Prime Minister Churchill and other top members of the government were aware of the relationship with Prince George and were anxious that it be totally covered up, to the extent that George’s letters to Coward were stolen from his London home – with Churchill’s approval. Apart from the scandal if the public were to hear of the affair, homosexual relations between two men were strictly illegal, and would remain so in England until 1967. Coward would finally be given a knighthood in 1970. Perhaps somewhat extraordinarily, George’s sister-in-law, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, remained a lifelong friend.

After the war, Coward started a relationship with a young actor, Graham Payne, who was to remain with him for the rest of his life. Soon Coward and Payne took a long lease on a house in Jamaica named Goldeneye, owned by Ian Fleming the creator of the James Bond novels. Later they built their own house on the island and it was here that Coward died in 1973. Thereafter Payne was frequently questioned about a relationship with Prince George. He refused to confirm any had taken place. Indeed throughout his life Coward had never openly revealed his sexuality.

Coward’s contribution to his country is marked by a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey and the re-naming in 2006 of one of London’s theatres as the Noël Coward Theatre.