Show Business: Noel Coward at 70

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Yet the pitch of last week's praise for Coward was a measure of what he himself calls "the Noel Coward renaissance." He has lived long enough to see himself transformed from a faded relic of some impossibly sophisticated yesterday into a minor classic. After World War II, a new generation viewed him—along with P. G. Wodehouse—as the last, slightly ridiculous vestige of the frivolous '20s. Country houses, stiff upper lips, cocktails-and-laughter-but-oh-what-comes-after and all that. Many of his plays flopped in the '40s and '50s and his fortunes sagged, although with typical resilience he embarked on a successful new venture as a cabaret performer in the '50s.

It was in the '60s that his best work, with its inspired inconsequentiality, seemed to exert not only a period charm but charm, period. Five years ago, a new production of Hay Fever (1924) by Olivier's National Theater Company set off a flurry of revivals and re-evaluations. The times seemed right for a look back at gaiety, and soon the brittle sophisticate of legend, clenching a cigarette holder and dashing off pages of decadent dialogue before breakfast, had become the grand old man of the English theater.

INTERVIEWER: You always gave the press plenty to talk about.

COWARD: Certainly I did. I acted up like crazy. I did everything that was expected of me. Part of the job.

Coward's greatest single gift has not been writing or composing, not acting or directing, but projecting a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise. He had it as a newcomer of 25, when he walked into a fashionable party where all but he were in formal dress, took in the situation at a glance and said reassuringly: "Now I don't want anyone to feel embarrassed." He has it still, dapper in a brown dinner jacket, hand elegantly holding aloft the perpetual cigarette, answering a request for a definition of the perfect life with a single word: "Mine."

The public personality that is built on this sense of style is Coward's one great creation, looming behind all his smaller ones and investing them with special effervescence. This is what John Osborne meant when he said that Coward "is his own invention and contribution to this century." This is what makes it idle to scan the man or his works for the "real" Noel Coward. The mask of supreme entertainer has become the man. With Coward's 70th birthday, the legend is sealed. As Carlyle said of the universe, we had best accept it—as gratefully as Coward does.

INTERVIEWER: I hope you haven't been bored having to go through all these interviews for your birthday, having to answer the same old questions about yourself.

COWARD: Not at all. I'm fascinated by the subject.