Posh, insouciant, ultra-chic: Noel Coward’s greatest creation was himself

Before Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski, there was Noël Coward. Both men – half a century apart – convinced a generation that dressing gowns were entirely suitable daytime attire, even if Coward would not have been seen dead in beige towelling.

Coward preferred jacquard or silk, and his patronage of them gave dressing gowns serious social standing in the interwar years. He did the same for turtlenecks paired with a Savile Row suit, a look that prompted “all the seedier West End chorus boys”, he noted in his 1937 autobiography, to arrive at the theatre identically clad the following week.

Scarcely anything the late playwright, actor, composer and society wit said, or did, wasn’t immediately copied. He possessed, according to Time magazine, a particular combination of “pose and poise” and in his prime, in the Thirties, was probably the most admired – or desired, depending on your persuasion – man of his day.

“Coward was seriously chic, and everybody wanted to be part of that,” says curator Brad Rosenstein, who has drawn together 350 objects for a new exhibition exploring Coward’s style and incredible visual acumen at Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

“The sense that, as a man, you didn’t have to be this grey wool-suited stereotype; that you could be a bit of a peacock or a dandy without it threatening your masculinity, he made something to imitate.”

Noël Coward: Art & Style includes Coward’s clothing, costumes he wore on stage and favourite scent (Caron’s Narcisse Noir), decor from his homes in Switzerland, Jamaica, London and Kent, an extraordinary stash of home movies and 3D colour slides, together with couture gowns by the likes of Norman Hartnell and Edward Molyneux (worn by Coward’s leading ladies) and set designs by Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel and Doris Zinkeisen.

“He placed tremendous value on what his shows looked like, and made sure to hire the greatest artists and designers of his day,” explains Rosenstein. “Audiences came to count on it – they would have turned up to one of his shows expecting not just the sparkling verbal wit that we mostly identify him with today, but a visual feast as well.”

Even a cursory glance at one of the theatrical programmes for Coward’s original productions bears this out: they are stuffed with advertisements for the best dressmakers and shoe designers. Anybody he bought from was extremely keen to let it be known that they were dressing or costuming Noël Coward.

Born in the London suburb of Teddington in 1899, Coward, who began acting at the age of 12 and made his playwriting debut at 24, led his field in a way that has never really been matched since. Besides a stream of hit plays, he wrote revues, operettas and musicals. He produced and directed; he danced and sang. Coward’s greatest creation, though, was undoubtedly himself – as even he admitted. “I have taken a lot of trouble with my public face,” he said, aged 70.

That face was particular: posh, intelligent, insouciant. All of it, though, says Rosenstein, was learned. “Coward came from what he termed ‘genteel poverty’, but he turned himself into a sponge. He read voraciously; he went to art galleries; he learned about wearing the right tie.

“He once told Cecil Beaton that he took ‘ruthless stock’ of himself in the mirror every time he left the house, to be sure he hadn’t made ‘some flashy error of taste’ that could ‘expose [him] to danger’.”

Coward wasn’t exaggerating. As a gay man at a time when homosexuality in Britain was criminalised, he was always on the watch – it’s what made him so painstaking in everything he did. “We must have some means of shielding our timid, shrinking souls from the glare of civilisation,” says the character Coward played in Design for Living (1932) “It’s all a question of masks, really; brittle, painted masks.”

“Even now, I find it hard to pin him down,” agrees Coward’s former American agent, Geoffrey Johnson. “Yes, he was that guy in the snappy dressing gown with a cigarette holder, but he was much more too.”

Johnson recalls a Boxing Day at Les Avants sur Montreux, Coward’s home in Switzerland, when the two of them, plus neighbours Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had been invited to a party at David Niven’s place, in Gstaad.

“There was a terrible blizzard, and we were all in snow gear. I sat on the chair in the hall to take off my boots, and Noël said, ‘Why are you taking the only chair? Don’t you know that I wrote many, many good plays?’ He loved to make me – all of us – laugh, you see. Regardless of who you were, or where you came from, he made you feel included, important. He was always interested in your story. For me that was his genius.”

Coward had moved into Les Avants in 1958. “It was dark, traditional, heavily painted, and with these tiny windows hardly let any light in,” says Johnson. “But he had great plans for the place, and set to work on it immediately. By the time he’d finished, you could look down the mountain and see Lake Geneva. He really fell in love with the place.”

As did his legions of fans. Indeed, it wasn’t just Coward’s clothes that people aped – they were fascinated to see what kind of world he lived in, too, and the interior of every one of his homes was lavishly reported in the press.

Take Goldenhurst, the 16th-century farmhouse in Kent that was Coward’s primary residence from the Thirties to the mid-Fifties. As with his London studio near Sloane Square, he had the interior fitted out by the decorator du jour, Syrie Maugham, whose other clients included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. Maugham was most famous for her all-white rooms, though for Coward she opted for something a little less modish. “What he really loved about her style was the combination of traditional and contemporary,” says Rosenstein. “It was a highlight of his stage designs, too. Between them, mixing an 18th-century cabinet with Art Deco cocktail shakers or something, it became a new kind of chic.”

There was only one place where Coward was not at pains to be setting the style, and would sometimes let his mask slip, and that was Firefly, the house he bought in Jamaica in the late Fifties. Two tropical shirts in the exhibition represent Coward’s time, “off camera”, as it were. He even turned part of the property into a painting studio – several of the pictures he painted are also on show.

None other than the Queen Mother visited him here in 1965. Coward served Ma’am bullshots – a vigorous cocktail of vodka, beef bouillon and lemon. “We sat on the veranda before lunch and I introduced [her] to bullshots,” reads his diary entry for that day: “She had two and was delighted.”

In the Fifties and Sixties, he had everyone drinking it: first the theatre and Hollywood crowd – Joan Crawford, Richard Chamberlain, and, naturally, the Burton-Taylors – but swiftly followed by society at large, too. “Everyone wanted to do as he did, to be like him,” says Rosenstein. “He made being funny, playful, things that were not a standard part of being English was like, something to emulate. Who wouldn’t want to follow in those footsteps?”

Noël Coward: Art & Style will be at the Guildhall Art Gallery from June 14. For more information, visit cityoflondon.gov.uk