![]() Payn was remarkably open, although still somewhat guarded, talking about his partner of 30 years. When writing Coward’s biography in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to talk to his contemporaries about those days. more images from the album, including one of his Kent house. ![]() It’s a story wittily and lovingly camped up in a novel by Goldenhurst’s later owner, Julian Clary, under the title Briefs Encountered.īearing witness. Wilson was the great love of Coward’s life, but his alcoholism and infidelities drove them apart. Then there’s Jack Wilson, Coward’s American manager, who has the square-jawed look of Marlon Brando, or an American football player. Graham Payn, an altogether less troubling young man, was to become Coward’s longest and most constant companion, and became the executor of his estate when the dramatist died in Jamaica in 1973. As John Gielgud once told me, Webb was “a very caustic and brilliant actor … one of the few who dared to oppose Noël”. We see the two men posing on the beach at Nassau in the Bahamas, holidaying there together in 1937. His relationship with Alan Webb, then starring in Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, was tempestuous, and ended in tears. Yet these men were his lovers and he made no secret of it. The mere existence of such images could have brought the punitive weight of the law – and public prejudice – down on Coward’s head. ![]() And then there are all those handsome young men, sporting droopy woollen swimsuits that leave nothing to the imagination. But Coward’s allure extended far beyond the stage: the writers Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf were also his good friends. ![]() Many of Coward’s guests are highly glamorous theatre women: Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead, Gladys Calthrop. Coward, on right, in the Bahamas with Alan Webb, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. And here’s Alec Guinness, in smart sunglasses, with his seraphic smile that gave little of his personal life away. There’s Lord Mountbatten, fishing – Coward was later to play him in the wartime film In Which We Serve. They bask in the ancient, faded sunlight, these people whose lives were bookended by two world wars. Here, and at more exotic sites, we see the artist and his famous friends at play. Many of the shots were taken at Goldenhurst, Coward’s country retreat in Kent, an extended redbrick farmhouse he bought in 1926. It is because of her long-held loyalty to the man she and other intimates only half-ironically called the Master that the album has only now come to light, due to be sold at a London sale room later this month. Apparently compiled in the 1930s by Coward’s closest female friend, Joyce Carey, the album is a remarkable insight into gay lives of the interwar years, lived in plain sight. It shows intimate glimpses from the private life of this towering cultural figure. It is this that makes a newly discovered photograph album so extraordinary. But perhaps the most astounding thing of all is the fact that – at a time when homosexuality was illegal and would remain so for some time – he lived an openly gay life. As well as writing hit songs, musicals, novels and short stories, he painted and, not least, performed. In 1931, Noël Coward was the highest-earning author in the western world, celebrated for his scintillating comedies and sensational dramas of hidden love such as The Vortex, Private Lives and Easy Virtue.
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