There are few images more iconic than the cover photo of 1955's Noël Coward at Las Vegas: the lone gentleman impeccably turned out in evening clothes and black tie, elegantly toting a teacup amidst a lunar expanse of Nevada desert. He is literally, as his most famous song put it, an Englishman in the midday sun. But it wasn't just the parched landscape that set off everything that was great about Noël Coward — this splendidly urbane man was equally exotic in 1950s Las Vegas, that gilded palace of sin, a tacky middle-class playground run by mobsters. There, as in that photograph, Coward was an oasis of Old World sophistication in the philistinic land of TV dinners and Howdy Doody. Ever the astute showman, he rose to the occasion with one of his greatest recordings.
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Having had a spectacular run on the British stage in the '20s and '30s as a playwright, actor and songwriter, Coward's star had been on a slow wane for years; he was also in serious financial trouble. But now, in his mid 50s, he was about to commence a rare second act. It all started when Louis Armstrong's manager Joe Glaser caught Coward's cabaret show at London's swank Café de Paris and invited him to play the Strip. It was an unlikely call — as Coward famously quipped about Las Vegas, "It was not café society. It was Nescafé society." But, lured by the siren call of an astronomical $15,000 a week (about $179,000 in today’s dollars), Coward brought his show to the Desert Inn in the white-hot Nevada summer of '55.
On opening night of his four-week run the audience included mega-luminaries like Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis, Jr., David Niven, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Merle Oberon, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. It was an auspicious start: Ol' Blue Eyes soon raved about Coward's show on national radio: "If you want to hear how songs should be sung, get the hell over to the Desert Inn!"
And that's exactly what legendary Columbia Records chief Goddard Lieberson did, along with a recording crew.
On Noël Coward at Las Vegas, Vegas glitz extends right into the arrangements — arranger Peter Matz (Tony Bennett, Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand) usually introduces the songs with a florid full-band flourish, then, swing established, it all subsides into Matz's solitary, sympathetic piano, foregrounding Coward's urbane soliloquies. Then, at the close of the number, the band invariably strikes up again, creating an overblown frame that cannily highlights Coward's preternatural refinement.
When Frank Sinatra says someone knows how songs should be sung, one would best take heed. Coward famously noted, "I can't sing, but I know how to, which is quite different." His crisp, clipped delivery is not only essential to his wordplay but manages to range from melancholy and ennui (the blithely suicidal "World Weary") to debauched bemusement ("Nina"). Besides, to sing well would be to stoop to the declassé station of the musician; this way, Coward maintained the veneer of the slumming sophisticate dashing off droll sketches for the amusement of his peers. The rest of us are just getting a peek at how the upper crust giggles and pines.
Hailing back at least as far as Gilbert & Sullivan and on through his peer Cole Porter, the way Coward triangulates rhyme scheme, melody and narrative has the elegant inevitability of a geometry proof. Like Saki and P.G. Wodehouse, his tales recall a more civilized, discreet time, when excesses certainly occurred but nobody was crass enough to mention them.
And yet for all his elegance, this is Vegas, after all, and things get racy almost immediately. After an opening medley, it's right into "Uncle Harry" — the misadventures of a randy missionary who concludes, "In all those languid latitudes/ the atmosphere's exotic/ To take up moral attitudes/ would be too… idiotic." Later, there's "Alice Is at It Again," Coward's droll tale of a country lass who apparently enjoys the, um, company of animals. Coward had always kept his sexuality private — no one was gay in the '50s, you see — but along comes a spirited version of the traditional Scottish ballad "Loch Lomond," no less, of which he offers "my own personal version." He begins with a very straight (sorry) reading of the venerable chestnut, but eventually his "true love" turns out to be "my bonnie laddie/ in his wee bittie kilt of Caledonian plaidie." No one seems shocked, though. How does he get away with it? Well, he's a posh middle-aged Englishman, and also this is the temporary autonomous zone of Las Vegas, where hidebound morals are loosened like a necktie.
By the fourth number, "A Bar on the Piccola Marina," the audience is eating out of his hand, laughing after virtually every line, even ones that weren't intended to be funny. He makes 'em laugh with "Nina," he makes 'em cry with "World Weary," and then he blows 'em away with a romping sprint through his immortal "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," his plummy diction hitting every mark with fastidious panache.
The tender "Matelot," written for his partner of 30 years, Graham Payn, is perhaps Coward's prettiest melody and most poignant lyric; his lilting tenor harks back vividly to his between-the-wars heyday. The ballads are exquisite, even heartbreaking, but here they're just a way of setting up the comic numbers. Coward had written the wistful "A Room with a View" 30 years before, in the midst of severe mental and physical exhaustion, about a carefree, and clearly impossible, romantic idyll; Coward gently rolls his r's like a purring cat, his gracefully elastic phrasing expanding and compressing the lines like an accordion. Stuff like that is probably what impressed Sinatra, a singer's singer.
But the reverie is shortly erased by Coward's risqué reworking of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)," name-checking notables of the day like Ernest Hemingway, the Gabor sisters, the recently disgraced Sen. Joseph McCarthy and many others — even, oh so ingratiatingly, the Desert Inn's owner Wilbur Clark. He also slyly outs a few of his peers: Tennessee Williams, Somerset Maugham, and Porter himself, not to mention "nice young men who sell antiques." His parting shot: "Even Liberace, we assume, does it," which brings gales of knowing applause. He bids a bittersweet adieu with his signature closing number, "The Party's over Now": "The thrill has gone/ To linger on/ Might spoil it anyhow/ Let's creep away from the day/ For the party's over now." (And let’s just take a moment to admire the rhyme scheme of those lines — [chef’s kiss]!)
But the party was not over — as Coward noted in his diary, his run at the Desert Inn was "one of the most sensational successes of my career." Noël Coward was a star all over again. He went on to do a handful of television specials and enjoyed a renaissance that continued right up to his death in 1973. Coward's suave wit and style lives on in the Pet Shop Boys, Morrissey and Magnetic Fields. But which one of them will be the first to play a Vegas nightclub? My bet's on Morrissey.
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