Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward. Orig Pub in Great Britain Under Title: Life of Noel Coward [Hardcover]

Cole Lesley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1976

Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward by Lesley, Cole

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House (November 1976)
• ISBN-10: 039449816X
• ISBN-13: 978-0394498164
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,858,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE best read on Coward, December 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward. Orig Pub in Great Britain Under Title: Life of Noel Coward (Hardcover)

from the title (marvelous!) on, this older (1976) book remains the best read on Noel Coward around. It's all here, consumately engaging, lovingly presented, with dignity, style, charm and all the other positive things that the incomparable Mr. Coward possessed. It's the sort of book one reads again and again and continues to capture the essence of Coward.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Names Dropped With A Thud!, November 8, 2006

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward. Orig Pub in Great Britain Under Title: Life of Noel Coward (Hardcover)

Noel Coward, prolific playwright and songsmith, had one of the Twentieth Century's better documented lives-- hardly a day passed without his picture's popping up in the paper. He wrote some outstanding, long-lived plays, such as "Blithe Spirit," and "Private Lives:" he also wrote such well-known songs as "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," and "Heigh-ho."He published his own two-volume autobiography. And, as if we needed more, along came a biography by Cole Lesley, Coward's longtime secretary-companion, as they used to say, and his heir.

The question is, how much more do we get from this fat book? If Lesley wrote with all the advantages of having been extremely close to his subject in life, he's also hobbled by all the disadvantages of such a situation. You could say he carries English reticence to an extreme. He also quotes Coward as having joked that any biography of his ought to be called "Name Dropping," in recognition of the troops of Names that marched through his life. And oh my, troops of Names do march through this book. Furthermore, unfortunately for us Americans, the Gertrude Lawrences, Kate Hepburns,Irene Mayer Selznicks and Marlene Dietrichs are few in proportion to all those now-obscure, at least to us, English society figures and theatrical stars of the Teens, Twenties and Thirties. Finally, it gets a little tiring trying to remember who mouthed which witticism to who, and where. Maybe wit should not be served cold; maybe we don't have as much time for it as we once did. Or maybe it's Lesley's annoying cutesy amateur writing style.

More irritating yet is Lesley's poor judgement as to what we might want to know. We get pages and pages of houseparty chat, but are told in single, bald sentences of Coward's periodic breakdowns. We are quoted scores of clever transatlantic telegrams to an American, Jack, clearly one of Coward's great loves. Next thing we know, Coward's attending Jack's wedding, to an actual Princess Natasha, at the Connecticut home of Jack's parents. No idea of Coward's feelings on the matter, though I suppose we can guess.

But we are told that he sailed across the seas on September 1 for this event; that he quoted Dorothy Parker's line about the wedding's representing "the twenty-first fine careless rapture," for bride and groom, and that Coward and the elegant Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg marked the occasion by writing naughty verses, in French, celebrating the erotic properties of Vaseline, to be sung to the tune of "La Petite Tonkinoise."

Well, if you're a Noel Coward fan, and admire his wit, there's lots of it to be had here, and we won't soon be getting any more vintage Noel Coward. If you haven't the patience for this kind of thing, this isn't going to be for you.