“I DO NOT THINK I COULD FORGET ANYTHING ABOUT NOEL...”

Elaine Stritch met Dominic Vlasto backstage at the Old Vic, to talk to the Noel Coward Society about what Coward meant to her.

In the printed material that comes with the CD of the show, John Lahr describes the process of working with Elaine Stritch, gradually knocking into shape the material that was to become At Liberty. He likened the process to a baseball game, where “she was the pitcher and I was the catcher.” Stritch was, he says, “at her best when she was seething and sour, and she had (as anyone who knows her work knows) a capacity to be breathtakingly forthright ... revealing conflict, failure, and the emotional price of Broadway survival.” The show is certainly “a vivid gallimaufrey of anecdotes.” Much of the sharpness of Stritch’s performance comes from its brutal honesty about her life, not least a frankness about her longterm alcoholism, which she cracked, and the telling of which she manages to turn into many moments of high comedy at her own expense. She says “I know I’m not always easy to work with,” and even Coward had his reservations when preparing the first production of Sail Away: “I forsee leetle clouds in the azure sky.”

Our meeting at The Old Vic gets off to a difficult start, since someone has given me the wrong date and Stritch has a physio in attendance for back problems and thought she’d cancelled all interviews until next week; but it’s about Coward, whom she adored, and so she manages to squeeze me in between the physio, a quick bowl of cereal and a strict deadline one-hour before the show starts. This is not a comfortable interview environment, but we do get to see Stritch at her gutsy, crapcutting best! Much of the content of At Liberty consists of Stritch talking and singing about her work in musicals with Rodgers, Sondheim and Coward. Coward has the best stories, and she tells them with affectionate mimicry.

Coward heard about Stritch from Leonard Bernstein, and came to see her in a show called Goldilocks, which despite a very strong production team just wouldn’t play right. “At 11.30 pm Noel Coward was at my dressing-room door. ‘Stritchie? Your attempt to keep it light, keep it gay, keep it fragrant ... impossible, I’m afraid. But take heart, Stritchie: any leading lady who doesn’t do a double-take when a nine-foot bear asks her to dance is my kind of actress.’” Any biographical show about Stritch would be incomplete without a generous serving of Sondheim. Stritch has effectively ‘branded’ some of Sondheim’s material so convincingly that it seems that songs were created for her. She maintains  this impression by very careful attention to musical detail: both Company and Follies were orchestrated by Jonathan Tunik, and for At Liberty she specified the Tunik orchestrations. She also specified her MD: “I asked for who I wanted, and I wanted Rob Bowman very desperately because he’s terrific, and we had worked together before.” She gives us Broadway Baby, Little Things You Do Together, The Ladies Who Lunch, and, of course (now that she is sixty years old and able to bring some real experience to bear on it!) I’m Still Here. It was in the subtle harmonies and complex rhythms of the Sondheim songs where the crystal brilliance of Tunik’s orchestrations and the precision of Rob Bowman’s band were made especially clear.

Elaine Stritch just knows what works in a show. For example, the endings of both halves of the show are very nicely judged. No going out on big brassy comedy numbers for Stritch: the first half trickles to a gently emotional close with a seamless medley of But Not For Me (Gershwin) and If Love Were All (Coward). This is not a Coward song that we’ve heard Stritch perform before, and she does so here with almost raw intensity and a wrenching catch in the throat at the ‘Heigh-ho,’ and with very sympathetic piano accompaniment from Bowman, which made it, for me, the most moving sequence of the entire show. This in itself is quite a tribute to Coward. The second half ‘closer’ is a gentle rendition of Something Good from The Sound of Music - it is (pace Edelweiss) the most melodic piece from that much-maligned show, and certainly Rodgers at his melodic best. Stritch’s work with Coward is well-represented by the inclusion of If Love Were All, I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party and Why Do the Wrong People Travel - but only one of these actually came from Sail Away. But it’s not supposed to be an accurate catalogue of her involvement in specific shows, more a metaphor of a life of stage and musical performances. She would have liked, she says, to include Something Very Strange: “It’s a great song - it’s almost poetry! - one of my most favourite songs I’ve ever done in my life...but there was no place for it. Oh, the wonderful stuff that we had to cut - well. not cut exactly, but which we couldn’t even think of including. Like, when I get to I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party I’d love to do all the verses, the whole number, but it is a bit late in the show for that.” And it was not possible to include Useful Phrases, which Stritch thinks “was an absolutely terrific song - it worked every single time - great humour.”

She emphasises her belief that “every truly funny song has also got a great melody,”and starts singing snatches of Zip! in illustration. We talk about the extraordinary process of her taking on a largely comedic role in Sail Away and emerging from the tour as the show’s main lead. “I remember when they told me in Philadelphia they wanted to talk to me after the show Saturday night, I thought I was going to get the sack - that’s how insecure actors are at times. And there I was being handed the whole ball-game.” No memory of that extraordinary two days learning, effectively, an entirely remodelled show (“I’m a quick study!”) can pass without remembering what Peter Matz contributed to her and the show’s success. “One of the greatest gifts I’ve ever had in my life was the fact that Peter Matz was in the pit. I was a youngster, I was talented, but Boy! I needed help. And Peter Matz was a godsend to me. Aside from the fact that he was brilliant - he was really, really talented - more than that, I thought he was the most attractive man I’d ever met in my whole life.

In Philadelphia I’d had a few Heinekens in the Variety Club, and I went up to Peter’s room afterwards and knocked on the door, and I said, ‘Can I come in? Can we have a nightcap?’ Imagine the gall of me! And he said, ‘No, you can’t. And I’m going to tell you something Elaine: you had a supporting part in this musical, and now you’ve got the lead, so go home and go to bed!’ What an adorable guy he was. People that you care about and admire ‘leave the building,’ and you’re sad, of course, but a few of them that have gone away and left all of us here for a while, a few of them you really miss. And Peter Matz is one of them.”

She understands, now, a comment that Coward made to her towards the end of his life that he was “so tired of performing.” “It got to the point where he felt that he was absolutely required to entertain. He couldn’t go to a party unless he gave them Noel Coward. And you shouldn’t have to do that, you should only have to do that on the stage. But - you can’t! Sure, you like to go to a party and have fun, but if you’re not the life and soul of the party they ask you if you don’t feel well. You cannot sit back and relax socially, if you have that kind of persona. And ... well, Noel Coward, so much was expected of him - they expected a show every time he arrived any place, and that’s really a killer. They expect a show from me, too, so I don’t go! I can’t, I don’t have the energy for that!” She admits, however, to having “extraordinary energy,” and certainly this is borne out by her performance of At Liberty. An ‘existential problem in tights’ maybe, but a problem with much heart and guts, and the ability to communicate the depth and power of great material. “I’m always ripe,” she says, “for the complicated things in life, not the easy things,” and this is what makes her testimony so telling. We feel that Rodgers, Sondheim and Coward all recognized her capacity to communicate the complex.

“They were all great in their own way. I would never judge who was the better - how can you compare greatness?”