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Noel's first Big Moment came with his first hit, The Vortex. From then on his career as playwright, actor, song-&-dance man, revue writer went from peak to peak.
But it had its valleys too. Once Noel had the unpleasant experience of hearing a third act (of Sirocco) drowned in boos, of being literally spat on by a waiting crowd —In Red Peppers, one of the nine plays in Tonight at 8:30, which closed abruptly in Manhattan fortnight ago when Author Coward took to his bed with laryngitis (TIME, March 22). at the stage door. He gave the crowd a furious look, sent his overcoat to the cleaners. Twice he has tired of it all, taken his shattered nerves on world-weary cruises.
But each time he has come back again with an even bigger success in his pocket. He now considers himself primarily a writer.
''I love acting, and it is only during the last few years that I have become good, although, as yet, limited in scope." What he thinks of himself as a writer he modestly leaves between the lines. He avers that Cavalcade, his most successful play, was written "straight"—not, as often rumored, "with my tongue in my cheek, in bed, probably wearing a silk dressing-gown and shaking with cynical laughter." Like Coward's plays, Present Indicative strikes many a theatrically effective note of frankness. When he was a child-actor in London he used to steal waitresses' fourpenny tips to eke out his meagre lunches.
When well-to-do women invited him to accompany them to Venice at their expense, he was not insulted but accepted gratefully. And when he speaks of a minor operation he had, he says straight out that it was for piles.