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unearths some literary gems.
From The Privilege of His Company, a biography of Noel Coward by William Marchant:***[Kenneth Tynan on John Gielgud's performance in Noel Coward's Nude with Violin]"Sir John never acts seriously in modern dress; it is the lounging attire in which he relaxes between classical bookings, and his present performance as a simpering valet is an act of boyish mischief, carried out with extreme elegance and the general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella."***[Said Coward]"One night I expanded the line. 'Of George IV there is absolutely nothing to be said,' and paused, and added in a sort of stricken voice, 'except that there is nothing to be said.' It was greeted with a shout of laughter, as it was at every performance thereafter until I threw the sketch out of the show."***[Marchant refers to a line, "Everything smells like something else... it's so dreadfully confusing," from one of Coward's plays, and describes Noël's attitudes in that vein, and in related areas]The lobby of the St. Regis Hotel in New York smelled to him uncomfortably like the piano department at Harrod's. [...] In America all sirloin steaks looked like bedroom slippers to him, and if the film showing at the old Roxy movie palace was no good, one could always look away and pretend one was rather drunk at the post office at Granada. [...] Beverly Hills looked like an uncommonly bad Raoul Dufy. [...] Strangers on the street or at restaurant tables were studied carefully to determine exactly whose twins they were. If the resemblance was only partial, or limited to a single feature, it was seen to have been an exchange of some kind: "That waiter has wickedly stolen Lilli Palmer's nose," or "Whatever can have possessed poor Margaret Rutherford to lend her chin to the Princess Murat?" [...] Faces were also understood to be in a transitory state and frequently seemed to be in a dreadful rush to look like someone else or to be marking time until the right original came along who might be copied. [He said of a Truman Capote photo], "What will this face be like twenty years from now? ... At the moment it isn't so much a face as a pre-face." [...]***
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