The Welsh Profile

IVOR NOVELLO (306 pp.)--Peter Noble --British Book Centre ($3).

"One morning . . . a most important gentleman came to our front door carrying a huge big box from Queen Victoria . . . There was a letter on top written in gold ink . . . He was all dressed in a beautiful uniform of red, and had on a blue hat with a white feather. When Mamsie hurried to open the big box she found it was all lined with red, white and blue cotton wool, and there in the very middle was ME."

While most of his contemporaries were still thinking of themselves as bundles dropped by a passing stork, little Ivor Novello had already and all by himself imagined, in this glamorous parthenogene-sis-in-Technicolor, his first theatrical production.

In later years, right up until his death last March, Novello produced box after box of fluffy entertainment for the British public--and there in the middle of almost every show was Ivor. He was not only Britain's Ziegfeld but also Britain's Valentino, and for a while her Jack Barrymore too; added to which he was one of the most successful song writers of his day, and a maker of light comedies second only to Noel Coward.

Ivor Novello, a biography by Peter Noble, British theater historian, does full, sometimes fulsome, credit to its flamboyant subject, and tells a success story as pat as any Novello melodrama.

A Song for History. Ivor Novello Davies was born in Cardiff, Wales, the son of David Davies, an accountant, and Clara Davies, a singing teacher. Little Ivor was early set down as a prodigy, at least by his doting mother, because, she said, he cried in perfect thirds. Mother was impatient for promise to become performance. "Darling," she reminded him all through his boyhood, "do you realize that if you died tomorrow, it would not make the slightest difference to the world?"

Ivor turned to song writing in his teens and in 1914, when he was only 21, wrote out one that made him both rich and famous: Keep the Home Fires Burning. It caught the ear of the marching men, and they sang it into history as one of the most popular songs of all time--to the distinct discomfiture of Novello's regular publisher, who rejected it.

Ivor was a national idol overnight. His delicately handsome profile, photographed in a thousand lights, became somehow confused in the public mind with a patriotic poster, and to lonely wives and mothers he became a romantic surrogate for the men away at war. The movies invited him into their realms of gold and in he went.

The Call of the Blood, when it was shown in 1920, puffed Ivor into a fullblown matinee craze, and The Rat, a melodrama which Ivor wrote, produced and starred in, made him a leading figure on the stage as well. Glamorous Night, the first Novello musical (in which he also starred), was a huge hit. The Dancing Years, his fourth musical, ran for ten years. Ivor composed seven musicals before he was through, all beautifully decorated and loaded with the brisk tunes and languid ballads that Britons had learned to expect of him.

Cheers Before the Curtain. By 1936, after a rat-tat-tat of hit plays and pictures, Novello was generally conceded to be "the most considerable personality on the English stage," not excepting Noel Coward himself. He had won his position, he admitted, with a formula rather simpler than Noel's: "Avoid gloom, and try to get a good cast."

By last winter, he was 58 and dead tired, but he could not bring himself to take a final bow. "My ambition," he once confessed, "is to go on working till I drop . . . I should like to make an enchanting curtain speech at the end of a wildly successful first night, and--to the sound of cheers and applause--drop gracefully dead. If possible, before the curtain falls!"

One night last March, Novello substantially got his wish. Three hours after he took his curtain call for a successful performance of his latest musical, King's Rhapsody, he died of a heart attack.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.