Noel Coward, tax exile. 4 July 1975

There's a story told about the late Sir Noel Coward in his last days and I can only say I hope it's true. It was no secret that for a good deal of his life, he had his tax troubles and, after the war, he tried living in various retreats overseas – Bermuda, Jamaica – and finally came back to settle in his native land. This was at a time when it was also no secret his appeal had waned. The rising generation had effectively dated and the critics had dismissed the drawing-room comedies of the '20s and '30s.

Well, as we all know, but always forget, nothing is more perishable than the judgement of the absolutely up-to-date critics. A writer is condemned to perdition by a new generation of critics. He slumbers in obscurity, not to say contempt, for a while and he gets into his seventies and suddenly the very young rediscover him as a neglected genius. I'm delighted to see that this has happened to Mr J. B. Priestley who was considered very gauche and middlebrow by the vital, young highbrows of the 1920s and '30s, all of whom have now vanished into what, I suspect, is permanent obscurity. 

Well, it happened to Noel Coward. He was the darling of London. Then he wasn't quite up to scratch and then he slipped and then he was old hat. And then, a few years before the end, he was rediscovered by the unlikeliest people. He became reverently known as 'The Master.' He was knighted and he was acclaimed wherever he went. And once again he found most of his income on the way to the tax bureau. So he made a final decision. He sought another haven and he found it in Switzerland. 

The day he left, the newspapers were on to his departure and corralled correspondents in Paris and Geneva and even, I believe, sent one or two over from London to be on hand to embarrass him as he arrived at Geneva. There was quite a bobbing crowd of newsmen as he got off his plane, went through immigration and came to the customs shed. His bags were soon passed and followed a porter through to a waiting car. Beyond the barrier the reporters swarmed around him and one of them cried, 'Why, Sir Noel, did you choose to leave England and settle in Switzerland?' And he sailed on through them without a pause, turned once before getting in his car and said, 'Adore chocolates!' 

Well now, I read, along with much sympathetic editorialising in American papers, about the plight of other stars, native Britons who have straggled up, some of them from poverty, have acquired glittering rewards but found, to their astonishment, that the money glitters very briefly before it's packed off to the tax boys. It's not a theme that jerks tears out of the ordinary householder. Most people would gladly settle for the pittance with which these superstars find life is intolerable. But it affects everyone who comes to feel that all the talent and the effort, however modest, weren't worthwhile, whether the pay-off is in hundreds of thousands of dollars or only scores of pounds. 

I see that Sean Connery has come to the conclusion that he can no longer afford to live either in England or his native Scotland, though more than the vast majority of movie stars, he's had a commendable share of what we used to call 'a social conscience'. Mr Connery will live in Spain. His successor as the imperturbable James Bond, Roger Moore, is going to spend the whole year outside his native land so as to keep most of what he earns in one year, at least. 

And another star, who chose to be nameless, put his problem this way. The good years for an actor who's lucky are fewer than the public ever dreams. When the good years come, the natural temptation is to live up to the income that is left over after taxes. But that can spell ruin because then you're no longer fashionable, the big parts don't come your way and people say, 'I wonder whatever happened to so-and-so?' By that time you find yourself thousands and thousands of dollars or pounds in arrears and the bad years are on you. You simply cannot earn the taxes. You come face to face with the bureau and they make a deal. They will confiscate most of what you earn, however little, till you've paid off an agreed percentage of what you owe, which you may never manage to do. And you're still a has-been and you end up in what we call 'the prime of life', living from hand to mouth or, more likely, friend to friend. 

Now surely most of us will think this is an exaggeration, an absurd sob story, but it happened to Veronica Lake and Betty Hutton and Mae Murray. And Joe Louis. And is happening to more living stars than it would be tasteful to mention. The American Screen Actors' Guild reports from time to time the average earnings of its many thousand members. In America, at any rate, the average earnings of all actors and actresses is less than $4,000 a year. That's to say about £1,500. All the legions of young hopefuls who swarm into New York as they once swarmed into Hollywood, and maybe swarm into both places in the hope of television fame, they all think that within a few years they'll be Robert Redford or Raquel Welch or at least Diana Rigg or Raymond Burr. The chances are about one in ten thousand. 

Most, literally 98 per cent, of the big stars started as fairly poor boys and girls and when they make it, they're appalled to learn the facts of economic life. They hang on the word of comfortable oldsters who tell about the times when you earned it and kept it – kept, in fact, quite a lot. 

I... I must confess that as a young journalist, crossing the Atlantic once, in the old days, on a big ship, I hung with barely concealed envy on the remark of a famous English novelist. He was not exactly Dickens or Balzac. He had a small talent that hit off the life of what was called 'the bright young people' in the 1920s. He wrote one chic and rather lurid novel about life among the Mayfair crowd. It was a huge success. It was translated into I don't know how many languages. It was made at least twice into a movie and after that he wrote very little. And in his thirties he bought a house on the Riviera and lived between there and New York. 

I ran into him on the Queen Mary and one night we were joined at drinks by a charming, young, middle-aged couple from Memphis, Tennessee. I doubt, in fact I know, they'd never heard of him. At one point the Memphis wife turned to him and said, 'Excuse me, Mr A, but what do you do?' – which in American is a polite idiom. Without a tremor or the flicker of an eyelid, he said blandly, 'I'm a retired writer.' And I thought at the time what a... what a marvellous thing to say when you're moving into your sixties. 

Well, you couldn't say it any more, no matter how successful you'd been. And here, the Authors Guild of America has been trying to do something because in spite of Dr Johnson's snap remark that no writer worth his salt writes for anything but money, most writers who have any 'stuff' in them want, like most good carpenters, painters, architects and car salesmen, they want mainly to do good work. They're invigorated by what they do and for as long as decent breath is in them, they have an itch to be the best of their trade. 

I have honestly known only the tiniest number of authors, and I've known a slew of them, who frankly sit down and write for money. And these few are poor things. They may be slick, they may have a fast talent, but even when they earn a million, they are not admired by their fellow writers. And yet it happens, and especially with writers of fiction, that they labour away at their lonely trade for years making, or not making a decent living and then, one day, they happen to hit the jackpot. Their royalties in one year are enviable. They can now spread the tax bite over three years, but that bite can be voracious and when it's taken, they revert to their former, fairly precarious life. The Authors' League thinks this is an injustice as against the life of a salesman or a truck driver, or a sailor, with a life pension. And it's unjust, too, they think, of actors, or increasingly in our time with sports superstars, whose span of big earnings is much shorter than that of movie stars or successful novelists. Muhammad Ali now says he's through and he may, in those few words, have, as Mr Johnny Mercer once said, 'spoke a book.' Ali is the one case in a generation of a sports star who, having earned about $50 million is able to keep one million five hundred. 

Then there's the case of Tony Jacklin, the only Englishman to have won the United States Open Golf Championship in donkey’s years. The money available to a top golfer is enormous, not merely from his tournament winnings but by way of endorsing sweaters and shoes and golf clubs and lawn mowers. In Japan they even have a chain of Arnold Palmer tee shops. What these simple, hard-slogging boys really realise is that the taxes, too, are enormous. They evidently floored Tony Jacklin who has taken off for the Channel Islands and virtual exile from his native land at the age of (what is it?) 31, 32? It seems a pity. 

And there are people who say that the most industrious talents in Britain and America are being driven away by an inequitable tax system. I question this, but even if true, the inequity extends to all of us. My own, rather downright, feeling is that if people desert their homeland for a tax haven, it's their own business but by so doing, they have forfeited the right to talk and argue about the politics of their native country. They have, in the most practical way, given up the citizen's right of complaint. 

Still... still, in all, it does seem cruel that any man or woman, any couple, especially when they approach late, middle or old age, should not be able to count the rewards of their lifetime's work. Or, as a young writer put it to me, 'I want to feel that in my country, the harder I work, the more I can see some, tangible result for it.' That does make people feel more like individuals and less like cogs.

Well, by a weird association, I thought of this the other week when a most attractive, young American golfer, Tom Watson, who may well be headed for superstardom – he's only 25 – he walked, or rather he ran off the golf course when a bolt of lightning shot out of the sky. He claimed one of the tools of golf which the player himself may act on. 'I invoke the lightning rule', he said. And he ran for cover before the rather miffed officials agreed with him after a larger and closer bolt. 

'Why did you do it?' the press asked him in the press tent. 'Because,' young Watson said, 'there will be lots of United States Open Championships; there's only one of me.' 

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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