Driven mad about a boy
QUESTION
Was Noel Coward’s song Mad About The Boy inspired by a movie actor?
Mad about The Boy was the signature song of Noel Coward’s dazzling 1932 revue Words and Music, which also featured Mad dogs and Englishmen.
The song expresses the adulation of a film star by a group of women as they queue outside a cinema:
On the silver screen He melts my foolish heart in every
single scene Although I’m quite aware that here and
there are traces of the cad About the boy.
Coward was intensely private about his sexuality. after all, it was an era when homosexual acts were illegal.
He later wrote additional verses to be sung by a businessman in a pinstripe suit. The lyrics make a more open reference to homosexual feelings:
When I told my wife, She said: ‘I’ve never heard such
nonsense in my life!’ Her lack of sympathy embarrassed me And made me frankly glad about
the boy.
It is rumoured that James Cagney inspired the song. Famous for his later menacing portrayal of gangsters in films such as The Public Enemy and White Heat, Cagney started out as a song and dance man.
He put these skills to good use in Footlight Parade and Yankee doodle dandy. In his first professional acting performance in 1919, Cagney wore drag and danced in the chorus line of the revue Every Sailor.
Philip Hoare’s biography of Coward contains a couple of anecdotes that support the rumour about the song’s origin. Composer Ned Rorem claimed he’d ‘heard that he [Coward] and James Cagney were lovers. That the song Mad about The Boy was written for Cagney . . . I thought it was so incongruous that is why it stuck with me.’
Coward’s U.S. agent Charles Russell said the star told him: ‘He had a rough and tumble with James Cagney, a wrestling match on the floor.’
Annabelle Lawson, Chichester, W. Sussex.
QUESTION
How did Strata Florida Abbey in West Wales get its name?
THIS former Cistercian abbey near Pontrhydfendigaid, a remote village in Ceredigion, was founded in 1164. The name Strata Florida is a Latinisation of the Welsh Ystrad Fflur and has a double meaning: Valley of (the river of) flowers.
Ystrad corrupts into Strata while Fflur (flowers) is also the name of the nearby river.
The abbey was second only to St david’s as a place of pilgrimage and linchpin of Welsh culture.
Strata Florida was targeted during the dissolution of the Monasteries and little remains of what was once clearly a great place of worship. But there is still enough for visitors to feel the presence of a forgotten way of life.
Giles Rees, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.