The Master’s bathroom cabinet was blissfully free of vanity products
I will never forget the wave of emotion that surged through me when I first looked into Noël Coward’s bathroom cabinet. It was 1999 and I was in Firefly, his hilltop house in Jamaica, where Coward died in 1973. Firefly is open to the public and, as on the Marie Celeste, the rooms and their contents are preserved unchanged from the day the playwright died there. Most poignant for me were the half-used contents of his bathroom cabinet. Need I explain how redolent they were of the very essence of the man? Moreover, with tiny traces of DNA still present on the razor and toothbrush, might the museum world admit there is a new curatorial niche waiting to be filled – ‘bio-obilia’? I may add that, although Coward was one of the top dandies of his day, those bathroom cabinet contents were minimal. A rusty razor, a rusty tin of...
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