Caralyn Kozlowski and Scott Barrow in Private Lives. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

Telegram exchange between Noël Coward to Gertrude Lawrence:
HAVE WRITTEN DELIGHTFUL NEW COMEDY STOP
GOOD PART FOR YOU STOP
WONDERFUL ONE FOR ME STOP
KEEP YOURSELF FREE FOR AUTUMN PRODUCTION
NOËL

HAVE READ NEW PLAY STOP
NOTHING WRONG THAT CAN’T BE FIXED STOP
GERTIE

THE ONLY THING THAT WILL NEED TO BE FIXED IS YOUR PERFORMANCE STOP
NOËL

In his memoir, Present Indicative, Coward describes the inspiration for the play. It came in January 1930, while staying at Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel on a tour of the Far East:
“…the moment I switched out the lights, Gertie appeared in a white Molyneux dress on a terrace in the South of France and refused to go again until four a.m., by which time Private Lives, title and all, had constructed itself.
In 1923 the play would have been written and typed within a few days of my thinking of it, but in 1929 I had learned the wisdom of not welcoming a new idea too ardently, so I forced it into the back of my mind, trusting to its own integrity to emerge again later on, when it had become sufficiently set and matured.”
And weeks later,
“A bout of influenza laid me low in Shanghai, and I lay, sweating gloomily, in my bedroom in the Cathay Hotel for several days. The ensuing convalescence, however, was productive, for I utilized it by writing Private Lives. The idea by now seemed ripe enough to have a shot at, so I started it, propped up in bed with a writing-block and an Eversharp pencil, and completed it, roughly, in four days.”

From the introduction to his first collection of plays, Play Parade:
I find it very interesting nowadays, now that I have fortunately achieved a definite publicity value, to read criticisms and analyses of my plays written by people of whom I have never heard and whom I have certainly never seen, and who appear to have an insatiable passion for labeling everything with a motive. They search busily behind the simplest of my phrases, like old ladies peering under the bed for burglars, and are not content until they have unearthed some definite, and usually quite inaccurate, reason for my saying this or that. This strange mania I can only suppose is the distinctive feature of a critical mind as opposed to a creative one. It seems to me that a professional writer should be animated by no other motive than the desire to write, and, by doing so, to earn his living.

Also from Play Parade:
Private Lives was conceived in Tokyo, written in Shanghai, and produced in London in September, 1930, after a preliminary try-out in the provinces. It was described in the papers variously, as being, “tenuous,” “thin,” “brittle,” “gossamer,” “iridescent,” and “delightfully daring.” All of which connoted, to the public mind, “cocktails,” “evening dress,” “repartee,” and irreverent allusions to copulation, thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office.

An epitaph from a life-long friend, Rebecca West:
A sensitive man, he was also a vain man. He talked constantly about himself, thought about himself, catalogued his achievements, evaluated them, presented to listeners such conclusions as were favourable, and expected, and waited for, applause.
His sensitivity knew this and was shocked, and he regularly rough-housed his own vanity by considering himself in a ridiculous light. This he did for the good of his soul. The public image of himself in top-hat and tails, the immortal spirit of the charming twenties, was merely one of his admirable inventions. It was a disguise worn by an odd and selective kind of Puritan.