`NOEL COWARD'S' DETAIL AS FASCINATING AS ITS SUBJECT.

Byline: Clifford A. Ridley Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

In 1921, having recently entered his maturity (he was born 18 days before the new century), Noel Coward set sail for the first time from London to New York. A rising young actor, playwright and man about town, he had heard from a fellow actor about the incandescent jangle of Times Square. As he later would recall in the first of his two autobiographies, ``Present Indicative,'' ``its gigantic sky-signs dazzled my dreams, flashing ... with unfailing regularity, the two words `Noel Coward.' ''

Born in South London to working-class parents, Coward had made his professional acting debut at age 11, and the recent opening of his comedy ``I'll Leave It to You'' had occasioned a newspaper profile that observed ``the narrow slant of his gray-green eyes, the tilt of his eyebrows, the sleek backward rush of his hair'' - traits that would delight caricaturists for the next half-century. His persona, too, was well established - bright and gossipy, with a ``darling'' for every new acquaintance.

He remained in New York for five months, absorbing the pace and energy of American theater and meeting such young actors as Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne and Tallulah Bankhead - names to be added to a list of friends that already included Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie. Within a decade, all of these eager newcomers would see their names emblazoned in Times Square. And within two decades, having written and performed in a string of dramas, comedies and musicals that both defined and reflected life between the wars, Noel Coward - playwright, actor and composer - would be the most celebrated man of theater in the world.

And then, for all intents and purposes, his run ended. After ``Blithe Spirit'' (1941), which played a then-unprecedented 1,997 London performances, Coward would not write another flat-out hit until the 1965 trilogy ``Suite in Three Keys.'' The love-hate relationship he had maintained with England ripened into disenchantment, fueled by oppressive taxes, niggling censorship and what he perceived as the nation's ingratitude for his service as both author and private citizen during World War II. Exiling himself to Jamaica, he built a seaside aerie in which he died on March 26, 1973.

The old stage magic had deserted him; the rebellious spirit of the early plays, which mirrored a privileged society frivolously squandering its assets, became an occasionally cranky defense of that same society. He continued to write new plays, stories and devilishly clever songs, and in the 1950s he briefly carved out a fresh career as a cabaret performer in London and Las Vegas, which he dubbed ``Nescafe Society.'' Yet while he could create a new persona as the Last of the Red Hot Sophisticates, he no longer could create the writing to back it up.

In the end, the character named ``Noel Coward'' was his best creation, a conclusion made clear by Philip Hoare's exhaustive new biography, the most complete and objective study of Coward yet written. Hoare, an English critic, has interviewed dozens of people and explored newly unearthed original sources (including letters from Coward to his beloved mother) to assemble a portrait of a man seldom less than entertaining but often less than attractive, a man whose life was heavily invested in topping itself and maintaining an image.

There is no question of Coward's talent. He was astonishingly facile (``Private Lives'' was written in four days, ``Blithe Spirit'' in seven), and preternaturally versatile, turning out brittle comedies, schmaltzy operettas, patriotic pageants, satiric revues and dozens of superbly crafted songs with equal ease.

By age 30 he was a very rich man and a pop-culture hero - his clothes and manners slavishly imitated, his hectic social life at country estates and expensive spas widely reported. In its panting effort to keep pace with this mad and decidedly unconventional whirl, ``Noel Coward'' sometimes sounds like nothing so much as a parody of its subject's hilarious song, ``I Went to a Marvelous Party'':

``Poor Lulu got fried on Chianti''

``And talked about Esprit de corps.''

``Maurice made a couple of passes''

``at Gus,''

``And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss,''

``Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss.''

``I couldn't have liked it more.''

Coward could write so wittily and accurately about this anything-goes milieu because he lived it, consorting throughout his life with groups as different (yet often overlapping) as royalty, theater folk, bohemians and Bloomsbury intellectuals. Yet in each group he remained something of an outsider. The ``haute monde'' distrusted his proletarian origins; the intellectuals deplored his shallowness; the bohemians sniffed at his social climbing; the theater folk resented his success and his bullying insistence on having his own way.

Even within his inner circle - the ``family'' of lovers, friends and factotums who gave him a sense of belonging that religion could not - Coward's megalomania, selfishness and childish tantrums often were exasperating. Forever nostalgic for his boyhood, Coward remained a spoiled, overgrown child - ``the most pampered, debonair, hardheaded professional boy on earth,'' as the critic Kenneth Tynan called him.

Yet, notwithstanding its cost to others, this trait seemed to Tynan a key to Coward's work. ``Infantilism may be the essential cocoon within which certain kinds of talent need to flourish,'' the critic wrote. ``It is a virtue, not a fault, in Coward that he never discarded - and was never embarrassed by - his childhood.''

But the most important source of Coward's status as an outsider was his homosexuality, which Hoare treats more completely and openly than any other biographer. Among family and friends, Coward's sexual orientation was well known, yet he was at pains to maintain a neutral facade in a country where homosexuality was still a crime.

``It is important not to let the public have a loophole to lampoon you,'' he told the gay designer Cecil Beaton, who recalled Coward's advice to speak firmly, move solidly, dress quietly. Says the playwright's alter ego, Leo, in the menage a trois comedy ``Design for Living'': ``It's all a question of masks, really. We all wear them as a form of protection; modern life forces us to. We must have some means of shielding our timid, shrinking souls from the glare of civilization.''

But a writer's soul is his currency in the intellectual marketplace, and the masks that Coward wore as man and artist compromised him in ways that may never be understood. ``Off stage,'' asked a friend, ``when did Noel act and when was his private behavior truly spontaneous?'' It was impossible to know.

As for the plays, they reflected all of Coward's experience except the experience that mattered most. The result, for both good and ill, is that their messages are decidedly ambiguous. ``What is Coward saying?'' Hoare asks of ``Hay Fever.'' ``That life is facile and fleeting, and artificiality is all? The joy of ``Hay Fever'' in particular, and of Coward's work in general, is that we do not know.'' And later, noting Coward's rightward turn in his later years, the biographer adds, ``But perhaps he had never really rebelled; had he not been homosexual, he might have been a conservative, run-of-the-mill playwright. Being a sexual outsider gave his work its edge.''

This kind of analysis is relatively rare in ``Noel Coward,'' which is considerably more illuminating about how Coward's life fed his work than it is about the work itself. The book also is deficient in other ways: People pop up without identification; dangling participles and other gaucheries mar the prose; and, although the narrative proceeds chronologically, it's so cavalierly set down that you're often unclear about where in the life you are. Worst of all, for a book about so prolific a writer, there's no list of his works and their dates.

The last half of the biography is largely a catalog of failure and disappointment, of flitting about the globe to escape the stress of living up to a reputation. (``When the storm clouds are rushing through a winter's sky,'' Coward wrote in one of his loveliest songs, ``Sail away, sail away.'') Yet the vulnerability that surfaced in these later years makes Coward more attractive to the reader, and his death produces a sense of genuine loss. The most truthful scene in Noel Coward's life turned out to be virtually the only one he didn't invent.

The facts

Title: ``Noel Coward: A Biography''

Author: Philip Hoare

Data: 605 pages, Simon & Schuster; $30

Our rating: Four stars

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Photo: The character named ``Noel Coward'' was his best cre ation.