I met Noel Coward entirely by accident. One of my original, tiny apartments in Bangkok could only be kept cool if both the air-conditioner and the ceiling fan were operating at the same time, the latter to push the coolness of the former down far enough to where it could do some good. Cold air rises in Southeast Asia, not hot, something to do with feng shui, I believe.

One irritatingly scalding day the fan’s routine squeaking became a petulant whine, and I just happened to have brought an oilcan home with me from my last trip back to Canada. (It was one of several pieces of hardware I imported over the years, much to the horror of Asian airport luggage scanners. Security had a good laugh speculating about why I thought I needed to bring a hammer to Asia when they had perfectly good hammers already; I was just being cheap.)

So I put a chair on my bed and teetered aloft, dotting the fan’s motor with oil. I calculated the dosage carefully, not wanting a mess, but not carefully enough. As soon as the fan was switched back on, it sprayed the room generously. And the bedclothes and me, of course.

More stoic individuals would have moaned, shrugged in resignation and got straight to cleaning up the slick, but I’d been drinking, and the obvious solution to me at the time was to move, and move quickly.

I wasn’t about to start calling around about fresh flats to let, so I simply phoned a hotel and made a reservation for that very afternoon, and since my spirits needed a lift, since I’d been drinking spirits, I went for something swank.

By coincidence, I’d just finished reading a biography of Somerset Maugham, so it was the Oriental Hotel I phoned and it was his suite I asked for. It was going to cost me Bt20,000 for the night, which at the time was well over half a month’s salary for me, but as I said, I’d been drinking.

I cleaned myself up like one of those cormorants caught in the Exxon Valdez disaster, packed a bag and got a cab down to the river. They gave me the once-over on arrival, especially when they realised I wasn’t a tourist but a native boy, but I’d anticipated that. Nor was I fazed once they got over their surprise and very pompously escorted me to my room, only to find it swathed in turquoise rather than the flaming red I’d expected from the pictures I’d seen.

It was a cavernously magnificent two-room suite, plush trappings everywhere the eye fell. The bathroom was, as they say, something to behold. I tipped the lad with the luggage, cracked open the bar and started perusing the in-room literature. Only then did I realise that this wasn’t the Somerset Maugham Suite at all, but the Noel Coward Suite.

“I’m not even sure who Noel Coward is,” I protested short-distance over the phone to the manager, Kurt Wachtvietl, who’s something of a venerable institution himself in Bangkok. “Something about the theatre, right?”

Mr Kurt is one of those stoic individuals I mentioned earlier, and to Verse 2 of my lament, the part about having just read Maugham’s biography, he could only add a chorus about someone else staying in Somerset’s boudoir. His argument that the hotel is never able to guarantee which author’s suite a guest will be placed in, even if they come all the way from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan (where Maugham is massive), rather than sticky, oily Bangna, was the spark for a lengthy written correspondence between us, sometimes flattering, sometimes contentious.

I think it was one of those chubby authoresses occupying the Maugham Suite just across the hall from me, Dame Edith something or other perhaps, crime novelist or whatever. Regardless, I was soaking in Noel Coward’s tub and by gosh I had to make the best of it. Who was this geezer, anyway? I bet myself he’d never written anything nearly as good as “Moon and Sixpence”, that’s for sure.

Some British royal once said that there were 14 clever things that other creative types could do better than Sir Noel Peirce Coward (1899-1973), such as acting, singing and writing plays and music, but no one in history had done them all — apart from Noel.

It’s the sort of back-handed compliment British royalty dabbles in with limited success, but the middle-class kid from Middlesex was certainly an overachiever on an almost Da Vinci-esque scale. He was a fast starter, appearing onstage professionally at 12, the lover of society painter Philip Streatfield at 14, shacked up poshly with Mrs Astley Cooper at 16.

A protege of Sir Charles Hawtrey, Coward learned comic acting and playwriting before getting a tiny part in DW Griffith’s film “Hearts of the World” and then staging his own plays. Controversy blessed his drugs-riddled, gay-ish drama “The Vortex” in 1924, and “Hay Fever”, “Fallen Angels” and “Easy Virtue” were all major hits. In the photo, taken much later, he’s trying to ignore Mae West and Cary Grant.

Then came his best work, the operetta “Bitter Sweet” and the gigantic production “Cavalcade”, and the witty comedies comedies “Private Lives” and “Design for Living”, which starred the lovely Lunts.

There were a slew of clever songs as well, like “I’ll See You Again” and “(Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage) Mrs Worthington” and, ah, here we go, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”.

This tune, it is confidently alleged, was written in Bangkok, although the lyrics meander all over the tropics. Coward (pictured here apparently autographing a kitten) supposedly first checked into the Oriental in 1925, during a vacation from the withering grind of “The Vortex”, but it was five years later when he was sitting on the verandah on another suite-naming tour of Asia that he got the idea for “Mad Dogs”, a roguish lampoon of the British colonial mindset.

He’d just been in Malaya, playing Captain Stanhope in “Journey’s End” at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore, then still part of Malaya, which Coward reckoned was a “first-rate country for second-rate people” (by which he meant the British administrators, not the Malayans).

And a one, and a two …

In tropical climes there are certain times of day
When all the citizens retire to tear their clothes off and perspire.
It’s one of the rules that the greatest fools obey,
Because the sun is much too sultry
And one must avoid its ultry-violet ray.
The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts,
Because they’re obviously, definitely nuts!

[two more verses here, and then]

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The toughest Burmese bandit can never understand it.
In Rangoon the heat of noon is just what the natives shun,
They put their Scotch or Rye down, and lie down.
In a jungle town where the sun beats down to the rage of man and beast
The English garb of the English sahib merely gets a bit more creased.
In Bangkok at twelve o’clock they foam at the mouth and run,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

I did some foaming indoors in my Noel Coward suite. It was just too fantastic a place to go to sleep in, and of course I kept drinking, and I’d summoned a squad of friends and co-workers (that’s Terry), so things were bound to get a little pear-shaped. I vaguely remember leaving the premises at one point because it was clear that the amount I was paying for booze in the room was approaching the price of the room itself. A trip to the nearest 7-Eleven for a few quarts of cheap whisky and mixer was essential.

The hotel’s Author’s Wing is a low-slung affair compared to the highrises around it, making for an easy exit. Coward would have approved of the former mansion, having once memorably asserted, “The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.”

Of course, you don’t just saunter in and out of the Oriental — everybody’s watching everybody else, in case someone turns out to be Mick Jagger. There were a few hopeful looks tossed my way when I appeared in T-shirt and shorts, but fortunately no one made a fuss, even when I found myself weaving through a tuxedo and evening-gown crowd assembled at the foot of the stairs leading to the Author’s Lounge, noshing on magnificent hors d’oeuvres.

They might have found it entertaining when I reappeared at the party a few minutes later toting clinking, plastic 7-Eleven bags. Maybe not. Among the other countless Coward quotes you come across is, “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.”

During World War II Coward also entertained, regaling the troops, and he did a few jobs for MI5 as well. He was on the Nazis’ gas-on-sight list due to either his homosexuality or his spy work, even though he wrote a song called “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”. Noel fretted to his painting partner Winston Churchill that he wasn’t doing enough for the war effort, so Winnie told him to make a movie about Mountbatten. “In Which We Serve” earned Coward an honourary Oscar.

The 1940s also produced the hugely successful black comedy “Blithe Spirit”, but by the ’50s Coward was becoming old hat, and doing a solo cabaret act in Las Vegas couldn’t have been much of an integrity booster. He had roles in the movies “Around the World in 80 Days”, “Our Man in Havana” and “The Italian Job” too, did some American TV specials, and then told the British taxman to stuff it and moved to Bermuda, then Jamaica, which is where he ended up buried.

I’ve been to Jamaica as well, so clearly we’re wired to the same mainframe, Noel and me. I was there to find traces of Bob Marley, though, and frankly couldn’t give a damn about heading up the north coast to see Ian Fleming’s hideaway, and at the time, of course, I knew next to nothing about his neighbour, Coward.

Noel Coward, who didn’t dally in the stock market, was unstung by the 1929 crash and prospered during the Depression, with a country estate in Kent, a posh studio on London’s Gerald Road and frequent, extended travels. He liked Fleming’s place in Jamaica so much that he built one of his own, a little further west, and called it Firefly. He and Sir Ian socialised but Sir Noel couldn’t stand the Flemings’ bickering, and when he was asked to play the villain in the first Bond film, he replied, “Doctor No? No. No. No.”

“My body has certainly wandered a good deal,” he said another time, “but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.” Proof of his wanderlust is nailed to the doors of many a fancy hotel. Singapore’s grand old Raffles has a suite honouring his autograph in the guestbook, and others for Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and James Michener, just like at the Oriental. (Much more recently the Algonquin in New York christened a suite in Noel’s name, perhaps because fewer and fewer people remember Dorothy Parker.)

Conrad always had a ship waiting, and Maugham was deathly ill from riding elephants across Burma when he signed in at the Oriental, but did our Noel get out much when he was in town, or was he happy to just order room service? None of the chatty websites devoted to him seems to have any anecdotes about this. This best I can come up with is a couple more well-fingered quotes:

“Sunburn is very becoming, but only when it is even. One must be careful to not look like a mixed grill.”

and

“I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.”

Ha ha!

Coward had a bit of a comeback in the late ’60s, and his last play, “Suite in Three Keys”, did alright. He was knighted in 1970, the queen obviously holding no grudges about his emigration to Jamaica. He died there in March 1973, not a bad place to go, and at his side was his companion of 30 years, Graham Payn.

I’m grateful to Kurt Wachtveitl for never answering my complaint about being in the wrong room by saying, “Well, at least they were both gay!”