The Theater: The Professional Amateur

One evening last week, a small, elegantly groomed man with thinning black hair, a limp, and the smile of a tired elf, took a party of friends to see the new Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate. The show is such a smash hit that ordinary playgoers find it impossible to get seats for any performance sooner than next April. Seats are just a little harder to get because this one satisfied customer has been buying up so many of them. At a cost of more than $1,000, Cole Porter, who wrote the music and lyrics for Kiss Me, Kate, took 97 of his friends along on opening night. He has been back with others 14 times since.

Composer-Lyricist Porter is a loyal patron of his own art because, after writing the songs for 22 shows and nine movies, he is still just a little stagestruck. He also combines genuine modesty about his work with an amateur’s enthusiasm for hearing it played and sung by first-rate professionals. At the opening performance of Kiss Me, Kate four weeks ago, he turned up in evening dress and settled himself happily down front in the midst of his large, glittering party. He was the picture of relaxed enjoyment, and a sight to amaze his fellow composers and authors, who generally pace, squirm and chew their nails backstage or in the lobby during a first performance. Playwright Russel Grouse once called Porter’s composure at his own first nights as “indecent as the bridegroom who has a good time at his own wedding.”

A Cole Porter first night is, in fact, a sort of ceremonial meeting of the two sides of Porter’s life—show business and the high-living, high-gloss international society that lionized him long before his songs caught the public’s ear. Between opening nights, Porter shuttles back & forth on a more or less rigid timetable between the greasepainted world of Ethel Merman and the gilded, brittle world of Elsa Maxwell.

Two Flops, No Hits. For all its likeness to other Porter openings, Kiss Me, Kate was a special milestone. For several years Composer Porter had not been regarded as a sure-fire Broadway investment, in spite of the fact that five of his songs (Begin the Beguine, Just One of Those Things, What Is This Thing Called Love?, Night and Day and I Get a Kick Out of You) ranked last year among the 35 all-time U.S. popular favorites. (The record is matched only by Irving Berlin, and was not equaled by such Tin Pan Alley titans as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers.)

Broadway had been saying gloomily that Porter had written two flops (Seven Lively Arts and Around the World) and had not turned out a hit since Mexican Hayride. Socially, Cole Porter has always had more invitations than he could possibly accept. Professionally, he had become a wallflower, waiting around for a producer to ask him to do a show. When the right invitation finally came, it was from a pair of new producers, Arnold Saint Subber and Lemuel Ayers, who had to find financial backing the hard way. Porter did his work on Kiss Me, Kate in three months. Then, often impatient if always polite, he had to wait almost a year until the producers had sweated out 20 backers’ auditions and persuaded 72 angels to put up $180,000 for the production.

The 17-song score for the new musical gleams with the gilt-edged Porter signet. The author of You’re the Top—which inspired a sort of national cult of memorizers and parodists in 1934—always turns out lyrics that are distinctly his own. They brim with stylish grace and colloquial impudence, real comic invention, multisyllabic rhymes, innuendoes about I’amour, digs at social foibles, and easy allusions to famous people and far-off places.

On that old reliable musicomedy subject —love—Lyricist Porter is more often cynical than sweet:

While tearing off a game of golf, I may make a play for the caddy;But when I do, I don’t follow through, ‘Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.*

He is more often disillusioned than starry-eyed:

If we’d thought a bit of the end of it, When we started painting the town,

We’d have been aware that our love affair

Was too hot not to cool down.†

He is more often passionate than romantic :

Night and day, under the hide of me,

There’s an oh, such a hungry yearning,

Burning inside of me.

And its torment won’t be through

‘Til you let me spend my life making

love to you . . .†

He can keep his sentiment dry, tart and fresh by invoking anything from the Colosseum and the Louvre Museum to Mickey Mouse and Cellophane, by chortling “You’re the bangle I long to dangle,” or by confessing, as he does in the new show:

To win you, Bianca,

There’s nothing I would not do;

I would gladly give up coffee for Sanka,

Even Sanka, Bianca, for you.**

From Broadway to Padua. Porter’s music is just as distinctively his. Many of his songs, like Night and Day, favor a long melodic line that breaks out of the traditional four-measure bounds of the popular ballad. He can write gaily, in complicated rhythms (as in Anything Goes). He can match a pointedly off-color lyric with an insinuating tune (as in My Heart Belongs to Daddy). But the true Porter hallmark is cut in the bittersweet lament of What Is This Thing Called Love? and in the sultry, Latin fervor of Begin the Beguine, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, In the Still of the Night and Get Out of Town.

In Kiss Me, Kate, Porter’s score blends several styles to harmonize with a play-within-a-play about a production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. He has ranged from comic ditties and Broadway torch ballads to songs in the rich, tuneful manner of Italian light opera, to match the Paduan setting of The Shrew. Several take their titles, and the flavor of their lyrical development, from the play’s Elizabethan verse. The New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson solemnly declared that I Hate Men is “the perfect musical sublimation of Shakespeare’s evil-tempered Kate.”

The Regulated Life. Born to wealth and bred to spend it, Cole Porter has shown such zest as tunesmith and playboy during most of his 55 years that many an admirer thinks of him as a brilliant dilettante. Actually, as Kiss Me, Kate proves better than any of his previous work, he is one of the most thoroughly trained musicians among U.S. popular composers. He is as painstaking a craftsman as any. He is no less rigorously professional in his approach to what his good friend, Actor Clifton Webb, calls “the perfectly regulated life.”

Porter’s life is probably one of the knottiest problems that ever tied up a Hollywood story conference. In 1946 Warner Bros, made a film “biography” of Porter called Night and Day (out of which Porter got nothing he could recognize except some of his best songs and $300,000). After hopefully combing through the Porter files, one of the writers assigned to work on the script complained: “There’s no struggle—all along the line.”

Porter was born in Peru, Ind. (pop. 15,000), in the corn country 75 miles north of Indianapolis, but his beginnings were hardly simple. He was the only child of a prosperous druggist, and the grandson and heir of coal and lumber Tycoon J. 0. Cole, who was worth something like $7,000,000. Though it took Cole years to satisfy his oh-such-a-hungry yearning for success on Broadway, getting there was not much more difficult than what a Porter lyric describes as “a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.”* His comfortable itinerary included stops at Worcester (Mass.) Academy, where he got into trouble for writing off-color lyrics; Yale, where he got a B.A. and wrote the Eli football songs Bingo and Bulldog; Harvard, where he took the law dean’s advice to switch to music; Paris, where he studied at the Schola Cantorum with Composer Vincent d’Indy; and the playgrounds of the Continent.

Whim of Iron. Porter’s life story has another deficiency as a movie plot. His 1919 Paris marriage to a wealthy beauty, Linda Lee Thomas, has been placid, childless, fashionable—and free of both the romantic hubbub and the folksiness that Hollywood prefers in its patterned fictions. Intimates describe the Porters as “great, devoted friends.” They live on the 41st floor of Manhattan’s Waldorf Towers, and from time to time share the mirrored elegance of his California summer place in Brentwood (complete with a swimming pool that lights up at night), or her luxurious house in Williamstown, Mass. Servants are kept the year round at both places.

Porter knew no real struggle until he was 45, and at the peak of success. Then he undertook a gallant and successful fight to walk again, after a Long Island horseback-riding accident left him with compound fractures of both legs. Winning this fight took 31 operations (mostly to clear up a bone infection of his right leg), years of constant pain, and a tough-minded courage that surprised his friends and impressed his physician.

To keep at his writing, Porter had his piano raised on wooden blocks so that he could sit at it in a wheelchair. Then he was on crutches for years. He can get around now for short stretches without a cane, though he usually carries one.

Porter’s way of life probably equipped him for surmounting the blow that abruptly cut short his pursuit of fun. There had always been method of a sort in his sportiveness. Porter himself once said: “I am spending my life escaping boredom, not because I’m bored, but because I don’t want to be.” He has always arranged his days with a whim of iron, and he refuses to be bored for as long as 15 minutes at a time. Such a schedule requires a certain ruthlessness, and Porter’s Broadway associates and friends have learned to make the best of it.

One playwright who is celebrated for his wit confesses that he feels an odd compulsion to be constantly entertaining in Porter’s company: “Suddenly, when he’s had enough, you find him staring at you with a kind of loathing and, before you know it, he’s not just out of sight, he’s out of the room and out of the hotel.” London’s Producer Charles B. Cochran, who put on a couple of Porter shows, at first was hurt and bewildered by the way Porter would listen to his conversation for a while, and then, without preamble, suddenly put out his hand and say “Goodbye.” Cochran was finally relieved to learn that he treated other people the same way.

200,000 Candles. Porter’s taste for a life of truffled trifles was whetted even before he went to college. As a reward from his grandfather for having been class valedictorian at prep school, he got a tour of France, Switzerland and Germany. He had also developed a talent for enchanting everyone within earshot of his piano (his mother, Kate Porter, now 87, made him practice every day). At Yale he moved about socially and expensively, wrote undergraduate shows, skipped regularly into Manhattan to see the Broadway output, and often got back to the campus on a milk train.

After his first Broadway show, See America First, flopped in 1916, he decided to see Europe again. He joined a war relief agency, then the French Foreign Legion, and was in a French artillery outfit on the western front at the end of the war.

After the war, the Porters plunged headlong into Europe’s melting pot of millionaires and marquises. They bought a $250,000 house in Paris, complete with kidskin chairs, zebra rugs and a room decorated in platinum leaf, but the house was often only a place from which mail was forwarded to the English countryside, Antibes, Venice, Florence, Siena, and the Duke of Alba’s palaces in Seville and Madrid. In 1923, when Porter came into an inheritance from his grandfather, he began renting Venetian palaces.

The Palazzo Rezzonico, which the Porters leased from 1925 to 1929, was the scene of parties that would have done the Medici proud. At one affair, 50 gondoliers stood like statues along a winding stairway, 600 guests frolicked in fancy-dress costumes provided by Porter, and floodlights played on tightrope walkers overhead. Once Sergei Diaghilev brought his ballet company to dance Les Sylphides at a Porter garden party. Diaghilev insisted on a few props: fireworks, a 50-foot statue of Venus (which was hauled through the canals by two barges and set up in the garden), and 20,000 candles to adorn the trees. Looking things over before the party began, Diaghilev decided that he would need 200,000 candles. “So,” Porter recalls, “I got 200,000 candles.”

Porter designed a galleggiante—an ornate danceboat seating 150—for the leading Venetian hotel. This pleasure dome plied the canals regularly, with French chef, wine cellar, Negro jazz band and $10 cover charge. As a small boy, Cole had fallen in love with Venice when he saw a backdrop painting of the Grand Canal in the Peru (Ind.) theater; he still thinks it is the best place to live.

Pearls & Sauce Cooks. A man who can afford to get tired of a place, he would take to train, plane or steamship whenever the urge hit him. He once turned up a week late on a trip from Hollywood to Manhattan to work on Red, Hot and Blue. He explained to his collaborators, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, that he had detoured to Callander, Ont., to get a look at the Dionne quintuplets. Once, drinking dark beer in Munich with a Yale crony, Monty Woolley, he decided to follow the trail of the brew as it grew lighter; they wound up in Pilsen. In 1935, Playwright Moss Hart got the idea of taking a world cruise and writing a show (Jubilee) on the way. He broached the idea to Porter at lunch. Recalls Hart: “Cole said: ‘Let’s go to Cook’s.’ By 3 o’clock, we had booked passage. By 5, we’d had our shots. Six days later we sailed.”

At about the same time, when Porter had been solidly established in the theater for some five years, luscious Lucius Beebe, self-made expert on the art of splendiferous living, hailed a master of the art: “It is really the simple things of life which give pleasure to Mr. Porter—half-million-dollar strings of pearls, Isotta motor cars, cases of double bottles of Grand Chambertin ’87, suites at Claridge’s, brief trips aboard the Bremen, a little grouse shooting … He is on all the first-night lists, Leon at L’Aperitif salutes him as ‘Highness,’ he is reputed to travel with his own linen sheets, punkah wavers, court chamberlains and sauce cooks . . .”

In the Still of the Night. Porter’s passion for high living is supplemented by a passion for tidiness, which extends to details as small as the boutonniere that is always in his lapel. His Waldorf suite is fastidiously neat. His valet has to be meticulous about keeping familiar things in familiar places: cigarettes, cough drops, bric-a-brac, Kleenex, sharpened pencils. When Porter travels, even his own ashtrays go with him, and he likes them kept so neat that at parties a servant cleans them up almost before a guest can crunch a cigarette out. When Porter went to Philadelphia for Kate’s 3½-week tryout, he took along five paintings, including a large Grandma Moses snowscape, to make his hotel suite homelike.

While working on a show, he keeps his music and lyrics in neat sets of looseleaf notebooks and Manila folders, and he follows a chart of the book’s plot for spotting his songs. The only top-ranking Broadway composer besides Irving Berlin who writes his own lyrics, he usually begins with a song title to fit the plot situation, then finds his melody, and later fits the words to it. He begins with the last line and works backward. Close at hand is an exhaustive library of rhyming and foreign dictionaries (he speaks French, German, Spanish and Italian), geographical guides and other reference books.

When a Porter song is finished, it generally has a few added staves that are the germ of an orchestral arrangement. He writes out the lyrics in a neat, printlike hand, to be typed by his secretary. First to hear the music is Budapest-born Dr. Albert Sirmay, chief editor of Chappell & Co., Porter’s publishers, and also his musical secretary, friend and adviser for 22 years. While the composer plays the song on one of his baby grands, Dr. Sirmay jots down notes and sometimes warns him about cribbing inadvertently from the 400 songs (250 of them published) that Porter has already written.

From Marrakech to Kalabahi. Perfectionist Porter once took singing lessons to help “place” his voice, which he has described as unpleasant. To see that justice was done his work, he spent hours last week hovering over Columbia recording sessions at which the orchestra and principals of Kiss Me, Kate worked on an album of the score. (One of his favorite performers is Ethel Merman, who has played in some of his biggest hits, Anything Goes, Du Barry Was a Lady, Something for the Boys, because, as she puts it, “I can boff out those lines the way he wants them.”) New singers know better than to risk trying out for Porter by singing his songs. He insists on at least 28 musicians in his show orchestras (the union minimum for Kate is 22).

A facile workman, he is cheerfully accommodating when he has to turn out a new number overnight because an old one has been dropped from a show. But unlike most composers and authors, he refuses to lower his own high royalty rate (5% of gross receipts) when a show has begun to slump at the box office. A song generally takes shape in his head before he plays it or puts a word on paper, and a glazed look of creation may come over his face at any time of day or night—and at any place on earth.

He wrote You’re the Top floating along the Rhine in a Falt-boot, Night and Day on the beach at Newport, and It’s DeLovely on the high seas,. His songs have felt the influence of his wanderings. What Is This Thing Called Love? was suggested by a native dance in Morocco’s Marrakech, and he developed the music of Begin the Beguine from a war-dance chant he heard in Kalabahi, a small island in the Netherlands Indies (he had already got the title idea from a Martinique cafe in Paris).

On to Venice. Finicky Cole Porter also likes a practical joke, if it is on the elaborate side. In the ’20s, he and Elsa Maxwell hornswoggled U.S. society in Paris into believing in the existence of a fictitious wealthy couple from Oklahoma named Fitch, who were “doing” the Continent. They planted newspaper stories about the Fitches, and even concocted an art exhibition by Mrs. Fitch, for which Jean Cocteau and others forged paintings. The night bearded Monty Woolley opened in Manhattan in The Man Who Came to Dinner, Porter gave a party for him. The host was the last to arrive, and on his arm was a stout, middle-aged lady (recruited from a circus) whose beard was a little longer than the guest of honor’s.

Porter can be frostily aloof when bored, but he can also be warmly demonstrative when something takes his fancy. He has been known to get emotional over an objet d’art or a piece of costume jewelry, and he has been moved to tears by revisiting his old Yale haunts and by hearing Lena Home sing.

The 1937 accident, which Porter seldom mentions and never complains about, has made him seem a more serious man than he once was. He is already at work on a score for a new show that Subber & Ayers plan for next fall; this week he leaves for Hollywood to help cast a second company of Kiss Me, Kate, which may turn out to be the biggest smash of his career.

But he still clings to the Porter plan for living. He will be back in Paris in the spring—his first trip to Europe since his accident. His mansion in the French capital is now occupied by a school, so the

Porters will put up at the Ritz. From Paris he plans to motor to Rome and, naturally, on to Venice. From Italy he will fly to Athens. Then he will take a yacht—already chartered—and trace a lazy course among the sunny Greek islands of the Aegean.

*Copyright 1938 Chappell & Co.

† Copyright Harms, Inc. Used by permission.

**Copyright 1948 by Cole Porter.

*From Just One of Those Things. Copyright by Harms, Inc. Used by permission.