The Letters of Cole Porter
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THE LETTERS OF COLE PORTER
Further praise for The Letters of Cole Porter:
‘An absolute must for any fan of the golden age, musical theatre or the incredible Porter himself.’ Matthew Shaftel, editor of A Cole Porter Companion
‘ “Well, did you evah!” Cole Porter’s letters are full not just of delightful gossip but of the detail of working on Broadway and in Hollywood during the golden age of the American musical. “What a swell party it is!” – or at least was for Porter moving through high society across several continents. His words read as gloriously as his music sounds.’ Tim Carter, author of Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical
‘These letters offer fascinating glimpses into some previously unseen corners of the personal and creative lives of one of America’s greatest songwriters. Eisen and McHugh provide a gilded frame for the source material in the form of expert glosses and annotations. The result is a new kind of Cole Porter biography.’ Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater
Copyright © 2019 Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.
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CONTENTS
List of Plates
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 From Peru, Indiana, to Broadway, 1891–1919
2 Cole Porter in Europe, 1918–1928
3 Porter’s Return to the United States, 1928–1937
4 Settled – and Injured – in New York, 1937–1944
5 A Porter Biopic and Two Flops, 1945–1947
6 Kiss Me, Kate, 1948
7 From Kiss Me, Kate to Out of This World, 1949–1950
8 From Limbo to the Writing of Can-Can, 1951–1952
9 Two Last Broadway Hits, Can-Can and Silk Stockings, 1953–1954
10 Porter’s Last Musicals, 1955–1957
11 The Final Years, 1958–1964
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
Index
PLATES
1. Cole Porter, Yale yearbook photograph (1913).
2. Westleigh Farms, Cole Porter’s childhood home in Indiana (2011).
3. Cole Porter’s World War I draft registration card (5 June 1917). War Department, Office of the Provost Marshal General.
4. Linda Porter, passport photograph (1919).
5. Cole Porter, Linda Porter, Bernard Berenson and Howard Sturges in Venice (c.1923).
6. Gerald Murphy, Ginny Carpenter, Cole Porter and Sara Murphy in Venice (1923).
7. Serge Diaghilev, Boris Kochno, Bronislava Nijinska, Ernest Ansermet and Igor Stravinsky in Monte Carlo (1923). Library of Congress, Music Division, Reproduction number: 200181841.
8. Letter from Cole Porter to Boris Kochno (September 1925). Courtesy of The Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts.
9. Scene from the original stage production of Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). PHOTOFEST.
10. Irene Bordoni, star of Porter’s show Paris (1928).
11. Sheet music, ‘Love for Sale’ from The New Yorkers (1930).
12. Production designer Jo Mielziner showing a set for Jubilee (1935). PHOTOFEST.
13. Cole Porter composing as he reclines on a couch in the Ritz Hotel during out-of-town tryouts for Du Barry Was a Lady (1939). George Karger / Getty Images.
14. Cole and Linda Porter (c.1938). PHOTOFEST.
15. Ethel Merman in the New York production of Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie (1940). George Karger / Getty Images.
16. Sheet music, ‘Let’s Be Buddies’ from Panama Hattie (1940).
17. Draft of ‘I Am Ashamed that Women Are So Simple’ from Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Library of Congress. Courtesy of The Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts.
18. Monty Woolley, publicity photo (1949).
19. Nelson Barclift rehearsing for Irving Berlin’s This is The Army at Camp Upton (1943). Bettmann / Getty Images.
20. Charlotte Greenwood in Cole Porter’s Out of This World (1950). PHOTOFEST.
21. Cole Porter and Ed Sullivan on Sullivan’s television show, Toast of the Town (1953).
22. Cole Porter in an advertisement for Bromo-Seltzer (c.1950).
23. Cole Porter in an advertisement for Rheingold Beer, Daily News, New York (18 May 1953).
24. Ann Miller, Cole Porter, producer Jack Cummings and Kathryn Grayson on the set of Kiss Me Kate (MGM, 1953). PHOTOFEST.
25. Cole Porter and Jean Howard (1954).
26. Scene from Silk Stockings (1955). PHOTOFEST.
27. Cole Porter, music director Andre Previn and producer Jack Cummings working on the film Kiss Me Kate (1953). PHOTOFEST.
28. Autograph lyric sheet for Can-Can (1953). Courtesy of The Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts.
29. Sheet music, ‘True Love’ from High Society (1956).
30. Louis Armstrong and Grace Kelly on the set of High Society (1956).
31. The last photograph of Cole Porter, New York (1964). PHOTOFEST.
PREFACE
Cole Porter’s status as one of the most prolific, enduring and successful American songwriters of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural associations of his extravagant lifestyle and elite social circle, make him a compelling subject for a book focusing on his letters to his friends, family and collaborators, not least because Porter’s life and works remain comparatively unexamined. By and large, the closer details of his activities and personality have been overlooked in favour of broad biographical tropes that were established during his lifetime and have been repeated without much refinement or challenge. This is true of even the best authorized and unauthorized biographies: Richard Hubler’s The Cole Porter Story, as Told to Richard G. Hubler (Cleveland, 1965); George Eells’s The Life that Late He Led: A Biography of Cole Porter (New York, 1967); Robert Kimball and Brendan Gill’s Cole (New York, 1971); Charles Schwartz’s Cole Porter: A Biography (New York, 1977); William McBrien’s Cole Porter: A Definitive Biography (New York, 1998); and Stephen Citron’s Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates (New York, 1993).*
Accordingly, in assembling this volume of Cole Porter’s correspondence we had specific aims and priorities – as well as several challenges. Our goal was not to write a biography but rather to assemble as much of Porter’s extant correspondence as possible, alongside complementary primary sources such as diaries and newspaper articles, and to place the letters in context through a succinct connecting commentary. Fans of Porter’s famously witty and wordy songs may be struck by how brief and to the point many of his letters are, and this quality dictated our decision to explain the significance of much of the material. Additionally, part of the challenge was the requirement to guide the reader through the disparate threads of Porter’s letters, including business letters to his publishers (such as Max Dreyfus at Chappell), accountant (his cousin Harvey), secretaries (among them Margaret Moore and Madeline P. Smith) and attorneys (John Wharton and Robert Montgomery); working letters about his songs to the book writ
ers of his shows (especially Bella Spewack and Abe Burrows) and arranger (Albert Sirmay); and miscellaneous letters to his fans, actors starring in his musicals (such as Clifton Webb and Ethel Merman), his lovers and his friends. For each of these, but particularly the last two categories, Porter adopts a slightly different tone or diction depending on who he is writing to. For example, his tone of voice in writing to his long-term gay male friends Monty Woolley and Charles Green Shaw is often noticeably exuberant, flirtatious and flamboyant, whereas in writing to his female friends such as Jean Howard he usually adopts a gently charming and affectionate manner. While most of his love letters have apparently not survived, there is a special character to those that have: a particular sincerity and anguish to the sequence of notes (written in French) from Porter to the dancer Boris Kochno in the 1920s, and an almost paternal concern in the letters written to the marine Nelson Barclift in the 1940s.
Even before considering the implications of the facts and details contained in the letters, these nuances speak volumes about Porter’s character and offer both the scholar and the general reader new insights into an important historical figure who is at once familiar and yet curiously distant. Of course, the details are where the true surprises lie. For example, we learn that Porter – famously born into a wealthy family and married to a rich divorcee – spent most of his adult life worrying about money, so much so that he often had to weigh up whether the consequently enormous rise in taxes would make it financially crippling to take on certain musical projects. Thus while we might have expected the affluent Porter to have written his songs and musicals without ‘needing’ the money, in truth the opposite was the case: he sometimes sacrificed his financial stability for his art. The letters also illuminate his relationship with his wife, Linda: he describes falling in love with her during their early acquaintance, and while he openly engaged in sexual relationships with numerous men during his marriage to her, the particular depth of feeling he had for Linda, and his anxiety over the emphysema that threatened her well-being, is striking.
With respect to Porter’s professional activities, too, the letters offer perhaps unexpected revelations. Letters to the librettists Bella Spewack and particularly Abe Burrows, on the musicals Kiss Me, Kate and Can-Can, highlight Porter’s concern to collaborate with them on details, rather than expecting Burrows and Spewack simply to slot his songs into their stories. His exchanges with Johnny Green and Saul Chaplin, co-musical directors of the movie High Society (1956), similarly show his attention to detail about melody, arrangements and tempi. Twenty years earlier, the extensive diary Porter kept during his experiences writing the movie Born to Dance (1936) offers a window into the songwriter’s excitement and frustrations on encountering the working practices of Hollywood, so different from those of Broadway. Two other sets of diaries, from the mid-1950s, document the lavish cruises Porter undertook with his friend Jean Howard as a distraction following Linda’s death in 1954. And his especially rich correspondence with one of his most loyal friends, Sam Stark, who appears to have retained almost every note or letter he received from Porter, charts the composer’s rise and fall during the last two decades of his life. The letters to Stark reflect the years in which Porter went from being one of the most prominent figures in American culture to dying in seclusion in 1964, six years after he had abandoned his work following the amputation of his right leg, finally bringing an end to the constant pain caused by a serious horse-riding accident in 1937. His death is described in detail by his secretary Madeline P. Smith in a poignant letter to Jean Howard that closes the book.
These and many other episodes are brought to life throughout this volume, mostly in Porter’s own words. Of course, the content of the book has been dictated by the availability of material. The Cole Porter Trust – which has been extraordinarily supportive of the project – holds a rich selection of material from the mid-1940s to the end of Porter’s life, but has only selected earlier material in its possession. At Yale University, the Porter papers include a relatively small selection of letters from across the composer’s life, the highlights of which are perhaps the love letters to Kochno and Barclift; even smaller is the Porter collection at the Library of Congress, though it includes useful materials relating to his first attempts at writing musicals and to the later shows Can-Can and Silk Stockings. The many gaps left by these main collections forced us to work particularly hard in tracking down further materials from the collections of the recipients of Porter’s letters, whether from friends (Katharine Hepburn’s papers at the Margaret Herrick Library and the Douglas Fairbanks Jr. papers at Boston University) or collaborators (the Arthur Freed and MGM collections at the University of Southern California, the Richard Lewine papers at the New York Public Library and the Bella Spewack papers at Columbia University). (To aid the reader, footnotes indicate important biographical and other factual information; endnotes are used to annotate sources.) Although many gaps nevertheless remain – and readers should not expect a detailed account of every event in Porter’s life or analysis of his works – the commentary (understandably more extensive for Porter’s earlier years, for which fewer letters are known) uses newspaper reports and other available sources to fill in as far as possible some otherwise unaccounted-for details of Porter’s life and times.
Cliff Eisen
Dominic McHugh
2018
* Two additional works are fundamental to Porter research and Porter biography: Robert Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (New York, 1983); and Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel and Susan Forscher Weiss, eds, A Cole Porter Companion (Urbana, IL, 2016).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank numerous institutions and individuals for their help in the preparations of this volume: James Archer Abbott and Amy Kimball (Evergreen Museum & Library, Johns Hopkins University), Boston University Libraries, James Burrows, Frank Callahan, Jessica Clark (University of Birmingham Library), Christa Cleeton (Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University), Columbia University Libraries, Mark Eden Horowitz and Walter Zvonchenko (Library of Congress), Mary Huelsbeck (Wisconsin Historical Society), The Margaret Herrick Library, Juliana Jenkins (Special Collections, UCLA), Diane Mulligan (The Worcester Review), The New York Public Library, Patricia Peterleitner (Worcester Academy), Noah Phelps (Sigma Phi Foundation), Hannah Robbins (University of Sheffield), Kate Scott (Indiana Historical Society), Susan Weiss (Johns Hopkins University), Ian Marshall Fisher (Lost Musicals), Geoffrey Block, Michael Feinstein, Anne Kaufman Schneider and the staff of the Arthur Freed and MGM collections at USC, especially Ned Comstock.
We are especially grateful to Lesley Anne Knight, who was a research assistant on this project, and to Nate Sloan, who photographed the Sam Stark collection for us; to Patrizia Rebulla, who helped transcribe Porter’s letters to Boris Kochno; to Richard Boursy (Yale University), who made the extensive Yale Porter collection available to us and answered our numerous questions; and above all to Roberta Staats and the Cole Porter Literary and Musical Trusts, without whose generous support and considerable help this volume would not have been possible. Particular thanks are due to Richard Mason for his sensitive and diligent copy-editing; to the anonymous readers for their valuable comments; and to the staff of Yale University Press, including Heather McCallum, Robert Baldock, Julian Loose, Marika Lysandrou, Clarissa Sutherland and Rachael Lonsdale.
We are also grateful as ever for the support of our families, including Katy and Sam Eisen, Gilly and Larry McHugh, and Lawrence Broomfield.
CHAPTER ONE
FROM PERU, INDIANA, TO BROADWAY, 1891–1919
‘My grandfather,’ Cole Porter told Richard Hubler in 1954, ‘. . . was a hearty man with a high temper who always considered me extravagant. He used to drive me a couple of miles out into the rolling Indiana countryside and rein in his horse at the top of a rise. He would point with the end of his buggywhip at a large, rather bleak gray building. “That, Cole,” he would say, “is the place you will end up.” It
was the county poorhouse. I was only eight in those days. Getting home from such a gruesome sightseeing, I would rush to my mother Kate for comfort. She would hug me, saying indignantly, “Cole, don’t listen to a thing he says!” ’1
Porter’s brief account is a fair summary of his family’s dynamic during his childhood. His grandfather, James Omar Cole (1828–1923), had inherited a considerable real-estate and mining fortune from his father, Albert Cole. According to some sources, James Omar was the richest man in Indiana. A ‘tyrant’, as Cole Porter later described him,2 he had firm ideas concerning what his grandson should study and where, and what sort of career he ought to pursue: he wanted him to go to school in Indiana, at a military academy or business school, and possibly to pursue a career in law. James Omar’s daughter Kate (1862–1952), Cole Porter’s mother, stood up to him at every opportunity, even in her marriage (9 April 1884) to the less well-off Samuel Fenwick Porter (1858–1927), who subsequently went on to become the leading druggist in Porter’s home town, Peru. Kate not only wanted her son (born 9 June 1891) to attend an East Coast school, as she had, but also encouraged him to pursue his musical and theatrical interests. These were apparent early on. In 1901 the Peru Republican reported that ‘Bills are out announcing the appearance of Porter’s greatest show on earth which will exhibit in Frank Bearss’ yard next Friday. The circus is owned and controlled by Master Cole Porter’ and that ‘Miss Emma Bearss took her sister Desdemona, and Cole Porter and Kathryn Kenny to Longansport Tuesday afternoon to see Buffalo Bill.’* When Porter was six he studied piano and violin, later travelling on a weekly basis to nearby Marion, Indiana, to take lessons at the Marion Conservatory of Music. Porter’s father, Samuel, is a shadowy figure. He appears not to have been involved in the disagreements between Kate and James Omar, but at the same time there are hints in the correspondence between Porter’s mother and the headmaster at her son’s school, the Worcester Academy, that he was ‘disgusted’ with Cole.† This animosity was apparently lifelong.