The Letters of Cole Porter
Page 17
Porter’s 1936 show, Red, Hot and Blue!, reunited many of the principals from Anything Goes, including producer Vinton Freedley, the authors Lindsay and Crouse, and Ethel Merman in the starring role, ‘Nails’ O’Reilly Duquesne. It had been mooted at least since the spring of 1935 when Freedley had signed Merman to the lead, but it was not written for almost a year and only opened at the Alvin Theatre, New York, on 19 October 1936. The New York Herald Tribune gave the show a positive review, perceptively noting, as well, that good performances make a significant difference to the success of a show:
With two such heart-warming performers [as Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante] properly cast and with a score by Mr. Porter, even if it is in his second-best vein, a musical comedy has a beautiful head start to success. Since Mr. Durante has never been funnier and Miss Merman sings as alluringly as ever, it is safe to set down “Red, Hot and Blue” as a triumph . . . It is always a pleasure to listen to Mr. Porter’s music, and the only critical problem arises from deciding whether one of his numbers belongs in his first or second flight. The confession must be made that, upon first hearing, the suspicion arises that the score of “Red, Hot and Blue” is in the second category. Miss Merman, however, invariably fools one. When she sings a number you are immediately forced into the conviction that it is a masterpiece. It is only as an afterthought that you begin to realize that it may have been merely a pretty good piece, raised into the major leagues by Miss Merman’s exciting rendition. At least it is safe to say that “Down in the Depths on the 90th Floor” is almost as good as Miss Merman makes it sound, which is a great tribute to it. The Durante song about the skipper from Heaven* is a comic masterpiece, as I think I have suggested, and the lyrics of “Ridin’ High” are in Mr. Porter’s best topical manner.36
The critic in Time Magazine was less positive: ‘This first brand-new star to rise in Broadway’s 1936–37 musicomedy firmament was judged by most observers to be of the second magnitude . . . Also second-best in the opinion of most listeners is the score Cole Porter has composed for his 12th musical show. Victim of his own previous high standards, composer Porter will doubtless have the misfortune of hearing Red, Hot and Blue’s comic number, “It’s De-Love-ly,” unfavorably compared with “A Picture Of Me Without You” which he wrote last year for Jubilee, and his current torch song, “Down in the Depths, On the 90th Floor,” rated way below his “I Get a Kick Out of You” in Anything Goes.’37
Shortly after the opening of Red, Hot and Blue!, Porter wrote to an unidentified correspondent concerning the addition to the show of ‘Down in the Depths’ during the tryout in Boston, a story he returned to in a piece he wrote for the New York Times, ‘Notes on the Morning After an Opening Night’:
24 October 1936: Cole Porter and unidentified correspondent38
Just last week while the new show was playing in Boston,† we all decided another song should be added. It had to be done in a hurry, of course, but I didn’t have any difficulty, as I knew the situation in the show perfectly. I got my song in mind Tuesday, worked on it that night and Wednesday, and it was in the show, orchestrated and sung by Ethel Merman on Thursday night [October 15, 1936].
8 November 1936: “Notes on the Morning After an Opening Night” by Cole Porter
Am I made wrong?
While Russel Crouse was pacing back and forth in the lounge of the Alvin Theatre during the opening performance of “Red, Hot and Blue!”* giving a perfect take-off on all of the ten million ghosts, and Howard Lindsay was somewhere on his New Jersey estate getting quarter-hourly reports from his wife, I was in as good a seat as the management would give me, and, flanked by Mary Pickford and Merle Oberon,† was having a swell time watching the actors. Russel claims this is being as indecent as the bridegroom who has a good time at his own wedding.
The morning after an opening of one of my own shows is more or less the same as any other morning – except that I sleep much later. In the case of “Red, Hot and Blue!” I broke my record by exactly ten minutes.
The reason for my behaviour isn’t that I’m confident of the play’s success or that I’m totally without nerves. I’ll put up my nerves against the best of them. But, for some reason, the moment the curtain rises on opening night, I say to myself: “There she goes,” and I’ve bid goodbye to my baby.
***
During the months of preparation the piece itself becomes something of a person to me – not always a nice person, perhaps, but at least some one that I’ve grown fond of. The minute it is exposed to its premiere audience, however, I feel that it’s no longer mine. It belongs to the performers. And I become just another $8.80 customer. That is why I take my friends along and make a night of it afterward.
The morning after is still a hangover of the holiday mood. One of the luxuries is to wake up to an inspired breakfast and then hunt for the notices. It is a pleasant feeling, this sensation of laziness which dictates that the entire day be dedicated to comfortable indolence, and nothing else but.
***
At any rate, there was I, my breakfast done and the notices half finished, when the telephone rang. It was Vinton Freedley,* the girl at the desk announced: would I talk to him? I hesitated a moment. Whenever a producer calls up a song writer it always means trouble. And this was my day of rest. However, I weakened. I steeled myself for the inevitable barrage and decided to take the call.
“Hello, Cole, this is Vinton talking. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine too.”
And he hung up.
Considerate fellow, Vinton, when you get down to it.
Pleasantly relieved, I settled back to the notices again.
The telephone rang once more. “Ethel Merman,” the girl at the desk announced.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I love Ethel. I hope it will not be considered ungracious of me, in the face of the other very talented artists who have sung my songs and helped them along to popularity, to confess that I’d rather write for Ethel than any one else in the world. Every composer has his favorite, and she is mine. Her voice, to me, is thrilling. She has the finest enunciation of any American singer I know. She has a sense of rhythm which few can equal. And her feeling for comedy is so intuitive that she can get every value out of a line without ever overstressing a single inference. And she is so damned apt.
***
We decided in Boston one day that her first number in the show, whatever its melodic qualities might be, was too somber to start things off, and it became advisable to replace it. So that same afternoon I locked myself in my room and emerged the following morning with “Down in the Depths, on the Ninetieth Floor”. The song was scored in the afternoon and that evening Ethel sang it in the show.* And sang it beautifully. One thinks of these things, on the morning after an opening, with affection and gratitude. For, after all is said and done, a song writer is very much at the mercy of his interpreters, and it adds greatly to his sense of comfort to know that numbers are in capable hands.
These thoughts ran through my mind and still I hesitated, for usually when Ethel phones one it is to suggest changes in her songs, and this was one morning when I did not feel like doing anything of the kind.
However, I took the call.
“Hello, Cole. This is Ethel talking. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine too.”
And she hung up.
***
Cheerfully I returned to the notices. But again the phone interrupted, and this time it was Henry Spitzer† of Chappell’s. Henry is my music publisher. I like him very much in spite of the fact that he often talks business. Right now I did not feel like being bothered with details pertaining to restricting numbers on the radio, additional arrangements, foreign rights, special licenses and the like.
However, I had taken the other calls. I might just as well take his too.
“Hello, Cole. T
his is Henry talking. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine too.”
And he hung up. A pal to the end.
A couple of minutes later Jimmy Durante‡ was on the phone. Jimmy had been after me to write him a song which he could sing with the girls in the show. Writing for Jimmy is not easy. It isn’t the range of his voice, which is usually the major problem when turning out numbers for other performers, but rather catching that certain something which goes into the making of the Durante personality. The man who cleans up my apartment had several extra basketfuls of paper to cart out during the days I was fashioning “Little Skipper From Heaven Above” for Jimmy. But I took the call.
“Hello, Cole. This is Jimmy talking. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine. How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling fine too.”
And that was that.
By this time I was more or less finished with the notices. They ran according to form. I was considering the prospect of going back to bed when the telephone rang once more.
It was the press agent of the show.
“Hello,” I said, beating him to the punch, “I’m feeling fine.”
“That’s fine, because then you’ll be able to do a piece about it.”
P.S. He was feeling fine too.
In December, Porter wrote to Monty Woolley, mentioning his next assignment, the MGM film Rosalie, which would be released the following year, on 24 December 1937.
18 December 1936: Cole Porter to Monty Woolley39
Dear Beardie:
I enclose $100, which you will please spend on that sack suit you have been crying about. If you can’t get anything magnificent for $100, let me know and I will supply the deficit.
It was very nice to get your drunken telegram this morning and to realize that you haven’t improved in the least.
For a few days The Oregon Mist got us down and the streets were so flooded that it was worth your life to venture out, but once more The Usual Weather has descended upon us and we are basking naked in the sun again.
I got my assignment to do “ROSALIE”,* the day after I arrived, which pleased me mightily, but when I called up Sam Katz a week later and told him that I had written the Title Song, he replied “Oh, Cole, don’t hurry about this, just get a good rest and enjoy California.” So I have had to call off all work, lest they lose respect for me.
Linda decided that we should not have any Christmas at all this year, consequently she’s very busy every day ordering Christmas trees, turkeys and geese for a bang-up Christmas Eve party. It’s going to be one of those evenings where everybody gives a present to everybody else and it’s going to cost us all a hell of a lot of money by the time they get out of the house.
[signed:] Cole
Two days later, an interview with Porter was published in the New York Herald Tribune. Unlike many interviews that merely skim the surface of Porter’s career and works, this one credibly describes his working method and his use of rhyming dictionaries:
Cole Porter, who according to his own admission, gets his inspiration from night clubs, never leaves them until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.
“Recently,” he says, “I visited a night club six times to get a feeling of swing in the new tunes played there. I go to the theater constantly to keep in touch with popular musical taste. My interest in composition is modern, of course, but I like going back to the classics. I am especially interested in providing dance forms that haven’t been used recently. In ‘Born to Dance,’ for instance, I used an old-fashioned hornpipe, and in ‘Red, Hot and Blue’ the Szardas.
“In every show I always try to use my favorite tempo, one seldom used in America – the paso doble – or three-two time, a lively tempo.”
So that his lyrics may be up to the minute in timeliness, he continually searches for that elusive topical idiom. He must know the newest wisecracks and clichés, so that his song lyrics appeal to every type of society – the younger set, the man-about-town, the first-nighters, Broadway, the racetrack, the prize ring and the roulette table.
Wherever Porter goes he is always busy on scores and lyrics. He works from 11 in the morning until 4 officially, and after that keeps at the job, making mental notes in transit – in automobiles, in trains and airplanes.
“In writing a song,” he says, “I start with a title first. From this title I work out the psychology of the tune. Next I write the lyric backward, and in this way build it up to a climax. In the lyric I work first for the climax, and if I can’t find a good climactic line I throw out the tune.”
Porter’s comments on rhyming are informative.
“I consult rhyme dictionaries. I swear by them. For long, easy rhymes I use Andrew Loring’s Lexicon. Other books I have in constant use are Roget’s ‘Thesaurus,’ an atlas, Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’ and a dictionary.*
“I have learned the map through my lyrics, for the backgrounds of pictures and places forces me to learn a great deal about geography. Motion pictures are more difficult to write for than the stage. I must deliver my tunes in a shorter time. I have only seven numbers in pictures, but twenty-one in an ordinary show.”40
* In Philadelphia, Paris was first given on 13 February; it opened in Boston on 7 May.
† Gilbert Heron Miller (1884–1969) was a theatrical producer. Among other works he produced Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife (1927), Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1938), T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1951) and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (1957); see the obituary in the New York Times, 3 January 1969, 1 and 24.
‡ Neither of these appears to have materialized.
§ Charles B. Cochran (1872–1951) was a producer, director and impresario. A frequent collaborator with Noël Coward, Cochran produced Wake Up and Dream and, later, Nymph Errant (1933), and the London production of Anything Goes (1935).
* Wake Up and Dream had a tryout in Manchester, beginning 5 March 1929, and opened in London, at the London Pavilion, on 27 March. Noël Coward’s revue, This Year of Grace, played at the London Pavilion from 22 March 1928. In New York, This Year of Grace played at the Selwyn Theatre from 7 November 1928 to 23 March 1929.
* With the exceptions of 1931 and 1933, Porter produced at least one new Broadway show every year between 1929 and 1936 and music for four films between 1929 and 1937: Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), The New Yorkers (1930), Gay Divorce (1932), Anything Goes (1934), Jubilee (1935), Red, Hot and Blue! (1936), and the films The Battle of Paris (1929), Adios Argentina (1934–5 but not produced), Born to Dance (1936) and Rosalie (1937).
† The producer, director and dancer Jack Buchanan (1891–1957), together with dancer Tillie Losch (1903–75), choreographed Wake Up and Dream. ‘Raquel Muller’s sister’ is unidentified.
‡ New York Herald Tribune, 31 December 1929, 24. The zoological theme, as well as the critics’ high regard for ‘What is This Thing Called Love?’, also figures in a review of Wake Up and Dream published in Time Magazine for 13 January 1930: ‘Charles B. Cochran, the British Ziegfeld, is quite as resourceful as his U. S. composer. The music, for instance, which accompanies his latest revue is by a trio consisting of Johann Sebastian Bach, Maurice Ravel and that infectious zoologist, Cole (“Let’s Do It”) Porter who used to lead the Yale Glee Club . . . Cole Porter fulfills the duty of popular composers to provide at least one haunting ballad per show. Its name: “What is This Thing Called Love?”’
* Armand-Albert Rateau (1882–1938) was a furniture maker and interior designer. See Frank Olivier Vial and François Rateau, Armand-Albert Rateau: Un Baroque chez les modernes (Paris, 1992). A 1925 notice concerning Rateau’s work notes: ‘The art of M. Rateau, decorator, is in not indiscriminately mixing modes, masculine and feminine, styles, sources, flowers, and scrollwork. He creates, but he creates by seeking moderation rather than lavishness or frivolity.’ Jared Goss, French Art Deco (New York, 2014), 178.
* Porter’s publisher Harms, New York, representing Chappell & Co., London, wrote to Harvey Cole on 7 March 1930 that Porter had been paid $1,000 on 5 April 1929, $1,000 on 8 March 1929 (paid in London), and $2,500 on 12 June 1929. http://www.lionheartautographs.com/autograph/19790-PORTER,-COLE-Composer-Cole-Porter-Writing-About-Tax-Issues-on-Black-Tuesday-1929.
* New York Herald Tribune, 9 December 1930, 20. Shortly after the opening of The New Yorkers, the Porters attended a party hosted by Elsa Maxwell that was typical of the festive soirées in Porter’s social set. See Time Magazine for 22 December 1930: ‘Elsa Maxwell, rich California socialite who lives in Paris and entertains amusingly on her visits to Manhattan, gave her annual Manhattan costume ball. The invitations bade 350 guests come dressed as their “opposites.” Miss Maxwell rigged herself in pantaloons and high stiff collar as Herbert Hoover . . . Dancer Adele Astaire thought she was the opposite of an angel. Lady Ribblesdale went as Charlie Chaplin, Banker Mortimer Schiff as Oscar Wilde. Two socialite matrons chose to dress as “Ladies of the Temperance Union.” Composer Cole Porter went as an oldtime footballer, his wife as a housemaid. Princess Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst wore the robes of a nun.’
† Richard J. Madden (birth and death dates unknown) was Cole Porter’s agent; the Richard J. Madden Play Company was based at 33 West 42nd Street, New York.