The Letters of Cole Porter

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by Cole Porter


  † John Joseph (‘Black Jack’) Pershing (1860–1948) was commander of the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, 1917–18.

  CHAPTER TWO

  COLE PORTER IN EUROPE, 1918–1928

  On 30 January 1918, while still on active duty, Cole Porter attended the wedding of socialites Ethel Harriman and Henry Russell at the Paris Ritz, where he met Linda Lee Thomas (1883–1954), who six years earlier had divorced Edward R. Thomas (1875–1926), owner of the New York Morning Telegraph. Two months later, Porter wrote to Monty Woolley, describing his life in Paris and, most significantly (though not without a feint to the contrary), his genuine infatuation with her:

  25 March 1918: Cole Porter to Monty Woolley1

  Monnnnnnnt;

  I know you will be happy to hear this: I’m spending most of my evenings with Li’l Ole Marise, dont le pere [sic] est corse et la mere [sic] est corse mais, pour un [sic] raison quelconque, n’est pas corse de [sic] tout.* Its [sic] considered rather dangerous seeing her too often, as her ideas as to finance and the value of a dollar aren’t at all clear. Rex Benson† warned me the other day, saying that she’d just been to him to ask that he pay her debts which amount to the tidy little sum of 300,000 francs. But I’ve explained that I haven’t a sou, except for occasional tete-a-tete [sic] dinners and now and then a nice ride in a taxi, so we’re very happy in our pastoral way. She’s being launched in the haut demi-monde by May Lou, who’s beginning to get just a wee bit discouraged, I believe, as things no sooner get on the way, and people are nearly convinced that Marise is one of the young intellectuals, when suddenly she gets a relapse and bites some woman she just met, on the arm. We were all in a train of having “an interesting evening” last night at May Lou’s-----Mistinguett was there, and Henri Bataille’s mistress, Yvonne Dupres [sic], and Charlotte Lyses [sic], Sacha Guitry’s former wife,* and we were all talking art and love and drama and no end of difficult things, when Blaaah, enter Marise and falls dead drunk in the fire-place.

  I nearly took a flying trip to America, about a week ago, but I’ve given it up and God knows when I’ll hit New York now. I’m going to Spain on the 22nd of April for a month’s motor trip with the Duc d’Albe,† my newest best friend. He’s got two Rolls and two country places and its [sic] all going to be rather congenial, what with that horrible woman, Linda Thomas going, and several other people that you’d despise. It appears that the motors are meeting us at the frontier, whence we roll to Madrid, where we stay only a few days and make immediately for Seville to see the Fair. He’s got a place just outside that is supposed to be fairly beautiful. I don’t believe you’d mind him as much as most of the awful acquaintances I’ve made in France. He looks rather like his cousin, the King,‡ but much better looking. And he’s very British, which doesn’t usually irritate you, if I remember correctly.

  Riggs§ is simply too too. I’m dodging him like a disease during Lent, as he’s given up so many things he likes that its [sic] made him mean. The other night I came home and went in my room. And I said “Riggs, it smells bad in my room.” And he tottered in, with his rubrics in his hand, looked at me sadly and replied “After all, why shouldn’t it?” And yesterday, I said to him “Think of it, in five years, you’ll be tied up in a lot of soiled old robes and I’ll be happy and married.” And Riggs said “Well, you may be married.” And he came in at dawn, the other morning and woke me up with “You and Willie think you’re devoted to each other, but once America goes dry, you won’t have a single thing in common.” He left last night for Rouen where [he] gets on a mule and rides cross-country with a lot of priests to some shrine. He took my musette with him, leaving at some impossible hour and making the Lasnes give him all sorts of sacred food to take along. I came home, several afternoons ago, and he and a greasy old priest were reading one of those enormous books of his aloud. Really, Lent’s never been as hard for me as it has, this time.

  Somebody appeared, the other day and had seen you receiving at the Yale Club. But it was Dick Douglas and I decided that, much as I wanted your news, it was asking too much for me to dine with Dick Douglas in order to get it. So I’ve no idea what you’re doing with your life. Please tell your father that I’ve found a wonderful new perfume called Le Moment Passione, that I’ve been given a marvelous dressing-gown made of an old Persian material and lined with purple and orange silk, and that, every evening at sun-set, I undress, take a bath in the perfume, put on the dressing gown and read Baudelaire aloud to the concierge’s pink young son. It may please him.

  Jack Clark’s back, after having persuaded his fiancée in the Midi somewhere that it would be much simpler if she married someone else. And I see Bill Tytus a good deal. He’s taken an apartment with [Paul Church] Harper and he’s violently in love with a Russian woman. He still has la fievre [sic] d’amour which cramps his style toward six every morning. But he’s drinking wines sparingly.

  With the exception of my occasional soirees [sic] with the half-world, I’m in a complete rut. I lunch and dine with Linda Thomas every day, and between times, call her up on the telephone. She happens to be the most perfect woman in the world and I’m falling so in love with her that I’m attractively triste. It may be merely the Spring, but it looks dangerously like the real thing and I’m quite terrified, for there’s nothing like it to kill concentration.

  [page cut off here but resumes on next page:]

  Please give this letter to Will after you’ve read it. I’ve been writing him awful things lately and this is rather chock full of it.

  Or, at least it will be when I finish, which may not be for days, as I haven’t a damned thing to do, but by hammering away at my Underwood, I give the impression of accomplishing wonders.

  Will Stewart* has gone to Constantinople as the aide of an admiral. He left Rome the other day on a sloop, Daisy de Broglie† has gone to Algeria to get her husband’s body, and as soon as she gets back to Marseilles, she’s giving a big party to celebrate and want wants [sic] us all to come. Sturges‡ is going to America on April 26th and staying the summer. He dreads it awfully. The Grand Duke Alexander§ has taken an apartment just over Toinon, who still cries about Will each time I see her and bores me infinitely. Lucette is still at Biarritz. She has a new lover----an awfully nice beau, parait-il. Maggie has gone away on a motor trip with her lover, Eddie Huffer, and Aliiice [!] has arrived back from Monte Carlo with her lover, after having gained two hundred thousand francs. She intends to spend it on a little diamond. I saw Sydney McCall¶ yesterday, but I saw him first. It appears that [two words unreadable] is at the Ritz. Also, Stanley Spiegelberg.** All of which doesn’t excite me very much.

  We’ll have fun this summer, Monnnnnnnnnnnnt, won’t we. I’m coming over to poison Grandfather and then spend the rest of the time with Will. And I promise not to race about AT ALL. We’ll just sit around and hash over those attractive days that can never be recalled. Those dear days when we were boys and you were ever so much younger.

  Good-bye, WWoolleeyy and write me if you ever have a moment between family rows. Every now and then, your name is mentioned and we all concentrate on how you look. Personally, I remember you perfectly.

  Cole Porter

  Mar 25

  The following December, while en route to Peru, Indiana, to confront his grandfather over the terms of a trust he had created for Cole, Porter met the producer Raymond Hitchcock (1865–1929), who heard him play what at the time was his best-known song, ‘An Old-Fashioned Garden’.2 Hitchcock subsequently engaged Porter to write the score for Hitchy-Koo of 1919, which opened at the Liberty Theatre, New York, on 6 October 1919. The New York Times for 7 October 1919 reported that: ‘ “Hitchy-Koo, 1919” is a Hit . . . The music and the lyrics are the work of Cole Porter, who has made a particularly clever job of the lyrics and a good, tinkling one of the music.’ Shortly afterwards, on 19 December, Porter married Linda Lee Thomas: ‘MRS. LEE THOMAS TO WED. Kentuckian to Marry Cole Porter, Composer, in Paris Today. According to private word fro
m Paris by friends of Mrs. Lee Thomas, formerly the wife of Edward R. Thomas, she is to be married today in that city to Cole Porter, a composer. The couple first met, it is said, last Winter while Mrs. Thomas was in Paris, and Mr. Porter was attached to the American Embassy there . . . Mrs. Thomas was formerly Miss Linda Lee, daughter of William P. Lee, a banker of Louisville, Ky., and was famed for her beauty . . . Mr. Porter is a Yale graduate, and his home is in Peru, Ind. He began composing music and lyrics for operettas and comic operas after his graduation. He wrote the music for “See America First” and also for “Hitchy Koo,” for Raymond Hitchcock, last October.’* Around a week later Porter wrote to Monty Woolley about an outing with Linda, including a cryptic reference to ‘our song’ (that is Porter and Woolley’s) and a first reference to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which for personal reasons – including Porter’s friendship with Diaghilev and his affair with Diaghilev’s amanuensis, Boris Kochno – was shortly afterwards to play an important role in his life:

  Christmas 1919: Cole Porter to Monty Woolley*

  Xmas 1919

  I thought of you last night, Mont – t – t. Linda + I had a great big comfortable box at the Opéra for the opening of the Ballet [sic] Russes + you should have been in it. Especially when during the Prince Igor thing, they started [here Porter writes out the first three bars of the dance later made famous as ‘Stranger in Paradise’] for it is our tune, isn’t it Mon – n – nt! And you’d die at the Boutique, the second one. Its [sic] by far the funniest thing I’ve seen . . .†

  The Porters honeymooned on the Côte d’Azur, the Italian Riviera and Sicily, and travelled frequently during the next several years. In February 1921, while in Egypt,3 Linda Porter made two short notes on the flyleaf of her copy of Arthur E. P. Weigall’s A Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt (London, 1913):

  28 February 1921, Luxor: Lord Carnarvon and his expert, Howard Carter, are digging at the Valley of the Kings – have discovered nothing so far . . . Visited Winlock working with the Metropolitan near Deir-el-Bahiri.‡

  6 March 1921, Tel-el-Amarna: Presented Lord Carnarvon’s letter to Mr. Peet who invited us to come over after lunch and see the excavation which he is making for the exploration fund. Had a delightful time. They live in an old house reconstructed by the Germans who were working there after the war. They have uncovered part of the old city. You can see the ground floor of the villas and the plan of gardens, old furnaces, bathroom, etc. – very interesting – they discovered some beautiful old glass (which we didn’t see) and some pottery – Are now digging near the Rock Tombs – Mr. Newton, the architect, Mr. Guy and a young photographer whose name I didn’t catch.*

  The Porters’ interest in Luxor in particular may have been piqued by Weigall’s description: ‘In or near the Valley are the tombs of all the Pharaohs . . . from Amenhoteph Ist to Rameses XIIth, with rare exceptions. The tomb of Tutantkhamen [sic] has not yet been found.’ That summer they took a chateau in Antibes, inviting friends and acquaintances to visit them there, among them the Mendls,† Gerald Murphy and Picasso.‡ Some years later Porter wrote to Bella Spewack, author of the book Kiss Me, Kate: ‘. . . we rented the Château de la Garoupe for two summers – 1921 and 1922 – and enjoyed every moment. But in those days we were considered crazy, and it was before the days anyone went to the Riviera in the summer, as the weather was considered too hot.’§

  In May 1921, Porter wrote to his friend Monty Woolley, complaining about his silence in a serious but good-natured way:

  2 May 1921: Cole Porter to Monty Woolley4

  Mont –

  It has ceased being decent.

  I’m very serious. Do you realize that not one word has come from you since December & this is May? And has it entered your great domed head that we are old friends?

  This is my final cry for help. And the thing I regret is that even if you continue this conspiracy of silence, I know that the day when we next hit N.Y. I shall be more anxious to see you than anyone else. But, mind you, I resent it. And if ever in the future, we do meet again, once I corner you, I’m going to be so damned remote that you will leave the interview firmly convinced that I had completely forgotten your existence.

  I shan’t tell you my thoughts as it would obviously bore you. But I do want yours.

  So if you’ve an atom of energy left, won’t you sit down + hammer out a letter. It could be done. Won’t you contemplate it?

  Goodbye Mont-t-t

  Co-l-e

  The Porters arrived in New York later that year and during their regular stays there during the 1920s, Linda was involved in the art scene and with cultural and philanthropic institutions. In 1920, Toys and Novelties reported on an exhibition of Bakst dolls at Knoedler’s – an art dealership founded in New York in 1846 – which included ‘several portraits, among them one of Mrs. Felix Doubleday and another of Mrs. Cole Porter’,* while the Annual Report of the American Museum for Natural History for 1921–3 lists among its annual members ‘By payment of $10 annually . . . Porter, Mrs. Cole.’ A headline in the New York Times for 31 December 1922 runs ‘SAYS AMERICA FAILS TO APPRECIATE ART’ and continues: ‘Joseph Pennell, the veteran artist,* yesterday afternoon made a strong plea for greater recognition of modern artists, in an address at the Anderson Galleries. The occasion was the hanging of pictures for the fourth exhibition of the New Society of Artists,† which will have its varnishing day on Tuesday at the Anderson Galleries . . . The members of the Varnishing Day Committee are: . . . Mrs. Cole Porter.’5 In January 1923, the New York Times also reported that ‘Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Mrs. John W. Garrett and Mrs. Cole Porter are members of the Reception Committee for the lecture of Leon Bakst, in French, at the Plaza on Tuesday morning, Jan. 30, on the art of dress. The proceeds will go to the Brooklyn Music School Settlement.’‡

  For his part, Porter appears regularly to have kept in contact with fellow Yalies and in 1922 he wrote songs for a sketch accompanying a Yale alumni production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, as the New York Times for 21 December, p. 18, reported: ‘YALE MEN IN SHAW PLAY . . . Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” is to be presented this evening by the Yale University Dramatic Association at the Heckscher Memorial Theatre. A smoker for the players will follow afterward at the Yale Club, and a sketch, the book for which was written by George Chappell and the music by Cole Porter, is to be staged by the alumni at the smoker.’ In 1925 he contributed to Out O’ Luck, produced by the Yale University Dramatic Association and directed by Monty Woolley. A review appeared in the New York Times on 19 December 1925, p. 15:

  YALE’S ‘OUT O’ LUCK’ IS A WAR COMEDY . . . Incidental Songs by Cole Porter Enliven Piece – Will Go on Tour During Holidays. Yale undergraduates reveled in a war play of their own last night, when the Yale University Dramatic Association produced “Out o’ Luck,” by Tom Cushing, ’02, at the Plaza. This play, however, unlike most of those which have been produced since the war, was a comedy, replete with the humor which doughboys can extract from even their most mud-begrimed and outwardly unhappy situations . . . There were three songs in the play, “Mademoiselle,” sung by Henry C. Potter, ’26, who played the hero, “Don Keogh,” a wistful lad suffering from the shock of war, “I’m the Hero-ine,” sung by John McA. Hoysradt, ’36, and “Butterfly,” sung by the entire group. The songs were written by Cole Porter, ’12.

  Only the texts for Out O’ Luck survive.6 Porter’s songs for the 1922 sketch are apparently otherwise unknown; neither the texts nor music survive.7 Apart from his musical involvement with fellow Yale alumni, Porter also wrote the bulk of the score of the Greenwich Village Follies, which opened at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre, New York, on 16 September. The New York Times for 17 September, p. 16, described it as having ‘something about it like the sack of Rome; it is like reviewing within the space of thirty minutes a deluge of music, costumes, angels, scenery, food, vivacity and week-end charades’. Porter’s songs were not well received and
by early 1925, when the show went on tour, most of them had been dropped.8

  For the most part, however, Porter’s musical activities at the end of the 1910s and during the early 1920s were centred in Europe. In late 1919 he may have thought about taking composition lessons with Igor Stravinsky;* on 2 December the painter and musician Paul Thévenaz wrote to Stravinsky in New York: ‘In a month or two you will probably receive a visit from Cole Porter, American musician, composer especially of ragtimes. He has a certain talent and wants to study with you. I told him that I was not at all sure that you would accept a pupil. But this could be interesting. He will pay anything you ask. He is a very nice boy, intelligent, gifted, and a multimillionaire.’9 Negotiations with Porter dragged on for more than two years but nothing came of them. On 18 July 1922, Stravinsky wrote to Winnaretta Singer:* ‘I would also like to tell you that mister Cole Porter has abruptly renounced to take lessons with me. When I saw him last, I had a contract that was drawn up and signed by him, accompanied by a letter. He asked me to let him know by lawyer if (and I underline) there was anything in the contract that might not be to my liking. So I did, and offered him a counterproposal, that only included a few precisions to his contract, that had only guaranteed me half of the announced sum. After which his lawyer announced to me the somehow unexpected news of Porter’s refusal. Unexpected, because it was Porter himself who urged me to make the changes. I do not hide to you the fact that I feel hurt by his behavior and I regret that he troubled you for nothing.’10 Also in 1922, on 21 July, while the Porters were in the United States, Linda sent a telegram to her friend Alice Garrett, then at Cannes, asking whether she could rent Garrett’s Paris apartment: ‘WILL YOU RENT YOUR APARTMENT TO COLE FOR SIX WEEKS SAILING JULY TWENTY SECOND AQ[U]ITANIA TO WRITE REVUE PLEASE WIRELESS HIM YES OR NO LOVE LINDA’.11 This could refer to Hitchy-Koo of 1922, which never made it to New York and closed during its Philadelphia tryout in October, or, since the Porters were on their way to Europe, the ‘Ragtime Pipes of Pan’ from Phi-Phi, a Charles Cochran revue that opened at the London Pavilion Theatre on 16 August.

 

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