by Cole Porter
In the meantime, in May 1920, Porter enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where one of his assignments was to orchestrate a Robert Schumann piano sonata.12 That same year he contributed three numbers to the London musical A Night Out, which opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on 18 September,13 and in 1922 several of his songs appeared in Charles B. Cochran’s Mayfair and Montmartre. A Night Out was well received. The Times of London described it as ‘one of the brightest things of its kind which we have had for a long time’ and ‘the music of Mr. Willie Redstone and the other composers who have lent a hand is dainty.’14 Mayfair and Montmartre fared less well:
At the beginning of the second part of Mr. C. B. Cochran’s new revue Mayfair and Montmartre, which was produced at the New Oxford Theatre last night, there was a scene which purported to represent three dramatic critics discussing the first part of the play. They said a good many harsh things about it – intended, of course, to be exceedingly ironical – and finally one of them remarked, “The whole show needs the axe.” The scene then ended, amid prolonged applause from the audience. Mr. Cochran was not only courageous to introduce such a post-mortem on half of his own production. He also showed a certain amount of perspicacity. Incidentally he has rendered criticism mere plagiarism. If he had held a similar post-mortem on the second half he could fairly have introduced some kinder remarks about the production, but by that time a section of the audience had started the work of criticism on its own.
Mayfair and Montmartre is not so good as some of its predecessors . . . The weakest part of the production lay in the various sketches. Few of them were very amusing, and one called The Conference Trick, which represented certain politicians, was in poor taste. It obtained a mixed reception, and should be the first candidate for Mr. Cochran’s axe.15
The review does not mention Porter or for that matter any of the revue’s musical numbers, including songs by Max Darewski, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.* And there is no evidence that Porter met Gershwin at this time; as far as is known, Gershwin was not in London for the production. They had, however, met by late 1925 when, according to the New York Times, Porter attended a post-concert reception for Gershwin at the home of Jules Glaenzer: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Jules Glaenzer gave a reception last night at their home, Sixty-fifth Street and Lexington Avenue, for George Gershwin, whose new piano concerto in F major was presented by the New York Symphony Orchestra at a concert earlier in the evening. The guests included . . . Mr. and Mrs. Walter Damrosch . . . Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Steinway . . . Conde Nast, Noel Coward, Cole Porter and Cyril Maude.’*
The most significant of Porter’s large-scale works at this time was the ballet Within the Quota, written for Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois† as a companion piece to Darius Milhaud’s‡ La Création du Monde. Within the Quota was initially conceived by Porter’s friend Gerald Murphy and, according to William McBrien,16 it was Milhaud who asked Porter – whom he had met at the home of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac – to write the ballet. Milhaud’s autobiography tells a slightly different story, that it was de Maré who concocted the ballet’s plot and commissioned Porter:
De Maré was to undertake a tour of the United States and wanted to put on an authentic American work, but did not know whom to approach. He was afraid of coming across some composer struggling along in the wake of Debussy, Ravel, or someone composing music à la Brahms or à la Reger. I had met Cole Porter several times at the house of the Princesse de Polignac. This elegant young American, who always wore a white carnation in the buttonhole of his faultless dinner jacket, sang in a low, husky voice songs having just the qualities that de Maré was looking for. I introduced them to each other. De Maré immediately asked him to treat a subject admirably suitable for his music: the arrival of a young Swede in New York. Charles Koechlin undertook to orchestrate his score, which was redolent of the pure spirit of Manhattan, with wistful blues alternating with throbbing ragtime rhythms. This odd partnership between the technician of counterpoint and fugue and the brilliant future “King of Broadway” was an outstanding success. Ferdinand Léger asked an American artist, Gerald Murphy, to paint the scenery, and the skyscrapers of Times Square were seen to rise on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.17
Milhaud’s account can be faulted on at least one detail: according to the diaries of Charles Koechlin, who in the autumn of 1923 orchestrated Within the Quota, Milhaud had previously met Porter at Koechlin’s home as early as 5 June 1923 when they had dinner together and, as Koechlin reported, listened to ‘Disques Négres’. That same month, Koechlin gave Porter eight orchestration lessons. None of these early meetings, however, concerned Within the Quota, which was first mentioned by Porter in a now-lost telegram to Koechlin of 14 September. Further diary entries document Koechlin’s work on the ballet:
15 September: Koechlin visits Porter at 13, rue Monsieur.
18–20, 21 and 24–27 September: Koechlin orchestrates Within the Quota.
26 September: Porter visits Koechlin at his home at Villers-sur-Mer; they review the orchestration of Within the Quota.
28 September and 1 October: Koechlin continues to work on his orchestration.
5 October: In apparent response to an invitation to visit Villers-sur-Mer again, Porter sends Koechlin a (now lost) telegram, apparently in response to an invitation to visit Villers-sur-Mer again; Porter ‘ne peut pas venir’.
17 October: Koechlin returns to Paris and reads through Porter’s ballet again.
19 October: Within the Quota is rehearsed and Koechlin asks Porter for payment for his work.
25 October: Koechlin cashes Cole Porter’s cheque for $500, approximately 8,600 Francs.
31 October: Koechlin visits Porter at the Hotel Ritz.
11 December: Koechlin cashes a second cheque from Porter, in the amount of 9,300 Francs.*
Within the Quota premiered on 25 October 1923 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, together with Milhaud’s La Création du Monde. Milhaud’s comment that the event was an ‘outstanding success’ notwithstanding, the reviews were generally mixed, and mostly negative:
Le Figaro, 27 October 1923
For its first musical event of this year, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées presented two new ballets, one by MM. Cendrars and Darius Milhaud, the other by Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter. The first has the simple and definitive title, La Création du Monde, the second an English title that the program translated as l’Immigrant. These two productions are of the humorous kind, the first infinitely superior to the second . . . The second ballet, the ballet-sketch of MM. Murphy and Cole Porter, is entirely different. Here there is no question of style or an attempt to move forward. We go back [instead] several years in the annals of the music hall. We have seen such sketches inserted in innumerable revues, and the music is unfortunately typical of this poor sort of invention. The care with which it was orchestrated by Mr. Koechlin further reveals its weakness [en révèle davantage l’indigence] and the grandiloquence of the finale highlights its vulgarity. The music of the finale, however, has the advantage of entering the ear easily . . . This was not the usual Swedish ballet performance.
L’Intransigeant, 27 October 1923, p. 4
That as worthy and serious a musician as Mr. Koechlin has granted his patronage – and the most active patronage possible: collaboration – to the score of Mr. Cole Porter, the composer of Within the Quota, cannot be seen merely as a courteous gesture to an American colleague. It must be that Mr. Koechlin, for his part, recognized qualities [in it] other than banal. On a single hearing, and despite the attraction added to it by ingenious orchestral colour, we would be embarrassed if we had to say exactly what these qualities are. Humour? A sense of wit and popular art? A directness without detours or complications? Maybe, and that would be something in itself. If there is more, we will not ask anything more of ourselves than to convince ourselves of it, and in the meantime we are entirely disposed to take Mr. Koechlin at his word.
Le Mat
in, 29 October, p. 4
More balanced [pondéré], but nevertheless very curious, was a ballet-sketch by Gérald Murphy, Within the Quota, comedic and satirical scenes with a score by Cole Porter, a famous jazz composer. The action takes place in America, in front of a giant newspaper page. Typical types of Americans appear: the billionaire, the puritan, the gentleman of colour, the jazzbaby, the cowboy, the queen-of-all-hearts . . . The public applauded them for their designs and their realizations perfectly adequate to the characters that they embody.
A report published in London was similarly dismissive: ‘The other ballet, Within the Quota, which might possibly be effective as a scene in a music-hall revue, is a rather poor attempt to do what was done once for all in Le Boeuf sur le Toit.’* The expatriate American press, however, was jingoistically favourable:
American Ballet Pleases Gathering At Paris Theatre. Fashionable and artistic Paris made up a brilliant first-night audience, with Americans much in evidence, when the Swedish Ballets yesterday revealed their new program at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in the first of three performances which M. Rolf de Mare, the director, will give here before taking his troupe to America next month. The ballet of the two Americans, Mr. Gerald Murphy and Mr. Cole Porter, the composer, had an undoubted success in the array of new compositions, by some of the best-known modernist composers, which made up the bill.
“Within the Quota” awoke laughter and applause from the audience, in which society and Montmartre were mingled, as it unfolded the story of a Swedish immigrant who lands in America to meet all the glamorous figures of American life which he had imagined, and finds himself separated from them by the sinister figure of prohibition in one form or another.
Mr. Murphy’s clever journalistic set brought a hearty laugh as soon as it was revealed and his eccentric costumes had a big effect, and the “intensified jazz” with which Mr. Cole Porter accompanied the dances of the negro, the jazz baby and the millionaires, culminating in a delightful and humorous movie music effect to mark the end of the Swedish boy’s search when he meets Mary Pickford amused and highly pleased the audience.18
In November, Within the Quota moved to New York. The New York Times for 23 November 1923, p. 30, noted that, ‘Midway in a week’s stay here, the Swedish Ballet gave an American novelty in its performance at the Century Theatre last night, one of the latest it had produced in Paris before sailing last month. The piece was its gesture of greeting to America, as it might well have been last Monday, introducing, not Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, but a Swedish immigrant landing in New York. The ballet sketch “Within the Quota” was by Gerald Murphy, a Yale graduate and son of Patrick Francis Murphy of this city. The descriptive music of a day in harbor and ashore, orchestrated by Charles Koechlin abroad, was sketched originally by Cole Porter, Mr. Murphy’s classmate and associate artist now overseas, who wrote a remembered song, “An Old-Fashioned Garden,” in one of Raymond Hitchcock’s productions of “Hitchy-Koo.” ’* The more positive response that Within the Quota got in New York appears to have enhanced Porter’s reputation in the United States at a time when he was not particularly well known to the public. The next year, the author and music critic Gilbert Seldes wrote in The Seven Lively Arts:
Two composers are possible successors to [Irving] Berlin if he ever chooses to stop. I omit Jerome Kern – a consideration of musical style will indicate why. I am sure of Gershwin and would be more sure of Cole Porter if his astonishing lyrics did not so dazzle me as to make me distrust my estimate of his music . . . Banking on Porter is dangerous because essentially he is much more sophisticated in general attitude of mind than any of the others, and although he has written ragtime and patter songs and jazz of exceptional goodness, he has one quality which may bar him forever from the highest place – I mean that he is essentially a parodist. I know of no one else with such a sense for musical styles. A blues, a 1910 rag, a Savoy operetta serio-comic love song, a mother song – he writes them all with a perfect feeling for their musical nature, and almost always with satiric intention, with a touch of parody. It is only the most sophisticated form which is germane to him; in highly complex jazzing he is so much at home, his curiosity is so engaged, he feels the problem so much, that the element of parody diminishes. Yet The Blue Boy Blues,* almost as intricate a thing as Berlin ever wrote, with a melody overlaid on a running syncopated comment, has a slight touch of parody in the very excess of its skill. Jazz has always mocked itself a little; it is possible that it will divide and follow two strains – the negro and the intellectual. In the second case Porter will be one of its leaders and Whiteman† will be his orchestra. The song Soon,19 for example, is a deliberate annihilation of the Southern negro sentiment carefully done by playing Harlem jazz, with a Harlem theme, mercilessly burlesquing the clichés of the Southern song – the Swanee-Mammy element* – in favour of a Harlem alley. Porter’s parody is almost too facile; Soon is an exasperatingly good piece of jazz in itself. He is a tireless experimenter, and the fact that in 1923 others are doing things he tried in 1919, makes me wonder whether his excessive intelligence and sophistication may not be pointing a way which steadier and essentially more native jazz writers will presently follow. Native, I mean, to jazz; taking it more seriously. Whether any of them could compose such a ballet as Porter did for the Ballet Suédois is another question.20
Shortly after the Paris premiere of Within the Quota, the Porters bought a new house in Paris, at 13 rue Monsieur in the 13th arrondissement, close to Les Invalides. Originally built in 1777 by the architect Alexandre Brongniart as a stable and residence for the Comte de Provence, a younger brother of Louis XVI (and from 1814 to 1824 Louis XVII), 13 rue Monsieur was featured in the 25 January 1925 issue of Vogue magazine.†
Their purchase of 13 rue Monsieur notwithstanding, the Porters maintained for a short while at least their apartment at the Ritz, as two curious newspaper articles in the New York Herald Tribune (European Edition) concerning Porter’s apparently abducted dog suggest:
4 January 1924, p. 2
LOST, on the 1st of January, between five and six o’clock in the evening SMALL BLACK AND WHITE CURLY-HAIRED DOG. RED COLLAR, marked JACK HAMLET, 3 RUE DE LA BAUME. Return to MR. COLE PORTER, Hôtel Ritz. WILL RECEIVE LIBERAL REWARD.
5 January 1924, p. 2
CANINE FAVORITE OF STAGE IS LOST. The alleged attempt to kidnap one of the Dolly Sisters recently was closely followed by the disappearance of another stage star in Paris, when Jack Hamlet vanished in an unexplained manner from the room of Mr. Cole Porter at the Hotel Ritz between five and six o’clock on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. No trace of him has been found since, in spite of his conspicuous appearance, for he has black and white curly hair and was wearing a red collar at the time he was missed. He is not a valuable dog, but his owner, the American composer, would like to have him back in memory of days spent together in America.
Mr. Cole Porter, who wrote the music of “Within the Quota,” the American immigrant story given in Paris last November by the Swedish Ballets and afterwards taken to America by them, is at work on a new ballet with M. Léon Bakst, the Russian designer, and was planning to put the dog in the show. This is another reason why he needs him back, as well as being sorry to have the dog’s stage career in danger of being blasted in the bud. The name, Jack Hamlet, was bestowed upon the future footlight favorite by Mr. John Barrymore, who must have had an idea of the dog’s theatrical ambitions. For these reasons the owner is offering a reward to anyone who will restore the fugitive Hamlet to his home and his career.*
In the late spring of 1925 the Porters travelled to North Africa, and in March Porter sent postcards to his friends Monty Woolley and the author and abstract artist Charles Green Shaw:
March 1925: Cole Porter to Monty Woolley21
You can’t imagine the beauties of the mountains of North Africa – We all wish you were with us to enjoy them.
C –
[?] Spring 1925: Cole Porter to Charles Green Sha
w22
There are lots of high ceilings in Fez.*
After his return to Europe, in May, Porter sent Shaw a postcard from Cherbourg and Woolley a postcard from Amsterdam, with a picture of the German Kaiser Wilhelm:23
2 May 1925: Cole Porter to Charles Green Shaw24
Courtney + I send you a great big Rick in your great big behind. C.
15 May 1925: Cole Porter to Monty Woolley25
I don’t see why you cant [sic] even answer mail on Marshall’s Petter [?]. Exactly why cant [sic] you?
C.
Charles Green Shaw (1892–1974), a Yale classmate of Porter’s, had been a close family friend at least since the late 1910s; as early as 1920 Porter’s mother wrote to him: ‘Dear Charles: You were very good to remember Cole Porter’s Mother with a copy of your latest book. I am delighted with it, I think the articles clever . . .’26 There is little evidence, however, to suggest he and Porter were lovers except perhaps occasionally: although Shaw was homosexual like Porter, the character of Porter’s correspondence with him, like his correspondence with Woolley, is intimate, flirtatious, natural, friendly, and seemingly based on a sort of equality of kindred spirits, unlike his serious correspondence with Boris Kochno,† or his earnest and paternal correspondence with Nelson Barclift later. A few of Porter’s letters to Shaw are undated but most are written on Parisian stationery or refer to France or Venice. It is likely, then, that the surviving letters largely date from the mid to late 1920s.27
[n.d.] Cole Porter to Charles Green Shaw28
Big Boy –
But so few letters dernierement. And why!