The Letters of Cole Porter

by Cole Porter

  I’m a little hampered in writing a review of “Paris,” by Martin Brown, at the Music Box, because directly behind me sat a lady and gentleman, both wits. The lady wit was upset before the curtain rose because the program threatened three renditions of an E. Ray Goetz song called “The Land of Going to Be.” Her companion thought it was a misprint for “The Land of Going to Bed.” As the evening wore on and Irene Bordoni obliged with the selection six times, the pair grew what you might call almost bitter . . . When it came to Cole Porter’s songs, however, I cared for no one’s opinion but my own, an ecstatic one. “Babes in the Wood,” “Don’t Look at Me That Way,” and “Let’s Fall in Love” are up to Mr. Porter’s best, and there is no better. No one else now writing words and music knows so exactly the delicate balance between sense, rhyme, and tune. His rare and satisfactory talent makes other lyrists [sic] sound as though they’d written their words for a steam whistle.44

  On 15 April 1928, the New York Times reported that:

  PARIS LIFE IS QUIET DURING HALF-SEASON . . . The opening of the classic races at Longchamps was marked by Ralph Strassburger† giving a big dinner party in a private salon at the Ritz, when the entertainers were two Southern girls, the Misses Lamkin and Ward, who made a big hit at Palm Beach with the latest jazz and plantation songs and who are now capturing Paris . . . The following night there was another big dinner with the American composer, George Gershwin, whose ingenious modern compositions have delighted Parisians, giving them a taste for more American music. Among the guests were Grand Duke Dimitri and his American wife, the Princess Ilyinski, formerly Audrey Emery;* also Cole Porter, who added to the jazz feast by playing his own compositions; Mrs. Porter and Prince and Princess Obolensky, formerly Alice Astor, who has just returned from London, where her mother, Lady Ribblesdale, underwent an operation.† The Duchess of Sutherland,‡ the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia§ and Michael Arlen were also present.45

  But while Paris life may have been quiet for the high-society set, it was a busy time for Porter who on 10 May opened a new show, La Revue des Ambassadeurs, at the Ambassadeurs Café.¶ The background to this production – essentially American, not French – was described in the New York Times for 19 February:

  When Latin temperament meets American efficiency in the theatre, a revue is often produced. That, at least, is the experience of William Morris Jr., who meets at least one foreign “buyer” each month. His latest experience was with Edmond Sayag, a revue producer of Paris, who spent one week in America and then went cheerfully home with a show packed under his arm. For during M. Sayag’s short visit at the William Morris offices contracts were signed for a group of American performers, headed by Buster West and Clifton Webb,* to appear in Paris this Spring in an American revue which will be known as “Vingt-huit” . . .

  M. Sayag’s entrance into the William Morris offices caused one of those emergency conferences which enlist every nerve and all the nerve of a booking-office system. First of all, M. Sayag wanted the best dancing chorus obtainable, and believed that this detail could be accomplished with no more difficulty than the pushing of a button. After all, he had to hurry back to Paris. So, magically, within twenty-four hours sixteen dancing girls had received his approbation. Concurrently, the jazz bands were signed without even one saxophonist going into a decline.

  These details completed, M. Sayag announced that he would have specialty dancers. There are specialty dancers and specialty dancers, but it was evident he wanted the latter. Long-distance calls, telegrams and shouting brought contracts from Myrio, Deshe and Barte, Dario and Irene, and Bud and Jack Pearson of “Take the Air.” The nucleus for “Vingt-huit” now safely in his pocket, the visitor then declared that he wanted a dancing star. Whereupon William Grady, who up to this time had merely taken a supervisor’s part in the proceedings, sought out on the telephone Buster West, who had left town some time ago with the “Scandals.”† To make a long story suspenseless, it may be disclosed that Mr. West was located and said “yes” from somewhere in a telephone booth.

  Two hours before M. Sayag’s boat sailed, Mr. Grady, still surviving, announced that he had secured Clifton Webb of “She’s My Baby.”‡ Bobby Connelly was contracted to direct the dances and Cole Porter to do the music and lyrics. Everyone sighed, shook hands and M. Sayag smilingly boarded the Paris.

  For the information of those who want to know what all the excitement was about, it can be stated that “Vingt-huit” will open at the Ambassadeurs, Paris, on May 15 and that the entire troupe will sail April 15 – excepting Mr. Webb, who will depart at a later date. After Paris the revue will be presented in London. It will then be seen in America – or, at all events, that is the plan.46

  A review was published in L’Intransigeant for 21 May 1928:

  We have all seen, if not in real life then at least at the cinema, a sumptuous “night club” near Broadway, with pretty girls who deploy their graces in plain sight of the spectators. Thanks to Edmond Sayag, we get a similar sensation and spectacle without crossing the Atlantic. We should add that pretty girls are not the only attraction of this essentially American revue. First and foremost is Buster West, because he is absolutely the dominant personality of the evening: this devil of a man, who in profile looks like Charlie Chaplin – but without his legendary mustache – manages the most unexpected comic effects from the flexibility and virtuosity of his truly amazing legs. He is an artist of quality, and well supported by the Nesbit brothers, full of brilliance, too; the trio Myrio, Desha and Barte, very remarkable; the three Eddies; Evelyn Hoey, that pretty mayflower, and the girls, brunettes or blondes, all equally charming. The whole world revolves around them. The sets by MM. Marcel and Andre Boil have a share in the very successful creation of an atmosphere of freshness, liveliness and youth. As for the principal, Vanimator . . . it’s really Waring’s Pennsylvanians Orchestra who perform – and with what fantasy! – the lively and sentimental music of Mr. Cole Porter.47

  A review in the New York Herald Tribune (European Edition) adds further details:

  Leading off is the “Touring Car” filled with wide-eyed sightseers and with Eleanor Shaler wittily pointing out the wonder of Gay Paree to the rich American, Jack Pearson. Then come bouncing down the two comedian-dancers, John and Buster West, a pair of wonders . . . The song and dance scene “Blue Hour” is sung by Morton Downy while Myria, Desha and Barte dance in dazzling fashion, yet another interpretation of Gershwin’s “Blue Rhapsody” [sic]. The dancing of this trio, particularly the whirling through the air by Desha, is a revelation of the show. There follows “An Old Fashioned Girl,” with Mary Leigh as the shy little crinoline maid, and Basil Howes as the attentive swain, and “Baby, Let’s Dance,” a comedic episode, again with Buster West, two pleasing numbers. Frances Gershwin, with her famous composer brother coming from his table to accompany her, made a very happy hit in her song and dance, “Maroc Garden.” The clever Nesbit Brothers, and a nimble trio of colored dancing jesters, the Three Eddies, made a hit with last year’s “Black Birds” ’ when Florence Mills charmed Paris with her delightful personality. Katheryn Ray, Carter Wardell, the Pearson Brothers and many more things go on, and for the dancing intermission the Waring Pennsylvanians are there to keep the revels up.48

  Clifton Webb joined the cast during the run of the show and Porter wrote to him from Lyon with a new song and a rude suggestion:

  16 June 1928: Cole Porter to Clifton Webb49

  Dear Clifton –

  I am sending you the refrain of your song. You should have a copy made by Olivier, chez Durand, music shop, Place de la Madeleine. He is the head copyist there. Keep one copy for rehearsal + give the other to Tom Waring* + get him into doing it for his band. I will send the verse + the lyric as soon as finished.

  Also tell Leteutre, Sayap’s [sic] secretary, to put this on the program – this title Maid of Mystery. And when you have done all these things, take your finger and stick it up your ass.

  My address is C
hateau de Gourdon, Gourdon-par-le-Bar, Alpes Maritimes.

  Goodbye + love to all my playthings.

  Cole.

  Saturday morning.

  * ‘whose father is Corsican, and whose mother is also Corsican, but for a reason no one knows, isn’t Corsican at all’.

  † Sir Reginald Lindsay Benson (1889–1968) was a banker and an army officer.

  * Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois (Mistinguett, 1875–1956) was an actress and singer; the actress Yvonne de Bray (1889–1954) was the lover of the dramatist and poet Henry Bataille (1872–1922); the actress Charlotte Lysès (1877–1956) had married the actor, director, screenwriter and playwright Sacha Guitry (Alexandre-Pierre Georges Guitry, 1885–1957) on 14 August 1907. See Olivier Barrot and Raymond Chirat, Noir et Blanc: 250 acteurs du cinema français 1930–1960 (Paris, 2000), and André Bernard and Alain Paucard, Sacha Guitry (Lausanne and Paris, 2002).

  † Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, 17th Duke of Alba (1878–1953), was a staunch Spanish Nationalist and after the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s ambassador in London.

  ‡ Alfonso XIII (1886–1941) was King of Spain, 1886–1931.

  § T. Lawrason Riggs was active in the Yale Mobile Hospital during the war and subsequently served as a specialist in foreign languages attached to military intelligence in Paris. Later he attended the Catholic University of America and St Thomas Seminary in Connecticut, and was appointed the first Catholic chaplain at Yale University.

  * William Rhinelander Stewart, Jr. (1888–1945), was a Yale classmate of Porter’s. Stewart’s father William was socially prominent and active in civic and state affairs, primarily as president of the New York State Board of Charities.

  † The socialite Daisy Fellowes (1890–1926), heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, who in 1910 had married Jean Amédée Marie Anatole de Broglie, Prince de Broglie (1886–1918). De Broglie reportedly died of influenza on 20 February while on military duty in Algeria.

  ‡ Howard Sturges (1884–1955), socialite, was a Yale classmate and lifelong friend of Porter’s. Sturges similarly served in Paris during World War I, first at the American Relief Clearing House Headquarters and later with the American Red Cross.

  § Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich of Russia (1866–1933) was a brother-in-law of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia.

  ¶ Sidney McCall (born Mary McNeill, 1865–1954) was a poet and novelist.

  ** Apparently many of the otherwise unidentified people mentioned in this letter were Porter’s Yale classmates. William Griffith Ewing Tytus is pictured, along with Porter, in an undated Yale yearbook: see https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/6/archival_objects/2547003. Tytus, Stanley James Spiegelberg, Richard Alexander Douglas and a Paul Church Harper are listed in the Catalogue of Yale University 1913–1914 (New Haven, CT, 1913), 744.

  * New York Times, 18 December 1919, 13. Not all of Linda’s friends were happy with the match. The art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), a friend and lifelong correspondent of Linda Porter, held out little hope for the marriage. In August 1921, shortly after the Porters’ trip to Egypt, he wrote to the well-known art collector Isabella Gardner describing Linda as ‘. . . a lovely creature, whom both the Duke of Alba and Prince Beauvais were in love with but couldn’t marry because she was divorced. She suddenly and to the surprise of everyone married a little musical man from the Middle West 15 [sic] years younger than herself and has nearly worn herself out going his rattling pace ever since. They came to us on their honeymoon, and I saw their future in the blackest terms.’ Source: privately owned; see McBrien, Cole Porter, 73.

  * This handwritten note is part of a cache of letters and telegrams from Porter to Monty Woolley, privately owned in Pittsburgh, which featured on an episode of Antiques Roadshow (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/season/16/pittsburgh-pa/appraisals/cole-porter-monty-woolley-letters-ca-1940--201106A28/). We have been unable to track down other items in the collection.

  † La Boutique fantasque, based on music by Gioacchino Rossini, arranged and orchestrated by Ottorino Respighi, had been premiered by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre, London, on 5 June 1919.

  ‡ George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866–1923), was the financial backer of Howard Carter (1874–1939), who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun (r. c. 1332–1323 BC) the next year, on 26 November 1922; see T. G. H. James, Howard Carter. The Path to Tutankhamun (London, 2012). The Egyptologist Herbert Winlock (1884–1950) headed up the Metropolitan Museum’s excavations of the mortuary complex of Mentuhotep II (2010–1998 BC) at Dier-el-Bahari, beginning in 1911; see his Excavations at Deir el Bahari: 1911–1931 (New York, 1942).

  * The location of Linda Porter’s copy of Antiquities of Upper Egypt is not presently known. A description of it, and a transcription of her notes, is in CPT.

  † Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl, 1865–1950) was an actress, interior decorator and author of The House in Good Taste (New York, 1913); her husband Sir Charles Mendl (1871–1958) was British press attaché in Paris. A profile of Lady Mendl was published in the New Yorker for 15 January 1938; it makes one mention of Porter: ‘Her first theatrical coaching was in Paris with Victorien Sardou of the Comédie-Française, and one of her pet friends in the theatre today is Clifton Webb. Jean de Reszke wouldn’t believe she couldn’t carry a tune till she sang him a hymn to prove it, and Cole Porter and his jazz are now her favored companions.’

  ‡ The artists Gerald Murphy (1888–1964) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). The expatriate Murphy and his wife Sara (Sara Sherman Wiborg, 1883–1975) were close friends of the Porters during the 1920s; in 1923, Murphy collaborated with Porter on the ballet Within the Quota.

  § See pp. 388–9.

  * Toys and Novelties 17 (April 1920), 91. Linda Porter had patronized the Russian-born artist Léon Bakst (Leyb-Khaim Izrailevich Rosenberg, 1866–1924) as early as the mid-1910s; a portrait sketch of her by Bakst, dated 1915, survives at the Evergreen House Foundation, Evergreen Museum & Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Linda Porter’s patronage lasted until at least 1925 when the New York Herald Tribune (European Edition) reported from Paris that ‘The exhibition of works of Léon Bakst will terminate in a few days at the Galerie Jean Charpentier, and a group of American friends of the late painter, headed by Mrs. Cole Porter, has made up a purse by which M. Bakst’s sixteen-year-old son, who inherits much of his father’s talent, will go to the Beaux-Arts. The fortune accumulated by Bakst was exhausted by the support of fourteen Russians, elderly people, after the revolution’ (25 November 1925, 2). In Paris, Bakst is also likely to have socialized with the Porters through their mutual acquaintance Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes he designed both sets and costumes.

  * Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) was known not only as an artist but also as an author, including a travel book, The Jew at Home: Impressions of a Summer and Autumn Spent with Him (New York, 1892). Virulently anti-Semitic, he described German and Russian Jews as ‘the most contemptible specimen of humanity in Europe’, Polish Jewish towns as ‘a hideous nightmare of dirt, disease, and poverty’, and he said of Russian Jews that ‘They like dirt; they like to herd together in human pigsties’ and that ‘they like to make money out of the immorality of the Christian. They are simply a race of middlemen and money-changers.’

  † Organized in 1918 as American Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, the society was renamed in 1920 as the New Society of Artists; it held exhibitions at the Wildenstein Galleries, 1919 and 1921; the Anderson Galleries, 1922–5; the Grand Central Art Galleries, 1926; the Brooklyn Museum, 1928–9; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1932. At various times it was patronized or had associations with Marcel Duchamp, Dashiell Hammett, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leo Stein, Alfred Stieglitz and Virgil Thomson; like the contemporaneous Society of Independent Artists, founded in 1916, its purpose was to mount exhibitions at which all artists were welcome, with neither jury nor prizes. The fourth exhibition of the New Society of Artists took place from 2 to 27 January 1923; a copy of the exhibition c
atalogue survives in the Seattle Art Museum Libraries. See Joshua C. Taylor, The Fine Arts in America (Chicago and London, 1979), 157.

  ‡ The Brooklyn Music School Settlement was founded in 1909 as an arm of the New York Music School Settlement; see https://www.brooklynmusicschool.org/history-culture-brooklyn-music-school.

  * Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was best known at the time for his ballets The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), composed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

  * Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865–1943), was heiress to the Singer sewing-machine company. Her marriage to Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834–1901) in 1893 was her second; well known to be lesbian, Singer was also a significant patron of modern composers, including Debussy, Ravel, Milhaud, Poulenc and Kurt Weill.

  * Porter’s songs included ‘Olga (Come Back to the Volga)’, ‘Cocktail Time’ and ‘The Blue Boy Blues’. Two other songs, ‘The Bandit Band’ and ‘The Sponge’, were copyrighted at the same time and apparently intended for Mayfair and Montmartre, although they are not listed in the London opening-night programme; see Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 132. The child prodigy pianist and composer Max Darewski (1894–1929) composed numerous songs for West End revues and musicals; his songs ‘Ting, Ling’, ‘Versailles’, ‘Home Once More’ and ‘I’m Not That Kind of Girl’ featured in Mayfair and Montmartre. Gershwin’s contributions included ‘Do It Again’, ‘My Lady’ and ‘South Sea Isles’; Berlin’s ‘Say it With Music’ was also included in the show. Piano-vocal scores of several numbers are at the Library of Congress, Music Division, shelfmark M1508 Mayfair and Montmartre. A 1922 British Pathé silent video of some of the song and dance numbers is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R516rrSQQSo.