The Letters of Cole Porter

by Cole Porter

  Even after a shot of Dilaudid has started to calm everything down, and the jagged glass shoehorn has changed into a rough stone shoehorn, it is obvious that the foot will never fit into that shoe . . .6

  Although Porter had been working on You Never Know – or what might have been You Never Know or Greek to Me – since at least October 1937 (a surviving sketch of the text for ‘At Long Last Love’ is written on S. S. Normandie stationery),7 he did not sign a contract for the show until 31 December 1937, at which time it was still titled Bei Kerzenlicht (By Candlelight) after the German property on which it was based.* In light of Porter’s recent accident, the contract included a special provision: ‘It is explicitly understood that in view of the partial physical disability of the Composer, of which the Manager is completely informed, the Composer shall not be required to be present at each and every rehearsal. It is the Composer’s intention, however, to exercise every effort to be present whenever it is essential and definitely necessary.’8

  Porter apparently made good progress with the show, writing to J. J. Shubert on 1 March 1938:†

  1 March 1938: Cole Porter, telegram to J. J. Shubert9

  Many thanks for having arranged the orchestra reading today. I know that you will agree with me that Spialeg* [sic] has done a great job. All my gratitude to you and warm regards. Cole Porter.

  And his work on the musical, according to a letter Linda Porter wrote to her friend Bernard Berenson on 18 March, was what Porter claimed saved his life: ‘This has been a dreadful winter! Cole is out of hospital + always an uncertainty about his right leg which was so badly smashed that the doctors could not decide whether or not the nerve was severed, – in which case he would have been lame for life. Finally, a month ago, his right leg was operated. The nerve, thank God! in tatters, but still intact . . . The left leg (double fracture) is healed – he is free from cast on this leg so can hobble about in his rooms at the Waldorf on crutches . . . has written a new score for “By Candlelight” which, incidentally, is a great success . . . He says this work saved his life for it makes him forget his pain.’10

  Shortly afterwards, You Never Know ran into difficulties, including a contractual dispute between the Shuberts and Robert Katscher, the composer of Bei Kerzenlicht, and his Viennese publisher, Georg Marten, and in April the writer George Abbott† was called in to revise the seemingly unsuccessful book, possibly at Porter’s request.‡ Premiered on 21 September 1938 at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, You Never Know was among the least successful of Porter’s shows, running for only seventy-eight performances. Theatre Arts Monthly for 22 November reported that ‘[You Never Know] finally came to the Winter Garden flourishing a comet’s tail of stars and displaying enough credit lines to fill two pages of the program. With Cole Porter, Clifton Webb, Lupe Velez, Libby Holman and the rest, something should have happened. It didn’t. As an intimate revue it might have passed, but it dies under the weight of musical comedy routine and the size of the theatre.’ The New Yorker noted Clifton Webb’s ‘stylish dancing’ but added that ‘Cole Porter’s music and lyrics only occasionally suggest that intricate and fascinating gift.’ And writing in the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson dismissed most of the score with the off-hand remark, ‘There is one of his patter serenades “Alpha to Omega,” that is gay and clever, and some of the rest of them may, as Mark Twain said of classical music, be better than they sounded.’* Ironically, while the show was still in tryouts, M. Clifford Townsend, Governor of Indiana from 1937 to 1941, wrote to Porter on 16 April 1938 to invite him to a ‘Cole Porter Day’ on 23 May at Peru, citing You Never Know in his proclamation, as ‘Mr. Porter’s latest and most successful musical’. Porter replied:

  19 April 1938: Cole Porter to M. Clifford Townsend11

  My dear Governor:

  I am indeed very deeply touched by your letter of the 16th inst. informing me of the plans of the citizens of Indiana, presumably initiated by you, whereby my family and I will be so signally honored on May 23rd.

  Although I live by the employment of words (and a little music) I now find them very inadequate to express my real gratitude, and that of my family, in accepting this most extraordinary honor. The one little fly in the ointment is that the slow progress I am making in recovering from an accident, will prevent me from being physically present. It is gratifying, however, to feel that the one who can most completely represent me, my mother, will doubtless suffer the embarrassment of such rare riches that I myself would like to enjoy.

  Living so long in a world of make-believe, where a kind of transitory tribute is paid one for his so-called good deeds by way of entertainment, makes me further realize that the testimonial you and my good citizen neighbors are planning is after all the one recognition that is worth while.

  With genuine gratitude and assurances of my very sincerest regards, believe me,

  Most cordially yours,

  [unsigned]

  P.S. Would it be possible for me to possess the original (or a duplicate for framing) of your proclamation. I’d love to have it prominently hung in my work shop.

  Linda Porter wrote to Bernard Berenson, reporting on Porter’s health: ‘With constant care he will make a complete recovery . . . He is as gay as a lark . . . & is now writing a second score.’12 That second score was Leave it to Me!, which Porter had started as early as April 1938, and that had its New Haven tryout beginning 13 October and its Boston tryout beginning 17 October. On 25 October, Linda Porter wrote to Jean Howard: ‘Coley is in Boston with his new show Leave it to Me which opens Nov. 2nd in N.Y. He comes home, I hope, on Thursday. The show has had excellent notices. I saw it in New Haven before any cuts were made and it was very amusing (but too long) and the score lovely. Victor Moore as the American ambassador in Russia is irresistible. The Spewacks* wrote the book. You know how well they write. Pray for our success!! Heaven knows what our future plans are – I don’t – or whether we will come to California. Cole is not signed up.’13

  Leave it to Me! opened at the Imperial Theatre, New York, on 9 November 1938, and unlike You Never Know, was well received: Arthur Pollock wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for 10 November 1938 that ‘Vinton Freedley knows how to do it! Take “Leave It to Me!” the musical comedy he presented with all its luminous charms, robust fun and a singularly agile beauty at the Imperial Theater last night. It has everything . . . [Cole Porter’s] songs and lyrics are among his best, sounding newer and neater than any he has done in several years.’ Leave it to Me! included two stars making their Broadway debuts, Gene Kelly and Mary Martin. Ten years later, Porter recalled his first ‘discovery’ of Mary Martin, who subsequently starred in Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus (1943), and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1949) and The Sound of Music (1959).

  8 October 1949: Cole Porter to Stanley Musgrove*

  Dear Stannie:

  Your story about Mary Martin and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” is so inexact that I must tell you the truth.

  We had engaged June Knight for the part which later Mary played, but June found a Texas millionaire and decided that he was more interesting than her career for the time being, so we were completely up a tree at the last moment. Suddenly an agent called up and said he had a girl which might interest me. I asked him to bring her to my room at the Waldorf where she proceeded to give such a good audition that I called up the producer and told him, -- “This is the girl. Don’t look any further.” He rushed over to my room and she repeated her audition, after which we signed her up immediately for a very small sum. Mary had just come from Los Angeles where she had sung and was a complete failure.

  When Leave Her To Me[!] [sic] opened in New Haven, as I was ill, Linda telephoned immediately after the performance saying, “Your star is not Sophie Tucker but it is that little girl called Mary Martin who stopped the show with ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’.”

  All my best.

  [unsigned]

  Leave it to Me! ran for 291 performances, closing on 1
5 July 1939. During its run, Porter travelled early in 1939 to Cuba with his valet Paul Sylvain and a friend, Ray Kelly,* and to Peru with Kelly, Sylvain and Howard Sturges.14 Shortly after his return, in an interview published in the New York Herald Tribune, Porter made some unexpected comments about ‘hit songs’ – in particular an assertion that a show should have only one hit song – and dropped a hint concerning his Republican-leaning politics:

  . . . to Cole Porter, the ranking creator of smart and glittering theatre lyrics of his time, more than one hit song to a show is no less than a calamity, a misfortune of major proportions, but one which strikes without warning and can be foretold by no barometer of public taste yet invented.

  “One really big hit song is all any show should have,” says Mr. Porter, “and I wish I could find some way to spread out successful lyrics to cover a number of productions. Four or five songs which catch the public fancy and become widely known tend to dissipate and diffuse their own successful effect. We find that if they have been released to bands and over the radio audiences feel that they are familiar with the entire score and are bored or disappointed accordingly, whereas if only one song stands out, even if they have heard it repeatedly before, they look forward to it with pleasure and anticipation. But the thing that baffles song writers, producers and musical directors is that nobody – and I say this quite unqualifiedly – nobody can, with any degree of consistent accuracy, tell what is going to catch the public ear and be a hit song. I certainly can’t and for that reason some of my shows have been awash with hit songs and lyrics I should far have preferred to distribute over two or three productions.”

  . . . “The policies of a Democratic administration, hurricanes and other acts of God are supposed to be unpredictable,” he says, “but they are as regular as the stars in their courses compared to the progress of a popular song. You remember, for example, ‘Begin the Begin’ [sic] in ‘Jubilee’ four seasons ago? Well, that had a moderate success at the time along with ‘Me and Marie’ and ‘Nice Municipal Park,’ but it didn’t achieve a vast national vogue because we didn’t release ‘Jubilee’s’ music to the radio at the time. Now, however, a band somewhere, I forget where, has revived the song with a swing treatment, Artie Shaw made a swing record of it, it has passed through the swing stage and has reverted to its original scoring as a rhumba, with the result that during the run of ‘Jubilee’ ‘Begin the Beguin’ [sic] wasn’t a tenth the hit it is at this very moment. There was a four-year delay before it became really big-time stuff.”*

  . . . “To show that you never can tell about hits in advance take ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy,’ which I wrote for ‘Leave It to Me.’ I had, as a matter of fact, hoped there might be the makings of hit songs in ‘I Want to Go Back to Old Topeka,’ ‘Tomorrow,’ and ‘Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love,’ but ‘Daddy’ was just written in as a spot song with no particular relation to the book of the show, and I said to myself that it was just one of those things. Not at all: along comes Mary Martin and over night the dingus becomes better known than the name of the show in which it is sung.

  “It takes, according to my experience anything up to two months to discover whether a song is a real wow or just a flash in the pan. With my stuff particularly, people have to hear it several times before they can discover whether or not it is really attractive to them. It took all of three months to find out that ‘Night and Day’ was getting anywhere. ‘Gay Divorce’ opened the first of December, 1932, and I wasn’t sure until the end of February the next year that I had anything authentically profitable on my hands.”

  . . . “My great professional tragedy is that I have to be a book hunter,” Mr. Porter says. “Look at such happy scoundrels as Rogers [sic] and Hart. They know how to write their own books.”†

  At the end of the article, the author, Lucius Beebe, mentions Porter’s prospects for the 1939–40 season: a show for Vinton Freedley, a Buddy DeSylva and Herbert Fields musical for Mae West,* a late autumn show for Moss Hart and George Kaufman† or, if these fell through, a film for MGM, the script of which was apparently already written. The MGM film was Broadway Melody of 1939 – a Fred Astaire-Eleanor Powell vehicle – which because of production delays was not released until the next February, renamed as Broadway Melody of 1940. The Buddy DeSylva project, if in fact this was what Porter had in mind, was Du Barry Was a Lady, which opened at the 46th Street Theatre on 6 December 1939. The reviews were lukewarm, especially with respect to Porter’s score, although there was universal praise for the show’s star, Ethel Merman, and one of Porter’s songs, ‘Do I Love You?’ The New York Herald Tribune wrote that:

  It is a strange thing to say of so bright and dashing a show as “Du Barry Was a Lady” that there is something nostalgic about it, but the quality is present and it is one of the virtues of the new musical comedy. In its glitter and expansiveness and toughness, in its hard-boiled gayety and its unashamed low-comedy laughter, it is the type of Broadway girl-and-music entertainment that used to prosper in the vicinity of Forty-second Street in the palmy days of prohibition and now is seen so rarely . . . It is, of course, Miss Merman and Mr. Lahr who make “Du Barry Was a Lady” the good fun that it is. Since Cole Porter’s songs for Miss Merman are not quite as effective as usual, this most dashing of our lady comics must rely chiefly on that air of hearty good-fellowship that is so winning a part of her . . . As for Mr. Porter’s score, I must say again that I do not think it is one of his best, but it contains one of the nicest songs of the year in “Do I Love You?’ and is generally serviceable.15

  The New York Times review was similar:

  According to the title, “Du Barry Was a Lady.” As a matter of fact she is Ethel Merman, which is more to the point, and Louis is Bert Lahr, which puts us all one up on history. For the musical show in which they are appearing is burlesque in gorgeous finery, with a lively score by Cole Porter . . . Miss Merman is the perfect musical comedy minstrel . . . Give her a roguish bit of bawdiness like “Give Him the Ooo-La-La,” with a good tune and shoddy lyrics, and she can set a hoop-skirt swaying like a one-woman chorus. Give her a modern ballad like “Katie Went to Haiti” and she can set it on fire. Mr. Porter’s ideas are a little skimpy this time, and never more so microscopic than in “But in the Morning, No!” . . . As the music-maker Mr. Porter has written a number of accomplished tunes in the modern idiom and one excellent romantic song, “Do I Love You?” but the lyrics are no more inspired than the book; they treat all humor as middling.16

  In light of the political situation in Europe, the Porters in 1939 gave up their Paris home at 13 rue Monsieur, relocating to New York. And in January 1940, together with friends, they travelled to the South Seas via Cuba and the Panama Canal aboard the Swedish liner Kunsholm.17 Linda Porter wrote to Jean Howard on 19 January: ‘We are off on our cruise tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn – & you don’t know how glad I am to go and how I look forward to being lazy – I shall probably return looking much like Elsa Maxwell in size. Len Hanna, Bill Powell, Roger Stearns, Winsor French,* S[turges], and I: Doesn’t that sound nice? We will be gone seven weeks, returning to the Waldorf Mch. 15th – so please delay your trip East until then.’18 In April, shortly after their return Linda Porter wrote to Bernard Berenson of her bronchial problems and her desire to live in the country where she could ‘walk and live in fresh air for a change . . . New York is no place to live.’19 To that end, while Porter was in Los Angeles, she went house hunting in Massachusetts, where she rented, and eventually bought, Buxton Hill, in Williamstown. She wrote to Jean Howard on 12 September: ‘This house is MINE – isn’t that wonderful? I got it for nothing, & pray God! I won’t spend a fortune doing it over. I want so many things: a guest house, a swimming pool, a new garage (the Barn) & lots of gardens. If I go bankrupt, you might buy it!! . . . Cole is splendidly well. Very busy.’20

  The show Porter was working on at the time, Panama Hattie, had tryouts in New Haven beginning on 3 October and Boston b
eginning on 8 October. On 12 October, Linda Porter wrote to Jean Howard: ‘Saturday. I just got back from Cole’s Boston opening – Panama Hattie is a HIT. Do come out for the opening & bring that nice Charlie* . . . I think I sign the papers on Monday for the house. It has been held up because the title was not clear. But I have it, really, & will go to Williamstown directly when everything is settled.’21 About the same time, Porter wrote to his cousin Omar, also expressing enthusiasm for the show:

  29 October 1940: Cole Porter to Omar Cole22

  Dear Omar:

  Katie† gave me those two beautiful photographs of your Big Horn adventure. They are wonderful and I am having one of them framed.

  We have great excitement here, what with the show‡ opening tomorrow night. It looks as if it would be good.

  All my love to everybody out there and thanks for the swell pictures.

  Best to you and to Josephine,

  [signed:] Cole

  Panama Hattie opened at the 46th Street Theatre, New York, on 30 October 1940 and the reviews were consistently positive. The New York Herald Tribune wrote, ‘Here is Broadway girl-and-music saturnalia at its peak, humorous, tuneful, hard-boiled, sentimental, rapidly paced and handsome, filled with good low comedians and beautiful girls . . . Mr. Porter’s score . . . is filled with any number of excellent songs’, while the New York Sun described it as ‘a particularly luxurious musical comedy’. According to Brooks Atkinson, writing in the New York Times, ‘Everything is in order in “Panama Hattie,” which opened at the Forty-sixth Street last evening. Cole Porter wrote the music and lyrics in his pithiest style, and Ethel Merman sings them like a high-compression engine.’23 Perhaps in response to the show’s success, Margaret Case Harriman published a profile of Porter in the 23 November 1940 issue of the New Yorker that, in addition to recapitulating his career, includes a description of his working methods and preferred working environment: