A Cole Porter Companion
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A Cole Porter Companion
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Overview
In A Cole Porter Companion, a parade of performers and scholars offers essays on little-known aspects of the master tunesmith's life and art. Here are Porter's days as a Yale wunderkind and his nights as the exemplar of louche living; the triumph of Kiss Me Kate and shocking failure of You Never Know; and his spinning rhythmic genius and a turkey dinner into "You're the Top" while cultural and economic forces take "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" in unforeseen directions. Other entries explore notes on ongoing Porter scholarship and delve into his formative works, performing career, and long-overlooked contributions to media as varied as film and ballet.
Prepared with the cooperation of the Porter archives, A Cole Porter Companion is an invaluable guide for the fans and scholars of this beloved American genius.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252098307 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Cole Porter Companion
By Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, Susan Forscher Weiss
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09830-7
CHAPTER 1
Cole Porter at Yale
ROBERT KIMBALL
In the September twilight in the fall of 1909, young men with golf bags, suitcases, hatboxes, and mandolin cases hurried from the New Haven train station to find lodging in the rooming houses that lined the York Street trolley tracks. Then upperclassmen hustled them to the intersection of College and Chapel Streets, where, linking arms, they lined up in a huge procession that was forming outside Osborn Hall. The Second Regiment Band struck up "Down the Field" and led a whirling, winding, snake-dancing torchlight parade through the city streets to the Old Campus. Chanting the Greek cheer Brek-ek-ek-coax-coax and stepping in time to "Boola" and other Yale marching songs, members of the class of 1913 arrived on campus.
The students formed a spacious semicircle in the shadow of the moon-drenched towers and witnessed the freshman-sophomore wrestling bouts. Then they were shepherded back to York Street, where they mixed it up with the sophomores in a sweating, chaotic "rush." After some mild hazing and various choruses of "Wake, Freshmen, Wake," the festivities were over, and lights went out all along York Street. Once again the strange amalgam of ritual, pageantry, and song that graced Yale before World War I had done its work, and several hundred individuals had been welded together for the first time as a class.
Cole Porter, Yale '13, settled in Garland's lodging house at 242 York Street, now the site of Davenport College, where he installed an upright piano in his single room (Porter roomed alone through most of his Yale career so that he could compose and play far into the night without disturbing a roommate) and promptly established a reputation as a fine entertainer. His classmates included W. Averell Harriman and future Yale grandees Arnold Whitridge, Sidney Lovett, and Ralph Gabriel. Porter majored in English, minored in music, studied French, and even received credit for singing in the university choir.
Porter's English courses at Yale College included English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, et al.), Tennyson and Browning, and Shakespeare. Porter thought Tennyson's "The Princess" had an "excellent libretto for comic opera." There is no evidence that reading Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew had any influence on Porter's future masterpiece Kiss Me, Kate.
The years 1909-13 were good years for anyone interested in pursuing music at Yale. When freshmen arrived on campus, they were greeted with a barrage of ads: "Pianos for rent"; "Learn to waltz, two-step, and Boston"; "Instruction in banjo, mandolin, and guitar"; "Let us build up your voice for the Glee Club trials." The Whiffenpoofs came into existence early in 1909 (Porter was a member during his senior year), and Yale's leading music professor, Horatio Parker, had his prize-winning opera Mona performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
Gustav Mahler brought the New York Philharmonic to Woolsey Hall for a concert of Bach, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss. Outstanding vocalists such as Geraldine Farrar, Alma Gluck, Marcella Sembrich, Louise Tetrazzini, and John McCormack attracted droves of admirers (including Porter) to their recitals. Porter's classmate Swede Reilly told me that "Cole, knowing how much I admired McCormack, took me to hear his New Haven recital."
Rather early in Porter's freshman year, an editorial in the Yale Daily News called for original musical compositions by the undergraduates. That summons may have encouraged Porter to submit his number "Bingo Eli Yale" in the 1910 football song competition. He had begun composing songs in earnest at his prep school, Worcester Academy, in Massachusetts. Two of his songs, "When the Summer Moon Comes 'Long" and "Bridget McGuire," survive from his freshman year at Yale.
"Bingo" was formally introduced by Eddie Wittstein and his orchestra at the Yale dining hall dinner concert on 29 October 1910. (Wittstein was a famous musical figure in New Haven for several decades.) The words to "Bingo" were printed in the Yale Daily News, and the song itself was successfully tried out at several football rallies.
Music at meals was a regular feature of Yale life; twice and sometimes four or five times a week, Wittstein, ensconced with his orchestra in a balcony overlooking the University Commons dining hall, performed a concert of staples from the symphonic and operatic repertoire — gems from light opera, waltzes, marches, two-steps, hits from the current musical comedies, and even an occasional ragtime piece. The concerts were always well received, and Wittstein recalled that sometimes the students kept time to the music by beating on the glasses and crockery. "Glow-Worm" was certain to evoke student participation, while a performance of the "Anvil Chorus" scattered glass and broken dishes all over the floor and nearly put an end to the concerts.
Wittstein, who conducted other Porter premieres at Yale, including his first musical comedy, Cora, in 1911, remembered Porter as "quiet, suave, intelligent, a real gentleman. He was a good pianist, and although not an especially talented singer he was excellent at putting over his own lyrics. I always liked him and played a lot of his football songs at the dining halls and the Yale Proms. I remember going up to his room where he told me he was influenced by the music of Richard Strauss. He was studying Der Rosenkavalier before it was performed in America."
In his junior year Porter's stepped-up output of football songs included the seemingly indestructible "Bull Dog." "I was standing outside Harvard Stadium on the day of the Harvard-Yale game," recalled Porter's classmate Albert B. "Baldy" Crawford. "The crowds were gathering. Inside the stadium the band was playing 'Bull Dog.' Cole came running up to me, shouting, 'Baldy, Baldy, they're playing my song, but I don't have my ticket and I can't get into the stadium.'"
As chairman of the football committee in his senior year (and, coincidentally, a cheerleader), Porter was arbiter of all Yale College football songs. In the Yale Daily News of 1 October 1912, Porter inserted the following notice: "Anyone who has any football songs which he would like to present to the committee will please leave them at 31 Vanderbilt before Wednesday, October 9." (Porter's room in Vanderbilt was the most expensive on campus.) Among the aspirants were Alonzo Elliott, Porter's classmate who later wrote the music for the poignant "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" (Stoddart King, Yale '14, wrote the lyrics), and Douglas Moore '15, later the distinguished composer of The Ballad of Baby Doe, whose "Goodnight Poor Harvard" achieved wide popularity the year after Porter's graduation.
While his football songs have secured a seemingly permanent place in Yale lore, Porter's most memorable personal triumphs occurred through his association with the Yale Glee Club. In his senior year he was president of the Glee Club and the Banjo and Mandolin Clubs Association; he was also the Glee Club's principal soloist.
In those days, after exhaustive rehearsals in the fall, the university musical clubs embarked on an extensive Christmas tour, alternating years between the American South and West. These tours (the Yale Dramatic Association enjoyed similar excursions) were really elaborate social events; the members were transported from city to city in private railroad cars to appear at a mélange of formal dances, multicourse dinners, luncheons, teas, gala receptions, coming-out parties, and other holiday fetes. The concerts, duly sponsored by the Yale Clubs of the various cities, were almost an anticlimax for the exhausted young men.
It was late in the second half of these concerts that Cole Porter would solo in a number of his own creation — "Perfectly Terrible," "The Motor Car," or "A Football King." Then the piano would be pushed out to the center of the stage, and Porter would launch into a series of what he called "pianologues." Essentially, they were a mixture of song and recitative with piano accompaniment.
There are very few accounts of the exact nature and content of his act, but it might have opened with a number like "No Show This Evening" or "Music with Meals" followed by a song in French or perhaps "It Pays to Advertise," which began with the line, "I'd walk a mile for that schoolgirl complexion." Then he would surely have played his comic-treatment burlesque on the waltz from The Merry Widow, first in a straight piano rendition, then successively as a church hymn, as a band arrangement, and finally as it might be played on the hurdy-gurdy.
Perhaps his most renowned original composition aside from "Bull Dog" was the many-versioned "Antoinette Birby," also known as "Sweet Alice Kirby" and "Annabelle Birby" before it evolved into the form in which it is now printed in Songs of Yale. The humor and pathos of the musical saga of the poor girl from the country who comes to New Haven to work as a waitress at the Taft Hotel, only to be corrupted by an evil Yale man, made the piece a general favorite. Invariably the final number, Porter's own favorite, was his burlesque of Marie Dressler's treatment of the ballad "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl."
As enthusiastic audiences brought him back again and again, he often held the stage for over thirty minutes before the Glee Club returned to conclude the concert. Porter's singing pianologue act, with its assortment of original compositions, deft burlesque, humorous patter, and topical allusions, was splendidly rendered with the superb phrasing and wonderful diction that he later demanded from the leading performers of the musical stage. It had all the ingredients of a first-class vaudeville act and was the delight of all who heard and saw it.
Yet in looking back at Porter's Yale years, the musical comedy scores he wrote for his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and for the annual smokers of the Yale Dramat were the most significant aspect of his Yale experience for his subsequent career in the musical theater. With his five show scores — Cora (1911), And the Villain Still Pursued Her (1912), The Pot of Gold (1912), The Kaleidoscope (1913), and Paranoia, which he wrote for his alma mater while a student at the Harvard School of Music in 1914 — Porter transformed musical comedy at Yale from what had been an occasional divertissement into a tradition that for many years held an honored place in the university's cultural life. He developed a proficiency in writing for the stage that prepared him ably for what would turn out to be a forty-year career as a composer-lyricist for Broadway and Hollywood.
Each of Porter's shows had its memorable moments, but his own favorite and the only college score he preserved until his death was The Pot of Gold. The book was written by Almet F. Jenks Jr., Yale '14, and the show was presented as the DKE initiation play on 26 November 1912. The story had something to do with efforts to reverse the declining fortunes of a rundown hotel and featured the inevitable hero and heroine, a group of plotting nihilists, scandal, mistaken identity, bellboys and lady guests, a chorus girl, a Southern general, an English barrister, and a generous assortment of complications and tearful reunions. All parts, including the female roles, were performed by members of DKE, who spared no expense in outfitting themselves in the finest wigs, shoes, and costumes.
On the appointed evening — after a dinner consisting of tomato soup, asparagus salad, roast turkey, ice cream, fancy cakes, and coffee, topped off with Champagne, cigars, and speeches by DKE members welcoming the neophytes — the house lights were dimmed, and the conductor, Mr. Fichtl of the New Haven Symphony, began the overture. Porter described the overture in a letter to Jenks as follows:
It begins with the motif — Chlodoswine's yearning for Larry; then follows the waltz representing her pangs on finding him false, ending in the motif of supreme happiness, which appears again at the end of the play. Following this comes Larry's love song, then a thing in 5/4 time introducing the foreign influence on the hotel, modulating into a death march representing the monotony and decadence of the place. This is connected with the opening chorus by a movement that grows more excited as it progresses. The opening chorus is the Rainbow Song which would be sung by the guests who depart at the end of it.
In the overture and some of the extended musical sections of The Pot of Gold, Porter sought to "combine the splendor of Wagner and the decadence of Strauss." The courses he had taken at Yale in harmony and music history with Professor David Stanley Smith had widened his musical knowledge; through Smith he met Professor William Haesche, who orchestrated The Pot of Gold for an unusually large ensemble of violins, cellos, bass, flutes, clarinets, cornets, trombone, and drums.
If the music of The Pot of Gold showed the influence of German Romanticism, Porter's lyrics demonstrated the literary impact of Browning and Tennyson, whom he had studied with Professor William Lyon Phelps, and a wide familiarity with artistic expression of the day. Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin of the Imperial Russian Ballet, who made such an impression on Porter during their appearances in New Haven, inspired "When I Used to Lead the Ballet," which was the hit song of The Pot of Gold and later a feature in his first Broadway show, See America First. Another standout number was "My Salvation Army Queen." With its musical burlesque of "Onward Christian Soldiers," the song was a reference to Edna May, the Salvation Army heroine of the Broadway show The Belle of New York who had won fame by singing "Men never proceed to follow the light, but they always follow me."
"She Was a Fair Young Mermaid" was a nod to Annette Kellerman of exhibition diving and swimming fame, who shocked the nation by appearing in her vaudeville act in a one-piece bathing suit. Musical comedy star Elsie Janis and her redoubtable Ma, perhaps the most famous of stage mothers and a formidable barrier to her daughter's love life, were the likely source of the sentimental burlesque "It's Awfully Hard When Mother's Not Along." And the Broadway kid himself, George M. Cohan, promoted Porter's unabashed tribute "Longing for Dear Old Broadway."
While The Pot of Gold owed something to the influence of others, there were already signs of the suave, audacious lyrics and sophisticated music that signal the unique Porter touch. The original turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes that are the hallmark of his later distinction were displayed in lines like "She was so seraphic that she blocked the traffic when she beat the tambourine"; "She's a most decided blonde — she just decided lately"; "For if you'd not neglect your figure's architecture, you've got to exercise."
Porter's skill as a musical comedy writer was recognized by almost everyone who saw his Yale shows. No less an authority than Professor William Lyon Phelps congratulated the Dramat after a performance of The Kaleidoscope for "having one man who is a real genius who writes words and music of such exceptional high order."
The triumphs of Porter's Yale years were followed by an almost uninterrupted series of professional disappointments, beginning with the failure of his first Broadway offering, See America First, a curious attempt to Americanize Gilbert and Sullivan that ran for two weeks in early 1916.
Porter was prepared to abandon songwriting for the theater altogether when, at the urging of his good friend Monty Woolley, director of the Yale Dramat, he reluctantly agreed to submit three songs for Out o' Luck, a comedy-melodrama concerning American doughboys during World War I. The show's success on the Dramat's Christmas tours of 1925 and 1926 helped Porter overcome the creative doldrums that had plagued him in the years after he graduated from Yale.
Henry C. Potter, Yale '26, who played the lead in Out o' Luck, recalls Porter's mood at that time:
I remember well, one evening "after hours" when those of us in the Dramat sat around with Cole, singing and doing little skits, imitations of Jolson and so on. I did an imitation of some currently popular vaudeville "sob-ballad" singer. When I finished, Cole laughed heartily; then his face grew somber and he said, "But do you know? I wish to God I could write songs like that."
Thank God he didn't. But not too many years after that evening along came "Night and Day" and all the glorious rest. And we Yale '25 and '26ers have always thought that perhaps we had helped him a little.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Cole Porter Companion by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, Susan Forscher Weiss. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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