The clever life

National Review, Dec 2, 1991 by Richard Brookhiser

IN THE centennial year of Cole Porter's birth, I wanted to hear him played, not by someone who was cashing in on the calendar, but by someone who has played him year in and year out because he enjoys him and knows how to play him well. So I went to hear Bobby Short at the Cafe Carlyle on Madison Avenue.

Short made his entrance to a long roll on the drums, twenty minutes late. He is a short, plain man, balding, with a snub nose and a sandpaper rasp to his voice. He majors in the golden age of American popular song, from the Twenties to the Fifties, as do most dinner singers. But his repertoire extends beyond the standards to tunes on flip sides, tunes buried in second acts of Broadway shows, tunes dropped from Broadway shows in Boston or Philadelphia. He knows when they were written and who first sang them, and imparts the information in his introductions as if he were a Grove's Dictionary of popular music.

Short's sets always include a cluster of songs by Cole Porter. Of the three he did tonight, two were bravura joshing. "I'm Throwing a Ball Tonight," introduced by Ethel Merman in Panama Hattie (1940), was like fast-forwarding through old Walter Winchell broadcasts.

I invited Wendell Willkie,

I invited FDR,

And for photographs,

I asked the staffs

Of Life, Look, Peek, Pic, Snap, Click,

and Harper's Bazaar.

"How's Your Romance?" from Gay Divorce (1932) was not topical, but no less clever.

In Italia the signori are so very

amatory

That their passion, a priori, is

l'amor.

And from Napoli to Pisa, every man

has on his knees a

Little private Mona Lisa to adore. The stars of the show, Short explained when he finished, had been Fred Astaire and Claire Luce-("not Clare Boothe Luce"). "For the film," Short went on, "they did two or three interesting things, I thought. They found another blonde girl, Ginger Rogers. The Censorship Board thought the title made divorce too attractive to the American public, so it was changed to The Gay Divorcee. And, what was unforgivable, they threw out all of Cole Porter's songs, except this one." And then he slipped, as if through a hidden door, into "Night and Day," skipping the "beat beat beat of the tom-tom" of the verse, and stepping directly into the passion of the refrain. As he sang, the spotlight narrowed to his head and shoulders, and the rest of the room sank into hurricane-lamp-lit dusk; old couples, and not-so-old (none were young), held hands.

Two manners, two kinds of songs. It is easy to understand, from his life, how Cole Porter managed to catch the mood of the first world-affected, witty, fashionable. Understanding how he plugged into the second world, of seriousness and held hands, is not so easy.

Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, only two generations after the first white man's log cabin went up there. His father was a druggist, and a cipher; his mother had the will in the family. Her father had the money, invested in Appalachian timberland, which turned out to be laden with gas and coal.

Propelled by his grandfather's cash and his mother's ambitions (she had his first juvenile compositions printed privately), Porter determined to say good-bye to all that. Said it, at first, unsuccessfully. As a freshman at Yale, "in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down," he looked, one Yalie later recalled, just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East." Maybe he looked so to the last; the carnation he always wore in his buttonhole suggests the anxious dapperness of the ex-rube.

However anxious he felt, from the beginning of his musical career Porter was a hit with the elite: first at Yale (where they still sing two of his football fight songs), then among the expatriates of Twenties Europe. The musical historian Robert Kimball thought Porter's years in Europe gave him the perspective of the lost generation. But it was the lost generation of Dick Diver, not of Gertrude Stein-of the idle rich, not the idle bohemians. Porter had augmented his own means by marrying an older divorcee whose ex had settled over a million dollars of stocks on her. ("He covered them with useful things, / Such as bonds, and stocks, and Paris frocks, / And Oriental pearls in strings." "Two Little Babes in the Woods.") They lived up to their incomes: when Porter wrote a song about a Jewish factory girl for Fanny Brice, he first played it for her on a grand piano in the ballroom of the Venetian palazzo he was renting. As Lucius Beebe observed, it was "the simple things of life which give pleasure to Mr. Porter-half-million-dollar strings of pearls, Isotta motor cars, cases of double bottles of Grand Chambertin 87, suites at Claridge's, brief trips aboard the Bremen, a little grouse shooting."

Although the Porters were attached to each other, their relationship was not sexual, for Porter was gay. You've never been laid till you've been laid by a man who knows the ropes," he once told Moss Hart. And laying and getting laid seems to have been what gayness amounted to for him. Porter cruised bars and waterfronts for sailors all his life, or called for prostitutes. Depression rates, according to his biographer Charles Schwartz, were ten dollars for a white man, five dollars for a black.