The clever life

National Review, Dec 2, 1991 by Richard Brookhiser

Charm was a lubricant of Porter's life even more important than money. The pattern was fixed as early as Yale, where, although he hated athletics, Porter managed to run with the jocks by being a cheerleader. His looks were one instrument of his charm, and he tended them carefully: every morning, he dabbed his eyes with chilled witch hazel, to keep the skin taut. When charm failed, he deflated; he broke off conversations and left parties (including his own) the minute they bored him.

This life-busy, lively, bright as a globe and just as hollow-is obviously the soil from which he harvested the clever songs: the catalogues of famous names, and names now famous only because he catalogued them; the rhymes and rhythms that clack like pool balls; the in-jokes; the double entendres. Other songwriters spun lyrics as adroitly as Porter did; none packed them with such loads of public figures, foreign words, and guide-book destinations.

But then there are the Porter standards about love and longing, which are as direct in their utterance as Irving Berlin, or Handel.

In the roaring traffic's boom,

In the silence of my lonely room,

I think of you ... How did the playboy write them?

He had, it is true, a craftsman's earnestness. Hart testified to Porter's prodigious and unending industry. He worked around the clock." Porter liked to boast about the time he had spent studying composition and theory at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. He boasted a bit much, in fact, for he had to rely on the services of arrangers throughout his career. But he oversaw their work carefully. He also paid particular attention to the ranges and the limitations of the singers for whom he wrote; Gay Divorcee did not force Fred Astaire to skate on the thin ice of his high notes.

But if hard work is necessary to express passion, it is not sufficient. Passion itself must be present. It is certainly present, as an end-product, in numbers of the songs. Sometimes it throbs in the black and white of the lyrics, even when the lyrics are unlikely. You're the Top," a catalogue to end all catalogues, breaks into passion by sheer exuberance. After the tenth or twelfth metaphor-Mahatma Gandhi, Napoleon brandy, the Arrow collar, the Coolidge dollar-the glittering superlatives fade into the act of finding superlatives. The song of admiration which seemed like an excuse to be witty actually turns out to be admiring. Sometimes the music carries an emotional charge even when the words do not. "I Get a luck out of You" looks on the printed page like a product of the clever life; love is equated with kicks, and one of the things the singer gets no kick from, besides "champagne," is cocaine"; for years, records altered this to "a bop-type refrain" or "the perfumes of Spain," and sheet music still does. But once the words are fused to the languorous melody, the wit becomes gallantry of an affecting, almost bashful, sort, and we notice the heart behind the lounge lizard's carnation.

What Porter's passions may have been are, with one exception, undiscoverable. Although it had a basis in convenience, and no basis in eros, Porter's marriage was not empty. He and his wife stayed together for 34 years, until her death at the age of seventy. For 16 of those years, she helped him deal with the effects of a riding accident which permanently crippled his right leg. In health, she supplied him with encouragement and security, much as his mother had done during his days in Peru. It is of course an irony that the life of the cosmopolite should have revolved around something as all-American as motherhood. Perhaps Porter appreciated it.