February 20, 1955

Words Anent Music by Cole Porter

By GILBERT MILLSTEIN

n the last forty-some-odd years, Cole Porter, a small, well-burnished and infinitely recherche man of 61, has written the words and music of about 500 songs which have been distributed, as circumstances required, among Yale University, of which he is a fairly atypical graduate, ('13), nine motion pictures and twenty-five musical comedies. The twenty-fifth is called "Silk Stockings" and will open Thursday in a fashionable brouhaha.

Porter is fashionable but looks askance at brouhaha. He will attend the opening but not the opening-night party. Nor will he wait up for the notices. "The next morning," he said recently in his suite at the Waldorf Towers, "this valet, Paul, I've had for twenty years will wake me up and either nod or shake his head. I cannot wait until I begin the next one. I begin in June. I'd rather write than do anything on earth." (During his tenure, Paul has nodded his head ten times, beginning with "Anything Goes" and ending with "Can-Can," and shaken it four times for "You Never Know," "Seven Lively Arts," "Around the World" and "Out of This World." Porter also experienced a nine-year drought between 1919, when he did the score of "Hitchy-Koo," and 1928, when he did the songs for "Paris." He spent most of the time traveling in Europe in a style most of his contemporaries would like to have become accustomed to.)

Porter disengaged himself elegantly but authoritatively from two schipperkes named PÈpin le Bref (a gift of Merle Oberon) and Berthe (a companion for PÈpin purchased by Porter). "You find them in sixteenth-century Dutch painting," he said. "They're supposed to be born without tails because they've sat on barges for centuries." He permitted himself a small, recondite smile.

The dogs disposed of, Porter deposited himself on an enormous green sofa, a sofa of sufficient breadth to accommodate his legs which were broken badly when a horse fell on him at Piping Rock in 1937 (he has undergone something like thirty operations on them and still limps), and was launched, like a painted skiff in a freshet, upon a discussion of popular music and a number of other germane things.

He had no helpful hints for aspiring songwriters. "I haven't the faintest notion how one writes hits," he said. "I don't know of anybody who sits down to write a hit, with the exception of Irving Berlin who can't help writing hits. I certainly don't know how. It never enters one of our heads when I sit down to write. 'My Heart Belongs to Daddy' was a hit. It was written simply to fill in a stage wait in 'Leave It to Me.' 'I Love Paris' in 'Can-Can' was written because Jo Mielziner had designed such a beautiful set. I once wrote a song called 'Rosalie' for a picture called 'Rosalie.' I'd written about six of that title. I handed in the sixth and played it for Louis B. Mayer. 'Forget Nelson Eddy,' he said. 'Go home and write a honky-tonk tune.' It was a hit. I don't like it. The one he threw out was better." (Among other unpremeditated hits are "Night and Day," "Begin the Beguine," "What Is This Thing Called Love?" "You're the Top" and "I Get a Kick Out of You.")

Obviously stirred by the breeze of some recollection or other, Porter tacked. "I've been accused most of my life of being remote," he said. "But that's not so. I've been working. It's awful to tell people things like that. I've done lots of work at dinner, sitting between two bores. I can feign listening beautifully and work. That's the reason I like to go out. I have no hours. I can work anywhere. I work very well when I'm shaving or when I'm in a taxi. When this horse fell on me, I was too stunned to be conscious of great pain, but until help came I worked on the lyrics for the songs for 'You Never Know,' a song called 'At Long Last' in particular. When are you going to ask me which comes first, the music or the lyrics? I don't work at a piano.

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer. If Feuer and Martin phoned me today and asked me to write a new song for a spot, I'd just begin thinking. First, I think of the idea and then I fit it to a title. Then, I go to work on the melody, spotting the title at certain moments in the melody, and then I write the lyric--the end first--that way, it has a strong finish. It's important for a song to have a strong finish. I do the lyrics like I'd do a crossword puzzle. I try to give myself a meter which will make the lyrics as easy as possible to write without being banal. On top of the meter, I try to pick for my rhyme words of which there is a long list with the same ending.

"I'm becoming less and less interested in tricky rhymes. I think I used to go overboard on them. In Yale, I was rhyme-crazy. (He wrote "Bingo" and "Bulldog" at school.) That was due to the fact that I was Gilbert and Sullivan crazy. They had a big influence on my life. My songs are easier than they used to be, musically and lyrically. I've never been able to get complete simplicity the way Berlin does. Sometimes, I'll take twenty-five minutes to write a song, sometimes two days. I can tell a bad line by watching audiences. The minute they look at a program, I know the line's got to be thrown out. Pretty often, though, you've got to have a bad line so the next one'll look good. It's planting, you know."

Porter thought that musical comedies were much more "musicianly" than they used to be and, just like everybody else, that Rodgers and Hammerstein were principally responsible for the phenomenon. "The librettos are much better," he said, "and the scores are much closer to the librettos than they used to be. Those two made it much harder for everybody else." He said that he did not know much about popular music, outside of musical comedies, but that lately he had been fascinated by a neurotic balled called "Let Me Go, Lover," which he thought had a fine folk quality, and another item known as "George," which involves three people, one of whom gets drowned. "I don't see," Porter complained mildly, "just what relationship George has to the couple."

He said also that he had done some research into the mambo. "There is an actual, distinctive form of music in Cuba called mambo," Porter said, "but the craze here is such that people write songs in any tempo and call them mambos. I fully expect the next will be called 'The Waltz Mambo,' just so that people of middle age will have a new step to do."

The winds of memory stepped up his pace. "I think the greatest surprise I ever had," Porter went on at a great rate, "was in Zanzibar in 1935. We went to a little hotel with a patio. All these ivory dealers from East Africa were sitting around in their burnouses and listening to 'Night and Day' being played on an ancient phonograph.

"That was a shock. People like to think composers get great pleasure out of hearing their songs played. I suppose some do. I don't particularly. And when you tell them you don't, their faces fall and they say, 'You must get very little out of life.' They're entirely wrong. I get a hell of a lot out of life. I've had two great women in my life--my mother, who thought I had this talent, and my wife, who kept goading me along, in spite of that general feeling that I couldn't appeal to the general public." (Porter's wife died last May, his mother some years ago. His vital statistics are both appealing and rich. He was born in Peru, Ind.--which gave him a medal and a testimonial letter in 1938--the son of a successful fruitgrower. His grandfather, a West Virginia coal and timber magnate, left him $1,000,000. After finishing Yale, he went to Harvard, ostensibly to become a lawyer in deference to his grandfather's wishes, but turned to music instead. He also joined the French Foreign Legion during the First World War, but suffered no apparent trauma from that.)

He glanced at his wristwatch. "Ah," he said, with the air of a man getting a hell of a lot out of life, "now my sacred hour comes. I listen to 'Stella Dallas' on the radio every afternoon--4:30 P. M. here, 1:30 P. M. on the Coast. I have listened every afternoon I could for sixteen years. I once took a six weeks' steamship trip from New York to California and paid for a very expensive radio so that I could hear 'Stella Dallas.'

"I am planning a luncheon to meet her," he went on. "I am inviting a dear friend from San Francisco and another one from Paris to this clambake. Stella's name is Ann Elstner Matthews. Also, I've been told to look into another one of these things. 12:45 P. M. It's called 'Our Gal Sunday.' All about a mountain girl who marries an English lord." He looked up from the radio, which he was tuning in. "I hear," he said enthusiastically, "that that's very fine, too."

Gilbert Millstein of The Times Sunday staff frequently reports on theatre notables.

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