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[0:00] Paul Lazarus: Hi, this is Paul Lazarus. In the 1980s, I produced and hosted a radio series called Anything Goes, a celebration of the American musical theater. Now the Broadway Podcast Network is bringing back these shows. This is the first of a three-part series featuring noted musical theater historian Robert Kimball discussing Cole Porter's work in the 1930s.

[0:29] Paul Lazarus: This program originally aired in 1983 and featured many Porter shows, including The New Yorkers, You Never Know, and this podcast's namesake, Anything Goes. Good afternoon, and welcome to Anything Goes. I'm your host, Paul Lazarus, and I'm very pleased today to have as my guest, noted musical theater historian Robert Kimball.

[1:01] Paul Lazarus: I've asked Bob to come down today because of the occasion of his latest book called The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, just out and published by Alfred A. Knopf. Welcome, Bob.

[1:12] Robert Kimball: Paul, I'm really happy to see you again.

[1:14] Paul Lazarus: Last time you were here, we did a kind of melange program. We covered everybody from Irving Berlin to Cicel and Blake, and I just want to mention some of the other books that you've contributed in this pursuit of the history of musical theater. You wrote the other rather prominent book on Cole Porter called Simply Cole, with Brendan Gill, well, Brendan Gill introduced it, and reminiscing with Cicel and Blake, The Gershwins with Al Simon. You did that wonderful collection of unpublished Cole Porter songs, but now the definitive collection of lyrics of Cole Porter. And in honor of this book being published, we thought today that Bob and I would talk about Cole Porter in the 30s, which I guess is his richest period, and play many selections from that era.

[2:12] Paul Lazarus: I just want to talk a little bit about the book first before we get to the 30s. When did you start putting this book together?

[2:18] Robert Kimball: Nineteen years ago. 1968, I think, is when I first had the idea of doing this, and it went like many, many other projects. It went forward, and then it stopped. Nine years ago, I signed a contract to do it with a publisher, and finally it's out this year.

[2:33] Paul Lazarus: That's terrific, too. It's wonderful. It's not only just the lyrics. There's notes on just about every song and pictures, and I know as a director, it's a tremendous help because you've amassed verses that I didn't even know about on a show that I'm working on, and I hope this will help other people, too, when they put these shows together. Tell me a little bit about the work of putting a book like this together. It's phenomenal. I imagine the research took you to many different places.

[3:07] Robert Kimball: It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle in which you know that many of the parts will never be found, and you do the best you can, and finally you just have to say, stop at some point. It's got to be done, even though you know that there are lyrics out there that will turn up someday, probably a week after the book comes out.

[3:23] Paul Lazarus: You mentioned to me that you already think that somebody's found some new ones that you wish you had.

[3:27] Robert Kimball: Oh, that always happens. In fact, that's one of the main purposes of doing this kind of work is you want to help get other people to be involved in the whole process of getting more material and making it better known for everybody who wants to use it.

[3:40] Paul Lazarus: What would you say is the most surprising thing you discovered about a lyric or about his lyrics in the course of putting this book together?

[3:51] Robert Kimball: That so many of his songs were unpublished, had not been previously published. More than 400 of the 800 lyrics in this book have never been printed before. I think that was the most surprising thing for me.

[4:04] Paul Lazarus: Well, we're going to talk about a lot of individual lyrics today, but I think we both decided to focus on the 30s because, in essence, his career really hit its full force in the 30s, and if anything, he had a very slow beginning. What do you count for the fact that it took him so long to make a name for himself and one of our greatest composer-lyricists?

[4:31] Robert Kimball: I think that part of Porter's problem was that he was from such a different world from people who were in the songwriting business and part of the theater business in New York. For musical theater writers, it was an apprenticeship that you served. You would go to work for a publishing company as a song demonstrator. You might be the kind of guy who, if you were a composer, would show up at a theater somewhere, play a song, you'd have a shill planted in the audience who would know the lyric instantly, and as soon as you played the song, you would get up from the second balcony and sing it right back, showing how easy it was to learn the song. You'd work in the 5 and 10 cent stores. You would plug songs for vaudeville artists.

George Gershwin did that, and that's how he met Fred Nadella Stair back when he was a teenager. He was plugging songs, and he became familiar with their work. And then if you were lucky enough, you got a chance to interpolate songs in reviews, and then you'd write your own review, and then from there you'd have the opportunity to begin to write musical comedies. So for a composer, it was a very exciting way to do that.

[5:28] Robert Kimball: Now Porter's approach was very different. First of all, he was a college graduate. His apprenticeship, in a sense, was writing shows for the Yale Dramat and for the fraternity of which he was a member, Delta Kappa Epsilon. So he had five shows written before he got out of school, but he was separate and apart. Part of it was he was quite wealthy, and he didn't really have to go down there and work and make a living, and he felt somewhat away from it. He didn't really know how to get involved. And when he did come in with songs which he really liked and which were characteristic of his style, the publishers found them totally uncommercial. So he was rejected quite frequently by many of the publishers, and he wasn't in a position to fight very hard for his material either.

And so consequently, he was frequently thrown out of reviews when he started to write for reviews in the late teens and in the early twenties. And the more he tried to imitate others, as he saw that other people were successful like Berlin and Gershwin, he began to try to imitate them. And Berlin said, listen, you're doing the wrong thing. You've got your own thing. Do it. And finally, by the end of the twenties, he began to have the opportunity to write from the point of view of an American who had gone to Europe, was part of the literary generation, had lived in Europe. He had an interesting perspective on America as a lyricist and as a composer, because he was a very well-versed composer and had studied the Scola Cantorum and knew his thing quite well.

And so having had that kind of experience and training, it gradually, through the efforts of Berlin and other people, he was prodded back to Broadway. And when he wrote the song Let's Do It for Irene Bordogne in 1928, that really was, I think, the big turning point in his career. And at that point, he had two shows in 1929, and interestingly, the last show to open in New York in the decade, Wake Up and Dream, in 1929. And when other people were hit very, very hard by the crash and the depression, Porter had already realized what many people were learning, that money didn't buy happiness. He had wealth and he was, like everybody else, troubled, uncertain, filled with anxieties about what human relationships were like.

And when other people were thrown by it, he stayed right in Broadway, hung in there during that period, particularly in the early 30s, and he sent a message of civilized cheer to the world, which helped to reassure people that, yes, it's okay, you're going to survive even that. And I think that's one of the reasons he became almost like a musical spokesperson for that decade. It was his most prolific decade. He also had more shows that didn't make Broadway or more film scores during that period. And it was also the decade of the riding accident. But we can see Porter's career, really, in full force, very top of his profession. We see him working very, very hard, successfully, and experimenting and also experiencing the difficulties that you have in trying to work within the framework of American commercial system, which has some restrictions about what you can say in a lyric. He was dealing with all kinds of interesting problems.

[8:33] Paul Lazarus: Well, the first show of that decade for him was The New Yorkers. And we wanted to play a few songs from that score. The first one is I'm Getting Myself Ready for You, which is a song that I don't know that well.

[8:48] Robert Kimball: It's in many ways a typical 20s dance band type song, and that's the kind of thing that record companies like, because after all, a lot of the music that was published in that decade, particularly, was for dancing. And this is really a dance band arrangement of it.

[10:12] ♪ Musical number: "I'm Getting Myself Ready for You" — performed by Harold Lang ♪

[11:26] Paul Lazarus: I'm getting myself ready for you from Cole Porter's The New Yorkers in 1930, his first show of the 30s, which is the decade that we are examining today. And my guest is Robert Kimball, whose book just came out, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter. This score had some wonderful, wonderful things in it, including our next song, which is one of the greater odes to New York that have ever been penned, I think. And one of the most, I think, underappreciated. It's like an explosion. It's hard to define, but it just builds and builds and builds. And I think Jeff London can tell us a lot about it musically. I've always thought, and I may be wrongly, that that sort of repeated figure that runs through the song, steady repetition, is similar in ways to Bizet's The Carillon from L'Arlesienne.

Porter would know those things, and he would intuitively grasp it. It builds. It is a very powerful song. It's an incredibly unique song for 1930, too. I've just noted here that the first mention I've ever seen of the song was in a piece in the New York Evening Journal, where it said that Cole Porter has sailed away to Monte Carlo for a vacation. This is right after the show had opened. The song wasn't in the show when it opened. The whole town is whistling and singing the big hit songs in the New Yorkers, written by Porter, and a song which caused Porter to wireless ray-gats for mid-ocean, where he was two days out at sea. The title being I Happen to Like New York, and it was put in the show in January of 1931.

[13:28] ♪ Musical number: "I Happen to Like New York" — performed by Harold Lang ♪

[15:13] Paul Lazarus: Harold Lang singing I happen to like New York from Cole Porter's New Yorkers. Porter was endlessly stretching the limits of the mores of the time, and I think this next song from New Yorkers particularly illustrates that bomb. It's amazing to me really that he even ventured this kind of lyric at that point. Yes, even after he'd written these very frank songs about love, like Let's Do It and What Is This Thing Called Love, this song really is unusual. It's a very realistic song about a prostitute. It's beautifully written, but the fact is it's about a street walker, and it was unthinkable to have a song like that in a Broadway show. It was certainly quickly thought to be unthinkable to broadcast its lyric on the air, and it was even difficult to present it in the show.

It faced all kinds of problems in the presentation. Where would it fit? And it was only, they tried it with various combinations, and everybody found it a little bit difficult to take. So they finally brought in, quote, a colored girl and have her set outside of a Harlem club, and that was accepted. Elizabeth Welsh, the great Elizabeth Welsh, who went on to do the songs in Inferent and many, many other shows, who's still a wonderful performer today, introduced this song, finally, after it went through all these switches with the three girlfriends, and it's very complicated. Some people thought this song should be censored and said so. And it was not allowed on the radio for many years. Many, many years. Last, maybe the last 15 or 20, it began to come back on. People would always hear the music and almost never the lyric. And this version is performed by? Libby Hallman. Right. Right.

[17:04] ♪ Musical number: "Love for Sale" — performed by Libby Hallman ♪

[20:24] Robert Kimball: "Love for Sale" from *The New Yorkers*. *Gay Divorce* came along in 1932. I always am amused when I hear about the movie having to be changed to *Gay Divorce* and all of that. It's a different time in the 1930s than what we live in today. Fred Astaire was the main performer in that. How did Porter get him to do this show? There's a story there, I think. It turned out to be Fred Astaire's very last Broadway show. Apparently, he met him in Paris and he felt he was auditioning for him. He really wanted to make a good impression on Fred Astaire. He played after *You Who*, or after *You* as it's often called, and Fred liked it. Talking years later, about ten years ago, with Fred Astaire about people he worked with, he had great affection for Porter, Gershwin, and others.

He just felt very happy to be honored to have the opportunity to sing the songs. He created so many great songs. But he left Broadway after the show and never returned. In talking about the Broadway of that period and earlier, he said it was a wonderful place. He said, you guys can't even begin to know what a great experience it was to work there then and how painful it is for me to walk back and look at the streets and see what's become of it. He never liked to come back. People often tried to get him to come back and do other shows, but he said he just didn't feel the same way. How much of it had to do with the departure of his sister Adele, also, who had worked with him for so many years.

Then again, he started so young on the stage as a teenager. This was his first show. He went all by himself, in effect, in a starring role. I don't have to say anything about this song, except that Fred Astaire introduced it. How do you account for the phenomenal success of a song like this? Do you have any theories about why a song like this takes off? I don't know. Maybe you can tell me after we hear it. Let's listen to it. This is "Night and Day." I think you'll recognize it.

[22:43] ♪ Musical number: "Night and Day" — performed by Fred Astaire ♪

[25:40] Robert Kimball: I guess it's just one of those things that, I don't know, how do you explain that? Porter was an incredible inventor of his own life, if you know what I mean by that. I was reading your note for this song that the music to "Night and Day" was inspired, or Porter claimed that the music to "Night and Day" was inspired by a Mohammedan call to worship he'd heard in Morocco. He also said he had finished the song on the beach in Newport, Rhode Island. There are so many stories surrounding the writing of his songs. He was a wonderful sort of breeder of these anecdotes about himself, wasn't he? I think he had a great sense of fun about it, and he wanted to, I think, mischievously mislead people, as which he did quite often with a number of jokes.

And also, I don't think he was upset at all when Cary Grant played him in the movie. Oh, no. At first, he was delighted. It was actually his choice. But later on, he began to have second thoughts after the movie came out. People would say things to him that weren't altogether complimentary about his resemblance to a man in the movie. He was suffering by comparison. Once again, this is a song I'm not that familiar with from this score, "How's Your Romance?" What do you like about this song? Why did you pick this one? I think it's an extraordinarily exuberant number, and it showed, again, Porter's ability during this time of great stress for everyone to come forward and talk about romance in a sort of mischievous way, a kind of, oh, well, you know, another romance. We'll go on and have some more fun. That's what he wanted people to do.

[27:33] ♪ Musical number: "How's Your Romance?" — performed by Bobby Short ♪

[29:37] Robert Kimball: Listening to Robert Kimball on Cole Porter, part one. *Anything Goes*, backstage with Broadway's Best, is produced and hosted by Paul Lazarus. For more information, visit anythinggoespl.com. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and follow us. Thanks for listening.