By courtesy of R. Kimball.
R. Kimball writes:
"A recently discovered trove in Kennebunk, Maine, of notebooks, lyrics, and sheet music, confirms that the composer of Kiss Me Kate and Top Hat was already hard at work on his future while laboring over assignments in sophomore English."
Kimball is the editor of Cole, published in 1971 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
"From the Orange Bowl in Miami to London’s West
End, fans of American musical theater spent much of last year celebrating
the centennial of Yale’s most famous minstrel, C. A. Porter, who graduated from
Yale in 1913."
"Artists as diverse as Thomas Hampton and U2 recorded his
songs for the occasion, and such institutions as the Smithsonian, the Indiana
Historical Society, and the United States Post Office have created their own
special tributes."
"But the Yale Music Library has been enjoying a quiet Porter
celebration all to itself."
Maurice Goodman was visiting Yale's contribution to the centennial, an exhibition in Sterling Memorial Library entitled, “Cole Porter at Yale.”
The
display of Porter memorabilia reminded the Goodmans of some material they
thought might be added to the collection.
It seems that fifteen years earlier, while spending the summer at
the home of Tom and Mary Liversidge in Kennebunk, Maine, the Goodmans had been
shown an envelope containing some of the course note books Porter kept as an
undergraduate, as well as manuscripts, sheet music, and lyric sketches in his
own handwriting.
Spurred by the Sterling exhibition, the Goodmans called Harold
Samuel, the librarian at the School of Music, and Samuel immediately contacted
Mary Liversidge, who readily agreed to donate the materials to Yale.
The
material Porter himself gave to Yale constitutes the main source on his
professional career, but the Liversidge gift has amplified it by providing a
unique glimpse into the formative period of one of the world's most cherished
composers.
The 80-year-old trove had a special
significance for Liversidge.
According to her account, Porter had
frequently visited her father, Charles Parsons and her uncle Humphrey,
who was Porter’s only room-mate at Yale, during their school vacations.
C. and H. Parsons had been raised in Kennebunk by their aunt Llewellyn (their parents
had died when Charles and Humphrey were young boys). “I was told,”
Liversidge said, “that Cole Porter even wrote a song about Aunt Llewellyn.”
Indeed he did.
Porter’s “Llewellyn” (whose title rhymed nicely in
the tune with “dwellin’,” “tellin’,” and “swellin’”) was sung in the 1912 Yale
Dramat “smoker,” And the Villain Still Pursued Her.
Porter wrote most of the
score for "The Pot of Gold" while visiting the Parsons family in the summer
of 1912 and returned often thereafter.
Liversidge surmises that he
probably left the school notebooks in Maine during these trips, and everyone
forgot about them.
Although Porter was a mere college man at the time he produced the
note books, he was hardly untutored in music.
Born in Peru, Indiana, on June 9,
1891, the son of Kate Cole and Samuel Fenwick Porter, the future composer of
Kiss Me, Kate got his first exposure to music from his mother, who
introduced him to the piano and the violin.
By the time he left for Worcester
Academy in Massachusetts, his appetite for lyric writing had been whetted by his pharmacist
father’s avid interest in classical languages and 19th-century romantic
poetry.
After a summer touring Europe, Porter arrived at Yale in the fall
of 1909, a class mate of, among others, W. Averell Harriman and Sidney Lovett.
Porter majored in English, minored in music, studied French, and even received
credit for singing in the University choir.
Porter also involved himself heavily in extra-curricular activities
and, while already a cheer-leader for the football team, achieved an additional
measure of campus fame for his durable fight songs,
“Bull Dog” and “Bingo Eli
Yale.”
His Glee Club singing, and the suave, audacious musical comedy scores he
wrote for the plays (Cora and The Pot of Gold) that were performed
as part of the initiation ceremonies at his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and
for the "smokers" put on by the Yale Dramatic Association, only added to his
popularity.
For his first three years at Yale, Porter roomed alone.
But as a
senior, he and Humphrey Parsons moved into 31 Vanderbilt Court, the sumptuous suite
over the archway.
Porter and Parsons had become friends as members of The Glee
Club, and as seniors shared its leadership, Parsons as manager and Porter as
president.
Porter also got top-billing as the star of the club’s month-long
annual Christmas tour, which crossed America by luxury train.
The documentary evidence of Porter’s days at
Yale is relatively thin, so the Kennebunk discovery does much to
reconstruct the way things were in those carefree, pre–World War I days.
By no
means all of them were spent singing.
The Liversidge material includes eleven of
Porter’s class note books, comprising more than 700 pages.
Most of the entries
are in pencil, and many are written on both sides of a sheet.
One notebook
includes review materials for Sophomore English (B5) and mentions such authors
as Spenser, Milton, Bacon, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Swift.
Two relate to a
course entitled, “English Poets of the Nineteenth Century” (Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, et al.), which Porter studied during his
junior year (1911–1912).
From his senior year there are note books on physiology,
“French Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” “Tennyson and Browning,” and
Shakespeare.
Among the things that set these note books apart from the normal
run of undergraduate scribblings of the day are page after page of Porter’s
remarkably skilled cartoon drawings of elegant women dressed in the sleek
fashions of the day, as well as flamboyant variations on his signature.
A few of
the note books also include a variety of music exercises and lyric sheets, some
of which provide hints of later compositions.
In addition to the academic note books, the Kennebunk trove
includes some early versions of lyrics for the two musicals Porter wrote during
his senior year, The Pot of Gold and The Kaleidoscope, as well as
an outline and fragment from an unfinished, untitled, and previously unknown
college show.
There is also a typescript of Almet F. Jenks Jr.’s libretto for
The Pot of Gold, Porter’s most important and best-preserved Yale musical,
and his own copies of three of his earliest published songs, “Bingo Eli Yale,”
which he wrote for the 1910 football song competition.
“Bridget,” also from
1910; and “Flah-Dee-Dah” (1911), the first “lost” Porter song to come to light
since the discovery a decade ago of many of his manuscripts in a Warner Brothers
warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Among the other major discoveries in the Liveridge gift are a
fragment, outline, and incomplete cast list for an unfinished, somewhat
fantastical musical fable about a circus troupe complete with clown, bareback
rider, snake charmer, fat lady, skeleton, and manager.
Other happy surprises abound in the
notebooks.
Among them are early versions of lyrics for “Scandal,” from
The Pot of Gold, “Maid of Santiago,” and “In the Land Where My Heart Is
Born,” from The Kaleidoscope.
No less an authority than William Lyon
Phelps, the legendary English professor and Porter’s mentor in The Pundits,
congratulated the Dramat after seeing The Kaleidoscope for
“having one
man who is a real genius and who writes both words and music of such exceptional
high order.”
Porter’s own reactions to Phelps and his famous course on Tennyson
and Browning are amply documented in one of the note books.
For example, Porter
noted that Tennyson’s “The Princess” had an “excellent libretto for comic
opera
[indeed perverted by Gilbert and Sullivan] and he responded raptly to Phelps’s sonorous utterances on “In Memoriam,” “Maud,” and many of the shorter poems as well.
[indeed perverted by Gilbert and Sullivan] and he responded raptly to Phelps’s sonorous utterances on “In Memoriam,” “Maud,” and many of the shorter poems as well.
However, when Phelps
turned to Tennyson’s late plays—Harold, The Cup, and The
Falcon—Porter’s thoughts were elsewhere, and he diverted himself by filling
his note book pages with words and music for songs entitled, “Exercise” and “We
Are So Aesthetic.”
Yet of all the notebooks surely it is the pair for the Shakespeare
course, B7 (described as “a rapid reading of all the authentic plays”), that
provides the greatest in-sight into the way song-writing invaded Porter’s academic
life, and eventually emerged onto the stage.
It is amusing to see, for example,
that during presentations on Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, and
Coriolanus, Porter was writing:
We are vicious Sheff men
A wful Mutt and Jeff men
Hell hangs o’er us
Like a sword of Damocles
We’re the chorus
Of a box of Rameses.
In a revised version, the saucy doggerel found a place in The
Kaleidoscope’s “We’re a Group of Nonentities”:
Death hangs o’er
Us like the threatening sword of Damocles
We’re so poor
We can’t afford a box of Rameses.
A year later, in 1914, Porter incorporated the characters of Mutt
and Jeff into the verse of “I’ve a Shooting Box in Scotland”:
First editions still uncut
Daily pranks of Jeff and Mutt.
Curiously, the B7 notebooks (which show that Porter missed a month
of lectures in the spring) are silent as to whether Porter read The Taming of
the Shrew, which became the source and inspiration 35 years later for his
outstanding Broadway achievement, Kiss Me, Kate.
For all his precocity and his early triumphs as
an undergraduate, Porter was dogged after graduation by a series of
disappointments that delayed, if only briefly, what seemed to be an inevitable
rise to the top of his profession.
After leaving Yale, he studied briefly at the
Harvard Law School, switching at the dean’s suggestion to the Harvard School of
Music, but that training was not enough to make a success of Porter’s first
Broadway show, See America First (1916), which closed two weeks after its
New York opening.
In June 1917, soon after the United States entered World War
I, Porter sailed for Europe to work with the Duryea Relief Organization.
Within
a few months he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and for a time was
attached to the American Embassy in Paris, where he met and married the elegant
divorcée Linda Belle Lee (played by Ashley Judd in "Dee-Lovely").
From the Great War until the late 1920’s, the Porters lived
primarily in Europe, mostly in Paris (next to T. de Chardin and which will be Nancy Mitford's house) and Venice (he would rent a couple of palazzi) and traveled widely.
However,
Porter’s years as a play-boy-expatriate, when many thought he was doing little
but giving and going to parties, afforded him both the distance and the
stimulation to develop his own distinctive style.
Nevertheless, while the songs
he wrote during those years were presented in such revues as Hitchy-Koo of
1919, Mayfair and Montmartre (1922), Hitchy-Koo of 1922, and
Greenwich Village Follies, in 1924, the response to his work was not
enthusiastic.
He was never a popular composer. "Too sophisticated for that".
So discouraged was Porter about his career at this point that he
was prepared to abandon songwriting altogether.
Fortunately, his good friend
Monty Woolley, the director of the Yale Dramat, intervened, and Porter
reluctantly agreed to submit three songs for Out O’Luck, a comedy
melodrama about American dough-boys in France.
The show’s success on the Dramat’s
Christmas tours of 1925 and 1926 helped Porter recover the self-confidence that
had eroded so badly since graduation.
Henry C. Potter ’26, who played the lead
in Out O’Luck, recalled 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.
Indeed they had.
Many great shows and songs followed — topped
perhaps in public esteem by Anything Goes in 1934, Kiss Me, Kate
in 1948 and Can-Can in 1953, as well as such classic Porter tunes as
“Begin the Beguine” and “In the Still of the Night.”
Even after the terrible riding accident in Locust Valley, Long Island (when riding with an Italian countess -- born Edith Mortimer -- and Fulco Santo Steffano) that crushed both his legs
when a horse fell on him in October 1937, Porter continued to write his amusing,
exhilarating, often poignant songs.
He welcomed communication with his Yale
friends and class mates over the years and was cheered up considerably when they
would come by for some a cappella renditions of the songs he had written in
college.
Porter would no doubt have been especially delighted to know that
the school books, songs, and sketches that he had taken with him on his summer
visits with the Parsons in Maine have found a new home along-side the papers,
books, and recordings he bequeathed to Yale on his death in 1964.
That was only
four years after Yale had saluted him, in 1960, with an honorary degree bestowed at his
apartment in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, on Park Avenue and 50th Street.
The citation read, in part:
Cole Porter:As an undergraduate, you first won acclaim for writing the words and music of two of Yale’s perennial football songs.
Since then you have achieved a reputation as a towering figure in thr musical theater.
Master of the deft phrase, the delectable rhyme, the distinctive melody, you are, in your own words and in your own field, the top.
Your graceful, impudent, inimitable songs will be played and sung as long as foot lights burn and curtains go up.
And they will.
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