Cole Porter

Today we mark the death of the songwriter and bon vivant par excellence Cole Albert Porter. He was born on June 9, 1891, and died at the age of 73 on October 15, 1964: 54 years ago today.

We begin with what is, I think, is a great story.

In September of 1939, Igor Stravinsky travelled from his home in Paris to Cambridge Massachusetts, there to be the Norton professor at Harvard for the school year. By the time his residency ended in June of 1940, France was being overrun by the Nazis. Stravinsky and his wife Vera had a choice to make: go back to Europe and take their chances or stay in the United States where the Hollywood studios were begging Stravinsky to head west. Not a tough choice.

Stravinsky instantly became a Hollywood celebrity and his music a sought-after commodity. Disney used The Rite of Spring for the dinosaur sequence in Fantasia. Barnum and Bailey’s circus commissioned Stravinsky to write a work for its dancing elephants. The producer-huckster Billy Rose commissioned a work called Scènes de ballet.

After the premiere of Scènes de ballet, Rose telegraphed Stravinsky:

“YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORIZE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT [TO] RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION STOP BENNETT ORCHESTRATES EVEN THE WORKS OF COLE PORTER”

Stravinsky telegraphed back:

“SATISFIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS.” 

Back, please, to the last line of Billy Rose’s telegram:

“BENNETT ORCHESTRATES EVEN THE WORKS OF COLE PORTER”

Clearly, Cole Porter was a big enough star in Rose’s estimation that by invoking him, not even Igor freaking-Stravinsky would be able to say “no” to having his orchestration “retouched”. 

How “big” – how “popular” – was Cole Porter in his day? Who should we compare him to today? 

Let’s step back for a moment before we answer that question.

Cole Porter

Porter’s first big hit was a Broadway musical entitled Paris, which opened in 1928 when Porter was 37. (The show featured one of Porter’s greatest songs, “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love”.) His last musical show was entitled Aladdin. Based on a book by S.J. Perelman, it was produced in 1958. 

In that 30-year career, Porter wrote the words and the music to hundreds of songs. By my informal count, at least 35 of them are masterpieces of the genre, among the greatest songs of the so-called “Great American Songbook”: that canon of enduring popular American “standards” created between the 19-teens and 1950s for musical revues, Broadway theater, and Hollywood musicals. 

Left to Right, Cole Porter, Audrey Hepburn, Irving Berlin

The principal composers of the ”Great American Songbook” are Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Richard Rogers, Harold Arlen and – yes – Cole Porter. (An interesting commentary on the nature of the American entertainment business during the first half of the twentieth century: excepting Cole Porter, all of these songwriters were immigrant Jews or the children/grandchildren of immigrant Jews.)

Who, then, constitute today’s equivalent of these phenomenally talented songwriters? Who has been working and producing continuously for the last 20 or 30 years at the highest level, creating songs of the highest artistic merit that are also, in their way,