PART 1
âWhat a Joy to Be Youngâ
From Peru to Paris via Yale and Other Academies
1
Cole Porter at Yale
ROBERT KIMBALL
In the September twilight in the fall of 1909, young men with golf bags, suitcases, hatboxes, and mandolin cases hurried from the New Haven train station to find lodging in the rooming houses that lined the York Street trolley tracks. Then upperclassmen hustled them to the intersection of College and Chapel Streets, where, linking arms, they lined up in a huge procession that was forming outside Osborn Hall. The Second Regiment Band struck up âDown the Fieldâ and led a whirling, winding, snake-dancing torchlight parade through the city streets to the Old Campus. Chanting the Greek cheer Brek-ek-ek-coax-coax and stepping in time to âBoolaâ and other Yale marching songs, members of the class of 1913 arrived on campus.
The students formed a spacious semicircle in the shadow of the moon-drenched towers and witnessed the freshman-sophomore wrestling bouts. Then they were shepherded back to York Street, where they mixed it up with the sophomores in a sweating, chaotic ârush.â After some mild hazing and various choruses of âWake, Freshmen, Wake,â the festivities were over, and lights went out all along York Street. Once again the strange amalgam of ritual, pageantry, and song that graced Yale before World War I had done its work, and several hundred individuals had been welded together for the first time as a class.
Cole Porter, Yale â13, settled in Garland's lodging house at 242 York Street, now the site of Davenport College, where he installed an upright piano in his single room (Porter roomed alone through most of his Yale career so that he could compose and play far into the night without disturbing a roommate) and promptly established a reputation as a fine entertainer. His classmates included W. Averell Harriman and future Yale grandees Arnold Whitridge, Sidney Lovett, and Ralph Gabriel. Porter majored in English, minored in music, studied French, and even received credit for singing in the university choir.
Porter's English courses at Yale College included English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, et al.), Tennyson and Browning, and Shakespeare. Porter thought Tennyson's âThe Princessâ had an âexcellent libretto for comic opera.â There is no evidence that reading Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew had any influence on Porter's future masterpiece Kiss Me, Kate.
The years 1909â13 were good years for anyone interested in pursuing music at Yale. When freshmen arrived on campus, they were greeted with a barrage of ads: âPianos for rentâ; âLearn to waltz, two-step, and Bostonâ; âInstruction in banjo, mandolin, and guitarâ; âLet us build up your voice for the Glee Club trials.â The Whiffenpoofs came into existence early in 1909 (Porter was a member during his senior year), and Yale's leading music professor, Horatio Parker, had his prize-winning opera Mona performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
Gustav Mahler brought the New York Philharmonic to Woolsey Hall for a concert of Bach, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss. Outstanding vocalists such as Geraldine Farrar, Alma Gluck, Marcella Sembrich, Louise Tetrazzini, and John McCormack attracted droves of admirers (including Porter) to their recitals. Porter's classmate Swede Reilly told me that âCole, knowing how much I admired McCormack, took me to hear his New Haven recital.â
Rather early in Porter's freshman year, an editorial in the Yale Daily News called for original musical compositions by the undergraduates. That summons may have encouraged Porter to submit his number âBingo Eli Yaleâ in the 1910 football song competition. He had begun composing songs in earnest at his prep school, Worcester Academy, in Massachusetts. Two of his songs, âWhen the Summer Moon Comes âLongâ and âBridget McGuire,â survive from his freshman year at Yale.
âBingoâ was formally introduced by Eddie Wittstein and his orchestra at the Yale dining hall dinner concert on 29 October 1910. (Wittstein was a famous musical figure in New Haven for several decades.) The words to âBingoâ were printed in the Yale Daily News, and the song itself was successfully tried out at several football rallies.
Music at meals was a regular feature of Yale life; twice and sometimes four or five times a week, Wittstein, ensconced with his orchestra in a balcony overlooking the University Commons dining hall, performed a concert of staples from the symphonic and operatic repertoireâgems from light opera, waltzes, marches, two-steps, hits from the current musical comedies, and even an occasional ragtime piece. The concerts were always well received, and Wittstein recalled that sometimes the students kept time to the music by beating on the glasses and crockery. âGlow-Wormâ was certain to evoke student participation, while a performance of the âAnvil Chorusâ scattered glass and broken dishes all over the floor and nearly put an end to the concerts.
Wittstein, who conducted other Porter premieres at Yale, including his first musical comedy, Cora, in 1911, remembered Porter as âquiet, suave, intelligent, a real gentleman. He was a good pianist, and although not an especially talented singer he was excellent at putting over his own lyrics. I always liked him and played a lot of his football songs at the dining halls and the Yale Proms. I remember going up to his room where he told me he was influenced by the music of Richard Strauss. He was studying Der Rosenkavalier before it was performed in America.â
In his junior year Porter's stepped-up output of football songs included the seemingly indestructible âBull Dog.â âI was standing outside Harvard Stadium on the day of the Harvard-Yale game,â recalled Porter's classmate Albert B. âBaldyâ Crawford. âThe crowds were gathering. Inside the stadium the band was playing âBull Dog.â Cole came running up to me, shouting, âBaldy, Baldy, they're playing my song, but I don't have my ticket and I can't get into the stadium.ââ
As chairman of the football committee in his senior year (and, coincidentally, a cheerleader), Porter was arbiter of all Yale College football songs. In the Yale Daily News of 1 October 1912, Porter inserted the following notice: âAnyone who has any football songs which he would like to present to the committee will please leave them at 31 Vanderbilt before Wednesday, October 9.â (Porter's room in Vanderbilt was the most expensive on campus.) Among the aspirants were Alonzo Elliott, Porter's classmate who later wrote the music for the poignant âThere's a Long, Long Trail A-Windingâ (Stoddart King, Yale â14, wrote the lyrics), and Douglas Moore â15, later the distinguished composer of The Ballad of Baby Doe, whose âGoodnight Poor Harvardâ achieved wide popularity the year after Porter's graduation.
While his football songs have secured a seemingly permanent place in Yale lore, Porter's most memorable personal triumphs occurred through his association with the Yale Glee Club. In his senior year he was president of the Glee Club and the Banjo and Mandolin Clubs Association; he was also the Glee Club's principal soloist.
In those days, after exhaustive rehearsals in the fall, the university musical clubs embarked on an extensive Christmas tour, alternating years between the American South and West. These tours (the Yale Dramatic Association enjoyed similar excursions) were really elaborate social events; the members were transported from city to city in private railroad cars to appear at a mélange of formal dances, multicourse dinners, luncheons, teas, gala receptions, coming-out parties, and other holiday fetes. The concerts, duly sponsored by the Yale Clubs of the various cities, were almost an anticlimax for the exhausted young men.
It was late in the second half of these concerts that Cole Porter would solo in a number of his own creationââPerfectly Terrible,â âThe Motor Car,â or âA Football King.â Then the piano would be pushed out to the center of the stage, and Porter would launch into a series of what he called âpianologues.â Essentially, they were a mixture of song and recitative with piano accompaniment.
There are very few accounts of the exact nature and content of his act, but it might have opened with a number like âNo Show This Eveningâ or âMusic with Mealsâ followed by a song in French or perhaps âIt Pays to Advertise,â which began with the line, âI'd walk a mile for that schoolgirl complexion.â Then he would surely have played his comic-treatment burlesque on the waltz from The Merry Widow, first in a straight piano rendition, then successively as a church hymn, as a band arrangement, and finally as it might be played on the hurdy-gurdy.
Perhaps his most renowned original composition aside from âBull Dogâ was the many-versioned âAntoinette Birby,â also known as âSweet Alice Kirbyâ and âAnnabelle Birbyâ before it evolved into the form in which it is now printed in Songs of Yale. The humor and pathos of the musical saga of the poor girl from the country who comes to New Haven to work as a waitress at the Taft Hotel, only to be corrupted by an evil Yale man, made the piece a general favorite. Invariably the final number, Porter's own favorite, was his burlesque of Marie Dressler's treatment of the ballad âHeaven Will Protect the Working Girl.â
As enthusiastic audiences brought him back again and again, he often held the stage for over thirty minutes before the Glee Club returned to conclude the concert. Porter's singing pianologue act, with its assortment of original compositions, deft burlesque, humorous patter, and topical allusions, was splendidly rendered with the superb phrasing and wonderful diction that he later demanded from the leading performers of the musical stage. It had all the ingredients of a first-class vaudeville act and was the delight of all who heard and saw it.
Yet in looking back at Porter's Yale years, the musical comedy scores he wrote for his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and for the annual smokers of the Yale Dramat were the most significant aspect of his Yale experience for his subsequent career in the musical theater. With his five show scoresâCora (1911), And the Villain Still Pursued Her (1912), The Pot of Gold (1912), The Kaleidoscope (1913), and Paranoia, which he wrote for his alma mater while a student at the Harvard School of Music in 1914âPorter transformed musical comedy at Yale from what had been an occasional divertissement into a tradition that for many years held an honored place in the university's cultural life. He developed a proficiency in writing for the stage that prepared him ably for what would turn out to be a forty-year career as a composer-lyricist for Broadway and Hollywood.
Each of Porter's shows had its memorable moments, but his own favorite and the only college score he preserved until his death was The Pot of Gold. The book was written by Almet F. Jenks Jr., Yale â14, and the show was presented as the DKE initiation play on 26 November 1912. The story had something to do with efforts to reverse the declining fortunes of a rundown hotel and featured the inevitable hero and heroine, a group of plotting nihilists, scandal, mistaken identity, bellboys and lady guests, a chorus girl, a Southern general, an English barrister, and a generous assortment of complications and tearful reunions. All parts, including the female roles, were performed by members of DKE, who spared no expense in outfitting themselves in the finest wigs, shoes, and costumes.
On the appointed eveningâafter a dinner consisting of tomato soup, asparagus salad, roast turkey, ice cream, fancy cakes, and coffee, topped off with Champagne, cigars, and speeches by DKE members welcoming the neophytesâthe house lights were dimmed, and the conductor, Mr. Fichtl of the New Haven Symphony, began the overture. Porter described the overture in a letter to Jenks as follows:
It begins with the motifâChlodoswine's yearning for Larry; then follows the waltz representing her pangs on finding him false, ending in the motif of supreme happiness, which appears again at the end of the play. Following this comes Larry's love song, then a thing in 5/4 time introducing the foreign influence on the hotel, modulating into a death march representing the monotony and decadence of the place. This is connected with the opening chorus by a movement that grows more excited as it progresses. The opening chorus is the Rainbow Song which would be sung by the guests who depart at the end of it.
In the overture and some of the extended musical sections of The Pot of Gold, Porter sought to âcombine the splendor of Wagner and the decadence of Strauss.â The courses he had taken at Yale in harmony and music history with Professor David Stanley Smith had widened his musical knowledge; through Smith he met Professor William Haesche, who orchestrated The Pot of Gold for an unusually large ensemble of violins, cellos, bass, flutes, clarinets, cornets, trombone, and drums.
If the music of The...