The clever life.

IN THE centennial year of Cole Porter's birth, I wanted to hear him played, not by someone who was cashing in on the calendar, but by someone who has played him year in and year out because he enjoys him and knows how to play him well. So I went to hear Bobby Short at the Cafe Carlyle on Madison Avenue.

Short made his entrance to a long roll on the drums, twenty minutes late. He is a short, plain man, balding, with a snub nose and a sandpaper rasp to his voice. He majors in the golden age of American popular song, from the Twenties to the Fifties, as do most dinner singers. But his repertoire extends beyond the standards to tunes on flip sides, tunes buried in second acts of Broadway shows, tunes dropped from Broadway shows in Boston or Philadelphia. He knows when they were written and who first sang them, and imparts the information in his introductions as if he were a Grove's Dictionary of popular music.

Short's sets always include a cluster of songs by Cole Porter. Of the three he did tonight, two were bravura joshing. "I'm Throwing a Ball Tonight," introduced by Ethel Merman in Panama Hattie (1940), was like fast-forwarding through old Walter Winchell broadcasts.

I invited Wendell Willkie,

I invited FDR,

And for photographs,

I asked the staffs

Of Life, Look, Peek, Pic, Snap, Click,

and Harper's Bazaar.

"How's Your Romance?" from Gay Divorce (1932) was not topical, but no less clever.

In Italia the signori are so very

amatory 

That their passion, a priori, is

l'amor.

And from Napoli to Pisa, every man

has on his knees a

Little private Mona Lisa to adore. The stars of the show, Short explained when he finished, had been Fred Astaire and Claire Luce-("not Clare Boothe Luce"). "For the film," Short went on, "they did two or three interesting things, I thought. They found another blonde girl, Ginger Rogers. The Censorship Board thought the title made divorce too attractive to the American public, so it was changed to The Gay Divorcee. And, what was unforgivable, they threw out all of Cole Porter's songs, except this one." And then he slipped, as if through a hidden door, into "Night and Day," skipping the "beat beat beat of the tom-tom" of the verse, and stepping directly into the passion of the refrain. As he sang, the spotlight narrowed to his head and shoulders, and the rest of the room sank into hurricane-lamp-lit dusk; old couples, and not-so-old (none were young), held hands.

Two manners, two kinds of songs. It is easy to understand, from his life, how Cole Porter managed to catch the mood of the first world-affected, witty, fashionable. Understanding how he plugged into the second world, of seriousness and held hands, is not so easy.

Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, only two generations after the first white man's log cabin went up there. His father was a druggist, and a cipher; his mother had the will in the family. Her father had the money, invested in Appalachian timberland, which turned out to be laden with gas and coal.

Propelled by his grandfather's cash and his mother's ambitions (she had his first juvenile compositions printed privately), Porter determined to say good-bye to all that. Said it, at first, unsuccessfully. As a freshman at Yale, "in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down," he looked, one Yalie later recalled, just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East." Maybe he looked so to the last; the carnation he always wore in his buttonhole suggests the anxious dapperness of the ex-rube.

However anxious he felt, from the beginning of his musical career Porter was a hit with the elite: first at Yale (where they still sing two of his football fight songs), then among the expatriates of Twenties Europe. The musical historian Robert Kimball thought Porter's years in Europe gave him the perspective of the lost generation. But it was the lost generation of Dick Diver, not of Gertrude Stein-of the idle rich, not the idle bohemians. Porter had augmented his own means by marrying an older divorcee whose ex had settled over a million dollars of stocks on her. ("He covered them with useful things, / Such as bonds, and stocks, and Paris frocks, / And Oriental pearls in strings." "Two Little Babes in the Woods.") They lived up to their incomes: when Porter wrote a song about a Jewish factory girl for Fanny Brice, he first played it for her on a grand piano in the ballroom of the Venetian palazzo he was renting. As Lucius Beebe observed, it was "the simple things of life which give pleasure to Mr. Porter-half-million-dollar strings of pearls, Isotta motor cars, cases of double bottles of Grand Chambertin 87, suites at Claridge's, brief trips aboard the Bremen, a little grouse shooting."

Although the Porters were attached to each other, their relationship was not sexual, for Porter was gay. You've never been laid till you've been laid by a man who knows the ropes," he once told Moss Hart. And laying and getting laid seems to have been what gayness amounted to for him. Porter cruised bars and waterfronts for sailors all his life, or called for prostitutes. Depression rates, according to his biographer Charles Schwartz, were ten dollars for a white man, five dollars for a black.

Charm was a lubricant of Porter's life even more important than money. The pattern was fixed as early as Yale, where, although he hated athletics, Porter managed to run with the jocks by being a cheerleader. His looks were one instrument of his charm, and he tended them carefully: every morning, he dabbed his eyes with chilled witch hazel, to keep the skin taut. When charm failed, he deflated; he broke off conversations and left parties (including his own) the minute they bored him.

This life-busy, lively, bright as a globe and just as hollow-is obviously the soil from which he harvested the clever songs: the catalogues of famous names, and names now famous only because he catalogued them; the rhymes and rhythms that clack like pool balls; the in-jokes; the double entendres. Other songwriters spun lyrics as adroitly as Porter did; none packed them with such loads of public figures, foreign words, and guide-book destinations.

But then there are the Porter standards about love and longing, which are as direct in their utterance as Irving Berlin, or Handel.

In the roaring traffic's boom,

In the silence of my lonely room,

I think of you ... How did the playboy write them?

He had, it is true, a craftsman's earnestness. Hart testified to Porter's prodigious and unending industry. He worked around the clock." Porter liked to boast about the time he had spent studying composition and theory at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. He boasted a bit much, in fact, for he had to rely on the services of arrangers throughout his career. But he oversaw their work carefully. He also paid particular attention to the ranges and the limitations of the singers for whom he wrote; Gay Divorcee did not force Fred Astaire to skate on the thin ice of his high notes.

But if hard work is necessary to express passion, it is not sufficient. Passion itself must be present. It is certainly present, as an end-product, in numbers of the songs. Sometimes it throbs in the black and white of the lyrics, even when the lyrics are unlikely. You're the Top," a catalogue to end all catalogues, breaks into passion by sheer exuberance. After the tenth or twelfth metaphor-Mahatma Gandhi, Napoleon brandy, the Arrow collar, the Coolidge dollar-the glittering superlatives fade into the act of finding superlatives. The song of admiration which seemed like an excuse to be witty actually turns out to be admiring. Sometimes the music carries an emotional charge even when the words do not. "I Get a luck out of You" looks on the printed page like a product of the clever life; love is equated with kicks, and one of the things the singer gets no kick from, besides "champagne," is cocaine"; for years, records altered this to "a bop-type refrain" or "the perfumes of Spain," and sheet music still does. But once the words are fused to the languorous melody, the wit becomes gallantry of an affecting, almost bashful, sort, and we notice the heart behind the lounge lizard's carnation.

What Porter's passions may have been are, with one exception, undiscoverable. Although it had a basis in convenience, and no basis in eros, Porter's marriage was not empty. He and his wife stayed together for 34 years, until her death at the age of seventy. For 16 of those years, she helped him deal with the effects of a riding accident which permanently crippled his right leg. In health, she supplied him with encouragement and security, much as his mother had done during his days in Peru. It is of course an irony that the life of the cosmopolite should have revolved around something as all-American as motherhood. Perhaps Porter appreciated it.

The rest is silence. Maybe there was no rest"-no other emotions which Porter drew on for his emotional numbers. Maybe, by the alchemy of the psyche and the creative process, mother-love produced "Begin the Beguine" and "Every Time We Say Good-bye" though those are not sentiments typically found on Mother's Day cards. Maybe the passion of the songs existed only in the songs, and only in the songwriter as he wrote them: an emotional exo-skeleton, like the shell of a crab.

At least shells last. In a hundred years, the emotional lives of all of us at the Cafe Carlyle will be as lost as Cole Porter's. Some of us will have left benchmarks in records of marriages contracted, or children reared-unreliable benchmarks, since couples and families can lead lives as coldly empty as those of promiscuous narcissists. Porter left several dozen tunes-which our successors will use, as we used them, to mark occasions in their own emotional lives.

As we made our way out, I saw that the crowd collected at the door for the 11:30 show was a bit younger: a woman in a shoulderless black evening dress, which her companion was slipping further down her shoulders; another woman with a small diamond set in the skin of her right nostril. So, both sides of Short's talent-and Cole Porter's-would be appreciated.