Word: cole
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nightclub owner better known to generations of café society on two continents as Bricktop; in New York City. Born in West Virginia to a black father and a mother who was part Irish, part black, freckle-faced Bricktop began her career in Harlem, then moved to Paris. Cole Porter wrote Miss Otis Regrets for her. John Steinbeck sent a taxiful of roses to apologize for getting drunk in her place. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the Duke of Windsor were regular visitors to her ultrachic Place Pigalle boite. In the '40s and '50s she ran clubs in Mexico City...
Nowhere is that more apparent than in exemplary collections of lyrics by two of the world's most polished light versifiers, Coward (1899-1973) and his friend and contemporary Cole Porter (1893-1964). The men would seem as different as Piccadilly and Park Avenue. Coward's family took in boarders and lived in London on the edge of genteel poverty. The stage became young Noël's Oxford and Cambridge; he was a professional actor at twelve and England's Neil Simon at 25, when four of his plays ran simultaneously in the West...
...Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, gathered by Musicologist Robert Kimball, is a model of typography, design and scholarship. The oversize book can lie indolently on a piano, ready to recall the hits of four decades. Because shows are arranged in chronological order, the reader can watch Porter's growth from restless experimenter to self-assured master. Early on, the songwriter attempted to overturn the bromides of his epoch. When saccharine "Mammy" tunes permeated Broadway, he celebrated a black man who journeyed back to Tennessee only to miss "the great big tall skyscrapers/ And the elevated's roar...
...from my perilous height; Deep in the heart of me,/ Always a part of me,/ Quivering, shivering light." Coward responded with Nina who "declined to begin the Beguine/ Though they besought her to/ And in language profane and obscene/ She cursed the man who taught her to,/ She cursed Cole Porter...
...truth was best articulated by Coward in a moment of rare revelation: "Work is much more fun than fun." Only for composers, of course; for the recipients of Noël's and Cole's enormous labor, fun is far more fun than work. -By Stefan Kanfer