Word: porter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...Porter had written the classic "list" song, Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love with its chromatic descent and brilliant cascade of double-entendres: "The most refined lady bugs do it,/ When a gentleman calls,/ Moths in your rugs do it,/ What's the use of moth balls?" For a subsequent show he wrote You Do Something to Me. Its echoing rhymes ("Do do that voodoo that you do so well") were to become a Porter hallmark. But they also betrayed a lifelong preference for facility over feeling...
...Today Porter's love songs often suggest stale valentines: "So taunt me and hurt me,/ Deceive me, desert me,/ I'm yours 'til I die,/ ... So in love with you, my love, am I." His comic couplets are another matter. "Good authors too who once knew better words/ Now only use four-letter words/ Writing prose,/ Anything goes" has the secret of eternal impudence...
...director, Noël the short-story writer, Noël the memoirist and, at the end, Sir Noël, knight of the British Empire. Yet of all his roles, Coward is likely to be remembered best as the songwriter with a taste for the bittersweet. Like Porter, he shied from passionate expression, sometimes in the belief that love, like moonlight, was "cruelly deceptive"; sometimes because he saw himself as an English Pierrot, the clown whose laughter cannot quite disguise the catch in his throat. Of the nearly 300 songs in Coward's collection, the dead-on love...