Word: portering
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...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...
...genre of the patter song, Sir Noël had no peer. Because he was a performer first, he made certain that his most complex lyrics could be delivered with ease (upon hearing Coward do Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Porter said that it was the first time he had ever heard a song delivered in one breath). Coward's broken rhythms uncannily reflect modern speech, and his rhymes are unpredictable ("The police had to send a squad car/ When Daddy got fried on vodka"). And many of his topics have actually grown more pertinent with age: "Mother requires...
Given the composers' polish and predilections, it was inevitable that Porter and Coward should admire each other's work. Given their distaste for awe, it is unsurprising that each disguised his affection as mockery. In Kaufman and Hart's comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, the character based on Coward is parodied with a convoluted song Porter wrote for the occasion: "Oft in the nightfall/ I think I might fall/ Down from my perilous height; Deep in the heart of me,/ Always a part of me,/ Quivering, shivering light." Coward responded with Nina who "declined...
This hall-of-mirrors badinage, coupled with gossip-column accounts of their hyperthyroid social lives and incessant travels, served to camouflage years of almost unbearable pain. Porter was the victim of a riding accident in 1937, when a horse fell on him and crushed both legs...