Word: porters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Still of the Night. Porter's passion for high living is supplemented by a passion for tidiness, which extends to details as small as the boutonniere that is always in his lapel. His Waldorf suite is fastidiously neat. His valet has to be meticulous about keeping familiar things in familiar places: cigarettes, cough drops, bric-a-brac, Kleenex, sharpened pencils. When Porter travels, even his own ashtrays go with him, and he likes them kept so neat that at parties a servant cleans them up almost before a guest can crunch a cigarette out. When Porter went to Philadelphia...
...When a Porter song is finished, it generally has a few added staves that are the germ of an orchestral arrangement. He writes out the lyrics in a neat, printlike hand, to be typed by his secretary. First to hear the music is Budapest-born Dr. Albert Sirmay, chief editor of Chappell & Co., Porter's publishers, and also his musical secretary, friend and adviser for 22 years. While the composer plays the song on one of his baby grands, Dr. Sirmay jots down notes and sometimes warns him about cribbing inadvertently from the 400 songs (250 of them published...
From Marrakech to Kalabahi. Perfectionist Porter once took singing lessons to help "place" his voice, which he has described as unpleasant. To see that justice was done his work, he spent hours last week hovering over Columbia recording sessions at which the orchestra and principals of Kiss Me, Kate worked on an album of the score. (One of his favorite performers is Ethel Merman, who has played in some of his biggest hits, Anything Goes, Du Barry Was a Lady, Something for the Boys, because, as she puts it, "I can boff out those lines the way he wants them...
...Venice. Finicky Cole Porter also likes a practical joke, if it is on the elaborate side. In the '20s, he and Elsa Maxwell hornswoggled U.S. society in Paris into believing in the existence of a fictitious wealthy couple from Oklahoma named Fitch, who were "doing" the Continent. They planted newspaper stories about the Fitches, and even concocted an art exhibition by Mrs. Fitch, for which Jean Cocteau and others forged paintings. The night bearded Monty Woolley opened in Manhattan in The Man Who Came to Dinner, Porter gave a party for him. The host was the last to arrive...
...Porter can be frostily aloof when bored, but he can also be warmly demonstrative when something takes his fancy. He has been known to get emotional over an objet d'art or a piece of costume jewelry, and he has been moved to tears by revisiting his old Yale haunts and by hearing Lena Home sing...