Word: porters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Silk Stockings (musical adaptation of Ninotchka by George S. Kaufman, Leueen MacGrath, Cole Porter), with Don Ameche and Hildegarde Neff...
...Cole Porter never wrote these lines, but he (almost) might have. They are a memorable lampoon by the late Ring Lardner of Minstrel Porter's most famous attack of heartburn. Readers-as distinct from listeners-now have an opportunity to judge the accuracy of Critic Lardner's aim. In a new book out this week, 103 Lyrics of Cole Porter (selected by Fred Lounsberry-Random House; $4.50) were clamped between hard covers without so much as an ocarina accompaniment. It is a rare tribute to a lyricist, but it is also a bit of a dirty trick...
...falls flat on the printed page. Yet time and again the aging (61) pixy of the Waldorf Towers flashes out with a line of verse that might be Ogden Nash at his snippiest or T. S. Eliot at his youngest. In one respect, however, Lardner was clearly right. When Porter tries to be sentimental about love (which is perhaps half the time), his music may be convincing but his words sound as invincibly phony as Porfirio Rubirosa reading Emily Dickinson to a debutante...
...lyrics, Porter himself mocks the true-blue, June-Moon school...
...Porter has got by with such rhymes plenty of times: even his wizardry is hard put to improve on four basic rhymes with "love" in the English language (above, dove, glove, shove). But while he can be shamelessly obvious, more often Porter is so dazzlingly dexterous that all the Tin Pan Alleycats bristle with awe. Nobody is cozier with words: for him, Winchell rhymes with provincial, suburban with Deanna Durbin, Nina with schizophrenia. Jehovah with Casanova, Lassie with democrassy, to the bottom I with hippopotami, a fine finnan haddie with my heart belongs to daddy, and Venetia who loved...