Cole Porter: A Biography by William McBrien

Author:William McBrien [McBrien, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Composers, Non-Fiction, 1891-1964, Music, Porter, Cole, Biography
ISBN: 9780394582351
Amazon: 0394582357
Barnesnoble: 0394582357
Goodreads: 699481
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1998-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Nelson Barclift

telegram dispatched to the stage door of the Broadway Theatre on September 14, 1942, Porter requests "Nelson" to "Come to 1-2-3 tonite." This intimate club opened in January 1942 at 123 East Fifty-fourth Street with the backing of Porter, Len Hanna, Dwight Wiman, Mrs. Paul Mellon, and other wealthy chums. Porter envisioned it as a luxurious lair where with some privacy he could rendezvous with friends. He also imagined it as a supper club where his homosexual friend (and, some say, lover) Roger Stearns would preside both as table-hopping host and performer.

Roger Stearns was part of Porter's entourage for many years. A student in New Haven a decade after Porter graduated, Stearns must have encountered Porter when Stearns worked with two other Yale alumni, Monty Woolley and Rudy Vallee, in Out 0' Luck. Porter wrote three songs for that show, in which, incidentally, drag was an element. One of the performers recalled later that "Cole's songs were sandwiched into Act II, during an impromptu 'show' being put on by . . . soldiers dressed in spangled, chorus-girl 'tutus' (but still wearing their GI boots)." At a rehearsal one of the cast did falsetto burlesques of current divas for Porter, who reappeared a few days later with a song called "Opera Star," which proved to be very popular with the audience. It concluded with a couplet that echoes a complaint evident in Cole's letters to Barclift: "I'm a great success making love on the stage / But a terrible failure at home." As an artist Cole could cause characters to fall in love, but in his private life he failed to find an enduring romantic attachment. In another song from this show Porter seems to anticipate the theme of "I'm in Love with a Soldier Boy" when his character proclaims, "I'm in love with the nicest doughboy." The love he writes about here is a "gentil" (Porter's word) love, and so, perhaps significantly, he places it in Indiana with his reference to Kokomo (rhymed with "gonna go" and "bungalow").

Roger Stearns did not succeed as an actor, but he had considerable popularity as a pianist who suavely played the songs of the period. For some years his club was the rage. "The 1-2-3 Club," said The New Yorker, "is one of those places where friends gather . . . preferring a room that looks like the lounge of a movie theatre to the loathsome privacy of their own home." Porter and his companions persuaded Gertrude Lawrence, Clifton Webb, Danny Kaye, the Vincent Astors, Ethel Merman, and Ethel Barrymore to grace the opening. A month later the New York Sun reported that "the 1-2-3 [packs] them in for supper . . . Gin rummy is one of the major activities at the 1-2-3 in the shank of the evening." The crowds were so large that Wendell Willkie was turned away, and Tallulah Bankhead (gready admired by gay GIs) and her party, which included Ruth Gordon and Lillian Gish, had

to perch on beer cases.

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