BOBBY SHORT: Getting a Kick Out of Cole Porter

You didn’t have to live through the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s to recognize these tunes: “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “I Love Paris,” “Too Darn Hot,” “Anything Goes,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Night and Day.” They are the witty, sophisticated and romantic handiwork of the beloved Cole Porter, who died in 1964. A contemporary of the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, Porter is the subject of the “American Masters” documentary, “You’re the Top: The Cole Porter Story,” airing Monday at 10 p.m. on KCET.

The one-hour special features interviews with performers and artists who knew Porter-including Bob Hope, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charrisse, Alfred Drake-more than 20 performances from his movie musicals and archival footage and photos.

And who better to host and narrate the documentary than noted cabaret performer, Bobby Short, who talked about Porter and his legacy with Susan King.

Did you ever meet Cole Porter?

I met him in the late 1940s. I had gone to the Masonic Hall in Los Angeles to accompany a young woman who was auditioning for the national company of “Kiss Me Kate.” She sang for Mr. Porter, who was sitting out front in a very dapper up mood in spite of his physical disabilities (a horseback-riding accident in 1937 left him handicapped) because he had this big hit on his hands.

After she finished singing the song, he yelled out, “Bobby, what do you think of the show?” We never met formally; it was just like that.

I think he had seen me before because I performed at the time on the Sunset Strip in a club called the Cafe Gala, which is now Spago. The Gala was about the most sophisticated little club on the West Coast. Porter was a regular. He could go there and hear his own songs.

We became friends right there. I didn’t see him again until I came to New York in the 1950s, where I saw him repeatedly at parties. He was a very polite person and, of course, I appeared in a revival of “Kiss Me Kate” in New York in 1956. I played the role of Paul, who was the valet to the leading man, and I sang “Too Darn Hot.”

What makes Porter’s songs so special?

It was his lifestyle which made him so attractive. He had the most glamorous lifestyle. He had enough style, intelligence, integrity and education to make it all work. I think whatever you want in this life, if you want it badly enough, you can get it. I really think Porter wanted to live life at its highest level-socially, that is.

Was composing easy for him?

There is evidence that Porter had great difficulty writing songs. When you write songs with an express purpose in mind, it is never easy. If you have to please a Hollywood studio executive with a song, it’s not easy.

The story about the song “Rosalie” that he wrote is just one example. I think he turned in a number of versions before the studio head said, “That’s the one I want.” When you are writing under a deadline for a Broadway show, it can’t be easy. And if you are a perfectionist like Porter was, it can’t be easy. It is not easy to please yourself.

Which Porter songs do you enjoy performing?

I like Cole Porter’s ballads. I think he becomes very pensive in the ballads, and his love songs took on a new turn in popular songwriting. Porter made it quite plain that love is not always going to have a happy ending.

Did you ever see the Porter film biography “Night and Day,” which starred Cary Grant as the composer?

I never saw the film. I think it was a commercialization of the many high points in his life. It had been said that Porter would have liked Fred Astaire to have portrayed him. He did have more of a resemblance to Porter than Cary Grant.

I think the thing to remember is that Porter, despite his flirtation with high society and fancy living, was a very, very hard worker and came along at the time when it must have been difficult for a young man just out of Yale to break through the ranks of Tin Pan Alley in New York.

What new insights into Porter does the documentary reveal?

It goes quite deeply into his personal life. There is a lot of attention paid to the struggles he had after the accident, and the fact that he was indeed reclusive when the pain and the disability became too much. In the end, Porter lived by himself in the Waldorf Towers and saw only a few of his friends. I suppose that is the way most people who grow old and sick wind up.

It always seems an artist’s life is touched with sadness and tragedy.

The entire pursuit of the arts necessarily makes for a kind of loneliness. If you are an artist, and I call myself one in a minor way, you are not really happy unless you are practicing your art. In the end, Cole Porter was not called upon to practice his art. His last effort was a TV special called “Aladdin” which was not particularly notable. I think all of our lives are mirrored in the lives of people as celebrated as Cole Porter. Think of all the people who end up all alone and ill who have not given the world anything or who are not special in anyway at all.

Despite Porter’s success, a lot of critics still don’t take his songs seriously.

Back in the 1930s and all through Cole Porter’s career, he has had to buck criticism. “Night and Day” came in for such criticism, I cannot tell you. People thought it sounded like Ravel’s “Bolero” or some kind of a chant.

In the 1930s, he wrote a score for a show called “Jubilee” and it failed because the critics thought the songs were so terrible. Out of the show came “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things.”

I think that Cole Porter’s songs hold up very, very well. It’s too bad people who tend to call themselves critics are so severe.