COLE PORTER has been considered by many to be the best writer of popular songs in show business history, but his impressive œuvre has been significantly incomplete until now, as the following stories of a number of lost songs demonstrate.
One of Porter’s best and most haunting love songs was originally written for a Carmen Miranda film that was planned but never produced, because Irving Tannenbaum, the head of Universal-Unintentional Studios, was allergic to some mangos used on one of the star’s hats. Porter did a quick rewrite and “I Love Parrots” became a memorable love song to the City of Lights.
In 1946, homesick after one too many cocktail parties in new York and Hollywood, Porter decided to take a nostalgic trip back to Peru, Indiana, but somehow got on the wrong plane and ended up instead in Lima, Peru. He wrote one song while there, “Chi Chi Chichén-Itzá, C’est Chic,” which he later tried to work into a Broadway show, The Avuncular Miss Jones, but the show was never produced and one night Porter put the only copy of the song into a Salvation Army drop box.
One of Broadway’s most anticipated musical comedies, An American in Brooklyn, closed on opening night when the entire audience failed to return after intermission, which is a shame because it meant oblivion for some of Porter’s best songs—“You’ll Be in Who’s You’s Some Day,” “Fugue for Egg Creams,” “Once Upon a Dame,” and the nonpareil love song, “Up Yours Truly.” While Breakfast at Tiffany’s was being made into a film, Truman Capote contacted Porter and asked if he would write a song for the film, thinking that the imagery of the title would lend itself to the creation of some memorable Porter lyrics. Porter hadn’t written anything for years and was leading a lonely and reclusive life after losing his leg due to the horse riding accident that had occurred years earlier, but he welcomed the opportunity to work again. Warming to the challenge, he experimented by writing two songs, “Snacks at Saks” and “Brunch at Bloomingdale’s,” but he couldn’t seem to find the proper inspiration for a song about Tiffany’s. “Brunch at Bloomingdale’s” became the theme song for a short-lived television series—the first show was cancelled in mid-broadcast after nine minutes—The Sherman Oakies. This story was told in detail in an article in Esquire by Duncan Doenitz, “Bulimia at Bergdorf Goodman.” Five of the songs originally written for Mexican Hayride—“Tellin’ the Blues Vamoose,” “Buenas Smooches,” “Waltz of the Mariachis,” “Sayin’ Ole! All Day,” and “Whackin’ Your Piñata”—were lost forever when a chihuahua owned by one of the show’s backers chewed up the sheet music and chased Porter up a tree in Central Park, spraining his lap. There is evidence that once, in a party mood, Porter wrote songs for four 11 mm pornographic films made by Wilmot “Pocket Pool” Swain, an American original so unique that by comparison he made Ed Wood seem like Norman Rockwell. An article by Maynard Tuggs in Cine Cinnati, the official organ of the Cincinnati Society of Film Oglers, describes Swain thus: “Swain invented a genre, and one that combined fundamental American values with their very antithesis. His pornographic Westerns were modeled on the juvenile B Westerns he saw while growing up. Swain and Porter met when they accidentally bumped heads while reaching for the same hors d’oeuvre at a party at Sonny Tufts’s house. One of Porter’s nurses during the final weeks of his life claims that he admitted writing songs for four of Swain’s films—Pederasts of the Purple Sage, Sappho Rides Shotgun, Hornier Than a Cattle Stampede, and Man on a Cactus. Unfortunately, Swain’s grandson pawned the only existing prints of the films in order to buy sock monkeys and Dogs Playing Poker wall art as Christmas presents for his cousins. The nurse, however, said that Porter often absentmindedly sang the lyrics of one of these songs: Horned owls, bush tits and loons do it, Two songs written for the Broadway musical Anything Goes were omitted from the score by Porter at the last minute: “Fifty Million Freshmen,” because Porter decided it was “sophomoric”; and “Christmas with My Mrs. on the Isthmus,” because he discovered that one of the show’s major backers lisped. Shortly after France was invaded by Germany in 1940, Porter, a passionate Francophile, wrote a song titled “Au Contraire, Mein Herr,” and attempted to have a recording of it delivered to Hitler. But as the story goes the record was intercepted by a Luftwaffe officer, Schnitzler, who shortly after fell out of a Stuka over Saarbrucken. One song, “Omaha Ain’t Oshkosh, B’Gosh,” was written on a cocktail napkin at Sardi’s one night when Porter was high on too much champagne and homemade fudge from Indiana. He reportedly later hired a hypnotist to make him forget the lyrics forever. In lieu of paying back a loan from a friend, Porter agreed to write a song for the Abbott and Costello movie, The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap, “provided that it be sung by Marjorie Main and not Costello.” But the song, “Trystin’ Isolde,” which was simply too sophisticated, was rejected, and a miffed Porter used the only copy to line the bottom of a canary cage. Larry Tritten, based in San Francisco, has contributed science fiction, humor, erotica, and travel pieces to The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications.
Let’s do it,
Let’s fly too high.
Sapsuckers and whippoorwills in the dark
do it,
Snipes on a lark do it,
Even hummingbirds without words do it,
Woodcocks and wild duck, they say, rue it,
Let’s do it, to wit,
Too-whit! Too-whit!
