The Soul of Cole and No

By Stefan Kanfer

THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF COLE PORTER; Knopf; 354 pages; $30 THE LYRICS OF NOeL COWARD; Overlook Press; 418 pages; $25 "Strange how potent cheap music is," wrote Noel Coward about one of his own songs. He was partly right: the melody and rhythm proved irresistible, but the lyric ("Some day I'll find you,/ Moonlight behind you") provided the real power. In an enduring song, notes beguile the ear; words build a home in the mind.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in exemplary collections of lyrics by two of the world's most polished light versifiers, Coward (1899-1973) and his friend and contemporary Cole Porter (1893-1964). The men would seem as different as Piccadilly and Park Avenue. Coward's family took in boarders and lived in London on the edge of genteel poverty. The stage became young Noel's Oxford and Cambridge; he was a professional actor at twelve and England's Neil Simon at 25, when four of his plays ran simultaneously in the West End. Porter was born wealthy and attended Yale and Harvard. His first Broadway show lasted two weeks. "You would be well advised," wrote one critic, "in considering the latest musical offerings, to see See America First last." Stung by the reviews, Porter retreated to France and did not compose a full score for the American theater until he was 35. Coward affected a brittle, malicious wit and was a lifelong bachelor. Porter had a ready, indulgent humor and was married for 35 years to Linda Lee Thomas, a famous society beauty.

In fact, the disparities were as superficial as a scrim. Both men were driven by adoring, voracious mothers. Both could tell a joke or draw a tear with a melodic or verbal phrase. And both concentrated on what Composer Alec Wilder called "the bone-deep fatigue of urban gaiety." In either case, that last word applied in its ancient and current sense.

The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, gathered by Musicologist Robert Kimball, is a model of typography, design and scholarship. The oversize book can lie indolently on a piano, ready to recall the hits of four decades. Because shows are arranged in chronological order, the reader can watch Porter's growth from restless experimenter to self-assured master. Early on, the songwriter attempted to overturn the bromides of his epoch. When saccharine "Mammy" tunes permeated Broadway, he celebrated a black man who journeyed back to Tennessee only to miss "the great big tall skyscrapers/ And the elevated's roar,/ And he longed for morning papers/ That come out the night before."

By 1928 Porter had written the classic "list" song, Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love with its chromatic descent and brilliant cascade of double-entendres: "The most refined lady bugs do it,/ When a gentleman calls,/ Moths in your rugs do it,/ What's the use of moth balls?" For a subsequent show he wrote You Do Something to Me. Its echoing rhymes ("Do do that voodoo that you do so well") were to become a Porter hallmark. But they also betrayed a lifelong preference for facility over feeling.

Today Porter's love songs often suggest stale valentines: "So taunt me and hurt me,/ Deceive me, desert me,/ I'm yours 'til I die,/ ... So in love with you, my love, am I." His comic couplets are another matter. "Good authors too who once knew better words/ Now only use four-letter words/ Writing prose,/ Anything goes" has the secret of eternal impudence.

There are 800 songs in this remarkable volume, and naturally many of them deserve their place at the bottom of the trunk. Who but a historian will ever want to hear The Social Coach of All.the Fashionable Future Debutantes or Since Ma Got the Craze Espagnole? But the best remain fresh and audacious in form as well as style. Begin the Beguine was the longest popular song ever written: 108 measures, as against the standard 32. Night and Day has an A-B-A-B-C-B rhyme scheme, rarely heard before or since. You're the Top

("You're the Colosseum./ You're the top!/ You're the Louvre Museum") is so firmly structured and so rich in comic invention that it has served parodists since 1934.

No maker of such pastiches has been as acute as Coward, who entirely rewrote Let's Do It for his nightclub act: "Teenagers in jeans do it/ Probably we'll live to see machines do it." But that was merely Noel the singer. There was also Noel the playwright, Noel the actor, Noel the director, Noel the short-story writer, Noel the memoirist and, at the end, Sir Noel, knight of the British Empire. Yet of all his roles, Coward is likely to be remembered best as the songwriter with a taste for the bittersweet. Like Porter, he shied from passionate expression, sometimes in the belief that love, like moonlight, was "cruelly deceptive"; sometimes because he saw himself as an English Pierrot, the clown whose laughter cannot quite disguise the catch in his throat. Of the nearly 300 songs in Coward's collection, the dead-on love ballads are the weakest: "Time and tide can never sever/ Those whom love has bound forever" serves to remind the reader that Coward grew up in the Edwardian heyday. But such songs as I'll See You Again, Someday I'll Find You and A Room with a View display the author's unique amalgam of anticipation and nostalgia ("Time may he heavy between,/ But what has been/ Is past forgetting").

In the genre of the patter song, Sir Noel had no peer. Because he was a performer first, he made certain that his most complex lyrics could be delivered with ease (upon hearing Coward do Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Porter said that it was the first time he had ever heard a song delivered in one breath). Coward's broken rhythms uncannily reflect modern speech, and his rhymes are unpredictable ("The police had to send a squad car/ When Daddy got fried on vodka"). And many of his topics have actually grown more pertinent with age: "Mother requires a few more shots,/ Does it amuse the tiny mites/ To see their parents high as kites?/ What's, what's, what's going to happen to the tots?"

Given the composers' polish and predilections, it was inevitable that Porter and Coward should admire each other's work. Given their distaste for awe, it is unsurprising that each disguised his affection as mockery. In Kaufman and Hart's comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, the character based on Coward is parodied with a convoluted song Porter wrote for the occasion: "Oft in the nightfall/ I think I might fall/ Down from my perilous height; Deep in the heart of me,/ Always a part of me,/ Quivering, shivering light." Coward responded with Nina who "declined to begin the Beguine/ Though they besought her to/ And in language profane and obscene/ She cursed the man who taught her to,/ She cursed Cole Porter too!"

This hall-of-mirrors badinage, coupled with gossip-column accounts of their hyperthyroid social lives and incessant travels, served to camouflage years of almost unbearable pain. Porter was the victim of a riding accident in 1937, when a horse fell on him and crushed both legs.

He underwent more than 30 excruciating operations, only, in the end, to have his right leg amputated/Coward, in precarious health, saw his last shows fail. He became a melodic antiques dealer, incongruously parading his elegant wares in Las Vegas. None of this misfortune appeared to affect the victims; to the public, each man presented a sophisticated shrug. Porter's attitude seemed encapsulated in a verse: "It was great fun,/ But it was just one of those things." Coward sang, "I believe that since my life began/ The most I've had is just/ A talent to amuse."

Both lyrics were highly accomplished lies. The authors suffered more than they admitted and struggled harder than anyone knew. There was nothing cheap about their music or their words. Their vast output, examined decades later, reveals the kind of craftsmanship that rises from unflagging standards and tireless rewriting.

The truth was best articulated by Coward in a moment of rare revelation: "Work is much more fun than fun." Only for composers, of course; for the recipients of Noel's and Cole's enormous labor, fun is far more fun than work. --By Stefan Kanfer