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Today’s birthday boy is Cole Porter, one of the greatest
songwriters who ever lived, and whose work I mainly know as performed by the
inimitable Ella Fitzgerald on Ella Sings the Cole Porter Songbook. Today’s song
is from Porter’s most successful musical, derived from the plot of The Taming of the Shrew, called Kiss Me, Kate (1948). So the song is
sung by a character who likes to play the field; more to the point, she
protests to her lover that, though she steps out often with well-heeled older
men, her heart still belongs to him.
I suppose one might wonder, what with “Boots” a day ago, why
I’m featuring these songs of young women chiding men by brandishing their
desirability and their ability to use sex appeal to get what they want. No
clue. Suffice to say, I’ve always been the type to believe that it’s “lady’s
choice” when it comes to the give and take of “will she, won’t she” and so find
nothing off-putting about the women in these respective songs stating their
cases. I should note, though, that the lyrics they mouth so coyly were written
by men.
In the case of “Always True,” we’re dealing with a fictional
character in a musical, and that character gets to “speak” in the kind of
winning and wonderfully witty lyrics that only Cole Porter could fashion. And “fashion”
is a key word here: “true in my fashion” is a way of saying that the girl knows
enough to assert her personal style as both the thing her lover loves about her
as well as the thing that attracts a slew of sugar daddies, but, as well, her
fashion (in terms of what she is able to wear) is dependent upon the favor of
rich men. We might, uncharitably, say she’s whoring herself, but Porter’s
tongue-in-cheek lyric encourages us to accept her viewpoint as sensible and
practical. In any case, anyone who is able to put it out there the way Ella
does in this song should be welcome to whatever rewards are showered upon her.
It’s not quite the song I
would choose as a really breathtaking showcase of Ella’s vocalizing—and she sings it brightly,
giving full attention to its flippancy. The slightly (deliberately) cloying
tune that comes in the chorus (sounding a bit like something from the nursery
delivered for her “big baby,” crying over what he must accept) finds Ella, as
ever, inserting changes in emphasis and phrasing that make it, each time, a new
discovery. We might say that each man introduced, in all his ample attendance
on her, must be given a send-off in a slightly different manner.
As a song to showcase Porter it’s not his most tuneful nor
his most intricate, nor even his cleverest, but it is plenty clever. And Ella’s
fun with Porter’s fun is lots of fun for us too. The swift characterizations
are wonderful: “Mr. Horn once cornered corn and that ain’t hay!” or “Mr. Fritz
invented Schlitz and Schlitz must pay,” giving us a kind of rogue’s gallery of
CEO types who are able and willing to pay for charming company. I have to admit
that the first time I heard this song, I envied these guys, while I toiled away
on a dissertation on the novel. Yeah, like that’s gonna be my ship come in.
The men with money make the world go round and live that “emperors
of the world” kind of thing, one imagines. “What of that,” Hamlet says, “those
of us with free hearts, it touches us not.” Maybe not, but when we notice the
girl of our dreams shying toward the high rollers (“a girl has to get by” she
may be thinking) we have to accede that there are other ways to play the game
than that of earnest schnook. Anyway, that’s what Porter’s wry little tune lets
us contemplate. My favorite verse:
Mister Harris,
plutocrat,
Wants to give my cheek
a pat
If a Harris pat means
a Paris hat, pay, pay!
That’s the kind of fun with words that make a song work so
well on the stage, a kind of tripping the light fantastic that wins the day. Similarly,
another date, a vet, gets: “when the vet begins to pet, I shout ‘Hurray!’” That
line, in the opening verse as Ella sings it, lets us know our girl is out for
fun wherever it can be found. None of that “heart of gold” stuff, this
gold-digger is irrepressible and stylish. And who’s to say she’s not “always
true in her fashion”? The means by which each man is given something to hope
for, something to be pleased by, and something elusive is where the skill comes
in, we imagine. But something true? That’s in her baldly calculating appraisal
of the men in her life.
