‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking’, carolled the company of Cole Porter’s 1934 Broadway smash musical Anything Goes. Eighty-five years on, in this age of Love Island and Naked Attraction, what wouldn’t you give for a retooled version?
Not that the song is wholly out of date. When the show opened at the Palace Theatre in London the following year, the lyric to ‘Anything Goes’ was nationalised. Out went Porter’s lines about Rockefeller and Max Gordon and in came two couplets on current parliamentary antics: ‘When in the House our Legislators/ Are calling each other “Traitors”/ And “So and So’s”/ Anything goes’. Hmmm. Let us note in passing that ‘Bercow’s’ rhymes with ‘goes’, and that Porter, as devout a worshipper of the double-entendre as Sid James, would have had a ball with the current PM’s surname.
In point of fact, those amended London lyrics were the work of P.G. Wodehouse. But it’s a measure of the level of Porter’s humour that it was Jeeves’s man who was drafted in for the translation. Many a Broadway lyricist could crack wise. But none of them, not even Lorenz Hart, had wit to burn. Porter did. He slotted gags into the most torrid and tremulous numbers. Hart might conceivably have come up with ‘All of You’s lines about how the singer loves ‘The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you/ The north, east, west and the south of you’, but he would never have thought of working them into a straight love song.
Whether by accident or design, this technique ensured that Porter got away with things other writers might not have. Though the censors insisted that the reference to his beloved ‘snow’ — ‘Some get a kick from cocaine’ — be removed from ‘I Get a Kick out of You’ (‘perfume from Spain’ was the effete substitute), they let the follow-up lines pass: ‘I’m sure that if/ I took even one sniff/ It would bore me terrif/ ically too’.
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