ABSTRACT
Was Cole Porter human? Friends (and enemies) often spoke of him as if he were something else—a kind of Puck or sprite or wind-up toy, possessed of eerie and mischievous gifts. After spotting him in the bar of the Paris Ritz, sipping Pernod and composing “his devastating little rhymes,” Beverley Nichols, who didn't like him, compared the songwriter to a “startled leprechaun.” Moss Hart, his collaborator on the musical Seven Lively Arts, found him “impish.” “A little human music box” was Ben Hecht's phrase, while Agnes de Mille, choreographer of Nymph Errant, spoke of the strange, mincing way Porter walked (“very gingerly, with tiny steps”) and thought his head looked like a doll's. Even Robert Kimball, editor of The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, speaks of the composer's “mascot-like head,” as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy.
