The Theater: The Professional Amateur

One evening last week, a small, elegantly groomed man with thinning black hair, a limp, and the smile of a tired elf, took a party of friends to see the new Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate. The show is such a smash hit that ordinary playgoers find it impossible to get seats for any performance sooner than next April. Seats are just a little harder to get because this one satisfied customer has been buying up so many of them. At a cost of more than $1,000, Cole Porter, who wrote the music and lyrics for Kiss Me, Kate, took 97 of his friends along on opening night. He has been back with others 14 times since.

Composer-Lyricist Porter is a loyal patron of his own art because, after writing the songs for 22 shows and nine movies, he is still just a little stagestruck. He also combines genuine modesty about his work with an amateur's enthusiasm for hearing it played and sung by first-rate professionals. At the opening performance of Kiss Me, Kate four weeks ago, he turned up in evening dress and settled himself happily down front in the midst of his large, glittering party. He was the picture of relaxed enjoyment, and a sight to amaze his fellow composers and authors, who generally pace, squirm and chew their nails backstage or in the lobby during a first performance. Playwright Russel Grouse once called Porter's composure at his own first nights as "indecent as the bridegroom who has a good time at his own wedding."

A Cole Porter first night is, in fact, a sort of ceremonial meeting of the two sides of Porter's life—show business and the high-living, high-gloss international society that lionized him long before his songs caught the public's ear. Between opening nights, Porter shuttles back & forth on a more or less rigid timetable between the greasepainted world of Ethel Merman and the gilded, brittle world of Elsa Maxwell.

Two Flops, No Hits. For all its likeness to other Porter openings, Kiss Me, Kate was a special milestone. For several years Composer Porter had not been regarded as a sure-fire Broadway investment, in spite of the fact that five of his songs (Begin the Beguine, Just One of Those Things, What Is This Thing Called Love?, Night and Day and I Get a Kick Out of You) ranked last year among the 35 all-time U.S. popular favorites. (The record is matched only by Irving Berlin, and was not equaled by such Tin Pan Alley titans as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers.)

Broadway had been saying gloomily that Porter had written two flops (Seven Lively Arts and Around the World) and had not turned out a hit since Mexican Hayride. Socially, Cole Porter has always had more invitations than he could possibly accept. Professionally, he had become a wallflower, waiting around for a producer to ask him to do a show. When the right invitation finally came, it was from a pair of new producers, Arnold Saint Subber and Lemuel Ayers, who had to find financial backing the hard way. Porter did his work on Kiss Me, Kate in three months. Then, often impatient if always polite, he had to wait almost a year until the producers had sweated out 20 backers' auditions and persuaded 72 angels to put up $180,000 for the production.