Mussolini and Cole Porter October 23, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Bit of possible cobblers for the end of the month. In 1934 Cole Porter wrote the musical Anything Goes, the most famous song of which is surely ‘You’re the Top’. In that song the following lyrics are alleged to appear.
You’re the top!
You’re a Coolidge dollar.
You’re the nimble tread
Of the feet of Fred Astaire,
You’re Mussolini,
You’re Mrs. Sweeney.
The lyric praising Mussolini has shock value today. After all, what the hell was an artist in a western democracy doing praising a dictator before the Second World War? Countless books have noted that CP made Mussolini into one of his ‘tops’: e.g. Gambino’s Blood of My Blood, 319; MacCarthy, Last Debutantes, 321; Loval, We Were Europeans, 315; Trompenaars, 21 Leaders, 53; even the WANW Byron Rogers includes the lyric (though he does not ascribe it to CP) in An Audience with an Elephant. Many of these writers are only parenthetically interested with Mussolini but the great John Lukacs and, if memory serves, Nicholas Farrell have also made the claim in their works. Is any of this actually true, though?
The first thing to note is that despite our shock today there would have been nothing at all strange about Cole Porter praising a man who, in the early 1930s, was one of the most admired political figures in the world: Mussolini unlike Hitler had a lot of positive press outside his homeland. If CP wrote these words then he would be in a club of Mussolini praisers with Roosevelt, Gandhi and Churchill. In fact, Mussolini appreciation if not adulation was the norm in some years between, say, 1925 and the Duce’s naughtiness in Africa in 1935.
The evidence for ‘You’re the Tops’ is, though, rather confusing. The song makes a series of references to ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ things. Their charm is how relevant and contemporary many of the references are (‘You’re Garbo’s salary’, ‘You’re Pepsodent’), mixed with more ‘timeless’ ones (‘You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain’). A song like this invited then rewriting and, in fact, an early and obscene parody survives. However, even taking this into account the versions available online do not have Mussolini. Well, of course, not… He was bound to be edited out. But Ethel Merman and Bing Crosby (the beard?!) singing You’re the Top in the 1936 film, Anything Goes, does not mention Mussolini: in fact, their version has almost nothing to do with the ‘official lyrics’!
What is going on here? There is an interesting minority opinion that claims that the Mussolini line came in P.G.Wodehouse’s rewriting of You’re the Top for Britain. The source for this seems to be Timothy Noah, who cites personal communication with Cole Porter’s estate.
In re “You’re Mussolini, you’re Mrs. Sweeney,” the tasteless alternative lyric to “You’re an O’Neill drama/ You’re Whistler’s mama,” the Cole Porter estate informs me that it was penned by P.G. Wodehouse—who, with Guy Bolton, wrote an early draft of the Anything Goes script—for the London production [of 1935?].
TN could be right – though Mrs Sweeney sounds as likely to be American as British, perhaps more so – but it would be good to actually demonstrate Wodehouse’s authorship. Wodehouse was involved in writing the original in 1934 with Guy Bolton. Wodehouse was apparently also involved in the 1936 film (he was not credited) where the lyrics certainly do not appear. Wodehouse was also involved (and credited) in a 1956 film (also starring Crosby!) No way by then Mussolini was not going to appear. There is a 1961 letter where Wodehouse is still revising You’re the Top lyrics for a London revival. Can anyone end this confusion once and for all: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Is it
(i) this lyric never actually existed
(ii) Porter’s original or later version
or
(iii) Wodehouse or someone else
?
[‘Mussolini expert’ sent me this 1994 letter from the New York Times: The Mussolini lyric from ‘You’re the Top,’ cited in John Lukacs’s article ‘Benito Mussolini, Back From the Dead’ (July 24), was written by P. G. Wodehouse for the 1935 London production of ‘Anything Goes.’… The fact that the Mussolini line does not appear in Robert Kimball’s ‘Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter’ or ‘The Unpublished Cole Porter’ is not due to any desire to censor Porter’s works; it is simply because he did not write that version.]
30 Oct 2015: Bruce T writes in
It’s possible that Wodehouse did write the line, but I have no real evidence other than deduction.
Wodehouse’s masterpiece “The Code of The Woosters” was published in 1938. It’s long novel by any standard, but especially by Wodehouse standards. In “The Code of The Woosters” Wodehouse first introduces an obnoxious character by the name of Sir Roderick Spode, later Lord Spode, very thinly based on the British Fascist leader, Oswald Moseley. Spode is the leader of the “Black Shorts” a Fascist group who in the words of Bertie Wooster “Go about the countryside marching around in black footer bags annoying people, shouting, ‘Hail Spode’. ”
Here’s where the novel and the song may mesh, if Wodehouse wrote the lyric. All of Wodehouse’s novels were serialized in the old “Saturday Evening Post” before they were released in book form. The Post was a weekly magazine. With a novel of the size of “The Code of The Woosters”, the time frame of the conception of the novel and the length of the serialization, would push us back to at least 1936, and probably 1935.
Spode is described as a large, fat, bald bully, described as jutting his chin out “when projecting my power” leads a gang of black shorted idiots who enjoy beating up the opposition. Who else in the time period fits that description? Il Duce, of course.
My guess, and it’s just a guess, is Wodehouse wrote the line in the song as an early shot a Moseley and Mussolini while creating Spode. It’s the type of backhand slap typical of Wodehouse’s sense of humor, and more so if it was for the London release. In the US, the line wouldn’t have been picked up on. In London, it’s a different story. Moseley was well known there and may have actually seen the play. Wodehouse with his sharp sense of humor may not have been able to resist the shot at Moseley and Moseley’s idol on Moseley’s home turf.
IMO, from reading the article, a certain segment of the British population needs to let go of the idea that Wodehouse was some sort of Fascist sympathizer due to five radio broadcasts during his imprisonment during the war. One, it’s not as if he had much of a choice. Two, if the German’s had really understood the tone and context of broadcasts, as Evelyn Waugh once remarked, they would have shot him. The man was making nine kinds of fun of them.
The more I dig into it, the more Wodehouse seems more plausible for the line in the song. The man loathed Oswald Moseley and his ilk. He hounded the man with the Spode character for years. That he would take a shot at Moseley’s hero in the London production makes sense. The rub is that Moseley may have been too dense to pick up on it, thus no howling from the target at the time. Sometimes the clever can be too obtuse for the thick headed.
