THE POWER BROKER - THE MUSICAL! Part 1: Cole Porter Meets Commissioner Moses
"You're a bowl of roses!"
Okay - not exactly a Broadway musical adaptation of The Power Broker - although that’s not a bad idea! (Marc Shaiman, Maury Yeston, Jason Robert Brown - are you reading? This would be a great production for Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom.) Rather, I’ve been reading Robert Caro’s masterful biography - in fact, I just wrote a story for The New York Sun about my experiences both with the book itself and a wonderful new podcast series from 99 Percent Invisible that does a wonderfully deep dive into Caro’s masterpiece. This short substack series is about musical references to and from The Power Broker and Robert Moses of the kind which I am proud to say are much too miniscule and trivial for even the Mighty Bob Caro himself to have paid any attention to. (Special thanks to the late and much-missed Roger Sturtevant for calling my attention to both The Decca All Star Revue 78s and the original cast album to Arabian Nights.)
Check out The 99% Invisible Power Broker Book Club here.
On November 21, 1934, Anything Goes opened at the Alvin Theater. This latest Cole Porter show, produced by Vinton Freedley, was a huge and immediate hit. It ran 420 performances, making it #4 on the list of the longest-running shows of the decade. Over the next 90 years, Anything Goes would go on to become quite possibly the most-revived musical comedy of the 1930s (unless you count Porgy and Bess) and probably Porter’s second most beloved show (after Kiss Me, Kate).
“You’re The Top,” sung by the two leads, “Reno Sweeney” (Ethel Merman) and Billy Crocker (William Gaxton), was one of the big hits of Anything Goes, and a major show stopper in the middle of Act 1. This is a classic Cole Porter ‘list” song, with multiple verses and choruses that could go on and on, literally as long as the director and choreographer want them to, or as long as the singers’ chops hold out.
Robert Kimball, In his definitive book, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (published in 1983), includes what we believe are 1. all the lyrics actually written by Porter himself and 2. All the lyrics that were actually sung in the original Broadway production. His total count is seven choruses and two verses.
There’s some discrepancy in the specifics of the lyrics from the very beginning. The earliest recordings of “You’re the Top” were both made for RCA Victor on October 26, by Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra and also by Porter himself, virtually the only commercial recording ever by the iconic songwriter himself. Both of these versions start with the official first chorus (although Porter sings the verse first):
You're the top!
You're the Coliseum
You're the top!
You're the Louvre Museum
(Above, Cole Porter’s own recording of “You’re The Top” from October 26, 1934, followed by the 2004 remix, which adds Vince Giordano and his Nighthawks - a CD I am proud to say that I worked on. I love both!)
On December 4, leading lady Ethel Merman recorded her version of “You’re The Top” for Brunswick Records, accompanied by bandleader Johnny Green. She begins with the official second chorus:
You're the top!
You're Mahatma Gandhi
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy
(While we’re on the subject, let us now give props to Porter for celebrating Gandhi at a moment when not all rich white men were so keen to shout his praises. Another early recording: Harry Rosenthal and His Orchestra, a straight-down-the-middle dance band that Benny Goodman briefly worked with, recorded “Top” on November 20, the day before Anything Goes opened. Here, Goodman’s own vocalist, Helen Ward, sings, and she too starts with the “Gandhi / Brandy” chorus.)
By the start of 1935, it was well known that there were tons of additional choruses for the song - probably even more than the two verses and seven choruses documented by Kimball. Someone at Decca Records decided it would be a cute idea to round up half a dozen different singers under contract to the label and record an all-star, two- part version. (Decca had already done a dance band version of the song, recorded by the Dorsey Brothers on November 27, with baritone Barry McKinley singing.)
On January 16, all these artists gathered at the New York Decca studio (probably on Seventh Avenue); the finished result is six different artists doing six different choruses of “You’re The Top,” accompanied by a small orchestra (about three horns and rhythm, including a prominent tenor saxophone) conducted by Decca house musical director Victor Young. The billing on the label is “The Decca All Star Revue.”
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On Part One, we hear Bob Crosby and then Kay Weber, who were both then singing with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. They are followed by two choruses from singer-trumpeter Johnny “Scat” Davis, who was kind of Decca’s answer to Louis Armstrong before they actually signed Louis Armstrong; Davis then went on to a kind of immortality as the singer-trumpeter who introduced “Hooray for Hollywood” with Benny Goodman’s Orchestra in Hollywood Hotel.
Part Two starts with Pee Wee Hunt, then singing with the Casa Loma Orchestra, followed by The Tune Twister, a vocal group that recorded for different labels under different names, including Babs and Her Brothers and The Freshmen with Ray Noble’s New York orchestra. They’re followed by Bob Howard, who was kind of Decca’s answer to Fats Waller, and for the final chorus, Crosby, Weber, Hunt, Davis, and the vocal group sing more or less together.
They collectively sing six different choruses of “You’re the Top,” which don’t line up with the seven official choruses given by Bob Kimball. (And, surprisingly, no one sings either of the verses.) Weber’s chorus includes references to the French actress Irene Bordoni, best remembered by history for starring in Paris (1929), the first film with a score by Porter, as well as to Bishop William T. Manning - various lines I’ve never heard anywhere else.
The Tune Twisters chorus includes the reference to Robert Moses, and, again, this a line I’ve only heard here:
You're the top!
You're a bowl of roses.
You're the top!
You're Commissioner Moses.
And that’s it! Robert Moses in a Cole Porter song.
I would like to think that this lyric was actually written by Porter himself. We do know that publishers would occasionally change lyrics; famously, at the publisher’s request, Jack Lawrence “cleaned up” some of the more risque lyrics in “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” for publication. P. G. Wodehouse, one of the writers of the book for Anything Goes, wrote some additional Euro-centric words to “You’re the Top” for the 1935 West End production; the line, “You’re Mrs. Sweeney - You’re Mussolini” (sung by Jeanne Aubert & Jack Whiting in the show and on a cast recording) might have caused Porter some embarrassment during WW2, even though he didn’t write it.
As we’ve seen, Anything Goes opened on November 21, 1934 and was a resounding hit. Less than two weeks later, on December 2, 1934, the newly-restored Central Park Zoo, a major Robert Moses project, officially opened - and was an even bigger “hit.” As Caro thoroughly documents, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia presided over the opening ceremony, which was covered by newspapers, radio, newsreels, and other mass media all over the world. There was literally a parade of high school marching bands, and everybody (except Moses himself, but that’s a long story) made speeches.
This was one of the highest peaks of Moses’s celebrity. My personal feeling is that Porter himself added the reference to Moses sometime in December 1934, after the zoo opening, and that it was probably sung at the Alvin around this time during the initial run. There’s no way to know for sure. Leave it to Porter to praise both Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Moses - although thankfully not Benito Mussolini - in the same song.
One thing that’s almost certain is that Commissioner Moses, who rarely went to the theater, never saw Anything Goes. His own taste in music rarely extended beyond Guy Lombardo, but that’s a story for another substack.
Postscript: I asked four guys who know more than I do - Michael Feinstein, Steve Ross, Peter Mintun, and Bob Kimball - if they had any thoughts as to whether the “Moses” lyric was actually by Porter himself, and Michael adds the following:
I don't know if Cole wrote the words but the publisher would have had to give permission for the change and may or may not have run it by Cole himself. With "I've Got A Crush On You," no one consulted Ira Gershwin before printing the lines "How glad the many millions of Tom and Dick's and Williams...". After they were in print he became aware and then had them reprint the song with his own change.
Coming soon:
The Power Broker - The Musical, Part Two: Robert Moses and Tony Bennett “Marching Along Together”
The Power Broker - The Musical, Part Three: “Robert Moses, Guy Lombardo, and the Teeny Weeny Genie”
This production played Los Angeles & San Francisco (it may have been the national tour) in October 1935, even while Merman, Gaxton, and Moore were still running in the Broadway production. I would love to see George Murphy and especially Shirley Ross in Anything Goes!
Here’s a very lovely transfer of the Dorsey Brothers / Barry McKinley Decca version, as issued on Brunswick in the UK:
Yet more sets of lyrics, from the 1936 film version. Paramount trashed much of the score, but at least had the good sense to retain Ethel Merman and Victor Moore, and it’s hard to disagree with the replacement of Bing Crosby for William Gaxton. Crosby (phony beard and all) is very assured at what was already a classic Broadway show tune, and Merman has never been sexier or more appealing. I’m sure Steve Smith will concur that much of this was sung “live,” i.e., they’re not lip-synching to a pre-recorded track. Alas, there’s never been a decent DVD or home video release of this first of many film & television productions of Anything Goes:
Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
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June 22: The Ralph Burns Centennial (+2)
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They were better times and much better music…
Fascinating stuff, Will, and after watching the "You're The Top" clip with Bing and Merman I have to give kudos to Paramount's sound editors for making that one shot where they exchange voices sound seemless. One thing-you forgot to include a button to enable listening to the Helen Ward recording after mentioning it-the other ones are great but would have loved to hear Helen belt that tune, as well. BTW, do you know who the vocalists on the Whiteman recording are? I have the RCA Vintage LP with the recording but they do not mention who does the singing.
BTW, I did manage to get through the "Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Popular Singers" and enjoyed every word of it-now, how do I call you about it? Interesting how your opinion of certain singers-the Andrews Sisters, for one-has evolved through various books.
Lastly, I managed to score a real nice first edition hardcover of the Moses book years ago and through A. Scott Berg was able to get in contact with Robert Caro where he signed some books and bookplates for me which I treasure. Hope he publishes the last volume of his LBJ bio sometime before both he and I shuffle off this mortal coil.
Keep up the great work and please tell me a bio of either Ella or Fats Waller is either in your pipeline or someone else's-both deserve a top-notch book.
All the best-Jeff Heise