Michael Kantor: What was Cole Porter, how did you meet Cole Porter?
Patricia Morison: Well, I had been in films for 10 years, you know, playing the other woman, or shooting somebody, or stealing somebody’s husband, and playing all those roles. And I had, I’d been a singer before. I came to California from Broadway, from an operetta called The Two Bouquets. The idea of singing for a long time. And then I started studying seriously, and my agent said to me, Patricia, you’ve got to get used to auditioning for people. And he said, I’m going to take you out to Cole Porter’s house. And I said, Cole Porter house? He had a house on Rockingham here. I did. We went out there, and I purposely brought music from Rodgers and Hammerstein. And he heard me sing, and he handed me the score of this show. He said, learn this and come back and sing it for me again. And I did, and he thought that was lovely. I was making a film at the time, I think it was called Song of the Thin Man with Myrna Loy and William Powell. He couldn’t raise the money for Kate. He had a difficult time. Nobody wanted to do a musical based on Shakespeare, or wanted to invest in a musical based on the Shakespeare. And then he’d had a series of failures. So his many dear friends, he’d give these elegant parties at his house and invite his wealthy friends. And he’d have two young singers perform the songs. And they said, it’s very nice, Cole, but it’s just not going to work. Years later, when I opened in London, this huge, triumphant opening in London. Sir Douglas Fairbanks came to me and he said, you know, Patty said Cole wanted me to put $2,000 in the show and I turned him down. And well, the rest is really history. The only other thing is that Super and Ayres and Sam and Bella Spiewak in New York had an opera singer in mind for the role of Kate. And they didn’t believe. Cold when he told them that I could sing so well. We have a theater here called the Wiltshire Ebell. It’s a concert hall. And he rented it one afternoon. And just Cole, his accompanist, and myself went there. And I stood on the stage while Cole climbed with his bad leg right up to the balcony while I sang. And he called them and said, you’re crazy. She sings beautifully. He still couldn’t raise the money for it. Well, I was going to start a new series called The Cases of Eddie Drake. This is when series were very new and people were doing them independently. And on the Saturday, somebody had called me and said, Patricia, you’re flying to New York with Bob Hope and everybody who went overseas to entertain the troops to Madison Square Garden. I said, I can’t possibly go. I’m starting to shoot on Monday. So my agent called up and said, you’re crazy. You’re going in. So I flew into New York and did this whole thing in Madison Square Garden and auditioned at the theater for Sam and Bella Spiewak and everybody. And then everybody was in love and I got the part. And that’s how it happened. Shall I give their names or just say the producer?
Michael Kantor: Just the producers.
Patricia Morison: The producers had wanted an opera singer, and they thought that Cole was a little nuts. They said, who wants this movie star who can’t sing? And Cole prevailed.
Michael Kantor: Okay, let’s play it one more time.
Patricia Morison: No, I’m not saying it right.
Michael Kantor: No, it was perfect, but how about coal was right?
Patricia Morison: Yeah, Cole was right.
Michael Kantor: Okay, one more time, here we go.
Patricia Morison: The producers wanted an opera singer, a lovely woman called Jamila Navadna, and they thought Cole was crazy. They said, she can’t sing, you couldn’t hear her beyond the third row. But Cole prevailed and never gave up and I got it.
Michael Kantor: Um, what is Kiss Me Kate really about? We know it’s about squabbling, you know.
Patricia Morison: It’s about.
Michael Kantor: Give me the title.
Patricia Morison: Kiss Me Kate, which is about an actor, it’s really based on Alfred London and Fontaine. And I remember seeing their Taming of the Shrew actually when I was younger. And it was about their, here are two people who work together, have worked together for years in their profession. And no matter what they do, they’re still madly in love with each other. And Kiss Me Kate is about that. And they carry their offstage battles on stage into the taming of the shrew. Great. But it’s really, when they were going to do the new Kiss Me, Kate, Marin Macy and Brian Stokes Mitchell called me from New York, I’d never met them, and they were petrified. And so I said to them, you have a director, you have to go with the director, but please never forget one thing, that these two people are madly in love with each other, in spite of the battles and the sarcasm. I didn’t really think about that. I mean, I know that when Bella Spiewak brought the idea to him, he didn’t wanna do it. And she was a very persuasive little lady, and she tortured him until he’s decided to write. Particular songs, especially the Shakespearean things, you know, and, and… So I guess.
Michael Kantor: It was more of doing music by Shakespeare, people didn’t think that way.
Patricia Morison: No, and he thought the same thing, but I think he enjoyed the challenge of writing the songs like Where’s the Life That Late I Led and I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily and Page of using, I mean the way he used words anyway, his own lyrics, but here he had Shakespeare to play with and I think that must have been very exciting for him.
Michael Kantor: That’s, that’s great. This show had so many hits. What do you think was the biggest hit from Kiss Me Kate?
Patricia Morison: I don’t know anyone, really.
Michael Kantor: But you mentioned in another interview I saw somewhere that a couple of the songs weren’t allowed to be played on the radio. Tell me about that.
Patricia Morison: Well, always true to you in my fashion. And it’s too darn hot. We’re not allowed to be played on the radio or television. Because they were all sexual innuendos. And especially too darn hard. I’d like to meet with my baby tonight, get off my feet with my baby tonight. I’d love to meet my baby with my feet tonight, but no repeat with my baby tonight because it’s too darn hot. They wouldn’t allow that. That’s nothing today.
Michael Kantor: Okay, so Broadway was always breaking barriers.
Patricia Morison: Broadway was always breaking barriers. My first line in Kiss Me Kate was, you bastard. And I got terribly snooty about it and said, I couldn’t possibly say that. That is not in my vocabulary. So Bella said, well, what about you jerk? You bum. None of them worked. So when I finally said it in the theater, the gasp from the audience was incredible. Oh, no. It’s slightly different nowadays, isn’t it?
Michael Kantor: Great. And then how did the, you know, just set up the play, the musical, is about sort of a fight between the sexes based on Taming the True, and you have this great number I Hate Men. Give us a little bit of that.
Patricia Morison: Well, as you know, Kiss Me Kate was about an actor and actress playing the Taming of the Shrew or having marital problems, and they carry their offstage fights on stage. And the Taining of the shrew, Katherine, has a song which is a diatribe against mankind called I Hate Men. It’s interesting, when we were rehearsing that I Hate Men, you know how the gypsies all sit out where you don’t, but I know, they sit out front and they watch the rehearsal and they used to come and say, oh, Pat, that’s a terrible number. That’s not going to make, it’s going to you look so bad. And it, Super and Air came to me and I started to feel very nervous about singing this. And so I would go to Cole and Cole said, there was an operetta by Victor Herbert in which the man sings a song called, I want what I want when I want it and bangs the tankard on the table. He said, you just go ahead and do it. Well, opening night in Philadelphia, I was petrified and I did it. And of course it stopped the show. So he was right. But when you have. The producers and the cast, all the dancers, telling you, Miss Morrison, that’s going to make you look terrible. I was really paranoid. So you want me to do a little?
Michael Kantor: Yeah, just say the song.
Patricia Morison: The song, I Hate Men, is Catherine’s diatribe against all mankind. She says, I hate men, I can’t abide them even now and then. Then ever marry one of them, I’d rest a virgin rather. And I forgot it. Ha ha ha ha!
Michael Kantor: You did it perfectly when we were over. How does he go?
Patricia Morison: I Hate Men was a Catherine’s diatribe against all mankind. I hate men, I can’t abide them even now and then. Then every marry one of them, I’d rest a virgin rather. For husbands are a boring lot and only give you bother. Course, I’m awfully glad that mother had to marry father. But I hate man. Bang.
Michael Kantor: Kiss Me Kate had many hits, what was your biggest hit?
Patricia Morison: I was so in love.
Michael Kantor: But give that in a topic sentence.
Patricia Morison: Kiss, you will. So In Love was a love ballad, and it was… Where it sat perfectly in my voice. And, but it had always a twist in it that Cole Porter was, I always felt that, I’ve always felt that Cole had an underlying in some of his most famous lyrics in songs. If you look back at them, there was an underlying, I don’t say melancholy. Something that takes away the joy, not the joy but is it a depth, I don’t know. And in So In Love, he has, you know, so taunt me and hurt me, deceive me, desert me, I’m yours till I die. So in love, I am yours till die. You know, like even in the song Why Can’t You Behave, they changed, they changed a lot of the lyrics but she has one pod. Gee, I need you, kid, I always knew it. At least till you dig my grave, I’ll be in love with you. I’d forgotten the lyrics of the song. But he seemed to have this sadness in him.
Michael Kantor: Sort of darkness.
Patricia Morison: Yes, I mean, everybody writes about the elegant, chic, witty lyrics and his elegant, chic life, but there was an underlying sadness, I think. Maybe I’m all wrong, I don’t know. In the middle of all the chatter and all the laughter, it was like a curtain would go down over his face, and people thought he was being very cold, and I found out later it was because he was in agony. From this leg injury, and that usually was a signal that everybody went home. But to me, he was. Charming and a dear friend.
Michael Kantor: Tell us about in rehearsals, wouldn’t he be, he had to be carried into the theater and.
Patricia Morison: Oh, he used to come in on the arm of a young man, and we rehearsed at the New Amsterdam roof, which was like the set from Follies in those days, dusty and dirty and everything, with an old rickety piano. He would come down elegantly dressed on the arms of a man and sit in a chair in the center aisle, and another chair put his leg. But he had a whistle, a little gold whistle, and if he didn’t hear a lyric, he took that, I didn’t hear that. And yet he would climb up on the stage if you needed something written, he’d climb up to that rickety old piano and write it right off. Father time goes gaily ticking along. We shall never be younger. Soon the lock will tire us singing his song, which is another lyric, you know, that’s a little sad. We never used it in the show. Cole took it away and put it in his trunk. And we had another song called, It Was Great Fun the First Time, which was funny. We didn’t know what we had. It wasn’t until in Philadelphia we heard the orchestrations that we suddenly sat up. And it was really the opening night in Philadelphia was far more exciting than the New York opening because we didn’t know what we had. And we walked out and we got these ovations that absolutely threw us. And I think Cole too, I know he came with his mother and Linda who was not well. And sat in the front row. And it was the most exciting opening I’ve ever had in my career, was that Philadelphia opening of Kiss Me Cake, because we did not really know. Isn’t that interesting?
Michael Kantor: Take us back to Hollywood, put places, you know, in the late 40s, you were out in Hollywood and again, he was sort of persona non grata.
Patricia Morison: He had a beautiful house in Rockingham and going to a lot of parties and things like that. That’s what he was doing. I didn’t know him that well then, you know, because I mean, can you imagine your agent saying I’m taking you to Cole Porter’s house to sing for him? You know, I was in awe. And he was, I know he had two pianos in his house. And there was a fine pianist called Alex Steinert, and they used to play classical, two pianos. Cole used to to play, to keep yourself busy, I guess.
Michael Kantor: Pick up one question with Rogers and Hammerstein had taken over Broadway. Yeah. Cole wanted to do this piece.
Patricia Morison: Well, he didn’t in the beginning, he didn’t, but it was Bella Spiewak who goaded him. And she was a gadfly. I mean, she just didn’t let him back out. And thank goodness, she didn’t. And it’s interesting, we opened before South Pacific in New York. I even auditioned for South Pacific at the time. But. Yes, it’s true that Rodgers and Hammerstein were the new, the new stars of Broadway. And Cole came back with this. That’s the best show he ever wrote. The best score, one of the best. I mean, yes, there are the wonderful, familiar things that I love of Cole, songs of Cole over the years and the fabulous lyrics. I have that big book, Cole, do you have that book?
Michael Kantor: Yeah.
Patricia Morison: Well, in the late 40s, Rodgers and Hammerstein had become sort of the kings of Broadway musicals. And Cole Porter had had several failures. And maybe people thinking he was a little passe. And so then came Kiss Me Kate. Speaks for itself. He was never passé.
Michael Kantor: Remind us of what Broadway.
Patricia Morison: What did I say? Don’t date it, can we just say it?
Michael Kantor: I remember way back when I was a kid.
Patricia Morison: I remember when I was younger, walking down, because it was during the Depression, and I was given a dime, a nickel for the subway, and a nickel to get back, but I always kept the other nickel in case I wanted to buy a hot dog or something. And I would walk down from, I lived on 72nd and West End Avenue, and I’d walk all the way down to Broadway. It was a lovely place then. There was a fabulous Astor Hotel, where a lot of people would meet in the lobby, this beautiful lobby. And there was also the Walgreen drug store, where actors and outer work actors and would-be actors could eat. And they were so wonderful to them. They could have it. They didn’t have to pay, you know. They would tote it up. They say, once you get the job, then you can pay. And then there were the lights. I mean, it was none of this fabulous lighting they have now on Broadway that is just really mind-boggling. They were light bulbs. And they flickered, and they moved, and they made pictures. And it was really a magical, magical place. And the Times building was the only building that had the news going round and round and around And many times, I was lucky to have a quarter. And when I had a quarter, I could stand at the back of a theater and see a play. And I got to see The Lunce, and I got to See Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward and Tonight at 8.30. And so those are wonderful memories, wonderful memories to have. I’m very fortunate.
Michael Kantor: That’s great. What about, you know, if you were to describe the Broadway that you knew with, you know, adjectives, what was it like? Was it brassy? Or what springs to mind is, you know, was it vulgar? Was, you
Patricia Morison: It had all of that, it had, you know, there were awful kind of dumpy places, but in a different way. I can’t explain it to today. Now they’ve changed 42nd Street and they’ve purified it in a way, which is lovely. But I remember it with all these cheap movie, in those days they were movie houses, they weren’t porn houses. That’s where you could go to the movies for five cents. And I got to see a lot of films there. And then going into agents’ offices, many of these offices were in these ramshackly buildings that they’ve all gone now. And you’d climb a lot a stairs, and you’d go in, and you filled out a card to tell the agent what you could do. That’s when I wrote, I Could Sing If I Had To. And it was a different world. Well, the world changes anyway, so what do we expect? Before we had the Broadway musical, we had The Viennese Operettas. You know, and we had the British Music Hall. And then Victor Herbert came. He was the first American composer. But that was not necessarily, I guess you’d call them musicals, call them operettas. But I think the 20s brought in the real musicals. The Jazz Age and things like that. But I really couldn’t explain it. It is definitely very American. Maybe a lot of it came out of the black culture. You know, a lot of jazz, a a lot of the composers, including Rogers, and including Cole, and all these people. To them, jazz was the biggest, biggest thing to come along, and the most American. And they used it a lot in their music. Gershwin, my god. You know, I went to the opening night of Porgy and Bess.
Michael Kantor: Place us in the late 40s and tell us about sort of racial integration on Broadway.
Patricia Morison: In Cate, we had two very fine black performers doing… One of them, Adelaide Hall, sang another opening, another show. And I think it was Larry Fuller who did Too Dawn Hot. But their roles were of the dressers to the stars. And today when they do Kiss Me Kate, they don’t cast them with African Americans. So it’s a different time. In The King and I, we had a lot of oriental, half oriental. Actors playing the wives and the children. And maybe that was more integrated in a way. But it’s different now. I mean, you didn’t see a lot of black dancers mixed in with white dancers on the stage, unless you had a show that was all African-American. It was a different time. And touring in the South in those days was rather difficult, especially if you were sensitive at all. We toured the King and I, and to play in a theater where they had a separate box office and a separate balcony for the African-American people was very, very hard. And I had a wonderful dresser, Marge Holmes, who had been, she’d been a singer in Carmen Jones. I used to have to fight to have her stay at the hotel with me in the South. And it was very, very difficult. It’s different now.
Michael Kantor: Tell us about meeting with Rodgers and Hammerstein at the plaza.
Patricia Morison: Well, I was about to go to London with Kiss Me Kate, and Dick Rogers called me, invited me to lunch at the plaza and was there with Oscar. And they asked me if I would take over for Mary Martin in South Pacific. And I said, well, I said that’s not really a role for me. I said but you’re going to be doing a musical based on Anna and the King of Siam. And that I would love to do. They say, oh. That dear, he said, Gertrude Lawrence got the rights to it and brought it to us. And so we’re going to use her. And they said that Alfred Drake, they wanted Alfred Drake to play the king. And he came to have lunch from the same table at the plaza. He made so many demands that they thought it was easier to get the King of Siam to play the King Of Siam than to get Alfred. And they went to the St. James Theater that very afternoon and Mary Martin had done a musical called Lute Song and Yule had played with her in it and she he was directing TV at the time and she told him to go and audition. And he went to that particular afternoon, he went the St. James Theater, sat on the stage, took out a guitar and sang some Russian songs and they had their king.
Michael Kantor: So tell us about when you joined Gertrude Lawrence and passed away.
Patricia Morison: I was in London doing Kate when Gertrude Lawrence passed away and Dick Rodgers called me. I said, well, I had another year and a half to go. Well, then I finally came and got the role of Mrs. Anna and I rehearsed with the understudy. When I then, Yule came and watched the rehearsal and that’s another story. But anyway, we started working together and after about six weeks, he said to Miss Morrison, said to me, Miss Morrison would you do me a favor? He said, I’ve been playing this role so long, I have barnacles on me. Would you mind rehearsing on our own time? He said you’re so different. And he said, I’d like to reevaluate my part. And we rehearsed for two or three weeks on our own time every day. And it was a nice king and I. He was a wonderful, wonderful actor, mischievous. And as the king, he could do a lot of things on stage. But I was always ready for him. And that made it interesting. And you’re doing something for nearly three years, every eight performances a week. And I had a lovely time.
Michael Kantor: What is the king and I really about?
Patricia Morison: Well, I guess it is a sense. In a sense. It was called Anna and the King of Siam originally. And there is the conflict, you know. You have this British lady, school teacher, and this man of another culture, extremely exotic and foreign. And she’s this very Victorian lady who’s grown up, at that time Britain was ruling the world in many ways. And her idea of bringing enlightenment. I mean, she was horrified to see the slavery, to see people, when the king came out, to see them dumping their heads into the dirt, not to look at his face. And maybe she was horrifying with all the wives, I don’t know. But a lot of the things she was very angry on her British Victorian. And she tried to teach, especially the young sons, as historically. Some of his letters to her are quite, he wrote beautifully in English. He tried to teaching the British way of freedom and give him all these ideas. He became a very progressive, in Western eyes, King of Siam. And I guess the song, Getting to Know You, has something to do with it. Where she’s teaching all these children how you make friends in the Western style. And the…
Michael Kantor: Who were the leads in South Pacific and who was it a bigger stretch for to perform in that show?
Patricia Morison: I think probably it was for Ezio Pinza. I wouldn’t call it a stretch. I mean, he was the star of the Metropolitan Opera and probably the, in a way, the sex symbol. Every time we did Don Giovanni, the people would, women would go crazy. And, but he was signed for South Pacific before Mary Martin and I know Dick Rogers told me that he had a contract to have first star billing. And a lot of us, we all auditioned for South Pacific. That was before I did Kate. And they finally thought of Ezio, and they went to Ezio. And they said, we finally got Mary Martin, but she wants first star billing. He said, my dear, she’s a lady. All right, give it to her. He did this. Well, all his friends at the Met refused to speak to him because he had demeaned himself by going into a Broadway musical. My maestro, my voice teacher, was a great friend of his, and he would call him. He said, ma detto maestro. Mr. Logan, he was cutting my line, saying, you can’t say this, you can say that, you can’t see that. And Richard said to him, Ezio, don’t worry. Just walk out on the stage and sing dita ma por qua, and you’ll have the audience. And he went up to New Haven for the opening and the tryout. And when Pinset came out… All the women fainted, so he was a success. I mean, crossing over from, and how is it that different, in a way? It’s musical theater, too. Opera.
Michael Kantor: It just doesn’t happen that much. That’s great. Let’s go back on that photography question, which is just set up for us that Yule Brenner was an interesting, exotic man. He was an avid photographer, and he used to take pictures backstage of himself and of you when he went abroad. We just need that one more time.
Patricia Morison: Are we running? Yule was a very interesting man in many, many ways. And he was a really accomplished photographer. And he would be running around backstage with his camera, snapping from all angles, taking many, may pictures. And I didn’t know it, but Christmas time came around this one year. And I received this beautiful portfolio with all these photographs he’d taken of me and also of him. He used a stagehand and decided to do that. And it’s one of my treasured possessions. And he won a prize with one photograph he took of me. He had an accident on stage doing that here in Los Angeles. He was in the wings photographing the dancers had the river for the small house of Uncle Thomas that is a piece of silk with two wooden ends on it. And they came running off stage and hit him in the nose and broke his nose. And the understudy went on for the second act. And some people didn’t know the difference.
Michael Kantor: So how did the film version differ from the Broadway production?
Patricia Morison: Oh, in many ways. Of course, film can open things up that you can’t do on stage. Like, for instance, in Shall We Dance, we were limited to the proscenium in our dance, whereas in the film, they dance through all these beautiful chambers of the palace and around and around and around, and it’s very beautiful. The one thing they didn’t really didn’t change that is exactly like the original is the ballet, The Small House of Uncle Thomas. Although originally… They had omitted it and had, at great expense, done a completely different version. And when they looked at it in the cutting room, I guess, they cut it and they went back and did the original. And I’m glad they did because it has the flavor of the original.
Michael Kantor: Kiss Me Cave was full.
Patricia Morison: Kiss Me Kate was full of witty and wonderful hits. But a lot of them at that time were not allowed to be played on television or radio. One of them was Too Darn Hot, which had a lot of interesting lyrics. And one I think was. Uh… According to the Kinsey report, every average man you know much prefers to play his favorite sport when the temperature is low. But when the thermometer goes way up and the weather is sizzling hot, Mr. Adam for his madam is not. Because it’s too, too, darn hot. But that was not so, so bad. But was the one I’d like to sup with my baby tonight and play the pup with my Baby tonight, but I ain’t up to my baby tonight because it’s to darn hot.” That was not allowed to be played. On radio or television, and also and always true to you in my fashion. They were not, you didn’t do that in those days. This sounds pretty tame today, doesn’t it? Mary Martin. She’s another one of those people that was unique. She could do anything. She had this wonderful, fresh air, open, Midwestern quality to her, and always that underlying little bit of humor. Alfred, I can’t say enough about. I mean, we were dear friends, so I guess I’m prejudiced, but if he never sang a note, he would have been a fine actor.
Michael Kantor: Why don’t we put that, you told me before, he was a Shakespearean scholar. Say, opposite me in Kiss Me Kate was Alfred Drake, and just tell us a little bit about it. Start right there, opposite.
Patricia Morison: Playing opposite me and Kiss Me Kate was Alfred Drake, who had a beautiful baritone voice and great style. Great style on stage. And a lot of that came from the fact that if he never sang a note, he’d be a great actor. And he was a Shakespearean scholar. He was an insomniac. And many times after the show, he’d have a table in Sardis, and all the young actors around. Would come because they knew they would learn something from him and they’d be up all night talking about theater and Shakespeare and all these things. He was very knowledgeable and very dear.
