Anything Goes is Gone

When my daughter Eva was a little over 3, I decided to try to take her to a musical, Anything Goes, which was then showing in Melbourne. This was ambitious, if not utterly foolhardy, and I figured to first show Eva a movie of the musical so that she would be more familiar with the story and the music. It was a good plan and it turned out to be impossible to implement. It also clearly didn’t matter: even with the excellent singing and dancing, Eva was simply too young for such an event and we didn’t stay long.¹

Anything Goes is a silly and fun musical with great songs by Cole Porter, most famously Anything Goes, I Get a Kick Out of You and You’re the Top. The musical has been movified twice, in 1936 and 1956, but both movies are very forgettable. The 1936 version² is fun enough but is typical of 30s movie adaptations in caring little about the music. That was undoubtedly exacerbated in this instance by the raciness of Porter’s lyrics clashing with Hollywood’s Hays code. Few of the songs from Anything Goes made it into the movie, including just a single line of the titular song.

Anything Goes is a great song, the catchy syncopated melody fitting perfectly with the very funny lyrics. The bouncy lyrics begin after the stately introduction (in which it is imagined that Plymouth Rock landed on the Puritans):

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now, God knows
Anything goes

Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose
Anything goes

It is this great song, and what the 1956 movie did with it, that initially motivated this post. Here is Mitzi Gaynor’s version:³

The introduction is missing but what is striking is an alteration, when Gaynor sings,

Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use three-letter words …

The 50s was a time of conformity but that is a bad, and oddly fussy, change. Not only did they want to avoid four-letter words, they wanted to avoid “four-letter words”, to any reference to dirty words.

 

1. The Princess Theatre management were lovely, very understanding of our attempt and offering free replacement tickets for a future date.

2. The 1936 movie can be watched here.

3. The 1956 movie can be watched here (part 1) and here (part 2).

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Before continuing, we should even the keel with another version of Anything Goes, by the great Ethel Merman. She was in the original Broadway production, and got to sing that single line in the 1936 movie. Mitzi Gaynor’s is a fun dance number, but compare it to Ethel Merman belting out an abbreviated version of the song on TV in 1954:

That’s the way to sing a show tune.⁴

Now, back to the alteration. Is it wrong to alter a song in such a manner? No and yes. As it happens, Anything Goes is essentially never performed as Cole Porter wrote it. Here is the complete version, with (approximately) Porter’s original lyrics:

Hands up anyone who has ever heard of Anna Sten or Lady Mendl.

Porter was a master at including topical allusions in his songs and Anything Goes was full of them. Even in the 30s that was pushing it and the only personal reference in Anything Goes that still works as intended is to Mae West.⁵ It is not surprising that the movies and later theatre productions low-browed and otherwise adapted Porter’s songs.⁶

What are the rules for updating such songs, and writing in general? I’m not sure there are any, or at least none that are ironclad. One can either keep obscure references or remove them, and either way something will be lost. It will always be a judgment call, usually a difficult and painful one.

This post is not about cultural allusions, however, but about prudery: the differing standards of different times and of different media. The 1956 switch to “three-letter words” in Anything Goes served no proper purpose and it was remarkably clunky. The new lyrics kind of work while not working at all, directly undermining the message of the song.

More striking is I Get a Kick Out of You, with an obviously problematic verse:

Some get a kick from cocaine
I’m sure that if
I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrif
Ically too
Yet I get a kick out of you

There’s no way that line was going to make it into early movies and the like,⁷ and a verse about “perfume from Spain” or similar was typically substituted. Yeah, cocaine or perfume: same-same.

 

4. For anyone who hasn’t seen it or has forgotten, near the end of her life Ethel Merman had one of the funniest scenes, a self-parody, in Airplane.

5. For a great explanation of the references in Anything Goes, both the song and the entire musical, see here and here.

6. For a survey of all the variations of Anything Goes, see the astonishingly thorough article by James Hepokoski, from A Cole Porter Companion.

7. Cocaine was first regulated in the USA in 1914 but was popular among high society for some time after. Cole Porter was, um, higher than most.

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Is “anything goes” now gone? In some ways, obviously not. The prudery of the mid 20th century was just a lull, and it now takes way, way more than a glimpse of stocking to be shocking. The musical Anything Goes will now be performed with all the naughty lyrics intact and without anyone raising an eyebrow.⁸ Sex references are now fine. Drug references are now fine. But not everything is now fine.

The 1935 London production of Anything Goes de-Americanised some of Porter’s lyrics, including a new verse for Anything Goes:

When ladies fair who seek affection
Prefer gents of dark complexion
As Romeos
Anything goes

It would be tough now to get away with these “gents” so referred. Heaven help anyone who tried to get away with P. G. Wodehouse’s original choice of “coons”.⁹

Another part of Anything Goes that has gone is Ching and Ling. These are two minor characters, who are under the (not close enough) watch of a missionary. Ching and Ling turn out to be very good gamblers, who clean out the 3rd class passengers of the ship on which Anything Goes takes place. In modern versions, the two characters are Luke and John, “reformed” American gamblers who have converted to Christianity.

Are these alterations necessary? Are they good? They may be necessary; it may be that modern audiences, with a (too) fine-tuned sense of racial pigeonholing, could not accept Ching and Ling, or “gents of dark complexion” (and certainly not “coons”). But I’m not sure that the alterations are good, or at least it is not good that they are necessary. Anything Goes is a period musical and in the world of that musical the verse on “gents of dark complexion” works; one can do without it, as testified by Porter’s own version of the song, but it works. Ching and Ling also works, and obviously better than Luke and John. Modern audiences may not like that these racial references work, and a single loud objector can ensure that they don’t work for any particular audience, but they work.

Again, I don’t think there are easy or universal answers to any of this. Anything Goes, Cole Porter’s genius notwithstanding, is fun fluff and not much is lost by playing safe. Excerpt, perhaps, for the willingness of modern audiences to not play it safe. Are Fagin and Shylock still permitted to be Jewish? If so, just how “Jewish” are they permitted to be? How stereotypical? Is it only Dickens and Shakespeare who get a pass? It depends upon who you ask, but I don’t think any modern answers are much coherent.¹⁰

 

8. See, for example, the London 2021 revival, which can be viewed here (with a VPN). This version also includes some Porter lines cut for the original Broadway production, including If love affairs you like/With young bears you like, “young bears” referring to gay men. It seems Porter readily agreed to delete the lines at Ethel Merman’s request. For similar reasons Porter deleted an entire song, Kate the Great, about Catherine the Great, which contained an extended double entendre on all the people Catherine “made”, including a reference to lesbianism: She made the maid who made the room. (Hepokoski p 130, especially footnotes 13 and 14.).

9. The first draft of the book of Anything Goes was written by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. The book was then much reworked by the Broadway director, Howard Lindsay, and with Porter adding the songs. When the completed show went to England, Wodehouse and Bolton adapted the songs, which were then checked over by Porter. It is obvious that “gents” is a much better choice, and not simply for, even then, the offensiveness of “coons”: the lack of redundancy of “gents” and the suggestion of the muddying of classes works in a way that “coons” does not.

10. I don’t want to wander too much further in this already meandering post, but idiotic acts like the neutering of Roald Dahl and the “aborigine” hunting of Frickin’ Al Fricker are obviously relevant. Also coming to mind is Little Black Sambo, a short children’s story from a century ago, about a small Sri Lankan or South Indian boy. Although the boy is clever and endearing in the story, the stereotyping, particularly in the naming and the illustrations, meant the book was disparaged and largely disappeared, to eventually reappear in sanitised form. As a little boy, I was charmed by Little Black Sambo, and am still charmed by it. I can see nothing charming in the sanitised remakes.

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One final point, and two final songs. Sexual references may be fine now, but not if there is a hint of non-consensualness. Pop songs can now be extraordinarily explicit, and crude, but Frank Loesser’s Baby It’s Cold Outside, a great seduction song, is a step too far in the wrong direction. Here is how the (Academy Award-winning) song first appeared, in the 1949 movie, Neptune’s Daughter:

Disgraceful. And if a seduction song is now too much then joking about rape is definitely way over the line. Which makes staging The Fantasticks very tricky.

Early on in The Fantasticks, the fathers of the Romeo and Juliet characters concoct a plan, to fake an abduction of “Juliet” who is then to be rescued by “Romeo”, after which they will fall in love, etc. The abduction is to be arranged by the calculating El Gallo, who brings up the matter of cost:

“The cost, Señor, depends upon the quality of the rape.”

“The what!?”

“Forgive me. The attempted rape. Now I know you prefer ‘abduction’. But the proper word is ‘rape’. It’s short and businesslike.”

El Gallo then launches into the very funny and/or very offensive It Depends on What You Pay:

As El Gallo explains, he is using the term “rape” in the (Middle English) sense of “abduction”. Tom Jones, the lyricist and librettist, has explained that their use of the word in this sense came via a forgotten period play, The Fantasticks, which provided early inspiration for the modern musical (p 41). But of course it was the shock value of the word, immediately followed by the humorous song, that was the reason to use it.

It is obviously not so easy to use the word now. In 1990, with The Fantasticks still running after thirty years, the writers Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt had their doubts, as Jones discusses at length (pp 90-91):

We like to think that The Fantasticks does not date. Based as it is upon an ancient sort of story, and utilizing primitive presentational stage devices from around the world, it seems to move easily from one culture to another, from one decade to the next. It was not “contemporary” when it was written. It was not meant to be. And for that reason it has been able to go through a significant number of social and cultural changes without losing its appeal.

Perhaps the one exception to this seeming timelessness is the use of the word “rape.” Beginning with the Women’s Liberation Movement and increasing steadily over the years, our consciousness has been raised. The word “rape,” which seemed so harmless in 1960, seems less harmless now. Of course, the word was never intended in a literal sense, but rather in the dictionary definition: “To seize and carry off by force.” (From the Latin “rapere.”) Even so, there is no doubt that some of the humor was obtained by the surprise effect, the “naughtiness,” of this short, unexpected word. …

This, then, is the history of our dilemma. What is the solution? Indeed, is there any need for a solution? The producers of the original Sullivan Street production do not think so. They feel that the show has been playing for thirty years without seriously offending anyone and, further, they feel that the very way the word is used makes it clear that we are not talking about “real” rape. We are not so sure, though it is hard to argue with the ongoing success and the continuing absence of any serious complaints.
 
After much discussion with the Sullivan Street producers, it was finally decided to leave the song untouched, but to alter the introductory scene, making it as clear as possible that we were referring to “artistic,” “literary” rape, as in [Alexander Pope’s] The Rape of the Lock.
 
However, for the new Thirtieth Anniversary tour to be launched in the Spring of 1990, we have written a new song to replace the old one. It is called “Abductions, (And So Forth),” and it is based upon the music of the “Abduction Ballet.” This song, both music and lyric, has been made available through Music Theatre International, so that in the future anyone doing the show will have an alternate choice in case they are offended by the word “rape.”

Since 1990, concern over the word and the song has only grown. But Jones and Schmidt offered a double solution: a more explanatory introduction to the original song and an alternative, “abduction” song. Problem then solved? Not even close.

The new introduction is slow and heavy, entirely negating the power of the short and businesslike employment of the short and businesslike word. And the alternative song simply does not have the sharpness or humour of the original. Neither solution solves the problem, and other attempted solutions have also failed. Various productions have kept the original song but with “rape” replaced by “chase” or “raid” or “masquerade”. It is all clumsy; it all fails.

What to do? I’m not convinced you can do anything more satisfactory than accept the musical as it was intended or to give it up. It Depends on What You Pay, with the word “rape”, is integral to the musical, and it is naïve to imagine otherwise. It is their musical but I think Jones and Schmidt were naïve to imagine otherwise.

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And, finally, the conclusion: I have none.

The past is difficult. In many ways we live in a more humane time than a century ago, let alone further back. Many things that made sense then now do not. Many things that were funny then now are not. But the easy choices, to either reject or to bowdlerize any past work of art that causes some confusion or discomfort, are too easy. Too much is lost.

We are living in an era of new-found sanctimony. Any artist, and certainly any artist trying to perform works from an earlier time, must be second-guessing. They dare not imagine that anything goes. That era perhaps never existed. It definitely does not exist now.