The New Yorkers
This early Cole Porter show is probably best remembered for the inclusion of the notorious Love For Sale. With a lyric containing such lines as ‘Appetizing young love for sale.’…‘If you want to buy my wares/Follow me and climb the stairs.’, this ‘threnody in which a frightened vocalist, Miss Kathryn Crawford, impersonates a lily of the gutters, vending her charms in trembling accents, accompanied by a trio of melancholy female crooners’, was banned for some years by radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic. Sub-titled A Sociological Musical Satire, THE NEW YORKERS opened at the Broadway Theatre on 8 December 1930. Herbert Fields's book, based on an idea of cartoonist Peter Arno's, propelled characters, swanky and seedy, around various Manhattan locations, both up-town and down. High society lady, Alice (Hope Williams), loves bootlegger and hoodlum, Al (Charles King), and they have Where Have You Been and one of the score's best numbers, the supremely optimistic Let's Fly Away (‘And find a land that's so provincial/We'll never hear what Walter Winchell/Might be forced to say.’). The cast also included Frances Williams, who sang The Great Indoors and Take Me Back To Manhattan; and Barrie Oliver and Ann Pennington, who joined Frances Williams and Charles King for the witty I'm Getting Myself Ready For You. The much-loved clown, Jimmy Durante, together with his vaudeville partners, Eddie Jackson and Lou Clayton, played three hoods. Durante stopped the show most nights with one of his own songs, an item called Wood, during which he littered the stage with a wide range of wood products. The clean-cut vocal instrumental group, Fred Waring And His Pennsylvanians, who had been discovered by the show's producer, Ray Goetz, while playing in Los Angeles, also used some of their own material, but, musically, the show belonged to Porter. Shortly after it opened, he interpolated a hymn to the Big Apple, I Happen To Like New York (‘I like the sight and the sound and even the stink of it.’), which was sung by Oscar Rags Ragland. THE NEW YORKERS ran for 168 performances, and despite being banned from airplay, Love For Sale was a hit for Libby Holman, Fred Waring, and later, Hal Kemp. It also became widely-heard in a version by Ella Fitzgerald on one of her COLE PORTER SONGBOOKS.