Cole Porter at Yale

This chapter focuses on Porter's years (1909–13) at Yale. Looking back at these years, the musical comedy scores Porter wrote for his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and for the annual smokers of the Yale Dramat were the most significant aspect of his college experience for his subsequent career in the musical theater. With his five show scores—Cora (1911), And the Villain Still Pursued Her (1912), The Pot of Gold (1912), The Kaleidoscope (1913), and Paranoia, which he wrote for his alma mater while a student at the Harvard School of Music in 1914—Porter transformed musical comedy at Yale from what had been an occasional divertissement into a tradition that for many years held an honored place in the university's cultural life. He developed a proficiency in writing for the stage that prepared him ably for what would turn out to be a forty-year career as a composer-lyricist for Broadway and Hollywood.