Cole Porter, Bruce Villanch, Elsa Maxwell, Betty Grable and Marijuana

"Come and see my collection of Turkish hookahs."

So states a female character in Cole Porter's play "Du Barry Was a Lady," now on stage in San Francisco in a delightful adaptation starring Bruce Vilanch.

Packed with Porter's witty lyrics and beautiful melodies, the play was first produced on Broadway in 1939 starring Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman, and WWII pin-up girl Betty Grable as the character who uttered the hookah line. Lucille Ball starred with Red Skelton, Gene Kelly and Zero Mostel in the 1943 movie version.

Vilanch—who's written comedy bits for Bette Midler, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Roseanne Barr and Lily Tomlin, among many others—is something of a modern wit and bon vivant in the tradition of Porter and Coward. "He's given more great lines to celebrities than a Hollywood coke dealer," quipped Nathan Lane in Get Bruce, a 1999 documentary on Vilanch now playing on Netflix.

Graduating from Ohio State with degrees in theatre and journalism during the turbulent 60s, Vilanch was brought out to Hollywood by studio executives looking to shape the new direction of film during the Easy Rider daze. "Everyone was wearing beads and paisley shirts," Vilanch recalls in the documentary, adding, "We were all sitting in a room together smoking dope and talking about the movies and I thought, 'This is a business I really want to be in.'"

Cole Porter and Elsa Maxwell

Likewise, Porter and his set were no strangers to various delights. Starting in 1923, Cole and his wife Linda rented palazzos in Venice, including the Palazzo Rezzonico once inhabited by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

Joining them there was the famed hostess Elsa Maxwell, who invented the scavenger hunt and other enticements that brought the rich and famous together. With Maxwell spreading the word, prominent figures like Tallulah Bankhead, Noel Coward and Fanny Brice came to Venice's Lido shoreline to enjoy its daytime amenities and nightly parties.

"Hard drinking was commonplace at these festivities, as was the use of drugs of all kinds, including opium, cocaine, and hashish," wrote Porter's biographer Charles Schwartz, who added, "A greater sensualist than most of his friends...Cole never hesitated trying drugs or practically anything else for kicks while socializing." Indeed, Porter's song, "I Get a Kick Out of You" has the lyric "I get no kick from cocaine" (sometimes sung as "champagne").

The Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice

The party was over in 1927 when police raided the Palazzo and found several local young men, including the son of the police chief, parading about in Linda Porter's dresses. Later, the principality of Monaco employed Maxwell's services to put it on the map as a tourist destination as she had done for the Lido. "Her imprimatur of social acceptability carried so much weight that the Waldorf Astoria gave her a suite rent-free when it opened in New York in 1931 at the height of the depression, hoping to attract rich clients because of her." (Schwartz)

While living in Los Angeles in 1944, Porter dated Bob Bray, a Marine from Montana who was friendly with Porter's longtime amour, choreographer Nelson Barclift. Porter's biographer William McBrien wrote that Bray and Barclift "were always high on marijuana" and that both came often to Porter's Brentwood home for lunch. According to McBrien, Porter's song "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" was written for Barclift.

In 1956, Porter contributed music and lyrics to "High Society," the musical version of "The Philadelphia Story" that opened with VIP Louis Armstrong and starred his pot-smoking buddy Bing Crosby.

Betty Grable in Three for the Show (1955)

As for Grable, her last musical was Three for the Show (1955) about a woman who must choose between two husbands, played by Jack Lemmon and Gower Champion. It featured a production number starting with Grable dressed in an Arabic costume smoking a hookah and dreaming of having a harem of husbands.  

For Nymph Errant, a 1933 musical about a young English lady intent upon losing her virginity that received its US premiere in 1982, Porter penned "Experiment," sung by Man We Love Kevin Kline as Porter in De-Lovely:

Before you leave these portals 

To meet less fortunate mortals 

There's just one final message 

I would give to you 

You all have learned reliance 

On the sacred teachings of science 

So I hope, through life you never will decline 

In spite of philistine Defiance 

To do what all good scientists do 

Experiment 

Make it your motto day and night 

Experiment 

And it will lead you to the light 

The apple on the top of the tree 

Is never too high to achieve 

So take an example from Eve 

Experiment 

Be curious 

Though interfering friends may frown, 

Get furious 

At each attempt to hold you down 

If this advice you'll only employ 

The future can offer you infinite joy 

And merriment 

Experiment 

And you'll see

A High-Living Princess: Violette Murat

UPDATE 10/15: Murat is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Princess Violette Murat, c. 1928-30
Photograph by Berenice Abbott 

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), Welch painter and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John described a 1920s dinner party at the home of photographer Curtis Moffatt, "a bit of a sybarite" who married poet Iris Tree:

When he lived in Hampstead, Curtis used to give small parties at which sardines and wine were consumed -- and sometimes hashish. I had already tried smoking this celebrated drug without the slightest result. It was Princess Murat who converted me. She contributed several pots of the substance in the form of a compôte or jam. A teaspoonful was taken at intervals. Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. 

 ...The crises of laughter continued with some of us till dawn, with further repercussions as I made my way home with Violette Murat, who had only been slightly amused by the night's proceedings. 

Violette Murat, who turned John onto hashish, was a Bonaparte princess who may have been a lover of Marie Laurencin. The book Cote D'Azur - Inventing The French Riviera includes the following insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the 1920s: “Princess Violette Murat, friends say, not only bought her opium in Toulon, but also rented a submarine in order to smoke it in peace."

Murat is described at another famous dinner party in 1922, where VIP Marcel Proust met James Joyce and Stravinsky: "Princesse Violette Murat flounced out of the party, looking daggers at [Proust] as he arrived. Gossip about her meanness was rife, and she was mortally offended by rumours that one of Proust’s particularly parsimonious characters was based on her. With her strange lack of physical proportions, he once said of her 'She looks more like a truffle than a violet.'"

The Napoleonic family is large and convoluted; everyone has five names, with repetitious family names like Eugene. I've uncovered conflicting information about Murat but I think she is Violette (aka Cecile) Ney D'Elchingen, born September 9, 1878. Granddaughter of Napoleon's marshall Michael Ney, she was the wife of (Eugene) Joachim Murat (1875-1906), a descendant of the Joachim Murat (1767-1815) who married Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. Violette died in Paris on July 19, 1936.

Along with VIP Tallulah Bankhead, Murat was part of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott, who photographed (Eugene?) Murat (shown), wrote of her, “A very high liver. Oh, all kinds of wonderful tales are told about her….She…knew how to make an art out of living and that’s something stupendous. Anything she did became a vibrant, extraordinary event. I can remember seeing her go into a ten-cent store and buy the place out and have a fling doing it.”

NOTES: The 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way, Proust's first volume in A la recherche du temps perdu (aka "In Search of Lost Time") November 14, 2013, will be celebrated the world over.

Born on November 13, 1913 in Paris, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat was a cousin of Violette Murat. In 1939, she married Fernand Auberjonois, a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade as well as NBC and Voice of America. The couple's son, actor Rene Auberjonois, is best known as Father Mulcahy in the movie M*A*S*H.

UPDATE 3/15 - Just discovered: Tucked in the corner of La Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)—a painting commissioned by Violette's grandmother and Napoleon's sister Caroline Bonaparte Murat—is what looks like a hash or opium pipe, along with what looks like an incense burner (complete with smoke). The fan the girl holds looks rather like a hookah mouthpiece.

The painting was “widely criticized” when it appeared, supposedly for the elongation of the girl’s figure (which almost looks like a grand pipe itself, with a big-ass bowl).