Miss Otis Regrets

"Miss Otis Regrets" is a song composed by Cole Porter in 1934, and first performed by Douglas Byng in Hi Diddle Diddle, a revue that opened on October 3, 1934, at London's Savoy Theatre.

Cole Porter spent many holidays in Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Ada "Bricktop" Smith was a close friend, and he frequented Bricktop's, whose "modern" performing acts certainly influenced or informed the erudite and dense lyrical content of Porter’s songs. However, despite her assertion and references to that assertion in articles by journalists, Porter did not write "Miss Otis Regrets" for Bricktop. According to Charles Schwartz's book Cole Porter: A Biography (Da Capo Press, 1979; ), the song began during a party at the New York apartment of Porter's classmate from Yale, Leonard Hanna. Hearing a cowboy's lament on the radio, Porter sat down at the piano and improvised a parody of the song. He retained the referential song’s minor-keyed blues melody, and added his wry take on lyrical subject matter common in country music: the regret of abandonment after being deceitfully coerced into sexual submission. Only instead of a country girl, Miss Otis is a polite society lady.

Friend and Yale classmate Monty Woolley jumped in to help Porter "sell it", pretending to be a butler who explains why Madam can't keep a lunch appointment. In the previous 24 hours, Miss Otis was jilted and abandoned, located and killed her seducer, was arrested, jailed, and, about to be hanged by a mob, made a final, polite apology for being unable to keep her lunch appointment. This performance was so well received, that the song evolved, "workshopped" with each subsequent cocktail party, many of which were at the Waldorf-Astoria suite of Elsa Maxwell, to whom Porter dedicated the song. The "smart set" that attended these parties, known to use wit or wisecracks to punctuate anecdotes and gossip, began using references to "Miss Otis" as a punchline. Porter incorporated the tale of "Miss Otis Regrets" into Hi Diddle Diddle later that year.

“Miss Otis” entered the lexicon of American pop culture, its enormous popularity and commercial success indicated when, a year later, Al Dubin and Harry Warren included an homage to Miss Otis in their song "Lulu's Back In Town", written for the 1935 film Broadway Gondolier. A man sings about getting ready for a date with Lulu, focusing all his attention on this awesome girl who's visiting town after having moved away: "You can tell all my pets, all my blondes and brunettes, Mister Otis regrets that he won't be around.”

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