"Miss Otis Regrets": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Miss Otis Regrets"

A list of the songs, with lyrics, written for this show along with some details about it can be found in Complete Lyrics.

Porter's biographer William McBrien states unequivocally that Porter wrote "Miss Otis Regrets" for the the unproduced musical Ever More, which had Music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Guy Bolton and was based on the stage play "The Spell" by Lilli Hatvany. Other sources seem less certain that it was written for this would-be show. In any event, the song was eventually used in a show, having been interpolated into a London production, Hi Diddle Diddle (not a Porter show), which opened in The West End in October, 1934, where it was sung by Douglas Byng playing a stuffy butler who dryly announces that Miss Otis will not lunch today. This is because, he explains even more dryly that on the previous evening she shot her lover and was lynched. What distinguishes the song more than anything else is the wry tone which Porter employs to tell the story of a society lady's down and dirty demise in the most polite terms with a demure melody to go with it. The song had already been published in April of 1934, and Ethel Waters recorded it in New York on August 20, 1934 (Decca 140 A), both before Hi Diddle Diddle opened in London.

Several accounts of the inspiration for the song are in circulation. Robert Kimball in his Complete Lyrics tells the story about how it is a parody of a country and western song that Porter heard on the radio while at a party. Another account has Porter's friend Monty Woolley betting the songwriter that he could not create a lyric to fit the title "Miss Otis Regrets." Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Catch Phrases: British and American gives the title the status of having become a catch phrase by including it as an entry in his reference work. His research reveals that Porter wrote it "not for one of his musical comedies but for the private entertainment of his friends" and confirms the Woolley connection by noting that the actor was fond of dressing up as a butler and singing the song, often at parties with Porter at the piano. He adds that the song at some point was dedicated to Elsa Maxwell, and was indeed first presented publicly in London by Byng in an apparently Woolleyesque performance in Hi Diddle Diddle. (Partridge, p. 310).

McBrien, however, muddying the waters a bit more, says that several performers have claimed that Porter wrote "Miss Otis Regrets," specifically for them. Most notably was the African American chanteuse Bricktop (Ada Smith) whose nightclub in Paris was a popular hangout for the avant-garde claimed that "one evening in Paris Cole came to her club and said, 'Brick, I've written a song for you.' It was 'Miss Otis Regrets'." Maybe he did or maybe he just wanted a good table. Partridge suggests that the song was written not so much for but about Bricktop. The country and western angle is supported by McBrien reporting that a newspaper clipping found among Porter's papers said the song was inspired by "a bad cowboy lament" the songwriter heard at a party. And finally McBrien quotes Porter as follows: "You haven't heard anything until you've heard Monty Woolley sing ['Miss Otis Regrets']. In fact he was the first one ever to sing it. I gave it to him and he did it at one of Elsa Maxwell's parties, and he was the life of the party for the evening thereafter." Whatever the origins/first performance etc. "Miss Otis Regrets" is now a standard with a life completely its own. (See McBrien, pp. 238-240 and Kimball, p. 193, hard cover Ed.

In this video clip from Night and Day, the 1946 biopic of Cole Porter, Monty Woolley, playing himself, sings "Miss Otis Regrets" as Cary Grant, playing Porter, is at the piano.

Before she sings "Miss Otis Regrets," Natalie Douglas elaborates on the Bricktop story referenced above. Douglas performance above is part of her show dedicated to Cafe Society, a legendary club in NYC that during the late Thirties was the first to integrate both performers on stage as well as members of the audiences for which they performed. Douglas' performance took place April 14, 2008 at Birdland, NYC, with Michael Croiter, drums; Patience Higgins, tenor saxophone; Debbie Kennedy, bass.

Richard Sudhalter envisions the creation of "Miss Otis Regrets" as an example of how the spigot of Porter's creative juices were often opened in social situations. In this case the song apparently came into being at a party hosted by the songwriter's Yale classmate, Leonard Hanna. The guests became aware of a sad cowboy song playing on the radio and Porter's awareness led him to the piano where he began to noodle out a tune. As Sudhalter describes it he accompanied himself by "yodeling a parody, broad and rather wicked" of the radio cowboy's lament. Porter then enlisted his friend and fellow guest Monty Woolley in the process and the two of them bounced lines off one another until something like a song emerged. Woolley, never strong on resisting the chance for a dramatic exhibition, donned a butler's jacket and borrowed a maid's serving tray. In the blink of an inebriated eye the first performance of "Miss Otis" took shape as the sad but somehow comic story of an upper class matron who must forgo her luncheon ap pointment because she has a date with the gallows -- after murdering her partner in a brief fling gone wrong. (Elliot, Kimball and Sudhalter, p. 37).

"Miss Otis" came to be dedicated to party-giver extraordinaire Elsa Maxwell after she made a regular things of having one or another of her talented guests sing it at her Manhattan siorées.

Thomas Hischak calls "Miss Otis Regrets" "a droll and ridiculous ditty" that "mocks the good manners of high society." It manages this through a "farcical lyric" sung in a "dispassionate tone and is all the more amusing because the music is so delicate and formal" (Hischak, p. 240).

Gerald Mast classifies Porter as songwriter who told stories not a writer for shows that told stories, "like Irving Berlin . . . a songwriter not a musical dramatist." "Miss Otis Regrets" was the Porter equivalent of a Browning poem such as "My Last Duchess" or "Adrea del Sarto" converted into an American song that like those poems is a dramatic monologue. Mast reminds us that the song was written to win a bet with his friend Monte Woolley who claimed he could not write a song with such a title as "Miss Otis Regrets." Porter's easy solution to the problem was to create a dramatic situation derived from the title line, a situation reminiscent of the Frankie and Johnny story of a man who has been murdered by his lover to whom he has been false. Here however, Porter adds a devilishly ironic twist by creating a woman character whose entire persona is, unlike Frankie's, embodied by restraint, which stands in sharp contrast to her passionate action:

The song is delivered by the butler of the title's Miss Otis, dignified, polite, terribly correct, unmoved by passion. He explains the recent difficulties of his employer as an apology to someone who has come to the Otis manse expecting lunch. The regrettable events of the evening before making it impossible for Miss Otis to keep her appointment. (Mast, pp. 193-4)

Like Frankie, Miss Otis upon feeling the brunt of her lover's treachery, "drew a gun from under her velvet gown and shot her false lover down." Nevertheless, "with her last gasp" before she is strung up by a lynch mob, she delivers her final line (the one that makes a stronger impression on us than her last action) in the language of her (and Porter's) upbringing:

Miss Otis regrets she is unable to lunch today.

According to Gerald Mast, Porter would never have been able to write Miss Otis Regrets" and win his bet with Woolley if he had not been able to picture his "dry, droll" friend as the character he would invent to present the song. Mast goes on to say, "Woolley's reading of the song in Night and Day (Listen and view above) remains its definitive version" (Mast, p. 194).

Perhaps Woolley's satirical take on the song is definitive in the sense of capturing what Porter had in mind at the moment he was creating it, but to listen to the other performances available on this page, suggests that the songwriter created a work of art that had possibilities beyond the songwriter's immediate intentions. (The performance by Woolley from the Porter biopic Night and Day cam be viewed in the Cafe Songbook Record-Video Cabinet, this page. Hearing Ethel Waters sing "Miss Otis Regrets" eliminates the possibility of the song as being "dry" or "droll." Waters, who made the recording that first put the song before the American public, gives us a traditional ballad at the center of which is a tragic story the full force of which is invested in her voice. She recognizes that Miss Otis was more than a superficial society lady, all manners and no heart. She was one who dreamed of love, a dream that once it was irretrievably lost led her to previously unimaginable feelings and actions. Josh White, Jr. brings a similar tone augmented by his Delta blues guitar that gives the story an American regional locus that is anything beside snooty, Boston drawing room. And without having to understand Dietrich's German, it is clear she keeps the song in the same vein, laden with sadness and loss.

Although it may be easier to hear Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Short as delivering a bit of bad news to an unsuspecting luncheon guest in a household where she or he is employed, there is no escaping the sadness in their conveyance of the tale. Once they proceed to the more shocking details of the story both of their voices subtly reveal their own sadness at what has happened. Of all the performers here these two may be the best actors, sticking to their assigned tasks while at the same time revealing their inner feelings. As Richard Sudhalter says of Ella's performance, it may the the same aloofness that critics have often called her out for that gives her "Miss Otis" its poignancy: "Her [Fitzgerald's] approach is simple, even innocent -- she tells the story and accepts it on its terms. Even the rather girlish quality of her voice seems to lend truth to the fable of love, betrayal, and revenge" (Porter in the 1930s, p. 39 -- Click here to hear Ella's version.). Pattie Austin also portrays the distinction between a character's demeanor and outer feelings, but more broadly. Her heart leaps more obviously to her sleeve as she drags us out of a stuffy foyer to the pulpit of a church where she is the preacher bearing her soul over the demise of a member of her flock. Miss Otis' inability to "lunch today" is for Austin, and must, at some hidden level have been for Porter, a preacherly rhetorical device, a metaphor for the fact that Miss Otis' emotional life as well as her physical one has been violently destroyed.

Natalie Douglas prefaces her performance with an iffy account of how the song was conceived, but after admitting its iffiness announces what matters to her is that Porter took a high-brow pharase he had heard and turned it into a low-brow song, which locates her with most of the performers here who all take us to the intersection of love and murder in order to witness humanity at its best and worst inextricably interwoven.

Only Bette Midler abandons the tone of deeply felt loss. Her rendition seems to ignore what all the other performers have found in the song as she makes Porter's words and music more of a vehicle for her own zaniness than anything else -- and in doing so may have more in common with Porter's mood as he wrote the song and Woolley's original performance of it.
JAC

Click here to read the lyrics for "Miss Otis Regrets" as sung by Ella Fitzgerald
on the 1956 album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
(with arrangements by Buddy Bregman). Although Ella often sings the verses on
her recordings, Porter did not create a verse for "Miss Otis Regrets."

Click the video below to listen to Ella sing the lyrics
accompanied by Paul Smith on piano.
This is the same track found on the album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.

Cafe Songbook responds: The term used for the part of a popular songs' lyric that would be the equivalent of "prologue" or "introduction" is the verse; however, Cole Porter did not write a verse for "Miss Otis Regrets," so we would also be interested in knowing if anyone knows the version of the song with "prologue" heard by Scamper. In the meantime, the lyric as written by Porter can be found in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter See above -- for copyright reasons, we cannot reproduce the lyric here.

• Awit4U
• Douglas Byng: EMGColonel
• Natalie Douglas: nataliedouglasmusic
• Addehiovy

Notes

• Other songs written for Ever Yours currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook : none.
• William McBrien Cole Porter New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1998, (Vintage Paperback Ed., 2000 shown).
• Eric Partridge A Dictionary of Catch Phrases 2nd Edition New York: Routledge, 1986
• Early recordings of "Miss Otis Regrets" that made the charts
• Ethel Waters (label and#): first charted 12/08/34, remained on charts for one week peaking at number #19.
• Source: Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music , 1986
• From Scamper 12/20/2018: I know I've heard this with a prologue, but I can't remember whose version OR the lyrics. Anyone?

Cite this page: "Miss Otis Regrets": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/m/miss_otis_regrets.html