Eventually, Mayer gave in, and Garbo sailed back. Mayer hemmed and hawed, so Garbo sailed to Sweden. NOAH: After the success of "Flesh and the Devil," Greta Garbo demanded that MGM raise her salary from $600 a week to $5,000 per week. (Soundbite of a needle scratching vinyl record) PORTER: (Singing) You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary. So without further adieu, here is an annotated guide to Cole Porter's "You're the Top." And I've tracked down almost all the other obscure references as well. Thanks to the miracle of Google scholarship, I discovered that a Bendel bonnet is merely a fashionable bonnet named for its designer, Henri Bendel. But a Bendel bonnet? The song's original lyric is filled with such dated references. NOAH: A Shakespeare sonnet I can explain. PORTER: (Singing) You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you're Mickey Mouse. After hearing the song, my nine-year-old daughter asked me what lines like this meant. But since it was written in 1934, a lot of the things Porter thought were wonderful are now meaningless to most of us. It's a love song in which the singer compares the object of his affection to a list of wonderful things. That's Cole Porter himself singing the song.
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COLE PORTER (Songwriter): (Singing) You're the top, you're the Colosseum, you're the top, you're the Louvre museum. He's just published a guide to a song we've probably all heard, but maybe not really listened to, Cole Porter's "You're the Top."
![define chatterbox define chatterbox](https://whhscbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screenshot-1-900x506.png)
Timothy Noah is a columnist for our online partner, Slate magazine. In a few minutes, we prowl the mean LA streets with one of the city's top paparazzi photographers.īut first, a piece of service journalism.