Cole Porter’s study in subcutaneous eroticism, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” was composed for the 1936 movie musical Born to Dance, a wonderful extravaganza in the high Hollywood style, with glamorous sets, expert direction and camera work, and, above all, an all-star cast of performers:
Frances Langford, a top singer; Buddy Ebsen, dancer and comedian who 26 years later was to star in the popular television series, The Beverly Hillbillies; the remarkable dancer Eleanor Powell; movie star James Stewart; actress Una Merkel, who in 1930 had starred in D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln; and beloved comedian Sid Silvers. With this stellar cast it was not surprising that the movie was successful and that it was viewed by millions of Americans seeking respite from the Depression.
In its initial appearance in the movie, Virginia Bruce, the sultry “other woman,” sings the song to Jimmy Stewart, a handsome chief petty officer in the navy on liberty in New York. Stewart soon detached himself from such musical comedy roles and gained a reputation as a major dramatic actor.
Cole Porter’s beautiful and passionate ballad appeared many times on “Your Hit Parade,” the popular weekly radio show that featured songs judged to be current hits.28 “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” appeared on the show on December 12, 1936, shortly after the release of the movie, and it occupied fourth place. It remained on “Your Hit Parade” for the next ten installments, falling to seventh place on January 30, 1937. However, the song reappeared much later, in tenth place on October 8, 1966, when it was released by the Four Seasons, a male falsetto quartet, which apparently engaged the libido of a new generation in the “if it feels good, do it” sixties. And Frank Sinatra kept the song alive before and after that time. It was one of his standards, usually rendered energetically with big band arrangements, and even included as part of his 1993 “Duets,” on which he sang it with Bono of the rock band U2.
In Born to Dance, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” provides the music for a dance routine by an anonymous team at the “Club Continental,” which provided the ubiquitous nightclub setting so dear to Hollywood script writers. What is noteworthy about this rendition is the Latin rhythm, which by this time had become associated with much of Cole Porter’s music, following the Latin American craze of the 1930s.
Given Porter’s severe case of Francophilia, it is likely that the title was suggested by the French idiom, “je t’ai dans la peau,” which, rendered literally, means “I have you in my skin.” The lyrics of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” express passionate love with considerable daring, but they were not regarded as offensive by the great American public, compared, say, with those by Lorenz Hart in “Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered)” (from Pal Joey), the stage lyrics for which had to be excluded from the published sheet music lyrics.
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is a long song, spanning 56 bars, as shown in Ex. 3-23. Since it was a movie song, it did not have to obey the constraints and conventions of the Broadway theater, but rather could adjust to the more flexible Hollywood cinematic script.
Accordingly, the lyrics are, well, longer than usual. Also the rhyme scheme is looser than it is in Porter’s shorter songs. In particular, many lines end with words that remain unrhymed: for example, “fool” in “Don’t you know, little fool” (bars 40–41), and “resist” in “But why should I try to resist”, lines that nonetheless contain the inner rhymes “why” and “try.” In short, Porter combines blank verse with traditional rhymed verse, which, although not a novel procedure, is rather unusual in the popular song idiom.
He also uses direct repetitions to achieve special impact, as in the lines that follow the titular phrase: “I’ve got you deep in the heart of me/So deep in my heart, You’re really a part of me.” Repetitions of this kind of course come close to the repetitive syntax of ordinary speech. Indeed, the verb “repeats” plays an important role in the lyrics in the line “And repeats and repeats in my ear” (Bridge, bars 38–40), which itself repeats the word “repeats” on a repeated note (B♭).
At the same time, Porter uses traditional rhyming in eloquent ways. His strategic placement of words that rhyme the key word “skin” exemplifies this beautifully: “in,” (also repeated internally) “win,” (bar 43) and “begin” (bars 51–52). The intricacy of the lyrics of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” suggests that Porter wrote them, at least in draft form, before he completed their melodic setting, a procedure that, as I mentioned before, reverses the usual arrangement involving songwriter and lyricist.
