"My Heart Belongs to Daddy" is a song written by Cole Porter, for the 1938 musical Leave It to Me! which premiered on Nov 9, 1938. It was performed by Mary Martin who played Dolly Winslow, the young protégée of an elderly ambassador, Alonzo P. Goodhue.[1] She is stranded at a Siberian railway station, wearing only a fur coat, and performs a striptease while performing the song.
She sang it again in the 1940 movie Love Thy Neighbor. Again she wears a fur coat, but the setting is a show within a show and the act is more conventional as she wears an evening gown beneath the fur. Her best movie performance is in the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day in which she plays herself. She again performs the striptease, discarding her muff and then the fur coat.[2]
In Britain, the song was a hit for Pat Kirkwood who performed it in the 1938 revue Black Velvet, making her the first wartime star,[3] and so the song was thereafter associated with her.[4]
Rhyming with "daddy" is difficult but Porter characteristically managed it well.[5] One clever rhyme is
| “ | If I invite A boy some night To dine on my fine Finnan haddie, I just adore His asking for more, But my heart belongs to daddy. |
” |
Finnan haddie is smoked fish, and this is one of many innuendoes which appear throughout the song. Sophie Tucker famously advised Mary Martin to deliver such sexy lines while looking towards heaven. Mary Martin was quite innocent and so the contrast between her naive manner and the suggestive lyrics accompanied by the provocative striptease made her performance a huge success.[6]
Referring to the melody, Oscar Levant described it as "one of the most Yiddish tunes ever written" despite the fact that "Cole Porter's genetic background was completely alien to any Jewishness."[7]