Although Bolton worked mostly in the West End in the 1930s, his biggest hit of the decade began on Broadway, a collaboration with his old friend Wodehouse, who had by then largely abandoned the theatre for novel-writing. When Bolton approached him to co-write the book for Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" (1934), Wodehouse objected, "Cole does his own lyrics ... What pests these lyric-writing composers are! Taking the bread out of a man's mouth". Still, he agreed to join Bolton in writing the book. The show was, in the words of the "Oxford Encyclopedia of Popular Music", "a smash hit" in New York and in London.