Cole Porter
High Society
Norwich Theatre Royal, 1996
As a composer and lyricist Cole Porter was unique. He was the only high-born sophisticate in the canon of contemporary songwriters, the only Yale graduate, and practically the only Gentile. Also, he didn’t need to work as hard as he did. Born to wealth and marrying into even more of it, he had no right to be as good as he was… unless, of course, it was the songs that brought him the satisfaction that riches failed to bring.
Kate Cole’s Son
He was born Cole Albert Porter in Peru, Indiana on 9 June 1891. By the age of ten he was already showing signs of a precocious musical talent, writing songs that his doting mother paid to have published. His old-money grandparents, however, baulked at the thought of having a musician in the family and urged him towards a more respectable profession. But as a law student at Yale and later Harvard, Porter spent more time writing songs for rallies and musical societies than he did studying and, seeing the way the wind was blowing, his family eventually allowed him to transfer to the Music Faculty. This, followed by a stay at Vincent d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum in Paris, laid the foundations for a thorough academic musical training.
His first effort for the musical stage was See America First (1916) which sank without trace. Still, buoyed up by a substantial trust fund set up for him by his forgiving grandfather, Cole headed off for Paris where he met and fell in love with the beautiful Mrs Linda Lee Thomas from Louisville, Kentucky, recently divorced from her millionaire husband and eight years Porter’s senior. She was said to be so sophisticated she didn’t know how to open a door…
But even Porter’s riches couldn’t support them both, so he returned home to ask his grandfather for a larger allowance. On the boat he met the comedian Raymond Hitchcock who snapped up a couple of his songs for his revue Hitchy-Koo of 1919. One of them, ‘Old Fashioned Garden’, became a hit and, buoyed up on a wave of success and royalties, not to mention a further subsidy from his grandfather, Cole sailed back to Paris to wed Linda. After years of rough handling in her first marriage, she had become disillusioned with sex, but this suited Cole fine as he has always had a roving eye for the boys. Although they were to have their ups and down over the next thirty-five years, the marriage would endure, ending only with Linda’s death in 1954.
The Party’s Never Over Until the Host Sings
As rich Americans in Europe, the Porters were at the centre of the pleasure-go-round which straddled Paris, Venice and the Riviera. Wherever the international glitterati gathered, the Porters glittered more gaily than most Their friends included Picasso, Stravinksy, Hemingway, Satie and Scott Fitzgerald. But while entertaining sumptuously, Porter continued to write, and in 1924 he produced his first full score, The Greenwich Village Follies. It was not a success and it was to be another four years before his next show. In the meantime, encouraged by his friend Gerald Murphy, he composed the ballet Within the Quota which premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1925. Pre-darting Geshwin’s Rhapsody in Blue by several months, it was one of the first serious pieces to be written in the currently popular jazz idiom.
Linda was no less serious about her husband’s career than Cole was. She tried to interest Diaghilev and Stravinsky in his work, and was even prepared to bribe the likes of Shaw, Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett to write opera librettos for him. But while all these efforts failed, Cole’s after-party pieces, written mainly for the entertainment of friends, were providing a practical grounding which would stand him in good stead for the rest of his working life.
In 1928 the show Paris appeared, containing one of Porter’s most characteristic songs, the sly and jaunty ‘Let’s Do It’. His next two shows were less successful, but each introduced individual songs which further confirmed Porter’s ability, including ‘You Do Something To Me’ and ‘Love For Sale’, which one critic described as “in the worst possible taste”.
The year 1932 saw his first smash hit, The Gay Divorce, which not only starred Fred Astaire but introduced one of Porter’s most famous songs, ‘Night and Day’. It was followed by Nymph Errant which CB Cochran produced in London with Gertrude Lawrence. Two years later Anything Goes quickly established itself as the definitive Broadway score of the thirties – it was stuffed with standards including, apart from the title song, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, ‘You’re the Top’, ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’, ‘It’s De-Lovely’, ‘Friendship’ and ‘All Through the Night’.
Tragedy and Triumph
The thirties further produced some of Cole Porter’s most enduring songs: ‘Miss Otis Regrets’, ‘Just One of Those Things’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, ‘Well Did You Evuh?’ and ‘Begin the Beguine’.
Moss Hart wrote Jubilee with him while on a world cruise on the Franconia in 1935 – maybe a novel working condition for Hart, but routine for Cole. The show didn’t click, so the Porters left for Hollywood which Linda loathed bit Cole loved, as it afforded him the opportunity to give his personal love life its head. It was here that he produced Red, Hot and Blue for the stage, Rosalie for the screen, and ‘In the Still of the Night’, which reduced Louis B Mayer to tears.
In 1937, husband and wife stopped speaking, so Cole returned to New York – where fate finally and literally took his legs from under him. Whilst weekending with the Countess de Zoppola at Oyster Bay, Long Island, he went out riding with friends on a mettlesome horse that reared up at some bushes and fell back on the rider, crushing both his legs, He was unconscious for two days, during which time Linda and her mother-in-law agreed over the phone not to allow any amputation as they felt the patient would never recover from the trauma. They were not to know his legs could never mend, and for the rest of his life, despite over thirty operations, Cole was in constant pain.
But he took it all with stoic courage, telling Elsa Maxwell, “It just goes to prove that fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong. They eat horses instead of riding them.” He even claimed that while waiting for the ambulance he had been working on the lyric for ‘At Long Last Love’. His next show, You Never Know, was, perhaps not surprisingly, a flop.
Back in Hollywood, now reunited if not fully reconciled with Linda, he provided songs for the film The Pirate, an expensive disaster starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Then Sam and Bella Spewack invited him to write the score for their proposed musical based on The Taming of the Shrew. Cole resisted for some time – his confidence was dented, it was too highbrow a concept, his legs were playing up again – but in the end, once he started writing he couldn’t stop. Bella Spewack had to ask him nicely to stop sending any more songs as they already had far too many to cope with. Certainly Cole was pleased with the results. “You’ll like this score,” he wrote to a friend. “It’s so simple it sounds as if it had been written by an idiot child…” Kiss Me, Kate became the biggest success of his career, ran for over 1,000 performances, became the first musical to win a Tony Award and, in 1953, was the first musical to be filmed in 3D.
Out of This World which followed was not so good, but his next, Can-Can contained a love song to his favourite city, ‘I Love Paris’, prompting an admiring Irving Berlin to write “It’s a swell show and I still say, to paraphrase an old barroom ballad, ‘anything I can do, you can do better’.”
End of the Party
In 1954 Linda died, to be followed a few years later by Cole’s mother. Both deaths took their toll, and in increasing loneliness he went to Hollywood to work on High Society, a portrait of the haut monde written by one who knew it from the inside. One of its hits, ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, has been seen as a rare instance of the songwriter for once dropping his guard and baring his soul – wealth had not saved his health, and it had not won him the deep romantic love he so often wrote about. But this is surely to ignore the irony that distinguishes many of his best comedy numbers.
Cole Porter was to write two more musicals before he died – Les Girls and a TV version of Aladdin – but deteriorating health slowly sapped his creativity. Following the eventual amputation of his right leg he lived from 1958 until his death without writing another song. He died on 16 October 1964 at the age of 73, alone in a hospital bed. He was laid to rest in a simple grave at his birthplace in Indiana.
He was once asked whether he thought his songs would last. “I never gave it a thought,” he replied. “My enjoyment was in writing them.” The world’s enjoyment still resides in hearing them.
