Porter, Cole

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PORTER, Cole

PORTER, Cole (b. 9 June 1891; d. 15 October 1964), songwriter.

Cole Albert Porter grew up a child of wealth and privilege in Peru, Indiana. He studied piano and violin at an early age, developing a rudimentary proficiency on both instruments, and began composing pieces and songs at about age ten. His parents encouraged his artistic interests, though they hoped that their only surviving child would enter law.

He attended Worcester Academy (1905–1909) and Yale University (1909–1913), where he majored in English and minored in music and where he wrote the lyrics and music for numerous songs for college shows and football games. After one year at Harvard Law School (1913–1914), he decided on a career in musical theater, studying music at Harvard University and then in New York. In 1916, he launched his first Broadway show, See America First. The following year, he went abroad to aid the war effort, and he remained in Europe—mostly in

Paris and Venice—for much of the next two decades. Singing his own sophisticated and witty songs at the piano, he quickly became the toast of European society. He pursued his musical studies at the Schola Cantorum (1920–1922) and wrote a ballet with Gerald Murphy for the Swedish Ballet, Within the Quota (1923; orchestrated by Charles Koechlin).

From homes on both sides of the Atlantic, he became the lyricist-composer of a number of successful Broadway musical comedies, including Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), The Gay Divorce (1932), and Anything Goes (1934). He also had success in Hollywood, where he kept yet another home, composing the music for Born to Dance (1936) and Rosalie (1937). With these scores, all of which yielded hit standards, Porter established himself as a master of the genre, a worthy successor to Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Audiences and critics especially admired the smart topical references and risqué humor of his lyrics and the sensuous harmonies and ambitious forms of his music.

In 1937, Porter broke both legs in a riding accident and for the rest of life endured numerous operations and much pain. He nonetheless continued to produce successful shows, including Panama Hattie (1940), Let's Face It (1941), and his masterpiece, Kiss Me Kate (1948). At the height of his fame, Hollywood released a film biography, Night and Day (1946), with Cary Grant playing the shorter and plainer Cole. However, in the course of the 1950s he became increasingly depressed, and after the amputation of a leg in 1958 he produced no new scores.

Porter was homosexual, and from his college days onward traveled in gay circles often in the company of such friends as Monty Woolley and Howard Sturges. In 1918, he married Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy divorcee fifteen years his senior. Although Cole and Linda were devoted to each other, the former pursued numerous homosexual affairs throughout his married years, including those with Ballets Russes regisseur Boris Kochno, architect Eddy Tauch, and sailor Ray Kelly. During his time in Hollywood, he also held "boy parties" with attractive young men lounging poolside. Thomas accepted her husband's homosexuality, and though Porter's promiscuity sometimes placed a strain on their relationship, they remained married until her death in 1954.

Porter's complex sexual life reflected itself in his lyrics, arguably the most erotic in the history of American musical comedy. Many of his best-known songs embrace such themes as romantic abandon, casual sex, unrequited love, and prostitution. He was a virtuoso of the double entendre and of the sexual metaphor: a lover, for example, is asked "to give my ship, / A maiden trip"; a patient finds that her doctor "murmured 'molto bella, ' / When I sat on his patella"; and a girl invites "a boy, some night, / To dine on my fine finnan haddie."

Although the sexual chic and campy wit of Porter's lyrics plainly were related to his sexual orientation and experiences, he rarely referenced homosexual subjects as explicitly as in "I'm Unlucky at Gambling" from Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), in which the female character who takes a croupier to the movies discovers that "he liked John Gilbert too." Otherwise, Porter used such code words as "queen," as in a 1919 song in which the singer goes to the bar of Paris's Ritz Hotel to "see the kings / And let the queens see me."

Combined with exquisite harmonies, radiant melodies, and sprightly rhythms, such clever ribaldry became irresistibly infectious, and as one of America's most popular and beloved songwriters, Porter arguably did as much to shape his country's attitudes toward love and sex as perhaps anyone else of his time.