You're the top!
You're the Colisseum.
You're the top!
You're the Louvre Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss,
You're a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse.
If not necessarily the top - there are, after all, quite a few claimants for that title - Cole Porter was certainly unique among his generation of songwriters. Unlike all the other great Broadway composers - Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin - Porter was not Jewish but instead of irrefutably Protestant stock. In 1926, he told Rodgers that in order to have hit songs, "I'll write Jewish tunes".
At the time, the latter presumed this remark was intended to be a joke but by the time he wrote his autobiography, Musical Stages, in 1975 Rodgers had reconsidered: "Not only was Cole dead serious, he eventually did exactly that. Just hum the melody that goes with `Only you beneath the moon and under the sun' . . . or any of Begin the Beguine, or Love for Sale, or My Heart Belongs to Daddy, or I Love Paris. It is surely one of the ironies of the musical theatre that despite the abundance of Jewish composers, the one who has written the most enduring `Jewish' music should be an Episcopalian millionaire who was born on a farm in Peru, Indiana."
That place of birth is another point of difference between Porter and his peers. He came from a small town in the mid-west whereas Rodgers et al were native New Yorkers. Yet it is Cole Porter who sounds consistently cosmopolitan and urban, not to mention urbane, even when writing songs such as Don't Fence Me In.
One other not unimportant point: when you look at the credits of a Cole Porter song, you never see the word "and". Exceptionally, he needed no writing partner, being able to produce both lyrics and tunes with equal facility. This explains why Cole Porter's output has a compact unity not seen in that of any other composer.
You'd be so easy to love,
So easy to idolise all heaven above.
So worth the yearning for,
So swell to keep every home fire burning for.
We'd be so grand at the game,
So carefree together that it does seem a shame,
That you can't see your future with me,
For you'd be so easy to love.
Cole Porter developed an international reputation as a socialite long before he became known for his music. Particularly after his marriage to divorcee Linda Thomas in 1919, he moved in circles far removed from those of his childhood. Although the son of a pharmacist, Porter liked to convey an impression of effortless ease and aristocratic disdain for the more mundane aspects of life. Thanks to money inherited from his grandfather and to his wife's wealth, he was always surrounded by staff to take care of his practical needs.
During the 1920s, the Porters regularly cruised around the Mediterranean on private yachts and hired palatial residences such as the Ca' Rezzonico in Venice. When Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart visited the city in 1926, they were invited to dinner by the Porters. "Promptly at seven-thirty, Porter's private gondola pulled up outside our hotel . . . We were assisted out of the gondola by a liveried footman wearing white gloves, and ushered up a massive stairway, at the top of which stood Noel (Coward), Cole and his wife Linda." Among the entertainments the Porters organised at this time was the construction of an enormous, illuminated float moored in the Venetian lagoon on which a jazz orchestra brought from Paris played. When Porter asked his wife why she rarely used a Rolls Royce he had given her as a present, she replied: "Because it bruises my sables."
Porter affected the same air of insouciance about his music. "Cole had a worldwide reputation as a sophisticate and hedonist," Ethel Merman wrote. "I suspect he capitalised on those traits." Others did more than just suspect. According to Kitty Carlisle Hart, wife of Moss Hart: "Cole Porter's passion was to be a success as a songwriter, but he so feared failure that he pretended in the 1920s to be a playboy who incidentally wrote songs."
I love the looks of you, the lure of you,
I'd love to make a tour of you, The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you,
The east, west, north and the south of you.
I'd love to gain complete control of you,
And handle even the heart and soul of you,
So love, at least, a small per cent of me, do,
For I love all of you.
Cole Porter's reputation as a master lyricist is indisputable. One of the most obvious characteristics of his songs is their use of repetition to achieve effect. This can be seen in the constant reiteration of certain words and phrases in Let's Do It, Night and Day, You're the Tops and All Through the Night. By working within such tight restrictions, Porter helps to ensure a song's memorability. In Night and Day, for example, while the musical structure is particularly tricky - Fred Astaire, for whom it was first written, commented that the song's range was "very low and very high and it was very long" - the lyrics return back to the same theme of night and day and thereby hold the piece together. Porter also loved innuendo. Let's Do It is the most obvious instance of his propensity for the double meaning. Quite what "it" is remains open to interpretation.
When Let's Do It first appeared, according to one apocryphal story, a man asked his young daughter to join him in the song. "Daddy," she asked, "If you don't want me to do `it', why do you want me to sing about `it'?" This talent was by no means unique to Cole Porter. How about the lines "You won't regret it/come and get it/let's do it again" from the Gershwin/De Sylva song Do It Again? Still, naughtiness and sexual suggestion are, without question, consistent features of Cole Porter's lyrics.
I get no kick from champagne
Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all,
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you?
Some get a kick from cocaine.
I'm sure that if I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrific'ly too
Yet I get a kick out of you.
In the 1945 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day, the five foot six composer, then aged 53 and fast balding, was played by 42-year-old Gary Grant who had a full head of hair and stood six foot two. Always slight of build, in later photographs particularly he has the appearance of a well-groomed monkey. From an early age, he cultivated the image of a dapper flaneur, known for his dandified appearance and the immense pains taken over his clothes and physique.
In character, he seems to have been a good, if at times difficult, friend - and a mean enemy. While his lovers could come from any class, his social life tended to revolve around the equally rich, famous and party-minded. He liked loyalty and punctuality and ran his life according to a strict schedule, especially as composing grew more important during the 1930s. He was assiduous in his research; for Come to the Super- market in Old Peking, a very slight song written late in his career, he made a point of reading books on the Chinese city.
Ev'ry time we say goodbye
I die a little.
Ev'ry time we say goodbye
I wonder why a little.
Why the gods above me
Who must be in the know
Think so little of me
They allow you to go.
At the age of six, Cole Porter was practising the piano daily and taking violin lessons. Within two years, he was providing piano accompaniment for silent films at the local theatre and performing on a steam-powered ship (shades of Showboat in that). At school and subsequently at Yale, he continued to develop his skills as a performer but also took time to study music. Shortly after his marriage, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in Paris to study for two years harmony, counterpoint and orchestration. Instructors at this establishment included Satie, Milhaud, Roussel and Varese.
It took some time for Porter to find his own, breezy style. According to Robert Kimball: "Between 1916 and 1928 Porter struggled to find his own voice." Irving Berlin told him one of his problems was that he was trying to write like other people; Gilbert and Sullivan were an early and powerful influence and then, like so many others writing for the American theatre at the time, he was drawn to Jerome Kern.
Some critics have suggested the elegance and suavity of Porter's songs comes from his time in France; musician and critic Alan Rich, after citing Ravel, Faure and Poulenc, comments that "the emotional power of a Porter ballad likewise comes only after the song has insinuated itself into your consciousness by the utter, beguiling ingenuity and meticulousness of its over-all shape."
Similarly, Leo Smits points out the direct influence of both Schumann and Tchaikovsky on Cole Porter. But just as importantly, he told one journalist "I go to the theatre constantly to keep in touch with popular musical taste. My interest in composition is modern, but I like going back to the classics."
I've got you under my skin
I've got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart, you're really a part of me
I've got you under my skin.
I've tried so not to give in,
I've said to myself this affair, it never will go so well
But why should I try to resist when darling I know so well
I've got you under my skin.
That Cole Porter was homosexual is now widely known. Was his 35-year long marriage therefore a sham? It has been suggested that Linda Thomas - who was eight years older than Porter - had been so brutalised by her first husband that only someone of Porter's disposition could be considered thereafter. "Linda became Cole's best friend," said his god-daughter, the Comtesse de Rochambeau, "and they had a mother/son arrangement. Linda brought sanity to Cole's life and was a wonderful foil for him." At least for the first 15 or so years of their marriage, the couple seemed devoted to one another, but as his affairs with other men became more overt, Linda Porter began to distance herself from her husband and they led largely separate lives in the decade before her death.
One of Cole Porter's first great loves, it has recently been discovered, was Boris Kochno, a protege of Diaghilev during the latter's final years. The Porter letters to Kochno read like some of his own more ardent lyrics and belie the impression of a dispassionate man. "I love you so much that I think only of you - I see only you and I dream only of the moment when we'll be reunited." Eventually, this affair cooled and many others followed; even in extreme old age, Porter continued to pursue men and at least four blackmailers had to be paid off.
None of Porter's best-known songs give any indication of his sexuality - of course, their innuendo leaves them open to a variety of interpretations, but it was never suggested that he had written so direct a paean to men as Noel Coward's Mad about the Boy . . . nor are any of his lyrics as frank as those from Rodgers and Hart's He was Too Good to Me: "I was a queen to him/Who's gonna make me gay now?"
Strange dear, but true dear
When I'm close to you dear
The stars fill the sky
So in love with you am I.
Even without you, My arms fold about you,
I'm yours till I die
So in love with you am I.
Even cushioned by prodigious wealth and fame, the final years were sad. In October 1937 while out riding on Long Island, Cole Porter suffered serious injury when his horse fell. Initially it seemed both his legs would have to be amputated. And although they were saved - his right leg had to be removed 20 years later - he was in pain for the rest of his life. The two women closest to him, his mother and his wife, died within two years of each other and thereafter a gradual drift is perceptible, even though Cole Porter himself did not die until October 1964. For much of the concluding period, he seems to have survived on no food but a great deal of alcohol. "When all is said and done," wrote a doctor at the time, "the saddest thing about him is his complete unwillingness to live and his deep depression."
"He was terribly alone at the end," remarked his secretary, Madeline Smith. "He really didn't have anything or anyone he was close to."
Cole Porter: The Definitive Biography by William McBride is published by Harper Collins, price £17.99 in the UK.