Cole Porter

Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in Hollywood films.

Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes for him to practice law and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the music for his songs.

After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 1930s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate. It won the first Tony Award for Best Musical.

Porter's other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes, Can-Can and Silk Stockings. His numerous hit songs include "Night and Day", "Begin the Beguine", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love", "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" and "You're the Top". He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s, including Born to Dance (1936), which featured the song "You'd Be So Easy to Love"; Rosalie (1937), which featured "In the Still of the Night"; High Society (1956), which included "True Love"; and Les Girls (1957).

Life and career

Early years

Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, on June 9, 1891, the only surviving child of a wealthy family. His father, Samuel Fenwick Porter, was a pharmacist by trade. His mother, Kate, was the indulged daughter of James Omar "J. O." Cole, "the richest man in Indiana", a coal and timber speculator who dominated the family. J. O. Cole built the couple a house on his Peru-area property, known as Westleigh Farms. After high school, Porter returned to his childhood home only for occasional visits.

Porter's strong-willed mother doted on him and began his musical training at an early age. He learned the violin at age six, the piano at eight, and wrote his first operetta (with help from his mother) at ten. She falsified his recorded birth year, changing it from 1891 to 1893 to make him appear more precocious. His father, a shy and unassertive man, played a lesser role in Porter's upbringing, although as an amateur poet, he may have influenced his son's gifts for rhyme and meter. Porter's father was also a talented singer and pianist, but the father-son relationship was not close.

J. O. Cole wanted his grandson to become a lawyer, and with that in mind, sent him to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts in 1905. Porter brought an upright piano with him to school and found that music, and his ability to entertain, made it easy for him to make friends. Porter did well in school and rarely came home to visit. He became class valedictorian and was rewarded by his grandfather with a tour of France, Switzerland and Germany. Entering Yale College in 1909, Porter majored in English, minored in music, and also studied French. He was a member of Scroll and Key and Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and contributed to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He was an early member of the Whiffenpoofs a cappella singing group and participated in several other music clubs; in his senior year, he was elected president of the Yale Glee Club and was its principal soloist.

Porter wrote 300 songs while at Yale, including student songs such as the football fight songs "Bulldog" and "Bingo Eli Yale" (aka "Bingo, That's The Lingo!") that are still played at Yale. During college, Porter became acquainted with New York City's vibrant nightlife, taking the train there for dinner, theater, and nights on the town with his classmates, before returning to New Haven, Connecticut, early in the morning. He also wrote musical comedy scores for his fraternity, the Yale Dramatic Association, and as a student at Harvard – Cora (1911), And the Villain Still Pursued Her (1912), The Pot of Gold (1912), The Kaleidoscope (1913) and Paranoia (1914) – which helped prepare him for a career as a Broadway and Hollywood composer and lyricist. After graduating from Yale, Porter enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1913, where he roomed with future Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He soon felt that he was not destined to be a lawyer, and, at the suggestion of the dean of the law school, switched to Harvard's music department, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Pietro Yon. His mother did not object to this move, but it was kept secret from J. O. Cole.

In 1915, Porter's first song on Broadway, "Esmeralda", appeared in the revue Hands Up. The quick success was immediately followed by failure: his first Broadway production, in 1916, See America First, a "patriotic comic opera" modeled on Gilbert and Sullivan, with a book by T. Lawrason Riggs, was a flop, closing after two weeks. Porter spent the next year in New York City before going overseas during World War I.

WWI, Paris and marriage

In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Porter moved to Paris to work with the Duryea Relief organization. Some writers have been skeptical about Porter's claim to have served in the French Foreign Legion, but the Legion lists Porter as one of its soldiers and displays his portrait at its museum in Aubagne. By some accounts, he served in North Africa and was transferred to the French Officers School at Fontainebleau, teaching gunnery to American soldiers. An obituary notice in The New York Times stated that, while in the Legion, "he had a specially constructed portable piano made for him so that he could carry it on his back and entertain the troops in their bivouacs." Another account, given by Porter, is that he joined the recruiting department of the American Aviation Headquarters, but, according to his biographer Stephen Citron, there is no record of his joining this or any other branch of the forces.

Porter maintained a luxury apartment in Paris, where he entertained lavishly. His parties were extravagant and scandalous, with "much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians and a large surplus of recreational drugs". 

In 1918, he met Linda Lee Thomas, a rich, Louisville, Kentucky-born divorcée eight years his senior. She was beautiful and well-connected socially; the couple shared interests, including a love of travel, and she became Porter's confidante and companion. The couple married the next year. She was in no doubt about Porter's homosexuality, but it was mutually advantageous for them to marry. For Linda, it offered continued social status and a partner who was the antithesis of her abusive first husband. For Porter, it brought a respectable heterosexual front in an era when homosexuality was not publicly acknowledged. They were, moreover, genuinely devoted to each other and remained married from December 19, 1919, until her death in 1954. Linda remained protective of her social position and, believing that classical music might be a more prestigious outlet than Broadway for her husband's talents, tried to use her connections to find him suitable teachers, including Igor Stravinsky, but was unsuccessful. Finally, Porter enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, founded by Vincent d'Indy, where he studied orchestration and counterpoint Meanwhile, Porter's first big hit was the song "Old-Fashioned Garden" from the revue Hitchy-Koo of 1919. In 1920, he contributed the music of several songs to the musical A Night Out.

Marriage did not diminish Porter's taste for extravagant luxury. The Porter home on the rue Monsieur near Les Invalides was a palatial house with platinum wallpaper and chairs upholstered in zebra skin. In 1923, Porter came into an inheritance from his grandfather, and the Porters began living in rented palaces in Venice. He once hired the entire Ballets Russes to entertain his guests, and for a party at Ca' Rezzonico, which he rented for $4,000 a month ($74,000 in current value), he hired 50 gondoliers to act as footmen and had a troupe of tightrope walkers perform in a blaze of lights. In the midst of this extravagant lifestyle, Porter continued to write songs with his wife's encouragement.

Porter received few commissions for songs in the years immediately after his marriage. He had the occasional number interpolated into other writers' revues in Britain and the U.S. For a C. B. Cochran show in 1921, he had two successes with the comedy numbers "The Blue Boy Blues" and "Olga, Come Back to the Volga". In 1923, in collaboration with Gerald Murphy, he composed a short ballet, originally titled Landed and then Within the Quota, satirically depicting the adventures of an immigrant to America who becomes a film star. The work, written for the Ballets suédois, lasts about 16 minutes. It was orchestrated by Charles Koechlin and shared the same opening night as Milhaud's La création du monde. Porter's work was one of the earliest symphonic jazz-based compositions, predating George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue by four months, and was well received by both French and American reviewers after its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in October 1923.

The next month, the Ballets suédois toured the work in the U.S., performing it 69 times. Reviews of the inaugural performance in New York were mixed; critics found the work to be too much like Milhaud and not American enough. A year later the company disbanded, and the score was lost until it was reconstructed from Porter's and Koechlin's manuscripts between 1966 and 1990, with help from Milhaud and others. Porter had even less success with his work on The Greenwich Village Follies (1924). He wrote most of the original score, but his songs were gradually dropped during the Broadway run, and by the time of the post-Broadway tour in 1925, all his numbers had been deleted. Frustrated by the public response to these works, Porter nearly gave up songwriting as a career, although he continued to compose songs for friends and perform at private parties.

Notable shows and songs

Dates, shows and songs are given in Robert Kimball's The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter. Shows listed are stage musicals unless otherwise noted:

• (1910) "Bingo Eli Yale" (Porter's first Yale football song, still sung today)
• (1911) "Bull Dog" (the official Yale fight song)
• (1916) See America First (Porter's first Broadway show)
• (1919) Hitchy-Koo of 1919 – "Old-Fashioned Garden" (Porter's first hit)
• (1927) "The Laziest Gal in Town" (made famous by Marlene Dietrich in the 1950 film Stage Fright)
• (1927) "Let's Misbehave" (used in Paris, but cut before the New York opening)
• (1928) Paris (adapted to film in 1929) – "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love"
• (1929) Wake Up and Dream – "What Is This Thing Called Love?"
• (1929) Fifty Million Frenchmen – "You Do Something to Me"
• (1930) The New Yorkers – "Love for Sale", "I Happen to Like New York", "Where Have You Been?"
• (1932) Gay Divorce (adapted to film as The Gay Divorcee, 1934) – "After You, Who?", "Night and Day"
• (1933) Nymph Errant – "The Physician", "It's Bad for Me"
• (1934) Hi Diddle Diddle (revue) — "Miss Otis Regrets"
• (1934) Anything Goes (adapted to film in 1936 and 1956) – "All Through the Night", "Anything Goes", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "You're the Top"
• (1934) Adios Argentina (unproduced film) – "Don't Fence Me In"
• (1935) Jubilee – "Begin the Beguine", "Just One of Those Things"
• (1936) Red, Hot and Blue – "Down in the Depths (On the Ninetieth Floor)", "Ridin' High", "It's De-Lovely"
• (1936) Born to Dance (film) – "You'd Be So Easy to Love", "I've Got You Under My Skin"†
• (1937) Rosalie (film)  – "In the Still of the Night"
• (1938) You Never Know – "At Long Last Love", "Let's Misbehave"
• (1938) Leave It to Me! – "Get Out of Town", "My Heart Belongs to Daddy"
• (1939) Broadway Melody of 1940 (film) – "I Concentrate on You", "I've Got My Eyes on You"

• (1939) Du Barry Was a Lady (adapted to film in 1943) – "Do I Love You?", "Give Him the Ooh-La-La", "Well, Did You Evah!", "Friendship"
• (1940) Panama Hattie (adapted to film in 1942) – "Let's Be Buddies"
• (1941) You'll Never Get Rich (film) – "Dream Dancing", "So Near and Yet So Far", "Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye"†
• (1941) Let's Face It! (adapted to film in 1943) – "Ace in the Hole"
• (1943) Something to Shout About (film) – "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To"†
• (1943) Something for the Boys
• (1944) Mexican Hayride – "I Love You"
• (1944) Seven Lively Arts – "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"
• (1946) Around the World
• (1948) The Pirate (film) – "Be a Clown"
• (1948) Kiss Me, Kate (adapted to film in 1953) – "Always True to You in My Fashion", "Another Op'nin', Another Show", "Brush Up Your Shakespeare",[186] "I Hate Men",[187] "So in Love", "Tom, Dick or Harry", "Too Darn Hot", "Why Can't You Behave?", "Wunderbar"[188]
• (1950) Out of This World – "From This Moment On", "I Am Loved"[189]
• (1953) Can-Can (adapted to film in 1960) – "Allez-Vous-En", "C'est Magnifique", "I Am in Love", "I Love Paris", "It's All Right with Me"
• (1954) Silk Stockings (adapted to film in 1957) – "All of You"
• (1955) High Society (film) – "I Love You, Samantha", "Mind if I Make Love to You?", "True Love",†[190] "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", "You're Sensational"
• (1956) Les Girls (film) – "Ça, C'est L'amour"
• (1958) Aladdin (television) (Porter's last score)

† Was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, but did not win.