One-Man Industry

By Gerald Clarke

COLE PORTER, A BIOGRAPHY

by CHARLES SCHWARTZ 365 pages. Dial Press. $9.95.

For 73 years Cole Porter was a man on the run, racing to outdistance that most dreaded of all pursuers--ennui. "I have spent my life escaping boredom," he said, "not because I am bored, but because I do not want to be." He won the contest. But then, he had a head start.

The parabola of the Porter career is one beloved by backstage biographers. As Brendan Gill's brisk, uncritical Cole showed, the life was filled with laughter, tragedy, a soupc,on of scandal and above and below all, money. For unlike the customary theatrical melodrama, Cole's life progressed from riches to riches. Schwartz's Cole Porter is marred by ungainly prose, but its detail is copious and its story irresistible.

The composer's grandfather was one of the wealthiest men in Indiana. Cole's adoring mother not only assured him that the world was his oyster, but presented it to him on the half shell--with champagne to wash it down. The boy spent summers in Europe, attended private schools in Massachusetts, and took his degree at Yale. In New Haven he had his own piano and, despite hayseed check suits and non-U Midwestern ways, ingratiated himself with wit and melodies. One of his undergraduate efforts is still mandatory half-time fare at Yale football games. His grandfather ordered him to go to law school. Instead, Cole, with the secret approval of his mother, majored in music at Harvard.

Marriage of Convenience. During World War I, Cole worked for an American relief group in Paris, where he met Linda Lee Thomas, a sophisticated, beautiful--and equally rich--American divorcee. They married in 1919; thereafter, the Porters embodied the '20s dictum, "Living well is the best revenge." They discovered the Riviera before anyone else, kept houses in Paris, California, Massachusetts--and an apartment on the 41st floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan.

Though they remained devoted until Linda's death 35 years later, their marriage was one of convenience; according to Schwartz, she showed no interest in sex of any kind and he was openly homosexual.

It would have been easy for Cole to fall into the role of dilettante, composing patter songs to amuse his intimates. Instead, as Alec Wilder observes in his classic treatise, American Popular Song, "the body of [Porter's] work shows clearly that he constantly sought to maintain a high level, not of social frippery, but of professional craftsmanship." Cole worked as hard as he played. Each morning he would sit down at the piano for three hours. When he went on a cruise he took--along with his tailored dinner jackets and crates of his favorite champagne--a piano organ, a metronome, a phonograph and records, two dozen pencils and a quire of music paper. On one voyage, from New York to New Guinea to Rio, he even took along 'Writer Moss Hart. When their ship docked in New York 4 1/2 months later, they presented their producers with a finished musical. Jubilee.

From the mid-'20s to the mid-'50s, Cole Porter was a one-man industry, both on Broadway and in Hollywood. His songs have long since become a lasting, universal language, from the flashy I Get a Kick out of You and Blow, Gabriel, Blow to the romantic experimental ballads Night and Day and Begin the Beguine. His polished lyrics have rarely been equaled--some scarcely need melody to support them: "Is it an earthquake/ or simply a shock?/ Is it the good turtle soup/ or merely the mock? . . . is it Granada I see/ or only Asbury Park?"

The joy he conveyed in life is more ironic than his lyrics; Porter's last 27 years were filled with pain. A horse fell on him in 1937, badly breaking both legs. Instead of having them amputated, as physicians recommended, he tried to save them by operation after operation. The results were never fully satisfactory, and in 1958 he lost his right leg. Only toward the very end of his life, with Linda dead and his health beyond repair, did he seem to despair, giving in more and more to pills and alcohol. Death, in 1964, was probably welcomed.

Porter deserves a biography as witty and entertaining as he was. Given the complexity of his work, he will no doubt get one some day. Brendan Gill did not write it, nor has Charles Schwartz, a professor of music at Manhattan's Hunter College. Though Schwartz gives the facts of Porter's life, he has forgotten too much of the fun. His book truly comes to life only when he quotes his subject's lyrics. The difference between stolid narration and bright rhymes is the difference, in Cole Porter's words, between the good turtle soup and merely the mock--or for that matter, night and day.

Gerald Clarke

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.