Au naturel: hirsute men
Lads in plaid:
Songwriter Cole Porter
During the time he sang second tenor in the Glee Club at Yale,
Cole Porter
(1891-1964) also appeared in stage roles and performed cabaret sets at
private parties. It became his habit to step out of the chorus just
before the choir’s last number to sit at the piano to accompany himself
in a solo performance of songs and patter, much of the clever and cheeky
material his own. Although he was listed just once in the program, the
audience usually kept him there until he had gone through 10-12 encores.
Reviewers called him the “highlight” of the concerts, “a clever
imitator, strong singer and comedian”. Then, as later in life, Porter
wrote both the words and music to his songs.
After one year he dropped out of Harvard Law School, where he had
resided with Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State. His unwavering
D-grades in all his law courses resulted in a transfer to the School of
Music in 1914 for his second year at Harvard.
Porter, who was exclusively homosexual, met his future wife Linda at a
1918 wedding reception in Paris, where he had lingered after serving in
France in a volunteer ambulance unit during the final year of WW I. At
least that's what he told Linda. Although Cole appeared on the streets
of Paris in various military uniforms, later biographers revealed that
Porter never served in the military of any country. Porter maintained a
luxury apartment in Paris, where he entertained lavishly. His parties
were extravagant and scandalous, with a little of everything sprinkled
in for good measure – much gay and bisexual activity, cross-dressing,
international musicians, Italian nobility, and a large surplus of
recreational drugs. For a twenty-something boy born on a farm in Peru,
Indiana, things were moving fast.
Linda Lee Thomas (at right), a wealthy socialite
divorcée, was descended from the Paca family, one of whom was a signer
of the Declaration of Independence, as well as from the Lees of
Virginia. Linda was well aware of Porter’s homosexuality, but they
nevertheless married on December 12, 1919, and remained based in Paris
as bon vivants of hedonistic high style until 1937, when the likelihood of war forced their return to the U.S. Many of their circle suspected that
Linda might be lesbian or bisexual, while others thought of her as
asexual. Whichever was true, their marriage was without sex, but
certainly not without love. They adored each other. Years later Linda
miscarried, but it is generally accepted that Cole was not the would-be father.
It’s all a cloud of ambiguity.
After their honeymoon in southern France and Italy, Cole sought further
formal musical training, enrolling at the Schola Cantorum in the Latin
Quarter of Paris. He soon abandoned his notion of writing serious
orchestral music, however, and did not complete the curriculum.
Linda, thirteen years older than Cole, provided him with a passport to elevated social strata he could never have traversed on his own. Their world
was a fusion of outrageous Bohemianism and mad-cap Roaring Twenties
liberation, tossed together with moneyed misfits, exiled royalty, show
business personalities and assorted impoverished creative geniuses.
Included in their social circles were Coco Chanel and musicians Lauritz Melchior and
Arthur Rubenstein, who loved to sit down at the piano to play Cole
Porter songs. In short, they knew anyone worth knowing.
Soon after their marriage, Linda bought a much larger Parisian residence
in 1920 at 13, rue Monsieur, a street just one block long, not far from
Les Invalides and the Rodin Museum (and purchased for more than $10
million in today’s money). The rear garden backed up to the house of
Nancy Mitford, the British novelist, biographer and socialite, who was
involved in a romance with the homosexual Scottish aristocrat Hamish St.
Clair-Erskine. But I digress.
Linda’s house in Paris was so large that they rented a suite of rooms to
Howard Sturges, a close friend of Linda’s who became Cole’s dearest
life-long friend. Sturges lent Linda a beautiful painting by Christian
Bérard, which hung for years in their Parisian drawing room. Sturges, a
witty, old-money Boston socialite, was a trained violinist who kept a
pet bear and walked a pig on a leash through the streets of Paris. I’m
not making this up.
Hostess Elsa Maxwell leans over a smiling Cole Porter. The lesbian society maven was a huge fan and patron.
Sturges often traveled with Cole and Linda, wherever their journeys took
them, and Cole and Howard made this three-way friendship more
complicated when the two men entered into an affair. The Porters were
peripatetic to the extreme. They always traveled with an entourage of
servants and friends, usually picking up the tab for their guests, and
quickly became acquainted with Egypt, Monte Carlo, Italy, London,
Biarritz, Spain and New York. To say that the Porters lived large is
understatement.
Cole and Linda befriended wealthy American ex-pats Gerald and Sarah
Murphy, and together they made the South of France a fashionable
year-round resort destination. There were striking parallels in the
lives of the Murphys and Porters, not the least of which was the fact
that both Gerald and Cole were married homosexual men.
In 1923 Cole’s wealthy grandfather died. Long disapproving of Cole’s
choice of a career, he made no mention of Cole in his will. Of the four
million dollars left to Cole’s mother, however, she gave half to her
son, then 32 years old, who later said the inheritance didn’t spoil or
ruin his life – it just made it wonderful. Well, not everything was
wonderful. It was about that time that Porter tested positive for
syphilis.
For five summers during the 1920s, the Porters descended upon Venice,
renting the fabulous Palazzo Rezzonico. During the summer of 1925 Cole
became completely smitten with
Boris Kochno, a Russian poet,
librettist and Ballet Russes dancer who was Diaghilev's collaborator.
Their correspondence survives, and Porter comes across as a love-sick
puppy. Soon thereafter, Porter returned to the U.S. to write shows for
Broadway and Hollywood. While living in New York, Porter found that
paying for sex was less complicated emotionally, and it allowed him to
indulge his taste in sailors, marines, assorted prostitutes and sexual humiliation.
Porter's piano (right) stands today on the cocktail terrace of the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria
hotel in NYC (no longer played as an accompaniment to cocktails, sad to say), where Cole and Linda Porter kept an apartment in the
Waldorf Towers, the residential wing of the hotel. The 1907 Steinway
grand, with a hand decorated walnut case, was a gift from the hotel in
1945. Upon Porter's death in 1964, the piano went downstairs to the
lobby.
Monty Woolley, who often joined Cole to cruise New York City's
waterfront bars and bordellos, recounted that one night, a young sailor
they approached by car asked outright, "Are you two cocksuckers?"
Woolley responded with, "Now that the preliminaries are over, why don't
you get in and we can discuss the details?"
Cole’s numerous male lovers included
Nelson Barfeld (a dancer/choreographer who was a former U.S. Marine),
Robert Bray (a married Californian) and
Jack Cassidy (a character actor). Not to mention architect
Ed Tauch, director
John Wilson and longtime friend
Ray Kelly, whose children still receive half of Porter's copyright royalties. After relocating to Hollywood, he was a regular guest at
George Cukor's
Sunday all-male pool parties, but soon the two became rivals. While
renting a beautiful Hollywood home owned by renowned homosexual
actor-decorator
Billy Haines, Porter held competing all-male
parties, and Cole’s became the more valued invitation. Porter was not
discrete. A recent biography recounts that in his later years, Cole kept
"breaking appliances so he could lure cute repairmen into his lair". As
well,
Scotty Bowers's recent Hollywood tell-all recounts that
Porter had a decided taste for giving oral sex to Marines while
suffering verbal abuse and humiliation. The homosexual relations were
not casual. All of Porter's sexual activity was homosexual, and he
became more brazen in the more open and permissive atmosphere of
Hollywood. Linda reacted by staying away from California, sailing back
and forth between her residences in Paris and New York. She was quietly
making plans to divorce Cole.
Then in 1937, Cole was involved in a tragic horse riding accident and
fractured both his legs. This was especially debilitating and
humiliating to the ego of a vain man who placed enormous value on looks
and a dashing appearance for both social and sexual reasons. He was in
the hospital for months as his mental and physical health waned. He was
in constant pain from his leg injuries and underwent 34 operations, all
ultimately unsuccessful. Linda changed her plans and returned to Cole's
side; they shared quarters at the Waldorf Towers in NYC, and before long
he returned to writing songs.
Porter hired a driver and a personal assistant, who tended to details
such as getting Cole into and out of wheelchairs, elevators and
buildings. Soon enough Porter was reviving his lusty male/male activity.
Once he graduated from a wheelchair to a cane, he maintained a small
house overlooking the ocean at Lido Beach on Long Island, which he used
for male/male trysts. Frank Walsh, a soldier stationed at Governors
Island, recalled attending a party at Porter's Lido Beach residence,
describing it as "a drinking and sex party, nearly orgiastic, with fifty
or more soldiers kissing, drinking and engaging in lots of very graphic
sex." At about this time Cole tripped on a stair and broke his left leg
again, causing a major setback to his recovery.
Cole Porter portrait by
Richard Avedon, 1950.
In 1945, he lent his permission to the movie project
Night and Day,
allegedly about the life of Cole Porter. Although a great boost to his
ego, the plot was a wildly fictionalized biography. His friends thought
it hysterically funny, knowing the divide between fact and fiction. The
movie overlooked Porter’s overly pampered and controlled youth, his
notorious gay life and his sexless marriage of social convenience;
instead it lent credence to the tall tales Cole spread about himself,
such as his (fake) war record and injuries. According to friends, Cole
enjoyed the movie's wildly fictional account, and he especially savored
having closeted movie star Cary Grant play a heroic, straight version of
himself. Fortunately Porter did not live to see the 2004 film
De-Lovely,
a wretched misstatement of facts and an utter bore. I do not know how
it was possible to make the extravagant, over-the-top lives of Cole and
Linda Porter, portrayed by Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, appear so dull.
Porter's greatest hit musical came late in his career.
Kiss Me Kate (1948) is a play within a play about a troupe putting on Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew. W. H. Auden even called it a much better piece of theater than
The Taming of the Shrew
(!). A film version hit movie theaters in 1953, also to great acclaim,
but Porter's risqué lyrics had to be sanitized to avoid the Hollywood
code censors, thus robbing the musical of much of its comedy. The film
was originally released in 3-D.
A major blow came with Linda’s death in 1954. She died after a long
illness from chronic respiratory problems at their apartment in the
Waldorf Towers in NYC. Although they had separated only to reunite
several times, they remained devoted to each other. She left an estate
of over $1.5 million, in which Cole had a lifetime interest (Cole had
also inherited the bulk of his mother's half million dollar estate, but
needlessly worried about money constantly). He was given Linda's
Williamsport, Massachusetts, estate outright, as well as all of Linda's
personal belongings.
Unfortunately, Porter descended into further creative silence and social
isolation in 1958, when his right leg was finally amputated. Porter was
embarrassed and incapacitated by the surgery. Linda Porter had
acquired a 40-acre estate in the Berkshires in 1940, and after her
death, Cole became a virtual recluse at
Buxton Hill**, as the
property was named. In a bizarre act Porter
ordered the Tudor-style main house razed after Linda's death and moved
a caretaker’s cottage to the location of the original house. According
to one of his biographers, visitors to Buxton Hill became fewer and
fewer, because most weekends Porter was wicked drunk and ignored his
invited guests, some of whom dubbed the farm, “the torture chamber.” At
Cole’s death from kidney failure in 1964 (at a nursing home in Santa
Monica), the Buxton Hill estate went to
Williams College, but
returned to private hands a few years later. It was turned into a luxury inn,
with tennis courts and a 30' X 50' swimming pool. And the whole shebang
(structures and 40 acres of land) was recently on the market for $4.5 million.
**When Cole Porter formed his own publishing company, he named it
Buxton Hill.
Porter’s 5-bedroom apartment in the
Waldorf Astoria was
available for rent last year at the rate of $150,000 a month. No lie.
The Porters had lived in several apartments at the Waldorf Towers from
1939 to 1954, but Cole moved into this much larger unit just after the
death of Linda. When Porter moved to apartment 33-A (1955-1964), he
hired
Billy Baldwin to do the interior design work. Baldwin was
so well-known for his love of slipcovers that Cole Porter joked that he
didn’t want to come back to find his piano slip covered! After Cole
Porter died,
Frank Sinatra moved in. Quite a pedigree for
Waldorf Towers apartment 33-A (floor-plan porn below).
Of note: Porter’s 1934 musical
Anything Goes was recently revived on Broadway, and a touring company is taking the show to audiences all across the country.
His body of work includes some 1,400 songs. Some are one-offs which continue to astonish listeners today. For example, in
Miss Otis Regrets
(1934) we are told by a servant of a polite society lady how her
employer was seduced and abandoned. In just a few lines of lyrics, we
learn that Miss Otis hunted down and shot her seducer, was arrested,
taken from the jail by a mob, and lynched. The servant conveys Miss
Otis's final, polite, apologetic words to her friends: "Miss Otis
regrets she's unable to lunch today." There is not another song like it.
Carmen McRae's impassioned reading of
"Miss Otis Regrets..."
Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye (1944)
Ray Charles and Betty Carter’s classic reading of Porter’s extraordinary tune and lyric:
When you're near there's such an air of spring about it.
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it.
There's no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor
Everytime we say goodbye.
Among Cole Porter’s classic American standards are:
Night and Day (1932 - one of ASCAP's top 10 all time money makers)
I Love Paris (1952)
Begin the Beguine (1935)
From This Moment On (1950)
I’ve Got a Crush on You (1929)
Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love (1928)
You’re the Top (1934)
I Get a Kick Out of You (1934)
I’ve Got You Under My Skin (1936)
In the Still of the Night (1937)
Don’t Fence Me In (1934)
True Love (1956)
Bing Crosby and
Grace Kelly sing a duet aboard the yacht
True Love in
High Society, the musical remake of Philip Barry’s 1939 stage play,
The Philadelphia Story (made into an acclaimed film in 1941).
Trivia: Cole Porter was left handed and found it awkward
to write down music on staff paper. He worked out a solution by turning
the paper at a right angle, so that the staff lines were vertical.
