Cole Porter

Cole Porter

Birth: 9th June, 1891
Place of Birth: Peru, Indiana, USA
Nationality: American
Job Title: Song Writer
Partners: Linda Thomas, Various others unknown
Died: 15th October 1964, Santa Monica, USA

Should the love of your life always be somebody you want to sleep with?

In our lifelong search for ‘the one’, is it possible that we are actually overlooking the ideal person simply because they are not the gender we have a sexual preference for? Could it be that all we are really after is a companion, somebody to be there through the good times and the bad? This month’s Gay Great was well aware that for him, love and sex were two very separate entities.

James Omar Cole, known simply as J.O, was extremely wealthy - easily the richest man in Indiana. He was keen to protect his family’s social status and therefore wanted his daughter Kate to marry a wealthy, successful man. However the rebellious Kate chose instead to marry Sam Porter, a lowly and shy pharmacist. When the couple’s only son was born, they decided to name him Cole Porter, an amalgamation of both family names in an attempt to placate J.O. Despite his disappointment at his daughter’s choice of husband, J.O. continued to heavily subsidise the couple and enthusiastically followed the development of his grandson.

With his grandfather’s financial support, the young Porter grew up surrounded by opulence. His every whim was catered for. At the age of six, he decided to try the violin and naturally, a top instrument and teacher were found for him. But Porter disliked the harsh sound it made and instead took piano lessons. He took to the piano instantly and was soon the best young pianist in the area. Porter’s mother was ambitious for her son and forced him into two hours of practice a day. However she did make the sessions light and enjoyable for him by encouraging him to learn some modern tunes. But her ambition for Porter went beyond merely enhancing his piano skills. She decided to surreptitiously alter her son’s birth date, thus making him officially two years younger than he was. Porter was therefore celebrated as a child genius when he was no longer a child!

Porter’s mother also used her considerable family fortune to help him along the way. She would often add financial backing to local orchestras...as long as her son was given a solo spot. Porter had already begun to compose music by the age of ten, and his mother paid for many of his early works to be published and sent to friends and family members. At school, his music teacher Dr. Abercrombie taught him the relationship between words and meter. Porter was an enthusiastic student and soon started to compose lyrical works.

When he was old enough to go to university, Porter knew his background would assure him an Ivy League education. His grandfather wanted him to become a solicitor and sent him to Yale. Porter was a keen socialite and was soon invited to join one of Yale’s most respected secret societies – the Scroll and Key. An elite few were asked to join and the networking advantages were huge. He agreed to join and began to attend the rituals and meetings, all of which took place behind closed doors. But Porter was also popular beyond the Scroll and Key meeting house. His musical skills were noticed by the college football team, who commissioned him to write some ‘fight songs’, tunes to be performed before Yale’s sporting events. (One of his compositions, called Bulldog, is still played before the start of every Yale football match.)

Porter’s musical talents were also being developed and showcased on the stage via the various performing arts societies at the university, most notably the Yale Glee Club and the world famous Whiffenpoofs, the oldest collegiate a cappella group in the US. While at Yale, the prolific Porter wrote and performed over 300 songs.

University clearly offered Cole the ultimate playground for his musical talent and it is probable that he was also exploring his sexuality too. It is impossible to say when Porter discovered it or when he began to express it, but judging by his relative openness later in life, Porter’s sexuality was probably well known on campus. Certainly the passion he expressed throughout his life for strong athletic men may well explain the large number of football songs he wrote!

After Yale, Porter stumbled through a year studying law at Harvard. His passion was never aroused by the subject and despite the wishes of his grandfather, he decided to leave and move to New York. There he stayed at the Yale Club, which offered exclusive accommodation for ex-students, and concentrated on his musical career. Although he was still completing successful musicals for Yale performing arts societies, commercial success on Broadway seemed to elude him. His first full length musical See America First.

Feeling dejected, Porter made his way to the surprisingly busy social scene of First World War Paris. Paris was unoccupied by German forces and at the forefront of the war effort, harbouring supplies and offering respite to war-torn soldiers. Whilst in the city, he lived the life of a wealthy American, sleeping in late and indulging in drink, drugs and the odd sexual liaison with a lonely serviceman. The media in America were keen to keep an eye on what the social and fashionable set were doing for the war effort and Porter fed back a string of lies about his involvement with the Foreign Legion. In fact, his time was spent mixing with the gathering American literati. Later, Ernest Hemingway would come to label this set as ‘the lost generation’ for their disenchantment with American literature and the state of the world in general. Porter was a keen part of this quiet artistic revolution that was taking place on the streets of Paris.

For Porter, there was one associate in Paris who stood out above the rest. Linda Lee Thomas was a rich American divorcee on the run from her former abusive husband. She and Porter struck up a friendship and became close companions. Marriage was ultimately something that would benefit them both. For Thomas, there would be great security in having a gentle gay man as a husband, whereas for Porter, there was the obvious use of a wife to disguise his homosexuality. Although their wedding in 1919 was more of a business deal than an expression of romance, there is no doubt the two adored each other. Together, they would attend some of the most prestigious parties in town, Thomas enjoying the gossip of the other smart-set women while Porter took advantage of the vast amount of bisexual activity which frequently went on behind the doors of the larger houses in Paris. The arrangement was perfect.

Although he had the security of his family heritage and now his wife’s fortune, Porter continued to work on his music. In 1928, he had his first Broadway hit with the musical Paris, which was eventually made into a film. The stage show had all the ‘live for the moment’ spirit that Porter had experienced on the Parisian scene. One song in particular Let’s Do It captured the imagination of the American audience and began to make him famous. Several more of Porter’s musicals hit Broadway, none of which seem to have been affected by the 1929 Wall Street crash. The USA may have been thrust into poverty, but there was always money available to visit one of Porter’s glittering and uplifting plays.

But the biggest decade of Porter’s career was the 1930s. In 1932, Fred Astaire took to the stage to play the lead in Porter’s musical Gay Divorce. Two years later came an even bigger hit, Anything Goes, a romantic comedy based loosely on the sometimes stormy, sometimes blissful relationship Porter had with his wife. Many more memorable shows and melodies followed throughout the decade and often the individual tunes were every bit as popular as the show itself. You Do Something to Me, In the Still of the Night, I’ve Got You Under My Skin….the list of famous tunes Porter produced was enormous. Most of his musicals were soon transferred onto the big screen, opening his work up to a larger audience and offering him the opportunity to move to Hollywood.

In Hollywood, he found a veritable playground was on offer for a rich gay man. With the studio system firmly in the control of homosexuals, gay men could feel at ease to be more open about their sexuality. But Hollywood did not bring happiness for Porter’s wife. She was worried about her husband’s increasing openness and ever more elaborate sexual exploits. She eventually felt the time had come to separate, and for a few years the couple lived apart.

However, they were still the best of friends, and when Porter broke both of his legs in a riding accident in 1937, Thomas went straight to his side. The accident was a bad one. His horse had slipped on some mud and fallen on top of him. Doctors were not sure if they could save both of his legs. As a man who spent hours on his physical appearance, the thought of losing a leg was hard to swallow and over the next few years, he endured over 30 operations to save it.

Cole Porter

But despite his physical problems, the music continued to flow from him. He continued to stage an average of two shows a year, an incredible rate of production for any composer, let alone one consigned to a wheelchair and in constant pain. His legend had become such that in 1945, producers asked to make a film based on his own life. The result was Night and Day, an amusing but wildly inaccurate interpretation of the gay writer’s life. Naturally, the issue of Porter’s homosexuality was absent from the film. Instead it dwelt on the very real, albeit platonic, love which he had for his wife.

The 50s saw a huge change in Porter’s fortune. Although he carried on writing and continued to generate hit after hit, his personal life was slowly falling apart. In 1952, his beloved mother passed away. Two years later, his wife and muse Thomas died too. The decade ended badly when in 1958, he lost the fight to keep his right leg. Battered and depressed, he became a virtual recluse and passed away from kidney failure at the age of 73.

But Porter’s music did not die along with him. His extensive back catalogue has been covered by artists across all genres. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Liza Minnelli and Peggy Lee have all taken on the challenge of a Cole Porter classic. In 1990 the songs of Cole Porter became the basis for an AIDS benefit album entitled Red, Hot and Blue. The album not only raised thousands for the fight against AIDS but also brought Porter’s music up to date with performances from U2, Iggy Pop, kd Lang and Annie Lennox. A recent biopic, entitle De-Lovely after one of his memorable song titles, retold the story of his life in sharp detail. For the soundtrack, modern artists such as Robbie Williams, Lemar, Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette covered the original tracks with precise authenticity. To date Porter stands as one of the most covered artists in history.

The lasting appeal of Cole Porter has to be the simple ‘boy meets girl’ sentiment in all his famous musicals and songs. Despite the odd cheeky reference to gay sex, Porter’s works were on the whole heterosexual and highly romantic. It seems odd that a man so obviously homosexual could write from the straight man’s point of view. However, when viewed in context of his life story, it is obvious that although their relationship was never consummated, Thomas was certainly the love of Porter’s life and the inspiration for a career that has produced melodies which will be performed forever.