Man of Two Worlds

One reason he was so inimitable is that few songwriters have ever traveled in the places and circles that Cole Porter made his natural world. He was born rich. He was educated to his manicured fingertips. He spent his best years lounging in wing collars against exotic backgrounds with the sleekest peacocks of two worlds.

Porter found his songs wherever he went. Once in Samoa, on a round-the-world cruise, he saw a native dance that had a rhythm too insistent to be forgotten. Back aboard ship, he turned it into Begin the Beguine. A few mornings later, Monty Woolley, who was traveling in Porter's party, stepped out on deck in his pajamas and greeted the day, saying: "It's delovely." Porter thought the line was delightful. Delicious, in fact. Delirious. Delimit.

Bow-Wow-Wow. Material came from home too. When Ethel Merman sang the funny patter song By the Mississine-wah in 1943's Something for the Boys, she was singing about the river that flowed through the 750-acre property in rural Indiana, where Cole Porter was raised. His father was an Indiana fruitgrower, and his grandfather was a coal and timber baron worth $50 million. As a boy, Porter was a prodigy who was writing songs before he was ten. When he got to Yale (class of 1913), he immortalized the college mascot; Yalemen will remember him forever as the chap who wrote "Bulldog, bulldog, bow, wow, wow, Eli Yale."

He went on to Harvard Law School, playing the piano for anyone who would listen. In World War I, he joined the French Foreign Legion, emerged in 1919 to marry a sparkling debutante, Linda Lee Thomas, whose wealth matched his own. In the next two decades, he skimmed along in the clear blue, living his international life often at a pace of seven parties per night, residing now at his retreat in the Berkshires, now in his Paris town house, now in his glass palacette in Los Angeles, now in his palazzo in Venice, now in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, where he kept two suites, one for work and one for play.

You're the Top. Despite the distractions, smash musical after smash musical kept materializing on the quires of composition paper he kept in his luggage. By 1937, he had done 15 of them, including Paris, Fifty Million Frenchmen, Red, Hot and Blue, and Anything Goes, the show which contained a lyric whose rhymes and similes transfigured the art and cast the moon-June school into lasting shade:

You're the Nile, you're the Tower of Pisa,

You're the smile of the Mona Lisa

I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop.

But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

Then one day, in the fall of 1937, he was riding with a couple of titled Europeans on the bridle paths of Long Island's Piping Rock Club. His horse reared, threw him, fell on him, and smashed his legs so badly that bone protruded through the skin. For the rest of his life he was in pain. He lived much of the time in a wheelchair and on crutches.

Many people had thought he was made of the same gossamer he had written about in Just One of Those

Things. But the tragedy of his legs revealed the considerable man he was. He put his piano on blocks so that he could work from his wheelchair, and went on writing. With music and language intermingling in his mind at the time of writing, he melded rather than matched his words to the rhythm and tone of his tunes. He innovated. While everyone else was writing 16-bar verses and 32-bar choruses, Porter became noted for the long song, sometimes going over 100 bars. Begin the Beguine and Night and Day are structured as artfully as a classical sonata, the theme elaborated and subtly expanded each time it returns, developed until it finally crests and crashes in soul-satisfying splendor.

Stuff for Stars. To supply his mercurial lyrics, he kept rhyming dictionaries beside him, but he was even more attentive to the individual equipment of his performing stars. It was his belief, for example, that Ethel Merman could sing the word terrific like no other creature. So he let her sing it:

Some get a kick from cocaine.

I'm sure that if

I had even one sniff

It would bore me terrific'lly, too,

Yet I get a kick out of you.

He knew a saucy siren when one came along; so for Mary Martin in 1938's Leave It to Me, he wrote:

While tearin' off a game of golf

I may make a play for the caddy,

But when I do, I don't follow through

'Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.

His masterpiece was 1948's Kiss Me, Kate. It was an intricately structured play within a play about an acting company doing The Taming of the Shrew. Its brilliant polish, erudite humor, unbuttoned bawdry and elevated style were sum and summary of Porter's professional posture. He was, when he wanted to be, Rabelais in a cutaway, rippling with educated crudities:

Better mention The Merchant of Venice

When her sweet pound o' flesh you would menace.

When your baby is pleading for pleasure

Let her sample your Measure for Measure.

But Kate was not a one-or two-song show. Its score was memorable from beginning to end, and its lyrics never flagged, from Why Can't You Behave? and Always True to You in My Fashion to Wunderbar and Where Is the Life That Late I Led?

Porter shelled out about $1,000 and took 97 people to see his show on opening night. He returned more than a dozen times, always with big parties of friends. When he wrote something, he knew it was great, and no one enjoyed a Cole Porter show more than he did.

Last week, at 71, Cole Porter died in Santa Monica. There was no reasonable sadness in his death. For the last ten years, since the death of his wife, he had lived alone and away from people.

But his life is permanent in melody. "The man was a school in himself," said a young Broadway lyricist when he heard the news last week. "A school with no students. Other songwriters can be imitated, but not Cole Porter."

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