Classic Cole Porter

Cole Albert Porter was the sole offspring of Kate Cole, daughter of a successful businessman, and her husband, pharmacist Sam Porter, residents of Peru, Indiana. Young Cole was composing by the time he was ten (in 1901), and his mother and grandfather supported his musical education (including altering records to make it appear that he was younger and therefore more precocious!). His grandfather, who wanted him to be a lawyer, funded his matriculation at Worcester Academy, where he became valedictorian of his graduating class; he then attended Yale, graduated, and began law school at Harvard, but surreptitiously switched to music without his grandfather’s knowledge. Throughout college he wrote musicals, fight songs, etc.– as many as 300 pieces of music !–, and still managed to do acceptable academic work. In 1916, after dropping out of Harvard, he wrote his first commercial musical, a patriotic piece called See America First. It flopped, and by mid-1917 he was headed where the action was– Europe, still embroiled in war. Exactly what he did there is questionable– he told many stories about that time, many of which were fabrications– but he clearly enjoyed Paris and a rather libertine existence. By 1919, back in the States, he married Linda Lee Thomas, eight years older and divorced from an abusive husband. While it was a marriage of convenience, there was clearly considerable affection between them. Mrs. Porter did not accompany Cole to the hotspots of New York and Hollywood. But her death in 1954 clearly grieved him deeply.

Porter’s first real success came in 1928, with a musical titled (what else!) Paris. On the heels of that he produced Fifty Million Frenchmen, and after that he had a string of successes, which lasted through most of the Great Depression. Among the songs that characterized these shows were “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love)”, “You Do Something to Me”, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”, “Love for Sale” (which was about a streetwalker, and was deemed too risque for radio), and “Night and Day”. By 1936 he was writing for Hollywood– “You’d Be So Easy to Love”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, and “In the Still of the Night”came out of movies in this period.. In 1937, an accident with a horse crushed both legs, and for the rest of his life he was in constant pain, despite tens of operations and, eventually, in 1958, amputation of one leg. Although Anything Goes, from 1934, was regarded for many years as his best show, he did have successes after World War II, notably Kiss Me Kate, Can-Can, and Silk Stockings. But even during the war years, individual songs– including some salvaged from not-so-successful shows in the 1920’s and 1930’s– were constantly on the public’s lips. Such introductions included “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Begin the Beguine”. It is important to recognize that, unlike mody of his contemporaneous tunesmiths, he wrote the lyrics to virtually all of his works; this was an approach imprinted by one of his early teachers, who emphasized the importance of having music fit the subject matter (whereas for most other Tin Pan Alley writers that process operated in reverse).

Program Notes

Classic Cole Porter