Product Description

In his life and in his music, Cole Porter was "the top"--the pinnacle of wit, sophistication, and success. His songs--"I Get a Kick Out of You," "Anything Goes," and hundreds more--were instant pop hits, and their musical and emotional depths have made them lasting standards.

William McBrien has captured the creator of these songs, whose life was not merely one of wealth and privilege. A prodigal young man, Porter found his emotional anchor in a long, loving, if sexless marriage, a relationship he repeatedly risked with a string of affairs with men. His last eighteen years were marked by physical agony but also unstinting artistic achievement, including the great Hollywood musicals High Society, Silk Stockings, and Kiss Me Kate (recently and very successfully revived on Broadway). Here, at last is a life that informs the great music and lyrics through illuminating glimpses of the hidden, complicated, private man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233622 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-05
• Released on: 2000-12-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679727927
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
It's not quite as witty as a Porter song (who could equal the incomparable Cole?), but this thorough biography honors the Broadway musical's worldliest, most intelligent composer by taking him seriously. Voluminous research buttresses William McBrien's portrait of a charmed life scarred by tragedy. Born in 1891, Porter left his wealthy family in Indiana to thoroughly enjoy himself at Yale University in Connecticut, where his sassy songs gave the Midwestern outsider social clout. Although exclusively homosexual, Porter was nonetheless devoted to the wealthy widow he married in 1919, and McBrien's narrative of their 1920s travels through Europe captures the glamorous sheen of their life together. Porter had some early success with shows like Fifty Million Frenchmen, but his sustained run of hits began in 1932 with Gay Divorce, continuing through the '50s and Kiss Me Kate. The author liberally quotes from Porter's deliciously naughty lyrics, reminding us how corny most show tunes seem when compared to "Love for Sale" or "Anything Goes." McBrien's painful account of the ghastly aftermath of a 1937 riding accident, which left Porter in pain that ended only with his death in 1964, reveals a quiet, uncomplaining stoic whose substance matched his dazzling style. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
The wit, sophistication and often-surprising depth of feeling in the music and lyrics of Cole Porter are at last fully realized in this latest of the songwriter's many biographies. Making illuminating use of previously unpublished material at Yale and at the Cole Porter Trust, McBrien (Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith) weaves a complex and groundbreaking portrait of Porter, interspersed with lyrics and 72 illustrations, recounting his affluent upbringing in Peru, Ind., and his emergence in the 1930s as the musical theater's reigning sophisticate. A delicious chapter on the making of Kiss Me Kate in 1948 demonstrates what sharp talons were needed to create a hit. But McBrien's most startling scholarship is on the subject of Porter's homosexuality. Although Porter's marriage remained sexless, he and his wife Linda were the most intimate of soulmates, says McBrien. He traces the early years of their marriage in the expatriate Europe of the 1920s?during which time Linda would meet and approve Porter's male lovers?through their older years in postwar Broadway and Hollywood, when Linda's respiratory illnesses and Porter's paralyzed legs racked their bodies but not their spirits. Never-before-seen letters shine light into Porter's ongoing relationships with Ballets Russes star Boris Kochno, architect Ed Tauch, choreographer Nelson Barclift, director John Wilson, and longtime friend Ray Kelly, whose children still receive half of the childless Porter's copyrights. In previous biographies by George Eells and Charles Schwartz, these men are passing references; here, they are three-dimensional figures, as McBrien locates the psychological roots of Porter's love songs in his unrequited love for the men he could have but not forever. In the tradition of Anthony Heilbut's Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature and Patrick McGilligan's A Double Life: George Cukor, this astute biography will help to create a standard-setting portrait of Porter as a homosexual artist in a heterosexual world.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
McBrien (English, Hofstra Univ.), whose previous work has focused on the poet Stevie Smith, provides us with the first full-length biography of Cole Porter in at least a decade. Porter is a major figure in American popular music, the composer of musicals running on Broadway from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s like Anything Goes and Kiss Me Kate and such perennial popular songs as "You're the Top" and "Begin the Beguine." Porter was born into a well-to-do Indiana family and later married into even more money. His globe-trotting experiences in high society show up in the sophistication of his lyrics. He was also gay, and McBrien points out how Porter's sexuality emerges in his songs as well. McBrien deals mostly with Porter's life and lyrics; there is little discussion of the music. Copiously illustrated and well researchedAit draws on notebooks and letters that were previously unavailableAthis book should supplant Charles Schwartz's excellent Cole Porter (LJ 6/15/77) as the definitive Porter biography.AMichael Colby, Univ. of California, Davis
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Memorable Biography of a Brilliant Artist
Cole Porter (1891-1964) determinedly created the image of an extremely wealthy man who traveled the world, played with the rich and famous, and now and then wrote a Broadway show or two for the pure pleasure of it. But although he was in some respects a shallow man who lived largely for personal pleasure, he was also a very driven and complex one, a man whose fame on the stage did not come easily and who faced a series of horrific hurdles in his private life.

Porter risked his grandfather's ire--and the family fortune he controlled--by settling on a career in music, and while he earned early fame at Yale through his compositions, his first Broadway venture, See America First, was a humiliating fiasco. Homosexual in an era when it was flatly unacceptable, he would marry to retain respectability and forge a remarkable emotional (if completely platonic) relationship with wife Linda Lee Thomas--even while conducting a series of same-sex affairs that would prove frustratingly superficial. Near the height of his career, a horseback riding accident would leave him crippled and in physical agony for the rest of his life, and the pressures of pain and keeping up appearances would plunge him into fits of depression that seemed to border on the psychotic.

Biographer William McBrien is meticulous in his research and his recreation of Porter's very high society, and in other hands such a weight of knowledge might plunge a book into absolute impenetrability--but although McBrien sometimes errs by flooding the reader with inconsequential detail, by and large he keeps a fine balance on his very difficult subject, tracing the arc of Porter's life from Indiana to Yale to New York to Europe to Hollywood, tracing the arc of his career from the humiliating fiasco of Porter's first Broadway show "See America First" to the brilliance of such successes as "Anything Goes" and "Kiss Me Kate."

In the process McBrien not only seems to capture Porter, but an entire era as well--a world of sharp sophistication when terms like "star" and "toast of two continents" and "gentlemen" still had meaning, when the "have-nots" danced to the tempo of the "haves" and the wealthy went slumming for a thrill. Filled with numerous photographs and large chunks of Porter's memorable lyrics, this is one biography that truly does its subject justice.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Night and Day this is the one Cole biography to read
Night and Day this is the best biography of the great Cole Porter (1891-1964). Porter was the scion of a wealthy family from Peru, Indiana. As a lad he excelled in music making and
graduated with a degree from Yale University. After a year of Law School at Harvard the travel loving Porter journeyed to Paris. He wed Linda Lee Thomas a wealthy woman several years his senior. Porter was gay and the marriage to Linda was sexless. The couple did love one another and Porter was never the same following Linda's death in 1954.
Porter wrote one fabulous musical after another for over 40 years. He lived in luxury with staff to attend his every need. He had a wide circle of friends from among the cultural and literary elite but was an aloof, fastidious, secretive man. Porter was a hard man to know and this biography is about as close as we will ever get to the inner core of the composer.
Porter was a genius in the witty line, the fetching tune and had the ability to make Broadway take notice during his fabulous career.
His life was placid but painful following his fall from a horse and the amputation of a leg. He was alcoholic and probably took durgs.
McBrien is an English professor who has written a well cratede book rich in anecdote. The book is well illustrated with photos from the Porter legacy. Several of Cole's famed lyrics are recorded to the delight of the reader.
With the new movie on Cole Porter this is a good supplement to the film. Well recommended.

READ IT!
WILLIAM McBRIEN has done it;he has given all the PORTER fans of this world the biography they were waiting for for thirty-four years.What this book gives us is an accurate account of the composer's life including his well known homosexuality, even if he married for respectability.PORTER's early years were quite different when compare with the other composers of his generation;he had a millionnaire grandfather and a rather aloof father with whom he didn't really communicate.He led a rather easy going life until he finally decided at the age of 37 to let his talent bloom on BROADWAY.There is considerable irony to the fact that from his riding accident in 1937,that man who had everything suffered a great deal until his death in 1964.You end up knowing what was this thing called love.