KING COLE

...But McBrien does stumble across at least one accurate description of the songs...

...Please give my ship / A maiden trip, / And we'll get the prize for speed...

...wanted his grandson to go to military school and then into business, while Katie wanted something more refined...

...Unlike the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe, few of Porter's shows are remembered or performed...

...A Porter song is a luxury item, expensively made ('Begin the Beguine' is 108 bars long...

...Cole still hoped his grandson would manage the family's holdings, and after Yale, Porter enrolled at Harvard Law School...

...After the armistice, Porter stayed on in France, where he met Linda Lee Thomas, a rich socialite divorced from a cruel husband...

...Sometimes even his best material had to be pulled...

...He was so good at bamboozling the moralists that they let the naughty "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" play on the radio for weeks before figuring out that it wasn't about an adoring daughter's love for her father...

...Is what I thought a new Rolls, a used Chevrolet...

...Astonishingly—given the means and the temptations to slip into dis-solute torpor—Porter continued to study music and scribble songs...

...Just as Porter needed the censors as a foil for his tunes to succeed, so too he needed an audience with the education and taste to appreciate both his wordplay and the complexity of his best melodies...

...But that didn't mean there could be no sex, just that it had to be couched in double-enten-dres: "Pilot me / Be the pilot I need...

...Cole, a rugged businessman who made his fortune selling supplies to miners in the California gold rush...

...He doesn't complain, for instance, that Porter, "seeking not to offend," changed the line "Chinks do it, Japs do it" to "Birds do it, bees do it" in "Let's Fall in Love...

...Throughout the 1920s, he wrote tunes for shows in Paris and New York and became friends with the other great popular composers of the age, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin...

...Nowa-days—when we're lucky to get a pop tune twelve bars long—songs have ceased to be luxury items...

...How can one be racy if there are no stodgy standards to tweak...

...But as a composer who penned both words and music, he stands alone, unmatched even by Irving Berlin...

...His composing peak came during the period when the plot of a musical was often simply a showcase for its songs...

...That was structural extravagance even in its own day, when the thirty-two-bar form was dominant...

...KING COLE The Luxury of Cole Porter By Eric Felten In late 1943, film mogul Jack Warner paid the extravagant sum of $300,000 to Cole Porter for the rights to make a movie about the composer's life...

...This lack of drama in Porter's life has proved no less a stumbling block for William McBrien, the composer's latest biographer...

...The puritans were not Porter's enemies, for without them his art wouldn't have flourished...

...Of the 1938 show You Never Know, for instance, McBrien observes, "As usual, puritans in the critical ranks warned readers of 'tawdry vulgarities' and 'obscenities' to be encountered in the show...

...But though the shows to which Porter's songs were attached have faded(with the possible exceptions of Kiss Me Kate and Can-Can), his songs have become a cornerstone of popular American music: "Night and Day," "Anything Goes," "What Is This Thing Called Love," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Easy to Love," "It's All Right With Me," and many others...

...Porter lived in a time when a popular songwriter could not pen anything so forward as the rap lyrics "Do me / Do me / Do me...

...But after a semester, the dean himself told Porter that he was better suited to music than the law...

...The complexity of Porter's best work sets him somewhat apart from the other great songwriters of the first half of this century," McBrien quotes Wal- ter Clemons...

...Then came the war, and he was off to France (where nobody quite knows what he did, other than strut about Paris in a perplexing variety of snappy uniforms...

...Eric Felten is a Washington writer and jazz musician...

...How can there be innuendo in the age of the full monty...

...Porter had cast as the lead a handsome young man he had spotted on the street, and he couldn't sing the demanding song...

...Is it in marble or is it in clay...

...A researcher named Herman Lissauer came up empty after plowing through fifteen volumes of yellowing newsprint: a near-en-cyclopedic compendium of press clippings Porter's wife Linda had compiled...

...It's true that Porter was able to call "Love for Sale" (a prostitute's lament) his "step-child" because it was banned from radio...

...In the winter of 1939—more than a year after the riding accident that crushed his legs nearly to the point of amputation—Porter sought relief in the warm sun and salt water of Havana...

...In Porter's day, the Broadway theater crowd were the taste-setters for much of popular music...

...Just as Schwartz and his screenwriters searched for villainous critics to provide some drama in Night and Day, so McBrien tries to juice up his Cole Porter by inventing a crowd of kill-joys and bluenoses whom he labels (with no great originality) the "puritans...

...Bull dog...

...As a lyricist Porter is rightly considered one of the best...

...The only suspense is—Will he or won't he accumulate ten million dollars...

...And, to hear Mc-Brien tell it, they hounded poor Porter in a never-ending effort to bowdlerize his art...

...It was a wealthy audience dominated by savvy fat cats with Ivy League degrees...

...It wasn't just his lyrics that were smart and expensive...

...From This Moment On" was dropped from Out of This World, but the censors were not to blame—nor, for that matter, was the producer...

...Himself a modern aristocrat, Porter credited elite audiences with his success...

...J.O...

...These puritans were always complaining about skimpy costumes, adult situations, sexually suggestive lyrics, and other depravities...

...and "When love congeals / It soon reveals / The faint aroma of performing seals...

...Asked what tools he used in crafting lyrics, he credited "Roget's Thesaurus, an atlas, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and a dictionary...

...McBrien isn't much of a story-teller, and though he gives in his new Cole Porter an accurate and thorough account of the man's life (and presents as well what Hollywood in the 1940s couldn't possibly manage: Porter's promiscuous homosexuality), his picture is hardly more compelling than Night and Day...

...By 1916, he was at work on his first musical, a Gilbert-and-Sullivanish flop called See America First...

...Outsmarting the censors is a game that favors the clever and witty— which is why, when the blue pencils are out, the clever and witty like Cole Porter succeed...

...Born in Peru, Indiana, in the summer of 1891, Porter was the sole son of a doting mother, Katie, whose only real effort at discipline was to make the boy practice the piano...

...It is a testament to Porter's songs that the film ever reached the screen...

...He often saw songs pulled from shows, but it was almost always by producers trying to home in on the most successful material...

...Legend has it that Porter worked out the lyrics to "At Long Last Love" while pinned under the horse that left him in pain for the rest of his life...

...Linda seems to have been more mother than wife to Porter: eight years older, she probably knew of Porter's homosexuality before they were married and grew cross with him only when, over the years, his taste for young men became indiscreet...

...McBrien is at his weakest attempting to analyze Porter's music: Barely a page goes by without a snippet of lyrics, but not once in the entire book does the author provide even a shard of a tune for inspection...

...And if a song was bumped from one show, it went into a trunk from which he might rescue it for a new production...

...In an effort to manufacture some dramatic struggle, the screenwriters went looking for early know-nothing reviews panning the songwriter...

...the song asks of an infatuation...

...Living as we do in an age when the airwaves are cluttered with junkyard Chevys, at least Cole Porter left us a fleet of shiny Rolls-Royces to admire and enjoy...

...Porter remained convinced that he had taken a shellacking in the press and complained to the film's producer, Arthur Schwartz, that Lissauer "has not been thorough enough...

...It wasn't that Porter was uninteresting...

...His first big Broadway show, Paris, opened in 1928, and included the hit song "Let's Fall in Love...

...With such tepid material to work with, Grant finally gave up complaining about the lousy plot and dialogue and instead delayed production by demanding that only an eighth of an inch, not a quarter, of his shirt cuffs be allowed to show...

...Or perhaps it is that the skill to create them has been lost: Where would you find someone to make a Faberge egg, even if you had the money to pay him...

...But it would be more than a year before filming would start—in no small part because Warner Brothers' screenwriters had no idea how to make the "biopic" work...

...He was named after Katie's father, J.O...

...Lying on the beach, he took solace from the flotilla of huge yachts anchored off-shore...

...But even so, Porter's life lacked anything resembling drama...

...As Orson Welles put it, "What will they use for a climax...

...They married in 1919, and with their charm and money quickly became the center of the expatriate social scene...

...From This Moment On" went back into Porter's treasure-chest and reappeared in the movie version of Kiss Me Kate...

...When the 1950 Out of This World got the same treatment, he declares, "How wearied Porter must have been by the perdurance of such stern and censorious judgments...

...They couldn't find any...

...In 1946, the Porter biopic Night and Day, starring Cary Grant, was finally released, credited to four different screenwriters...

...But the vast majority of Porter's songs were celebrated, not censored...

...As long as there is that much money," he told a friend, "there must be opulent audiences for [my] brittle and sparkling songs and lyrics, most of which concern themselves with people who do smart and expensive things...

...Living the high life in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, hobnobbing with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Noel Coward, earning fame and fortune: These are hardly the humdrum of an ordinary existence...

...After a bitter struggle, Katie won, sending Porter to Worcester Academy and then to Yale, where his gifts first brought him acclaim, of sorts...

...So were his melodies and harmonies...

...Perhaps it is that the audience lacks the education to appreciate them...

...He became famous for his football songs, some still used by the boula-boula crowd—though it's hard to find in them much prediction of his future: There's a big gap between "Bull dog...

...Bow, wow, wow / Eli Yale...

...So Schwartz went through the scrapbooks himself—and wrote back to Porter: "It looks as if you are in the rather ironic position of a man disappointed by the lack of bad notices...

...It should be noted that McBrien doesn't mind a little censorship here and there, so long as it comports with current standards of political correctness...

...In those days, as Porter himself put it, you could just have a girl step out from behind the curtain and start to sing...

...so too as a songwriter...