- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; First British Edition edition (16 Nov 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0002154951
- ISBN-13: 978-0002154956
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.8 x 4.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 751,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
The definitive biography of Cole Porter – the urbane American composer of musical comedies and of over 1000 songs – which reveals the darker side of the star whose life and work epitomizes the romance of Café Society.
Cole Porter – composer of Night and Day, Easy to Love and I’ve Got You Under My Skin – is familiar to three generations. His tunes conjure up romance, glamour and cultivated sensuality.
This biography charts Porter’s life, beginning on a fruit farm in Indiana and moving on to Yale, where his social charm and musical gifts earned him leadership of the Glee Club. From Yale he moved to Harvard, where he roomed with Dean Acheson, and on to the School of Music and the Paris Conservatoire to study music theory, history, harmony and counterpoint.
In 1919, Porter married the rich and beautiful Linda Thomas. The pair spent a decade roaming glamorous, bohemian Europe and Porter, sponsored by Irving Berlin among others, experienced the beginnings of success with his songs before making his name in the 1930s with hit shows like Anything Goes. A riding accident left him in constant pain, but he still continued to write shows like Kiss Me Kate and Silk Stockings until his death in 1964.
William McBrien contrasts Porter’s refined, elegant music with the stoicism, pain and passion of a life which mixed devotion to his wife with numerous homosexual love affairs.
Talking to friends and colleagues (for example, Bob Hope, Diana Vreeland, Stephen Sondheim) who have never spoken about him before, McBrien paints a picture of Porter’s sophisticated and unstable world in Europe and America.
Researching Porter’s lyrics and correspondence, McBrien makes new links between his work and life and reveals how Porter’s particular brand of hedonism – nonchalance, lovely pals, glamorous venues, splendid tailoring, good hotels, and love – was his protection against encroaching darkness.
From the Back Cover
COLE PORTER composed some of this century’s most evocative music, including 'Night and Day', 'Easy to Love' and 'I've Got You Under My Skin'. His musical scores, notably 'Kiss Me Kate', 'High Society', 'Silk Stockings' and 'Can-Can', shaped three decades of movie-making.
This definitive biography evokes the frenetic glamour of his career on Broadway and in Hollywood. Cole Porter knew and worked with everyone who was anyone: the casts of his wildly successful musicals included (among many others) Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. His music was the up-beat accompaniment to the gloomier events of the Depression, the Second World War and the bleak years that followed. However, Porter's own suffering was never hinted at publicly or in his work.
Interweaving his life and music, McBrien contrasts Porter's raffish, elegant scores with the pain and passion of his life. He reveals the private Porter; the lost privileged man with an irrepressible talent to amuse, who had long-term relationships and frequent dalliances with many men – even though he maintained a loving marriage to the woman he truly adored. His biography contains frank interviews with friends and colleagues who until now have never spoken openly about Cole Porter. Now at last we can fully understand the man, the music and its magic – and see exactly how his doubts, desires and infatuations insinuated their way into the heart of so many brilliant and captivating lyrics.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Memorable Biography of a Brilliant Artist,
By
This review is from: Cole Porter (Paperback)
Cole Porter (1891-1964) worked hard to create 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 even 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
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful book, interlaced with his lyrics,
This review is from: Cole Porter (Paperback)
My title for this review says it all.This is an affordable and brilliantly written book about the life of one the 20th century's greatest tunesmiths and lyricists. One joy of this book is the way in which the lyrics and narrative complement and intertwine with each other to advance the story of his life. Incidentally, the film of his life ('De-lovely') does exactly the same thing. Both this book and the film manage to show just how autobiographical many of Porter's songs were, or how they reflected his own unusual attitudes to life and society. If you have any level of interest in Cole Porter - and you probably do if you're reading this review - then I heartily recommend this book to you - as well as the separate film.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Great for trivia, but forget the music,
By
This review is from: Cole Porter: The Definitive Biography (Paperback)
You would never guess, reading this long book, that Cole Porter was, above else a wonderful musician. A songrwiter up there with Gershwin, Jobim or Lennon & McCartney.
There is a fundamental thing missing in this biography and it is music. You will get the most remarkably well researched details about the socialites from the time (don't Monty Woolley and Duff Cooper or George Beisingwanger sound like characters straight out of an american PG Woodhouse?). But this is all you will get. Bearing in mind the period, and Porter's influential role in american XX century music, the following statistics from the index are remarkable. Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald get a couple of mentions, Miles, Bird, Getz, Gillespie, Basie, Ellington, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, NONE. Considering that over the years they and their successors have done more to maintain the genious of Porter alive than the Duke of Verdura (I kid you not), it is rather remarkable they are not mentioned nor Porter's view on their work. It is unfortunate that a professional biographer who's previous claim to fame were three books about Stevie Smith has taken on this task. Clearly he is methodical and thorough (he can tell you who dined with Porter every night for 30 years). HOwever he has applied his method to tracking socialites rather than the real relevance of Porter's contribution. Unfortunately he cannot make you understand Porter's influence in modern music beyond often forgotten Broadway musicals. I hope someone will take on the challenge of writing the real "definitive" biography, the one that doesn't forget the music!
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