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Cole Porter: A Biography
by William Mcbrien
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Knopf (1998-10-06)
ISBN: 0394582357
EAN: 9780394582351
Dewy Decimal #: 782.14092
Hardcover: 480 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1998-10-06
SKU: 08030212
Condition: Very Good As issued
Comments: Trade Paperback. Very Good plus condition with no markings. Owners plate on flyleaf. No highlights, underlines or notes in text. No creases to spine or cover. Minor wear to cover. Tight binding and clean crisp text. Very Nice copy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
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
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Product Description
The most richly told biography we have had of one of the most important and beguiling composer/lyricists of the century--the incomparable Cole Porter, whose songs were the essence of wit and sophistication and whose life was marked by tragedy, courage, sorrow, and secrecy.
McBrien reveals the private Porter: his privileged Indiana youth (he composed his first song at ten). He went East to boarding school and to Yale, where he wrote the football anthems "Hail to Yale" and "Bull Dog," and show after show in which many of his classmates appeared--among them, Archibald MacLeish, Gerald Murphy, Dean Acheson, and Averell Harriman. Then a brief, unhappy stint at Harvard Law School. Off to Paris at twenty-six, and in crisis joining the French Foreign Legion during the First World War. Two years later, Cole Porter had his first Broadway hit.
William McBrien's biography, the result of ten years of work and bursting with stories and scenes of Porter's life, takes us beyond the patina of Porter's very public career, beyond the high and low aristocratic worlds of Venice (Porter with Elsa Maxwell in 1923 together put Venice back on the map as the place to be), beyond the opulent parties and costume balls on two continents he not only attended but threw himself--and made into an art form. McBrien takes us into Porter's seemingly conventional marriage to reveal his complicated emotional life--the lost, privileged man who had a wild, irrepressible talent to amuse but at first find couldn't find his voice; the man who married "the most beautiful woman in the world," the very social, very southern Linda Lee Thomas, but who preferred his own sex. He had long relationships as well as frequent dalliances with many men but for thirty-five years maintained a loving marriage to the woman he truly adored.
We see the supremely gifted Porter who created twenty musicals on Broadway (Anything Goes, DuBarry Was a Lady, Gay Divorce, Born to Dance), writing for such stars as Ethel Merman, Fred Astaire, Mary Martin, Bert Lahr, and Bea Lilly; and who gave Hollywood Fifty Million Frenchmen, The Gay Divorcee, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1940, Night and Day, High Society, Silk Stockings, Can-Can, and Kiss Me, Kate.
Porter was "the top" and lived at the top, but his life was catastrophically transformed after a near-fatal horseback-riding accident. The thirty-one operations during the next eighteen years brought on increasing pain, and the growing paralysis that darkened his life was never hinted at publicly nor in his work.
Interweaving the life and the music, McBrien shows us a man whose genius as a composer flowered in deceptively simple melodies that were thought to be completely modern but today are considered ingenious, complicated, and steeped in the nineteenth-century tradition of lieder; a composer whose craft concealed complicated solutions to musical problems while it enchanted his audiences. And we come to understand how Porter's doubts and desires, longings and infatuations, insinuated their way into the heart of his incomparable words and music.
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Customer Reviews
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Good, but not great.
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-02-20
5 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
I suppose the challenge of reading a biography is slogging through the parts of the person's life in which you have little interest. As a musical theatre performer, I was most interested in the chapters devoted to the genesis of Porter's shows - to me, these were the most interesting, and seemingly well researched. The rest of it, particularly his early life, did not quite spark my interest. I did find the ending chapters - dealing with Cole's descent into melancholy and illness - to be touching. I did gain some insight into the glamorous world of Mr. Porter's time - quite the polar opposite to the Great Depression and WWII. In the sense that I admire books that give me a glimpse into a world different from my own, I liked it.
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Night and Day this is the one Cole biography to read
Rating (3)
Date: 2004-08-18
23 out of 24 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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A Memorable Biography of a Brilliant Artist
Rating  (5)
Date: 2004-06-10
43 out of 44 customers found this reveiw helpful
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
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READ IT!
Rating (5)
Date: 2003-01-11
14 out of 16 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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A Ride Down Memory Lane
Rating (3)
Date: 2002-06-26
7 out of 12 customers found this reveiw helpful
I was more curious about Cole Porter's life because I, too, am in love with the lyrics and music he created. Songs like ANYTHING GOES, YOU'RE THE TOP, I LOVE PARIS to name a few are classics to no end. I like a book that takes me back in time, but I'd prefer a good story. I was a bit disappointed how the book became too informational with naming of who's who and who did what vs. a classic story. There are definitely stories behind the stories that would be much more interesting...so, I suppose we have to use our imagination. This book is a great resource to anyone studying about Cole Porter. I had no idea about his horse accident which really put a damper on his lifestyle. He was quite the world traveler in the 20s & 30s which is quite an accomplishment in those days. He definitely had a way with words...but if you read this...complement it with a CD of the COLE PORTER Songbook. It took me a while to get through this because it IS a book that you can put down & keep on your coffee table for a long time (before you pick it up again).
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