The Letters of Cole Porter
Edited by Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh
Yale University Press
662 pages, $35.
THE LETTERS of Cole Porter begins with a note in 1905 from the headmaster of Worcester Academy to Porter’s mother about the impracticality of violin lessons for her son and ends with a letter from Porter’s private secretary describing his death in the Waldorf Towers in New York in 1964. In between are almost 700 pages of letters he wrote to his lawyer, his accountant, his music publisher, the people with whom he was collaborating on a show, lovers, friends, and fans asking how he came to compose a particular song. It spans his years at Yale, his first failures on Broadway, the decade he spent in Europe, his marriage to a society woman eight years his senior, her lifelong struggles with lung disease, his return to Broadway, his ups and downs in show business, his work in Hollywood, his love affairs, the riding accident in 1937 that left him in pain for the rest of his life, and the dark final years after one of his legs was amputated.
The main impression one takes away from this book is that the composer was a very nice man. Almost every letter ends with “Love to both of you,” “All love,” “Lots of love,” “Luck and love,” or just “Love, Cole.” To Sam Stark, a gay friend in Los Angeles, he signs off: “Good-bye Sam. You have no idea how much we love you. Often during the day Linda and I sit together and simply repeat over and over, ‘We love Sam,’ and even as I sign my name tears are dropping because you are so far away.” Tongue in cheek perhaps, but not entirely. The presiding tone is one of affection and unfailing good manners, though the reader seldom sees beneath the surface. Porter did not use his correspondence to ruminate the way, say, Henry Adams did; there are few revelations or glimpses into his intellectual or spiritual struggles, whatever they were.
To give us perspective, the editors have supplemented Porter’s telegrams, thank you notes, and letters with interviews he gave, essays he wrote, letters from other people, and copious footnotes that are so scrupulous they verge occasionally on the nutty. We even get the lists of items he wanted in the hotel suite he occupied in Philadelphia during try-outs (a brief sample: pickles, 24 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, 3 lbs. of pot roast, linen napkins, cold cuts, witch hazel, milk of magnesia, 2 Tubes Toilet Lanolin, 1 Carter’s Little Liver Powder, 1 Large Nivea Skin Oil). There is also a section from the diary Porter kept while working in Hollywood for the first time (on Born to Dance in 1936) and another that he kept while cruising the Greek Islands on Stavros Niarchos’ yacht in 1955.
The movie diary establishes Porter’s character early on: the contrast between the screenwriters inventing and discarding a new concept every day, and the businesslike Porter merely waiting to be told what sort of song was needed in what scene so he can get to work. Porter could come up with a song whenever it was needed on a moment’s notice. He loved his craft. “I’d rather write than do anything on earth,” he told an interviewer. “I can work anywhere.” Indeed, he told The New York Times: “When this horse fell on me, I was too stunned to be conscious of great pain, but until help came I worked on the lyrics for … a song called ‘At Long Last Love.’”
His incredible discipline allowed him to survive an era when a lot of artists succumbed to booze or burn-out of one sort or another. “Thanks for the story on Scott Fitz. G.,” Porter writes to Sam Stark in 1949 from Williamstown, Massachusetts. “I knew him first when he was a most attractive cock-teaser. Later I knew him with Zelda. They were both exhibitionist drunkards + when I saw them anywhere in Paris, I always made a quick exit for I knew that if I stayed, this would implicate me in a possible police raid. They were all that is tawdry. And the dégringolade of Scott was horrible to watch as he had so much talent.”
As for his own domestic life: “Sturges [a Yale classmate and close friend]is here in the cottage with me. The trees have begun to turn. The skies are spectacular. The cook is pure French with an ass so big that I can’t understand how she keeps her balance. I’m working well, I believe. But Linda is dying. All my love.” The postscript: “Get hold of Robert. He needs nice people like you + Allan. He is so alone. Your devoted, Cole.”
Robert Bray was a handsome ex-Marine who looked like “a big motorcycle cop,” according to Jean Howard, a friend of Porter’s. Bray, who became an actor in TV westerns, is often mentioned in these letters, but after he left his wife and children, Porter wrote him out of his will. Porter was a man of many contradictions, and one of them was that this composer whose lyrics were loved for their sophisticated hedonism was in many ways an old-fashioned Victorian. In fact, his idols when he started to write music were Gilbert and Sullivan: “I was Gilbert and Sullivan crazy,” he told an interviewer. “They had a big influence on my life.”
Although Porter was a man with a Victorian upbringing, what runs beneath so many of his songs is sex.
Yet the fact that he was homosexual did not seem to bother him in the slightest. When Porter writes that he’s sending a friend a book by Harrison Dowd called The Night Air (1950)—an early 1950s novel about a homosexual in the theater world—he says he hopes the friend can explain it because he, Porter, cannot. One suspects the reason is that Porter couldn’t comprehend a homosexual character tortured by guilt. He did, on the other hand, understand Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. “I think this book is extraordinary,” he writes to Sam Stark. “Certainly the author knows his subject + he writes well.”
But then Porter had no patience with self-pity of any kind. There was a pillow in his home embroidered with the French translation of “Never explain—Never complain.” He certainly didn’t. He was a disciplined, stoic, often aloof man with a very strong will—until it came to matters of the heart. Of the two batches of love letters here, the first is to Boris Kochno, a Russian poet who was also Diaghilev’s lover and amanuensis, the second to a Broadway dancer named Nelson Barclift. To Kochno: “I’m so hungry for you to tell me that you love me & thousands of times, so I can look at your written words in the night when I long to have you pressing against me, your lips on mine—your lips that I caress so often and so tenderly, my dear Boris. … I’m leaving Florence early Wednesday to avoid seeing you. It would be easy to arrange but I realize we must not.”
ALTHOUGH Porter married a beautiful, rich socialite named Linda Lee Thomas and remained married to her for 35 years until her death from emphysema, all the while he carried on an active sex life with other men—men he wanted Linda to meet because it was important to him that she like them as well. The two of them led separate lives in many ways. Even at their country getaway in Williamstown, they lived apart (as they did in the Waldorf Towers, where Linda’s apartment was across the hall from Cole’s). Linda’s house in Williamstown was called Buxton Hill; the name of the cottage Cole occupied nearby was named No Trespassing. And every year after 1936, he spent several months working on a movie in Hollywood, where he hosted all-male pool parties on Sundays at his place in Brentwood, parties at which no women were allowed. What linked Cole and Linda, it seems, was not just the love they evidently had for one another but a shared enthusiasm for a glamorous, sophisticated social life.
This legendary social life started in the1920s, when Porter fled to Europe after his first three attempts on Broadway were such flops that Richard Rodgers, when he visited Porter in his rented palazzo in Venice, had never heard of any of them. It was a life centered on dukes, duchesses, countesses, princes, society decorators, artists, and the very rich. Closeted lesbian Elsa Maxwell was the ringleader; Porter was the link between Hollywood “royalty” and the real kind. “I have a request to make,” he writes Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 1947. “The Duke and Duchess of Montoro will arrive in Los Angeles in about ten days. Linda and I decided that the nicest people to be nice to them would be you and Mary Lee. … You will find them everything delightful, and she is so pretty. They … like all the rest of the world, hunger to meet film stars and see pictures being made.”
Part of this glamorous image was manufactured. Monty Woolley—the star of 1942’s The Man Who Came To Dinner,” Porter’s Yale classmate and lifelong friend until Porter dropped him after Woolley took as his lover a black “manservant”—reported that Porter didn’t come from a really good family, even if it was the most prominent in Peru, Indiana. Someone else said you could see Porter’s birthplace in the way he dressed. No matter. The pride of Peru ended up living in the Waldorf Towers in an apartment designed by Billy Baldwin. It was all white tie, and opening nights with ermine and jewels. At one point Porter asked Linda why she didn’t use the new Cadillac that he bought her every year, and she replied that it was because the upholstery “bruises my sables” (a joke, one hopes). It helped that both Linda and Cole were rich. “People always say that so much money spoils one’s life,” Porter said. “But it didn’t spoil mine; it simply made it wonderful.” On the other hand, one of the surprises of this book is the degree to which Porter worried about his finances, especially as he got older. He even wondered whether, because more income from Hollywood would put him in a higher income tax bracket, a new movie would make him “poorer.”
Reading this book, you wonder about Porter’s apparent snobbery, but before long you realize it wasn’t as simple as that. According to a friend, Porter hated snobs and social climbers. But on page 369 of The Letters is a list of Cole Porter’s guests for the opening night of Out of This World (his follow-up to his biggest hit, Kiss Me, Kate). The roll-call is led by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and goes on to include Merle Oberon, Andre Kostelanetz, Lily Pons, Main Bocher, the Duke di Verdura, Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, and Countess di Zoppola. But a few pages later, in a letter to Sam Stark, he mocks a mutual friend named Michael Pearman, who has just taken a job in a hotel: “Michael seems to like his job very much, but I worry for him as I am so afraid that he will insult some of the customers, as not all of them belong either in the Social Register or to Burke’s Peerage.” What seems to have mattered to him most were two qualities he mentions in a letter to Stark about his friend Sturges: “he—like you—has the rare genius of companionship with humor.”
In both Hollywood and New York he seems to have entertained almost every night. He kept lists of his lunch and dinner guests, the menu, and the service that was used. Weeks before arriving in L.A. for his annual visit, he’d write friends to schedule them. He seems never to have eaten a meal alone. This played out at the end of his life in rather surreal terms. After years of pain following the riding accident, Porter went into a deep depression when one of his legs was finally amputated. Having to be bathed and dressed by his valet, or ask dinner guests to momentarily withdraw so he could urinate, had to be demoralizing to a man as fastidious as he was. (As Linda wrote to her friend Bernard Berenson about her own setbacks: “Illness is so humiliating!”) After losing his leg, Porter continued to have people to dinner at the Waldorf, though toward the end of his life an extraordinary thing happened: he stopped speaking to them. The guests were expected to keep talking while Porter remained mum. Needless to say, this made it harder for him to obtain dinner companions. But Porter was resourceful. If there was no guest, he’d have his butler pretend to be one. The butler would serve the meal, and then when he sat down, he turned into a guest.
Toward the very end, Porter stopped eating much as well, and—perhaps the saddest thing in the book—his letters, even to long-time correspondents like Sam Stark, became terse and distant, in contrast to the chatty, funny tone of the middle years. He also stopped taking on new composing assignments. He had made his way with words, and at one point the words stopped coming, in both conversation and lyric-writing, though just before the final section of The Letters we get a marvelous diary he kept of his travels through Italy, Greece, and Egypt—full of curiosity and delight in everything he saw. The monks on Mt. Athos annoyed this very hard-working man because they didn’t seem to do anything. “The ones who are here do no good,” he writes. “This has always been true. They merely have retired from life. The one I met today seemed to be happy but nearly infantile. … It is a strange experience to have been here, and fascinating, but it reeks of rot.”
Then his own leg began to rot, and was amputated, and Mrs. Madeline Smith, his secretary, took over, writing to Sam Stark to tell him what was really happening as Porter was hospitalized for months on end. And then, with his mother (who died at ninety) and Linda gone, a crushing loneliness came to a man whose music had often lamented the transience of love. In 1958 Porter and his dog Pep were being taken care of by the very faithful valet Paul Sylvain, which led Mrs. Smith to write Stark: “You have one advantage over Mr. Porter that I can think of. You have a fine wife to help you get well.” (Sam Stark was an apparently gay man whose male partner Porter always sent his best at the end of a letter, but then Stark married a woman related to a mafia clan in Kansas City, according to a footnote, and his partner Allen disappeared from the correspondence.) But, she goes on to say: “Mr. P. seems so alone—friends and admirers by the thousands, but no immediate family. I take little black ‘Pep’ home with me every week-end—as he is the only other creature—except Paul (Sylvain)—who lives in this beautiful apartment.”
It’s letters like Mrs. Smith’s that give us a view of Porter that we could not have gained by reading only his own correspondence. Reading The Collected Letters, for instance, one wouldn’t know that Porter had any feelings about his wife’s death whatsoever. Here’s the telegram he sent to Abe Burrows: “Linda died today. Please no flowers.” You need a biography to learn that he cried like a baby at the funeral. Such is the limitation of this, or any, book of letters. On the one hand, they give us Porter in an unmediated fashion—we can form our own judgments. As quotidian as many of them are, we see the life of a busy, sociable, successful composer. On the other hand, they leave out so much that one is bound to turn to a biography like the one cited most frequently in the footnotes, William McBrien’s Cole Porter (2000). There one gets the full narrative, and it’s riveting. Porter was a man of many contradictions. The author of innumerable courtesies, the man who sent the paramedic that reached him first after the riding accident tickets to all his musicals for the rest of his life, also had, according to a friend quoted in McBrien, a “mean streak.”
A letter from Mrs. Smith closes the collection, like a Greek chorus commenting on the tragedy. “I am glad you agree with me that we must not grieve for our friend,” she writes to Porter’s friend Jean Howard after he died in 1964, “for he will never have to suffer again. This is the end of an Era. Three great and good men have left the Waldorf now: General MacArthur, Cole Porter, and Herbert Hoover, this year.”
Only in America.
Andrew Holleran is the author of the novelsDancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, andGrief.
