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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1940, a Profile of Cole Porter
On October 24, 1937, Cole Porter went out for a horseback ride at the Piping Rock Club, in Locust Valley, Long Island--one of those swank playgrounds whose names he liked to rhyme in song and which signalled his fully paid-up membership in the Elegentsia. In the woods, the skittish horse, which the forty-six-year-old Porter had been warned against riding, shied and fell on him, crushing both his legs. According to Porter--a story that William McBrien, the author of "Cole Porter: A Biography" (1998), finds "difficult to believe"--he passed the excruciating hours while he waited to be rescued composing the lyrics to an elusive verse of his song "At Long Last Love."
The moment was pivotal in Porter's life; so, too, was his recounting of it. The lyrics to "At Long Last Love" are, of course, exquisite--"Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? / Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock? / Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy? / Or is what I feel the real McCoy?"--but Porter's talent for masquerade, for turning life's griefs and glories into an impudent game, didn't end there. In gruelling pain for decades after the accident, forced to walk with braces and canes, he nonetheless had the humor to give his lame legs names: the left he christened Josephine, the right Geraldine, "a hellion, a bitch, a psychopath." Even at the end of his life, his apartment at the Waldorf Towers, in New York, was decorated with an embroidered pillow that advised, in French, "Don't Explain--Don't Complain."
Porter's entire life was built around the act of decoying his depths. From the moment in 1905 when the elfin fourteen-year-old from a powerful lumber and mining family in Peru, Indiana--the pampered and only surviving one of three siblings--arrived at Worcester Academy, in Massachusetts, with his paintings and an upright piano for his dorm room, he cast himself as a kind of dandy. The dandy's strategy is to combine daring with tact, flamboyance with distance. Instead of breaking the rules, Porter learned to play with them. "At boarding school I was always taught," he wrote in "I'm in Love," "not to reveal what I really thought, / Nor ever once let my eyes betray / The dreadful things I longed to say." At Yale, where he had a sensational undergraduate career, his salmon-colored ties, his slick, center-parted hair, and his manicured nails broadcast his privilege and his rebellion. "Porter did not fit easily into the social mold of a Yale man," his friend Gerald...
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