46 Facts About Cole Porter

Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter.

Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Cole Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the music for his songs.

Cole Porter's other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes, Can-Can, and Silk Stockings.

Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, the only surviving child of a wealthy family.

Cole Porter'sfather, Samuel Fenwick Porter, was a druggist by trade.

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Cole Porter's father was a talented singer and pianist, but the father-son relationship was not close.

Cole Porter brought an upright piano with him to school and found that music, and his ability to entertain, made it easy for him to make friends.

Cole Porter wrote 300 songs while at Yale, including student songs such as the football fight songs "Bulldog" and "Bingo Eli Yale" that are still played at Yale.

Cole Porter'smother did not object to this move, but it was kept secret from J O Cole.

In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Cole Porter moved to Paris to work with the Duryea Relief organization.

Cole Porter maintained a luxury apartment in Paris, where he entertained lavishly.

Cole Porter'sparties were extravagant and scandalous, with "much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians, and a large surplus of recreational drugs".

For Cole Porter, it brought a respectable heterosexual front in an era when homosexuality was not publicly acknowledged.

Finally, Cole Porter enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he studied orchestration and counterpoint with Vincent d'Indy.

The Cole Porter home on the rue Monsieur near Les Invalides was a palatial house with platinum wallpaper and chairs upholstered in zebra skin.

Cole Porter received few commissions for songs in the years immediately after his marriage.

Cole Porter's work was one of the earliest symphonic jazz-based compositions, predating George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue by four months, and was well received by both French and American reviewers after its premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in October 1923.

Cole Porter had less success with his work on The Greenwich Village Follies .

Frustrated by the public response to most of his work, Cole Porter nearly gave up songwriting as a career, although he continued to compose songs for friends and perform at private parties.

At the age of 36, Cole Porter reintroduced himself to Broadway in 1928 with the musical Paris, his first hit.

Ray Goetz, producer of Paris and Fifty Million Frenchmen, the success of which had kept him solvent when other producers were bankrupted by the post-crash slump in Broadway business, invited Cole Porter to write a musical show about the other city that he knew and loved: New York.

Goetz offered the team with whom Cole Porter had last worked: Herbert Fields writing the book and Cole Porter's old friend Monty Woolley directing.

Cole Porter followed this with a West End show for Gertrude Lawrence, Nymph Errant, presented by Cochran at the Adelphi Theatre, where it ran for 154 performances.

Cole Porter wrote what many consider his greatest score of this period.

The New Yorker magazine's review said, "Mr Cole Porter is in class by himself", and Cole Porter subsequently called it one of his two perfect shows, along with the later Kiss Me, Kate.

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Now at the height of his success, Cole Porter was able to enjoy the opening night of his musicals; he made grand entrances and sat in front, apparently relishing the show as much as any audience member.

Cole Porter composed the cowboy song "Don't Fence Me In" for Adios, Argentina, an unproduced movie, in 1934, but it did not become a hit until Roy Rogers sang it in the 1944 film Hollywood Canteen.

When his film assignment on Rosalie was finished in 1937, Cole Porter hastened to Paris to make peace with Linda, but she remained cool.

On October 24,1937, Cole Porter was riding with Countess Edith di Zoppola and Duke Fulco di Verdura at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, when his horse rolled on him and crushed his legs, leaving him substantially crippled and in constant pain for the rest of his life.

Cole Porter's last show of the 1930s was DuBarry Was a Lady, a particularly risque show starring Merman and Bert Lahr.

Meanwhile, as political unrest increased in Europe, Cole Porter's wife closed their Paris house in 1939, and the next year bought a country home in the Berkshire mountains, near Williamstown, Massachusetts, which she decorated with elegant furnishings from their Paris home.

Panama Hattie was Cole Porter's longest-running hit so far, running in New York for 501 performances despite the absence of any enduring Cole Porter songs.

From this low spot, Cole Porter made a conspicuous comeback in 1948 with Kiss Me, Kate.

Cole Porter began the 1950s with Out of This World, which had some good numbers but too much camp and vulgarity, and was not greatly successful.

Cole Porter'snext show, Can-Can, featuring "C'est Magnifique" and "It's All Right with Me", was another hit, running for 892 performances.

Cole Porter wrote two more film scores and music for a television special before ending his Hollywood career.

Cole Porter wrote numbers for the film Les Girls, which starred Gene Kelly.

Cole Porter's mother died in 1952, and his wife died of emphysema in 1954.

Cole Porter died of kidney failure at age 73 on October 15,1964, in Santa Monica, California.

In that same year, Red Hot + Blue was released as a benefit CD for AIDS research and featured 20 Cole Porter songs recorded by artists such as U2 and Annie Lennox.

In 1980, Cole Porter's music was used for the score of Happy New Year, based on the Philip Barry play Holiday.

In contrast to the highly embellished 1946 screen biography Night and Day, Cole Porter's life was chronicled more realistically in De-Lovely, a 2004 Irwin Winkler film starring Kevin Kline as Cole Porter and Ashley Judd as Linda.

Cole Porter appears as a character in Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris.

Many events commemorated the centenary of Cole Porter's birth, including the halftime show of the 1991 Orange Bowl.

Cole Porter is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame and Great American Songbook Hall of Fame, which recognized his "musically complex [songs] with witty, urbane lyrics".

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In 2014, Cole Porter was honored with a plaque on the Legacy Walk in Chicago, which celebrates LGBT achievers.