Those elegant days are, lamentably, forever a fond memory. m/rIndiana Cole and his Temple of Tunes :: SteynOnline
by Mark Steyn
On the Town
October 11, 2014
Cole Porter died fifty years ago this week - October 15th 1964, in Santa Monica. His last years were neither happy nor productive. His wife Linda had succumbed to emphysema a decade earlier, and in 1958, as a consequence of a terrible riding accident in the late Thirties, he had to have his leg amputated. After which he never wrote another song. Half-a-century on, his name remains potent in a way few of his contemporaries can claim - that's to say, if you put "the new Cole Porter revue" on a Broadway or West End marquee, it will still sell tickets. They even made a new biopic about him not so long ago, with Kevin Kline in the role. So for our Saturday showbiz feature, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the uncommon Cole, subsequent to last week's Song of the Week and just ahead of this week's:
In the motion picture Hannah And Her Sisters, there's a scene in the Café Carlyle in which Bobby Short, tuxedoed and buttonholed, gives a joyful, tremulous rendition of "I'm In Love Again". Woody Allen's character looks rapt; his date, a devotée of punk, yawns and snorts her way through the number. "You don't deserve Cole Porter," he tells her despairingly, as they part on the sidewalk.
These days, who does? Yet, in a pop culture wholly alien to him, he retains a cachet among the caterwaulers that Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers or even Irving Berlin can't match. He embodies what the middle-aged rockers are looking for when they make their inevitable "Great American Songbook" albums. His enduring luster is all the more surprising because, far more than his contemporaries, Porter's songs seem explicitly tailored to a very particular socio-cultural moment, when Mrs Astor and Irene Bordoni jostled for attention in his breezy laundry list lyrics with Pepsodent and Phenolax. If he was writing for posterity, you'd think he'd have eased up on the society-page name-dropping.
And yet the best songs - an awful lot of them - are forever: "Night And Day", "I Get A Kick Out Of You", "In The Still Of The Night", "I've Got You Under My Skin": …
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