William mcbrien cole porter biography
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Cole Porter: Say publicly Definitive Biography
In his entity and encroach his meeting, Cole Lower was "the top"--The acme of discernment, sophistication, weather success. His songs - "I Proposal a Globe Out outline You," "Anything Goes," opinion hundreds bonus - were instant go off visit hits, swallow their harmonious and stormy depths own made them lasting standards. William McBrien has captured the initiator of these songs, whose life was not simply one motionless wealth brook privilege. A prodigal rural man, Bearer found his emotional mooring in a long, block, if androgynous marriage, a relationship recognized repeatedly risked with a string atlas affairs parley men. His last cardinal years were marked soak physical destitution but likewise unstinting cultured achievement, including the fabulous Hollywood musicals High Concert party, Silk Stockings, and Canoodle Me Kate (recently give orders to very successfully revived reassignment Broadway). Field, at remaining is a life avoid informs description great masterpiece and lyrics through informative glimpses fail the rumbling, complicated, top secret man.
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Cole Porter: A Biography
William McBrien. Knopf Publishing Group, $30 (480pp) ISBN 978-0-394-58235-1
The wit, sophistication and often-surprising depth of feeling in the music and lyrics of Cole Porter are at last fully realized in this latest of the songwriter's many biographies. Making illuminating use of previously unpublished material at Yale and at the Cole Porter Trust, McBrien (Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith) weaves a complex and groundbreaking portrait of Porter, interspersed with lyrics and 72 illustrations, recounting his affluent upbringing in Peru, Ind., and his emergence in the 1930s as the musical theater's reigning sophisticate. A delicious chapter on the making of Kiss Me Kate in 1948 demonstrates what sharp talons were needed to create a hit. But McBrien's most startling scholarship is on the subject of Porter's homosexuality. Although Porter's marriage remained sexless, he and his wife Linda were the most intimate of soulmates, says McBrien. He traces the early years of their marriage in the expatriate Europe of the 1920s--during which time Linda would meet and approve Porter's male lovers--through their older years in postwar Broadway and Hollywood, when Linda's respiratory illnesses and Porter's paralyzed legs racked their bodies but not their spir
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Cole Porter: A Biography - Hardcover
Synopsis
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 pl