To get to the bottom of Cole Albert Porter one would have to understand how serious there was behind a man who seemed not to take anything seriously. If we traced that huge flow of bright rhymes, we would discover a creature that was always different and fragile.

He landed in this world on June 9, 1891, in Peru, Indiana, a Victorian neighborhood, curd of ash and sumac. He was the only son who survived the marriage formed by Kate Cole, daughter of a tycoon, and Sam Porter, dependent on a drugstore. That short boy like a sixteenth, with dark eyes and bulging, chose to cause laughter rather than suffer . The maternal grandfather soon sniffed his strange condition; one afternoon he took him to a hill and said: «That is the asylum of the poor. There you will end ». His mother, however, fed the early vocation of the child. Since he was six years he has spent countless hours studying piano and violin, opting soon for the first instrument.

The grandfather kept pressing for him to study law, but the only fruit of Porter's fleeting passage through Yale and Harvard is a good handful of football hymns, which are still chanted . In 1916 he premiered his first professional show in New York, See America First, a disaster at the box office shattered by critics: «Cole Porter is a young man who should leave the composition or leave the city». Obey and enlist in the Foreign Legion in World War I.

Following his tendency to fabulation, Porter adorned his participation as an artilleryman with an epic edging in a war that, in fact, happened to him from afar . Paris was a party, at least for him. There he displayed his desires with more freedom and less fear. Porter went through life as a prophet of joy, spending an apparent frivolity that served him to be protected from the stigma of being gay. Unlike his admired Oscar Wilde, he seemed not to go wrong at all.

In 1919, he married millionaire Linda Lee Thomas, forming, more than a marriage of convenience, a care society. She tried to forget a first husband who mistreated her, she could surrender herself to her loves with other women and enjoyed Cole's company and talent; he dodged the immense loneliness of a house where no one expects, something like a home to return to after a new love disappointment. Porter confessed that he loved much more than he was loved . In 1925, he maintained an affair with Russian dancer and poet Boris Kojno. He wrote Easy to love for Ed Tauch, a Boston architect, and love for choreographer Nelson Barclift is behind the verses of You'd Be so Nice to Come Home To . In his will, Porter arranged that half of his rights should be for Ray Kelly's children, his last great love.

Although Porter's career had great ups and downs, it changed the history of musical theater forever . Two titles stand out among all his production: Anything goes (1934) and Kiss me, Kate (1948), which was his resurrection when many believed him finished (inspired by Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew ). A year before the premiere of this piece, Porter suffered a horse accident, whose consequences would suffer until the end of his days.

Especially disastrous was his relationship with the cinema ; including the biopic about his life entitled Night and Day (1946), in which Cary Grant argues in vain in a bland script and without any reference to his homosexuality. Between failures and successes, Porter left a collection of irrefutable songs: I've Got You Under My Skin , Anything Goes , I Get a Kick Out of You or Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye , to name just a few.

The death of his mother in 1952 and that of Linda in 1954, after 35 years of marriage, lead him to a deep depression aggravated by alcoholism . "If it had not been for my wife, who died two years ago, and for my mother, I would never have had the courage to continue my career in the nine years in which I did nothing but failures." Electroshocks treatment only makes things worse . In 1956 he was nominated for an Oscar for best song for True love , but once again he did not get the statuette.

In April 1958 they have to amputate his right leg in the middle of the thigh due to the osteomyelitis caused by the fall of the horse two decades earlier. The world is no longer an interesting place . Fill the emptiness of his former enthusiasm with alcohol. In 1963, they re-enter it, this time because of the severe burns when their bed caught fire while smoking. Their diet is practically reduced to whiskey and barbiturates.

The heart of Porter stops forever the night of October 15, 1964. On the other side of the phone, an employee of the funeral home of Peru hears the following: «Congratulations. We send them Cole Porter's body ». He was buried between Linda's graves and his father's. They say his last words were: "I don't know how I did it."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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