It's Delightful. It's Delicious. It's De-Lovely!

"I researched that with a rose specialist in London," says Stewart, an Oscar nominee for her work on a previous music-filled film, Topsy-Turvy. "He made a drawing of the rose and then I had thousands of silk ones made after the drawing...I wanted to show how much Cole loved her, really."

So taunt me and hurt me

Deceive me, desert me

I'm yours, till I die

So in love with you,

my love, am I

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For yes, It's De-Lovely is, at heart, a love story--albeit, as one character says in the film, "a little unconventional." Cole was born in Peru, Indiana, to a wealthy Midwestern family in 1891. By age 6 he was playing piano, by 10 he was composing, and in his college years at Yale (where he was voted "Most Entertaining Man") he wrote over 800 songs, some of which are fight songs still sung there today. After a brief stint at Harvard, Cole continued his songwriting pursuits in Paris, joining the expat "Lost Generation" and throwing fabulous, decadent parties attended by the glitterati.

But his music career didn't really launch until he met socialite divorcee Linda Lee Thomas, a blueblood beauty perhaps as much as 15 years his senior. They married in 1919, and though it would appear to be the textbook definition of a marriage of convenience, It's De-Lovely posits that it was more complicated than that. Beyond their shared enthusiasm for café-society life, Linda realized Cole's potential for greatness and skillfully nurtured his talent, helping him make crucial professional connections, setting up this work spaces and, not least of all, serving as the muse for many--if not all--of his indelible love songs. She had to tolerate his many clandestine affairs with men--he would even submit his lovers to her for approval--and they eventually slept in different bedrooms, but it was Linda who remained the love of Cole's life and who knew him more intimately than anyone.

The complexities of their relationship looked like fertile, unexplored dramatic ground to Winkler when he came into contact with the Cole Porter Trusts, which were interested in keeping the songwriter's catalogue in front of the public and hopefully creating a new generation of Cole Porter fans through film. Winkler loved the music--he'd grown up on Porter and Berlin and George Gershwin--but he'd also seen the previous, whitewashed Cole Porter biopic, 1946's Night and Day, which starred Cary Grant as Cole and Alexis Smith as Linda and left out Cole's same-sex liaisons in favor of recounting as fact the fanciful (and unverified) tales Cole told of his war heroics. So Winkler wasn't interested unless he was given the freedom to do a "really honest portrayal," he says--warts and all, no holds barred. Happily, "they had no objection when they saw the (script or the film," he says.

There have been other songwriter biopics over the years--Winkler points to l945's Rhapsody in Blue (about Gershwin) and 1948's Words and Music (about Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart)--but he felt that an uncoventional life like Cole's necessitated a non-traditional, edgier approach. He and screenwriter Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York) developed the framing device of an aging, near-death Cole looking back on the scenes of his life while sitting in an empty theater, the principal players in his life acting out its key moments on stage, with Cole's glorious songs providing the soundtrack to his memories.

In casting an actor to play Cole, Winkler says they needed someone who could play the piano--because he didn't want to fake it--and sing and dance and was attractive. "Kevin was all of those things," he says, "so it was a natural fit." Kline, who starred in Winkler's last film, Life as a House, actually had studied composition in college and won two Tony Awards for his musical performances in The Pirates of Penzance and On the Twentieth Century on Broadway. For It's De-Lovely, Kline took nine months of voice and piano lessons, spent up to five hours getting into makeup to play Cole in his last years and insisted on recording his vocals and piano playing for the film live on set--almost unheard of for a large -scale production because the quality of sound is often compromised.

Experiment

Make it your motto day and night

Experiment

And it will lead you to the light

The apple on the top of the tree

Is never too high to achieve

So take an example from Eve

Experiment

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