Jet-setting, high-living and never, ever dull, Cole and Linda Porter reigned jubilantly among the glitterati of their day. Now the debonair pair is back on the scene in a lush new film filled with Cole's innumerable, indelible love songs.
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Cole Porter was truly an entertainer--in more than one sense of the word. As a songwriter he was arguably unparalleled in crafting exquisitely witty, breezily incisive love songs: "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Just One of Those Things," "I've Got You Under My Skin." They're lyrically and musically intricate ditties that were both enormously popular and critically lauded, advancing the nascent art form of the Broadway musical in triumphant shows like Anything Goes, Silk Stockings, Can-Can and his crowning success, Kiss Me, Kate.
But Cole Porter and his socialite wife Linda also knew how to entertain. Stylish, sophisticated and vivacious, the Porters were the epitome of high society in the first half of the 20th century, throwing the grandest parties and livening up other people's dull ones. They kept company with the crème de la crème--the likes of Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, gossip maven and party hostess Elsa Maxwell, Ballets Russes founder Serge Diaghilev, Fred and Adele Astaire and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (among many other European royalty). They made their plush homes, over the years, in Paris and Venice, New York and Hollywood. And, oh yes, they were always impeccably dressed. Cole employed the best tailors, wore the finest fabrics, defined the word "dapper"; Linda's flawless taste made her a style icon known the world over.
NOW THE PORTERS ARE KICKING up their heels once more as embodied by Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd in It's De-Lovely, director Irwin Winkler's $30-million, music-filled biopic spanning the decades of Cole and Linda's lifelong, somewhat unorthodox love affair. (He trysted with numerous men on the side, and she allowed it--so long as he was discreet and didn't cause a scandal.) It's hardly a surprise that there's interest again in the Porters in this age of celebrity idolatry and fixation. "Cole was so magnificent and so rich," says Eve Stewart, It's De-Lovely's production designer. "He was the kind of person that you'd have on the front page of Hello! magazine [or Us Weekly, for us non-Brits] every week."
There's something wild about you, child
That's so contagious
Let's be outrageous
Let's misbehave
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They lived the most extravagant and the most glamorous lifestyle," says the film's costume designer, Janty Yates. "They were the ones that were immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. There had been nobody more elegant than Cole and Linda Porter--they really were the forerunners." Designer Bill Blass ranks them among the top five most stylish figures of the 20th century. Not even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could compare to Linda in her day.
"Whereas Jackie O. went to acknowledged designers," says Yates, "Linda Porter discovered them"--particularly Mainbocher, whose clothes Linda was closely associated with all her life. The Porters helped the Sicilian nobleman-turned-jeweler Duke Fulco di Verdura to establish himself apart from Chanel, and when they traveled by train, they did so with an entire coach reserved only for their garments. In fact, the phrase "very Linda Porter-ish" entered the lexicon of chic at the time.
Although Yates, who won an Oscar for her work on Gladiator, talked to one or two other fashion houses for the film, her gut instinct was that no designer was more suited to the Cole Porter story than Giorgio Armani, whose creations have long been heavily influenced by '20s and '30s fashions. Yates had previously worked with the house of Armani for Anthony Hopkins' wardrobe in Hannibal, and, coincidentally, Armani is a close friend of Judd's and even designed her wedding dress for her marriage to Dario Franchitti in 2001.
Armani, whose name was made in the States when Richard Gere modeled Armani wardrobe throughout 1980's American Gigolo, personally fitted Kline's dozens of suits for the film. "It was amazing to see him work," marvels Winkler. "He's on his knees with chalk, pins in his mouth. You would think that the man runs this big empire and he's sitting in an office somewhere--no. He's out there doing the actual clothes and that was great to see."
For It's De-Lovely, Yates was given free run of Armani's archives, warehouses and even his shop floors in Italy and England. For Judd, Yates adapted "vintage" Armani gowns to crisp, elegant '20s, '30s and '40s styles. "Every evening dress that Ashley put on just made my heart leap," she says. Yates also had other dresses made, drawing upon designers of the times to create a single look for Judd, with Mainbocher as a guiding light. "We kept everything silk or silk chiffon or silk satin," says Yates. "We were very faithful to the fabric and the cut of the day."
The sumptuous apparel was complemented by similarly luxe accessories granted to the production: jewelry by Verdura, vintage evening bags by Van Cleef & Arpels, pearls by Mikimoto, diamonds by Chanel Joaillerie and, for Kline, hats by Borsalino and shoes by Church's. Production designer Stewart even borrowed some of Cole's personal effects from the Cole Porter Trusts to help Kline get into character. Stewart also draped the film's wedding scene in giant roses, inspired by the fact that Cole once had a rose created for Linda, which was named--what else?--the Linda Porter rose.
"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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It's De-Lovely, Winkler says, hews pretty closely to the biographical events in Porter's life, but liberties were taken with the chronology of Porter's songs to serve the drama of the tale. "I wanted to use the music as I felt the emotions required rather than stick to what he wrote when he wrote it," he says. Once Cocks used the lyrics to figure out where the songs fit in the story dramatically, it was up to music supervisor Steven Endelman to make them work musically.
"Irwin put the gauntlet down," says Endelman. "He said, 'I don't want old, nothing too new.' He wanted pop, jazz and Broadway all in one go, so that was the challenge for me." Endelman--who had previously worked on another musical biopic, Bride of the Wind, about Dutch classical composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma--was a fan of Porter s music, but he "wasn't a Cole Porter zealot," he says. "I wasn't somebody who was going to say, 'Oh my God, we can't do that because it's going to be sacreligious to the written note of Cole Porter.'"
Thus Endelman rearranged, for example, the usual rumba-like rhythm of "Begin the Beguine" into a much slower, melancholy lament that punctuates a tragic moment in the film for Cole and Linda. But none of the Cole Porter experts consulted for the film had objections to the new interpretations. "In fact, they were so pleased with what was done musically" says Endelman.
The filmmakers went after a variety of recording artists to perform Porter's songs in the film, looking to attract as wide a demographic as possible. But they were pleasantly surprised that many artists were actually clamoring to be in the film.
"I didn't think that that many contemporary pop singers really knew that much about Cole Porter," says Winkler. Of course, there were obvious choices like Diana Krall (who performs "Just One of Those Things" and "I Get a Kick Out of You"), who's included Porter in her repertoire for years, and Natalie Cole ("Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"), whose father, Nat King Cole, popularized quite a few Porter tunes. But the Porter song-book also stoked the enthusiasm of big names from the pop-rock world like Sheryl Crow ("Begin the Beguine") and Alanis Morissette ("Let's Do It [Let's Fall in Love]").
"I knew that Alanis had actually sung this kind of material years ago as a kid," Endelman says. "She walks in and she goes, 'OK, Steven, I can give you Jagged Little Pill, or I can give you Broadway. What do you want?' I said, 'Well, I'd like it to be down the center, a bit of this and a bit of that,' and that's what we did."
It's De-Lovely also brought out the unlikely but altogether smooth crooner in both Elvis Costello (Krall's new hubby), who does a raspy, rollicking "Let's Misbehave," and Britpop superstar Robbie Williams, who sells the title song with bouncy panache. "His father was a singer, so he'd grown up with this kind of material," says Endelman. Williams had a bit of a warm-up, having recorded a swing album in the mode of Sinatra and Martin (even dueting with Nicole Kidman) a few years ago.
But the singers' enthusiasm was sometimes tempered by apprehension. "There was a point where a lot of artists were very nervous about doing it because the songs are so complicated," says Endelman. The range can be so tough, and the lyrics operate on both a superficial level and a subtextual level where Porter "puts in so much personal information and thought, and he does it in such a sophisticated way. Unless you really are studying it, you may not get it." "Let's Misbehave" and "Anything Goes" were like Porter's mantras, Endelman says, and the lesser-known gem "Experiment," which Kline performs in the film, "is such a great lyric for that character. He's telling you in that one moment in the film--he's looking at his wife, he's looking at the audience [of partygoers]--and he's going, 'Listen, this is me.'
"What also struck me about his music is that most of them are love songs, but they're not gooey love songs--they're questioning. 'Do you love me as I love you?' 'Don't Fence Me In'--think about it. What does that say about Cole Porter, about wanting to not be restricted?"
You're the Nile,
you're the Tow'r of Pisa
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa
I'm a worthless check,
a total wreck, a flop
But if, baby, I'm the bottom
You're the top!
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Porter is "one of the finest lyric and music writers of the 20th century," says Endelman. "He's so prolific, and you don't realize how many wonderful songs he wrote, in a way, until you see the movie--and we only touch on the great songs." Winkler ranks Porter, Berlin and Stephen Sondheim as the three greatest Broadway lyricists/composers ever in musical theater, and Endelman sees a clear lineage between Porter's and Sondheim's ingeniously witty lyrics.
"It's really hard to beat Cole Porter," he says. "He's so brilliant at setting his own lyric, because the nuances of the lyric come across so well in the melody line. In terms of sophistication, he's the top." Adds Winkler, "A friend of mine who is the widow of Sammy Cahn, who was a great lyricist, said to me, 'Every lyricist makes a mistake now and then. Cole Porter never did.'"
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