Cole Porter: Cultural Revolutionary

Dr. Potomac, venturing very far-afield indeed from Beltway politics, would like to offer comment on the film, De-Lovely, a musical recounting of the life of Cole Porter. To put it succinctly as possible, Dr. Potomac would like to nominate Mr. Porter as the Most Destructive Influence in 20th Century Popular Culture. You think he's kidding but let me assure you he is not.

If you haven't caught the Kevin Klein film yet, put it at the top of your Netflix queue. Other than enjoying the Porter's toe-tapping tunes from the 30s, 40s and 50s, Dr. Potomac had had no other exposure to the Porter story. It was a very rude shock, indeed. Porter, it turns out, was a not-so-closeted homosexual who carried on mutliple gay affairs simultaneously over the course of his long marriage to Linda Lee Porter. The film reinterprets Porter's music through this prism (and quite a prism it is) to disturbing effect. Cole Porter turns out to be the Elton John of his generation using catchy tunes to cast he most base human impulses as natural and inevitable.

We are all acquainted with songs like "Anything Goes" and "Let's Do it (Let's Fall in Love)" -- more about the unpleasant juxtaposition those paretheses create later --but "De-Lovely" throws these songs into a light that reveals them as nothing short of cultural subversion. The movie script has Porter suggesting, as he and his wife traverse what seems to be a marriage that was one long, sad, rough patch, that all the songs "sound like they are written in code." He's too modest: they are written in code and the code is frontal assault on traditional morality.

"Experiment," which sounds like a paean to gay liberation, was edited and edited but never ultimately used in a film that was never made:

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.
Be curious,
Though interfering friends may frown.
Get furious
At each attempt to hold you down.
If this advice you always employ
The future can offer you infinite joy
And merriment,
Experiment
And you'll see

Were it not for all the rhyming and tinkling piano accompaniment the song would not be out of place at Woodstock. One wonders what the studio guys, in on the worst-kept secret in Hollywood, thought when they laid their eyes on "Experiment." Evidently, they asked Cole to re-think because it was subsequently revised to something with a little more appeal to middle-class movie goers of the mid-1940s:

Experiment,
Be curious,
And when you've picked a perfect wife,
Get furious
Till she is yours and yours for life.
If this you do (and no cock-and-bull)
In time she may give you a nurs'ry full
Of merriment.
Experiment
And you'll see.

"Let's Misbehave" reinforces the a kind of naturalistic worldview that extinguishes differences between human love and sexuality and sexual reproduction among the animals:

They say that spring
Means just one thing
To little love birds
We're not above birds
Let's misbehave

They say that bears
Have love affairs
And even camels
We're merely mammals
Let's misbehave

"Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)" was (and is) one of my favorites in the Porter repetoir but I won't play it with children in the room. The song is particularly egregious in its crude reduction of love to mere sex.

Romantic sponges, they say, do it
Oysters down in oyster bay do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish, do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

Electric eels I might add do it
Though it shocks em I know
Why ask if shad do it - Waiter bring me
"shad roe"

In shallow shoals English soles do it
Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love.

And on and on it goes. There are Webpages with lots of unused verses that run together in a dizzy string.

It is interesting to think about the influence of figures like Cole Porter on the cultural context of their time -- and our present. It is not difficult to see how his music, immensely popular among the parents and grandparents of the 1960s radicals, might have had effects far beyond his imagining but not, Dr. Potomac thinks, beyond his hope. He seems to have been out to liberate bourgeois culture from behavioral constraints that he himself could not and would not conform himself to. In doing so, he added his considerable influence to a sexual revolution that, toward the end of his life in the 1960s, would reshape American society and from which we are still recovering. Damos of Athens' reminder on the cultural influence of music comes to mind, "Let me make the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws."