{"product_id":"cole-porter-a-biography-9780394582351","title":"Cole Porter: A Biography","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe 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 McBriens biography  the result of ten years of work and bursting with stories and scenes of Porters life  takes us beyond the patina of Porters 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 place to be)  beyond the opulent parties and costume balls on two continents he not only attended but threw himself--and made into an art form. McBrien takes us into Porters seemingly conventional marriage to reveal his complicated emotional life--the lost  privileged man who had a wild  irrepressible talent to amuse but at first find couldnt find his voice; the man who married \"the most beautiful woman in the world \" the very social  very southern Linda Lee Thomas  but who preferred his own sex. He had long relationships as well as frequent dalliances with many men but for thirty-five years maintained a loving marriage to the woman he truly adored. We see the supremely gifted Porter who created twenty musicals on Broadway (Anything Goes  DuBarry Was a Lady  Gay Divorce  Born to Dance)  writing for such stars as Ethel Merman  Fred Astaire  Mary Martin  Bert Lahr  and Bea Lilly; and who gave Hollywood Fifty Million Frenchmen  The Gay Divorcee  Rosalie  Broadway Melody of 1940  Night and Day  High Society  Silk Stockings  Can-Can  and Kiss Me  Kate. Porter was \"the top\" and lived at the top  but his life was catastrophically transformed after a near-fatal horseback-riding accident. The thirty-one operations during the next eighteen years brought on increasing pain  and the growing paralysis that darkened his life was never hinted at publicly nor in his work. Interweaving the life and the music  McBrien shows us a man whose genius as a composer flowered in deceptively simple melodies that were thought to be completely modern but today are considered ingenious  complicated  and steeped in the nineteenth-century tradition of lieder; a composer whose craft concealed complicated solutions to musical problems while it enchanted his audiences. And we come to understand how Porters doubts and desires  longings and infatuations  insinuated their way into the heart of his incomparable words and music.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646830141493,"sku":"ByrdShop_0394582357","price":22.02,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780394582351.jpg?v=1781678946","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/cole-porter-a-biography-9780394582351","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}