In 1908, a prep-school principal grew worried enough about one of his charges, a bright boy of 17, to contact the student’s mother. His concern was sincere, though its cause was unusual: “Do you think that one may be too popular?”
He shouldn’t have worried. For the boy—who was, even then, Cole Porter —bore his vast popularity with aplomb: He graduated as class valedictorian, enjoyed Yale and Harvard for a time, then took his convivial overachieving to the world stage. In the four decades that he spent as one of Broadway’s and Hollywood’s foremost songwriters, he produced an astonishing number of classics, a list barely scratched by naming “Night and Day,” “Anything Goes,” “You’re the Top,” “(You’d Be So) Easy to Love,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and (a little incongruously) “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Read Full Article »