Book review
- Genius and Lust by Joseph Morell and George Mazzei, subtitled, the Creative and Sexual Lives of Cole Porter and Noel Coward.
The title says most of it, it tells the lives of the two Masters in parallel - it has to do that because they bumped into each other from time to time, though they never seem to have actually, um, bumped into each other.
They were very different, Porter was born to money and never lacked it, Coward wasn't and often did. Porter was pushed into music by his mother, Coward pulled his mother along behind him.
Coward left home early to join the travelling theatrical company of Charles Hawtry - and Hawtry was a homophobe and a friend of the Marquis of Queensberry, in fact five years before Coward was born, he had helped Queensberry get evidence against Oscar Wilde and they celebrated his imprisonment together. Coward doesn't seem to have found his sexuality yet though, and in fact he learnt enough from the other little thesbians, such as Gertrude Lawrence, to be able to write convincing strait love-scenes. Aged 15, he was also taken under the wing of various older men, without apparently causing much comment.
Cole Porter met Monty Woolley, later an actor, at Yale law school and they strayed together. Another classmate he may have had sex with was John "Black Jack" Bouvier, later the father of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
He first gained fame writing what we would call student revues, and he went on writing them for years after he left varsity. He made friends with a lot of lesbians, too, notably the famous party-giver Elsa Maxwell.
The authors make the point that Coward found love easy and sex difficult; with Porter it was the other way around. And this comes through in their songs: Coward wrote about lost love: "Some day I'll find you, moonlight behind you", "I'll see you again, whenever spring breaks through again". Porter wrote about sex: "Let's do it" "Anything goes" and on the other hand "What is this thing called love?" It's possible that the line "Baby if I'm the bottom, you're the top" means what we mean by bottom and top.
Coward and Porter both wrote alternative lyrics for their songs, for private party use: Porter wrote:
You're the top, You're Miss Pinkham's tonic
You're the top, You're a high colonic
You're the burning heat of a bridal suite in use,
You're the tits of Venus, you're King Kong's penis
You're self-abuse.
(and Lydia Pinkham's medicinal compound later got a song of its own, Lily the Pink.) One Porter song still sometimes heard is about
a maid who would marry and will take double quick,
any Tom, Dick or Harry, any Tom, Harry or Dick,
a dick a dick, a dick a dick.
Coward never married, but presented himself publicly as a womanising bachelor. Everybody who knew him at all, knew he was gay, and he says it was the big problem between him and the Duke of Windsor.
"He pretends not to hate me, but he does, and it's because I'm queer and he's queer, but unlike him I don't pretend not to be."
Coward had an affair with Edward's younger brother George, Duke of Kent and perhaps also with their cousin Louis Mountbatten. He had a series of strained long-term relationships, often overlapping - notably with a handsome New York stockbroker, Jack Wilson, who handled his finances and got him in a lot of financial bother. Wilson later moved into the theatre and was to produce many of Porter's shows.
Porter married for friendship and convenience, continuing to buy sex with muscular men - whom the authors call "beefers". His wife Linda left him over them, but she returned after he had a disastrous accident with a horse that cost him the use of his legs.
As for the book, there are a few rather irritating features: they never give Noël his diaereses, the trademark dots over the e in his name, not even on the cover. They say he invented the patter-song, apparently bone-ignorant of the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition (let alone Mozart's Catalogue aria and Rossini's Largo al Factotum). They persistently use "pals" as a synonym for "friends", and finally, they know far too much about homosexuality to be strait, but they always treat it as if with tongs, apparently for the benefit of a strait audience.
(reviewed on Gay BC, Wellington Access Radio, December 2001)
