Broadway: Man of Two Worlds

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Things. But the tragedy of his legs revealed the considerable man he was. He put his piano on blocks so that he could work from his wheelchair, and went on writing. With music and language intermingling in his mind at the time of writing, he melded rather than matched his words to the rhythm and tone of his tunes. He innovated. While everyone else was writing 16-bar verses and 32-bar choruses, Porter became noted for the long song, sometimes going over 100 bars. Begin the Beguine and Night and Day are structured as artfully as a classical sonata, the theme elaborated and subtly expanded each time it returns, developed until it finally crests and crashes in soul-satisfying splendor.

Stuff for Stars. To supply his mercurial lyrics, he kept rhyming dictionaries beside him, but he was even more attentive to the individual equipment of his performing stars. It was his belief, for example, that Ethel Merman could sing the word terrific like no other creature. So he let her sing it:

Some get a kick from cocaine.

I'm sure that if

I had even one sniff

It would bore me terrific'lly, too,

Yet I get a kick out of you.

He knew a saucy siren when one came along; so for Mary Martin in 1938's Leave It to Me, he wrote:

While tearin' off a game of golf

I may make a play for the caddy,

But when I do, I don't follow through

'Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.

His masterpiece was 1948's Kiss Me, Kate. It was an intricately structured play within a play about an acting company doing The Taming of the Shrew. Its brilliant polish, erudite humor, unbuttoned bawdry and elevated style were sum and summary of Porter's professional posture. He was, when he wanted to be, Rabelais in a cutaway, rippling with educated crudities:

Better mention The Merchant of Venice

When her sweet pound o' flesh you would menace.

When your baby is pleading for pleasure

Let her sample your Measure for Measure.

But Kate was not a one-or two-song show. Its score was memorable from beginning to end, and its lyrics never flagged, from Why Can't You Behave? and Always True to You in My Fashion to Wunderbar and Where Is the Life That Late I Led?

Porter shelled out about $1,000 and took 97 people to see his show on opening night. He returned more than a dozen times, always with big parties of friends. When he wrote something, he knew it was great, and no one enjoyed a Cole Porter show more than he did.

Last week, at 71, Cole Porter died in Santa Monica. There was no reasonable sadness in his death. For the last ten years, since the death of his wife, he had lived alone and away from people.

But his life is permanent in melody. "The man was a school in himself," said a young Broadway lyricist when he heard the news last week. "A school with no students. Other songwriters can be imitated, but not Cole Porter."