Cole Porter

flashbook

Thanks to naive recordkeepers at Worcester Academy, June 9 will be recognized as Cole Porter's centennial. Actually, Porter slyly skipped over a couple of birthdays as a Worcester squid, and it's really his 102nd this year. But there should be no quarrel. Cole, after all, was a marvel of self-invention—a master of his own myth. And like a good mythmaker, he spread it around. The virtual inventor of high life in the American Century, he blazed the trail to the French Riviera, chic-ified the Waldorf Towers, and sailed around the world, bringing back a priceless gift: "Begin the Beguine." In a jukebox jumble of tunes, a Cole Porter song is always the smartest and most nicely reasoned. From the achingly bemused strains of "What Is This Thing Called Love?" ("I saw you there one wonderful day. / You took my heart and threw it away") to that desolate lover's "warning voice" in "I've Got You Under My Skin" (" 'Use your mentality, / Wake up to reality' "). And Porter's couplets, of course, are nonpareil. "The royal set, sans regret, do it," in "Let's Do It." "Whistler's mama" comes together with an "O'Neill drama" in "You're the Top." The last Cole Porter song was written 35 years ago, but his genius remains omnipresent. Stop to listen sometime: at the movies or on TV, to the person humming on the street, "In the roaring traffic's boom / In the silence of my lonely room /1 think of you night and day."