By the time he was eight he was sometimes invited to accompany the silent films at Peru’s Wallace Theatre on one occasion, distressed by the sadness on screen, Porter ‘climbed uninvited onto the stage and played happy music on the piano’. Even as a child, his dapper clothes and musicianship set him apart and announced the Porter family’s imperial position. Small, impish and shy, Port was encouraged to shine. Cole, whose fortune from oil, timber and real estate was estimated at $17 million.

He inherited his wealth from his doting mother and her father, J.O. ‘I suppose he started me writing lyrics,’ Porter said – he wrote his first song when he was ten. He inherited his aptitude for music from his father, a good pianist with an attractive tenor voice. Porter (1891-1964) was the cosseted surviving child of three born to Kate and Sam Porter, a pharmacist in Peru, Indiana. As he waited for help, or so he claimed, he worked on the refrain of ‘At Long Last Love’, a song he’d copyrighted a month earlier: ‘Is it in marble or is it in clay/Is what I thought a new Rolls, a used Chevrolet?’ True or not – Porter was in shock and unconscious for two days afterwards – his account illustrates the function of music-making’s in his life: a dandy’s masquerade of perfect equipoise. The accident was defining of Porter’s life and legend. He gave his crippled legs nicknames: ‘Josephine’ was the obliging left one the right, ‘Geraldine’, ‘a hellion, a bitch a psychopath’, was amputated mid-thigh in 1958. In October 1937, at the age of 46, out for an early morning canter at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, Porter lost his stirrups when his horse spooked at a bush and fell on him, crushing both his legs. O f the many remedies Cole Porter used to kill pain – boys, drink, luxury – the most powerful was song.

Lyrics editor waldorf