Television Reviews : Salute to ‘Swell-Egant’ American Master

You have to wonder if the National Endowment for the Arts, under the new climate of threatened censorship, knew what it was getting into when it agreed to fund a PBS series about “American Masters” of the creative arts. As we’ve learned in the current controversy surrounding NEA grants, artists come in all shapes and varieties.

Tonight’s lively and nostalgic installment of the series (at 10 p.m. on Channel 28) is dedicated to the racy and fast life of composer-lyricist Cole Porter. During this one-hour tour of his career, Porter’s songs are variously described as “sin-sin-sensual” and “wicked” by a cavalcade of celebrities and authors. There are numerous rare newsreel clips intermixed with interviews of friends who drop anecdotes about the excesses and emotional depths of the composer’s hedonistic lifestyle, which ended in 1964.

What would NEA critics such as Sen. Jesse Helms make of it all? The parties in Paris, the golden boys who escorted Porter? Say what anyone might, the legacy of songs is an American treasure.

Author Brendan Gill, a friend of Porter’s, casually drops the tidbit that Porter was gay--something that even the otherwise-thorough 1967 biography by George Eells, “The Life That Late He Led,” merely suggests. “Cole was, of course, homosexual,” Gill states in discussing Porter’s marriage to the very wealthy Linda Thomas. He says that Porter often had “double or triple lives” going on, and that Thomas wanted the marriage with Porter because she had no interest in sex, having had an unhappy and violent first marriage.

Actress Alexis Smith, who played Thomas in the 1946 film biography of Porter, “Night and Day,” says that the idyllic marriage depicted in the film was “pure fantasy.”

But the high style he actually lived was no fantasy--from the Waldorf Towers to the Riviera to Venice to the Hollywood Hills, surrounding himself, always, with the cream of society. When he wrote the lyric, “it’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s delovely,” or the songs “Anything Goes,” or “Night and Day” or “I Love Paris,” these were more than just words, more than just grand songs; they were his life.

Bobby Short, perhaps the classiest current interpreter of Porter, narrates the program with little passion, and it’s a mistake on the part of writer-director Allan Albert that Short doesn’t sing more. It’s also curious why several of those interviewed are not identified readily and confusing that the musical clips--showing the likes of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Fred Astaire, Patricia Morrison and Mary Martin, among many more--are identified by the year that the song was written rather than the year of the clip. (In many cases, the song had been written decades before.)

These are minor flaws, however. In fact, the program is an all-too-fleeting glimpse of one of America’s premier songwriters. How Albert crammed so much into an hour is a wonder. But what a “swell-egant, elegant” party it is.