HOLLYWOOD LOVES HOMOSEXUALITY without reservation–but within reason. Indeed, in movies and on television all portraits of male homosexuality are buffed to a sentimental glow, just so long as certain rules are followed. For example, it’s fine for an obviously gay performer to play an openly gay character–if that gay character is a delightful supporting player whose purpose is to serve as foil and sounding-board.
He can be the best friend, the infinitely understanding next-door neighbor, the wacky relative. He cannot be the lead. We’re not supposed to identify with him. We’re supposed to enjoy his company, to be amused by him, and deal with him only in small doses. Oh, we might see him bicker lovingly with his hunky new boyfriend, but the camera won’t follow him into a gay bar or a bathhouse or the bedroom. Though the wacky neighbor type makes a lot of jokes about sex, he is fundamentally sexless.
The situation is different if the central figure is gay. Here we are allowed to see him kiss a boyfriend for a moment, even to wake up beside a man. But the embrace is never passionate, and when the two men rise from bed and dress, they will tend to converse in tones more appropriate to clubsmen talking about the afternoon’s golf game.
It also seems necessary for the actor who plays the gay character to be well known for living a real-life conventional heterosexual existence. Tom Hanks, who has one of America’s most famously contented marriages, to the actress Rita Wilson, won an Oscar playing an AIDS sufferer in Philadelphia. His partner in that film was Antonio Banderas, who was the object of Madonna’s lust in the documentary Truth or Dare and who now cavorts happily before the paparazzi with his second wife, the babe-alicious Melanie Griffith. In HBO’s mammoth film version of Angels in America, Al Pacino–recently embroiled in a vicious custody battle with yet another onetime sexpot actress, Beverly D’Angelo–played AIDS-tormented McCarthyite power broker Roy Cohn.
It’s clear that Hollywood’s idea of the perfect gay man is Kevin Kline, who is now starring in his second film as a homosexual. (Kline has been married for fifteen years to Phoebe Cates, who was realistically portrayed as the object of every teenage boy’s fantasy twenty years ago in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.) Kline’s first gay role was in In & Out from 1997, in which he played a high-school teacher who realizes the truth about himself on the day of his wedding. Now, in De–Lovely, Kline takes on the role of witty bon vivant Cole Porter, the Broadway genius who wrote dozens and dozens of great songs over the course of a forty-year career in New York and Hollywood.
The classically trained Kline speaks with crisp precision and has the ramrod posture of a Prussian military officer. He is occasionally guilty of actorly excess, but not when he’s playing a homosexual. Indeed, the only occasions on which Kline has ever underacted are his two gay roles. Kline is Hollywood’s go-to gay guy, because there’s a way in which he seems gay without setting off anybody’s gaydar. And that’s part of the problem with De–Lovely. Kline is playing someone who was as blatantly gay as any closeted man in the decades before the gay-rights movement could have been. It’s as though Kline had been hired to play the Lubavitcher rebbe–but told not to grow a beard and sidelocks.
De–Lovely is a very strange film that can’t decide what it wants to be. Its failure is due in part to the extreme discomfort director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks show towards Porter’s sexual hijinks and the role they played in his life. At times De–Lovely tries to turn Cole Porter’s life into a Cole Porter musical, with one scene set in glittering Paris salons at which tuxedoed and evening-gowned Parisians burst into Porter’s amazing “Well, Did You Evah? (What a Swell Party This Is).” In another, Porter himself lets loose with an all-singing, all-dancing proposal to his soon-to-be-wife Linda in the Tuileries to the tune of “Easy to Love.”
At other points De–Lovely becomes a version of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, featuring an aged Porter sitting in an empty theater with a supernatural being who is directing a fantasy stage-show version of Porter’s life. And what a peculiar and remarkable life it was. Like Irving Berlin, Porter was one of the few Broadway songwriters to compose both music and lyrics, and he was astonishingly gifted at both. His tunes were as rich and unusually memorable as his lyrics were effervescent and witty. The movie’s one brilliant touch is that it has such present-day pop stars as Elvis Costello and Alanis Morrissette performing Porter numbers in period costume. Costello appears as a society bandleader singing “Let’s Misbehave,” while Morrissette is a Broadway actress who introduces Porter’s first great hit, “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).”
Porter was singular in other ways as well. Every other great Broadway songwriter was a Jewish boy who was either born in New York or immigrated there as a child. Porter was a rich kid from the Hoosier sticks. J.O. Cole had been the wealthiest man in Peru, Indiana, and deeply disapproved of the songwriting foolishness that consumed his namesake.
As a Yale undergraduate, Porter wrote two school fight songs that are still warbled today. A few years later, at Harvard Law School, he roomed with future secretary of state Dean Acheson. At the age of twenty-five, in 1916, he wrote his first Broadway show, a huge flop called See America First. Distressed by its failure, he moved to Paris–and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to fight for his country’s cause when America entered World War I.
None of this is in the movie. Instead, De–Lovely begins with Porter in Paris after the war. The once-legendary literary portraitist Michael Arlen wrote in 1919 about Porter’s glittering life there: “Every morning at half past seven, Cole Porter leaps lightly out of bed and, having said his prayers, arranges himself in a riding habit. Then, having written a song or two, he will appear at the stroke of half-past twelve at the Ritz, where leaning in a manly way on the bar he will say ‘Champagne cocktail, please. Had a marvelous ride this morning!'”
Just at this time, he met and married an aristocratic divorcée, eight years his senior, named Linda Lee Thomas. Cole and Linda remained married for thirty-four years, until her death in 1954. During that time, he actively and without guilt pursued the company of men. This unusual marriage is the true subject of De–Lovely, and the choice to center the movie around the Cole-Linda relationship was a terrible mistake. Director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks simply don’t know what to make of it.
IT’S THEIR THEORY that Linda was accepting of Cole, who treated her with kindness and loved her as much as he was able to love any woman. Linda was his Muse, even though in their depiction of her she wants much more from him. The Linda of De–Lovely loves Cole deeply, craves his touch sexually, but understands that his urges lead him elsewhere. She complains when he behaves indiscreetly with men, but the moviemakers want us to understand she’s really complaining mostly because she loves him so. The movie shows two scenes of Cole and Linda making love and even invents a fictional and conveniently doomed pregnancy for Linda.
This is all nonsense. According to Porter’s biographer, William McBrien, Linda may herself have been a lesbian. Certainly many of her contemporaries thought so. There were other theories about her as well. One of her relatives speculated that she had been so violently abused, both physically and sexually, during her first marriage that she grew repulsed by physical contact of any kind. There is no reason to believe Cole and Linda ever touched each other in a sexual way.
Porter was a classic mama’s boy–the apple of his mother Kate’s eye. Everybody who knew them believed that Linda’s relationship with Cole was largely maternal. De–Lovely makes a total hash out of this key aspect of their relationship. Kevin Kline is fifty-seven years old. Ashley Judd, who plays Linda, is thirty-six. Now, Kline is a very young fifty-six, and Judd a mature thirty-six, but there’s no question he’s very much her senior. If anything, he’s more paternal toward her than she is maternal toward him. And that makes their connection even more mysterious.
But it really wasn’t mysterious at all. The Porters had a successful marriage of convenience. They enjoyed each other’s company, were useful to each other, and were able to live the high life while paying necessary dues to social convention. Such was the well-functioning life of the closeted homosexual, especially for someone like Porter who had a special taste for rent boys.
Winkler and Cocks clearly do not want us to judge Porter’s behavior, lest their film seem homophobic. As a result, the scenes involving Porter’s gay behavior are incomprehensible. The filmmakers don’t want us to think that Porter was compulsive, even though he clearly was. They dutifully portray Porter’s homosexual life but make it lifeless, so that it’s hard to understand why he would be spending time with these well-dressed men when he has that lovely wife at home slinking around in a silk nightgown.
The truth is that Porter was a man consumed by hungers–for experience, for sex, for fame, for social standing, for money, for that “yearning, burning inside of me,” as he described it in “Night and Day.” That insatiable quality is nowhere present in this dainty movie. Porter’s life was anything but dainty–even though much of it was spent in very high-flown and expensive quarters.
It’s well known that Porter wrote some of the dirtiest songs ever to slip by the censors, with double entendres that can still make you blush when you think about them (there are dozens of verses of “Let’s Do It,” many of them nearly pornographic, and Winston Churchill knew them all). What’s less frequently noted is his dark, sadomasochistic streak, as in “So in Love” from Kiss Me Kate: “So taunt me, and hurt me, deceive me, desert me, I’m yours till I die.”
Astonishingly, Winkler and Cocks attempt to turn “So in Love” into the romantic high point of the movie, with Cole telling an ailing Linda that he wrote it just for her. Watching Linda die is just one of the many depressing aspects of the final hour of De–Lovely, which also features Cole’s crippling horse-riding accident that left him in excruciating pain for decades–and a long look at the depression that consumed Porter in the last years of his life.
THE MOVIE takes a perverse pleasure in denying us pleasure. Nowhere is this clearer than in the odd way Kline assays eight of Porter’s greatest songs. Kline performs them not in the strong Broadway baritone that helped him win two Tony awards for his work in musicals, but rather in a high-pitched and breathy voice that more closely approximates Porter’s own. According to the production notes, Kline actually had to learn how not to sing well. Now, why on earth would you deny the audience of a movie musical the pleasure of hearing great songs sung beautifully?
And why on earth would anyone choose to make a movie about an immensely charming, immensely talented, immensely amusing songwriter–and turn his life into a tiresome chore?
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
