- Wikimedia Commons
- Cole Porter
When World War I ended and Paris returned to its full effervescence, Cole Porter was there as a dashing young American, Linda Thomas as a divorced socialite eight years Porter’s senior. They met and became excellent friends. This capsule biography of Porter I found online tells us more of their story:
De-Lovely reminded me of a one-man show I’d seen at the Royal George a couple of years earlier: Hershey Felder’s Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein. Like Porter, Bernstein was gay; like Porter, he married. Like De-Lovely, Maestro was frank about the marriage. The union of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre had its stresses, but they were quite the couple—the swells Tom Wolfe had so much fun with in “Radical Chic,” his 1970 account in New York magazine of the Bernsteins’ reception in their “13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue” for various Black Panthers. The Bernsteins, unlike the Porters, did have children; and although Lennie, at an age when men get silly, left her for a young stud muffin, it didn’t last, and he soon moved back in and cared for Felicia, who was sick with cancer and died in 1978. Lennie died in 1990, and last year a collection was published of letters he’d written and received. A reviewer observed that they showed his marriage, “until its painful breakup, was not simply a convenience for Bernstein, a hedge to protect his public reputation; The letters demonstrate beyond a doubt that this was an intimate and loving relationship, not an arrangement.” Like the Porters, the Bernsteins are buried side by side.
