The tale of the moon’s dance with Earth can be read in the tides of the sea. So, too, can Cole Porter’s love affairs with men be observed in the wrack and strain on his marriage over time. We see the Porters at high tide and at low tide in DE-LOVELY. In one moment Linda (Ashley Judd) and Cole (Kevin Kline) are walking hand-in-hand along the placid waters; in the next, the perfect storm has come to sweep away their moorings.

Of course, the metaphor, like the movie, presupposes Linda as the love of Cole’s life and makes his male lovers into remote and foreign objects, casting only reflected light, of interest only as they effect the marriage. One could just as easily have reversed the roles, positing Linda as the variably interfering force in Cole’s not-so-secret life. I don’t think that would have made as interesting or dramatic a film, if only because gay men of the time routinely accepted the fact of their partner’s marriage, with all attendant inconveniences and heartbreaks. By contrast, the Porters’ marriage broke sharply from tradition because Linda licensed Cole to seek male paramours.

There is a third dramatic choice. Winkler could have presented all of Cole’s loves, great and small, with sympathy and in proportion. That would have been best, but I doubt there’s a director alive with the subtlety to pull it off. Telling one good love story is as complicated as heart surgery. Shedding light on two great loves would be akin to brain surgery while juggling plates – almost certain to be messy and unsuccessful. DE-LOVELY traces one love story with great success.

DE-LOVELY starts with Cole dying, as he lived, at the piano. Gabriel (Jonathan Pryce) has come to escort Cole to a metaphysical musical. “It’s your life,” Gabriel assures Cole, “your music will be our guide.” And so it is. In sort of a temporal inversion of the final scenes in Big Fish, the opening number of Cole Porter: the Musical is “Anything Goes,” as sung by everyone who ever mattered to Cole. Friends from Yale, Paris, Venice, Broadway, and Hollywood. Lovers. Linda.

He meets her at a party. Gabriel opines, “She could stop your heart.” “No,” Cole demurs, “start it.” Linda and Cole get swept up in each other, in Paris, in the possibilities. Gabriel asks whether this was “a love affair, a business partnership, a social arrangement?” Cole denies the last two, though he’s not quite willing to admit of the first. “There was nothing negotiated or arranged about our relationship,” he huffs.

The first compliment Cole pays to Linda is to tell her that she has strong hands. “I wanted every kind of love that was available….I could never find them in the same person… or the same sex,” Cole confides to Gabriel. But by this little touch, this perfect touch, enforced by others, Winkler opens a window into their hearts. Cole compliments Linda on strength, a manly virtue. She admires his beauty, his song, his sexual reserve, traditional feminine graces. They are special people, those who can find gifts hidden in plain view. A.A. Milne wrote, “they say love is blind. Love is not blind. Love is an extra eye that sees in the other what is most worthy of regard.”

Linda accepts Cole’s proclivities. “Nothing is cruel that fulfills your promise. We could fulfill your promise together… we could always be a singular couple.” Given all the sorrow fate has in store for them, is this wishful thinking on Linda’s part? Liberal, bohemian promiscuity which will reap a bitter harvest? “You don’t have to love me the way that I love you, “ she tells him. Can true love ever be happy with a half a loaf?

“The physical part, we could take it or leave it,” Cole tells God’s angel, “but the intimacy was stunning.” In crisis, and in age, Cole and Linda find their great reserve of friendship undiminished by the dancers, the actors, the decorators and paid escorts with whom Cole took liberties. Friendship is too poor a word, but love may be too jealous. To say she was his Muse makes of her life a mere instrument. Cole and Linda found in each other a tragically flawed soulmate. They amplified and clarified each other. “There are no little memories with you,” Cole tells her.

Mistrust seeps into Linda’s heart. How could it not? She watches her husband watch men, and holds onto her husband by letting him go. “All of the sudden, all of the songs sounded as if they were written in code,” mocking her, flaunting her inability to have all of Cole. When an enterprising nightclub owner blackmails the couple with pictures of Cole’s dalliances, Cole dismisses Linda’s concerns. “I look at it as a luxury tax.” And this, this stupid callow preening, is finally too much. She leaves, but not forever. Linda is with Cole even as Gabriel blows his horn, even to the very last.

Great debate rages on, in our public square and in our homes, about acceptable and unacceptable forms of marriage. DE-LOVELY suggests we should think more about the substance of the institution. The Porters had the traditional form of marriage – one man and one woman – but broached the non-negotiable rules of fidelity and mutual concern. Cole and Linda generated love, but weren’t always close enough to hold on to it. It slipped through their fingers, like water returning to the ocean, to the great seas that may destroy us, or that may, if we’re lucky, carry us together home.

-- Martin Scribbs

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