And the moment before she died.

She lifted up her lovely head and cried. Madame.

"Miss Otis Regrets she's unable to lunch today."

Porter was a cynic at heart, a believer in the good life who didn't find it all that good, but still preferred it to anything conventional:

The marriage game is quite all right.

Yes, during the day it's easy to play.

But oh, what a bore at night!

His cynicism grew tempered as he grew older. He seemed to yearn for the quiet Midwestern life he had rejected, to want to roll back the years to a more peaceful age--"Wouldn't it be nice not to be famous?" one of his later songs asks, and you hear the voice of the composer behind the question. But the same man who wrote "I'm in love again, and I love, love, love it" also wrote:

Goodbye, dear, and amen.

Here's hoping we meet now and then

It was great fun, but it was just

One of those things.

This cavalier dismissal of love was typical of the man: he refused to take love seriously, life seriously, himself seriously. He felt life as deeply as any other modern poet, but forced life to meet him on his own terms. Here was his strength, yes, but here also was his weakness.

BRENDAN GILL describes Porter's life and times in the introduction to George Kimball's anthology Cole (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston: more money than you'd care to think about). Gill gives us the old, familiar story: the debonair roue, writing At Long Last Love between swoons into unconsciousness while lying pinned under his horse with both legs broken, tiring the second half of his life in agony after the accident. The midwestern kid who made good; the character like Auntie Mame or his own Katie who came east and set the town on its ear, the country on its ear, the world on its ear. But the shocking debauche would do facile little runs around his own end, drop back, and make fun of himself and his own people. Witness the mock horror of one of his classic songs:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking.