His friend Monty Woolley contended that Porter's talent lay in the off-beat and the esoteric, maintaining that he could never take a cliché title like "I Love You" and write lyrics that included the banal sentiment: "It's spring again, and birds on the wing again" and be successful.
[2] In 1945, Ira B. Arnstein sued Cole Porter for plagiarizing his work and filed a suit in the Federal Court.
[citation needed] He claimed that Porter had stolen four songs: "I Love You", "Don't Fence Me In", "Begin the Beguine" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To".
A jury dismissed the charges, and the judge, moreover, awarded Porter $2,500 ($45,154 in 2022 terms) in legal costs—a sum that, since Arnstein couldn't pay it, kept him from any chance of prevailing in a federal court for the rest of his life.
[6] Other charted versions were by Tommy Tucker, Enric Madriguera, Jo Stafford and Perry Como.