NOVEMBER 1926
Having just returned from another three-month trip, Jimmy asked Kay to join him for a stroll in Central Park. “Top of the morning, Mister and Misses Warburg.” A police officer tipped his hat.
“Good morning, Officer McGinty.” Jimmy slowed his pace to match Kay’s. “The oddest thing happened while I was away,” he told her.
“Your pants stayed buttoned up?” asked Kay.
He turned to her, raising his eyebrows. “Why, yes, precisely.”
“Hah!” said Kay. “You’ve become celibate?”
“Celibate? Heavens, no. Monogamous, possibly.” Two nannies passed, pushing black prams. “What if we were to take this over from the beginning,” asked Jimmy. “To just pick up the needle and drop it back down at the start of the record. Wouldn’t that be grand?”
She shook her head. “We can’t, though. We were so naïve. We had to be, or we never would have tried. And naïveté, that’s not something you can get back.”
They passed an amateur artist who was painting the trees and the lake. “I didn’t sign up for a lukewarm marriage,” said Jimmy. “I want to fix this.”
“Suddenly? Now?”
“It’s obvious, Kay. You’ve taken the dive. You and Gershwin.”
She laughed. “Aren’t you the one that said marriage isn’t about ownership, but sharing?”
“Sharing, certainly. Not giving everything away. Not giving away your heart.”
“I can’t perform without feeling,” said Kay. “That isn’t music. That’s just notes.”
“I appreciate that,” said Jimmy. “It’s why I was drawn to you in the first place.” He took her hand. “Speaking of sharing, maybe we should resume sharing a bedroom.”
“I’ve grown used to sleeping alone. You know how much I move in bed,” said Kay.
“You’ve grown used to sleeping with Gershwin.”
She freed her hand. “What do you want from me, Jimmy?”
“A pinch of reassurance, perhaps?” he tried. “Just tell me everything will be fine and dandy.”
“You want little white lies?”
“They wouldn’t cost you a thing, would they,” said Jimmy.
A cycle-skater zipped past wearing boots bolted to narrow ten-inch wheels, flinging himself forward with ski poles. “Everything will be fine and dandy,” said Kay with a smile.
Children were running, shouting, sliding, and swinging in the playground. Jimmy watched them, contemplative and sullen. “Let’s catch a musical tonight,” he suggested. “How about The Girl Friend? Word is it’s a delight.”
The Girl Friend, by the new team of Rodgers and Hart, was indeed a pleasure. Its bare-bones plot treated themes of ambition and love, the temptation to get ahead by cheating, and the ultimate reward for honest labor. It illustrated the essential mythos of the aspirational American middle class: that success is to be measured not in peerships, freedom from labor, or other privileges, but in sincerity and diligence.
“I guess Gershwin isn’t the only talented songwriter out there,” Jimmy remarked as they walked down Forty-Second Street for after-the-show refreshments.
“As far as I know,” said Kay, “Irving Berlin, or Richard Rodgers, never composed a Rhapsody in Blue or a New York Concerto.”
“I can’t deny he’s a wunderkind of sorts.”
“And I can’t deny it’s invigorating to work with him,” said Kay. She slung her arm through his. “Jimmy, I always needed to write music, you know that. But my compositions… I went to bed every night fearing no one would ever hear them.”
“I know,” said Jimmy.
“The best thing about my Hotel Astor recital? George Gershwin showed up, with Adele Astaire.”
Jimmy held the door of Molly’s Sweets & Sundries. “I worry he might exploit you,” he said. “Your brilliant musical mind. Your perfect ear.”
Kay went in. “Perhaps,” she said as they approached the counter. “Or maybe I’m using him. I’ll have a Sundae Decadence,” she told the fountain jerk. Vanilla with crumbled cookies and melted chocolate fudge.
The ice cream boy turned to Jimmy. “Yes, I’ll have a Dreamland.” Vanilla with fresh peach slices, walnuts, and whipped cream. “Just give me those little white lies,” he repeated to his wife as the shop boy busied himself with their desserts.
“Everything’ll be fine and dandy,” said Kay with a smile.
These days, Kay enjoyed working at night. But Jimmy was a morning person. She was touching up a song she had begun at Bydale when he sauntered into the room in his pajamas and robe, smoking a pipe.
“What do you think?” She ran through the wide-ranging melody she had composed. The style was her own, a broader, more sweeping line than the typical Gershwin song. But like him she added off-key notes and broke the rhythm into uneven beats.
“Catchy. Lyrics?”
She shook her head. “Just a title. ‘Little White Lies.’ I might ask Ira.”
He crossed to the liquor cabinet. “Gin Rickey?”
She smiled.
He set her drink on an aluminum tray on the piano and stood watching while she played a few more chords, then modified them and tried again. He poured himself a tulip glass of Armagnac.
Later that night he appeared at her bedroom door. She was reading the new issue of the New Yorker, the magazine founded and published by Aleck Woollcott’s housemate Harold Ross. “That tune you wrote. It’s driving me batty.”
She looked up.
“Couldn’t sleep. Some words came to me.” Jimmy whined in his wandering tonality:
The ancients, they touted the virtue of honesty,
But ask any modernist: that was a fallacy.
Just give me more of your little white lies,
Your lily-white smile and sparkling green eyes.
Tonight I intend to sleep like a kitten,
Atop a silk blanket in a castle in Britain.
She lowered her magazine. “Not shabby! Let’s try it.”
They raced downstairs. She sat at the piano and played as he sang the lyric, adding a second verse:
Let the moralists boast of their permanent truths.
And the leaders of Europe, their delicate truce.
Just give me more of your little white lies…
“You made that up on the spot?” asked Kay, astonished.
He nodded.
“Why was I not aware of this talent?”
He stepped closer and leaned to kiss her forehead. “Just don’t say, lyrics by James Paul Warburg. I’m a banker. It wouldn’t fly.”
Like Kay, Jimmy had been trained to appreciate Victorian styles in poetry and music. In the Romantic vein, he had written poetry that idealized love. It had come off as stilted and inauthentic. Kay deemed his lyrics to “Little White Lies” refreshing and poignant. She had conceived of it as a gloomy ballad but he had inverted her intention with tender irony. And now, far from craving recognition, he did not even want his name on the lyrics.
“What name do you have in mind?”
“Why don’t you reverse my middle and first names. Paul James.”
“Sounds rather Episcopalian.”
“Precisely.”
“And I’ll be Kay Swift,” said Kay.
James smiled past her shoulder. Kay turned to see their daughter Andrea standing at the foot of the stairway in her pajamas. “I had a bad dream.”
“Come, little nut.” Jimmy took her hand. “I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”