APRIL 1929
The Little Show hearkened back to the first works with which George Gershwin had been associated, prior to the development of the musical play: collections of vaudeville skits loosely sewn together. And although George now preferred to write songs and orchestral settings for larger works, stories that unfolded through an entire evening, he attended The Little Show, appearing in the empty seat at Kay’s left just before the curtain rose. Jimmy, seated at her right, noticed his arrival, smiled, and nodded. Despite everything, he harbored mixed feelings about George, admiring him intensely as a musician, somewhat less as a man.
The production included a scene called The Still Alarm by George S. Kaufman, a soliloquy by the comedian Fred Allen, and the bittersweet ballad “Can’t We Be Friends?” by Kay Swift and Paul James. Libby Holman, in a strapless carmine dress, stood alone between the closed stage curtains and twittered like a lark. George squeezed her hand. This is your moment. The audience exploded. “Can’t We Be Friends?,” in Libby’s dulcet voice, drew them to their feet. Kay rose slowly, dazed. George clapped, shouted, and whistled. Jimmy grinned at his wife.
That night the cast, the creators, and the producers flitted from one party to another. To celebrate with Kay and Jimmy, Julie Glaenzer invited George S. Kaufman, Mark Connelly, Dottie Parker, Aleck Woollcott, and the rest of the gang, as well as the city’s dissolute mayor Jimmy Walker, to his apartment. Luckey Roberts, recommended to Glaenzer by Gershwin, bedazzled them at the piano.
George shushed everyone for the toast. “Here’s to the two new crown princesses of New York City.” He held aloft his Mary Pickford. “Kay Swift and Libby Holman.” He glanced from one to the other, sipped, and added: “And to Kay’s terrific lyricist, Paul James.”
Later, he introduced Kay and Jimmy to a slumped gentleman in a pin-striped suit. “Kay, Jimmy, or should I say Paul, I’d like you to meet Max Dreyfus, my publisher.”
Dreyfus removed the cigar from his mouth. “That number, ‘Can’t We Be Friends?,’ was the showstopper. Why haven’t I heard of you before? Talent like yours, it’s no London drizzle, it’s a thunder shower. You’re gonna make a ruckus in this town. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” said Kay.
“With your permission I’d like to publish ‘Can’t We Be Friends?’ Can’t promise anything but I smell a hit.” Kay wondered how he could smell anything past the stench of his cigar smoke.
She turned to Jimmy. “I never agree to anything right away,” said Jimmy. “But yes.” Dreyfus shook his hand, and then Kay’s. “We have other songs,” said Jimmy. “In fact, we’re planning a full-scale show. It’s called Fine and Dandy.”
Dreyfus removed the cigar from his mouth and wiped a speck of tobacco from his lower lip. “Fine and Dandy. Nice title. Come demo your material and we’ll take it from there.” Apparently he had no idea Kay had already done so.
Three quick raps at the door. George pulled it open. “Fred, come in.”
“Can I grab a shot?” asked a man with a big camera.
“How ’bout I join you?” Libby Holman strolled over, holding her champagne flute like the winning bet at the Kentucky Derby.
“Of course,” said George, making room for her. “What would a picture be without the star?”
Fred Astaire, George Gershwin, Kay Swift, Jimmy Warburg, Max Dreyfus, and Libby Holman slung their arms around each other. A lightning flash and a puff of smoke captured the happiest moment of Kay’s thirty years.
With Libby Holman’s performance of “Can’t We Be Friends?,” the dam broke. Played for music vendors by Max Dreyfus’s army of piano pluggers and performed every evening by the bisexual, headline-grabbing siren from Cincinnati, the song’s chirrupy lament pulled the city’s emotions this way and that at the same time. Despite Jimmy’s concerns, the stock market was still surging in the spring and summer of 1929 and no one was in the mood for a tearjerker. The upbeat melody of Kay’s ballad commented ironically upon Jimmy’s sad lyric like a friend reminding her jilted lover that the eaves are full of swallows.
Dreyfus called with the casualness and unpredictability of an uncle who sought to reinforce old bonds without wasting time. “How’s Fine and Dandy coming along? That sounds terrific but we need a few hits meantime to keep your names alive.” Kay and Jimmy provided songs to be interpolated in The Nine Fifteen Revue and The Garrick Gaieties.
They celebrated at private parties and in clubs. An air of depravity, excessive wealth, drinking, explicit dancing, and promiscuity surrounded the new darlings of Broadway, enhancing their mystique and allure. Dick Rodgers and Fred Astaire now frequented Kay’s home, as well as George Gershwin, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Averell Harriman, and the rest of their clique. The openly homosexual negrophile Carl Van Vechten, whose novel Nigger Heaven had made him a subject of adoration and scorn in literary circles, often popped in with Paul Robeson or Langston Hughes. Others, who could no longer walk down Fifth Avenue without being harassed by reporters and photographers, welcomed the freedom and release of the boozy Warburg salon. The goings-on of Libby Holman and Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter had become the focus of celebrity journalists. Harlem pianists Luckey Roberts and Willie “The Lion” Smith provided jangly entertainment. Kay sometimes spent the greater part of an evening watching and listening to their creations.
With leading cultural figures from myriad communities in New York—the Negros, Jews, homosexuals, lesbians, and others crowding their salon—with the accelerating power of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolph Hitler in Germany; with controversial decisions taken by the British Empire to split Transjordan, and then the Golan Heights, from the Palestine Mandate, it was inevitable that loud conversations would erupt about economics and politics, religion and race, national identity and ethnic pride. Woollcott inveighed against capitalism and what he described as “its first cousins, greed and imperialism,” which, he claimed, had caused the Great War.
“And the Soviet Union isn’t imperialist?” argued Averell Harriman.
“How so?” asked Gershwin with a frown.
Harriman seemed miffed. “You’ve heard nothing about the invasion of the Ukraine?”
“Sure I heard about it,” said Gershwin. “The Russians say it’s historically Russian. What do I know?”
Harriman shook his head. “Stalin is open about his plans. One state, one party, one ruler. Not just for Russia. For the world. The dictatorship of the proletariat and all that dross.”
Gershwin thought this unfair. His parents had been born in the cruel regime of Czarist Russia, with its aristocratic excesses, oppression of workers, and pogroms. He took an intense interest in the young Soviet Union, which he considered an idealistic experiment struggling for survival. “Look at Stalin’s achievements,” he objected. “Equal rights for women. Full employment. Free health care and education. You don’t need a PhD in number crunching to see that capitalism in America is rigged.”
“Of course it’s rigged,” countered Averell. “So, for your information, is the music business. And so is the Politburo.”
When conversation turned to Palestine, Jimmy expressed contempt for the Zionist movement, insisting that “the creation of a Jewish state will only reinforce the idea of dual Jewish loyalties. It’s everything this world does not need.”
Again, George objected. “Everyone’s got dual loyalties. You think the Vatican’s nothing to American Catholics? Or that Charles Lindberg doesn’t feel Swedish? Or that Joe Kennedy could care less about Ireland? What the hell is wrong with being sentimental about the old country?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Two thousand years. That’s pretty damn old.”
Meanwhile, Fats Waller sang,
This here spot is more than hot.
In fact, the joint is jumpin’.
And then, in mid-October, the city’s white-hot financial elation finished erupting, leaving a smoldering Depression in its wake. The international economy melted. Banks evaporated. Stock traders sailed down from high-rise windows. Soup lines noosed city blocks. Small fortunes crumbled to dust and blew away. But for Kay and Jimmy, for George and many of their friends, the bubble never burst. In fact, it soared higher into the skies of New York. The entertainment industry was one of the few that continued to thrive. And six months before the crash, Jimmy had converted his stock market securities into government-backed bonds.
Even as the banking sector exploded, Jimmy’s career as a wordsmith blossomed. He had once yearned to become a latter-day Lord Byron, free, romantic, and brilliant. He had toiled over one or two lines for hours and weeks, trying to squeeze significance and color into every syllable. All that striving and exertion had earned him no respect from the New York literary community. Now, having achieved success elsewhere, he was tossing off lyrics with abandon and hitting the target more often than not.
Kay, too, had honed her style, which featured gay, jaunty melodies and a bright orchestra replete with saxophonic tone color. In the title number, “Fine and Dandy,” the starlet justifies her sexual straying. What else should her lover expect, when he travels so much?
When you’re handy it’s fine and dandy.
But when you’re gone what can I do?
As Kay and Jimmy wrote and polished song after song, her confidence swelled. She understood Broadway now. If she had questions, she could rely on the best advisors, George Gershwin and Dick Rodgers, not to mention Max Dreyfus.
When they had buffed and glossed a dozen-odd songs, Kay’s chauffeur drove her down Park Avenue to take tea with Dorothy Parker at the Waldorf. Looking through the car window at the depression-stricken city, she saw homeless people hunched in soup lines, beggars holding tin cups, old men sleeping on ratty jackets on sidewalks, and ragged boys chasing each other between passersby. Due to citizen congestion, a portion of East Fiftieth Street was closed to traffic, so Kay had to disembark and continue on foot. In her furs, she felt conspicuous and guilty—even while she stepped off the curb to avoid kicking a sleeping man, or offered a few coins to a woman whose toddlers clutched at her legs.
Her purpose in meeting with Dottie was to discuss the book for Fine and Dandy. Who would shape and flesh out the story line? Who would craft the dialogue? Like a watchmaker, Jimmy took pleasure in working with smaller structures—individual semantic units, metric schemes, rhymes. He had never learned, nor did he care to learn, to write characters other than himself, or to shape their conflicting fears and desires toward a climax and resolution.
Nor, as it turned out, had Dottie. “If I knew how to do that,” she told Kay, “you wouldn’t be financing my tea. And I wouldn’t be sleeping in a Lilliputian walk-up. I’d be masquerading in the Venice Carnevale or dipping my little toes in the waters of Cap D’Antibes.” Dottie frowned, leaned forward over the table, and whispered: “That man is staring at you.”
Kay turned to look. Her psychoanalyst was seated in a dark corner of the room. He smiled at her and turned his attention back to the man across from him.
“Oh, that’s Doctor Zilboorg,” said Kay.
“Hmm,” said Dottie. “I’ve heard of him.”
“What have you heard?”
Dottie looked at Zilboorg. “Oh, people talk. You know how people are. Anyone who’s anyone. Anyway, I have a pal who will be perfect for your show. Donald Ogden Stewart. Stewie. A Yale man, with a light touch. You and Jimmy will adore him.”
To avoid the squalor of the streets, Kay and Jimmy invited Stewie to dinner in their home, where they explained their concept. She had chosen a setting for their play, a small factory like the one her father had briefly owned, beset by labor-management strife. The B-Story would introduce a loveable, compassionate, hasn’t-got-a-clue manager who so sympathizes with his workers that hierarchy crumbles. Jimmy invented the A-Story of star-crossed lovers who, despite their best intentions, cannot fulfill each other’s emotional and sexual needs.
“A factory, that’s fresh,” agreed Stewie, tripping on his words and nodding. “Labor, management, boffo territory for conflict and satire. But—” he held up an index finger. “Caution! Nothing too vicious, political, or cerebral.”
Jimmy and Kay agreed.
“What we’re after is laughs,” said Stewie.
“Precisely,” said Kay.
“And what’s the triedest and truest laugh machine?” He answered his own question: “Vaudeville.”
Jimmy scratched his cheek. “Vaudeville?”
Stewie nodded. “We’re not looking for the bemused, patronizing grin of the New Yorker crowd.”
“We’re not?” asked Jimmy with a bemused, patronizing grin.
“The French term succès d’estime translates to American as ‘failure.’ We want guffaws,” insisted Stewie. “We want them rolling in the aisles. And I know just the man to pull it off. Joe Cook.”
Kay and Jimmy had seen Joe Cook perform. He was the last star of undiluted, unrepentant vaudeville, a man who understood like no other the power of absurdity paired with physical prowess; a fellow whose facility with silly seemed limitless.
They were skeptical. Was Stewie off-loading the task of funnying it up? Did he intend to substitute antics for ingenuity? But after they read Stewie’s droll, elegant published works they decided to let him take a stab at it.
A month later, motivated by Jimmy’s down payment, Stewie delivered a draft that accomplished their objective: it demonstrated the humorous side of failure. It transformed misery into a smile. And then it tortured them with laughter.
Like their hit song, “Can’t We Be Friends?,” the effect of “Fine and Dandy” relied on its suggestion of desperate paradox, its evocation of artlessness in business and torment in romance through bumptious songs and zany antics. Life is a train wreck, it told its audience: Enjoy!
They hired Stewie to rewrite and polish the play. On his advice, they met with the vaudeville star Joe Cook.
Having learned a hard lesson with Say When, Kay involved herself in every aspect of Fine and Dandy from casting through décor. But when she recognized talent she gave it a long leash. Stewie was right in so many ways; not least, in his awareness of his own limitations. He knew how to craft an entertaining story but for guffaws he deferred to Joe Cook, whose virtuoso ad-libs and agile physical comedy reduced his audiences to mounds of jiggly Jell-O.
Rehearsals were arduous. One of the principals broke her ankle. A lead singer fell ill. Kay argued with the producers, on one occasion crumpling three pages of the score, throwing them in the air, and stomping off the set. Lyrics and melodies wandered off; other songs leapt in to steal their places.
But by the night of the dress rehearsal most of the scars had healed; others hid under ear-to-ear layers of stage grease. The actors’ and actresses’ faces glowed in the limelight as their voices traveled well-worn, engineered rails. While newly destitute families snored on sidewalks outside, the audience inside Erlanger’s Theatre on Forty-Fourth Street roared with laughter.
Up in heaven, Kay thought, Sam Swift must be grinning. His daughter, the first woman in history to have composed the entire score of a musical play, to see it produced, and to experience the enthusiasm of a Broadway audience. Like Annie Oakley, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Dorothy Kuhn, Kay had proven that a woman could compete and succeed in a field reserved for men.
Max Dreyfus, Averell Harriman, Aleck Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Oscar Levant, and a hundred of their acquaintances guzzled Dom Perignon and swallowed escargots au beurre persillé at Julie Glaenzer’s apartment, where Luckey Roberts now performed three or four times a week, attracting New York’s elite sots and fox trotters, who treated the jewelry executive’s penthouse as an exclusive club. Glaenzer, who considered the publicity a boon to his trade, slept at the Plaza hotel.
Kay found herself in conversation with Sam Rothapfel, the impresario and theater magnate, whom she had previously seen from a distance at a party or two. Known as Roxy to his friends, Rothapfel boasted about his newest project, the International Music Hall. “Culture is crowds,” he told Kay. “Bigger room, louder laughs.”
His enthusiasm reminded her of her erstwhile hero Wagner, who had once touted the merits of his Bayreuth project in similarly bombastic terms. But while Kay delighted in the hysteria that had filled Erlanger’s Theatre earlier that evening, a part of her remained skeptical. The part that still responded to the quiet resonances of Chopin’s nocturnes. The part that would never forget her father’s contemplative, solitary, mournful side. The part of her that had failed.
Jimmy left early. Kay and George celebrated until about two in the morning. Then, instead of heading uptown to his apartment, or hers, she hired a horse-drawn carriage to trot them down Fifth Avenue to see the building that so inflamed Rothapfel’s imagination.
At Fiftieth Street, construction of the RCA Building was not complete. The design, telescoping rectangular monoliths, oozed elegance and majesty, an art deco lighthouse looming high above the other buildings and the seas of the world, a symbol of the new American claim of cultural preeminence. The top floors, lacking walls, reminded her of a stack of pancakes against the moon. To keep out squatters, the construction crew had surrounded the site with plywood barriers, but Kay found a breach—a door at the side that was slightly ajar. “Over here!” she waved to George. They sneaked in.
A nocturnal jungle of steel, cement, and electrical vines. After their eyes adjusted they forged a path to the completed elevator shafts and slipped inside. Kay pushed the highest button. The elevator began whirring. It climbed and climbed. Sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six floors. They held their breath with anticipation. Finally it stopped and the doors slid open.
Steel girders, rivets, and hoisting cables. Giddy with wonder, they stepped onto a platform and looked west to the Hudson River and south through the center of Manhattan Island to the moon-streaked sea. The city below brightened by Edison bulbs, echoing the constellations. The headlamps of automobiles purring down Fifth Avenue. George pointed to a spot above the horizon, where a falling star streaked and vanished in the firmament. “Modernity,” he whispered. “Mankind lighting the world. Us up here in the heavens.”
He held her tight, listening to the buzzing and murmurs of the night. “We’re all alone here, just you and me, Kay. Probably the first folks ever in this place.” His eyes glowed.
“The workers are here every day, George.”
“Maybe. But not every night. Not tonight. Tonight, this place is ours.” His grip tightened. “Do you hear that?”
She listened.
“That music,” said George, “blooming, like flowers.”
She smiled. Yes, they were standing all alone, close to the sky, the stars, their dreams. Yes, she detected a celestial choir somewhere. A jazzy one. Her heart skipped a beat.
He kissed her with fierceness with the whole world below them. And while most of New York City slept they sank to the cold metal floor, embracing to the strains of Fine and Dandy’s romantic ballad “Can This Be Love?,” which still resonated in their ears.
What can it be, can this be love—
this thing that I keep dreaming of?
“Listen to your heart,” Father Ganter had instructed her. Well, she was listening now. And her heart was thumping.