On September 30, 1935, Porgy and Bess premiered at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. As the curtain fell the audience jumped to their feet and applauded for fifteen minutes. At their insistence, and the conductor’s, George strolled onto the stage in his tuxedo and bowed, his eyes wandering to Kay. The ovation increased and resonated long after she joined him in the wings.
The show was an unqualified triumph, but later, meeting in their hotel lobby, the director expressed reservations about its three-hour length. He, George, and Kay decided which passages to excise or abbreviate. Kay and George worked all night, the following day, and the night after. They incorporated the changes in the third performance.
The director timed the audience’s standing ovation. It clocked in at thirty seconds less than opening night. Still, he insisted, the cuts represented an improvement. In fact, he demanded more.
The version that opened in New York City ten days later therefore lacked some of the subtle connective tissue of the original. It made up for this loss in concision and verve. George thought it better. Kay was not certain but knew, her heart bursting with pride, that either way Porgy and Bess was an American masterpiece that would endure.
Most of the print reviewers cheered but some expressed puzzlement. Was Porgy and Bess a musical or an opera? It was performed in a Broadway theater, like a musical, but it lacked spoken dialogue, like an opera. In interviews George called it a folk opera. No one had ever heard that term. What did folk opera imply? George refused to provide a clear answer. He thought the question unimportant but many of the reviewers considered it crucial.
In newspapers and magazines, the debate exploded. Critics questioned the scene: an impoverished ghetto in Charleston, South Carolina. Broadway shows usually took place in iconic American settings: New York City, the prairies of Oklahoma, a steamboat on the Mississippi. Operas had always been set either in Europe or in one of the mythological realms favored by Wagner or Debussy. The America that Gershwin had set to music was not the nation many wished to display to the world, the industrial titan, home of great institutions of education and research, the hope and freedom of the wide-open plains. No, this Catfish Row had little to do with mainstream American culture or its European heritage. In their few appearances, white people were portrayed as oppressors.
And what to make of the dialect, officially known as Sea Island Creole English? It was neither grammatical American nor the cocky, colorful patois of Harlem. The idiom of the Gullah people combined English diction with syntax from the languages of West Africa and nineteenth-century plantation creole. It was difficult to understand, especially sung.
And those characters. A cripple, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a community of ardent Baptists. Were such people worthy of glorification? What, precisely, was Gershwin’s intent?
But the thorniest issue stemmed from the fact that a handful of genteel white people, George, Kay, DuBose and Dorothy Hayward, Ira Gershwin, had appointed themselves the artistic interpreters of a culture not their own. In discussions of his novel, years earlier, DuBose had referred to his approach as anthropological, suggesting a modern, objective aesthetic. In place of the villains and heroes of the Victorian novel, which had presented itself as a medium for moral commentary, DuBose championed a narrative that depicted men and women as complex and flawed, often emotional, sometimes brave, and deeply ethnic.
But to many that very term, anthropological, also implied colonial arrogance. As the days passed, and then the weeks, reviews turned hostile. George’s rivals, unable to deny the powerful appeal of his music, seized on the cultural issues. The composer Virgil Thomson led the charge. “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself,” he wrote. “Which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.” Ironically, as George pointed out to Kay, Thomson himself was guilty of the charge he was leveling. A white man, he was advocating for the Negroes with this very comment, as if they could not speak for themselves.
Neither George nor DuBose thought of Porgy as social commentary about Negro culture in general. For DuBose it showcased one small piece of the American jigsaw. George saw the story as an affirmation of humanity, a portrayal of the beauty and unseemliness, the simplicity and opacity of emotion and song, of shared humanity but also of the attitudes and idioms that lend a people its singularity. No one could credibly claim that George or DuBose did not love their characters, or that they reduced them to stereotypes or derided them. The denizens of Catfish Row were real, full-blooded human beings, with hearts bursting as they endeavored to forge a path through the muddle of life.
Theater patrons initially loved Porgy and Bess, but the increasingly hostile reviews sank it. Audiences dwindled. Every performance now lost money. Porgy and Bess closed after 124 nights. Not a good run by Gershwin standards, and a catastrophe for such an ambitious, costly production.
The night after the last performance Kay and George enjoyed a canard a l’orange with a blanc de blancs wine, prepared and served in George’s candlelit apartment by Fred Boursier, the premier sous-chef at the Waldorf-Astoria restaurant. Just the two of them. “George,” she told him, “mark my words. In fifty years, a hundred years, few people will remember Virgil Thomson. Even fewer will know the words of his arias. But everyone will know ‘Summertime.’”
He smiled sadly.
The event that pained him most was Edward Morrow’s interview with Duke Ellington in New Theatre magazine. The Duke’s remarks sounded ad hominem and scathing. “The time has come,” said Ellington, “to debunk such tripe as Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.”
Stunned, Gershwin read and reread the interview. For days he lingered in bed or moped around his apartment in pajamas and robe. Finally he called the Duke and they arranged to meet for lunch at Small’s Paradise on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Kay accompanied him.
“Lampblack Negroisms,” George read. He put down the magazine and wiped his forehead with his breast-pocket handkerchief. “Duke, there isn’t a pot of lampblack in any of those dressing rooms. These are real people. Do you have any idea how much pushback I got for insisting on these singers? You’ve known me how long?”
“It’s the dialogue, George. Do you know a colored person who talks that way?”
“Not here in New York, but in Charleston, among the Gullah people? You betcha. DuBose lived with them, worked with them, for years. His mother studied their language. I prayed with them, Duke.”
“Is DuBose colored, himself?” asked the Duke.
“Was Shakespeare colored, when he wrote Othello?” asked George. “Was Bizet a gypsy when he wrote Carmen? Was Rembrandt Jewish when he painted the Jews of Amsterdam—so respectfully that his portraits bring tears to my eyes? It doesn’t change a thing what he believed or what color his skin was. Othello’s a sympathetic guy. He’s flawed but we root for him. Same goes for Porgy. No one’s mocking him. This is no minstrel show, Duke.”
“I guess you’re sensitive to this,” said the Duke, “having begun your career with ‘Swanee.’ ”
“Damn straight I’m sensitive to it,” said George. “Take a swing at the segregationists. But not at your comrades in arms.”
“Duke,” put in Kay, “when the novel Porgy came out everyone hailed it as a masterpiece. The Herald Tribune, the Chicago Daily News, everyone. Including the papers here in Harlem. They used the word authentic. Over and over. When the play opened on Broadway, same tune. No one objected. The dialogue hasn’t changed that much. George just set it to music. And now it’s inauthentic and condescending?”
The Duke salted his fries. “I didn’t actually make that remark. Eddie made it up. And I’ll say so publicly.”
George glanced at Kay. The Duke could be hard driving and cagey. But a liar he was not.
“That said, I don’t imagine you read Porgy the way I do,” added Ellington. “Your Porgy isn’t about the Negro tenement.”
“I’m not following you,” said George.
“All this promised land stuff,” explained the Duke. “It’s about the ghetto. Your people’s ghetto.”
George laughed. “You’ve never set foot in a church in South Carolina.”
They finished their lunch and parted with a warm handshake. The Duke followed through, writing a letter to the editor of New Theatre magazine in which he stated that his comments about Porgy had been misrepresented. But the damage was done.
After Porgy closed, George faced financial ruin. His health deteriorated further. His headaches struck frequently and were more debilitating. He smelled burning rubber at the strangest times. Or it might be invisible trash bursting into flames, or human hair sizzling somewhere just out of sight. Kay feared it was his own life force that was being consumed in the furious flames of his ambition.
He caught a whiff of it when he and Kay watched workers remove the Porgy and Bess lettering from the Alvin Theatre marquee on Fifty-Second Street. As always, when Kay stood beside him on a New York sidewalk in daytime, she felt as if she were swimming in an aquarium. So many passersby looked at them in the intense yet restrained way of those who recognize a celebrity but pretend otherwise. “Why don’t we just do it, George,” she suggested slipping her arm through his. “Settle down somewhere in the countryside. Who needs this Coney Island roller coaster?”
“Kay, you’re about the best thing that ever hit me,” said George. “But I have to get back on my feet.”
“You have a plan?”
“Another movie score. What choice?”
Kay fetched a cigarette in her bag. George lit it for her. “An offer I’m not aware of?”
He nodded. “Shall We Dance.” And then he chuckled. “Who knows, maybe it’ll click this time. Fred and Ginger! Kicking up a storm out there. She’s begging me. It’s been too darn long since I’ve worked with either one of them.” They walked up Broadway in the late summer afternoon. The colorful street thronged with vehicles and trams and smelled like asphalt and grease. Workers in smudged coveralls and neatly pressed suits trudged home from offices and factories, their heads low, their pace languid. “Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of work, yourself,” George told Kay with a sly smile. “You won’t even have time to miss me.”