IRA GERSHWIN, an amiable, highly literate gentleman, resides in Beverly Hills, California, and has been known to a wide circle of his friends for many years as Permanent President of the Nice Guys Association.
“Let me give you an idea what sort of person Ira is,” says Larry Adler, the master of the mouth organ. “When Paul Draper and I were starting out on our first concert tour—I was to play, and he to dance—I was living out in California, about three blocks away from Ira. The day I was to leave by train to meet Paul in Denver for our first engagement, I was pretty nervous, as you can imagine. The doorbell rang; it was Ira. He handed me a package. In it was some formal dresswear. Shirts, collars, bow ties, studs, waistcoats. He said, ‘Larry, these belonged to George. You and he wore the same sizes, so I thought they might bring you some luck tonight.’ The guy is some sort of an angel.”
Eudora Welty has written that humorist S. J. Perelman must be considered one of our national treasures. Surely, the same applies to Ira Gershwin. Since 1918 his words have been sweeping the country. The title f his own first published lyric proved to be descriptive of his whole oeuvre— “The Real American Folk Song.”
In 1921, using the pseudonym “Arthur Francis,” he wrote his first Broadway show, Two Little Girls in Blue, with Vincent Youmans. Then came all the marvelous classics that he wrote with his brother George. But since George’s passing in 1937, Ira has proved remarkably adaptable to the talents of a phalanx of other fine composers. With Kurt Weill he did the score for Lady in the Dark; and ever since things have always looked up when he’s written with Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Burton Lane, Arthur Schwartz, and Harry Warren.
Ira Gershwin
In his book, Lyrics on Several Occasions, he has stated, “Anyone may turn up with a hit song, as evidenced by any number of one-hit writers…. A career of lyric-writing isn’t one that anyone can easily muscle in on; … if the lyricist who lasts isn’t a W. S. Gilbert he is at least literate and conscientious; … even when his words at times sound like something off the cuff, lots of hard work and experience have made them so. And I do believe that generally I am speaking not only for myself but for—in any order you like—Porter, Fields, Berlin, Mercer, Lerner, Loesser, Dietz, Wodehouse, Comden and Green, Hammerstein, Hart, Harburg, and two or three others whose work I respect.”
Gershwin includes in his book the following wisdom: “A Small Summing Up. Given a fondness for music, a feeling for rhyme, a sense of whimsy and humor, an eye for the balanced sentence, an ear for the current phrase, and the ability to imagine oneself a performer trying to put over the number in progress—given all this, I still would say it takes four or five years collaborating with knowledgeable composers to become a well-rounded lyricist. I could be wrong about the time element—no doubt there have been lyricists who knew their business from the start—but time and experiment and experience help.”
The gallantry he demonstrates toward his fellow lyricists in these quotations is typical of Mr. Gershwin’s lack of competitive spirit. In a dog-eatdog business, his specialty is handing out laurel wreaths. “Ira,” said one of his closest friends, “is defter with words than anyone I know—and he hasn’t got a bad one for anybody.”
For the past several decades he and Mrs. Gershwin have been living in a large, sunny Beverly Hills home, where the living-room walls are graced with brother George’s excellent paintings. There are several more recent works by younger sister Frances Godowsky, another artist of sensitivity and talent.
Ira’s shelves are stacked with an extensive library of recondite reference books—words have always fascinated him—and there are also vast stores of phonograph records. “Hundreds and hundreds of them in there,” he says, beaming behind a small, fragrant cigar. “Most of them I’ve never gotten around to playing.”
Nattily attired in a sports jacket with an ascot knotted at his throat, Mr. Gershwin glances somewhat nervously at the small tape-recorder on the table which is recording him sans obvious microphone. “Is that thing taking every word down?” he inquires. And when informed that it is, he shakes his head in amazement. “I’m still back to where I want to wind the Victrola,” he sighs. “I am just not mechan-ic-ally inclined. You know who used to say that? Maurice Abravanel—he was our conductor for Lady in the Dark. Now he conducts the Utah Symphony. Kurt Weill and I were with him one night and Kurt asked, ‘How was the show you saw last night?’ Abravanel said, ‘Artis-tic-ally not too bad, but mechan-ic-ally not so good.”
He shrugs. “But you can’t fight progress, can you? Especially phonograph records. They really changed the music business. Expanded the field so much. Especially with Decca, when Jack Kapp brought them out three for a dollar. I remember, during the war, out here we had a little man who supplied us with bedsheets and so on—not black market or anything. He just knew where to get them. Nice little Jewish man who only wanted to help the war effort by entertaining the troops. He’d find an empty store and say, ‘We’ll put in a checkerboard, get a phonograph—keep the soldiers happy.’ He set up five or six of those places. One day he was opening up a place out in Westwood, and he called me up. ‘Mr. Gershwin,’ he said, ‘I got hold of a Victrola, but I have no records. Could you spare some?’ I figured it was much easier to do it another way, so I told him, ‘Look, I’ll give you $25. Go to a store in town here, you’ll get seventy-five records.’ Three-for-a-dollar Deccas—that meant 150 sides. So later he called me up and said, ‘I’m very happy, you’ve made it nice for the soldiers, and you’ve made me very happy too. I got the seventy-five records.’ I asked him, ‘By the way, any Gershwin songs?’ He said, ‘Nope.’”
Inevitably, the conversation turns to the state of the American musical-comedy theatre, and to how it has changed since the days in the 1920s when George and Ira Gershwin were turning out successes at a rapid-fire pace.
“Funny,” says Mr. G, “I was thinking at four o’clock this morning about the finances of Of Thee I Sing, which cost $88,000. Of course, that was during the Depression. Imagine, though, putting on a Broadway musical for that; they only needed $50,000 cash. Herb Waters, the scenery man, would wait for his $38,000—he trusted you.
“We were up in Boston trying out, and George Kaufman said, ‘You ought to have a piece of the show.’ I said, ‘I have no money.’ He said, ‘Well, look, there’s still five percent open that we can let you have.’ In those days, if you put in $10,000 and the producer had $10,000, you got the same piece as he did. There was nothing like today, when fifty percent goes to the backer after the production cost is recouped, and then the management keeps fifty percent of the profits. So I borrowed $2,500 from my brother George, and I got five percent of Of Thee I Sing. I was able to pay George back in a few months because I eventually got $11,000 from my little $2,500 investment!”
He shakes his head. “Today … well, you can lose $700,000-$800,000 in one night, if the reviews aren’t good.”
“Funny thing about Kaufman,” he says. “It’s very funny, considering he did so many musicals—he hated music, you know. I remember standing at a performance of Of Thee I Sing. My brother George and I and Kaufman. Kaufman turned to George and said, ‘How do you account for the success of this thing?’ And my brother said, ‘George, you don’t like to be sentimental. You hate love, and so forth. But the people believe that the President of the United States, even though he’s going to be impeached, is not going to give up the girl he loves.’ But Kaufman could not understand that. He was very cynical about those things. But, God knows, he was a clever craftsman.”
Gershwin has been inactive since 1954, when he and Harold Arlen wrote the score for the remake of A Star Is Born. He may have retired from active songwriting, but he keeps up a lively correspondence with his good friends. His pen pal of longest standing is P. G. Wodehouse. “He writes me all the time,” says Gershwin, between puffs of his cigar. “In most of the letters he says, ‘Oh, when can we get together? When do you come to New York?’ Because I haven’t seen Plum in thirty years. Marvelous fellow. Wonderful lyricist, in the English tradition of W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert was the greatest, no question of that. If he were alive today, he’d be doing good musical-comedy songs. More, of course, in the modern fashion, rather than just versifying.
“You know, Wodehouse and Guy Bolton sent me a copy of their book Bring On the Girls some time back, and it started me thinking about them. So many of the things that were left out of that profile The New Yorker ran about Plum. For instance, Bolton once told me that Wodehouse and he were working in London on some show. Wodehouse lived on the third floor of the house, and there was an empty lot next door. And Wodehouse would write a letter to Bolton and throw it out of the window. He’d stamp it, of course, and throw it out—knowing that some passing taxi-driver would see it and then deliver it! Bolton would call up, maybe an hour later, and he’d say, ‘That’s fast delivery!’
“Plum once told my wife, ‘You know, I can never live in a house or an apartment which is higher than the second or third floor; I like a walk-up. If there’s an elevator, you get into it and the elevator boy says, “Nice day, isn’t it?” You don’t know what to say to him, do you?’ And he meant it! He is very shy.
“I remember we went up to Boston for a show we were opening called Rosalie. My brother and I and Plum had written it. Jack Donahue and Marilyn Miller were the stars. For that type of a show, I guess it was pretty good.1 Anyway, opening night in Boston, I couldn’t see a thing, because I’m only five foot six and all these college boys standing in the back were so tall. Wodehouse is about six foot three. In the first act we were way over-long, and the first act wasn’t over until 10:40. Then came the intermission, and at 10:50 the second act started. I’m standing there, trying to listen. I can’t see anything, but I can hear; Plus is right next to me and I’m trying to catch a view of the stage. I feel a tap on my shoulder. I whispered, ‘What is it?’ And Plum has reached into his back pocket, where he always kept his dollar Ingersoll, and he says, ‘Ira, it’s eleven o’clock. I must toddle off to bed.’ Opening night!
“The next day I asked him, ‘On opening night, why did you have to toddle off to bed?’ He said, ‘Oh, I have to get up early at six o’clock because I like to browse along the bookstalls on the Charles River!’
“He is quite a character. He wrote me a while back after some Broadway show had just opened and closed overnight and lost $600,000, and he said, ‘Can you imagine this? How could you put on a show today when it needs that sort of financing?’ In the days when Wodehouse and Bolton and Kern would do their musicals at the Princess Theatre, I would imagine the entire cost wasn’t more than $30,000 or $40,000.”
*
The ’20s, when the partnership of George and Ira Gershwin flourished so remarkably, was a boom period, not only for the Harding-Coolidge economy but for the American musical comedy.
“Do you realize, the night we opened Oh, Kay! [November 1926] there were eleven other shows opening? I think four of them were musicals. We had 240-odd shows opening that year—and about the same number in 1927!” Which would account for the number and variety of young composers and lyricists who emerged: Hammerstein, De Sylva, Brown and Henderson, Arlen, Harburg, Rodgers and Hart, Vernon Duke. “Of course, right up until the Depression, and even a little bit after, there were so many more opportunities for people to get started.”
Does Gershwin subscribe to Harry Ruby’s theory that the proliferation of talents (the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Irving Caesar, Ruby, Harburg) which emerged from the Lower East Side was due to the presence of a piano in the living room of newly arrived immigrant families?
“That could be it,” he muses. “I know the piano was very important in our lives. The great thing in those days was this. Say a girl was working in a department store; she could go and buy sheet music. It only cost ten cents. Later on it cost more, but you could still buy half a dozen songs for a dollar or so and have the gang around the piano on Saturday nights, and they would be singing all the songs.
“You know, we got a piano for me. I was supposed to take lessons—my aunt gave me a few at her house. I got as far as page thirty in the lesson book. We lived on Second Avenue, and when the piano came in through the window—they hoisted it up—my brother George sat right down and he played it! I was amazed. It turned out he had a friend around the corner on Seventh Street who had a pianola at his house, and George would study things on it. He played with perfect harmonics, and with that wonderful left hand of his. So that business of having a piano around must be true….
“Of course, today there’s so much distraction, with the radio and the TV, that the best you can do is to learn to strum a guitar, because nobody has the time for basics … unless you want to be a concert pianist or something.”
Then Gershwin hasn’t any further comment about the state of modern popular music?
“Oh, I give no thought to it,” he admits. “When you have this influx of country music and that sort of thing, I’m just not interested. Today it’s all protesters. Kids protesting against parents, and so forth. And they make a fortune, these protesters. My God, the money they can make!
“The other night a friend called me up, and he said, ‘Can you imagine if your brother George were alive today?’ You know, George was very attractive and smart-looking, had great authority. And he said, ‘If he were alive today, what he would make—compared to Bacharach, or Mancini, or any of these men?’
“So I thought that over, and I said, ‘No, he wouldn’t make as much, because he would want to write things for the symphony, which would take so much time.’ But George would do very well, I’m sure.”2
Ira Gershwin keeps busy these days annotating Gershwin material for the Library of Congress, which, considering the worldwide popularity of George’s work, must be a full-time job. He has encountered some strange translations along the way. “Especially the Russians,” he says. “You know, after the production of Porgy and Bess that toured Russia, they published George’s Rhapsody in Blue and a folio of Songs by Gershwin. A varied selection, about eight or ten songs … things like ‘The Man I Love’ and four or five from Porgy and Bess. Translated into Russian. Of course, they didn’t pay royalties.
“One day, Dmitri Tiomkin, the composer, came here to visit. He brought along Georges Auric, the French composer—he was one of The Six. They were back from Japan, where they’d been doing something about international copyrights. I said, ‘Dimmie, some time ago I received this Russian thing, and I’d like to know what the Russian lyrics are like. So he read them for me. They were more or less faithful to my lyrics, except when it came to ‘I Got Plenty of Nothing’—there they sneaked in a little propaganda! I asked Dimmie about ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So,’ and he started to read it, and he said ‘Little David was … let me see…. ‘ He said ‘Little David was impotent, but oh my!’ I must say, I found that very curious,” grins Mr. Gershwin.
“You know, the Russians never say ‘sweetheart’ or ‘girl friend.’ It’s always my ‘wife.’ Very puritanic. Of course, I knew all about that from the opening night of Porgy and Bess in Moscow. In the scene where Bess lifts up her skirt to get some money to give Sporting Life for the bottle of whiskey, there was a gasp all through the opera house. A woman lifting her skirt up like that—unheard of!”
Since its première in 1935 Porgy and Bess has achieved a steady international success; somewhat ironically, its acceptance in other countries is far greater than here in America.
“Lehman Engel, the conductor, sent me a ninety-page manuscript of his experiences with Porgy and Bess in Turkey. They did it in Ankara. He wrote all about the trouble he had having the thing translated into Turkish. For instance, in ‘The Buzzard Song’—they’d never even heard of a buzzard there. So many things were different—idiomatic things like the crap game. They had to hunt for its equivalent in Turkish. Very, very difficult.
“But that goes on all the time. We just signed contracts to have Porgy and Bess translated into Dutch for the Amsterdam Opera House. Poland. Czechoslovakia. In France they play it in English. The first translation was in Denmark. Bertolt Brecht had translated it. The Nazis allowed the Danes to have it played, as long as they didn’t advertise! Years later I read a book about the German occupation of Denmark. The author told all about how the Nazis would do their regular propaganda broadcasts on the radio, with the fanfares and the music … and whenever they’d finished delivering their daily stuff, the underground radio would come on immediately afterward and play ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So!’
“Even up in Finland—they just wrote me from Helsinki the other day and asked if they might do it there, with a small orchestra. More of a concert version.”
What about future productions of Porgy and Bess here in its home territory?
“Well,” says Gershwin, with a touch of wry, “not too many at this particular moment. It may be that the social climate isn’t exactly right. Interestingly enough, there was a very successful performance done last year in Charleston, South Carolina. One hundred and twenty people, all local talent outside of three principals. Sensational, they wrote me; they’re going to do it again next year. Afterwards they had a big party.” He smiles. “It was the first time the bluebloods mixed with the blackbloods. I remember, that happened with we played Dallas with the touring company a few years back. So perhaps, the show does do some good after all.”
A few months after that sunny California afternoon when Gershwin sat in his living room schmoozing about such a variety of subjects, the President of the Nice Guys Association celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. This happy event elicited greetings and joyful sounds from a vast throng of friends and admirers, all of whom struck up the band in his honor.
ASCAP’s own magazine, ASCAP Today, published a special issue of tributes to Mr. G from his friends, replete with fond reminiscences from Harold Arlen, Howard Dietz, Harry Warren, Arthur Schwartz, and other cronies. Ever modest, Gershwin wrote to this author and mentioned the birthday issue of the magazine, adding, “But I had nothing to do with its contents.”
An arguable statement, Mr. Gershwin. It could be said that you had everything to do with it.