A SONGWRITER EMERGES (1917–18)
SHORTLY AFTER LEAVING the Remick firm in 1917, Gershwin suffered a professional humiliation that haunted him for years. At the Fox City Theater on 14th Street, he got a $25-a-week job filling in at the piano for the orchestra—at the so-called supper show—while its members broke for their evening meal. This was apparently Gershwin’s first stint as an accompanist in vaudeville, and he took the assignment seriously:
Happy to be working, I attended the Monday morning rehearsal and sat beside the pianist, watching the acts go through their routine. I also sat through the first show (matinée) eagerly watching the music and the acts to make sure I’d make good. The supper show began. I got along fine with three or four acts. I was especially good with a turn that used Remick songs.
The next act, however, featured a juvenile male lead, a soprano, six chorus girls, and a “terrible” comedian. Its music, cobbled together from varied sources, was in manuscript form.
You know the cryptic condition of those theatrical manuscript scores. I started to play the opening chorus and seemed to be getting along fine, when suddenly I found myself playing one thing and the chorus girls singing another. Evidently I had missed a couple of cues. After all it was my first day at the new job, and aside from nervousness I was as yet unfamiliar with all the musical terms you find in such music.
Gershwin soldiered on, managing to struggle through the first number. But the worst was yet to come: later on, he again seemed to be playing something the soprano was definitely not singing. “I tried to find the right cue, but failed and gave up trying to play.” Another cast member saw an opportunity. “The comic—I can still see his leering face—came down to the footlights and began to jeer at me. ‘Who told you you were a piano player?’ he bawled out. ‘You ought to be driving a truck.’ The audience howled, the chorus girls giggled and I died a thousand deaths.” After the show ended, Gershwin informed the box office cashier, “I was the piano player here this afternoon and I’m quitting,” and left without picking up his pay ($3.13) for the evening’s work. A certain measure of vindication came thirteen years later, when the Fox movie studio in Hollywood offered the Gershwin brothers $100,000 to write music for a movie called Delicious. When it came time to sign the contract, George “changed the figure to read $100,003.13 and when eyebrows were raised I told the story. ‘You see I’ve got an eighth of a week’s salary coming,’ . . . and the revised figure was solemnly agreed to.”1
Although the incident left no perceptible mark on the course of Gershwin’s career, it surely left an emotional one: a rare example of professional failure and ridicule. Gershwin was not in the habit of discussing scars on his memory, and it is hard to think of another incident in his life whose telling centers so fully on his emotions. To fail on musical grounds wounded him unforgettably.
Not sure where to turn, he sought help from a friend—Will Vodery, a “colored arranger” who had worked on several editions of the Ziegfeld Follies. Vodery seems to have opened the right door, for before the summer’s end Gershwin was accompanying rehearsals for a new Ziegfeld revue: Miss 1917, coproduced by Charles Dillingham, another eminent figure in musical comedy. The show boasted a score by Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse—three luminaries of the trade he hoped to practice himself.2 In Vodery, Gershwin had chosen a unique figure as a confidant: a well-schooled African American musician with connections to the upper echelon of the (white) Broadway theater. Although a composer, Vodery was respected most for his arranging, orchestrating, conducting, and coaching.3 It is not clear when the two men met, but Vodery’s new prominence in Gershwin’s life points to the matter of how the young composer was drawn to jazz music.
More than most of his white colleagues, he was drawn to music made by black Americans, and he had some contact with three other illustrious black musicians before 1920. All were pianists older than he, and all wrote scores for musicals: James Hubert (“Eubie”) Blake, Charles Luckeyeth (“Luckey”) Roberts, and James P. Johnson. They were by profession “ticklers”: pianists who held forth at saloons, cabarets, dance halls, ballrooms, sporting houses, and joints of other kinds that comprised the bedrock of New York’s black entertainment and show business. Their job was to attract customers and keep the music going through the long hours that such places maintained, especially before Prohibition. A successful tickler had to have the right blend of personality and musicianship, and as Johnson saw it, another virtuoso pianist, Willie (“the Lion”) Smith, whom Gershwin came to know a few years later, struck that balance better than anyone else. These four were but a handful of the dozens of skilled pianists who moved through the city’s black entertainment venues during the 1910s. Few, however, matched their combination of talent, creativity, and access to the means of preserving and disseminating music.
One undocumented report has Roberts and Johnson telling Blake as early as 1916 about a recent arrival in the city, a “very talented ofay [white] piano player at Remick’s . . . good enough to learn some of those terribly difficult tricks that only a few of us could master.”4 If Gershwin was indeed able to execute dazzling piano tricks akin to those of his black compatriots, it is hard to imagine where, other than directly from them, he could have learned them. Roberts claimed Gershwin as his student more than once, but never while the composer was still alive.5
In these years, Gershwin was living in upper Manhattan with his parents and siblings, first on West 111th Street and then farther north, on West 144th Street. The city’s black neighborhoods were then close to midtown Manhattan, from the West 20s to the 50s and 60s. Only after the country’s entry into World War I in April 1917 did the black population move north to the point that Harlem became home to the city’s African American culture. After Prohibition began in 1920, nightlife there came to include high-toned “black and tan” clubs, where the entertainers were black and the clientele white. Indications are that Gershwin, who was making a mark on Broadway by then, visited such places to listen to the music.
Bert Williams, the gifted actor, singer, and comedian, is another African American stalwart who noticed Gershwin’s talent before he was famous. In 1914, the year George began to work for Remick’s, the firm published “The Darktown Poker Club,” a song with music attributed to Vodery and Williams. It’s possible that Gershwin took a hand in making the piano arrangement, or in plugging the number after it was published, and he likely accompanied Williams at least once. During Miss 1917’s Broadway run, cast members gave concerts on Sunday nights in the Century Theater, which otherwise would have been dark. Gershwin, as rehearsal pianist, served as an accompanist for these Sunday Evening Concerts. The first one, which took place on November 11, boasted a stellar cast that included Williams along with Eddie Cantor, George White, Ann Pennington, and Fanny Brice.6
Gershwin met James P. Johnson in 1920, when both were making piano rolls for the Aeolian Corporation. Each excelled in his own milieu—Johnson in the world of the black cabaret, Gershwin in that of Broadway songwriting—while cultivating talents beyond their specialty. Gershwin by this time had written the score for a successful Broadway musical comedy and had logged at least a year of study with Edward Kilenyi. Johnson was beginning to dream of “conducting symphony orchestras in large concert halls, playing his works based on native Afro-American musical themes.”7 Within the decade, each man would make a major statement along the lines Johnson was imagining.
FEW MUSICALS of the World War I era left a mark on history. The so-called Princess Theatre shows, beginning in 1915—among them Very Good Eddie, Leave It to Jane, Oh, Boy, and Oh, Lady, Lady—are considered landmarks for their modest scale (the theater held only 299 seats), the catchiness of their songs (music by Kern, lyrics by Wodehouse), and the deft coordination between music and books (many of the latter by Guy Bolton).8 The popular Ziegfeld Follies, a series of annual variety shows—“revues”—are remembered for their emphasis on glamour and spectacle, and on muscle as a box-office draw.9 Operetta, a distinctive European genre, flourished as well: Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime (1918) enjoyed a Broadway run of 492 performances.
Miss 1917, another Bolton–Wodehouse collaboration, proved to be a flop, opening on November 5 and closing after only seventy-two performances. Given the credentials of the creative team and the talented cast, the outcome must have surprised many.10 Aside from Herbert and Kern, producers Dillingham and Ziegfeld both had records of success; the director, Ned Wayburn, was famous for his work with theatrical dancers; Viennese-born Joseph Urban, Ziegfeld’s favorite designer, did the sets. Moreover, the cast boasted such headliners as veteran comedian Lew Fields, female impersonator Bert Savoy, dancers Irene Castle and Ann Pennington, singer Vivienne Segal, and dancer and future producer George White. But the writers and the producers were seldom on the same page. As Bolton and Wodehouse claimed fancifully long after the fiasco, the principals—“three classical dancers, three acrobatic dancers, a Spanish dancer, forty-eight buck and wing dancers, two trained cows, a performing seal and Harry Kelly and his dog Lizzy”—posed obstacles for Bolton, whose job it was to invent a plot for them all. Meanwhile, Wodehouse labored to write words for a number that featured no fewer than a dozen dancing girls, each with a different costume:
On arriving at the theater in the morning, the sensitive poet [Wodehouse] was handed a pile of costume designs. One would represent a butterfly, another the Woolworth Building, a third a fish, a fourth a bird, a fifth a fruit salad and the others the Spirit of American Womanhood, Education Enlightening the Backward South, Venus Rising from the Sea, and so on, and Mr. Ziegfeld says will you please have it ready for tomorrow’s rehearsal, as the girls are threatening to walk out because they have nothing to do. . . . When the bard had finished twelve refrains, cunningly introducing the butterfly, the Woolworth Building, the Growing Unrest in the Balkans and Venus Rising from the Sea, the management decided that they didn’t want to use those costumes after all, and handed him another batch.11
The show turned out to be so large and lavish that, even with full houses, it stood to lose almost $4,000 a week. Luckily for Bolton and Wodehouse, “The boy who played the piano at rehearsals was a young fellow named George Gershwin.”12
The young rehearsal pianist found Broadway’s environment far superior to that of Tin Pan Alley: more musically ambitious and more varied in the challenges it offered. Capital flowed more freely too: he earned $35 a week. Drawing on his own improvisatory bent, Gershwin took to his new position with grace and panache. “After I got to know the music of the show,” he told a Billboard interviewer in 1920, “I started to put little frills and furbelows into it. This made a hit with the chorus girls and Ned Wayburn found they worked better when I played for them.” The rehearsals for Miss 1917 alerted Jerome Kern to Gershwin’s talent, especially his unusual gift for improvisations and arrangements. Hearing Gershwin launch into an impromptu session at the piano after one rehearsal, Kern was so impressed that he arrived the next day with his wife so that she might hear “this young man who is surely going to go places.”13 Director Wayburn kept Gershwin on the payroll after the show opened, which made him available for a succession of Sunday Night Concerts.
Between the end of those concerts in December and the early days of February, Gershwin held no steady employment, but he still managed to find work as a pianist. When a nightspot called the Coconut Grove, on the roof of the Century Theatre, staged an all-Spanish revue featuring the music of Quinito Valverde, a composer for the popular stage in Spain, Gershwin played piano in the orchestra for about half the thirty-three performances. In a November Sunday Evening Concert at the Century, he accompanied Vivienne Segal, a star from the Miss 1917 cast. A classically trained singer, Segal was by 1917 a poised trouper with the clout to choose two songs by her even younger accompanist. After singing “There’s More to the Kiss Than the X-X-X” and “You-oo Just You,” both with lyrics by Irving Caesar, she brought Gershwin out for a bow. Segal’s performance may have marked the first time a New York theater audience had heard a Gershwin song with the composer at the piano.
Caesar and Gershwin liked what they had accomplished in “You-oo Just You” enough to seek out a publisher. Remick’s was their first choice, and they set their sights on making $25 each from the song. At the audition, Fred Belcher of the professional department listened while Caesar sang and George played. Caesar recalled:
When we stopped Belcher asked, “Well, boys, how about $250?” We were speechless. We both thought he was telling us we would have to pay him that to see the song in print. Belcher took our silence to mean we were not satisfied. He said, “OK, I’ll give you $500.” We were so excited that we ran all the way uptown to where George lived. We told his parents the great news. Many years have passed since that day but I’ve never forgotten what Rose said: “Morris,” she told her husband. “Send a lawyer to help them. These boys will be eaten up.”14
“You-oo Just You,” Gershwin’s third published song, and his first with a text accompanied by blackface images, projects a mood of tenderness. The song’s grounding in minstrel-show conventions is unmistakable, from the colloquial diction (“Evenin’ comes and my work is thru-oo”) to the southern plantation frame. It was thus with Caesar that Gershwin, an advance of $250 in his pocket, got his first taste of the moneyed side of the business he hoped to break into. By late 1917, he was collaborating with three other lyricists: Ira’s friend Ben Praskins, Lou Paley, and Ira himself. And by February, Ira, then working at the B. Altman department store, had written around ten songs with George.
Miss 1917, in addition to offering Gershwin the opportunity to work with leading lights of musical comedy, provided an even more important breakthrough. Harry Askins, the show’s manager, having observed the competence and flair with which Gershwin carried out his duties, recommended him to Max Dreyfus, the head of T. B. Harms music publishers.15 Born in Germany and trained in the European classical tradition, Dreyfus had worked as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley and was a composer as well. But his genius lay in his ability to spot talent, to choose and market songs, and to run a business. Dreyfus focused his attention on the theater, recruiting leading theatrical composers to the Harms staff, with a salary plus a royalty on songs the firm published. One of the first to receive this treatment was Jerome Kern, followed over the years by an impressive roster of relatively young men at or near the beginning of their careers, among them Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter. By the late 1920s, under Dreyfus’s direction, approximately 90 percent of Broadway stage music being published, from show songs in sheet music format to vocal scores, was issued by Harms.16
Dreyfus was careful about whom he recruited, and he could be a forbidding figure, as Rodgers discovered in 1922. When a neophyte producer named Lawrence Schwab was looking for someone to score a new musical and Rodgers offered him a batch of songs, Schwab proposed that his “good friend” Max Dreyfus judge his efforts; but Dreyfus found “nothing of value” in the tunes. Three years later, however, when two shows with scores by Rodgers and his lyricist Lorenz Hart were running simultaneously on Broadway, Rodgers received “the royal summons” to visit Dreyfus again. This time, when he walked into the office, “Dreyfus rose solemnly from his desk, greeted me warmly and immediately got down to business. Not only did he want to publish the songs from Dearest Enemy, he also wanted Larry and me to sign with his company as staff writers,” an offer he did not refuse. At the end of the meeting, “he put his arm around my shoulder, and I suddenly realized what it meant to be one of Max Dreyfus’ boys. ‘There’s one thing I want you to promise me,’ he said. ‘If you ever need money, I don’t want you to go to anyone else but me. From now on, don’t ever forget that I’m your friend.’ ” And Rodgers never did.17
In Gershwin’s case, the anointing took place early in 1918, when Harry Askins offered to introduce him. Dreyfus
asked me to play for him and I played four of my songs. When I finished, he said, “Come and see me next Monday.” At this I laughed inwardly, for it had a familiar sound by that time. . . . I didn’t consider Mr. Dreyfus’s invitation to call again very seriously. You can judge of my surprise then, when on going to see him the next Monday, he said, “Gershwin, I believe you’ve got the stuff in you. I’m willing to back my judgment by putting you on the salary list.”18
Ira’s diary for February 10 added more details: “Geo. has been placed on the staff of T. B. Harms Co. . . . He gets $35 a week for this connection, then $50 advance & 3c royalty, on each song of his they accept. This entails no other efforts on his part than the composing, they not requiring any of his leisure for ‘plugging’ nor for piano-playing. Some snap.” From this moment in his twentieth year until the end of his life, Gershwin was never without a ready source of income.19
The new Harms staff composer continued to work as a pianist in vaudeville. On February 25, Gershwin and singer Louise Dresser opened at New York’s Riverside Theatre, the first engagement in a four-city tour. Their program included five songs—apparently interwoven with personal anecdotes by the singer, who had a personal connection to at least four. Foremost among them was “My Gal Sal” (1905), with words and music by Indiana native Paul Dresser, brother of novelist Theodore Dreiser, said to have been written specifically for Louise. Born Louise Kerlin in Evansville, Indiana, she apparently took the name Dresser because of her link to the song. (Paul adopted his stage name early in his professional acting career.) Active on Broadway as well as in vaudeville, she was twice Gershwin’s age when the pair toured together. She remembered him affectionately in later years, citing the conscientious way he went about his business. Gershwin made no secret of his aversion to “My Gal Sal.” Nevertheless, “there were times when I almost forgot the lyrics, listening to Georgie trying to make that trite melody sound like a beautiful bit of music. . . . It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit had he banged the piano one day and walked off the stage. I wouldn’t have blamed him too much—but that lovable, shy lad wouldn’t have done such a thing.”20
After New York, Dresser and Gershwin, traveling the Keith vaudeville circuit, played in Boston, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., where President Woodrow Wilson attended one of their performances. Back in New York after the tour ended, Gershwin took more jobs as a rehearsal accompanist. The first was with Rock-a-Bye Baby, produced by Arch and Edgar Selwyn, which opened on May 22. Kern had written the score, and during the show’s preparation the two composers renewed their acquaintance. In a mentoring frame of mind, Kern advised the young man to consult first with him if he was ever offered a major creative assignment.21 Gershwin moved on to a stint as rehearsal pianist for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, which opened on June 18.22 His salary was presumably $35 a week, as it had been for Miss 1917. Because Max Dreyfus was also paying him the same weekly stipend, the year 1918 must have seen an improvement in the Gershwin family finances.
Between these two Broadway openings, Gershwin sat down one day at the piano with his brother. Ira, yet to be published as a lyricist, had nurtured a hunch that an “American folk song” could make an apt starting point for a musical comedy number. So he wrote an essaylike refrain and worked it over in several drafts. On May 26 he showed his latest draft to George, who responded with a syncopated burst. Ira’s opening states the song’s premise in an eight-word declaration: “The real American folk song / is a rag.” To which George responded, as if via a musical hypodermic: “The REAL a-MER-i-can FOLK-song is a RAG!!”: an explosion both musical and syntactical, demanding an assertive delivery. At a time when such rhythmic disruptiveness was rare on Broadway, a listener may have found the refrain’s melody extreme. Yet Gershwin devised two ways to mitigate the beginning’s strangeness. One was to follow the explosion with smoother, more restrained melodic motion. The other was to familiarize the syncopation by referring often to it during the rest of his refrain. As Ira explained years later, once he had found a title for a new song, which was sure to appear early in the refrain, he would often “skip to the last line and . . . try to work the title in again with a twist, if possible.”23 And that’s what happened here.
Eventually, the brothers’ compositional process usually began with George at the piano trolling for music to underline a particular narrative or mood. With “Folk Song,” however, their first known collaboration, the opposite was true—up to a point. The words came first, in the form of the lyric Ira wrote for the refrain. George wrote four bars of music to set the first two lines, and then extended them by a mix of melodic repetition and balance to fill out the refrain’s form—routinely thirty-two bars long. An adjusted lyric followed, with lines changed and reshaped to fit the new music. The verse came later, presumably invented by George with maximum contrast in mind, and Ira supplying words to fit. George, to be sure, was the composer of what we call the Gershwin songs, and Ira the lyricist of most of them. Yet during the making of these numbers, the line between those roles was not always clear.
SOMETIME during the summer of 1918, vaudeville and Broadway headliner Nora Bayes heard Gershwin play, apparently during a visit to the Harms office, and hired him as onstage pianist for a show soon to go into rehearsal: Look Who’s Here, renamed Ladies First by the time it opened on Broadway. The producer was Harry Frazee, theater owner and president of the Boston Red Sox (who infamously sold his team’s star outfielder-pitcher, George Herman [“Babe”] Ruth, to the New York Yankees). Frazee’s creative staff for Ladies First was experienced, if old-fashioned. The librettist and lyricist, Harry B. Smith, was perhaps the musical stage’s most prolific author, credited with writing the words for over 6,000 songs.24 Composer A. Baldwin Sloane had scored almost fifty Broadway shows, though his efforts had yet to produce a single hit song.25 Director Frank Smithson had filled that role for at least three dozen musicals, dating back to the 1890s. The show’s chief asset, though, was Bayes, a star high enough in the entertainment firmament to have been ranked among the “Golden Dozen” of vaudeville’s single-woman acts.26 Some numbers were sung with piano accompaniment alone, provided by Gershwin. In addition, he persuaded the show’s brain trust to accept three of his own songs: “Some Wonderful Sort of Someone” (lyrics by Schuyler Greene), “Something About Love” (lyrics by Lou Paley), and “The Real American Folk Song.”
A long tryout period began early in September, split between Trenton, New Jersey (Ira took the train from New York to experience the thrill of hearing his own words sung from a professional stage), Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Baltimore, Atlantic City, Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. One of those tryout performances in Pittsburgh was attended by an eleven-year-old budding musician named Oscar Levant, who years later vividly recalled George Gershwin’s accompaniment:
I don’t remember a thing about the performance . . . except that in the second act the show stopped, Bayes came down front and did what amounted to her vaudeville turn. For those who don’t remember, her singing was marked by a highly personal treatment of the music and words, in which the piano accompaniments played a very subtle and important part requiring almost constant improvisation. After one chorus of the first song my attention left Bayes and remained fixed on the playing of the pianist. I had never heard such fresh, brisk, unstudied, completely free and inventive playing—all within a consistent frame that set off her singing perfectly.27
Ladies First gave Gershwin his first chance to travel with a professional theatrical company, and he responded with the awareness of a budding professional. After less than two weeks of on-the-road experience, he started to take stock of his situation. “Baldwin Sloane [the composer] told me he received $400 from Trenton & Pittsburg,” he wrote Max Abrahamson, a cousin of Lou Paley, from Cleveland on September 12. “Zowie!!! Why didn’t I write the show & let him interpolate? He gets 3 percent of the gross.” Gershwin was also learning the importance of billing, pleased that Nora Bayes was having his name listed on the program as the composer of interpolated songs. He confided to his friend that he felt ready to write the score of an entire show. “In spite of what J[erome] K[ern] told me, I am getting confidence & encouragement from this show, & B. Sloane (and his royalties). I’m going to make an attempt when I reach N.Y.”28 And he was realizing the importance of the placement of a song in a show, how it was staged, and how it was performed. “It’s not merely having good songs that make hits,” he wrote to Caesar.29 “The Real American Folk Song” was being sung and staged ineffectively, he felt. In fact, the song disappeared into obscurity until 1958.
Gershwin was thinking hard about the end of his professional apprenticeship. Two-plus years on Tin Pan Alley had made him knowledgeable about current popular song performance and composition. Vaudeville performances, together with experience as a theatergoer, had taught him much about how songs were put over to an audience. Stints as rehearsal pianist for three Broadway shows had instructed him in the school of musical comedy and its stagecraft. And now, watching Ladies First take shape, Gershwin had a standard against which he could measure the quality of his own work and his creative potential.
Ladies First opened at New York’s Broadhurst Theatre on October 24, 1918. It moved on December 30 to the Nora Bayes Theater, where it ran until March 15, 1919, closing after 164 performances. By the time the show reached New York, however, Gershwin had left the cast, reportedly after an argument with its star. Bayes asked him to change the ending of one of his songs, something she pointed out that both Berlin and Kern had been willing to do for her.30 The young man refused; he quit the show and returned home. Still, notwithstanding this outcome, his Ladies First adventure had given him sufficient experience and confidence, at age twenty, to take a crack at the vocation of Broadway composer.