Summertime

“ARTHUR FRANCIS” AND EDWARD KILENYI

PURPOSEFUL AND ENERGETIC, by age twenty-one George Gershwin was a presence in the New York scene. Ira was different: an avid reader from childhood, he was more an observer than a doer, and fond of putting his observations into written form. He gravitated more toward formal education than did George, and to school-sponsored publications that invited him to try on the mantle of humorist and versifier. The brothers both lived at home, but from age fifteen George led his life in the music business, while Ira, after leaving college, worked mostly in family enterprises as he mulled over what kind of writer he might come to be. Even after Ira settled into lyric writing, the brothers’ careers remained mostly separate for years—until circumstances persuaded them that their true calling was to explore the realm of popular song together. For, whatever their differences in temperament and experience, the Gershwin brothers seem always to have held in common an intuitive and compatible feel for excellence.1

By the summer of 1919, Ira was serving a stint as business manager of a circus-style entertainment company. Several months on the road with Col. Lagg’s Great Empire Show left him unfulfilled, however, and he returned to New York to continue his existence as “pretty much a floating soul.”2 As Ira floated, George forged ahead, discovering new songwriting opportunities on Broadway and continuing to work with a variety of lyricists.

Early in 1920, another chance for the brothers to collaborate—after 1918’s “The Real American Folk Song”—brought forth “Waiting for the Sun to Come Out,” their first published song. Producer Edgar MacGregor had put out the word that he was seeking a number for the ingénue of The Sweetheart Shop, a show then playing in Chicago and presumably Broadway-bound. George, sensing an opportunity for his brother, enlisted Ira’s help and then played their new song for MacGregor. When MacGregor asked about the lyricist, George identified him as a talented but penniless “college boy.” MacGregor offered him $250 for the song’s performance rights. Later, when the producer continued to delay payment, George advised him that while he could wait for his own share of the money, the college boy was sorely in need of his; this ploy extracted $125 from MacGregor. When Harms found “Waiting for the Sun to Come Out” worthy of publication, Ira, determined not to trade on his younger brother’s name, concocted an alias from the names of his other siblings: Arthur Francis. The royalties he received for this song gave him his first taste of the profits that a published lyricist could realize.

“Waiting for the Sun to Come Out” was only the fifth song whose lyrics Ira wrote entirely on his own, and George had composed the music for all five.3 But this song was a turning point for Ira, and 1920 seems to be when he decided to give lyric writing a serious try. Before the year was out, the brothers wrote two more songs together. Equally significant, if not more so, Ira also began—apparently at his brother’s suggestion—to write songs with Vincent Youmans, an up-and-coming composer born just one day after George.4 In all, Ira wrote lyrics for at least ten songs that year, seven of them for music by Youmans, and all under the name Arthur Francis.

The year was also a busy one for George. His success with George White’s Scandals of 1920 prompted White to hire him for each of the next four Scandals editions. In addition to Broadway Brevities (which opened at the end of September and for which he composed three songs), Gershwin also contributed to another revue, Piccadilly to Broadway, whose Atlantic City tryout started just two days before Brevities began its New York run. Produced by E. Ray Goetz, Piccadilly to Broadway toured for months, running through several titles, including Vogues and Vanities and Here and There, but never making it to New York.5 Yet the lineup of contributors Goetz drew on for this project was extraordinary. A songwriter himself, of both music and lyrics, Goetz joined forces with librettist and lyricist Glen MacDonough to supply some of the score. Gershwin wrote three songs, and Ira, as Arthur Francis, may also have contributed three, to music by Youmans; William Daly wrote music and conducted the orchestra; and George W. Meyer, composer of such hits as the 1917 “For Me and My Gal,” also contributed music. Ira was in artistically fast company.

In June 1920, Lou Paley married his longtime sweetheart Emily Strunsky, and Gershwin played at the wedding. Soon thereafter the Paleys moved to 18 West Eighth Street, site of their regular Saturday evening open houses. “Ira never missed a Saturday night,” Emily recalled, “and George came often. His playing was always a highlight of those evenings.” Their house was also a “testing ground” for George’s dates: “if one of George’s girls didn’t like the atmosphere, he gave her up.”6 It would have been difficult for any girl to compete with Emily herself, who, it was generally agreed, was beautiful, gracious, empathetic, and greatly admired by George.

Close friends like the Paleys saw Gershwin as a marvel: charismatic, prodigiously talented, and seemingly always in motion. This view stands behind a note dashed off by Lou in February, inviting George to visit and to bring with him as many friends as he could round up, including Ira, Irving Caesar, and Vincent Youmans.

George,

I’ve taken an accurate census of the various theatrical managers, producers, sages, etc. with the following results:

1. Klaw offices	—4 extravaganzas with music to be written by Geo. G.—next Monday—
2. Gest ”	—12 pantomimes with incidental music composed by G. Gershwin—next Tues.
3. Shubert ”	—1¹/₃ shows with music—interpolated by Mr. George Gershwin—next Thursday at least
4. Selwyn ”	—2,003 Music Review Melodies by Mr. G. Gersh—next Friday—
5. T. B. Harms	17 checks—to be handed to George Gershvin—All next Saturday A.M.
6. Gershwin—familye—26 hours—to be occupied by George
	(himself) at piano and vicinity for benefit and pleasure of the pop & mom and neighbors—

And

Next Wednesday—At the Paley’s

Feb. 16, 1921—Bring Caesar—Iz—Vinc.—all & sundry7

Gershwin was also involved in one new show at this time. A Dangerous Maid, the first and only Gershwin brothers musical comedy for which no libretto is known to survive, began its pre-Broadway tryout at the Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City on March 21. One review found the show highly unconventional, in that “the drama of the plot is sustained,” a trait rare in musicals of that day. In fact, the best this critic could say about the music and dancing is that they did not get in the way.8 Simple arithmetic supports this claim: for a three-act play, George and “Arthur” wrote a score with only eight songs. Director Edgar MacGregor’s top priority was to maintain the audience’s focus on the story: the spendthrift son of a wealthy family marries a Broadway chorus girl named Elsie, to the chagrin of his family and friends, the latter forming a conspiracy against her, but she proves resourceful and charming enough to win them over.9

After Atlantic City, the Dangerous Maid company played in Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, and Pittsburgh.10 Critical consensus was favorable, with actors playing nonsinging roles receiving the highest praise, affirming the show’s emphasis on comedic drama over music and dance. By the time the company reached Pittsburgh, Juliette Day, playing Elsie, had left the cast and was replaced by Vivienne Segal, the star who in 1917 had insisted that her Sunday Night Concert audience recognize Gershwin as someone special. After the final performance on April 16, however, for reasons never spelled out in the press, the show closed and was never seen in the theater again.

By all indications, A Dangerous Maid reflected the precepts put forward by Edgar MacGregor in an article published more than a year after its demise. “The musical comedy of the future,” he believed, “must have a perfect story, filled with realism, an adequately interpretive score and characters, with unusual ability and talents, if it would prove a success. Art must enter into [its] vivid glamour.” Of the show’s eight musical numbers, two experienced singers and dancers, Vivienne Segal and Vinton Freedley, sang five. The cast was divided into singing and nonsinging roles, with skilled actors in the latter, and the heroine’s role was given to a performer with enough acting ability to play a complex character. Another of MacGregor’s ideas was to reduce the size of the chorus to eight and to use it more effectively for dramatic purposes. “Boy Wanted,” sung by four female chorus members—Broadway colleagues visiting Elsie—owes its existence to this notion.

The Gershwins’ usual practice, once a subject and mood were agreed upon, was for George to compose a melody to which Ira would fit words. However, for a comic song, Ira would occasionally fashion a form and a line or two, or even a stanza, and a gait, and George would come up with music to fit it. “Boy Wanted” seems like a hybrid: a three-syllable cattle call set to George’s tune and sung by four female applicants, each with her own wish list. One of Ira’s signature traits as a lyricist, evident here, lay in tricky rhymes (“advertisement / flirt is meant”) and internal rhyme (“right little laddie / I’ll make him glad he answered”). While the music serves the workmanlike function of carrying the words, the declamation is graceful and airy, with rests in key spots.

In contrast, Ira’s lyrics for “Just to Know You Are Mine” are tender. When Elsie sings this number, she is an operetta heroine in the throes of love, untroubled by doubt. George, taking the words seriously, writes a waltz on a grandly expressive scale, and perhaps its vocal demands explain why the operatically trained Vivienne Segal was brought in to play the role of Elsie. The song is written for a singer with a broad range, solid technique, and a secure grasp of operatic expression. Its refrain is filled with rhythmic nuance, and at the end a thunderous climax gives way to an ethereal peroration: a soprano melody floating over the waltz rhythm—“Just to know, just to know, you are mine, mine alone”—as motion and sound melt gradually into a whisper.

“Dancing Shoes,” a duet about the joy dancing brings for Elsie and Fred Blakeley, the spendthrift son and her suitor, played by Vinton Freedley, is the score’s only jazz-oriented number. Yet Freedley, it turned out, would contribute even more than Segal to the Gershwin legacy. In 1922, he joined the cast of For Goodness Sake, an Astaire show produced by Alex Aarons, with some songs contributed by Gershwin and “Arthur Francis.” Two years later, in January 1924, Freedley produced a stage play of his own, entitled The New Poor, and shortly thereafter Aarons told the Astaires that he was starting a producing firm in partnership with Freedley. “This was surprising news” to Astaire. “It pleased and amused us a lot that our friend Vinton would now be one of our bosses.”11 Between 1924 and 1933, the firm of Aarons and Freedley would produce no fewer than seven Gershwin musical comedies—including one of the signature shows of the 1920s.

GERSHWIN, though committed to songwriting as a calling, had aspirations that reached beyond that trade. His study with Kilenyi, begun in 1917, continued on and off for roughly five years. In July 1921, Gershwin also furthered his education in a way unprecedented for him: he enrolled in two summer classes at Columbia University, Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music and Elementary Orchestration.12 Kilenyi’s instruction followed a textbook, The Material Used in Musical Composition, written by Percy Goetschius, a renowned teacher at the Institute of Musical Art in New York, later the Juilliard School of Music. Of his own approach to teaching, Kilenyi commented: “George understood that he was not to learn ‘rules’ according to which he himself would have to write music, but instead he would be shown what great composers had written, what devices, styles, traditions—later wrongly called rules—they used.” He was struck by the zeal with which his student took instruction, and the lad’s pleasure in deploying each new harmony to the point of overuse in a new piece. He even recopied exercises after his teacher had corrected them, to produce an elegant-looking manuscript.

Before he began work on La-La-Lucille!, Gershwin had sought his teacher’s advice on how the score might make use of his lessons, but Kilenyi advised him to “try not to think of anything you learned. Write anything which comes to you spontaneously.” Some five months later, a gratified Gershwin reported to Kilenyi that not only had his advice worked, but George had been able to write with less effort.

Among other things, Gershwin’s lessons with Kilenyi explored the interconnectedness of harmony and form. They “went through complete classical sonatas and symphonies,” where Gershwin learned “to recognize harmonies in their original and complete texts.” For lessons on form, Gershwin composed sketches that would later take shape as his piano preludes. But Kilenyi’s teaching went beyond the piano. In those days, Kilenyi explained,

we did not have records and phonographs which could reproduce orchestral instruments with great fidelity. Therefore we went through the discussion of an instrument in our textbooks and looked up characteristic passages from orchestral scores. George wrote out examples and composed some passages himself. Then we engaged a member of a prominent symphony orchestra to play the examples for us. By this time George Gershwin was familiar with the orchestra. He not only attended orchestra rehearsals of his shows but he studied orchestral scores. Subsequently, too, we went over them in his lessons.

As his technical grasp of musical principles and techniques grew, Gershwin seems to have felt more and more at home with their challenges. By Kilenyi’s account, in fact, the young composer “often spoke of his desire to quit writing popular music and retire somewhere far away so that he could devote himself to serious music,” but Kilenyi found that idea impractical:

“In a few years,” I told him, “you would be forgotten as a Broadway writer. You would face the same difficulty all young Americans have to face when trying to have their works performed. You would come nearer your goal if you were to continue your studies and become even a bigger success than you are today. You should attain such fame that conductors in due time would ask you for serious compositions to be performed by them.” He saw immediately what I meant.

THIS ADVICE proved prophetic. By 1921, if not before, Gershwin was seeing himself not simply as a composer of musical comedies but as a serious artist contemplating a personal journey across the popular–classical divide. Kilenyi seems to have been an ideal teacher for a young musician who viewed the difference between the two spheres more as a matter of convention and attitude than of artistic quality, and who “had an extraordinary faculty for absorbing everything he observed and applying it to his own music in his own individual ways.”13

For Gershwin, the Scandals of 1921, with Arthur Jackson as lyricist, was that year’s top project. The show opened in New York on July 11 and played for ninety-seven performances—a fitting run for a summer show with plans to tour in the fall. The five numbers that survive from this Scandals as published songs deserve consideration, although neither the composer nor his work received much notice from critics. The New York Times’s terse comment on the score lacked enthusiasm: “not bad, but nothing noteworthy.” In a more expansive judgment, Alan Dale of the New York American found the music “above the average of the sticky and treacly stuff that adheres to most of our musical shows.”14 If Gershwin’s creative contribution seems on the skimpy side, a look at the playbill helps to explain why more new songs were not needed. The star performers—comedian Lou Holtz, Tess Gardella, and Ann Pennington—each appeared with their own signature songs from earlier shows and appearances.

Variety editor and critic Sime Silverman identified “Drifting Along with the Tide” as the show’s intended “plug number” because “it was given two encores in the second act, when everything else had been rushed through.” Its status is confirmed by the release, in October 1921, of a piano-roll version by Gershwin, who recorded no other song from the show.15 The song was introduced in Scandals by tenor Lloyd Garrett, with soprano Victoria Herbert, joined onstage by a chorus of female “sailors.” In the verse, the male singer and his beloved imagine themselves to be ships on life’s vast ocean, carried apart by inexorable tides, and the refrain brings no resolution. But Gershwin’s music makes the journey sound like smooth sailing into a mood more wistful than tragic.

“Drifting Along with the Tide” is the only number in the show that carries even a hint of the jazz feel that Gershwin had tapped in both the Scandals of 1920 and A Dangerous Maid. The song is also noteworthy for his command of voice-leading, a staple of classical technique that values the independence of individual musical lines, which manifests in both verse and refrain. Having learned what it meant to realize a figured bass line in the mode of Handel, he fashioned his harmonies in part from an interweaving of contrapuntal lines. The music is grounded in the bass, and a Gershwin bass line’s profile tends to be musically robust. Another song, “South Sea Islands,” belongs to a scene that critics uniformly enjoyed. It was sung by Charles King, then danced by Ann Pennington, joined by a large female contingent of “South Sea Islanders.” The refrain is sung to a melody of impressive breadth—full of sustained notes and virtually rest-free—that attempts to live up to the beauty of a South Sea paradise.

In October 1921, a chance encounter took place in a midtown Manhattan haberdashery that would have a long-term effect on Gershwin’s career, though he was not present. Fred Astaire, then costarring with Adele in a musical comedy called The Love Letter, wandered into the store, Finchley’s, in search of a tie. The clerk knew who Astaire was, and in their conversation he went so far as to advise the twenty-two-year-old dancer that his talents were better suited to intimate musical comedy than revues or operettas. Taken aback, Astaire asked, in effect, what gave him the right to offer such advice. Whereupon the clerk introduced himself as Alex A. Aarons, part owner of Finchley’s with plans to enter the musical comedy field full time as a producer.

At that point, the conversation turned to Gershwin, a new composer Aarons said he had signed, and whose music Aarons thought would be a good match for the Astaires. Identifying himself as the producer of La-La-Lucille!, Aarons admitted that while that show wasn’t much of a hit, “everybody was talking about Gershwin.” Astaire, who had been on tour and missed the show, responded that he knew Gershwin pretty well from Remick’s. After expressing his belief that The Love Letter was in for only a short run, Aarons told Astaire that he would like to sign both brother and sister for his next show.

Before October was out, The Love Letter closed as Aarons predicted. Casting about for a new show, the Astaires contacted Aarons and learned that he was eager to feature them in a new musical comedy in which both would have speaking parts. When Astaire learned that Gershwin would not be doing the music—as he was engaged for the Scandals—he confessed disappointment. Even so, he and Adele signed on for Aarons’s new show, For Goodness Sake, which opened on Broadway some weeks into 1922.16 Thus, more than two years before Aarons and his partner Vinton Freedley brought together the Astaires and George and Ira Gershwin for Lady, Be Good!, associations were formed and friendships kindled that would make theatrical history.