IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1922, AN INTRIGUING ARTICLE written by Dolly Dalrymple for an English audience appeared in the New York World: an interview with American pianist Beryl Rubinstein, headlined “Pianist, Playing Role of Columbus, Makes Another American Discovery.”1 Rubinstein’s discovery was a musician he considered an unrecognized genius: the composer of the music for New York’s Scandals. Dalrymple’s earlier conversations with Rubinstein had concerned the likes of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Busoni, she noted, “so imagine the consternation when Mr. Rubinstein mentioned anything as ‘low brow’ as the ‘Scandals.’ ”
Yet Rubinstein’s claim was based not only on Scandals music, but also on the spark of genius and originality he had heard in that composer’s “serious” music—presumably piano pieces. “With Gershwin’s style and seriousness he is not definitely from the popular musical school, but one of the really outstanding figures in the country’s serious musical efforts,” he told the interviewer. Rubinstein’s remarks indicate that the two men had crossed paths in New York within striking distance of a piano; in 1922, it could have been no simple thing for a classical musician who had heard Gershwin play to describe his music-making to one who hadn’t. A discourse grounded in aesthetic, historical, and technical lore was widely shared within the classical sphere, but not in the popular. Because serious music was widely assumed to hold a monopoly on artistic value, popular styles had received little such scrutiny. Rubinstein’s experience with Gershwin exposed the limitations of that point of view.
That fall saw Gershwin involved in a new show, eventually named Our Nell, in which he shared composing duties with Bill Daly. Beginning its tryout in Stamford, Connecticut, on November 20, Our Nell opened in New York on December 4, only to close in January after forty performances. In spite of positive notices, the show proved a gamble that didn’t pay off—partly, perhaps, because few cast members had had much prior experience on New York’s musical stage.2 Ira Gershwin wryly summed up the show’s character and brief history in a January 12 letter to his cousin Benjamin Botkin:
To-morrow night I expect our Nell to die. . . . It was a musical travesty on the old mellowdrama which flourished up to about a dozen years ago. The notices in Washington a week before it opened in New York, were marvelous. But she sort of flopped here. She was a good gal while she had it, was Nell, but when she closes to-morrow night, I’m expectin’ they’ll put a white sheet around her, and call it a season.3
As Ira’s comment reveals, Our Nell, or The Villain Still Pursued Her parodied an old-fashioned dramatic form, unusual for Broadway. It differed enough from regular musical comedy fare, in fact, that some out-of-town audiences were slow to realize that satire was intended, though by the time the show reached New York, the word was out, and the opening-night crowd enthusiastically hissed the villain’s first appearance.
Our Nell was first brought to the attention of producers Ed Davidow and Rufus LeMaire by Ray Goetz, who, having decided that a modern sendup of a melodrama had a chance at Broadway success, sponsored the fashioning of one while seeking others to produce it. Goetz’s creative team included two stage veterans—playwright A. E. Thomas and lyricist-librettist Brian Hooker—in addition to composers Gershwin and Daly, who also invested in the show. Ira’s letter to Botkin confirms that “George had an interest in the show, which adventure in producing will cost him about $3,800. . . . All he can do now is to take it out on his income tax and charge it to experience.”
Perhaps Goetz was the one to decide that Gershwin and Daly should work together on the Our Nell project.4 Whatever the catalyst, the friendship that took root during the making of this show proved one of the most important in Gershwin’s life, personally and musically.
Born in Cincinnati into a theatrical family, Daly grew up in Boston as a musical prodigy. He studied piano with German-born pedagogue Carl Faelten, who had once headed the New England Conservatory, and his brother Reinhold; before age twelve, he was also studying harmony, counterpoint, and composition. On graduation from Harvard in 1908, he was a self-confessed “musical snob” interested only in the classics, yet averse to making music his profession. In 1909, Daly joined the staff of New York’s Everybody’s magazine, a journal known for investigative reporting, and within two years became managing editor. In 1914, however, the lure of music resurfaced after the eminent pianist and statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski saw him conduct a chorus and recommended him to the director of the Chicago Opera Company, who offered him a contract as assistant conductor. Daly accepted the offer and resigned from Everybody’s, only to be left jobless when the company canceled its upcoming season.
Finding himself at a crossroads, Daly relaxed his musical standards and found work in the Broadway theater, hiring out as an orchestra pianist while teaching himself how to orchestrate. In 1915, he conducted the Broadway musical Hands Up, a Shubert production with a score by Sigmund Romberg and the versatile Ray Goetz,5 and he went on to conduct more shows in the years that followed, including two featuring the Astaires.6 Along the way, he also tried his hand at songwriting, contributing to Goetz’s ill-fated Piccadilly to Broadway. The year 1922 seems to have marked the peak of Daly’s career as a Broadway composer: he wrote about ten songs for For Goodness Sake, alone or together with Paul Lannin. Then, on November 13, he and Gershwin signed a contract with Hayseed Productions to write the score of Our Nell, for which they would each earn a royalty of 1 percent of the weekly box-office receipts.
Set in the fictional Hen’s Foot, Connecticut, Our Nell featured characters who were rural stereotypes. Much of the show’s music has disappeared, but five songs survive: two by Gershwin, one by Daly, and two by both. Brian Hooker wrote the words, and Harms published all but “Little Villages,” a Gershwin-Daly number whose focus on Algonquian place names in Connecticut and Massachusetts (“From Missisquoi to Monomoy, from Aspetuck to Kennebunk”) made it a poor candidate for publication. A shared sense of humor was one of the traits that brought Gershwin and Daly together, and this song reflects it. The other number whose authorship they shared is “Innocent Ingenue Baby,” the only song to outlast the show’s closing; it would be heard the following year in Gershwin’s first London venture, and later on a song recital he accompanied. There is no way to know which composer contributed what to this song, but the constrained accompaniment, mild harmonic drive, and patterned blue notes suggest that Daly had the heavier hand.
In his January 1923 letter to Ben Botkin, Ira added that George was not working on a new show at the moment but was studying composition with Rubin Goldmark, a figure of consequence in New York musical circles. A native of New York City, and nephew of Viennese composer Karl Goldmark, he had studied both in Vienna and at New York’s National Conservatory while Antonin Dvorˇák was there in the 1890s. While still a young man, Goldmark headed a music conservatory in Colorado Springs; later, when the Juilliard Graduate School was established in New York in 1924, he was named head of its composition department, a post he held until his death. Between these appointments, he taught harmony and composition privately in New York. His best-known student was Aaron Copland, who respected Goldmark’s teaching as thorough and professional but found him unsympathetic to the modern cast of the ideas that captured his own allegiance.
For Gershwin’s part, per an article he wrote for the American Hebrew in 1929, he considered Goldmark’s gift to American composition to be his belief that “the negro spiritual,” with its “strong sense for rhythm” and its “sad wails and pathetic groans,” could be the foundation of a true American idiom. Goldmark’s own contribution to that idiom was A Negro Rhapsody for orchestra in 1923, a piece whose significance Gershwin finds more historical than artistic. Still, he argues,
Goldmark was among the very first to turn his eye towards the negro and to attempt to interpret America through the poignant strains of the spiritual. And since jazz—certainly the most efficacious means, to date, for the creation of American music—has its roots deeply embedded in the negro spiritual, the importance of such a pioneer work as the “Negro Rhapsody” should not be disregarded.7
Kilenyi noted in his memoir that Gershwin studied harmony with him between 1917 or 1918 and 1922, so Gershwin could not have begun with Goldmark much before the end of 1922. In April 1924, in an encounter initiated by George’s mother, Rose, Kilenyi enjoyed a lengthy talk with George, who told him about the instruction he had received since they had parted ways: he had taken three lessons from Goldmark, and he “apologized for not having told me about it.” It seems likely that these took place between late 1922 and early 1923. Later, however—probably between May 1926 and mid-1927—he again took lessons from Goldmark, though not for long. The results were positive enough that in the American Hebrew article he referred to Goldmark as “my teacher and friend.”
IN NEW YORK on February 8, 1923, Gershwin and English producer Albert de Courville, representing Empire Palace, Ltd., signed a contract securing his services as composer for The Rainbow, a revue scheduled for London’s Empire Theatre in April. Gershwin, who embarked for London soon thereafter, agreed to deliver a score by March 19, for which he was paid 300 pounds (about $1,500).8 On Sunday, February 18, having taken up residence in a London hotel, he sat down to write his brother about his first full day on foreign soil:
A funny thing happened yesterday which made me very joyful & for the moment very happy I came here. The boat was in dock at Southampton & everyone was in line with their passports & landing cards. When I handed my passport to one of the men at a table he read it, looked up & said, “George Gershwin writer of Swanee?” It took me off my feet for a second. It was so unexpected, you know. Of course I agreed I was the composer & then he asked what I was writing now etc. etc. I couldn’t ask for a more pleasant entrance into a country. When I reached shore a woman reporter came up to me and asked for a few words. I felt like I was Kern or somebody.9
That feeling persisted when, after reaching his hotel, Gershwin fielded a phone call from a reporter for the Weekly Dispatch. “He asked my opinion about the possibility of a rag-time opera & when I thought it would come about.” Then it was on to the theater for the evening, where a revue called You’d Be Surprised was playing: “a fast show, with many scenes from burlesque & music by Melville Morris.” The performance left him wondering what music Morris had actually composed, for “all I heard were popular American songs.”10 But “the hit of the show is an orchestra. The Savoy Orchestra. And who do you suppose is the leader? Bert Ralston the sax player who recorded my Mexican Dance with me. He’s got a great band and is a riot over here.”11 Gershwin came away from the performance with some ideas about the British musical comedy scene: “From what I can see, America is years ahead of England theatrically, both in wealth of material & money.” He also found London “shy of ingenues, leading men, composers, etc.,” while granting that good lyric writers abounded.12
In his letter to Ira, Gershwin was struck by contrasts he noted with his home turf. “The English are the politest people I’ve yet met,” he wrote, adding that “even the taxi drivers are polite.” And he marveled: “how different from the Yellow Cabs of New York,” though they “drive on the left of the street which is also a bit befuddling.” He had also grasped the essential principle of the currency—“They go by 12ves instead of 10s”—and he was already picking up local speech idioms: “I could go on & tell you more observations of my first 24 hours here but I must trot along to Greys. Did you notice ‘trot along?’ . . . Write heaps & heaps. (Notice? heaps & heaps?).” Finally he referred to the task that loomed ahead. He and lyricist Clifford Grey would start that very afternoon on a show that would begin rehearsals the following Tuesday. Comparing the challenge with that of “writing the Scandals in a month,” he imagined that the New York assignment “will seem an eternity compared to the time allotted us.”
If George’s letter from London displays the energy and high spirits that fueled his rise as a composer, an article written by Ira for the New York Sun of April 9 reveals that the composer’s less famous brother also brought unusual qualities to the songwriting trade—and a characteristic angle of vision as unique as George’s. Ira had come up with a sardonic “questionnaire for poets—beg pardon, for popular song lyricists,” designed for a “popular song factory,” whose foreman could use it to help assign applicants to the bench or lathe that suited them best. The questions asked:
What is a mammy?
What southern state rhymes with mammy?
What color is inevitably associated with sad and lonely?
What are the three greatest words in the world?
Who is your best pal?
Name three words that rhyme with “home” besides “alone.”
Her kisses taste like what substance from the bees?
Aspirants were then instructed:
Complete the following with rhymes with the “earl” family:
I had a g————
She was a p————
She put my head in a wh————
And then they were asked:
Next to your latest, what is the greatest song ever written?
Ira goes on to explain the rationale behind these questions. Although “mammy” is a favorite character in songs about the South, he says he “would like to read a few Tin Pan Alley definitions.” The second question is supposed to make readers think of “Alabammy”—until they realize that a lyricist might find “Loosiany” just as acceptable. With the sixth, the author admits that his “home/alone” equivalence is a “subtle and sardonic” move by a writer pretending to think these words actually rhyme. The eighth is a setup: “With a thrill of pride, one would complete the rhyme with the earl family as ‘goil,’ ‘poil,’ and ‘whoil.’ ”
Early in 1923, George and Ira Gershwin were still more than a year away from a regular partnership, yet proof of the inventiveness and originality that would stamp their future efforts together lies in what each of them did and said independently during the preceding year. George, working with Clifford Grey, produced a score for The Rainbow—the complete revue—in one month. For Ira, the common ground between journalistic humor and lyric writing was that both required an ability to choose a subject, strike a posture, and find words to fit that stance. In this phase of his career his muse was not much moved by dramatic concerns, but he surely continued to cultivate his sense for the sound and rhythm of words.
The score for The Rainbow includes nine songs, all published under the joint copyright of Harms of New York and Chappell Music Ltd. of London, an old-line firm that, together with its classical catalogue, published the stage works of Gilbert and Sullivan and other comic operas. Two of these predate the new show: “Innocent Lonesome Blue Baby,” based on Our Nell’s “Innocent Ingenue Baby,” and “Sweetheart (I’m So Glad That I Met You),” which Gershwin and Grey had written in New York for Flying Island, a 1921 project organized by Ned Wayburn that was never completed.13 The other seven numbers, composed between February 18 and March 19, seem to have left no mark outside the show. In some of these, the accompaniment’s left hand is conceived chiefly as support for the melody, rather than as the foundation of a multivoice texture; perhaps British popular song, less oriented toward dance rhythms, syncopation, and harmony-based part-writing than Gershwin’s customary styles, tended toward a simpler texture than popular song in America.
The Rainbow opened on a Tuesday evening, April 3. Playing thereafter twice a day at 2:30 and 8:30, it remained at the Empire for 111 performances. Reviews were generally positive. British performers made up most of the cast, but some Americans were also featured, including the white singers Grace Hayes and Earl Rickard and a troupe of African Americans: “32 Coloured Singers, Dancers and Musicians from the Southern States of America,” with a “syncopated orchestra” under the direction of James P. Johnson.14 As well as filling a substantial place in the show, a portion called “Plantation Days,” this troupe offered longer “cabaret” performances at 5:15 p.m. between presentations of The Rainbow, and again at 11:15 after the evening show.
Originating in New York, “Plantation Days” had provided a full evening’s entertainment in the United States before and after Johnson became the company’s musical director in 1922, enjoying successful stops in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago before returning to New York in February 1923 with a European tour in the offing. (Hit numbers from Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along, used without authorization, boosted the show’s appeal until a formal complaint was lodged and they were removed.) But the company’s presence in The Rainbow, together with that of the other American performers, sparked a local resentment that boiled over on opening night. A British comedian named Jack Edge used his customary postshow speech to inform the audience that his role as a principal player had been reduced, and suggested that the management had favored American cast members over homegrown talent. A stagehand interrupted Edge’s tirade by dragging him, struggling, behind the curtain. When producer de Courville stepped to the footlights to apologize for the incident, his comments drew cheers but also such shouted complaints as “Why don’t you give English artists a chance?” and “Send the niggers back.”
Shortly thereafter, portions of the show given to Grace Hayes and Earl Rickard were curtailed, while “Plantation Days” was trimmed from twenty-nine minutes to fourteen. Moreover, “the Empire cabaret, announced to open April 5 has been indefinitely postponed,” reported Variety: “It is said the colored troupe is not believed strong enough to hold it up.”15 Two weeks later, “theatrical, artistic, and social London is becoming incensed over the treatment of the imported American artists by the Empire management.”16 Nevertheless, the “Plantation Days” company managed to survive until the end of the Rainbow’s run.17
Gershwin seems not to have been involved in these disputes. After fulfilling his contractual obligation to stay in London for a week after the April 3 opening, he traveled to Paris for a visit, then sailed for New York at the end of the month. The nature of the show and his connection to it may explain his nonintervention: rather than an independent production that any playhouse could have staged, The Rainbow was a high-end variety show conceived and presented under the Empire’s sponsorship. Gershwin held no financial stake in the result beyond the reception of individual songs, and there is no evidence that he felt any particular attachment to the show. Even if the revue proved less than a triumph, it was only the first of his many London engagements during the 1920s. In fact, even as The Rainbow approached its opening, a second enterprise was gearing up for what would be a major London hit of the 1923–24 season.
Alex Aarons’s For Goodness Sake had enjoyed a decent run in New York and a tour through the summer of 1922, sparked by the dancing of Fred and Adele Astaire. At the tour’s end, producer Charles Dillingham, who had the pair under contract, exercised his option to present them as stars of The Bunch and Judy, a comedy with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Anne Caldwell. But when that show opened in New York on November 28, it proved a dud. Aarons soon approached the Astaires with a new plan: “You know this thing is going to fold any week now. I’ve got a hunch that you two would be a great bet for England. How’d you like to do For Goodness Sake in London?” The Astaires liked the idea, and the young producer left for the U.K. to lay the groundwork of his plan.
After The Bunch and Judy closed in January, Dillingham declined to pick up the Astaires’ options for the next two seasons. “We’ll get together a little later on,” he told them. “I’ve got to carry out some other plans for the present. Now, don’t go and get too tied up.” As Fred Astaire saw it, The Bunch and Judy had raised questions in Broadway circles about whether the dancers’ talents could actually “carry stardom,” and Dillingham’s own doubts seemed obvious. In the meantime, though, the Astaires received other feelers, including one from Albert de Courville for The Rainbow; perhaps the notion of hiring the pair had been suggested to him by Gershwin. Then a wire arrived from Alex Aarons in London: “CAN ARRANGE ENGLISH PRODUCTION FOR GOODNESS SAKE AS WE DISCUSSED IT. UNDERSTAND YOU’RE CONSIDERING DECOURVILLE REVUE. NO GOOD FOR YOU. DON’T DO ANYTHING UNTIL I SEE YOU NEXT WEEK.”18 When Aarons returned to New York after a quick visit, now in cahoots with the eminent English producer Sir Alfred Butt, he immediately signed Adele and Fred to appear under his aegis, and on March 23, 1923, they sailed for England.
Still bothered by the failure of The Bunch and Judy and by Dillingham’s flagging support, Astaire later admitted to leaving New York with doubts about the transatlantic adventure. On the way over, however, his confidence got a boost when he and Adele agreed to perform in a charity concert for the Seaman’s Fund. On the day of the performance the sea was rough, and by the time the Astaires appeared, their dance floor was pitching and rolling dangerously. The pair adjusted deftly, turning involuntary careenings and pratfalls into comic moments, and charmed fellow passengers with their good grace and sportsmanship. After the performance, an Englishman made them a promise: “I say, you two should make a jolly good hit in London. I shall be there with a party the first night!” From that time on, Fred managed to put his worrying tendency on hold.
Astaire’s recounting of the London triumph of For Goodness Sake, now renamed Stop Flirting, hardly mentions George Gershwin, whose work on the Rainbow revue was winding down as the Astaires arrived; when Gershwin’s assignment was over, he took a short vacation to Paris, where he visited American friends. Nevertheless, Alex Aarons was surely in touch with Gershwin, for they were now considering a new Astaire project to follow the current one. Gershwin’s share in London’s Stop Flirting would be three-quarters of 1 percent of box-office receipts, but his obligations did not include attending that show’s end-of-May London opening; he sailed for New York at the end of April.19 Since Aarons booked a five-week out-of-town tryout tour—to Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and other cities—Gershwin may have attended rehearsals before the tour began. Astaire’s only mention of Gershwin in his account of Stop Flirting, however, is his comment that “(I’ll Build a) Stairway to Paradise,” interpolated from the Scandals of 1922, had proved one of the show’s best numbers.20
Toward the end of May, Aarons, having decided that both Gershwins were essential for the project he had in his sights, typed a long letter to Ira Gershwin in New York. Confident that a London success would boost the Astaires’ appeal at the American box office, he was now preparing his next step. Convinced that in Fred and Adele he had “secured one of the most valuable pieces of property (as far as talent is concerned) on the American musical comedy stage,” he recognized that there was no better way for his new stars to display their talents than to have them sing and to dance to the music of the Gershwin brothers. “As George has probably told you,” he now wrote to Ira, “I am planning to have him do the score Alone.” And the impresario’s next words must have felt like manna from above to a young lyricist whose handiwork had so far been published only under a pseudonym. “I believe you know that there is no one I should like so much for the lyrics as you.”
Aarons and Astaire were already discussing the type of story, settings, characters, and numbers they wanted for the show following For Goodness Sake: a show written to represent the Jazz Age generation. “Of course, everything I am telling you here is strictly in confidence,” he warned Ira, “and I should prefer that you discuss it with NOBODY except George. I want to have everything set before I make my plans known to any outsiders.” Aarons also asked the Gershwins to “save all your best stuff,” adding that “I shall want some numbers that you have already finished but a great amount of new work will be necessary too.” For example, “Hang On to Me,” a song George had already previewed for Aarons, greatly appealed to the Astaires.21
The show that Aarons was hatching was still almost a year and a half away from its onstage debut as Lady, Be Good! But the cause for the delay could only have been gratifying to him: the overwhelming success of Stop Flirting. The Astaires took the United Kingdom by storm, scoring a triumph with the public, catching the attention of the nobility—even the royalty—and hobnobbing personally with the highest of English society. Not until their show had run for more than a year did Fred and Adele decide it was time to return to the United States and look to the new project that Aarons was cooking up for them.
THE JOB that greeted Gershwin on his return to New York resembled the one he had faced in London: he had about a month to write the score for George White’s Scandals of 1923. DeSylva was his lyricist again, with Ray Goetz also contributing to a few songs. While Ann Pennington and W. C. Fields, two of the 1922 edition’s major stars, did not return, White had recruited a pair of younger vaudevillians, Winnie Lightner and Tom Patricola, who performed specialty numbers with music of their own. There was no Paul Whiteman this year, but Charles Dornberger and his Orchestra, a jazz ensemble of the Whiteman stripe, appeared in the finale of Act II, hoping to send the audience home in an upbeat mood.
The Scandals of 1923 proved more successful on Broadway than any of its predecessors, opening on June 18 and closing on November 10 after 168 performances. Gershwin’s score included twelve songs, seven of which were published. As with the Rainbow songs, each of the published numbers has an attribute to recommend it, yet—also like the London revue—none seem to have made a strong impression on the marketplace, the audience, or the critics. By several accounts, the most elegant episode was a scene taking place in a jeweler’s shop, with chorus girls impersonating articles of jewelry and single stones: ruby, sapphire, emerald, diamond. As a clerk attends to them, the scene’s male protagonist opens his heart to the lovely woman at his side in “There Is Nothing Too Good for You,” vowing in the verse to buy the rarest treasures the store has to offer and to lay them at her feet. Perhaps the song’s failure to make more of an impact lay partly with the lyrics. The refrain’s first two phrases get the rhyming off to a rickety start: “There is nothing too good for you, / Nothing I would not do for you.” A real rhyme, like “good for you”/ “would for you,” might have encouraged listeners to settle more easily into the moment. And perhaps the song’s implication that material treasure wins a woman’s heart every time lacked the tenderness to open those hearts.
Another number praised by some critics, “The Life of a Rose,” also suffered from clumsy rhyming, as well as the notion that roses bloomed for a single day. “Lo-La-Lo,” a Hawaiian-themed song, must have seemed old-fashioned by 1923, though Gershwin tackled this challenge by forging a “Hawaiian” style with near-primitive melody, harmony free of complication, and a retrogressive form: a verse, refrain, and trio.22 “Throw Her in High,” a political song protesting the arrival of Prohibition, was seen by critic Robert C. Benchley as just one more of the Scandals’ less imaginative quirks:
Each year there is a strange Messiah-complex manifested at the end of the first act of Mr. George White’s “Scandals.” He seems to feel that it is his mission, as the producer of a summer revue, to bring some Great Message or other to the world, to bring down his first-act curtain on a scene which will send the audience out into the lobby shaking their heads and saying to each other: “By George, Moe, I am going to write to Congressman Minnick to-night about this thing.” One year it was the Free Passage of American Ships through the Panama Canal to which Mr. White devoted the services of his shapely young ladies. . . . We forget whether or not the Newfoundland Fisheries case has ever been taken up in a serious way by Mr. White. At any rate, this year it is Prohibition.23
The quietly beautiful duet “Let’s Be Lonesome Together” is built on the poetic concept of “lonesome” togetherness, but an improbable stage setting—a canary in a cage and a goldfish in a bowl who manage to grasp each other’s solitary existence—undermined the pensive tune.
In the company of numbers like these, another published song, “Where Is She?,” stands out for a premise more suited to the tastes of the time. Written from the perspective of a traveling businessman and in a jazz-tinged idiom, it projects the sincerity of a young man’s search for the girl of his dreams. Even from the distance of almost a century, its premise, its lyrics, and the rhythmic inventiveness of the music make it seem eligible for more success than it received.
What we know about Gershwin’s two 1923 revue projects suggests a certain similarity between composing for those kinds of productions and employment at the kind of song mill that Ira had mocked in the spring. Broadway had its own industrial-style elements. For both The Rainbow and the Scandals of 1923, the books for which touched on a variety of subjects, moods, and visual settings—and, not incidentally, musical styles—Gershwin was given around a month to write a complete score of about a dozen songs together with other music. Once the score was delivered, the published songs had to be chosen, arranged, printed, and in the hands of distributors by the time the show opened. Orchestrations had to be made and the music rehearsed by the performers. Individual numbers could be altered or dropped, but not without a cost in time and money. As in a factory, the final product depended on combining many constituent parts under pressure of time, to fit a performance schedule that had been set in advance. Producers could not afford to fuss too much over details. If a “home/alone” rhyme or an awkward bit of melody slipped by, such glitches could always be avoided in the next show. These were the conditions under which Gershwin, between February and June 1923, composed and published at least fourteen new songs, plus perhaps as many as a dozen more that filled their quota but were not judged worthy of publication.
As of that summer, one of those revue songs, “(I’ll Build a) Stairway to Paradise,” stood out from all the rest: a number, as it happened, whose words were cowritten by “Arthur Francis.” It would be an exaggeration to say that that summer the Gershwin brothers were preparing to join forces in the pursuit of song hits. Yet knowing that Alex Aarons, a producer they knew and trusted, had plans to unite them as the songwriting team for a new musical in 1924, they might have had an inkling that George’s days as a composer of revues were coming to an end in favor of bigger things.