WITH 196 BROADWAY PERFORMANCES, George White’s Scandals of 1924 ran longer than any of its five predecessors. By the time it opened on June 30, Gershwin had played the Rhapsody in Blue close to a dozen times in public and had recorded it with Paul Whiteman, and the expansive turn his career had taken was current news in some quarters, marking him as a musician to be reckoned with. Yet the fifth Scandals proved to be the last revue score he composed for Broadway.
One song from the show registered, however, and it still does. “Somebody Loves Me” bears the stamp of the urban Jazz Age. Buddy DeSylva had help on the lyrics from veteran songwriter Ballard MacDonald, and the two fashioned a courtship number that turns on a simple question: “Somebody loves me, / I wonder who, / I wonder who she can be.” The protagonist’s words flow easily, carrying a quarter-note–based tune as straightforward as his sensibility seems—especially when the mystery of “who” is emphasized by a sustained blue third in the melody. “Somebody Loves Me” is an early example of what might be called the “Gershwin song,” with a lyric revealing character traits through a clear tonal design: a firm establishment of the home key, a move away from it, and then a return. Along with “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” it was the only other song out of the almost fifty Gershwin wrote for the Scandals to become a hit in the marketplace.
As he pushed to finish his Scandals duties while preparing to sail for the U.K. and a new London show, Gershwin got a phone call from a musical friend in need. Vladimir Dukelsky, now residing in New York, called to seek Gershwin’s advice about money. “George, with his customary generosity and big-brother kindness to me, told me to come right over,” and Dukelsky did, explaining that he hoped to raise funds for a summer stay in Paris to promote his new piano concerto.1 His timing could hardly have been better. Gershwin, overloaded with work at the moment, needed help with a ragtime number in the Scandals; it took Dukelsky only a few hours to come up with the music, for which Gershwin paid him $100. Then he was entrusted with making voice-and-piano arrangements of another six songs.2 Admitting himself proud of his “fill-ins” for “Somebody Loves Me,’ ” Dukelsky noted that they also appeared in the orchestration, proof that the arranger “thought them eminently Gershwinesque, which indeed they were.” For this work he earned another $120. And Gershwin threw another duty and another $100 his friend’s way: arranging the piano solo version of the Rhapsody in Blue. When Dukelsky left for Paris, he was supported in part by the work for hire he had done on Gershwin’s behalf. It would not be the last such assignment he took on.
By the time the Scandals opened late in June, Gershwin himself had sailed to London. There, on the 24th, he signed a contract with Alex Aarons for the musical comedy that would come to be known as Primrose.3 Two weeks later, he wrote Lou and Emily Paley to tell them how much more pleasant this English visit was than his last. He was sharing quarters with Aarons and his wife Ella, “one of the cheeriest flats I’ve seen anywhere. It looks over Devonshire Gardens, and makes a comfortable place for me to work in.” The quarters had already seen visits by such notables as Prince George (the Duke of Kent), Otto Kahn (American financier and patron of the arts), Lord Berners (an English nobleman who was also a composer and writer), and the Earl of Lytton. Gershwin’s second London stay seems to have been a mostly enjoyable blend of work and play, at least during its first phase. On top of the socializing, he watched a tennis match at Wimbledon and played a round of golf with Guy Bolton, librettist of Primrose and the new Astaire musical scheduled for New York in the fall. (“I believe I shall [take] it up professionally,” he joked, for golf might be “a good way to knock off some heiress.”) Updates about his musical chores were upbeat. He was collaborating on Primrose with Desmond Carter, a promising young lyricist on the staff of Chappell, the Harms affiliate in London. “I am most optimistic about this show,” he wrote, “because the book seems so good—to say nothing of the score.”4
Primrose’s story revolves around a writer named Hilary Vane who, living on a houseboat, is working on a novel about a character named Primrose. A comely new neighbor, Joan, intrigued by what she can read of the story during a quick visit and fancying herself mirrored in the title character, sneaks off with the manuscript, and when she returns it, she and Hilary quickly fall in love. But Joan is not free, for her wealthy guardian—Sir Barnaby Falls—has insisted that she marry his feckless nephew, Freddie Falls. Meanwhile, Toby Mopham, scion of an aristocratic family, seeks Vane’s help in dissolving his entanglement with Pinkie Peach, a romantically aggressive beauty specialist whose muscular big brother stands ready to enforce the matrimonial pledge Toby has made to her. By the time the curtain falls, Hilary and Joan are together, Freddie has found another partner, and Toby and Pinkie Peach stand ready to tie the knot.
Almost three weeks into September, after Primrose opened its doors to a warm welcome, poet and critic Edward Shanks appraised the show as a classic example of English musical comedy, though the composer was a twenty-five-year-old American with meager experience writing for London’s West End. One reason for that assessment might be the score’s several numbers in 6/8 time. In a September 6 newspaper column called “Londoner’s Diary,” Gershwin explained why he had included them: the English were “a 6–8 nation,” he had decided, as it was the rhythm that most closely approached ordinary English speech and the basis of the Arthur Sullivan tradition. America, on the other hand, struck him as “a 4–4 nation” whose musical gait was essentially the fox-trot.5
Two 6/8 numbers written for the character of Toby, played by gifted comedian Leslie Henson—“When Toby Is Out of Town” and “Mary, Queen of Scots,” a duet with Freddie Falls—are both grounded in comic exaggeration, featuring patter in the mode of W. S. Gilbert. Henson’s comedic gifts are also called on for the quick-moving patter song “The Mophams” and “That New-Fangled Mother of Mine,” which reveals Lady Sophia Mopham as a fan of liquor and a lover of nightlife. This song bears a definite 2/4 American stamp, although one more from 1910 than 1924: with its moderate pace, strategically placed syncopations, and left-hand accompaniment patterns, it looks back toward ragtime.
“This Is the Life for a Man,” another 6/8 number, presents Hilary Vane, played by Percy Heming, as a man’s man—a lover of the rural landscape—who happens to be a writer. His last solo number, “Beau Brummel,” a drinking song celebrating the British bon vivant of the latter 1700s and early 1800s, allows Gershwin to emulate the pompous cast of British patriotic music. He obviously wrote these two songs with Heming in mind: the singer had made his mark in opera, to which he would eventually return.
Heming also sang two love songs with Margery Hicklin, who played Joan—“Some Faraway Someone” and “Wait a Bit, Susie”—that were less portentous and more subtle. Desmond Carter shared credit for these words with another lyricist: Ira Gershwin.
When George sailed from New York, he carried with him a backlog of songs he and Ira had already written for possible use in Primrose. Indeed, Ira stood ready to provide “second verses and extra choruses,” not to mention new lyrics, as needed. In a June 25 letter to George in London, Ira brims with the excitement of a new partner:
If you haven’t already written about it, I want a letter in great detail about the work you’re doing and expect to do, who’s doing the book [to Primrose], who’s in it, what lyrics of mine are you using, who’s doing the others, what you are getting, what am I getting, what songs are you saving for the Astaires, how about the book for the Astaires, can I get a copy of either or both scripts and start on them, how about the second verses and extra choruses of the songs you have, what new songs do you want, when does Stop Flirting stop . . . etc. . . . Leave out nothing.6
One song originally written for A Dangerous Maid, “Four Little Sirens,” fit comfortably into the London show—it was the only preexistent all-Gershwin number that did. Unrelated to the plot, the song feeds on wordplay for its own sake, revealing its theatrical roots. “We never swim in the sea,” confess the four female singers, all dressed in bathing suits, but “still we get along quite swimmingly.” Audience members familiar with The Mikado would have recognized in this song the comic spirit behind that classic’s “Three Little Maids from School.”
Another number from A Dangerous Maid, “Boy Wanted,” sung by four chorus mates in the 1921 show, was reworked for Pinkie Peach alone, who aims her bill of particulars at rich men (the boy of her choice must “own a Rolls Royce”). Desmond Carter, of whom Gershwin thought highly, receives co-lyricist’s credit. His role in this and other joint efforts was to start with a lyric written by Ira and revise as needed for the English audience. As George wrote to his brother: “You won’t recognize some of your old lyrics but you understand of course, they had to be altered to fit certain situations.” These two songs from A Dangerous Maid had the effect of adding to Primrose’s stock of humorous charm, while highlighting work by the Gershwins that had fallen by the wayside.
One of the ironies of Ira’s career was that he won success and respect as a popular song wordsmith in spite of being a staunch antisentimentalist wary of love-song clichés. Most likely his own emotional disposition pressed alternatives upon him, for his body of work abounds in the ambiguity, indirection, self-consciousness, and conditional feelings that real life, courtship included, carries with it. In any event, Ira’s emergence as his brother’s regular and full-fledged partner was given voice in a burst of conditional love songs. The lyrics of the two new duets sung by Hilary and Joan complicate the show’s romantic theme. The dignified “Some Faraway Someone” flows with restrained formality, its rhythm stretching here and there to underline the vocal expression. Joan’s words reveal that she is more in love with an image than with a flesh-and-blood man—a premise shared by a far better-known song, “The Man I Love,” which the Gershwin brothers had worked on in April in New York, perhaps with the coming Astaire show in mind. “Wait a Bit, Susie,” a parable inspired by Hilary’s novel-in-progress, was similarly ambivalent: this song’s suitor is a “lonely,” indecisive man given to “watching” and “waiting,” words that echo feelings the young Izzy Gershvin recorded in his diary when romantic inclinations touched his heart.
Primrose had a run of 255 performances, closing in the spring of 1925, and was replaced at London’s Winter Garden Theatre with Tell Me More, an American import—with a score by Gershwin. But Primrose was never revived in London, nor was it produced in America, as the composer had hoped. None of its songs became hits in the U.K.—though “Wait a Bit, Susie” won some popularity—nor did any enjoy much circulation in the United States. The show’s significance lay mostly in what it meant for the Gershwins’ collaboration: Primrose—something of a trial run for the Broadway venture Alex Aarons had been planning for more than a year—marks the functional start of the regular Gershwin partnership that flourished until George’s death. From now on, every show or movie for which George wrote the music, with one exception, also included lyrics by his brother, now working under his own name.
Primrose was also the first Gershwin show whose music was published in a piano-vocal score, in addition to the half-dozen songs issued separately. Under the imprint of Harms in New York and Chappell in London, nineteen numbers were engraved and bound together consecutively in a 113-page volume containing, together with the songs, the act openers, dance music, and finales. In later years other Gershwin musical comedies would appear in score form, too, preserving a much more detailed version of the show than what the songs alone could provide.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1924, Adele and Fred Astaire arrived in New York Harbor, where tales of their hobnobbing with the nobility in London had preceded them. “We were pleased to find that we had not been forgotten during our long stay abroad,” Astaire wrote later: the reporters who greeted the ship “knew all about what we had been doing over there and were eager to get some statements from Adele about her experiences dancing with the Prince of Wales.”7 Standing on deck, the Astaires also spotted their new producers, Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley. “While we were going through customs,” Aarons “was telling us the plot for our new show,” then called Black-Eyed Susan but soon to be renamed Lady, Be Good! The Astaires signed their contracts on the lid of a trunk while the customs men were going through their baggage. Their joint salary was $1,750 a week in New York and $2,000 on the road.8
With barely a month to go before rehearsals started, brother and sister settled into life in New York City, scoping out the theatrical competition. Gershwin, who had preceded the Astaires back to the States, took them to shows that “looked mighty good to us.” In fact, Fred admitted, “we started to worry about what we would do in ours”—but their doubts were eased when Gershwin played through the new musical’s songs for them. They also learned from Gershwin that the two-piano team of Victor Arden and Phil Ohman would be featured in the orchestra. Ohman, who had served a stint with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1922–23, was currently teamed up with Arden to play popular music in clubs and theaters, and Lady, Be Good! was their first Broadway engagement. Their flashy song arrangements would provide yet another way for Gershwin’s music to be circulated.9
Guy Bolton, collaborating with Fred Thompson, devised a book for Lady, Be Good! about a coterie of mostly well-to-do young New Englanders and their entanglements, romantic and financial. The main characters are a sister and brother, Susie and Dick Trevor (played by the Astaires), who, though born to wealth, have come upon hard times: their landlord has evicted them for nonpayment of rent, and they vow to replenish the family coffers. A wealthy young woman named Josephine who fancies Dick eagerly awaits his proposal of marriage—a move that would solve the Trevors’ problem if Dick weren’t already in love with Shirley Vernon. For her part, Susie falls for Jack Robinson, a hobo just arrived from Mexico—who has inherited his rich uncle’s estate but has yet to learn of his windfall. The various plot twists involve lawyers, especially J. Watterson Watkins—“Watty,” the comic lead—who works doggedly to cut deals for the Trevors that will line his own pockets. In the end, Jack’s inheritance is announced, allowing him to marry Susie and Dick to tie the knot with Shirley. Watty prospers, too, by snaring Josephine.
When Aarons laid his plans in 1923 for a new kind of Broadway musical, he started not with this book or even a story, but with a wish list. He wanted the show to reflect the sensibilities of his generation’s creative artists and performers, and his trump card would be the Astaires. Having taken English theatergoers by storm in Stop Flirting, they now repeated their triumph in New York, dancing and singing to a score written with their talents specifically in mind. The nimble, bubbly Adele, in the role of a flapper with a deft comic touch, was the duo’s star, and for the first time in his Broadway career, Fred stepped beyond the confines of the duo and created a tap routine of his own—to “The Half of It, Dearie, Blues,” which he sang with Shirley.
For another dance, Fred got an assist from an enthusiastic social dancer with a sure feel for what worked onstage: Gershwin himself.10 Shortly before the company headed to Philadelphia for the show’s tryout run, Fred and Adele found themselves stuck at the end of a tricky number, “Fascinating Rhythm.” “We had the routine set, but needed a climax wow step to get us off,” said Fred. “For days I couldn’t find one. Neither could dance director Sammy Lee.” Then George Gershwin
happened to drop by and I asked him to look at the routine. We went all through the thing, reaching the last step before the proposed exit and George said, “Now travel—travel with that one.” I stopped to ask what he meant and he jumped up from the piano and demonstrated what he visualized. He wanted us to continue doing the last step, which started center stage, and sustain it as we traveled to the side, continuing until we were out of sight off stage. The step was a complicated precision rhythm thing in which we kicked out simultaneously as we crossed back and forth in front of each other with arm pulls and heads back. There was a lot going on, and when George suggested traveling, we didn’t think it was possible. It was the perfect answer to our problem . . . and it turned out to be a knockout applause puller.11
Astaire, sometimes called “moaning Minnie” by his sister, tended to take a dim view of his shows’ prospects as the day of reckoning drew near. However, “from the very beginning,” it seemed to him, “Lady, Be Good! was one of those naturals that jelled.” Opening night in Philadelphia, at the Forrest Theatre on November 17, went without a hitch, and “the audience laughed and applauded everything we had counted on. It didn’t matter, that weak plot. Somehow there was an indefinable magic about the show.”12 The mercurial Aarons, known for panic attacks on opening nights—he customarily spent the evening in the men’s room—appeared backstage after the first act in a buoyant mood. “This thing is a cinch,” he told Astaire. “I just made a deal for six months with the ticket brokers in New York. We’re sold out already.” The company headed for New York’s Liberty Theatre on a wave of optimism, while still trying to guard against overconfidence.
But Lady, Be Good! clicked on Broadway as well. “The whole thing had a new look to it, a flow,” Astaire wrote.
Even after the final curtain many of the audience would linger around the orchestra pit to hear Ohman and Arden playing the exit music with the orchestra. Often too, when the exit music was completed, Phil and Vic would put on an impromptu concert for the fans who refused to go home. This happened many times and I was convinced that the new sound of Ohman and Arden’s two pianos in the pit had a lot to do with the over-all success of Lady, Be Good!13
Critical reception in both cities could hardly have been better. Much of the approval centered on the Astaires, especially Adele, whose dancing and comedy skills won many hearts, though Cliff Edwards, a singer already known to many audience members from cabaret and vaudeville as “Ukulele Ike,” received the most enthusiastic response. In New York, Frank Vreeland of the Telegram and Evening Mail attributed much of the show’s momentum to Gershwin’s music, which “tugged at the feet and plucked at the roots of the hair.”14
Perhaps the most sophisticated review was a Sunday piece by Linton Martin of the Philadelphia North American, who judged Lady, Be Good! nothing less than a “vital contribution to American music.” Gershwin had
combined the musical heritage of his eastern antecedents with the syncopated sounds of Forty-second and Broadway in rhythmic and harmonic effects so bizarre as to bow confidently at Stravinsky, and thus arrive at originality. . . . Bach selling flamboyant sheet music about June moons in the lobby on the way out could hardly be a more startling or unexpected spectacle. . . . This is music that one may listen to time and again, elusive, subtle, individual, piquant and plaintive. It is also jazzy, elementary, even uncouth.15
Just as the Rhapsody in Blue, with its prescriptive notation and classical references, reflected Gershwin’s emergence as an accomplished composer, so did the songs he had written for this landmark show. And three of them—“Oh, Lady Be Good!,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” and “The Man I Love”—not only made an impression at the time, but became standards. “Swanee” and “Stairway to Paradise” had already turned into independent hits, and “Somebody Loves Me” was showing signs of doing the same, but each of these old songs came from a different show, all of them revues, and had a different source of words. In contrast, the songs from Lady, Be Good! were all the work of the same lyricist and belonged to the same theatrical context. The Gershwin brothers were now engaged more fully with each other’s imagination and craft, opening up a new era of songmaking with a fresh stamp.
Linton Martin was among the first to identify the blues as one of the most effective arrows in Gershwin’s compositional quiver for Lady, Be Good!16 By this date blues music was characterized by any or all of four traits: (1) the use of “blue notes”; (2) repeated quarter-note rhythms in the bass register, sometimes called the “blues bass,” or even “quarter-note throb”; (3) melodies based on call-and-response; and sometimes (4) a twelve-bar refrain structure. The title song of the show, although it cannot be called a blues number, does show the composer drawing on blues music to give it a distinctive cast: acting the part of a near-helpless male, Watty pleads with an ingénue as if she were his only romantic hope in the world. In the space of thirty-two bars, the petition “Lady be good” is sung four times to a four-note gesture, often completed as “Lady, be good . . . to me.” Gershwin’s music offers an aural whiff of the “blue” feeling asserted in the lyrics.
The second standard from Lady is about a rhythm disruptive enough to threaten a person’s sanity. (The idea that popular music could be dangerous was not new to songdom, for it reaches back at least into the ragtime era, with Berlin’s 1911 “That Mysterious Rag.”) “Fascinating Rhythm” had its beginning in London during the summer of 1924, when George wrote eight bars of music that seemed weirdly promising. “Alex Aarons, who was with him, and who is one of the keenest judges of a smart tune among the managers, told him to develop it for the next show,” Ira recalled. The rhythmic opening of this tune was tricky: six eighth notes plus an eighth-note rest, to be repeated in 4/4 time. That incongruity, George noted with satisfaction, ensured that each repetition would start with a new emphasis.
With rhythm and meter out of sync by design, it was up to Ira to reconcile seven-syllable lines—the last “syllable” being silent—with duple-time accents, while meeting the comprehensibility test of a show-song lyric. His first breakthrough was a masterful phrase, “fascinating rhythm [rest],” that fit the music of George’s opening gesture while naming the very thing the gesture embodied. His second was to find two more lines of identical length that would make sense following the first. And his third breakthrough was to invent, for the fourth line, a five-syllable clincher (“I’m all a-quiver”) suggesting why such music posed a risk to listeners.
Despite the technical complexities the brothers faced, their goal was to make this song irresistible—a show-stopper. And in that they succeeded. “If you saw the show,” said George, “you remember that ‘Ukulele Ike’ sang the verse and chorus, followed by a miraculous dance by Fred and Adele Astaire. The song was played by an orchestra which featured Ohman and Arden in the pit.” These things together turned the technically formidable “Fascinating Rhythm” into a crowd pleaser.17
Musically, “Fascinating Rhythm” holds two elements in common with the blues. The regular minor-key pulsing of the verse’s bass line combined with a flatted third in the melody gives more than a hint of blueslike sound, and in the refrain’s a section, the melody’s rhythmic complications are supported by a stable harmonic background reflecting blues chordal practice. The b, or contrasting, sections offer much more harmonic change, as well as a syncopated rhythmic turn based on the popular dance step known as the Charleston.
But perhaps the most enduring of the three standards in Lady, Be Good! is one that was cut from the show before it reached New York.
In the spring of 1924, the brothers were working on a song long since forgotten, and after Ira had finished his words for its refrain, George composed a verse to go with it. Both brothers took a liking to this “definite and insistent melody.” But because the music didn’t seem “light and introductory enough” for a verse, they “upped its importance to the status of a refrain,” which Ira then fitted with new words. Once the brothers gave this melody a verse of its own, “The Man I Love” was complete.
Two standard elements of blues music are present here as well: a blue seventh prominent in the refrain’s melody, and references to the bass-line throb in the verse. What Ira considered the song’s insistent quality lies in the refrain’s repetition of a melodic figure that comes in both a six-note and a four-note form, the latter a postcadential sign-off known as “Good evening, friends”; listeners familiar with the Rhapsody in Blue may recognize it as the first music played by the piano when it enters with the work’s final melodic statement.18 “The Man I Love” stands out for the sober dignity of the music supporting the singer’s determined imaginings. And when Lady, Be Good! opened in Philadelphia, Adele Astaire sang it charmingly, Ira recalled. But during the tryout run it became clear that this song, by far the show’s weightiest, added nothing essential to the plot. Its solemnity seemed lost among the dancing duets and novelty numbers. It may be, too, that for all of Adele’s talents, they did not include taking herself seriously enough as a singer to dramatize “The Man I Love” to a theater audience.19 After a week, the ballad was withdrawn.
As the show’s only self-identified blues number, “The Half of It, Dearie, Blues” offers a more direct example of Broadway’s approach to blues music.20 This is a duet for Dick and Shirley, who, though they have just officially broken up, still love each other. Blues elements fly thick and fast once the title is introduced: a blue third on a strong beat, the quarter-note bass throb, a melody built around call-and-response, and a harmonic move from tonic to subdominant. At the end, Astaire completes the confessional by swinging into his solo tap dance. Real feelings lie behind this “blues” number, but it’s also rich in parody.
The only blues element in the show’s first song, “Hang On to Me,” sung and danced by the Astaires after their characters have been evicted and find themselves out on the sidewalk, occupies just one fleeting moment—a quote from the first phrase of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (“I hate to see the evenin’ sun go down”). But the show’s remaining published song, “Little Jazz Bird,” like “Fascinating Rhythm,” testifies to the irresistibility of modern popular music at its best. A songbird happens to fly into a cabaret where jazz is being performed, and likes what he hears. After heading home, he tells the other birds that their songs are hopelessly out of date and it’s time they learned to syncopate; “a little jazz bird is in heaven when it’s singing blue.” It appears that Gershwin wanted to put a stamp on the songs of Lady, Be Good! that would reflect their American provenance while also identifying them with the Jazz Age generation—and blues music, which could carry either a serious or a comic effect, was coming to be a distinctive marker of the time.
Lady, Be Good! proved a major success, with 330 performances in a forty-one-week run on Broadway, followed by a national tour. In 1926, the show was produced in London with some changes, but still featuring the Astaires, and it enjoyed a lengthy run there as well. Aarons and Freedley’s intent was made clear by the contract Gershwin signed on September 30, 1924: “Whereas the Managers desire to secure the services of the Composer, for the purpose of composing the complete score for a Musical Comedy, in which the Managers desire to present Fred and Adele Astaire.” No title or librettist is mentioned, just the stars. George Gershwin was paid $250 to sign the contract; once performances began, he received 2 percent (Ira’s take was 1 percent) of the weekly box-office receipts, less than half of what each Astaire earned. Whatever the take-home pay, Aarons and Freedley’s Lady, Be Good! had brought to Broadway two pairs of transcendent, family-based talents whose artistry set a new standard on the musical stage for years to come.