12

A YEAR IN THE LIFE, PART I (1924–25)

LESTER DONAHUE, A CLASSICAL PIANIST with connections to New York City’s café society, wrote a brief recollection in 1938 looking back on a friendship with George Gershwin that had begun some fifteen years earlier. Donahue named 1924 as the year when the composer became a household name, thanks to “the Rhapsody heard ’round the world.” In some of those households, the man himself was entertaining such English guests as Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, and Noël Coward—and “George’s Rhapsody became the theme-song for all these occasions.” The range of talents Gershwin drew upon in the salons of New York may be seen as both a reflection of his professional work and a template for its future.1

On November 15, two nights before Lady, Be Good! began its tryout run in Philadelphia, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra played for an overflow audience in Carnegie Hall, their concert again including Gershwin and his Rhapsody in Blue. Local critics had weighed in on the piece nine months earlier, but on this occasion a respected voice from overseas was also heard. The British music critic Ernest Newman, serving a stint at the Evening Post while on leave from London’s Sunday Times, singled out the concert’s only substantial piece:

Mr. Gershwin’s Rhapsody is by far the most interesting thing of its kind I have yet met with; it really has ideas and they work themselves out in a way that interests the musical hearer. Perhaps it is better not to prophesy. What is at present certain is that Mr. Gershwin has written something for a Jazz orchestra that is really music, not a mechanical box of tricks.2

Gershwin’s multitasking continued into December. On the 1st Lady, Be Good! opened in New York, and on the 4th Whiteman’s musicians performed at Symphony Hall in Boston, with the composer himself playing his Rhapsody. Henry Taylor Parker’s Boston review highlighted the “ ‘devil-may-care’ spirit which should be spice and life to American jazz. . . . For the hour, [Gershwin] is the beginning, and also the end, of the jazz-music that deserves to be.”3 Like some critics before him, including Deems Taylor, W. J. Henderson, and Henry O. Osgood, Parker was intrigued by the artistic potential an orchestra like Whiteman’s held for American music, and for modern music as a whole. So far, however, Gershwin seemed the only composer able to seize with authority the artistic freedom that Whiteman’s ensemble proclaimed.

As the world of musical comedy and the tiny fiefdom of symphonic jazz continued on their separate paths, a new artistic prospect came to public notice. On November 18, the day after Lady, Be Good! opened in Philadelphia, the New York Evening Mail reported, with an eye-catching headline—“Wanted: Jazz Grand Opera”—that investment banker Otto Kahn, chairman of the board of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, had raised the possibility of a jazz opera. It would be produced at the Met, and three composers were under consideration: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin. Kern, the trio’s senior figure, did not rule out Kahn’s idea, nor did he rise to the bait. Berlin, while warmly embracing the notion of such a project, declined to take part. “I have talked syncopated opera a long time,” he was quoted in the article, “and I’d give my right arm to be able to do it. But I don’t feel that I’m equipped for the work.”4

Gershwin, on the other hand, found Kahn’s proposal both appealing and thought-provoking. While Kern had little experience composing instrumental music or orchestrating for the stage, and the self-taught Berlin required a musical secretary to notate his songs, Gershwin, during the past half-dozen years, had been learning the technical skills that classical composition demanded. Kern and Berlin, both in their late thirties, had settled into lucrative careers as songwriters; Gershwin, having established himself as a songwriter, had recently made an impact as a composer-pianist, too. If, as he prepared for the debut of Lady, Be Good!, he had found time beyond that to contemplate his professional future, Kahn’s call for a jazz opera gave him more to think about.5

ON NOVEMBER 26, Ira Gershwin closed a letter to Lou and Emily Paley with a plea for a long reply. He got one—a nine-page typewritten dispatch, dated January 10, from Paris. Lou had taken a sabbatical from his teaching job in Manhattan, and the couple were spending the academic year in Europe, chiefly in France. An avid wordsmith, song lyricist, jokester, lover of puns, and self-styled intellectual, Lou Paley was the author of this remarkable document: a travel journal of sorts, written in the ranting voice of an eccentric devoted to exaggerations and lies worthy of a picaresque novel. The letter offers a window on the kind of banter that must have flowed over the years at the Paleys’ Saturday evening get-togethers.

On the subject of his shipboard journey, Paley explained how dietary preparation had enabled him to avoid abdominal troubles:

Alors, as I was saying in my impeccable French, the trip thus far has been . . . a wow, or any multiple thereof. D’abord (there I go again) I was immune to seasickness, thanks to my Jewish training. Kugel, Tzmiss, Borscht, Schav, Chulunt, Blintzes, Miltz (just like mother’s), Laahx (who asked you?), Bub, Hayse Arbess, and a slew, a cold slew, so to speak, of Yiddish trainers had conditioned me and made me fit.

The ship docked in the port of Cherbourg, where the Paleys observed

whores, prostitutes, harlots, strumpets, demireps, trollops, baggages, cocottes, courtesans, and a fair sprinkling of street walkers. Real bargains—but I refrained, saving my shopping for Paris where the selection is greater. We left Cherbourg in the company of several Catholic priests, who also were going to do their shopping later.

The scenic trip from Cherbourg to Paris was revisited in a stream of gag lines (the group had seen “little donkeys on the hillsides” and gotten “a real kick” out of them). Finally, “Paris at last!”

I hesitate to write about that glorious city. Dostoevsky has done it so much better in “Brothers Karamazov” and in “Crime and Punishment”; Karl Marx so beautifully in “Das Kapital”; and Carl Sand[burg]—so photographically in “Chicago Poems”; not to speak of those others, —Sholem Ash, in his “Motke Goneff.” . . . And yet I feel somehow, that they all missed something. Dare I say it? Yes, I dare. They all held out in their various writings, on the poignancy of Paris. . . . They did miss its poignancy, even if it was only by a hair. I got it, of course, because I have no hair to miss it by.

Paley’s letter continues in a posturing vein for several more pages. Then, at the very end, the writer assumes a new tone, lyric and sincere.

Blinding sun on yellow, pink and white stucco houses; villas, brilliant facades of splendid hotels; beautiful gals, girls, and gels; automobiles, Rolls Royces, Hispano-Suizas, Sizaire Berwicks, Voisin, and Panhards; Tunisian rug-sellers; shops, Poiret, Patou, Lanvin, and Molyneux; Rajahs, Dukes, (Grand Russian) Dukes, (Grand Street) and their entwhoreage; scandals, fortunes won and lost; and suicides; bands of music in the open, kiss in the open, piss in the open and that and this in the open; The Blue Mediterranean throbbing continually a seaside accompaniment to it all; . . . and threaded through this fantastic embroidery of new scenes is the memory of loved friends. Emily and I keep praying that we are hemstitched even slightly in your memory.6

It took Ira until June to respond to Lou’s letter.

Dear Lou and Em (and vice versa),

If you haven’t heard from me up to now, it’s your own fault. That novel, which you modestly called a letter, discouraged me. Ev’ry (excuse it, please—that comes from writing songs)—Every time I wanted to write you (and I have wanted to write almost every other day for the past six months), a vision of fourteen pages of typewriting floated before me. In the time it would have taken me to write a not altogether unworthy response (that is, of course, if I could), I could have done two shows. Well, the answer is, I didn’t write, and Tell Me More! was the result. However, after seeing some weekly box office statements of the same, I know I should have written you.7

Composing the score for the new musical comedy Tell Me More, which opened on Broadway in April and shortly thereafter in London, was only one of a variety of fronts on which George Gershwin was active in the early months of 1925. On February 3, he signed a two-year contract with the Aeolian Company that called for nine recordings per year. A decade earlier the Standard Music Roll Company had paid him $5 per roll; now for each recording he would receive $166.67. Aeolian’s main stake in this arrangement lay in its desire for a recording of the Rhapsody in Blue. Part II of the Rhapsody, issued in May, was the firm’s first Gershwin release.

In April Gershwin also accepted a commission from the New York Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Walter Damrosch, to write and perform a new concerto for piano and orchestra. The contract specified that Gershwin was to supply a complete orchestral score; this time, every element of the composition would be his own. That same month Gershwin expounded his thoughts about writing an opera, which by then had taken a decisive turn, in an article published in Musical America. He envisioned a wholly original “Negro opera. . . . Negro, because it is not incongruous for a Negro to like jazz. It would not be absurd on the stage. The mood could change from ecstasy to lyricism plausibly, because the Negro has so much of both in his nature.” Opera singers with conventional classical instruction and experience could not sing such music, he believed, but African American singers could. Eighteen months before encountering DuBose Heyward’s novella Porgy, Gershwin had pondered Otto Kahn’s idea of an American jazz opera and decided that such a work should be centered upon and performed by black Americans—and rather than in an opera house, it ought to be produced in a theater for musical comedy.8

For all the opportunities Gershwin explored early in 1925, musical comedy had been the keystone of his career for some time, and so it remained. As Lady, Be Good! had been a vehicle for Adele and Fred Astaire, so Tell Me More was designed for Lou Holtz, a comic actor from vaudeville who had enjoyed success on Broadway. The new show’s contract reflects Gershwin’s rising status, paying him $500 at the outset plus 3 percent of the box-office receipts. Ira, who shared the duties of lyricist with Buddy DeSylva, received a $250 signing fee, and the two men split the lyricist’s share of 1 percent of the box-office take.9 There were other continuities with Gershwin’s previous musical theater work: the show’s producer was Alfred E. Aarons, father of Alex, first involved with Gershwin in La-La-Lucille! In London, a West End version of Tell Me More replaced Primrose and had the same English producers—George Grossmith and J. A. E. Malone—and music director—John Ansell—as well as several of the same stars, including Leslie Henson and Heather Thatcher. Fred Thompson, coauthor with Guy Bolton of Lady, Be Good!’s book, shared credit for the new show’s libretto, this time collaborating with William K. Wells; Felix Edwardes served as stage director for both Lady, Be Good! and the London production of Tell Me More, and Sammy Lee directed ensembles and the dancing for both.

A brief tryout for Tell Me More began on April 6 at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City, and the Broadway opening at the Gaiety Theatre took place a week later. (The show’s original title, My Fair Lady, was changed because it sounded too much like Lady, Be Good!) Generally speaking, most of the characters are cut from the same cloth as those in the preceding show—here, meeting at a New York masked ball, a Fifth Avenue millinery shop, and a fancy hotel in Newport, Rhode Island—and the plot once again traces the romantic ups and downs of three couples. Polo-playing Kenneth Dennison and once-wealthy Peggy Van de Leur taste love at first sight, then hit a bump in the road, but rediscover the magic just before the curtain falls. Peggy’s brother Billy Smith and a plain shop girl named Bonnie marry offstage toward the end. The millinery’s fast-talking, outrageous, and conspicuously Jewish manager, Monty Sipkin, played by Lou Holtz, and the aging heiress Jane Wallace maintain a partially hidden, hard-to-explain romantic connection despite the doubts of the other characters, and their own.

Holtz supplies much of the show’s comedy. He introduces himself in “Mr. and Mrs. Sipkin,” a song of self-celebration in 6/8 time sounding like a remake of Primrose’s “When Toby Is Out of Town.” Holtz had made his mark in show business playing ethnic characters, whether a minstrel “darky” in blackface or a Jewish funny man, and his comic song—barely linked to the plot—in Act II, “In Sardinia on the Delicatessen,” places him in the latter role, impersonating a Jewish waiter in Newport. Seemingly tailored for a New York audience and never published, the song is a flowing waltz about a town on the banks of the Delicatessen River, where, favored by breezes “spicy and balmy,” the citizens can take their leisure by strolling “through the fields of salami.”

Gershwin’s score for Tell Me More drew general approbation from critics but no hint that it rivaled that of Lady, Be Good! Robert Benchley commented in Life magazine that “Mr. Gershwin’s second-best is so much better than most others’ best that there should be no complaint.” He also noted that two of the show’s numbers were based on folk songs. One, “My Fair Lady,” sung by a male chorus, is beholden to “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” The other is borrowed from a ballad—“I know a boarding house, far, far away, where they have pork and beans three times a day”—that Mark Twain had cited as far back as 1892.10 While “My Fair Lady” has little to do with the plot, “Three Times a Day” furthers the romance of Kenneth and Peggy: meeting by chance at the masked ball, they immediately fall in love, but a skittish Peggy flees from that encounter, leaving her mask behind. After tracking her down, and explaining that he must leave New York for Newport, Kenneth vows that after his return she may expect his presence on her doorstep “three times a day,” and maybe even four. With its arching phrases, the song supports a lyric promise with music conveying true affection.

The show’s first number, “Tell Me More,” taps an emotional vein—that of memory—more akin to operetta than musical comedy. At the masked ball, Kenneth and Peggy confess a déjà vu sense of having shared each other’s company before. The title phrase embodies the empathy they share from the moment they meet. Introduced memorably in this first song, the three-note “tell me more” motive is reprised often thereafter, as a way of signaling assent between characters.

The show’s most explosive song is the rhythm number “Kickin’ the Clouds Away,” sung and danced toward the end of Act I by Monty and Jane, plus a female chorus. Jane, preparing to leave New York for a vacation with her parents in Newport, has been stewing about how to include Monty in the vacation party. Her plan is to invite Peggy and then have Monty drop by, pretending to be Peggy’s brother. “Do you think you could be British?” asks Jane, and Monty quickly assures her that he can. (As will become clear later, he mistakenly thinks she said “Yiddish.”) He and Jane celebrate the moment with a lively song and dance. By the time the refrain is delivered, audience members have already heard its melody twice: first in the overture, and then, as the curtain rises on the masked ball, from the dance floor. Critic Alexander Woollcott dubbed this song one of Gershwin’s “rhythmic anarchies.”11

As well as being a rhythm number, “Kickin’ the Clouds Away” is the only song in Tell Me More grounded in the blues—indeed, it embodies the therapeutic idea that this music can dispel glum feelings. The refrain is a sophisticated and musically complex entity built around a blues bass and a syncopated melodic figure that infuses many 2/2 ragtime melodies: an eighth note on the downbeat followed by a quarter note and another eighth note, and then a half note. Short repeated figures like this one have come to be known as riffs in jazz parlance. As Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” summoned folks to “come on and hear” some compelling music, and then to “come on along” to meet the bandleader, so Gershwin’s refrain—though with different declamation—urges: “Come on along! / You can’t go wrong! / Kickin’ the clouds away.” Like “Fascinating Rhythm” in Lady, Be Good!, the song serves to display the dancing energies of the cast.

In Monty and Jane’s later duet “Why Do I Love You?,” Jane admits in the verse that her once rosy view of romantic passion has faded. Based on Monty’s response, not to mention the plot of the entire show, Jane’s life would be simpler if she had fallen in love with somebody else. She’s anxious about Monty’s shortcomings as a suitor, and he gives no hint that the quality of their relationship interests him much; his self-regard, fed by a childlike blend of charm and carelessness, protects him from worry. Gershwin’s peppy music, seeming not to take this love affair seriously, reflects Monty’s attitude more than it does Jane’s. The effect is one of mismatched lovers.

On April 18, only a few days after the show’s Broadway debut, Gershwin sailed for England to help oversee the London production of Tell Me More, scheduled for a May opening. His trip marked the third consecutive year that a theatrical project had drawn him there. As he settled into the customs of London’s musical theater scene during these years, he also made an impression in the city’s social circles, where he was accepted as a uniquely gifted artist whose talents enriched the theater and whose fondness for entertaining at the piano made him a valued and congenial guest.

As it happened, Eva Gauthier was also in London at the time, and on May 22 Gershwin joined her in a recital repeating the program she had sung in 1923 in New York and early the next year in Boston. After the concert, cousins of King George V, Lord and Lady Carisbrooke, threw a party. “It was Gershwin’s first meeting with royalty,” Gauthier wrote later, “and it was as if he had always belonged there. With his charm and talent he made the party alive and interesting and had everyone around the piano as he sang and played all his latest songs and dance hits.” She also noted that the dose of Tin Pan Alley in her recital’s musical mix was rather “too much of a jolt for the English—too radical an innovation. . . . It took nine recitals before I could make them forgive me.”12

With a run of 264 performances, Tell Me More proved a greater success in London than in New York, where it had closed in July after just 100. Gershwin changed relatively little in the score, but he did write three new songs for the London version: “Have You Heard,” a song for Monty to replace “In Sardinia”; and two waltzes, “Love, I Never Knew,” a soliloquy for Peggy, and the comic “Murderous Monty (and Light-Fingered Jane),” a list song devoted to criminal services. These were two very different approaches to waltz time. “Love, I Never Knew,” with its Viennese rhythmic inflections, harmonic richness, and flexible declamation, proved an apt way to deliver a statement with its share of emotional complexity. “Murderous Monty” achieved its comic purpose through a strict oom-pah-pah beat and steady streams of quarter notes, with nary a dotted rhythm within earshot.