FROM AARONS TO ZIEGFELD (1927)
BEFORE STRIKE UP THE BAND OPENED in August 1927, the Gershwins had begun work on their next musical, Funny Face, originally named Smarty—a return to type. Produced by Aarons and Freedley, the show had a tryout run of six weeks during October and November before bursting onto the New York scene as a hit in the mold of its predecessors. It was a high-stakes enterprise, elected to open a new 1,400-seat theater built for Aarons and Freedley, with a name—the Alvin—fashioned from the first syllable of each of their first names.1 To mark the milestone the producers hired a potent assemblage of talent: the Gershwins, Fred and Adele Astaire, and Robert Benchley of Life magazine as librettist in collaboration with Fred Thompson. And in the end, Funny Face succeeded where Strike Up the Band had failed—even though at first it seemed a lost cause.
Fred Astaire found the plot “one of those things that wouldn’t work—even at rehearsals,”2 and Ira remembered that “everyone concerned with the show worked day and night, recasting, rewriting, rehearsing, recriminating.”3 After some five weeks of rehearsals in New York starting on September 6, the company left for Philadelphia and the Shubert Theatre, where Strike Up the Band had expired a month before. The dress rehearsal, which ran until 1:30 a.m., went so badly that Freedley called the performers and crew together for a reality check. “We don’t see how it will be possible to open tomorrow night with the show as ragged as this,” he told them. “I know it’ll be tough, but I am going to ask you to run through the whole thing again without stopping, otherwise we’ll have to postpone the opening.” Another three-hour rehearsal followed, keeping the company onstage until 4:30 a.m.
The Philadelphia opening took place on October 11. “The numbers went well,” Astaire thought, “but the comedy missed.” Aarons decided to keep the show on the road for enough weeks to rewrite most of it, though his plan made for an exceedingly difficult time. Benchley resigned and was replaced by a known “play doctor,” Paul Gerard Smith. Bad reviews in Philadelphia kept the crowds small as the company remained in town much longer than originally planned. Observers arrived from New York and returned with such glum forecasts that ticket brokers there declined to order seats for the Broadway opening. Morale ran low as Smarty moved on to Washington for a week, then to Atlantic City for another week. All the while, Astaire recalled, “we were playing one version while rehearsing another.” The arrival of a new cast member, Victor Moore, whose comedic talents had sparked Oh, Kay! a year earlier, provided some encouragement, but the sense of being in limbo persisted.4 With audiences so small, noted Astaire, “we couldn’t tell how the changes were working out because there was never enough of an audience to give us a reaction.”
The tour’s last stop was Wilmington, where the show opened on November 14 with a newly added dance number for the Astaires, “The Babbitt and the Bromide.” “It went in on a Thursday or Friday night,” wrote Ira, “when the audience consisted of no more than two hundred—mostly pretty and young and pregnant Du Pont matrons (my wife’s observation).” The new number “was introduced at 10:50 and concluded with Fred and Adele doing their famous ‘run-around’—to show-stopping applause—and suddenly, with all the other changes, the show looked possible.”5 Astaire, too, sensed that the tide may have turned in Wilmington. “It seemed better, but we didn’t know.”
When Funny Face opened in New York on November 22, they knew. Astaire, who had been dreading certain humiliation, was pleasantly amazed: “the over-all something was there.”
Having gone through such a series of mishaps and revisions on the road, we simply didn’t know what we had. Adele sang “’S Wonderful” with Allen Kearns; I did “High Hat” with an all-male chorus, also “My One and Only” with lovely Gertrude MacDonald. Betty Compton had a good specialty dance. Adele and I did “The Babbitt and the Bromide” with the old run-around once more. We discovered we had many high spots both in Victor Moore’s and Billy Kent’s comedy.
The New York reviews offer no hint of the difficulties that had plagued the company on the road. They are almost uniformly enthusiastic, while saying little about the plot cobbled together by Thompson and Smith. Alexander Woollcott of the World, having called the book “singularly perishable,” proved his point by staying mum on the matter. John Anderson of the Evening Post was more informative: Funny Face was “the one about a girl and a tenor, or, to put it more brutally, the [one] about the stolen jewels. . . . They are stolen accidentally by the right people while the real burglars make off with a diary.”6
Woollcott sensed a rare rapport at the heart of Funny Face. “I do not know whether Gershwin was born into this world to write rhythms for Fred Astaire’s feet or whether Astaire was born into this world to show how the Gershwin music should really be danced. But surely they were written in the same key, these two.” Though he was no music critic, Woollcott had reviewed Gershwin musicals for the better part of a decade, and his comments on the music stand among the most sound-oriented of any to appear in the wake of the Broadway premiere:
For “Funny Face” Gershwin has written a clever, sparkling, teasing score. I can imagine that there are many who would find such a sauce piquante of odd dissonances and stumbling measures a little trying as steady fare, like a whole meal made out of Worcestershire sauce. But it is tickling music, all of it, and for once in a way the Brothers Gershwin . . . have the satisfaction of hearing their songs sung. . . . You hear such lusty volume and such harmony and such loving swipes as seldom reward our songwriters until their songs have reached the campus.
Adele and Fred Astaire, having cut their teeth as vaudeville performers, had tailored their talents to fit that environment. Neither had anything like a stentorian voice, able, like that of Al Jolson or Tessa Kosta, to be heard over the orchestra in a space built for 1,400. Songs the Gershwins wrote for the two of them ran toward the easy conversational tone of “Hang On to Me” or the tricky declamation of “Fascinating Rhythm,” rather than ones more reliant on sustained tones and vocal resonance. Still, surviving recordings show that Fred’s and Adele’s voices had a focused timbre that must have been audible in the theater, if not thrilling for their ring. Fred’s vocal production, in particular, reflected his stage persona: a relaxed-sounding performer with considerable resonance from the bottom to the top of his tenor range and the ability to project tones without signs of strain. The result was a clarity of line aided by his keen ear for pitch, apt sense of phrasing, and distinct but unfussy declamation of words—all of it grounded in the rhythmic mastery that made him a superior dancer. Once he began his movie career, Fred eventually won a reputation as a unique vocal stylist.
In Funny Face, Astaire plays Jimmy Reeve, guardian of three lively young women: Dora, played by Betty Compton, who has both a boyfriend and a roving eye; June, played by Gertrude McDonald, a model of feminine intelligence and virtue; and Frankie, played by Adele, a charming contrarian and inveterate liar. Much of Jimmy’s energy is spent trying to extricate Frankie from trouble. But partway through Act II, he realizes that June is “My One and Only,” the only song Woollcott singled out for comment, and fitting his description of “odd dissonances and stumbling measures.” The verse stumbles repeatedly, for in each of the first six bars the downbeat is marked by a rest—giving Astaire opportunities to put his brand of understated virtuosity as dancer, singer, and master of rhythm on display. Another Astaire number, “High Hat”—the first time he appeared on Broadway in full evening dress, which came to be seen as his signature costume—strikes a different tone. Jimmy advises a corps of young men how to win the hand of the girl they fancy: give her “the high hat,” striking a pose of superiority and indifference. The 2/4 meter forges ahead in the manner of a turn-of-the-century one-step, with syncopations that feel marchlike.
Astaire was involved in three more songs in Funny Face, each a duet with Adele, but only the last a full-fledged dance number. The first, the show’s title song, concludes an interchange between Jimmy and Frankie that shows how exasperating life as her guardian can be. A police sergeant has given Frankie a speeding ticket; she tells the officer that Jimmy has been rushed to the hospital with a broken leg. But after visiting Jimmy at home and finding him intact, the policeman, who has dealt with Frankie before, forgives the ticket and offers her guardian his sympathies. Jimmy then questions her about a recent public incident, in which an aviator named Peter Thurston, played by Allen Kearns, landed at the local airfield and Frankie made a spectacle of herself by rushing up alone to kiss him. And then there is the matter of Frankie’s diary, which includes false accounts of her lunching with Babe Ruth, joining Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York on a trip, meeting heavyweight champ Gene Tunney, and taking a walk with President “Cal” Coolidge. Jimmy announces, over Frankie’s protests, that he intends to lock the diary up in the family safe. Nevertheless, Jimmy realizes, too, that he is touched by the sheer life force of the young woman who lives so restlessly under his roof, and the song he sings now owns up to a genuine fondness. “Funny Face” offers a smooth, serene melody in appreciation of what she has brought into his life: spontaneity, imagination, and a sense of play.
By the last scene, each of the Astaires had done an ample amount of dancing, but the pair had yet to share the stage in a show-stopper. That moment arrived with “The Babbitt and the Bromide,” a freestanding novelty number launched into after Jimmy learns that Frankie is engaged to marry Peter Thurston. The marking at the start of the music, “Allegretto humoroso,” is unique in the Gershwin songbook.
Ira’s tale begins: “A Babbitt met a Bromide on the avenue one day,” Babbitt referring to a conventional, small-minded businessman and a bromide being a conventional, commonplace, and tiresome person.7 The first refrain reproduces their exchange, a stream of clichés (“What’s new? / I’m great! / That’s good! / Knock wood!”); the two dullards have recognized each other on the street and stopped, but neither one can remember anything about the other, so they fake it. The second stanza depicts a replay: a chance encounter ten years later. Having anticipated “an awful lot to talk about,” they return to what they’d said a decade ago. In the third stanza—twenty more years have passed—the Babbitt and the Bromide meet within “Saint Peter’s gate.” Each now wears wings, carries a harp, and sports a few extra pounds. Other than noting their weight gain and proposing to meet someday to have a drink, the best they can manage is a recap of their original refrain.
Given the song’s storytelling form and comic character, it’s likely that in this case Ira came up with the idea, mapped out the words, and George set them to music. Each refrain ends with an instrumental tag, to which the Astaires danced their signature “run-around” maneuver, ensuring that the number, and the show, would close on a high note.
Funny Face also features examples of a kind of speech that has been dubbed “flapperese”: “I’m worried stiff,” “I mean,” “don’t be ridic.”8 Conspicuous examples are found in “’S Wonderful,” one of two numbers sung by Frankie and Peter Thurston. Having thrust herself into Peter’s triumphant landing at the airfield, she has decided that a visit to his home is in order. After hearing a confusing story about wanting Peter to steal her diary from Jimmy’s safe, he suggests that Frankie go home, which prompts her charge that he’s a coward. Stunned by that challenge, Peter vows to do whatever Frankie’s bidding may be. “Life has just begun,” he intones, to the simplest of motives: four repeated quarter notes plus a whole note. In the verse that unfolds, transfixed by the rightness of that motive, he sings it repeatedly while moving up the scale, a step at a time, and then back down. Frankie’s language in her response does the aviator one better, with its flapperesque clipping of syllables, rhyming “fash” (fashion) and “pash” (passion), and following with “emosh.” In the refrain of “’S Wonderful” a depth of feeling is registered not through emphatic expression but through musical restraint.9 The song’s deft portrayal of unbidden, unconditional love has enabled it to outlive Funny Face by far.
Frankie and Peter’s other duet, “He Loves and She Loves,” is a substitute for the smoky “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” introduced during the last week of the show’s tryout. It follows a squabble over an auto accident that is mostly her doing. The refrain—“Slowly, with sentiment”—reflects the mood of a singer determined to preserve his romance with a partner whose unreliability could discourage even the most avid suitor. If “’S Wonderful” registers the feelings of a pair in the throes of new love, “He Loves and She Loves” reveals emotions being tested by time and experience. The refrain requires the singers to turn a melody based on disjunct ups and downs into a musical line. Perhaps the effort of making tunefulness from disjointed pitches mirrors the challenges of romantic love, likely to loom in Frankie and Peter’s future.
Funny Face opened in the Alvin Theatre on November 22 and ran for more than six months. Audiences considered the Astaires as a duo, with Adele perhaps the more vivid star. Her ability to bridge the contradictions in a role like that of Frankie proves her uncanny onstage charm.
A FEW MONTHS before the new show opened, George Gershwin took part in a historic concert in Lewisohn Stadium on the campus of the City College of New York, where the New York Philharmonic offered a regular menu of outdoor concerts. On July 25, on a program bookended by Berlioz’s Overture to Benvenuto Cellini and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, Gershwin played his Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue, marking his first performance with the city’s foremost orchestra, and the first time he had played both works on the same program in New York. The concert was reviewed as a newsworthy event, in large part because of the huge size of its audience—around 16,000. “That cheering multitude must have taken George Gershwin’s breath away,” fancied Robert Garland of the New York Telegram. “Perhaps even he hadn’t realized how many men enjoy both music and cigars.”10 Charles Pike Sawyer of the Evening Post was convinced that “Gershwin grew greatly between the rhapsody and the concerto and he is going further.”11 An unsigned review in the Times found that the Concerto in F grows on listeners “with repeated hearings, has characteristics of solid musical worth, and may well achieve a place among the significant works of contemporary American composers.”12 The stadium concert was a celebration of musical artistry that seemed to welcome everyone. No other American musician of the day could have filled a 16,000-seat stadium.
Gershwin was soon to make the aquaintance of an even more celebrated American: the real-life Peter Thurston. After his transatlantic flight the previous May, Charles Lindbergh had returned home from France to a hero’s welcome. During highly publicized travels, including a tour of the West Coast, attention grew so unremitting that he dropped out of sight for a time to escape the spotlight. In the fall, as he lay low in a New York apartment, a wealthy banker named Schuyler Parsons organized a bachelor dinner party in Lindbergh’s honor. The guests included inventor John Jay Hammond; aeronautical engineer Grover Loening; Charles Lawrence, who had designed the engine of Lindbergh’s plane, The Spirit of St. Louis; theatrical producer Dwight Taylor; British writer and socialite Beverley Nichols; Charlie Hanson Towne, editor of Harpers Bazaar magazine; and, from the world of music, George Gershwin.
Some three decades later, Taylor published an account of the gathering, according to which Nichols, known as a raconteur, took over the conversation and dominated it through an opening round of drinks and much of the dinner that followed. Despite the best efforts of the host and others, Lindbergh was excluded from the conversation. But after the meal, Gershwin took a seat at the piano, and Lindbergh sat next to him on the bench. As Gershwin began to play the Rhapsody in Blue, Taylor noticed the aviator hunch forward,
peering like a puzzled child at the lively fingers as they traveled up and down the keyboard, while Gershwin leaned back, a freshly lit cigar in the corner of his mouth, losing himself in the melancholy intricacies of his composition. The rest of the company remained silent and attentive, fully aware of the drama of the moment, in which these two idols of the contemporary scene were caught together for a brief period in time, never to be forgotten. When Gershwin had finished, the men applauded, but Lindbergh leaned forward and struck a few spasmodic notes on the piano, as if some conjuring trick had been performed, the secret of which, through the proper research and investigation, he might possibly reveal. For the second time that evening he had found himself in . . . second place, but I think that Gershwin, aware of the atmosphere of tension which had been created by Nichols, had decided to pre-empt the floor solely to engage the guest of honor in other interests, the better to relieve him of his embarrassment.13
When Gershwin finished, Lindbergh asked him to play something else. But instead, the composer took the cigar out of his mouth and asked a question—the one that had been on the minds of most of the company all evening. “Tell me, Mr. Lindbergh—weren’t you afraid?” The rest of the guests burst out in hearty laughter. “Why no!” Lindbergh answered. “Flying’s my business. And I’d started out for this Le Bourget field in France.” Gershwin, having broken the ice, then questioned Lindbergh in detail about how he felt during the flight.
Among the accomplished men at Parsons’s dinner party that night, only he and Lindbergh knew what it felt like to be adored for doing their job: for having accomplished something extraordinary that immense throngs of Americans could appreciate and wholeheartedly admire. That evening, the aviator and the artist sat side by side on the piano bench as peers.
HAVING COMPOSED two musical comedies for production during the second half of 1927, Gershwin was then tapped for a third. Rosalie was a project of the foremost theatrical producer of the age, Florenz Ziegfeld, who in February had marked another milestone in an illustrious career when he opened the Ziegfeld Theatre. Born in Chicago to a family devoted to classical music—his father headed a conservatory there—Ziegfeld won his reputation as a purveyor of light theatrical entertainment, and a man whose producing talents owed more to his eye than his ear. The Ziegfeld Follies, whose first edition was staged in 1907, made their mark from the start as visual spectacles: dazzling in their colors and sheer profusion, and with meticulous attention to detail, from the top quality of costume materials to the painstaking care taken to create onstage “pictures” made from deftly positioned cast members. Most of all, Ziegfeld built his career around his skill at presenting feminine beauty onstage to striking effect. He ballyhooed his pageantry as part of “the Glorification of the Ziegfeld Girl.”
Although raised in a musical household, Ziegfeld claimed no particular interest in music, and especially not the classical kind. On the other hand, well aware that the theater’s best-known composers would enhance his shows’ appeal, he worked with the likes of Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rodgers as well as Gershwin. These men and all his other creative personnel had to deal with a boss who controlled his productions like a dictator. Ira Gershwin credited Ziegfeld with a “hypnotically persuasive manner” manifesting “great charm until a contract was signed.”14
George Gershwin had met Ziegfeld a decade earlier, when he accompanied dancers for Miss 1917. As far as can be traced through correspondence, the start of his connection with Ziegfeld the producer dates from shortly before July 22, 1927, when Gershwin wrote him about a forthcoming project:
When I spoke to you about the Marilyn Miller show [Rosalie], I had no idea that the Astaire show [Funny Face], which I was scheduled to do, would be postponed until September. That means that the Astaire show will open in October, which would be the same time you would like to start rehearsals on the Marilyn Miller show. It is only right for me to tell you at once that I cannot see how it will be possible for me to give you the best that is in me. This is particularly unfortunate for me, as I so admire Marilyn Miller and Jack Donoh[u]e and would like so much to write for them.15
Ziegfeld’s reply, showing him in aggressive persuasion mode, arrived the next day by telegraph. The producer asked if Gershwin could give him three or four numbers at least, “as Marilyn is so very anxious to have something from you to dance to and to sing and as you promised me you would do that show only asking me not to announce it for reasons of your own.”16
When Rosalie opened in Boston on the evening of December 5, the score included several songs by the Gershwin brothers. The production that took the Broadway stage on January 10, 1928, had risen from “three or four” musical numbers by Gershwin to nine.17 In musical comedy history, Rosalie has been overshadowed by Ziegfeld’s near-simultaneous production: on December 27, Show Boat, with book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a score by Jerome Kern, opened at the producer’s own Ziegfeld Theatre. Not only did Show Boat continue into the spring of 1929, on the way to 572 performances, but it also won classic status as a work whose skillful integration of music and drama set a new standard for musical comedy. While Rosalie has enjoyed no such afterlife, some critics of the day set it side by side with Show Boat as another example of the master touch that Ziegfeld alone could provide.
For Rosalie he had certainly assembled a talented crew. The book was drafted by playwright William Anthony McGuire, who cobbled together a detailed scenario that he dispatched via Ziegfeld’s medium of choice, the telegram; this one ran to forty-two pages. Ziegfeld liked what he read enough to seek out a second librettist as a collaborator—the experienced, dependable Guy Bolton. Sigmund Romberg composed ten songs for the score with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse, plus a ballet and incidental music. Indications are that five of the nine Gershwin songs were composed for Rosalie, and the other four came from his trunk of unused songs written for earlier shows, including Funny Face.
The story was inspired, again, by Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, plus another well-publicized event: a visit to North America in the fall of 1926 by Queen Marie of Romania and her daughter. In Rosalie, American pilot Lieutenant Dick Fay lands in the Balkan kingdom of Romanza (rhymes with “stanza”) after his solo crossing. There, at a peasant festival, he falls in love with a beautiful young woman, Rosalie, he had danced with at a ball in Paris the year before, only to learn that she is a princess forbidden to marry a commoner. Shortly after Dick returns to the Military Academy at West Point, where he is stationed, the Romanzan royal family pays a visit there. The queen does all in her power to keep her daughter and the aviator apart, but Rosalie manages to reconnect with Dick, and they declare their intention to marry. The final scene takes place in Paris, where the king of Romanza—flirtatious, henpecked, and bored with his job—abdicates. His act makes Rosalie a commoner, free to marry the man she loves.
In a show set in both Europe and America, the Hungarian-born Romberg, a master of operetta, supplied most of the martial and all the Old World dance music, while Gershwin’s offerings were cast in more modern and New World styles. Ira wrote the lyrics for most of his brother’s music, as Wodehouse did for Romberg’s. Neither the credits nor manuscripts surviving from the show indicate that the composers collaborated on any songs, though the lyricists did so on three of them.
Because Marilyn Miller was a famous and accomplished dancer—Ira remembered her as “Broadway’s biggest musical star”—and was eager for new music by Gershwin, it is no surprise that four of his nine songs were written for her character. Three are duets, one of which was with Dick Fay, played by Oliver McLennan, sung at the peasant festival in Rosalie’s homeland. “Say So!” is a tender exchange between a young man and woman who, believing themselves to be profoundly in love, are actually meeting for only the second time. Gershwin’s verse music adds a legato countermelody that brings a textural richness to a tune fashioned around repeated quarter notes. Then, a hint of eroticism in the more dancelike refrain affirms the romantic destiny of the princess and the American commoner.
Miller’s other two duets are sung with Jack Donahue in the role of Bill Delroy, Dick Fay’s best buddy and Rosalie’s coconspirator in her quest to join her destiny with Dick’s. In “Let Me Be a Friend to You,” the two endorse their personal link in a number that went unpublished and whose music has not survived. Their second duet is a genial and innocent show-stopper that won success outside the theater, “Oh Gee!—Oh Joy!,” with lyrics by Wodehouse and Ira. Here, two-syllable exclamations—“gee whiz!,” “heigh-ho!,” and others—salute love as one of life’s best rewards, sung to music with an inexorable, exuberant flow.
One beneficiary of Ziegfeld’s recruitment of Gershwin was Bobbe Arnst in the role of Mary O’Brien, Bill Delroy’s girlfriend, who is visiting Romanza. Where Miller received new material that displayed her talents mostly alongside others’, Arnst was assigned three solo songs, including two written for earlier shows and already in print. “Show Me the Town” had been composed for Oh, Kay! but then removed, owing to a change in the script. As the first song in Rosalie, it introduces Mary as a spunky American party girl who is game for whatever the locals have in store. Later, she sings “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” a potent love song cut from Funny Face. Written and published as a duet for Mary with Bill, it was transformed, by the time of Rosalie’s New York debut, into a number for her alone to fill an entire short scene in a secluded West Point rendezvous. Now that Mary has met Bill Delroy and taken his measure, the song testifies, she has learned why the physical side of romance has sparked so much enthusiasm. Set in a bluesified four-beats-to-the-bar rhythmic environment, Mary’s confession celebrates an innocent’s entrée to the realm of erotic loving. Addressing her absent mentor with wonder, this young woman declares her readiness to double down on lessons learned under his romantic tutelage. According to critic Leonard Hall in New York, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” leaves its mark on the show through the persona of “Little Bobbie Arnst,” whose performance as “one of those amazing young lumps of original sin that break out these days, is singled out.”18
Arnst’s personal success mirrored that of the show as a whole. Rosalie succeeded at the box office, running from January until October 27, 1928, for 335 performances.