ON JANUARY 9, 1929, soon after its premiere, An American in Paris was broadcast on the radio by the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret, who followed up with a recording on February 4. Gershwin had a hand in the recording, as Shilkret recounted:
George called me and gave me a list of instrumentalists needed to record American in Paris the next day. He would bring the score and parts. What he forgot was to mention a celesta player. The next morning Gershwin was at the recording studio, and we started to play the manuscript. As we ran over the number, George kept suggesting this and that for about fifteen minutes. I finally turned to him and said, “George, please get lost for about one hour. This is a new work for me and the orchestra. Let us get acquainted with the score. I’ll understand you, but not until then.” George went off, but I was sure that he stayed in the hall, where I could not see him. When he returned, I said, “George, you forgot to let me know that a celesta player was needed.” He was sorry and said, “I’ll play the celesta.” We recorded the American in Paris, but George was so excited that, in one place, he did not play the celesta.1
The end of February found him in Ohio for a performance of the new work by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Local columnist Charles Ludwig wrote a memorable description of a morning rehearsal: as the session began, Gershwin joined conductor Fritz Reiner on the podium, telling the orchestra what had been on his mind as he composed his new work and throwing in a quick seminar for the percussionist assigned to play the taxi horns. Even after the orchestra swung into action, he stayed at the conductor’s side.
As [Reiner] directed the work, Gershwin, overflowing with enthusiasm, joined in. He was caught up in the lilt and swing of his own jazz music and waved his body and moved his feet and hands with the dance rhythms, pointing to the musicians of different sections of the orchestra as a cue as each, in turn, joined in the performance. And all the while Gershwin smoked his long pipe. It was a rare picture: a dancing young composer smoking a pipe, swinging his body, tapping his feet on the floor in dance time and waving his hands to different parts of the orchestra.2
As in New York, the Cincinnati audience welcomed An American in Paris warmly, while the critical reception was mixed. Robert Aura Smith of the Commercial Tribune wrote that “the audience understood its terminology from first to last and had a wonderful time,” but William Smith Goldenburg found the music out of place in a concert hall—a clear case of “Class C goods on a Class A counter.”3
The winter and spring of 1929 saw Gershwin promoting his new orchestra piece and working on two different Broadway scores—East Is West and Show Girl, both for Ziegfeld—while significant changes also took place in his personal life. The Gershwins sold the five-story residence on West 103rd Street where they had lived since 1925. By early spring, George had rented a penthouse atop a seventeen-story apartment building at Riverside Drive and 75th Street, while Ira and Leonore moved into an adjoining penthouse. On the heels of this move, word went out in the press that the composer, who in recent years had shown a growing interest in the visual arts, had taken up painting in earnest. His painter cousin Henry Botkin, visiting from Paris, was quoted in the New York Sun on April 10: “George only took up painting recently, but he has a natural ability that is absolutely remarkable. He also wants to start a modern picture collection, and to give him a better understanding and appreciation I suggested that he study painting seriously.”4
The next month, the New Yorker magazine published a profile of Gershwin by S. N. Behrman entitled “Troubadour,” which conveyed something of the magic of a social gathering when the composer sat down to play:
You get the sense of a complete mastery, a complete authority—the most satisfactory feeling any artist can give you. . . . He sings. He makes elaborate gestures. When he comes to a line in “My Little Ducky”—“Gloria Swanson is hot for me, / Look at the pin she got for me”—hand flies to his tie to convey the better Miss Swanson’s magnanimity. Described, this sounds grotesque, but actually it is as beautifully interpreted as a clever harmony. Gershwin becomes a sort of sublimated and transplanted troubadour, singing an elemental emotion, an unabashed humor.
“He told me once,” Behrman continued, “that his mother had cautioned him against playing too much at parties. With engaging candor Gershwin admitted that there might be some truth in this; but . . . ‘You see, the trouble is, when I don’t play, I don’t have a good time.’ ” 5
By the spring the long, lucrative run of the current Ziegfeld success was nearing its end. The epic Show Boat was going to complete its year-and-a-half run on May 4, and, not wanting to let his Ziegfeld Theatre go dark, the producer needed a replacement. The Gershwins had set to work on East Is West as early as January, but when librettist William Anthony McGuire failed to deliver a script by March, Ziegfeld postponed it and pointed the Gershwins toward Show Girl. George filled in some of the circumstances for a radio audience in 1934:
I’ll never forget Show Girl because it was the greatest rush job I’ve ever had on a score. I was working on another show for Mr. Ziegfeld, when he suddenly decided to drop that one and produce Show Girl immediately. He often did those things. Mr. Ziegfeld called me down to his office one day and said, “George, I’m going to produce J. P. McEvoy’s Show Girl and you must write the score for it. We go into rehearsal in two weeks!” I said, “But Mr. Ziegfeld, I can’t write a score in two weeks. That’s impossible.” Mr. Ziegfeld smiled up at me and said, “Why, sure you can—just dig down in the trunk and pull out a couple of hits.” Flo Ziegfeld had a way of getting what he wanted. . . . Well, the show went into rehearsal with half the score finished and about one third of the book completed. 6
His comments were made to introduce a broadcast performance of one of Show Girl’s most enduring songs, and they led to an anecdote that is hard to forget:
Mr. Ziegfeld said, “I would like to have a minstrel number in the second act with one hundred beautiful girls seated on steps that cover the entire stage.” This minstrel number was to be sung and danced by Ruby Keeler. So we went to work on a minstrel number and wrote “Liza.” The show opened in Boston—and I think the last scene was rehearsed on the train going up. The first act went along fine. The second act came and the attractive and talented Ruby Keeler appeared to sing and dance “Liza.” Imagine the audience’s surprise, and mine, when without warning Al Jolson, who was sitting in the third row on the aisle, jumped up and sang a chorus of “Liza” to his bride! Miss Keeler and he had just been married. It caused a sensation, and it gave the song a great start!
After this surprise during the Boston tryout, the same thing happened at the Broadway premiere, and virtually every review written in both cities mentioned it.7
The character of Show Girl and the philosophy of its producer help to explain the speed with which the production—a combination of musical comedy and revue—was thrown together. McGuire’s Cinderella-story libretto is centered on Dixie Dugan, an eighteen-year-old from Brooklyn, and how she realizes her ambition to star on Broadway in a Ziegfeld show. The real Ziegfeld placed Show Girl’s Dixie, played by a tap dancer who could also sing and act, in both the main narrative and a show-within-a-show purporting to be an edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. This allowed him to insert special acts and episodes as he saw fit; discontinuity was the result.
Among the best revue-style episodes involved a trio of nightclub entertainers, all making their Broadway debuts: comedian-singer-pianist Jimmy Durante, dancer Lou Clayton, and minstrel-style singer and strutter Eddie Jackson. Cast as stage crew members, they added comic antics to their professional duties. Durante brought much of his own material to the show, reducing the workload of both librettist and songwriters; Ziegfeld had already taken a step in that direction by adding lyricist Gus Kahn to the songwriting team.8 Nick Lucas, a singer who accompanied himself on guitar, made two appearances as a specialty act. A decision was also made to start the second act with An American in Paris, refashioned as a mix of pantomine, song, and ballet, created by Albertina Rasch and featuring ballerina Harriet Hoctor; during the last week of June, when Show Girl was enjoying its tryout run in Boston, An American in Paris was simultaneously having its local premiere with the Boston Pops Orchestra under Alfredo Casella. Finally, Ziegfeld added a rising African American jazz ensemble known as Duke Ellington and His Orchestra to the cast. Featured in two spots—Act I’s cabaret scene, which included the act-closing “Harlem Serenade,” and an Act II “minstrel scene”—Ellington and his musicians completed their Show Girl turns early enough in the evening to allow them to fill their regular engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club.
Rather than being “written” by librettist McGuire, Show Girl was assembled by interweaving a stage drama with varied specialty stuff. Because Ziegfeld hired the talent, made the decisions, and shaped the whole as it evolved, he acted as the show’s architect and its artistic conscience. As if to remind the audience of that fact, the character of “Mr. Ziegfeld” maintains an offstage presence, referred to by characters as a powerful figure whom they strive to please.9
Dramatizing a 1928 novel centered on the Broadway theater, the show begins, improbably, with the final scene from a purported Ziegfeld production called Magnolias, set on a Colonel Witherby’s plantation during the Civil War. The scene features a duel between suitors for the hand of the colonel’s daughter, then shifts to the backstage lives of the young working women whose looks and talent make such spectacles possible. Despite its flimsy connection to the main body of Show Girl, Ziegfeld continued to work on the lavish opening even after the Broadway run had begun. A specialty for dancers was cut, and a Finaletto for the ensemble by the Gershwins and Kahn was replaced by a new song, “Mississippi Dry,” by songwriters not otherwise connected to the show: music by Vincent Youmans, lyrics by J. Russel Robinson. This new number, an African American love lament grounded in the blues, was sung by the Jubilee Singers, a bona fide black chorus. The opening thus introduces the audience to the pagentry of race in the American South. Even before adding the number by the Jubilee Singers, Ziegfeld had Jimmy Durante, blacked up as if in a minstrel show, playing that scene as a servant who delivers mint juleps to Colonel Witherby, responding to his every order with a servile “Yes, Massa.”
The critic for the Boston Herald cited moments when Durante and his two cohorts “set the house in an uproar of laughter.”10 Moreover, when Show Girl reached New York, Brooks Atkinson felt that “Durante’s sizzling energy can galvanize any audience,” although “his spluttering, insane material does not melt gracefully into a musical comedy book. His personality, however, batters its way through all barriers.”11 Perhaps the admirer most in thrall to Durante’s art, and Ziegfeld’s too, was Gilbert Seldes, who in the New Republic named Show Girl his favorite of all Ziegfeld’s productions. Durante, he wrote,
easily “runs away with the show”—but stops short of spoiling it because he manages to make whatever he does contribute to the affairs of Dixie Dugan and her lovers, and, what is more important, to the affairs of the chorus and the stage manager and Mr. Ziegfeld. He tells bad jokes and good ones with complete confidence in their wit or lack of it—and makes them equally amusing.12
Ruby Keeler left the cast for reasons of health, but even though she played Dixie Dugan for only a week in Boston and three more in New York, the positive reviews she received, plus the story of her famous husband serenading her, secured her place in the show’s history.13 Atkinson caught hints of erotic complexity in her performance, “a prospect of sin.”14
Show Girl, touted as “a good summer show,” closed on October 5 after 111 performances. Nevertheless, the musical carries historical significance if for no other reason than that it marks the first and only time that Gershwin and Duke Ellington, iconic figures of twentieth-century American music, worked together. As Ziegfeld’s show opened in New York, Gershwin was approaching his thirty-first birthday, while Ellington had recently turned thirty. Gershwin was establishing himself as a presence in the classical as well as the popular sphere. Ellington, also a composer-pianist as well as an orchestra leader, was coming to be recognized as a leading and original voice in the New York cabaret and dance hall, and one whose jazz-based music was circulating widely through broadcasts and recordings. If Gershwin was an avid student of music, always ready for more instruction, Ellington was self-taught, apparently by design. Showing uncanny skill at borrowing and synthesizing material from members of his orchestra plus a wide range of other musicians, through his long career he remained wary that formal training might compromise the uniqueness of his musical voice. Considered strikingly fresh in their own day, the music of both composers hardly seems less so today. Indeed, the identification of both Gershwin and Ellington with jazz music, and the differences between their approaches, suggests the breadth of the American musical landscape’s creative possibilities in the 1920s.
Even looking beyond the divide that, in 1929, still discouraged interracial collaboration in a metropolis as dominating as New York, the protocols of Broadway musical comedy left little chance for artistic engagement between these two paragons. Both were working for Ziegfeld and were subject to his artistic decisions—and some of those decisions amounted to a waste of Ellington’s “magnificent” ensemble in the view of critic Abbe Niles, who felt they had been assigned a role that an ordinary band could have filled just as well.15
THE FIRST published Gershwin song from Show Girl is sung by Dixie at her audition for the Ziegfeld Follies: she’s trying out for the role of an innocent who has never kissed the same man more than once. Having recently received a kiss whose clarifying impact lingers in her bones, in “Do What You Do” she sings of being hungry for more of the same. The show’s second published song introduces her boyfriend Denny, a traveling greeting-card salesman, played by Eddie Foy, Jr. After opening a glowing letter from Dixie about her upcoming audition, an idea he abhors, Denny shows a genuine strain of lyric tenderness for her in “So Are You.” Dixie’s next song, “I Must Be Home by Twelve O’Clock,” is set in the New York penthouse of John Milton, a rich playboy who is throwing a “pajama party” for the showgirls of Ziegfeld’s Follies. Dixie, surprised to find herself on a couch next to Milton, together with a gaggle of pajama-clad and crapshooting girls, proclaims over and over that she’s absolutely got to leave this party. Here the Gershwin brothers—and Gus Kahn—wrote a song whose discontinuities model the workings of a confused mind. The number reveals the dark side of a glamorous social scene, and shows Dixie to be sensible, observant, and no easy mark for a man on the make.
The Act I finale, “Harlem Serenade,” is sung by Dixie and the ensemble at the Club Caprice, with Duke Ellington and his orchestra accompanying. This pure revue number is built around the notion of a nightspot featuring music that gives white customers a taste of what was passing there for Africa. Nor was it new to Ellington’s musicians, whose regular venue, the Cotton Club, was the kind of establishment where “jungle” scenes and “jungle music” were standard fare.
The remaining new song in Show Girl, “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away),” is sung in the Act II “minstrel scene” that, from the start, had loomed large in Ziegfeld’s conception of the show. “Liza” is something of a second-act counterpart to the opening plantation number. As the scene was originally conceived, it opens with “Follow the Minstrel Band” sung by Eddie Jackson “in One,” meaning in front of the curtain, apparently accompanied by the Ellington Orchestra. After a verse and refrain, the curtain rises on a full stage where the female chorus repeats “Follow the Minstrel Band” and then dances to it. “Liza,” sung by Nick Lucas, follows with a nostalgic glimpse of a romantic evening in the antebellum South. The male protagonist pictures a “moon shinin’ on the river” and a “breeze singin’ ” through the trees.
On the heels of the minstrel band number, the song’s parade of racially tinged markers—the chorus of “minstrel girls”; a belle called Liza, a common name for black female characters; the colloquial diction of the lyrics; and the easy informality of the marriage proposal being delivered—give the flavor of a blackface number for white performers.16 “Liza,” a song with a thirty-two-bar refrain, was soon embraced by jazz musicians, partly on the strength of a harmonic plan in aaba form that lent itself to theme-and-variation improvising—as the number’s composer himself soon learned.