ON MAY 3, 1932, THE PULITZER PRIZE for drama was awarded to George Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin for Of Thee I Sing, but the show’s composer received no such recognition, for in that day there was no Pulitzer Prize for music. Ira’s inclination was to refuse the prize, but George insisted that he accept.1
Less than two weeks later, on May 14, Morris Gershwin died of leukemia at age sixty-two. Those who knew George Gershwin well agreed that the death of his father affected him deeply. His aunt, Rose Gershwin’s sister Kate Wolpin, witnessed George exclaiming in the hospital, “Papa, I would give everything in the world if I could do something for you to get well,” and she remembered his sending “for medication to that big hospital in Maryland, and for special doctors.”2 Friend and pianist Oscar Levant, also saddened by Morris’s death, admitted that he lacked the sensibility to engage with others on such matters as sorrow and loss—an incapacity that he and Gershwin, he believed, held in common. Levant could “lay no claim to a special access to [George’s] feelings,” he recalled later. “We merely had a healthy, extrovertial intimacy, born . . . of mutual interests. Excluding the members of his family,” Levant believed, “the only man who could possibly be said to have enjoyed such a special affection from George was Bill Daly.”3
Another hint of Gershwin’s emotional reticence now may be suggested by a letter he wrote to DuBose Heyward just six days after his father died. As part of their correspondence that spring, about the opera the two men had been considering over the past five years, Heyward had written from North Carolina with news that he had finally cleared operatic rights to his novella Porgy. Gershwin’s brief reply, explaining that he would not be free to start composing the opera until 1933, was all business, carrying no hint of the personal loss he had just sustained.4
As success made Gershwin a figure whose doings were followed by the press, perhaps the most persistent question about his personal life was why one of New York’s most eligible bachelors—who in interviews avowed his intent to marry when “the right” woman came along—stayed single. Long after her brother died, it seems that Frances Godowsky was still pondering that matter. In a 1983 interview, she recalled his saying that he wanted to live in a setting “with beautiful things in it. He loved glass and beautiful dishes, and he loved paintings. He said ‘I want to have a home.’ Somehow it never happened.” In fact, George, who in 1929 had set up his own household, did surround himself with beautiful things from that time forward. But he found no female companion to share his existence with. Frances could not avoid looking back on her brother’s extraordinary life with a certain regret. “George wasn’t a happy person,” she told an interviewer. “He didn’t understand why he couldn’t get out of life what he wanted, which was a companion. Somehow there may be something in our background that did that to him.”5
The list of women with whom Gershwin was romantically involved over the years is long, and many among them were famous in their own right. In addition to Adele Astaire and Rosamond Walling, they include pianists Josepha Rosanska and Pauline Heifetz (sister of violinist Jascha), Countess Nadige de Ganny, Julia Thomas Van Norman, and actresses Marilyn Miller, Ginger Rogers, Aileen Pringle, Roberta Robinson, Kitty Carlisle, Elizabeth Allan, Simone Simon, Luise Rainer, and Paulette Goddard.6 But the longest-lasting of his relationships, with pianist-composer Kay Swift, was also the one linked most closely to his musical life.
Born into a musical family in 1897—her father Samuel was a New York music critic—Katharine Faulkner Swift studied piano and composition at the Institute of Musical Art, which later became the Juilliard School of Music. Receiving her diploma in 1917, she married James Paul Warburg, of a prominent New York banking family, a year later. Between 1919 and 1924, the couple had three daughters, even as Katharine continued her musical studies. She was something of a free spirit, and the Warburgs carried on an active social life, filled with entertaining, partygoing, and an apparently relaxed attitude toward marital vows. There were days when the daughters—looked after by a staff of servants—saw their parents only in the evening, dressed to the nines and on their way to a dinner party or the theater. By 1924, the couple had purchased Bydale, a twenty-five-acre farm in Greenwich, Connecticut, that eventually grew to more than eighty acres.
On April 17, 1925, Katharine gave a party honoring Jascha Heifetz, and Gershwin was there in the company of Pauline. He attended another Warburg party in February 1926, and this time, with the premiere of the Concerto in F behind him and two shows running on Broadway, he spent much of the evening at the piano, apparently the first time the hostess had witnessed him in action. After some time he rose abruptly from the keyboard and announced, “Well, I’ve got to go to Europe now,” a comment she found rather charming.7 The next day he did leave for Europe—bound by ocean liner for work on the upcoming London production of Lady, Be Good! 8
Before this occasion, in line with her background and training, Katharine had paid little attention to music outside the classical sphere, and her composing had run to art songs and character pieces for piano. But now she found herself paying heed to the music Gershwin played, and gaining new respect for the popular realm. When Gershwin returned from London early in May—to the disappointment, we have learned, of Adele Astaire—James Warburg was traveling on business, and Katharine and George struck up a friendship, which gave her an escort to the concerts, art exhibits, theatrical parties, and posttheater gatherings that comprised much of her social routine. Their friendship also included sessions at the piano, where Gershwin introduced her to the popular songs of such masters as Irving Berlin and Hoagy Carmichael. Following George’s lead, Katharine now began to answer to “Kay.”
Kay Swift was an excellent pianist with a quick ear and an uncanny memory, ready to assist Gershwin on such tasks as editing and copying his music. Technical skills that he was still working to master, such as orchestration and counterpoint, lay within her ken. Later that year, as Gershwin was composing short piano pieces to play at a Marguerite d’Alvarez recital, Kay rendered in musical notation the third of the Three Preludes for Piano that he soon published. She also introduced Gershwin into a lofty echelon of New York’s café society, and at Bydale she introduced him to horseback riding. It was through Kay and Bydale, too, that he met Charles Martin Loeffler, with whom she had studied composition in earlier days, and who came to be one of the few American composers to give Gershwin encouragement and support.9 During times when Gershwin needed a hideaway where he could work without interruption, she offered the use of the farm; it was there, in the fall of 1928, that he completed the orchestration of An American in Paris.
Kay’s relationship with Gershwin alerted her to opportunities in the world of popular music, and she seized them. She joined the musicians’ union, worked with stage designer Norman Bel Geddes on a musical comedy project, and was hired in the fall of 1927 as rehearsal pianist for Rodgers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee. Such a job, with its long hours and strict rehearsal schedule, would have been impossible for an on-duty mother with children who were then eight, five, and three years old, but the Warburgs’ wealth allowed her to outsource childcare to a household staff. James Paul Warburg proved to be the kind of banker who found the challenges of light verse intriguing. As his wife began to compose popular songs, he began to invent lyrics for them.
By 1928, the songwriting team of “Kay Swift” and “Paul James” had collaborated on a pair of songs worthy of being interpolated into a Broadway show. The next year saw the publication of their first hit, “Can’t We Be Friends?,” sung by chanteuse Libby Holman in a successful revue called The Little Show.10 And in September 1930, Fine and Dandy, a production by Morris Green and Lewis E. Gensler, with a book by Donald Ogden Stewart and songs by Kay Swift and Paul James, opened on Broadway: the Great White Way’s first musical comedy with a score composed entirely by a woman, and a most successful one at that, running for 255 performances.11 But although their marriage continued until 1934, the couple’s creative partnership did not. Gershwin and Kay kept frequent company through these years, during which she devoted much of her musical energy to him and his projects. “George was a fascinating but disturbing element at Bydale,” Warburg recalled in his autobiography.
His exuberant vitality and many-sided zest for life knew no bounds. He wanted to learn and experience literally everything that he had not known in a childhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He wanted to learn to ride a horse, to buy and wear the right country clothes, to play with young children, and, most of all, to acquire from Kay the techniques of orchestration. He would sit for hours at the piano, experimenting in contagious excitement with a new melody or rhythm while Kay suggested harmonic treatment. Day turned into night and night into day when George was in the throes of creation.12
By no means did Gershwin’s connection with Kay Swift, which continued until he moved to Hollywood in 1936, preclude attachments to other women. His involvement with Rosamond Walling took place while he and Kay were also spending considerable time together. On his first trip to Hollywood, he formed a close connection with actress Aileen Pringle, coming to feel sufficiently at home in her domicile on Adelaide Street that he did some composing there. Indeed, he and “Pringie” stayed in touch after he returned to New York. Nevertheless, the musical sensibilities and skills that Kay brought to their relationship gave her a unique place among his closest professional colleagues.13
Kay Swift was the dedicatee of a unique volume published in May 1932 under the imprint of Simon and Schuster: George Gershwin’s Song-book, a retrospective compilation of eighteen songs, arranged in chronological order from 1919 to 1931. The book’s format and contents mark it as the artistic statement of a songwriter with a distinctive perspective on the musical comedy song. First issued in a deluxe edition with a 300-copy print run, each song came with an illustration by Constantin Alajolov, a Russian-born painter, illustrator, and cartoonist whose covers for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker had made his work familiar. Each first-edition copy was signed by both the composer and the artist.14
“With the general increase of technical skill at the piano,” Gershwin’s introduction announces, “there has arisen a demand for arrangements that shall consider that skill. Playing my songs as frequently as I do at private parties, I have naturally been led to compose numerous variations upon them, and to indulge the desire for complication and variety that every composer feels when he manipulates the same material over and over again.” In the Song-book he explores the material as his “desire for complication and variety” urges him on—with arrangements that seem invented on the spot. The format is straightforward: first the song’s sheet-music version—introduction, verse, and refrain, with lyrics—and then Gershwin’s embellished version of the refrain, without lyrics—intended for the benefit of accomplished pianists “who enjoy popular music but who rebel at the too-simple arrangements issued by the publishers with the average pianist in view.”
Because the music now demands it, Gershwin explains, present-day players of popular music are more likely than their earlier counterparts to be accomplished musicians. “As the American popular song has grown richer in harmony and rhythm, so has the player grown more subtle and incisive in his performance of it,” he observes. However, he has learned, “our study of the great romantic composers has trained us in the method of the legato,” while “our popular music asks for staccato effects, for almost a stenciled style.” Classically trained pianists tend to fail “lamentably,” he warns, when they play ragtime or jazz, because “they use the pedaling of Chopin when interpreting the blues of Handy.”15
Gershwin’s introduction says nothing about how he has chosen the songs in the anthology, but some of his reasoning is obvious—for example, his desire to represent his achievements as a songwriter from his first hits to the present. The earliest songs, “Swanee” and “Nobody but You,” date from 1919, and the latest, “Who Cares?,” comes from Of Thee I Sing, still running on Broadway. Gershwin also chose to republish songs that had won popularity beyond their original context. They vary in character; most are love songs, but such subjects as the American South, the joy of dancing, life in a modern city, and even wartime activity are represented, too. Each number is a concise instrumental interpretation of a thought or a mood encountered in the urban United States during the years after World War I.
As well as being chronologically ordered, the songs fall into four groups, based on sources, key relationships, and affinities within the trajectory of Gershwin’s career:
GROUP 1 |
|
“Swanee” (1919; Caesar) |
F |
“Nobody but You” (1919; DeSylva) |
E-flat |
“I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” |
C |
“Do It Again” (1922; DeSylva) |
F |
GROUP 2 |
|
“Fascinating Rhythm” |
E-flat |
“Oh, Lady Be Good” (1924; Ira) |
G |
“Somebody Loves Me” (1924; DeSylva |
G |
“Sweet and Low-Down” (1925; Ira) |
G |
“That Certain Feeling” (1925; Ira) |
E-flat |
“The Man I Love” (1924; Ira) |
E-flat |
GROUP 3 |
|
“Clap Yo’ Hands” (1926; Ira) |
B-flat |
“Do-Do-Do” (1926; Ira) |
E-flat |
“My One and Only” (1927; Ira) |
B-flat |
“’S Wonderful” (1927; Ira) |
E-flat |
GROUP 4 |
|
“Strike Up the Band” (1927; Ira) |
B-flat |
“Liza” (1929; Ira and Gus Kahn) |
D-flat |
“I Got Rhythm” (1930; Ira) |
D-flat |
“Who Cares?” (1931; Ira) |
C |
When played in their published order, the embellished refrains constitute a suite for pianists to include in public performances. George Gershwin’s Song-book offers a compelling mix of examples of how Gershwin treated some of his best-known songs when the spirit moved him to sit down at the piano and play them. But, further, the composer declares his own song repertory fair game for decoration, offering other pianists exemplars of how they might proceed along similar lines with other songs, including their own.
A LEWISOHN STADIUM concert of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on August 16, 1932, proved to be a landmark in the composer’s career: the music was all by Gershwin, including a world premiere.
I. |
Of Thee I Sing, overture William Daly, conductor |
II. |
Concerto in F Oscar Levant, piano; Daly, conductor |
III. |
An American in Paris Albert Coates, conductor16 |
IV. |
Rhapsody in Blue Gershwin, piano; Daly, conductor |
INTERMISSION |
|
V. |
“Wintergreen for President” Daly, conductor |
VI. |
Second Rhapsody Gershwin, piano; Coates, conductor |
VII. |
Rumba (premiere) Coates, conductor |
VIII. |
Medley of tunes arranged by Daly “Fascinating Rhythm,” “The Man I Love,” “Liza,” “I Got Rhythm” Gershwin, piano; Daly, conductor 17 |
The next day, Gershwin confided to George Pallay: “This is the morning after a very big night before. . . . It was, I really believe, the most exciting night I have ever had.” The attendance set a record. “17,845 people paid to get in and just 5,000 were at the closed gates trying to fight their way in—unsuccessfully.” His only comment about the performances themselves was that Rumba had gone “very well.”18 A letter later that month to Isaac Goldberg recalled a Gershwin concert with something for everyone:
It was interesting to hear comments from different sources . . . I was glad to see that almost every piece was ‘liked best’ by someone—some the Concerto, others the Rumba,—and the Second Rhapsody had quite a number of supporters. Many thought that the American in Paris had its best performance under Coates’ direction. Some people enjoyed the popular part of the program more than the serious—and others resented the popular music.19
Soon to be renamed Cuban Overture, Rumba was the fruit of a vacation Gershwin had taken early in February, after the New York premiere of the Second Rhapsody. His traveling party—including Everett Jacobs, Adam Gimbel, and publisher Bennett Cerf, as well as Ira and Leonore Gershwin—indulged in “two hysterical weeks in Havana, where no sleep was had but the quantity and quality of the fun made up for that.”20 Financier Emil Mosbacher joined the others in Havana for a few days, and saw “George and Bennett chasing after the same girl, each trying to keep [her] from the other.”21 What caught George’s composerly interest, though, were the local dance orchestras, “who play most intricate rhythms most naturally.”22
The novelty and impact of that Cuban music lingered in his consciousness until July, when he drafted a solo piano version of Rumba. His orchestration of that piece was finished by August 9. Determined to enliven his thematic material with Cuban rhythms, he called for indigenous percussion instruments to be placed in front of the conductor’s stand; he even provided sketches of sticks, bongo, gourd, and a pair of maracas in his “conductor’s note.”
A program note that Gershwin wrote for his new composition describes it as “a symphonic ouverture” combining “Cuban rhythms with my own thematic material” in a three-part structure. An introduction prefiguring bits of that material leads into a contrapuntal first section, “Moderato e molto ritmato” (relaxed and very rhythmic), with two themes. The composer explains in technical terms what comes next:
A solo clarinet cadenza leads to a middle part, which is in a plaintive mood. It is a gradually developing canon in a polytonal manner. This part concludes with a climax based on an ostinato of the theme in the canon, after which a sudden change in tempo brings us back to the rumba dance rhythms.
The finale is a development of the preceding material in a stretto-like manner. This leads us back once again to the main theme.
The conclusion of the work is a coda featuring the Cuban instruments of percussion.23
Like three of Gershwin’s one-movement orchestral compositions that predate it—the Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and the Second Rhapsody—the Cuban Overture is cast in ABA1 form.
BY THE FALL of 1932, the hardship caused by the Great Depression was weighing heavily on the musical world. Under the leadership of Walter Damrosch, the Musicians’ Emergency Aid had been formed in New York to raise funds for unemployed colleagues, and a group called the Musicians’ Symphony Orchestra had staged five concerts during the 1931–32 season, with musicians paid from Emergency Aid funds. Twenty more concerts were given in 1932–33, the first on November 1 on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.24 The first half of the program that evening was Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, led by the group’s permanent conductor, Sandor Harmati. The second half was all-Gershwin, beginning with the Concerto in F, with Daly conducting and the composer as soloist. Daly then led An American in Paris, followed by the second-ever performance of the Cuban Overture, which the composer conducted. To close, Gershwin returned to the piano and Daly to the podium to lead the same songs played in the summer’s Lewisohn Stadium concert. Later that month, Gershwin and Daly traveled to Pittsburgh for a concert that enabled the beleaguered Pittsburgh Symphony Society to open its season on a high note, drawing a standing-room-only audience of 4,000.25
The fall of 1932, however, saw the Gershwin brothers focused on a new musical comedy from Aarons and Freedley: Pardon My English, set in Dresden, Germany. Ira deemed the project “a headache from start to finish,” and its performance history bears out that verdict: after more than six weeks on the road, the New York run lasted for only forty-three performances. The show’s incurable problem lay in the role of the leading man, played by Jack Buchanan, a Scottish actor who had had a successful career in both the U.K. and the United States. The script called for him to play a split personality: Michael Bramleigh, an affluent scion of the British aristocracy; and, after suffering a brain-scrambling head injury in a plane crash, a coarse and thuggish kleptomaniac named Golo. Thereafter, each thump on the head induces a switch to the counteridentity, with no memory of the other one. Golo proved to be beyond Buchanan’s range as a performer, and his role evolved into that of a jewel thief. Even so, after weeks of trying, Buchanan gave up and bought his way out of the production.26
To replace Buchanan, the producers hired George Givot, who lasted three weeks, and then Joseph Santley.27 Changes in the Michael/Golo role, and in the casting of it, altered the show considerably. By the end, in a plot now revolving around crime and punishment, the leading male character was a comedian: Commissioner Bauer, head of the Dresden police, played by Jack Pearl. Bauer locks people up and releases them on a whim, walks the streets of Dresden with a dachshund for an attack dog, and allows a continuous craps game to flourish in police headquarters.
The show’s female lead, Gita, played by Lyda Roberti, is a blond bombshell with a thick Polish accent, an entertainer by trade and a thief on the side. Devoted to Golo and matching him in toughness, she courts the unmarried Commissioner Bauer under Golo’s orders. Both of her solo songs radiate uninhibited exuberance. In the first, a rhythmically aggressive number called “The Lorelei,” she likens herself to a seductress in German mythology who casts a spell over sailors and lures them to their doom. The lyrics were considered raw enough to keep the song off the radio; she admits to being “lecherous” (rhymes with “treacherous”), while confiding, “I want to bite my initials on a sailor’s neck.”28 Gita sings her second solo number, “My Cousin in Milwaukee,” to a contingent of the Dresden police, explaining how and where she got her torrid approach to singing and dancing.
Bauer’s beautiful daughter Ilse is the show’s other female lead, and another role with a high turnover: Ona Munson played her in Philadelphia, beginning December 2; Roberta Robinson, an ex-girlfriend of Gershwin, in Brooklyn, beginning December 26; and, finally, Josephine Huston on Broadway, beginning January 20. Ilse is the woman with whom Michael Bramleigh falls in love, after he’s knocked unconscious by an automobile as Golo. “Isn’t it a pity,” Ilse and Michael marvel, that “we never met before?” By the third stanza of this ballad of true love sung by a mature man and woman, they have agreed to share henceforth a life worthy of the couple they surely were destined to be.
But when a birdhouse falls on his head, Michael wakes up as Golo and learns that Ilse is soon to be married. Golo and Gita plot to kidnap the bride before the wedding, and he arranges to have a boat ready to spirit Ilse away to an inn up the Elbe River from Dresden. When he shows up to abduct her, she greets him as Michael and, under the impression that they are eloping, joins him in the boat. At the inn they occupy the bridal suite and, after a long colloquy set to music, “Tonight,” agree to consummate what for Ilse is a marriage arranged for the next day and for Golo a tactically contrived seduction. The music underlying this drama unfolds in a many-faceted waltz worthy of an opera, showing Gershwin’s skill as an inventor of music to support heartfelt emotions. Two different yet complementary melodies—one each for Golo and Ilse—suggest separate identities approaching synchrony, filling almost six minutes with continuous music, all but a small part of it in 3/4 time.
Pardon My English opened in Philadelphia on December 2: the eve of a much-anticipated college football game to be played there. One critic described the festive anticipation and dashed the audience’s hopes:
Since the big Army-Navy show today had attracted visitors from all parts of the country to our city, the theatre was filled to overflowing. The spectators, in smart attire, and high spirits, were eager for entertainment. They watched and waited and displayed resolute patience. When, at odd and infrequent intervals, it seemed as if Jack Buchanan and his associates might possibly snap the slumbering mediocrity into some sort of life, they acknowledged their gratitude by rapturous applause.29
By the time the show reached New York, Jack Pearl and Lyda Roberti had emerged as its main stars, Jack Buchanan and Ona Munson were gone from the cast, and the out-of-town difficulties had become part of the show’s story. Robert Benchley of the New Yorker commiserated with the (unnamed) authors of the libretto, confessing that he had once contributed to a script that was even worse. “As is usually the case when a show has taken a lot of doctoring on the road,” he wrote, the doctors themselves “come down with the disease and the whole thing turns into a shambles.” Benchley does his best to imagine an audience that might actually enjoy Pardon My English. “If you had never heard anything from the Gershwins before, you might not know that this score is definitely not one of their major works. Very, very young people, who do not remember Miss Roberti . . . would be sufficiently charmed by her presence to think that everything was going all right. . . . So perhaps we can recommend ‘Pardon My English’ after all—to all those who are too young to remember.”30
To Gilbert Gabriel of the New York American, after all the show’s troubles, “It would be nice deportment on a critic’s part, to kiss it on both cheeks, overlook its faults . . . and bid it welcome.” But, “well, no sir, I can’t. . . . The sense of such sheer wastage of [the Gershwins’] musical and lyrical wit makes me nothing except mad.”31 And John Mason Brown of the Evening Post ended his review with a nod to Jack Buchanan, “a wise man” who, after sampling the wasteful incoherence of Pardon My English, had had the good sense to put as much distance as possible between it and himself. 32