Summertime

(1933–34)

AMONG THE REWARDS OF STUDYING George Gershwin’s life in music is the opportunity to behold and trace the course of an artist who, endowed with talent, confidence, and a hunger for learning, never stopped broadening and deepening his command of these gifts. And as we have seen, that artistic sensibility reached beyond the realm of music. On November 10, 1933, Gershwin’s growing art collection—paintings, drawings, and sculpture, plus three oil canvases and a watercolor of his own making—went on public display in Chicago’s Arts Club gallery, where it remained for two weeks. A brief notice in the Chicago Tribune caught the flavor of a keenly anticipated opening: “Never have the galleries been such a crush! Somebody thought it looked like the subway (the one we haven’t got) at the rush hour. . . . I glimpsed two amazing Modeglianis [sic], but it is a picture show one will go many times to see.”1 The Chicago Daily News found that Gershwin “collects pictures as an intelligent painter might—choice little things from this studio or that, with an individuality—a little touch of the unusual that sparkles.”2

Whatever his achievements in visual art, as a maker of music, Gershwin was a resourceful manager of his opportunities. From early days he showed a growing awareness of where his talents could contribute to the landscape open to him. On October 3, 1933, the day after Let ’Em Eat Cake began its first tryout run, the Boston Post carried an interview that, in retrospect, indicates he had already relegated that project to the past.3 Though he made no such announcement, the view of musical comedy he reveals helps to explain why Let ’Em Eat Cake proved to be the brothers’ last work in that genre.

Gershwin’s first point was that the traditional musical comedy, to which he and Ira had devoted their skills, relied more upon “pretty girls, dancing, and songs” than on the interactions taking place among the characters. In such “Cinderella musicals” the substance of the story mattered little, as long as the song-and-dance moments satisfied the audience. But 1931’s Of Thee I Sing had been different: enacting an ingenious and appealing story by Kaufman and Ryskind, its music had furthered the plot rather than pausing for interludes of song and dance. With a libretto of the Kaufman-Ryskind stripe, as in its sequel—which offered only one love song and almost no dancing at all—the composer was obliged to “follow the book,” applying his skills and artistry to animate the story. Indeed, Of Thee I Sing’s artistic and commercial success signaled to him nothing less than “the composer’s legitimacy.” Its triumph led Gershwin to entertain the notion that a new American audience for a theatrical brand of political satire with sophisticated music was coming into existence.

A second matter addressed in Gershwin’s interview has to do with casting. He argued that the quality of performing talent available to the Broadway musical theater was in decline, and decried a shortage of compelling leading men and women, citing Marilyn Miller as the last of the breed. More strangely, he then revisited even more remote days, when composers had had the likes of Julia Sanderson—“the best of them,” who had flourished in the 1910s and early 1920s—to bring larger-than-life talents to roles that librettists, lyricists, and composers were then fashioning for the stage. To cast a show in 1933, Gershwin had learned, had become a “difficult” task. By the time Let ’Em Eat Cake was ready to open on the road, the composer’s plans for the future had already shifted to an arena beyond musical comedy and its limitations.

In fact, before the end of October the artistic venture he’d been planning for years took an essential step toward fulfillment when the parties involved signed a contract for an opera—a work based on the 1925 novel and the 1927 play Porgy—for which he would compose the music, author and playwright DuBose Heyward would supply the libretto, and both Heyward and Ira Gershwin would write song lyrics for a production by New York’s Theatre Guild.4 With an opera looming in the near future, the concerns expressed in Gershwin’s interview make perfect sense; as a composer now practiced in “following the book” through Kaufman’s satires, he must have relished the prospect of engaging with the endeavor he and Heyward had been contemplating for so long. As for the comments about casting in his Boston interview, they acknowledge that the project he was about to undertake would rely upon African American performers whose talents, if unschooled in opera, would bring a freshness of attitude and vitality to the enterprise. Having embraced his “legitimacy” as a composer, he was prepared to “follow the book” in a way that would bring his skills and his artistry into full play.

SEVERAL ASPECTS of DuBose Heyward’s background and career made it likely that his tale about an African American community in Charleston, South Carolina, would be culturally and artistically credible. He was a native of Charleston who lived there for most of his first forty years. He grew up in a white household where the customs and lore of the local “Gullah Negroes” were a living presence, and from the time he began to fancy himself a writer, he concentrated on African American life in the South. Approaching that subject through close observation, respect for his characters, and an appreciation of black culture, he found a milieu suited to his talents and the literary environment of his day.5

The phrase “too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash” was applied to the Heyward family of Charleston in the late 1800s. DuBose’s father, who died when his son was two years old, counted a signer of the Declaration of Independence as an ancestor, and his mother—whose maiden name was DuBose—descended from once-prosperous plantation owners. Before age sixteen, the family’s future man of letters dropped out of school to help supplement the meager family income, and some of his jobs brought him into contact with South Carolina’s black population. Hired by an insurance company as a teenager, he canvased black neighborhoods to collect “burial money”; during the summers of 1900–1903, he supervised black field hands on the nearby plantation of a relative; and beginning in 1905, working as a cotton checker for a steamship line, he came to know something of stevedore life. Each of these jobs gave the young man a vantage point for observing a people who remained separate from, and imperfectly known by, the white population of Charleston. The racial imbalance of power never claimed much of his attention; what fascinated him was the mystery of cultural difference.6

In 1920, Heyward and several writing cohorts founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and during the next few years no one in Charleston took their goal of stimulating “an interest in the reading, writing, and critical appreciation of poetry in the community” more seriously than Heyward. As corresponding secretary, he supervised the group’s series of guest lecturers, and managed trips to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summers of 1921 and 1922. Contacts made through the Poetry Society enabled him to publish poems in such journals as Poetry, the Atlantic, and Contemporary Verse, and in April 1924 he quit his job in the insurance business and began a career as a professional writer.7

Heyward may have been encouraged in his leap into the unknown by the economic prospects of his wife, playwright Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, whom he met at the MacDowell Colony and married in 1923, and whose play Nancy Ann enjoyed a short run on Broadway in 1924.8 But more important, by the spring of 1924, Heyward, with no illusions about a poet’s career, had settled on a subject for a novel—after years of pondering what he deemed the “secret law” that seemed to animate the lives of the “alien people” of Charleston. He later admitted to a feeling close to envy, having come to see “the primitive Negro as the inheritor of a source of delight that I would have given much to possess. . . . What was the quality in a spiritual sung in the secrecy of some back room that brought the chance listener up short against the outer wall with a contraction of the solar plexus, and lachrymal glands that he was powerless to control?”9

The moment that sparked the novel arrived when Heyward spotted an item in a Charleston newspaper: “Samuel Smalls, who is a cripple and is familiar to King Street with his goat and cart, was held for the June term of court of sessions on an aggravated assault charge. It is alleged that on Saturday night he attempted to shoot Maggie Barnes at number four Romney Street. His shots went wide of the mark.” On further inquiry, Heyward learned that Smalls had tried to escape in his wagon but had been captured by the police patrol.10 The incident gave Heyward a fresh window on the life flourishing around him, where an existence like that of Smalls “could never lift above the dead level of the commonplace.” Yet this news notice also carried the stuff of personal tragedy that Heyward had previously reserved for white people. On such an imagined character, “I could impose my own white man’s conception of a summer of aspiration, devotion, and heartbreak across the color wall.”11 Drafted that summer and published in September 1925, Porgy became a best-seller. As a serious portrait of African American life, which most white authors had treated lightly in the past, it was also considered groundbreaking.

Even before Porgy was published, Dorothy Heyward was drafting the script for a play based on the novel. Heyward’s response to his wife’s idea was at first skepticism, but once he saw her script, he realized that it offered a closer approximation of the artistic ideal he had imagined. The challenge was to recruit a black cast, and he was determined to postpone production indefinitely rather than resort to white actors in disguise.

By early 1926, Heyward’s career change could be considered a success. Then, in October, after reading Heyward’s slim novel at one sitting, George Gershwin wrote from New York City to propose a collaboration on an operatic treatment.12 The prospect delighted Heyward, and the two men met that fall in Atlantic City to discuss it.13 Heyward’s first impression of his future collaborator was “singularly vivid”:

A young man of enormous physical and emotional vitality, who possessed the faculty of seeing himself quite impersonally and realistically, and who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going. This characteristic put him beyond both modesty and conceit. About himself he would merely mention certain facts, aspirations, failings. They were usually right. We discussed Porgy. He said that it would not matter about the dramatic production, as it would be a number of years before he would be prepared technically to compose an opera. . . . It was extraordinary, I thought, that, in view of a success that might well have dazzled any man, he could appraise his talent with such complete detachment.14

The Heywards’ play Porgy, with its all-black cast, was produced by the Theatre Guild in October 1927 and enjoyed a long run. But although Heyward and Gershwin stayed in touch over the next several years, no further progress was made on their project until the playwright let Gershwin know on May 10, 1932, that rights had been secured for the play script to be turned into an opera libretto. Ten days later, Gershwin sent Heyward a brief letter that left no doubt about his commitment:

I was very glad to have your letter telling me that the operatic rights of “Porgy” are free and clear. Of course there is no possibility of the operatic version’s being written before January 1933. I shall be around here most of the summer and will read the book several times to see what ideas I can evolve as to how it should be done. Any notions I get I shall forward to you. I think it would be wise for us to meet—either here or where you are—several times, before any real start is made.

Heyward visited New York early that fall, and by October he and Gershwin were addressing each other as “DuBose” and “George.” A new element that entered momentarily into their planning was singer Al Jolson’s approach to Heyward, asking about the possibility of a musical show based on Porgy, with him in the title role.15 On September 3, Heyward asked Gershwin if he thought it would be possible to use Jolson, “and arrange some sort of agreement with him, or is that too preposterous?”16 Gershwin’s reply was sent within the week:

I think it is very interesting that Al Jolson would like to play the part of Porgy, but I really don’t know how he would be in it. Of course he is a very big star, who certainly knows how to put over a song, and it might mean more to you financially if he should do it—provided that the rest of the production were well done. The sort of thing that I should have in mind for PORGY is a much more serious thing than Jolson could ever do. Of course I would not attempt to write music to your play until I had all the themes and musical devices worked out for such an undertaking. It would be more a labor of love than anything else. If you can see your way to making some ready money from Jolson’s version I don’t know that it would hurt a later version done by an all-colored cast.17

Heyward replied on October 17 that, although out of financial necessity he had not flatly rejected Jolson’s approach,

What I would like to be able to afford would be to wait indefinitely for your operatic version, and to work with you myself without the least thought of the commercial angle. It is not my idea to work in any way upon a possible Jolson musical, but merely to sell the story. . . . Please let me tell you that I think your attitude in this matter is simply splendid. It makes me all the more eager to work with you some day, some time, before we wake up and find ourselves in our dotage.18

Jolson soon gave up on his Porgy idea, and it took another year for a contract to be signed. But on October 26, 1933, DuBose Heyward, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, and Warren B. Munsell of the New York Theatre Guild signed a contract for an opera based on DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s play Porgy. And less than three weeks later Heyward sent Gershwin two copies of the opera’s first scene.

Heyward had often insisted that Gershwin would benefit from firsthand experience of the region where Porgy took place, and on December 2, 1933, the composer acted on that advice. He boarded a train for Charleston with his friend Emil Mosbacher, whose family spent the winter months on an ocean-front estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Apparently alerted by Heyward, the Charleston News and Courier of December 4 reported Gershwin’s presence in town:

Yesterday afternoon he and Mr. Heyward went to a negro church and listened to the singing. “I’m sure even Mr. Heyward was surprised at the primitiveness of this particular service and it gave me a lot to think about,” Mr. Gershwin said. Mr. Heyward is going to conduct the composer around the city. They plan to arrange to hear as much negro music as possible and Mr. Gershwin is anxious to listen in on some of the fish and vegetable hucksters.19

Gershwin and his friend accompanied Heyward “from home to home where the shutters would go up and the houses looked as if they were on stilts,” in Mosbacher’s account. “George would get the people in the homes to dance so hard that I thought the houses would fall down. I went to church with George, and when they passed the hat, I watched what DuBose put in. He put in a half-dollar, so George and I did the same.”20

On December 6, the two northerners completed their journey south to Florida. Since the opera would leave him no time for another musical comedy, Gershwin had arranged a concert tour, scheduled to start in Boston on January 14, 1934, with the idea of replacing income likely to be lost. Mosbacher’s rented estate included a separate house where the composer could work uninterrupted on a new piece for the tour: Variations on “I Got Rhythm,” for piano and orchestra; by the time Gershwin left Florida, on January 2, it was almost completed. He had also had time to share some thoughts on Porgy’s progress with the Palm Beach newspaper. Having by then given a careful reading to the first scene, he was wrestling with the matter of recitative: “I have not made up my mind whether to combine speech with singing or what to do,” he said. “The problem will work out by itself when I begin work on it in earnest. I like to digest ideas a long time.” And then he added: “I am really only happy when I am composing or just finishing something.”21

MUCH OF THE STORY of Gershwin’s tour, managed by Harry Askins in New York (it was Askins who had recommended the nineteen-year-old rehearsal pianist for Miss 1917 to Max Dreyfus), is embodied in the program distributed at the concerts, and in the demanding itinerary—twenty-eight concerts in twenty-eight days.

Tour Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of “Rhapsody in Blue”

presenting

GEORGE GERSHWIN

Composer-Pianist

JAMES MELTON, Tenor

and the

REISMAN SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA

CHARLES PREVIN, Conductor

IN A PROGRAM OF GERSHWIN SUCCESSES

(Program subject to change)

1. Concerto in F Gershwin

Mr. Gershwin

2. (a) Swanee Gershwin
Do It Again; Sam and Delilah
Lady Be Good
(b) Mine
Strike Up the Band

Orchestra

3. (a) Hills of Home Oscar Fox
(b) Home on the Range [Arr. by] David Guion
(c) Carry Me Back to the Lone Prairie Carson Robison

[encore, The Last Roundup]

Mr. Melton [accompanied by the orchestra]

4. Rhapsody in Blue Gershwin

Mr. Gershwin

INTERMISSION

5. An American in Paris Gershwin

Orchestra

6. (a) Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child Arr. by Frank Black
(b) G’wine to Hebb’n [Arr. by] Jacques Wolfe
(c) Shortnin’ Bread [Arr. by] Jacques Wolfe

James Melton

7. “I Got Rhythm” Variations (New) Gershwin

Mr. Gershwin

8. “Wintergreen for President” from “Of Thee I Sing” Gershwin

Orchestra

9. Medley (a) Fascinating Rhythm Gershwin

(b) Man I Love
(c) Liza
(d) I Got Rhythm

Mr. Gershwin

Steinway Pianos Used

Sun. Jan. 14	Symphony Hall	Boston, Mass.
Mon. Jan. 15	City Hall Auditorium	Portland, Me.
Tues. Jan. 16	Memorial Auditorium	Worcester, Mass.
Wed. Jan. 17	City Auditorium	Springfield, Mass.
Thurs. Jan. 18	Lincoln Auditorium, Central High School	Syracuse, N.Y.
Fri. Jan. 19	Massey Hall	Toronto, Ontario
Sat. Jan. 20	Music Hall, Public Auditorium	Cleveland, Ohio
Sun. Jan. 21	Orchestra Hall	Detroit, Mich.
Mon. Jan. 22	Shrine Theater	Fort Wayne, Ind.
Tues. Jan. 23	Auditorium	Milwaukee, Wis.
Wed. Jan. 24	West High School	Madison, Wis.
Thurs. Jan. 25	Auditorium	St. Paul, Minn.
Fri. Jan. 26	The Coliseum	Sioux Falls, S.D.
Sat. Jan. 27	Technical High School	Omaha, Neb.
Sun. Jan. 28	Convention Hall	Kansas City, Mo.
Mon. Jan. 29	Shrine Auditorium	Des Moines, Iowa
Tues. Jan. 30	Masonic Auditorium	Davenport, Iowa
Wed. Jan. 31	The Odeon	St. Louis, Mo.
Thurs. Feb. 1	English Opera House	Indianapolis, Ind.
Fri. Feb. 2	Memorial Auditorium	Louisville, Ky.
Sat. Feb. 3	Taft Auditorium	Cincinnati, Ohio
Sun. Feb. 4	Auditorium Theater	Chicago, Ill.
Mon. Feb. 5	Memorial Hall	Dayton, Ohio
Tues. Feb. 6	Syria Mosque	Pittsburgh, Pa.
Wed. Feb. 7	Academy of Music	Philadelphia, Pa.
Thurs. Feb. 8	Constitution Hall	Washington, D.C.
Fri. Feb. 9	Mosque Auditorium	Richmond, Va.
Sat. Feb. 10	Academy of Music	Brooklyn, N.Y.

As the tour’s avowed purpose was to mark the tenth anniversary of the Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin made it his program’s centerpiece. The orchestra’s founder, Leo Reisman, had planned to be on the podium, but when an auto accident left him hospitalized with a fractured hip, he was replaced by Broadway maestro Charles Previn, who had conducted earlier Gershwin musicals, most recently Of Thee I Sing. The musicians—five from Boston and thirty from New York, including concertmaster John Corigliano—were joined by traveling manager Herbert Farrar and Paul Mueller, Gershwin’s valet. Mueller was on hand to supervise the handling of the musical instruments that players didn’t (or couldn’t) carry with them, to give Gershwin a daily massage, and to “keep people away, especially women, who tended to overwhelm both George and [tenor James] Melton.”22

The most meaningful deviations from the printed ordering seem to have taken place at the end of the program. Apparently it dawned on Gershwin early on that there was no good reason to keep the concert’s two star performers entirely apart onstage. In Worcester, Massachusetts, critic Dorothy Boyd Mattison described a highlight:

Probably the most delightful moment of the program came at the very end when Mr. Melton and Mr. Gershwin, tossing aside the final scheduled number, “Wintergreen for President,” and silencing the orchestra, got together at the piano. Mr. Gershwin played and Mr. Melton sang “Of Thee I Sing” and a number from Mr. Gershwin’s “Oh, Kay!” The informal, parlor-like atmosphere lent zest to the evening, and brought it to a beautiful climax.23

As the tour progressed, Gershwin and Melton chose different encores as the spirit moved them. “The audience would have kept both Gershwin and Melton all night after their last number together,” wrote a critic in Milwaukee. “You do not often hear such perfect rapport between composer and interpreter in consonance.”24 An honest effort to wrap words around the idea of Gershwin as a jazz composer appeared in a Chicago newspaper the day after a Sunday afternoon concert on February 4. “He catches one’s ear, as every good composer of jazz must do, but he also leaves one a little more to guess about [than] what is strictly a jazzist’s gift. Indeed, the most musical element in his style seems to me the reticence which jazz never possesses, but which good music, even the most expressive, always does.”25 Three days later, Philadelphia critic Odell Hauser found Gershwin a less-than-expert composer only in his command of musical form. “Time and time again,” he displayed a “restless tendency . . . a willingness to cut off abruptly from one figuration and plunge into another” that could lead to an impression of disorder. “However, give him time.”26

The concert variations Gershwin composed on “I Got Rhythm” bear a musical pedigree far removed from that of swing bands and the jazz tradition. Two differences stand out especially. One is that the Variations’ life-blood is found not in the song’s harmony or form, but in its melody, which is heard in full, or almost so, in every section of the piece, as well as in recurrent motivic statements. And just as tempo variety and nuance had loomed large in the Rhapsody in Blue, this work changes pace from one variation to the next, and also within variations. Gershwin’s notation controls every musical moment, including three brief passages in Variation 5 that he composed in “swing” rhythm.

By making a song’s melody the basis for an entire theme-and-variations piece for piano and orchestra, Gershwin linked the songwriting and composing sides of his musical persona in an imaginative way—as indeed he was acccustomed to do whenever he performed on-the-spot variations on any of his songs.

However, despite his artistic successes, when the tour ended and the costs and expenses were tallied, the star of the show found himself several thousand dollars out of pocket. Gershwin summed it up in a letter to Heyward:

Well here I am, back again after an arduous but exciting trip of 12,000 miles which took 28 days. The tour was a fine artistic success for me and would have been splendid financially if my foolish Manager hadn’t booked me into seven towns that were too small to support such an expensive organization as I carried. Nevertheless, it was a very worthwhile thing for me to have done and I have many pleasant memories of Cities I had not visited before.27

In another letter written the same day, this one answering his friend George Pallay’s plea for a personal loan, he assessed the state of his finances.

On account of losses of the LET ’EM EAT CAKE company and losses of my tour which was most successful from every angle except the financial one . . . my funds are fairly low at the present time. I don’t like to go below a certain bank balance so if $500 will help now I will be glad to send it to you and if you need the other $500 a little later I will let you have that also. I am glad to hear you are going into business and hope it will be the start of a big fortune.28

During the fall of 1934—long after Let ’Em Eat Cake had run its course and Gershwin was well into his work on the opera—Gilbert Seldes published an article about where this gifted songwriter’s career seemed to be headed. “Swanee,” now more than a dozen years old, “was just Gershwin writing a Mammy song for Al Jolson,” he recalled, “but it was one of the best and it is the sort of thing Gershwin wouldn’t be found dead with today. . . . Popular music used to be written to be sung; then to be danced to; and now it is written to be played. . . . No one has ever sung, no one has ever tried, no one was ever meant to try, to sing Wintergreen for President, but who can forget it?” Gershwin now “composes to be heard,” he concluded, “not to be sung. He is lucky because we are becoming a nation of listeners, thanks to the radio. But he is losing ground as a pure troubadour. He has stopped singing himself.” Still, because his prodigious talent allowed him to produce first-rate results, “he can afford to be spendthrift” with his uncommon abilities.29

But the critic’s report of the demise of his subject’s singing days was premature. For by the time this message appeared in print, DuBose Heyward’s libretto had been completed for almost a year; and George Gershwin had spent more than half of that year contemplating and composing a folk opera whose characters, a cast of African Americans accompanied by a symphony orchestra, would sing the words for him.