CRITICAL RESPONSE TO HIS December 1936−January 1937 concerts in Seattle and San Francisco, as well as in Detroit, leaves no doubt that West Coast audiences warmed to the approach Gershwin brought to the concert stage. “ ‘Tired business men’ by the hundreds patted juba to the captivating rhythms,” fancied a reviewer of the Porgy and Bess Suite in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin;
The banjo, it seems was the final straw. Messrs. Beethoven, Brahms and Bach may have, for all we know, turned over in their graves. But we think not, remembering that they, too, were chroniclers of their times. Listening in some Valhalla, they probably chuckled and commented upon the fact that Gershwin was making more money than they did when they wove folk songs into symphonies.1
En route to the Bay Area, Gershwin had enjoyed the hospitality of Sidney and Olga Fish at their Palo Corona Ranch on the Monterey Peninsula. Accompanying him were supporters “up from L.A. to hear me play & see the sights & new bridge.2 They are, Mother, Ira & Lee, Jerome Kern, wife & daughter, Dorothy Fields & brother Herbie & sweetheart Felix Young & several others.”3 At the same time, the ranch hosted a working conference for key players in the Gershwins’ second RKO picture, A Damsel in Distress—among them director George Stevens, who had directed the earlier Astaire-Rogers film Swing Time, and producer Pandro Berman.
For Merle Armitage’s sold-out concerts in Los Angeles on February 10 and 11, Gershwin was rejoined by conductor Alexander Smallens during the Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F, and Todd Duncan for the Porgy and Bess excerpts. (Marguerite Chapman, a local white soprano, sang the role of Bess.) Los Angeles Times critic Isabelle Morse Jones felt that in Porgy and Bess Gershwin had “taken popular song writing into a new field and won recognition for it on its merits,” and Florence Lawrence of the Los Angeles Examiner judged the program “unquestionably one of the most novel and interesting ever heard in Philharmonic.”4 But Richard D. Saunders of the Hollywood Citizen-News deemed the performance an evening of Gershwin overkill, complete with “garish orchestrations” and harmony sprinkled with seconds and fourths in the hope of hiding the music’s sentimentality. “It was obvious that a large number had never been in the Philharmonic Auditorium before,” he wrote. “Anyway, they saw some movie stars.”5
Movie stars there were. After the second concert, Armitage hosted a party at a Sunset Strip night spot, where
George was in great spirits, and the whole group, exclusively celebrities, seemed to have been electrified by what they had heard. As he chatted with me, Jack Benny, the old maestro, said, “Armitage, you have a lot of nerve, this thing was too damn good for Hollywood.” Dining with George, Ira, and a few of their friends, our enthusiasm running high, I proposed that the next year we do Porgy and Bess on the coast, and take it across the country for a second New York engagement. George tempered his enthusiasm by a word of caution. “It’s devilishly expensive, Merle. The Theatre Guild lost money. Do you dare?” My reply was positive, possibly more positive than my reservations warranted.
The entrepreneur also revealed a brief mishap at the February 11 performance:
At the second concert, unknown to a single person in the audience, George had suffered a black-out while playing the Concerto in F. He said afterward that everything suddenly went black and he missed a few bars. Smallens covered this nicely. George regained complete control and continued the performance brilliantly.
Whether or not the memory slip had anything to do with it, Gershwin notified Zena Hannenfeldt a week later that he would play no more concerts until he had finished writing the songs for his two remaining films.
And he had fallen a bit behind schedule. At least since early January, Gershwin, deeply interested in the process of movie-making, had been an avid observer on the Shall We Dance set. “The Astaire picture is being ‘shot’ & is most interesting to watch,” he wrote Emily Paley. “It fascinates me to see the amazing things they do with sound recording, for instance. And lighting and cutting and so forth.”6 On March 19, having used up more than two months of a sixteen-week contract to compose songs for A Damsel in Distress, he confessed to Mabel Schirmer that he had “spent so much time watching the first picture being shot that Ira & I are a little behind on the second one.”7
George and his brother were eagerly anticipating the first picture’s release, scheduled for May 7. “There is a real excitement about the opening of a film that compares favorably with a Broadway opening of a show,” he wrote Isaac Goldberg as that date approached.
In fact, it’s really much bigger, for example, “Shall We Dance,” our first Astair[e] opus, will be playing in probably a hundred cities at the same time, including a large theatre in London during the Coronation. Also, all the record companies record the numbers before the picture is released—on Broadway sometimes you have to wait months before the numbers are recorded.8
But his verdict on the finished film included some reservations once it was released: “The picture does not take advantage of the songs as well as it should. They literally throw one or two songs away without any kind of a plug,” he wrote Goldberg. “This is mainly due to the structure of the story which does not include any other singers than Fred and Ginger and the amount of singing one can stand of these two is quite limited.”9
Critics, however, had few reservations. Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times called the movie “one of the best things the screen’s premier dance team has done,” and Gershwin’s score “the one we intend to ask for if ever the critics have to make good their promise and actually go dancing through the streets.”10 And Variety’s critic saw the “underproduced” nature of the songs as more a virtue than a flaw. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” was “merely given a verse and one chorus. No reprise, no plug. Almost a once-over-light but it’s smart and it helps curtail footage.”11
AS 1937 ARRIVED, Gershwin wrote hopefully to Mabel Schirmer that this might be “their year”:
A year that will see both of us finding that elusive something that seems to bring happiness to the lucky. The pendulum swings back, so I’ve heard, and it’s about due to swing us back to a more satisfying state. 1936 was a year of important changes to me. They are too obvious to you to mention here. So, sweet Mabel, lift your glass high with me & drink a toast to two nice people who will, in a happy state go places this year.12
One fundamental change for him, of course, was the absence of Kay Swift, a presence in Gershwin’s life for more than a decade. George’s cousin Henry Botkin, at that time a frequent visitor to Southern California, told biographer Robert Kimball:
The last year of his life was an awful year. Did you know about the awful loneliness he had? I remember once he came out with it and said, “Harry, this year I’ve GOT to get married.” Just like that. Like saying he had to write a new opera or something. The truth is George wanted the most beautiful gal, the most marvelous hostess, someone interested in music. What he wanted and demanded just didn’t exist. He would have loved to have a son or a daughter or two. George was very soft. I could never get over that.13
Emil Mosbacher also recalled that “in the last years George was increasingly restless. Even more than before, he needed people to share things with. He was lonely in many ways and would call me up at all hours, as I’m sure he called others, just to talk and get something off his chest.”14
Come spring, Gershwin seems to have felt he had finally met that “most beautiful gal.” In mid-March, he attended a particularly enjoyable evening at the home of Edward G. Robinson and the film star’s wife Gladys, along with his mother Rose, visiting from New York, and Igor Stravinsky, among others. “The whole evening was memorable,” he reported in a letter to Emily Paley:
Stravinsky was the guest of honor & was charming. He asked if he & [violinist Samuel] Dushkin could play for the group. They played seven or eight pieces superbly. Stravinsky & mother got on famously. Isn’t Hollywood wonderful? . . . Gladys sat me next to the most glamorous & enchanting girl in the west. Paulette Goddard. She is a really exciting creature. Gladys knows my taste better than I thought. The whole evening was grand, what with those pictures, Stravinsky, Miss P.G., Frank Capra & thoughts & talk about you.15
From this evening forward, Gershwin harbored a romantic interest in Goddard, even though the actress was married at the time to Charlie Chaplin. The social connection that blossomed between them that spring was caught in a photograph that shows them dressed in shorts and relaxing in lawn chairs, in what seems to be the yard of the Gershwins’ house on North Roxbury Drive. Most of what we know about Gershwin’s feelings at that time is gleaned from his correspondence with Emily, Mabel, his sister Frances, and his mother. Two months after their meeting, addressing a question about “Miss P.” in a letter from Rose, he replied that “there is nothing new to tell you about her. I see her less frequently than I did. She seems very well and asks about you often. There is a possibility of her appearing in the picture ‘Gone with the Wind.’ That’s about all the news there is to tell about her.”16 A letter written the same day to Mabel Schirmer offers more on the subject; New York columnist Walter Winchell had apparently reported a romantic connection between the two:
About your reference to Winchell’s item concerning Miss Goddard and myself, it is only partly true. For your own information, I met Miss Goddard a couple of months ago and found her the most interesting personality I’ve come across since arriving in Hollywood. You would be crazy about meeting her as she has one of the most alert minds you could possibly imagine. On the other hand, she is married to the “famous Charlie” and under such circumstances I am not allowing myself to become too involved.17
A few days later, Gershwin ended a letter to Frances with a P.S.: “It is true that I took the young lady out a couple of times and found her most attractive, but whether it goes any farther than that, I doubt.”18
Since returning home from California in April, Rose Gershwin had consulted her personal network in and around New York, where Paulette Goddard had been born and raised. “You know that she is a Jews girl,” she wrote her son in June, “and was married before.” Adding in her unique style, she continued: “Dagmar is a friend of her’s the name was Levy but that does not meet a thing, you steel love her. Write me all about wath is going to happen . . . tell me the true, do you mees me, a little?”19 George replied immediately, on June 10:
It was a most pleasant surprise to get your nice fat letter with so much news in it. Your writing is certainly improving and if you don’t watch out some Hollywood studio will sign you up—I think I’ve got something there because the only thing the Gershwin family lacks is a book writer and it would be simply wonderful if the posters read—Book by Rose Gershwin—Lyrics by Ira Gershwin—Music by GG—and we’ve got to get Arthur in somewhere, so let’s say—Entire Production staged by Arthur Gershwin.
But, he told his mother, he had not seen Goddard “for about a week as she went to Palm Springs for a rest.” However, he continued, “she phoned yesterday and said that little Blumenthal was in town and asked if she could come over for lunch with him, so either today or tomorrow I expect to see them both. There’s nothing more to tell you about her at this time.”20
To songwriter Harold Arlen, a neighbor of the Gershwins in Beverly Hills, George made it no secret that he had imagined Goddard as part of his future. But Arlen expressed his doubts about Gershwin and marriage:
You know, he wanted to marry Paulette Goddard. We sat by his pool talking about it. She was a great girl, but George’s life style was very free-wheeling. I knew that marriage would tie him down, so I told him that he would have to give up some of the freedom he had. He didn’t say anything, because I knew—all of us knew—that he wanted to get married. But George was the kind of guy who would go first to one house and play a few songs, then go on to another house and play some more, then to another and so on. He knew he couldn’t do that if he were married. Yet there was that warmth and wistfulness in him too, and it all made for great internal conflicts. So it would have been hard for George to change his life style from work, party-going, tennis, golf, long fast walks in the mountains. He always was so God-damned excited, and the glory road had to be his.21
Further evidence that Gershwin had been smitten by Paulette Goddard at the Robinsons’ party appears in a detailed doctor’s report from an examination of the composer’s health. That report noted on June 9 that he had experienced insomnia “four months ago” in mid-March, “when the patient was in love.”22
THE GERSHWIN brothers had finished their songs for A Damsel in Distress by May 17, when George sent them to Henry Botkin in New York with instructions to have them copyrighted in the composer’s name and then put away “where nobody can see them,” for it would be “at least several months before they can be made public.”23 On May 25, the brothers had a visit from Fred Astaire, who “for the first time listened to the second score that we wrote for him,” George wrote to Frances. “He made us very happy by apparently liking the entire score immensely. There wasn’t one number he could find fault with.”
In A Damsel in Distress, Astaire plays Jerry Halliday, a famous American entertainer who has arrived in England accompanied by George Burns, his press agent, and Gracie Allen, Burns’s secretary. The film’s first song, “I Can’t Be Bothered Now,” enacted on a London street, reveals Jerry as a man who lives to dance. Shortly before this number, Jerry, mobbed by adoring fans, has hopped into a cab, only to be startled when a lovely young woman—played by Joan Fontaine—opens another of the cab’s doors and dives into his lap, with a polite request to hide her. She is Lady Alyce, daughter of Lord John Marshmorton of Totleigh Castle and a niece of Lady Caroline Marshmorton. Lady Alyce has come to the city to visit an American man with whom she suspects—wrongly, as it happens—she may be in love, and is being trailed by a servant sent by Lady Marshmorton. Her choice of a husband has sparked such keen interest within the Totleigh household staff that they have set up a sweepstakes on which of her suitors she will prefer. One staff member, guessing that Jerry Halliday is the American she fancies, forges a love letter from her to Jerry, who has fancied Alyce from the moment she landed in his cab.
At Totleigh Castle, Jerry sneaks onto the premises in the guise of one of a group of madrigal singers. These choristers have specialized in old English music, an emphasis that brought out the scholar in Ira Gershwin. In “The Jolly Tar and the Milkmaid,” the Gershwins tried for “the feel of an English eighteenth-century light ballad,” so Ira threw in phrases—“with a hey and a nonny” and “a down-a-derry”—that the Oxford English Dictionary revealed had been sung since the 1500s. For this number George fashioned a sportive 6/8 tune, moving with the easy coherence and swing of a Gershwin melody but with major/minor modal freedom, giving the harmony an archaic flavor.
Jerry, imagining that Lady Alyce is smitten with him, has rented a cottage near the castle grounds with Burns and Allen. Learning that Alyce plans to attend a “fun fair,” perhaps with another suitor, Jerry and his colleagues decide to go there, too. He follows her into a Tunnel of Love and tries to kiss her in the dark, only to get a slap in return—whereupon the three Americans sing and dance to “Stiff Upper Lip,” celebrating the vaunted refusal of Englishmen to complain, no matter how vexing the setbacks they may face. The words are set to a catchy melody, in tune with the good-natured setting of a fun fair. Ira borrowed some of the song’s lingo from P. G. Wodehouse—who had adapted his novel for the screenplay—and some from show business of the day. “Whether Englishmen actually greeted each other or not with ‘old bean’ or ‘old fluff’ or ‘old tin of fruit’ didn’t matter frightfully,” he granted later, but “we had been conditioned by vaudevillians and comic weeklies to think they did.”24
The first love song in A Damsel in Distress is sung by Jerry to Lady Alyce, on the grounds adjacent to his cottage. A heart-to-heart conversation with her father, who has found Jerry likable and trustworthy, convinces Alyce of the American’s merits, and she admits her attraction to him. Jerry responds with “Things Are Looking Up,” sung to music with a rich harmonic palette and an unsyncopated flow mirroring his respect for her dignity and candor. Joan Fontaine was known as neither a singer nor a dancer—Burns and Allen are Astaire’s dancing partners in this picture—but she and Astaire move gracefully through two orchestral statements of this melodious refrain.
That evening at the castle ball, the madrigal group performs “Sing of Spring” as guests arrive. The lyrics of this part song, composed some years earlier for a number called “Back to Bach” that had never found its way onstage, also include vocables of yore—“Spring is here / Sing ‘Willy-wally-willo!’ ”—but its music avoids the “Jolly-Tar” effect of more ancient vintage. Now, however, in an act of social sabotage, a servant who in the suitor sweepstakes has bet against the American makes sure that Lady Alyce sees an inflammatory article smearing his character. Jerry, the article claims, has broken the hearts of no fewer than twenty-seven would-be lovers, and she is marked to be his twenty-eighth victim. Outraged by this charge, Alyce orders the staff to bar Jerry from the castle. Then she storms up to her room, where she looks out a window and sees him walking about the grounds, apparently in contemplation. In the evening mist, Jerry sings about wandering the streets of London on “A Foggy Day.”
Ira’s account of how the song came to be written reveals it as one of the few that Gershwin attributed to inspiration:
We had finished three or four songs. One night I was in the living room, reading. About 1 a.m. George returned from a party . . . took off his dinner jacket, sat down at the piano. . . . “How about some work? Got any ideas?” “Well, there’s one spot we might do something about a fog . . . how about a foggy day in London or maybe foggy day in London Town?” “Sounds good. . . . I like it better with town” and he was off immediately on the melody. We finished the refrain, words and music, in less than an hour. . . . Next day the song still sounded good so we started on a verse. . . . All I had to say was: “George, how about an Irish verse?” and he sensed instantly the degree of wistful loneliness I meant.25
The protagonist of this song has spent a solitary, misty day wandering city streets when a transformative moment arrives. “Suddenly I saw you there”—a phrase that reflects the meeting of Jerry and Lady Alyce, with the adverb at the peak of the melody—and out comes the sun. A quarter-note loop to the tune of Big Ben’s clock (mi-do-re-sol) fills out the melody of the refrain, as if the first encounter of a couple-to-be has brought the music into synchrony with time as it is measured in London town.
With the help of Lord Marshmorton, the servant’s mischief is revealed and the romantic misunderstanding resolved in time for the castle’s social gathering that evening. Again Jerry shows up as a cheeky chorister, now in a didactic number called “Nice Work if You Can Get It”—touting the rewards bestowed upon true lovers, from hand-holding by starlight to being welcomed home at the end of a working day. (On this reward, Ira quotes himself in a line borrowed from “I Got Rhythm”: “Who could ask for anything more?”) Sung by a choir perhaps to Lady Alyce and Jerry, a couple ready to embark on the road of matrimony, the advice the singers deliver takes a cautionary turn at the end of the refrain, warning that “if you get it, won’t you tell me how?”
As for the song’s title, Ira counseled songwriters in later years that “in lyric-writing it’s nice work when you get hold of a seemly title, for that’s half the battle. But what follows must follow through in the verse and refrain, whether the development is direct or oblique. In short:
The madrigal singers perform “Nice Work” with Jerry conspicuously among them, calling attention to himself, in a parody of a self-regarding choir member. The end of the choral singing finds Jerry in a virtuosic encounter—partly danced—with a drum set, to the strains of the new song. And that caper extends into a finale in which he and Lady Alyce march arm in arm out of Totleigh Castle, presumably with more nice work and a new life together in their sights.
Once the Gershwins had finished the music for A Damsel in Distress on schedule in mid-May, they started immediately to write music for the last project on their contract: Samuel Goldwyn’s Goldwyn Follies (1938), for which they were able to complete only part of the musical score.