IN THE FIRST OF HIS MEMOIRS, Oscar Levant reveals that he was one of the few listeners who noticed Gershwin’s memory slips during his two Los Angeles performances in February 1937. “Though he had played the ‘Concerto’ dozens of times in public with great fluency I noticed that he stumbled on a very easy passage in the first movement. Then, in the andante, in playing the four simple octaves that conclude the movement above the sustained orchestral chords, he blundered again.” The next evening, Gershwin mentioned that while conducting another number, “he had experienced a curious odor of some undefinable burning smell in his nostrils . . . and a sudden headache.” Nobody, least of all Gershwin, attached significance to these lapses, experienced by a man who radiated good health and vitality.
When the headaches recurred more frequently later on, some friends saw them as a neurotic response to working conditions in Hollywood, but Levant found that line of thinking “plainly fallacious.” Gershwin’s interests were expanding; his musical life in Hollywood was going well, and “his mental outlook was altogether healthy.”
He took a great interest in the contemporary music that was being played in Los Angeles at the time, where, contrary to the usual opinion, the musical atmosphere was a sharp and bracing one. Stravinsky made a guest appearance with the Los Angeles Orchestra, conducting his own works; there were the Schoenberg quartet concerts, the WPA Schoenberg-and-pupils concert; the presence of Ernest Toch and Aaron Copland on the coast—all these things interested and stimulated him. The freshness of these contacts, indeed, aroused George to the contemplation of renewed work in large forms, which had not engaged his attention since Porgy more than two years before. From his conversation I believe this would have been in the field of ballet or, possibly, a string quartet.1
As mentioned earlier, Levant’s first exposure to Gershwin had been in 1918 in Pittsburgh, at a performance of Ladies First, where the “completely free and inventive playing” of the accompanist left a lasting impression tainted by envy.2 After moving to New York in the early 1920s, the classically trained Levant had learned that the only work available to him lay in the field of dance music, most of which he held in a state of “unhealthy contempt.” But the songs that awakened his professional envy often proved to be the work of Gershwin, who had begun to loom in his mind’s eye as “a contemporary worthy of my most zealous dislike.”3
Early in 1925, Levant received an emergency morning phone call from conductor Frank Black at the Brunswick studio. An orchestra had been assembled there to record the Rhapsody in Blue, but the piano soloist had failed to show up. Could Oscar fill in? He could and he did, forgetting in the excitement to negotiate a larger-than-usual fee for having saved Brunswick’s and Black’s venture. Discovering later that he had been paid at union scale, he decided to seek “consolation in a word of praise from the composer,” whom he had yet to meet, and phoned him. Yes, he had heard the Brunswick recording, Gershwin told him, but he preferred his own version with the Victor recording label—a judgment that Levant came to share. Levant’s mother, noting that from then on the Rhapsody in Blue seemed to be the only music her son was ever invited to perform, often registered disappointment on his behalf. When, without mentioning repertory, the pianist told her that the prestigious Roxy Broadcast radio program had hired him to perform on the air, she was thrilled. But when he called home after the broadcast, “she remarked not too cryptically, ‘Again the “Rhapsody”!’ ” a phrase that came to be a punch line for Gershwin and Levant when either spotted a redundancy in his life.4
The first face-to-face meeting of these two composer-pianists took place later in 1925, when Levant dropped by the 110th Street apartment where the Gershwin family then lived. George was at work on the Concerto in F’s first movement, with Bill Daly playing the orchestra part on a second piano, and the encounter was short but sour. “Bristling with inarticulateness,” the best Levant could manage when the music stopped was a remark “graceless” enough to annoy Gershwin, who promptly “returned to his work.”5 Several years went by. Then, in a coincidence inviting more unfavorable comparison, Ripples, a Broadway show for which Levant had composed the music, was playing across the street from the Selwyn Theatre, where the revised version of Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band was holding forth. “As quickly as the score of Ripples palled on my audience, it palled on me more,” Levant recalled. “Hypnotically, I would find myself at the rear of the Selwyn, resentfully transported by the fresh rhythms and humors of the Gershwin lyrics and music.” At a matinee performance one day, drinking in Gershwin’s music from the back of the theater, he felt a tap on the shoulder from a young woman who asked how his show across the street was going. The tapper was Leonore Gershwin, whom he had met once before. At intermission, Levant invited her to have a look at Ripples. They watched a few numbers, she escorted him back to Strike Up the Band, and then she invited him home with her.6
Thus it was that, beginning early in 1930 with Leonore’s ice-breaking gesture, the Gershwin brothers’ adjoining penthouses on Riverside Drive evolved into the unofficial headquarters of Oscar Levant, then a single man who called a New York hotel home.
Leonore was a gracious hostess and the first person to tolerate my unresolved social dissonances. With this encouragement, I flowered as a buffoon, warmed in the sun of this amiable household. . . . From the first day’s supper I worked up to having four and five meals a day with the Gershwins, eating my way through the composition of the music and lyrics for Delicious and Girl Crazy. . . . Between the two households I emerged as a penthouse beachcomber.
Levant’s pianistic skills made him a valuable musical collaborator for George, who would sketch his large instrumental works for two pianos before he orchestrated them. Both the Second Rhapsody in 1931 and the Cuban Overture in 1932 were composed in this way, with Levant at the second piano.7 He also made an engaging witness to the lively environment of work and play at the Gershwin household early in the 1930s:
Surrounding the music in the two apartments (Ira had a fondness for singing George’s settings of his lyrics) both from the pianos and the phonographs, was a sporadic stream of talk embracing prize fighting, music, painting, football and sex. The Gershwin enthusiasm for ping-pong was communicated to me along with the scores, and we spent hours at the game. Amid this constant activity there was recurrently a recess for food, variously disguised as lunch, dinner, supper or midnight snack.
At the same time, Levant found his own efforts as a composer submerged in the tide of Gershwin’s energy and his talents: “He had such fluency at the piano and so steady a surge of ideas that any time he sat down just to amuse himself something came of it.”8
By the time the Gershwins arrived in Hollywood in the summer of 1936, Levant and his first wife, whom he married in 1932, were settled there. Levant was then studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg, who shared with both Gershwin brothers a passion for tennis.
The meeting of Schoenberg and Gershwin was an affectionate one and resulted, among other things, in a standing invitation for the older man to use the Gershwin court on a regular day each week. He would arrive with an entourage consisting of string-quartet players, conductors, and disciples. . . . One of the most memorable experiences I have ever had in music occurred during that California visit, when Mrs. Elizabeth Coolidge sponsored the performance of the four Schoenberg quartets and the last group of Beethoven, played by the Kolisch ensemble. George, Ira and I were overjoyed by this opportunity, and all of the music impressed us deeply.9
Levant also learned of Gershwin’s appetite for jazz music. For example, of the many recorded versions of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” the composer was especially fond of the one by the Benny Goodman Trio, with Gene Krupa on drums and Teddy Wilson on piano. And a special favorite among performers was Art Tatum, whom Gershwin had invited to his New York apartment before leaving for California, to play for company that included pianist Leopold Godowsky. Tatum enjoyed displaying his keyboard virtuosity by inventing strings of variations on certain jazz standards, including “Liza” and “I Got Rhythm.” At one point later, in a “small, dingy, badly lighted room” in the Los Angeles area, Levant and Gershwin heard Tatum play “virtually the equivalent of Beethoven’s thirty-two variations” on “Liza.” When that prodigious adventure was over, Gershwin’s response was to ask for more.10
. . .
GERSHWIN SPENT the last weeks of his life at work on “a super, super, stupendous, colossal, moving picture extravaganza which the ‘Great Goldwyn’ is producing,” as he announced to Isaac Goldberg.11 After thirty-two weeks of song-making for RKO and the supportive Pandro Berman, the brothers found themselves in a far less welcoming environment. In an ironic twist of fate, their new project was based on a show business tradition started by Ziegfeld: the most overbearing and least trustworthy producer they had worked for—until now. One industry executive described Sam Goldwyn as “the kind of man who, if he understands what you tell him, thinks he thought of it himself.”12 From the start, the Gershwins’ venture with him was fraught with complication and mistrust beyond what would come to be recognized as a decline in George’s health.
Gershwin began his new assignment with a sense of having been overextended, longing for a break from the pressures of songwriting. A letter on May 19, 1937, to Mabel Schirmer, who had written to tell him of the European trip she was planning for June and July, was far from upbeat about the artistic grind the brothers faced:
Ira and I have had to literally drag ourselves to work the last few days as we have just finished the second Astaire score and have to start right in on the “Goldwyn Follies.” Even the Gershwins can’t take that kind of routine. It’s too bad our contracts followed one another so closely as we both could use a month’s rest. Anyway, the silver lining on this cloud is that after the “Goldwyn Follies” we are going to take a long vacation, come to New York and perhaps I may even go to Europe.13
A week or so later, George received a letter from Frances Godowsky informing him that she and Leo and their ten-month-old daughter would soon be off on a European trip of their own. He answered her the same day, detailing his plan to return to New York once the Follies music was done, and stated the brothers’ determination to limit themselves in the future to one picture per year. He also applauded Goldwyn’s decision to film the picture in Technicolor. “Still, our health is good and our brains seem once again to be functioning,” he assured her, “so we are getting some pretty good starts of songs for the ‘Follies.’ ”14
But early in June, he revealed concern about his health—in what proved to be his last letter to his mother.
Of late I haven’t been feeling particularly well. Yesterday I put myself in the hands of a Dr. Segall and he is going to try to find out the reason for the slight dizziness I get every once in a while. He examined me yesterday and told me not to worry about it as he was convinced that it was nothing of a serious nature but that he would like to investigate it further to make sure about the cause of it.15
During his last contact with Gregory Zilboorg, with whom Gershwin had recently kept in close touch via correspondence, the psychiatrist had urged him to see Ernst Simmel, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and highly regarded pupil of Freud. After examining Gershwin, Simmel felt that his medical history suggested an “organic disorder” and referred him immediately to Gabriel Segall.
Gershwin was convinced that the headaches he was having were psychosomatic, caused by exhaustion from a heavy work schedule. Nor did the thorough examination conducted by Dr. Segall in the house on North Roxbury Drive reveal physical abnormalities. But during the next two weeks his headaches grew worse, particularly in the morning. Sometimes they were accompanied by nausea and dizziness, and the sensation of a foul odor (in medical terms, “olfactory hallucinations”). On June 23, Dr. Segall admitted Gershwin to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, calling in a neurologist, Eugene Ziskind, who found some light sensitivity but no tangible evidence of organic disease. A diagnostic spinal tap was recommended, but Gershwin refused it, fearing that such a test would aggravate his headaches. Three days later, on June 26, he was discharged from the hospital at his own request; the final note on his chart stated “most likely hysteria.”16 In the days after his discharge, Simmel paid daily visits to his patient at home, and a full-time psychiatric nurse remained at Gershwin’s side.
On Saturday, July 3, Sam Behrman arrived from New York to attend the Los Angeles opening of his play Amphitryon 38. He was shocked to see his always-vital friend in such a diminished condition. “He was very pale. The light had gone from his eyes. He seemed old. He greeted me mirthlessly. His handshake was limp, the spring had gone out of his walk.” Did he feel like playing the piano? Behrman asked, prompting “the first refusal I’d ever heard from him.” As for whether he would be attending the premiere on Monday, Gershwin shook his head.
“I had to live for this,” he said, “that Sam Goldwyn should say to me: ‘Why don’t you write hits like Irving Berlin?’ ” There was silence. . . . He looked at me with lusterless eyes. I had a sinking feeling: he is no longer one of us.17
On July 6, Segall and Ziskind, joined by Carl Rand, a local neurosurgeon, reexamined Gershwin. This time a spinal tap was performed, and the result proved consistent with the presence of a brain tumor.
Since the onset of George’s symptoms, Leonore Gershwin, arbiter of the household’s day-to-day activity, had shown little sympathy for her brother-in-law’s uncharacteristic behavior, suspecting that his actions reflected emotional self-indulgence. But once medical experts convinced her that George faced a delicate, specialized operation, she launched a national search for the surgeon best qualified to perform it; her chief collaborator was the well-connected Emil Mosbacher. Through a White House aide, an attempt was made to enlist the eminent Walter Dandy of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. But Dandy turned out to be vacationing on a yacht in Chesapeake Bay, and by the time he was located and ready to make the journey west, Gershwin’s declining condition demanded immediate surgery. Carl Rand undertook that task, beginning shortly after midnight on July 11 as family and friends gathered in a waiting room. They were briefed periodically by George Pallay, acting as a messenger from the operating room. After the skull was opened,
a large cyst was found on the right side of the brain that compressed the left ventricle and shifted the right ventricle across the midline. The family was heartened by the news of a large cyst (as opposed to a tumor) that could be removed, but no mention was made of the trauma to the brain tissue that occurred as a result of its herniation and shift past the midline. The cyst was opened but revealed a mural nodule located on its medial side. It was presumed to be malignant. Both the cyst and the nodule were removed and the wound closed. The family, now subdued, all left the hospital around 6 a.m., after completion of the surgery.18
But after Gershwin was returned to his hospital room, his body temperature climbed to an unsustainable level, his heart rate sped upward, and so did his rate of respiration. At 10:35 that morning he died without regaining consciousness.19
ABOUT a month later, Dr. Dandy, having reviewed Gershwin’s medical records, wrote to Dr. Segall:
I do not see what more you could have done for Mr. Gershwin. It was just one of those fulminating tumors. There are not many tumors that have uncinate attacks that are removable, and it would be my impression that although the tumor in a large part might have been extirpated and he would have recovered for a little while, it would have recurred very quickly since the whole thing fulminated so suddenly at the onset. I think the outcome is much the best for himself, for a man as brilliant as he with a recurring tumor would have been terrible: it would have been a slow death.20
Gershwin’s body was transported by train to New York City, and his funeral took place on July 15 at two o’clock on a rainy afternoon at the Temple Emmanu-El in Manhattan, attended by 3,500 mourners; 1,000 more were turned away. He was buried at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson. At the same time on the same day, another thousand attended a morning service at Temple B’nai B’rith in Los Angeles, where Oscar Hammerstein served as eulogist:
We remember a smile that was nearly always on his face, a cigar that was nearly always in his mouth. He was a lucky young man, lucky to be so in love with the world, and lucky because the world was so in love with him. It endowed him with talent. It endowed him with character. And, rarest of all things, it gave him a complete capacity for enjoying all his gifts.21
A spoken memorial broadcast from Los Angeles the day after George died included this tribute from Arnold Schoenberg:
Music to him was the air he breathed, the food which nourished him, the drink that refreshed him. Music was what made him feel, and music was the feeling he expressed.
Directness of this kind is given only to great men, and there is no doubt that he was a great composer. What he achieved was not only to the benefit of a national American music but also a contribution to the music of the whole world.22
Those who knew him personally, and the multitudes who loved his music, found themselves struggling to adjust to a world without George Gershwin in it. As writer John O’Hara registered the impact, “George died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”23 Still feeling the loss years after the fact, Oscar Levant railed in his memoir against the “cliché panegyrics whose one unison refrain was: ‘But his music lives on.’ . . . I detest this self-derived omniscience . . . the survival of music is not determined by such tea-leaf fortunetelling.” For this friend and musical colleague, no amount of music by Gershwin “could compensate for the loss of his corporeal presence, the cessation of his creative being—especially when we could have had both.”24
Press accounts of the passing of an American icon show that both of the musical spheres that Gershwin had served—as songwriter and as composer—valued him as an artist of true consequence. On Monday morning, July 12, the New York Times measured the breadth of his accomplishments:
In the tempo of jazz he jabbed at the dignities of American life, while he won the plaudits of the musical élite with the classic qualities of “A Rhapsody in Blue.” With his brother Ira and that master of gentle satire George S. Kaufman25 he set the nation laughing at the foibles of its government; but, in more serious mood, he found time to write music that the great conductors of his time were glad to present. Mr. Gershwin was a child of the Twenties, the Age of Jazz. In the fast two-step time of the years after the war he was to music what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to prose. . . . He had turned out tunes with all the tricks of the dove that rhymed with love. He had woven the cadences of Broadway into his songs and he had given America the plaintive Negro music of Porgy and Bess.26
The same day, the Boston Herald celebrated Gershwin’s uniqueness and the infectious delight he brought to his music-making, whether as a composer or a pianist:
As a delineator of the hard, brittle rhythms of contemporary America in the hundreds of songs which he wrote for musical comedies he was unexcelled. His score for “Of Thee I Sing” . . . was musical inventiveness of the deftest sort. Who, for instance, can ever forget the tingling tomfoolery of the music for the torchlight parade which opened the show, “Wintergreen for President”? . . . Whatever Gershwin may have done to introduce jazz to the concert hall is little compared to the happiness which he gave—and still gives—to the millions who sing, whistle, or dance to his tunes.27
In contrast, a July 13 piece in the New York Herald Tribune centered on Gershwin’s compositions, with hardly a word about his songwriting self:
For the first time in its long and ultra-respectable history American music became something that the man in the street delighted to hear. It had ceased to be essentially Colonial music, derived from European models, and had become a relatively new thing, full of native character and wit and charm, and with its sentimental prettiness artfully concealed. . . . Not only was he the most popular of American composers, he was perhaps the only American composer whom the Europeans took seriously. It is said that when Mr. Gershwin requested the great Stravinsky to give him some lessons in composition. Mr. Stravinsky asked Mr. Gershwin what his yearly income was, and was told $100,000, or something of the sort. “Oh,” said Mr. Stravinsky, “well, then, I think you had better give me lessons in composition.” . . . In his last important work, the opera “Porgy and Bess,” there were indications of a growing mastery and power that might eventually have yielded an even more important contribution to American music.28
On July 15, the New Republic struck a note more acquiescent than bereaved. Its farewell, titled “The Man I Love,” began with an announcement from jazz critic Otis Ferguson: “Last Sunday night, the word came over the radio that George Gershwin was dead at the age of thirty-eight, and almost everywhere in the country people must have stopped for a moment. They knew him well, for they had sung his songs.” And then the critic judged Gershwin in America’s landscape of music-making as a giver of gifts that would long outlive him.
He made the idea of jazz—as opposed to jazz itself, of course—acceptable to those who must get their music over a shirtfront and would otherwise be oblivious of anything in America that spoke without a thick accent to this day. . . . When you think back to the strange running sadness of “The Man I Love,” or “Soon,” and when you don’t have to think back to “Somebody Loves Me” because Jack Teagarden . . . recorded it again a year or so ago; or to “Lady Be Good,” because it is still to be found in the books of the first bands after these eleven years . . . you don’t have to think any farther. . . . So he’s gone, and let him go, and God bless him. And if there is any requiem at all, it should be a glad one, playing tonight in the swinging phrases of, say Benny Goodman’s current arrangement of that title tune for “Lady Be Good.”29
Ira Gershwin stands on the written record as a shadowy figure during his brother’s decline. Said to have been numbed by grief in the wake of George’s passing, he appears, during the course of his brother’s illness, to have ceded to his wife whatever domestic responsibilities may have fallen to him. But after the funeral, he returned to Beverly Hills as a man with a legacy to manage.
The first thing Ira had to deal with was a disagreement over the memorial concerts being planned for Los Angeles in early September. “There were two groups working against each other,” he wrote Rose Gershwin on July 31: ASCAP and the Hollywood Bowl, planning concerts within two weeks of each other. Ira suggested “that ASCAP hire the Hollywood Bowl and the Los Angeles Symphony and run the entire concert and the Bowl organization cooperate and get 25% of the proceeds for their deficit. So far they have bowed to my judgement in every respect and I’m hoping there will be no more trouble.”
The uncompleted film contract, though, was more vexing. Sam Goldwyn had hired a musical collaborator, Vernon Duke, to flesh out the Follies score. Nevertheless, Ira explained,
it now develops that Goldwyn thought he was hiring Duke to help me finish the score and that he doesn’t want to pay any more money than he has to. Yesterday I gave Duke a lead sheet of a waltz of George’s to go ahead with for a dance that [George] Balanchine wanted. Today I called Duke and explained the situation and he agreed not to work on the waltz, but would put in one of his own.
As you probably know, George and I signed a contract as a team, so that when George was through I was through. Goldwyn wants me to come to work Monday to help Balanchine and Duke on an idea for the opening. I told [Arthur] Lyons to ask for at least two week’s [sic] guarantee for me, but I couldn’t even get that. His (Goldwyn’s) attitude is that I ought to be able to finish it in a week. . . . I’ll probably go to see him, but frankly I’ve found him a great disappointment, to put it mildly, and personally I don’t care if I go on with it at all.30
With Russian-born choreographer and dancer George Balanchine as a key collaborator in an enterprise featuring ballet dancer Vera Zorina, his wife, it had been agreed from the start that the Gershwins’ score would include a new ballet for Zorina. Ira and George had decided to write the songs first, leaving time in their sixteen-week contract to spend on the ballet. They had completed five songs and drafted material for one more before George’s symptoms overtook his capacity to compose. To compensate, Gershwin had offered Goldwyn free use of the score of An American in Paris. Goldwyn had agreed, but the result he witnessed toward the end of July failed to please him—“too highbrow.”
As for Balanchine, his first encounter with the Gershwins had begun awkwardly; his English was poor, and he had had trouble understanding George’s New York accent. But the choreographer had come to expect a “very enjoyable” association:
We met a few times and then I heard George was sick. I went to visit him and found him lying in bed in a dark room with all the shades drawn. He had a towel against his head and he obviously was in great pain. In that dark room he said to me, “It is difficult for me to work now, but I’ll be all right.” He knew I was trained in music, so he also said, “Do what you must. I know it will be good.” He had more confidence in me than Goldwyn did then. “And when I’m all better, we’ll do our ballet just the way you want it.” 31
The Gershwins’ first new song to appear in the Goldwyn Follies, “Love Walked In,” was written with tenor Kenny Baker, playing a short-order cook, in mind. The melody was not new, having been sketched in a manuscript tunebook dating from the days of Girl Crazy (1930). The refrain’s flowing, legato, wide-ranging (an octave plus a fifth), and rhythmically graceful theme was another that George referred to as “Brahms-like.” Indeed, if he had a specific source, it could have been the theme of the fourth movement of Brahms’s First Symphony. And as for Ira’s notion of a “completely new” world revealed by the beloved’s arrival, it shows that, for all his emotional reserve, he could deliver when George walked in with a melody demanding warmth. “Love Walked In” made plenty of “noise” in the marketplace—Harold Arlen’s word for commercial success—rising to No. 1 on the Hit Parade radio program in the spring of 1938.32
“I Was Doing All Right,” the Follies’ second number, is sung by a secondary character played by Ella Logan, whose comfortable life has been disrupted by a lover who sets her physical person “tingling all through.” The music of Gershwin’s refrain disconnects her complicated present from a simple past, back when she was “doing all right.” “I Love to Rhyme,” a light-hearted number introduced by comedian Phil Baker and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen working with his dummy, “Charlie McCarthy,” dwells on rhymers and their talents—mountaineers, for instance, driven to climb, and criminals who prefer “to crime.” The song glories in the sounds of rhymes, whether in one syllable (“gay, day, may, hey”), two (“chuckle, knuckle”), or more (“variety, society, propriety”). But would it not be “sublime,” the protagonist wonders, “if one day it could be / That you rhyme with me?”
“Just Another Rhumba,” an ambitious, extended number with a fully realized piano accompaniment whose rhythmic motor channels that of the Cuban Overture, went unused in Goldwyn’s picture.
But as for “Love Is Here to Stay,” it’s a song that George did not live to complete in written form: it was finished according to his wishes by Ira and Oscar Levant.33 As a song with an existential subject, it stands as a rarity in the Gershwin canon: a view of romantic love that professes permanence on an epic level. Trading conviction for eloquence, a plain truth—“our love is here to stay”—is sung word-for-word in three of the refrain’s four sections, linked each time to the melody’s only syncopated turn. Never had the gist of a Gershwin love song been stated more persistently.
More than half of the lyric Ira came up with for George’s “start” dwells on a world in which “nothing seems to be lasting.” His first examples point to human ingenuity and the quickening of social change wrought by gadgets: phones, radios, even the cinema. Then, however, he turns to the stability of nature at its most monumental (Gibraltar, the Rocky Mountains). Nothing short of the song’s protagonists’ faith in their love could have brought such exemplars of permanence to mind. The sentiment expressed here rang true as Ira and a devoted musical friend completed “Love Is Here to Stay” from the nine bars of melody that comprise the last music Gershwin committed to paper, plus Ira and Levant’s recollection of what he had suggested or played for them to fill unfilled places.
As those nine bars of “Love Is Here to Stay” took shape, the composer’s last days were at hand. Gershwin received a cable from Paris on July 6 inviting him to appear in a number of concerts later that year. But by the time that invitation arrived George’s vitality had ebbed to the point that “Ira had had his brother and himself taken off contract” with the Goldwyn studio.34 George was also too ill to learn that he had been elected an honorary member of the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, Italy’s highest award to musicians.
FOR ALL the achievements and success of George and Ira Gershwin’s partnership, their move to Hollywood in the summer of 1936 opened, by the end of the year, a divide between the musician and the wordsmith, based on the lives they each preferred to lead. At first, taken by the attractions of the setting—for work and for play—George may have given serious thought to making Beverly Hills a permanent home. But by the end of October, he had learned that “one can become pretty sedentary in this climate,” and his future was more likely to flourish elsewhere.35 Conversations with Leo and Frances Godowsky, who visited her brothers during the 1936 holiday season, revealed that George had come
“out here to make enough money with movies so I don’t have to think of money any more. Because I just want to work on American music: symphonies, chamber music, opera. This is what I really want to do. I don’t feel I’ve even scratched the surface.” He told Leo, Frances later said, that he wanted to start on a string quartet. This was the last remark he made to us. We left and I never saw him again because we were in Europe when he died.36
Centered more on composition than on songwriting, George’s inclinations for the future leaned toward New York, whose quicker pace and wealth of resources he missed in Hollywood.
In the meantime, as the brothers invented songs whose treatment on the screen lay in the hands of others, Ira, a master at biding his time, had “permanently succumbed” to Southern California’s climate and to the “geographical remoteness that protected him from the business pressures of New York.” He and Leonore would spend the rest of their lives within the orbit of Hollywood.
But if Ira had found a life that he and his wife savored, George had broader vistas to explore. The European trip he’d been contemplating since the family junket in 1928 might have enabled him to perform on concert stages overseas as a pianist and conductor, to compose music he had imagined writing for some time, and to enrich his life as an art collector and painter. Indeed, perhaps the task uppermost in his mind was the composition of a string quartet, whether the one sparked by his visit in 1934 to Folly Island, or another inspired in Hollywood after he heard all four of Arnold Schoenberg’s exemplars.37
At the moment when fate brought George Gershwin’s life to an end, his collaboration with Ira was poised to enter a new phase, which would most likely have seen his brother settle into a house in Beverly Hills, perhaps with a “studio-cottage” for George, who would be based in New York. George would presumably have returned to his apartment on East 72nd Street, free to travel, but also to host Ira when the next promising project beckoned, be it a musical comedy, an opera, or another project that called for lyrics.
THE END of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s saw the birth of three composers of varied background and persuasion who loom large in the annals of America’s musical history. Duke Ellington, who was born in 1899 and died in 1974, left behind a vast legacy of jazz-based music composed, played, and recorded over five decades. A lifetime of satisfying customers while experimenting with the varied worlds of sound explored by his ensemble won for him the distinction of being named the century’s foremost maker of American music: of “music that illuminated the unprecedented conditions of modern life.”38 Aaron Copland, who was born in 1900 and died in 1990, was long thought of as the foremost American composer of the age for a more symbolic reason: his recognizably homegrown composition in the Eurocentric, “classical,” and academic camp of a professional world in which popular music seemed a sphere separate from music to be taken seriously.
And then there was George Gershwin, who lived from 1898 to 1937, and who, after a life shorter by far than those of Ellington and Copland, was mourned by multitudes: by those who “had sung his songs” and heard him on the radio; and by generations drawn to the theater, the concert hall, and the stadium to enjoy music as fullfilling and varied as the Rhapsody in Blue, Lady, Be Good!, and Porgy and Bess. For the few who knew him best, life could never be the same in the absence of so irreplaceable a presence. But in the Western world at large, his music had already won a valued place in the lives of listeners and institutions, and in the hearts and habits of performers, professional and amateur alike. Welcomed in his youth as a fresh voice of the Jazz Age, George Gershwin maintained the flavor and conviction of that voice through the better part of two decades. His days on earth were limited to the summertime season of life. But the music he left behind, endowed with his extraordinary inventiveness and intellectual curiosity, has yet to cease thriving as an evergreen gift to the world.