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When I first knew George Gershwin he was living with his
family in an apartment in 110th Street. To me, who am forced
when I want to write so much as a postcard to shut all
doors, cut off the telephone, and cere myself carefully in
an immutable silence, it was a perpetual wonder that
Gershwin could do his work in the living-room of this
particular flat, the simultaneous stamping ground of the
other members of the family and the numberless relatives and
visitors who would lounge through, lean on the piano, chat,
tell stories, and do their setting-up exercises. I have seen
Gershwin working on the score of the Concerto in F in a room
in which there must have been six other people talking among
themselves, having tea, and playing checkers. In those days
Gershwin used to mumble ineffectually that what he needed
was privacy. This mild protest went on for several years and
resulted finally in the purchase of a five-story house in
West 103rd Street. The top floor was the composer's study;
here his treasures were transplanted: the Steinway grand,
the "Great Composers Series" drawn for him by Will Cotton,
the photograph of Prince George of England informally
inscribed "From George to George," the framed poster
announcing the performance of the Concerto at the Paris
Opera, the specially bound scores of Debussy and Wagner. At
one time, during those 110th Street days, Gershwin was
working simultaneously on the Concerto and the scores of
"The Song of the Flame" and "Tip-Toes." During this triple
creation he would occasionally emigrate to a suite of rooms
in a hotel at Broadway and One Hundredth Street. But even
here the "privacy" he achieved was only comparative; here,
too, the rooms were generally full of admirers, voluntary
secretaries who asked nothing further than to be allowed to
copy out a score—and relatives.
The electrical success of the Rhapsody in Blue (first played
by Paul Whiteman in Aeolian Hall, February 12, 1924) made
Gershwin an international figure and the house in 103rd
Street, with its presumably sacrosanct top floor, was a
symbol of the composer's new dignity.
My last visit to the house in 103rd Street demonstrated
vividly the futility of symbols in the face of an
overpowering, reality. I hadn't seen the Gershwins in a long
time and I telephoned to ask if it would he convenient for
me to call. It was a sweltering night in September and I
arrived at the house about nine o'clock. For a long time I
rang the doorbell but got no answer. Through the screened,
curtained door-window I could see figures moving inside, and
I kept ringing impatiently. No answer. Finally I pushed the
door open and walked in. Three or four young men I had never
seen before were sitting around the hall smoking. Off the
hall was a small reception-room which had been converted
into a billiard-room. I peered in—there was a game in
progress but I knew none of the players. I asked for George,
or his brother Ira. No one bothered to reply, but one of the
young men made a terse gesture in the direction of the upper
stories. I went up one flight and there I found a new group.
One of them I vaguely recognized from 110th Street and I
asked him where George and Ira were. He said he thought they
were upstairs. On the third floor I found Arthur, the
youngest brother, who had just come in and didn't know who
was in the house, but on the fourth I got an answer to my—by
this time agonized —cry. I heard Ira's voice inviting me up
to the fifth. I found him and his wife Leonore trying to
keep cool in George's study. I told them of my adventures
coming up the stairs. "Who under the sun," I asked, "are
those fellows playing billiards on the first floor?"
Ira looked almost guilty. "To tell you the truth," he said,
"I don't know!"
"But you must," I insisted. "They looked perfectly at home."
"I really don't," he said. "There's a bunch of fellows from
down the street who've taken to dropping in here every night
for a game. I think they're friends of Arthur's. But I don't
know who they are."
"Where," I demanded sternly, "is George?"
"He's taken his old rooms in the hotel around the corner. He
says he's got to have a little privacy."
And, lest I deduce from this that George had become
unbeara1y temperamental, Ira—who is the fidus Achates of his
younger brother as well as his lyricist—added
apologetically, "You see, George had to do some work on
'Funny Face.'"
As matter of fact I had long since come to the conclusion
that George doesn't in the least need "privacy"—at any rate
not for composition. His talent is so amazingly prodigal
that he hasn't, like the less favored of us, to dig and prod
for it. Possibly his training in Tin Pan Alley when he
plugged songs for Remick accustomed him to working under
conditions that the average creative artist would find
impossible. The Rhapsody in Blue was written in a few weeks
because he had promised Paul Whiteman a piece for his first
concert. The Concerto in F was written and scored while he
was at work on two musical shows; "An American in Paris,"
during a few hectic weeks on the Continent. Mr. Gershwin is
thirty; his first show, "La La Lucille," was produced when
he was twenty. Since then he has written thirty full musical
scores; three important orchestral works (" 'An American in
Paris' is the most important American composition since the
Concerto in F"—I quote from the review written on the
morning after the first performance by the music critic of
the World); a series of piano preludes which,
I am told by the same authority, are first-rate; and besides
that, literally scores of songs
which have never appeared in shows.
Among these last are some of his loveliest. "The Man I Love"
was one until it was stuck into the ill-fated "Strike Up the
Band." There was talk once of making up a score of Gershwin
songs which, for one reason or another, had been thrown out
of shows, and the list made one feel like going out at once
to raise the money. At the mercy of banal librettists and
the exigencies of "show business," Mr. Gershwin has to take
out songs because the prima donnas can't sing them, or
because it's time for the slapstick men, or because they're
too intricate for the chorus to dance. Almost anyone who
knows him well will tell you that much of his stuff which
sounds magnificent when he plays it on the piano is dimmed
and muffled by the time it reaches the theatre.
But Gershwin's active repertory at the piano is practically
endless; besides the well-known ones, from "Swanee" to "My
One and Only" and "Feeling I'm Falling" there is a
succession not generally known—among which two prime
favorites are the incomparable "Mischa, Jascha, Toscha,
Sascha," written for a party at Jascha Heifetz's, and "My
Little Duckie." It is a seemingly inexhaustible fecundity.
The house in 103rd Street has only recently been abandoned,
and Gershwin is installed now in a penthouse apartment in
Riverside Drive. To complete the gesture of emancipation,
the place is done in ultra-modern style—a rather swooning,
Melisandish bedroom, terraced bookshelves and elongated
wall-lights in the living-room, and over the dining-room
table a weirdly crenellated electric lamp that reminds me
somehow of the last act of "Dynamo." One room, though, is
fitted as a gymnasium with old-fashioned punching-bags and
fencing-foils.
Personally I regard the break-up of the Gershwin ménage with
considerable regret, because it will probably minimize my
contacts with Gershwin père. He is short, rotund, inclined
to literalness, and he has that singular and unerring
faculty which certain originals have for saying, in any
situation, that final thing beyond which there is nothing
left to be said. There has accumulated gradually a saga of
anecdotes emanating from him; when I meet George or Ira I
simply say, "What's the latest?" and I am generally told.
The latest happens to be this. The family was discussing the
new Einstein paper and George commented on the astonishing
compactness of scientific vocabulary:
"Imagine working for twenty years and putting your results
into three pages!"
"Well," said Mr. Gershwin calmly, "it was probably very
small print!"
The rest of the family consists of Mrs. Gershwin and a
younger brother and sister, Frances and Arthur. Mrs.
Gershwin is level-headed and practical; I imagine it was she
who steered the family through the early years and who
helped Gershwin père to the eminence of a restaurant
proprietor. I gather that it was not her fault that
prosperity dwindled in the era immediately before George
became famous. When George was growing up the family was so
poor it couldn't afford a piano, and it was at some
sacrifice that one was secured for him when he was thirteen
years old. The sister is sporadically on t h e stage and at
Palm Beach, and Arthur does something in the commercial side
of films and practices the piano. It is the family joke that
one day Arthur will out-distance George, but so far this
speculation remains in the region of humor.
This is the background of Gershwin's electrifying genius—a
background which has this in common with the environment of
most genius—that it remains inscrutable and explains
nothing. I use the expression deliberately, for this
good-humored, ingenuous young man is one of the most
thrilling artists now alive. Because I have no authority to
write about music, I have spoken with circumspection of
Gershwin's achievements as a composer. I come now to a side
of his talent of which I can speak because I have been under
its spell—his immediate talent as a pianist, as an
interpreter of his own songs. Josef Hofmann says of Gershwin
that he has "a fine pianistic talent . . . firm, clear . . .
good command over the keyboard." To the layman it seems a
positive domination. You get the sense of a complete
mastery, a complete authority—the most satisfactory feeling
any artist can give you. When he sits at the piano and plays
his own songs in a roomful of people, the effect that he
evokes is extraordinary. I have seen Kreisler, Zimbalist,
Auer, and Heifetz caught up in the heady surf that inundates
a room the moment he strikes a chord. It is a feat not only
of technique but of sheer virtuosity of personality. At the
piano Gershwin takes on a new life and so do his auditors.
He sings. He makes elaborate gestures. When he comes to a
line in "My Little Ducky"—
Gloria Swanson is hot for me,
Look at the pin she got for me
his hand flies to his tie to convey the better Miss
Swanson's magnanimity. Described, this sounds grotesque, but
actually it is as beautifully integrated as a clever
harmony. Gershwin becomes a sort of sublimated and
transplanted troubadour, singing an elemental emotion, an
unabashed humor . . .
Do, do, do what you've done done done before . . .
Sigh away, cry away, fly away to heaven . . .
Vicariously, you obey. (What a stunt it would be for someone
to take a slow movie of a group of people crowded around a
piano while Gershwin is playing and run it off without
music!) Illuminated and vitalized by his own music, his own
voice, his own eager sense of the rhythm of life, Gershwin instantly conveys
that illumination and that vitality to others, and that is
why he can at once pick up the confused and disparate
elements of the average New York party and precipitate
them—willy-nilly—into a medium warm and homogeneous and
ecstatic.
Of course, Gershwin enjoys his own playing and his own music
and his own talent. It is part of the integrity of his
effect. There are people who will tell you that Gershwin
can't write a tune and there are people who will tell you
that he plays too long at parties. There are, in fact, all
sorts of people. As a matter of fact, Gershwin has been
exploited mercilessly by hostesses—and hosts—whose parties
he has saved from irredeemable dullness. I have referred to
Gershwin as ingenuous. This is a condescension with which
articulate people often indulge themselves when speaking of
the less articulate. There are moments when I gather that
Gershwin is not unable to evaluate nicely his own place in
society. He told me once that his mother had cautioned him
against playing too much at parties. With engaging candor
Gershwin admitted that there might be some truth in this,
but was it ingenuousness or sophistication which prompted
him to add: "You see the trouble is, when r don't play, I
don't have a good time!"? |
