George Gershwin,an intimate portrait review A composer who brought an ecstatic mastery to music and life By JOSEPH EPSTEIN Sept. 4, 2009 All genius is inexplicable, but some kinds of genius are more inexplicable than others. George Gershwin falls into the latter category. The second son of a Russian Jewish family in New York, he was a genius of the natural kind—his mother had no special interest in culture or talent for music; his father ran bakeries, Turkish baths, a cigar store and a pool parlor, and was briefly a bookie—but Gershwin had only to sit down at a piano in his boyhood to realize that in music lay his destiny. Like many vastly talented people, he could not be accommodated by school, so he dropped out at 15 and went to work plugging songs to vaudeville for a music publisher. Soon he was writing them. At age 21 he had his first hit, Swanee, with lyrics by Irving Caesar. The songs sheet music sold in the millions, as did Al Jolsons recording of it, writes Walter Rimler in George Gershwin. The book is an intimate portrait that tells the story of its subjects life and career with an admirable economy, showing an impressive feeling for the complexities of Gershwins character and the twists in his fortunes. The variety of Gershwins work, from his early tossed-off Tin Pan Alley songs to his classical compositions, is inexhaustible, yet all the music is unmistakably his. Random and easy though he made it look, Gershwin was never without a plan. There had been so much chatter about the limitations of jazz, he wrote, recalling his early days as a composer. Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow. The blow, successfully administered in 1924, was Rhapsody in Blue. Throughout his brief life—he died in 1937 at age 38—Gershwin had the golden touch. The phenomenon of George Gershwin astonished everyone—not least Gershwin himself. He was famous for his immodesty, except that in him it came off as something else, self-amazement perhaps. You know the extraordinary thing about my mother, he once said, shes so modest about me. When a friend in Hollywood was driving wildly, Gershwin alerted him: Careful, man, you have Gershwin in the car. Listening for the first time to a full orchestral rendering of the opera Porgy and Bess, he exclaimed: This music is so wonderful, so beautiful that I can hardly believe I wrote it. Not F. Scott Fitzgerald but George Gershwin may have been the reigning figure of the Jazz Age. Gershwin holding forth at the piano at parties in Manhattan, everyone gathered around as if by magnetic force—these scenes were among the symbolic tableaux of the 1920s. Samuel Behrman, the playwright and memoirist, described his reaction when he first heard Gershwin at one such party: I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it. Gershwin did everything with the throttle all the way out. As a golfer, he is said to have run between holes. He could compose intricate music in a crowded room; in fact, he preferred to do it that way. His being less than conventionally handsome—he had a chosen nose and a pendulous lower lip, with an early receding hairline—did not get in the way of his notable success with women. Money from his music royalties rained down upon him, and he spent it lavishly on clothes, townhouses, dashing cars. More thorough biographies than Mr. Rimlers slender volume exist—Edward Jablonskis Gershwin at 436 pages, Howard Pollacks George Gershwin: His Life and Work weighing in at 882 pages—but for those of us interested less in the technical details of Gershwins music and its performance than in the comet called George Gershwin that blazed briefly across American skies, Mr. Rimler is the astronomer of choice. He writes well, is quietly authoritative (he is also the author of The Gershwin Companion) and, while discriminating in his selection of details, never loses the larger subject, which is the trajectory of George Gershwins extraordinary life. Mr. Rimler remarks in an authors note that Gershwins was as personal and original a musical voice as Chopins and that the question about his career was not whether he would choose between jazz or classical, songs or concert works; rather, the conflict was about whether he could make full use of his powers. By this Mr. Rimler means how deeply could he develop his astonishing musical gift. Three stories play through Mr. Rimlers book: one is Gershwins lengthy love affair with a brilliant woman named Kay Swift; another is his relationship, musical and personal, with his brother, Ira; and finally there is Gershwins travail in getting Porgy and Bess composed, launched and properly appreciated as a great American opera. Kay Swift, when Gershwin first met her, was Katharine Swift Warburg, married to James Warburg, a scion of the famous banking family and a man who longed for a life in art. The mother of three daughters, Kay was bright and attractive, a talented musician, in fact a composer herself—she was the first woman to write a successful Broadway musical, Fine and Dandy (1930)—and thus well-positioned to understand Gershwins achievement. Mr. Rimler nicely conveys what kind of woman Kay Swift was by quoting her on whether Gershwin knew he had a masterpiece in the works while composing Porgy and Bess. It was like watching a pitcher who has a no-hitter going for him, she said. He knows it and you know it; and, in the case of George Gershwin, as in that of the pitcher, nobody mentions the fact at the time. Their love affair was an entirely open secret, a fact far from painless to her husband. When the Warburgs divorced, Gershwin, who valued his freedom perhaps too much, did not step forth to marry Kay— probably, Mr. Rimler suggests, a mistake. Unlike tennis, golf and gin rummy, monogamy wasnt Gershwins game. Ira Gershwin was Georges older brother and in every way different from him. Where George was brash, Ira was bashful; where George was free-spirited, Ira was under the control of his strong-willed wife; where George was a full symphony orchestra of self-esteem, Ira refused to blow his own horn. They meshed beautifully, though, in the realm of talent. Ira Gershwin may have been the greatest lyricist in the history of American popular song, a man born to translate his brothers joyous music into words. He played an essential role in Porgy and Bess, George Gershwins big gamble, in which he set out to stake his claim to being a great American composer. With a few exceptions, Gershwin had always been treated as a bit of an interloper by contemporary classical composers. Prokofiev spoke slightingly of his piano concerto in F major. At Yaddo, Aaron Copland excluded him from a festival of the works of modern composers. Virgil Thomson wrote crushingly of Porgy and Bess that it is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasnt learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business he wanted to learn, though Thomson spoke more kindly of him off the record. Ravel, one of the exceptions among serious composers, delighted in Gershwins music and recommended him to the great classical-music teacher Nadia Boulanger. She claimed that she had nothing to teach Gershwin, a remark that Mr. Rimler holds is open to interpretation. Did it mean that he was too advanced to require her aid, or did she instead think him hopeless? While the premiere of Porgy and Bess in 1935 marked the zenith of Gershwins musical accomplishment, the work also signaled the beginning of his fall. To begin with, confusion set in over whether the work was meant to be a musical or an opera; that it carried the subtitle a folk opera served only to confuse matters. The reviews, led by that of the New York Timess Olin Downes, were unenthusiastic. Crowds stayed away even when ticket prices were lowered. There was no need, Mr. Rimler writes, to spend ones dollars on what had been deemed a pretentious hodgepodge. The show ran for 124 performances on Broadway—not a catastrophe but certainly not what Gershwin had dreamed of. In a state of depression, he fled, along with Ira, to Hollywood in 1936. They had a 16-week, $55,000 contract with RKO to write music for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—and the charming Shall We Dance (1937), with the song Lets Call the Whole Thing Off, was the result. Gershwin never gave up the hope of a Porgy and Bess revival, but such was the elasticity of his musical talent that he could go from writing serious formal music to movie music without a hitch. He had also knocked off the song Nice Work If You Can Get It for the Astaire musical Damsel in Distress (1937) soon after the debacle in New York, and Mr. Rimler claims that just about everything he had written since beginning work on Porgy and Bess had been a masterpiece. With his characteristic joie de vivre, Gershwin enjoyed Hollywood—the weather, the golf, the women. He had an earnest flirtation with the actress Paulette Goddard. Only the work was dreary, especially after he was hired by producer Samuel Goldwyn, who foolishly failed to appreciate Gershwin. Goldwyn, that philistine of philistines, instructed him to write hits like Irving Berlin. All this while a tumor— technically, a malignant glioblastoma—was growing in Gershwins brain. Earlier he had begun to sense the smell of burning garbage; horrific headaches soon set in. His omnipresent energy drained. Several authoritative medical misdiagnoses didnt help. Gershwin began to despair—over his health and his career. Sam Behrman, an old friend, knew the game was up when he visited Gershwin in Los Angeles. I asked him if he felt like playing the piano. He shook his head. It was the first such refusal Id ever heard from him. Why a man whose music has brought so much pleasure to so many people should have spent his last days in wretched pain, certain that his life had been a failure, is one of those sad puzzles for which neither Mr. Rimler nor anyone else has a solution.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 04:12:50 +0000
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