While George painted he wondered aloud: What was the role of hero worship in the appreciation of music, or any of the arts? Would Beethoven’s music be the same without that face of his? His scowl had so much to do with the myth that surrounded and enhanced his music, in George’s view.
“Maybe he used his music to sell his delusion of grandeur,” said Kay.
“It’s not a delusion when it’s true,” said Gershwin.
“Would it be true, if he had written the same music but the world didn’t recognize his genius?”
“No,” said Gershwin.
She hired a high school athletics coach to teach them tennis, and they practiced an hour each day after their lesson. They shared an unsuspected trait: they both hit the ball hard. They played piano mornings, afternoons, and whenever in the bright front room. He composed—assiduously, furiously—an overture and songs for a new show that he decided to call, Oh, Kay! She transcribed melodies and chord progressions and commented on his counterpoint. He ingested her knowledge like a famished schoolboy at a banquet.
George demonstrated compositional tricks he had learned from Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, both innovators in his estimation, and from private teachers he had hired over the years, Charles Hambitzer, Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody, who had introduced him to new, sometimes contrasting ways of thinking about harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and rhythm. Despite his reputation as a self-taught genius he had continuously studied music theory since his youth, though never in recognized institutions.
He never claimed, however, to understand music. Its essence remained a mystery to him. If he was humble about anything, it was this.
In the evening, they found German editions of Heine’s poetry and Kafka’s Der Prozess in James’s bookshelf, as well as a copy of Ulysses, printed in Paris. The latter was banned in the United States and the controversy had only enhanced its reputation. Late at night Kay and George slogged through it aloud. George judged Ulysses a dazzling experiment, virtuosic, at times fascinating, but just as often trying and exhibitionistic.
“One thing it’s not,” said George. “It’s not storytelling. Just like Wassily Kandinsky isn’t painting pictures. Just like Schoenberg isn’t writing melodies. It’s something else.”
Much as he wrote modern but melodic music, so in painting George chose a middle ground between realism and abstraction, but erring on the side of realism. He cared about his audience and his first audience was his own ear. Modern harmonies, rhythms, and instrumentation provided freshness if not innovation. But a melody had to seize the listener’s attention and hold it captive or the entire effort collapsed. He knew that much of musical academia disagreed. He did not care.
They talked in semidarkness about the Great War, a wound that had not healed. George wondered whether the war had been a cause, or a symptom, of changes in the culture. Kay asked him to elaborate. “Well,” George mused aloud, “not so long ago, the idea of Europe meant something. It meant certain attitudes about music, and painting, and religion—which is storytelling on the biggest canvas, isn’t it?—and then it all collapsed. It all turned out to be so fragile. What I’m saying is, maybe the change happened first in the culture—Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg—and the Great War was just the final implosion.”
“So where do we go from here?” Kay wondered. “Beyond abstraction in painting, non-linear narrative, and atonality in music?”
“That’s when your steamer docks at Ellis Island,” said George.
“And what do you find?” asked Kay. “A different scale?”
“A different rhythm,” said George. “Jazz.”
* * *
They decided to read something else. Kay went into the salon and came back with the copy of Porgy that Dorothy Heyward had sent.
Sales of the novel, Heyward’s first, had soared, fueled by the near-unanimous enthusiasm of reviewers. The Nation had praised its “poetry and penetration.” The New York Evening Post had described Porgy as “a series of throbbing moments, a ghost of Africa stalking on American soil.” Ellen Glasgow, the prestigious author of the novel Barren Ground, declared that Porgy was destined to become “a classic.” The poet Langston Hughes appreciated “the poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row that make them come alive.”
With George, Kay entered the Gullah tenements of Charleston a second time. They took turns reading aloud in bed. The setting reminded George, in ways, of the Lower East Side of his youth. Entranced, they allowed Porgy to occupy them through the night.
The following afternoon Kay found George wandering through the house in his slippers, holding Porgy and looking for something. “You got a phone?”
“Who do you want to call?”
“DuBose Heyward. You got his number?”
“It’s on that note we’re using as a bookmark.”
A few minutes later, the telephone operator rang the line of the author at his home in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. “DuBose Heyward, George Gershwin here. My friend Kay Warburg and I cruised through your novel last night, title page right through to…” He flipped to the last line. “Mariah left Porgy and the goat alone in an irony of morning sunlight.” He placed the book on a side table. “I was hoping for some shut-eye but Catfish Row kept calling me back.”
“Why thank you, Mister Gershwin, mighty honored,” DuBose Heyward answered in a thin, wheezy voice.
“Your Porgy, what a fella,” gushed George. “A cripple, dirt poor, no education, a rough seven-card-stud hand, but he knows he’s worthy of this doll. Deserves her more than Sporting Life or Crown. And she knows it, too, but she’s not as strong as he is.”
“Why, thank you kindly, Mister Gershwin. That was precisely my intention.”
“Tell me how you came up with this story, these people.”
“Well,” drawled Heyward, “I used to work the docks in Charleston. I was one of the few whites and many of the others were Gullahs. That is the way I spent my adolescence. As different as the Lord made us they were like family to me and I was always fascinated with the rhythms of spoken language, so naturally I absorbed their dialect.” He paused. “Then one day a few years back I came across a story in the local news about a crippled man who tried to flee the police using his goat cart. The story filled me with compassion and I knew right then that man would be the subject of my first novel.”
“Your compassion hit me hard, Mister Heyward.”
“That means a lot, coming from you, Mister Gershwin.”
“You see, Mister Heyward,” George told him, “I’ve been wracking my brain for a subject for an opera. Any chance we could meet?”
“Why that is a fascinating idea. But I must tell you, my wife is working on a stage adaptation. Porgy has been such a surprising success, she swears there’s a Broadway show in there.”
“I would hate to interfere with your wife’s plans,” said George. “Why don’t you just go ahead and see if you can throw that show together. Let’s talk later, one way or the other.”
“I will very much look forward to that, Mister Gershwin,” said DuBose Heyward. “I am so honored.”
Hanging up the telephone, Gershwin chuckled and shook his head at some inner thought. But his smile dissolved into a frown as he sniffed. “Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” asked Kay.
“Burning rubber,” said George.
Kay shook her head, laughing.
* * *
Olga brought the children for the holiday weekend. Andrea and Kathleen ran around outside, shouting and yelping. But April, the oldest of Kay’s children at seven, shut herself into her room. “Something’s bothering her,” said George.
“That’s how she is,” said Kay. “I’m not happy about it but what am I to do?”
He went upstairs and knocked. Kay followed.
April sat on her bed studying a scrapbook. George entered and sat beside her. “Little Orphan Annie, eh,” he said.
“She cuts them out every day,” sai
d Kay. “And glues them in.”
“What’s it about?” George asked April.
“A girl.”
“How ’bout I read to you?” He moved to take the album from her but she clutched it tightly.
“I didn’t give you permission.”
“April!”
April ignored her mother. “I’d rather be with my dad,” she told George.
“I’ll leave you alone then,” said George. He rose and left, closing the door behind him.
“She’s going through something,” Kay told him, as they went downstairs.
“The kid feels orphaned,” said George.
“There’s a man all over that scrapbook,” said Kay. “Daddy Warbucks. Daddy Warburg, get it? He saves her from the orphanage. Not Mommy Swift. Daddy Warburg.”
Andrea adored Gershwin, whom she called Uncle George. She tromped with him through the forest when he ventured out with his Leica camera. She sat next to him on the piano bench when he improvised. Sometimes the music made her giggle. Sometimes she rolled on the floor laughing. He looked down at her, smiling, while his hands increased the tempo, as if tickling her. Then he stopped and let her recover.
On the afternoon of July Fourth, wearing a beret, George rolled up a newspaper and used it as a megaphone, refereeing a footrace between Andrea and Kay. That night, Benjamin Fairchild drove them all into Greenwich except April, who refused to leave her room. The ice cream shop was offering two double-scoops for the price of one. They sat on the grass and watched star pods burst over the water. They watched flowers of light bloom and fade. Andrea draped her arm around George’s shoulder and leaned into him. Kathleen drifted to sleep. Ice cream melted onto her skirt. Before they left, George asked: “What’s April’s favorite flavor?”
“Strawberry,” said Kay.
He returned to the ice cream parlor, where he bought a half-gallon container of strawberry, a dozen cones, and a bag of Abba-Zaba candy bars.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NOVEMBER 1926
Having just returned from another three-month trip, Jimmy asked Kay to join him for a stroll in Central Park. “Top of the morning, Mister and Misses Warburg.” A police officer tipped his hat.
“Good morning, Officer McGinty.” Jimmy slowed his pace to match Kay’s. “The oddest thing happened while I was away,” he told her.
“Your pants stayed buttoned up?” asked Kay.
He turned to her, raising his eyebrows. “Why, yes, precisely.”
“Hah!” said Kay. “You’ve become celibate?”
“Celibate? Heavens, no. Monogamous, possibly.” Two nannies passed, pushing black prams. “What if we were to take this over from the beginning,” asked Jimmy. “To just pick up the needle and drop it back down at the start of the record. Wouldn’t that be grand?”
She shook her head. “We can’t, though. We were so naïve. We had to be, or we never would have tried. And naïveté, that’s not something you can get back.”
They passed an amateur artist who was painting the trees and the lake. “I didn’t sign up for a lukewarm marriage,” said Jimmy. “I want to fix this.”
“Suddenly? Now?”
“It’s obvious, Kay. You’ve taken the dive. You and Gershwin.”
She laughed. “Aren’t you the one that said marriage isn’t about ownership, but sharing?”
“Sharing, certainly. Not giving everything away. Not giving away your heart.”
“I can’t perform without feeling,” said Kay. “That isn’t music. That’s just notes.”
“I appreciate that,” said Jimmy. “It’s why I was drawn to you in the first place.” He took her hand. “Speaking of sharing, maybe we should resume sharing a bedroom.”
“I’ve grown used to sleeping alone. You know how much I move in bed,” said Kay.
“You’ve grown used to sleeping with Gershwin.”
She freed her hand. “What do you want from me, Jimmy?”
“A pinch of reassurance, perhaps?” he tried. “Just tell me everything will be fine and dandy.”
“You want little white lies?”
“They wouldn’t cost you a thing, would they,” said Jimmy.
A cycle-skater zipped past wearing boots bolted to narrow ten-inch wheels, flinging himself forward with ski poles. “Everything will be fine and dandy,” said Kay with a smile.
Children were running, shouting, sliding, and swinging in the playground. Jimmy watched them, contemplative and sullen. “Let’s catch a musical tonight,” he suggested. “How about The Girl Friend? Word is it’s a delight.”
* * *
The Girl Friend, by the new team of Rodgers and Hart, was indeed a pleasure. Its bare-bones plot treated themes of ambition and love, the temptation to get ahead by cheating, and the ultimate reward for honest labor. It illustrated the essential mythos of the aspirational American middle class: that success is to be measured not in peerships, freedom from labor, or other privileges, but in sincerity and diligence.
“I guess Gershwin isn’t the only talented songwriter out there,” Jimmy remarked as they walked down Forty-Second Street for after-the-show refreshments.
“As far as I know,” said Kay, “Irving Berlin, or Richard Rodgers, never composed a Rhapsody in Blue or a New York Concerto.”
“I can’t deny he’s a wunderkind of sorts.”
“And I can’t deny it’s invigorating to work with him,” said Kay. She slung her arm through his. “Jimmy, I always needed to write music, you know that. But my compositions… I went to bed every night fearing no one would ever hear them.”
“I know,” said Jimmy.
“The best thing about my Hotel Astor recital? George Gershwin showed up, with Adele Astaire.”
Jimmy held the door of Molly’s Sweets & Sundries. “I worry he might exploit you,” he said. “Your brilliant musical mind. Your perfect ear.”
Kay went in. “Perhaps,” she said as they approached the counter. “Or maybe I’m using him. I’ll have a Sundae Decadence,” she told the fountain jerk. Vanilla with crumbled cookies and melted chocolate fudge.
The ice cream boy turned to Jimmy. “Yes, I’ll have a Dreamland.” Vanilla with fresh peach slices, walnuts, and whipped cream. “Just give me those little white lies,” he repeated to his wife as the shop boy busied himself with their desserts.
“Everything’ll be fine and dandy,” said Kay with a smile.
* * *
These days, Kay enjoyed working at night. But Jimmy was a morning person. She was touching up a song she had begun at Bydale when he sauntered into the room in his pajamas and robe, smoking a pipe.
“What do you think?” She ran through the wide-ranging melody she had composed. The style was her own, a broader, more sweeping line than the typical Gershwin song. But like him she added off-key notes and broke the rhythm into uneven beats.
“Catchy. Lyrics?”
She shook her head. “Just a title. ‘Little White Lies.’ I might ask Ira.”
He crossed to the liquor cabinet. “Gin Rickey?”
She smiled.
He set her drink on an aluminum tray on the piano and stood watching while she played a few more chords, then modified them and tried again. He poured himself a tulip glass of Armagnac.
Later that night he appeared at her bedroom door. She was reading the new issue of the New Yorker, the magazine founded and published by Aleck Woollcott’s housemate Harold Ross. “That tune you wrote. It’s driving me batty.”
She looked up.
“Couldn’t sleep. Some words came to me.” Jimmy whined in his wandering tonality:
The ancients, they touted the virtue of honesty,
But ask any modernist: that was a fallacy.
Just give me more of your little white lies,
Your lily-white smile and sparkling green eyes.
Tonight I intend to sleep like a kitten,
Atop a silk blanket in a castle in Britain.
She lowered her magazine. “Not shabby! Let’s try it.”
They raced downstairs. She sat at the piano and played as he sang the lyric, adding a second verse:
Let the moralists boast of their permanent truths.
And the leaders of Europe, their delicate truce.
Just give me more of your little white lies…
“You made that up on the spot?” asked Kay, astonished.
He nodded.
“Why was I not aware of this talent?”
He stepped closer and leaned to kiss her forehead. “Just don’t say, lyrics by James Paul Warburg. I’m a banker. It wouldn’t fly.”
Like Kay, Jimmy had been trained to appreciate Victorian styles in poetry and music. In the Romantic vein, he had written poetry that idealized love. It had come off as stilted and inauthentic. Kay deemed his lyrics to “Little White Lies” refreshing and poignant. She had conceived of it as a gloomy ballad but he had inverted her intention with tender irony. And now, far from craving recognition, he did not even want his name on the lyrics.
“What name do you have in mind?”
“Why don’t you reverse my middle and first names. Paul James.”
“Sounds rather Episcopalian.”
“Precisely.”
“And I’ll be Kay Swift,” said Kay.
James smiled past her shoulder. Kay turned to see their daughter Andrea standing at the foot of the stairway in her pajamas. “I had a bad dream.”
“Come, little nut.” Jimmy took her hand. “I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JUNE 1927
A month earlier, Charles Lindbergh had flown from New York to Paris in his custom-built monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. His daring, so soon after two Frenchmen had perished in a similar attempt, defined him as a symbol of American pluck. Everyone understood that his proof-of-concept adventure would change the world. A parade welcomed him home to New York, and the crowds that gathered paralyzed the city.
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