Rodgers glanced at his watch, pushed his tray aside, and said, “better be heading back.” He rose and walked away.
“He’s thrilled with you, Kay,” George assured her as they strolled back to the stage.
“Hard to tell, though,” said Kay.
George chuckled.
Larry Hart chimed in. “You know how to tell Dick likes you? He hasn’t fired you.”
During a break, Kay spoke with Hart, who was eating a donut and sipping coffee while looking over hand-scrawled lyrics. A kind, rumpled man seven years Rodgers’ senior at thirty-two, Larry struck her as the wisest and most cynical artist associated with the production.
“Larry, I’ve been working on some tunes and I think they’re jim-dandy. But publisher after publisher turns me down. Do you have advice for an earnest ingénue?” She smiled ingratiatingly.
“An earnest ingénue, eh?” said Larry looking up from his notes. “Yeah, I have advice. Don’t try to make sense of it. It’s a roll of the dice. And then another. And another. Life is a casino.” He placed his hand on her shoulder and looked her squarely in the eyes. “That’s the advice I’d offer a stranger. But someone I cared about, like a niece or a nonchalant chorus girl? I’d say, why trouble your pretty head? You’re better off learning shorthand.”
Dress rehearsals started at 8:00 p.m. and lasted well into the night. Kay slept much of the day. As opening night neared, frayed nerves yielded to temper tantrums. Broadway was a pressure cooker. In show business, success bred success but one failure engendered others too, leading to career extinction. The egos of leading men and women were as fragile as their reputations. So were those of the creative team, including the songwriters. And although only the most celebrated actors and actresses felt entitled to vent their anxieties, the future of every other individual involved was also at stake. A hit show would glow on the curriculum vitae of the lighting supervisor as well as the gofer, even if the lighting had been uneven. A dud, no matter how impressive the lighting, and employment would be harder to come across next time.
Dick Rodgers insisted that everyone connected with the production attend the final dress rehearsal, with full orchestra. Additional handpicked guests, friends and critics, filled the theater. Kay heard flutes and violins sound the notes she had been playing all these weeks.
George leaned toward Kay. “You feel that buzz? It’s not just what’s happening on stage. It’s not just the audience either. It’s the whole damn room. The walls, the ceiling. That’s how you know you’ve got a hit.”
At intermission, he made introductions. “Kay Swift and Paul James, the songwriters,” he said to the singer Libby Holman and Libby’s lover the DuPont heiress Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter. Tall and shapely, Libby Holman held herself like a diva. “Libby blew in from Cincinnati like a heat wave,” said George. “This broad was born to be a star. All she needs is smart, new material.”
Kay took George’s cue. “I may have some of that!”
“Can I hear it?” asked Libby.
“I certainly hope you can,” said Kay.
“How do you know she’s going to be a star?” Kay asked as George escorted her back into the theater.
“I feel her hunger. Don’t you?”
“So many singers and dancers are hungry—”
“Not like that.”
After the final curtain fell and they spilled into the street, Kay turned to look at the marquee. A laborer on a ladder applied the last letters. “Rodgers and Hart,” it proclaimed: “A Connecticut Yankee.” Pride swelled in her heart. No matter how modest her part, she had contributed to a production that would inspire laughter and song throughout New York, perhaps the world.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JANUARY 1928
Kay visited George’s apartment almost daily. They improvised duets and composed side by side. She transcribed and took notes. He repaid her with companionship, love, and introductions. Sometimes she played a new tune or asked George’s opinion of a musical idea. Maybe that’s what friendship should be, mused Kay, still smarting from the loss of Edith and Marie and the Rubel Trio. Not a promise but an opportunity. Not a lifetime but a moment. Emotional expectation, after all, sometimes melted away in the hot sunshine of social mobility. “Listen to this one, George. Jimmy and I wrote this for Libby.”
“Who?”
“The singer. You introduced us. Connecticut Yankee, intermission?”
“Oh, sure. Her.”
“You thought she had a brilliant future.”
“Right,” he nodded. “Libby.”
Kay propped “Can’t We Be Friends?” on the piano and played the intro as a solo in Gershwin’s style. “I thought it was sweet and uplifting. But Jimmy came up with this sad lyric.” And she sang in her dusky voice:
I thought I’d found the man of my dreams,
Now, it seems, this is how the story ends:
He’s gonna turn me down and say, “Can’t we be friends?”
The song twisted through a few more verses, the metrically unbalanced lament of a spurned lover delivered on the loopy melody of a drunken nightingale. While she played, George’s valet Paul brought in the mail. She doubted that George was listening; he seemed too busy opening envelopes and reading letters. But when she finished playing he looked up. “Kay, that’s your best number yet. Libby’ll love it. It’ll fit her voice like a bathing suit.” He read a note and slipped it into his breast pocket. “Let’s grab a bite.” He fetched his hat. “Bring your song.”
They hailed a cab. George mumbled directions to the driver. In the back seat they jostled and bumped south and east and south again, music playing in their minds.
“Where are we going?”
He smiled.
The car bobbled and wove through cobblestone streets past Delancey, finally pulling to the curb in front of a coffee-and-sandwich establishment, Meier’s. As they stepped out and George paid the driver, a ragman was pulling a wooden wagon, calling out to prospective buyers. Men in ill-fitting suits and Stetson hats hurried up and down the sidewalk. A woman shouted from her open window to another woman across the street.
“It may not smell like honeysuckle,” said George. “More like garlic and brine. But this place makes me feel alive. Look at those kids.” A boy zoomed past on roller skates. “That could be me.” His eyes lingered on the roller skater until the boy disappeared around a corner. George opened the sandwich-shop door and escorted Kay in. The front window was steamy, the painted wood tables marred with pen-knifed initials.
“Jake, where you been?” The burly, balding man at the counter glanced up from the corned beef he was slicing. “Folks say being famous has turned your cup. That you’re so busy doing this and that, running here and there, Paris, London, all the fancy places, who needs the Lower East Side? They call you a genius, ’course it blows you up.”
George grinned. “Meier, this is Kay.”
Meier’s small eyes, set in a bloated face, took in her pearls, her hat, her silk dress. “Have a seat.” He waved them toward a bench.
“Jake?” asked Kay as they walked to a table.
“Jacob Gershowitz,” George told her. “Everyone has a birth name. I’m no exception.” They sat down. “Meier likes you.”
“I would never have guessed.”
George nodded, beaming. Kay leaned over the table and asked, low, “Why would you care?”
“Meier has a direct line to God. Don’t laugh. I could tell you stories. Without him, I’d be a nobody.”
“Someone like you could never be a nobody.”
George shook his head. “There are plenty of smart, hardworking musicians running around this town. Never insult Fortune, Kay. She’s the stage manager. We’re just lousy bit players.”
Meier brought two pastrami sandwiches. “Two pickles, half-done, lots of mustard, your way.”
Kay frowned at the pile of steaming meat in soggy rye bread. She raised it to her mouth and bit into it with resolve, losing meat and staining her face and han
ds. George chuckled and leaned forward to wipe her face with his napkin. He removed the top slice of rye from his sandwich and slathered extra mustard onto it. “You only live once, Kay. We’re all here on borrowed time, as Meier says. Enjoy the ride is what I’m saying.”
“Jimmy would never set foot in this place,” said Kay as she glanced around.
He followed her eyes. “Is that right. Ever heard of Eva Gauthier?” He wiped his hand with his napkin, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out an invitation.
“Who hasn’t?” asked Kay raising her eyebrows.
“Five years ago, before the Rhapsody, she sang a few of my numbers alongside Bartók and Schoenberg in the Aeolian Hall. You can imagine the uproar. A classical mezzo-soprano singing Gershwin! That’s what gave Paul Whiteman the idea for the Rhapsody.”
“It was Whiteman’s idea?” asked Kay.
“His idea. My music,” George reassured her. “I had two weeks to write it. Planned the whole thing on a train from Boston to New York.”
“Did you know it would be a masterpiece?”
“Sure,” he nodded. “I knew. But I didn’t know whether the world would know.”
Kay found his peculiar mixture of overweening confidence and humility—if that was what it was—positively dizzying. He handed her the card. “In honor of Monsieur Maurice Ravel,” it began. And scrawled in the margin: “George, do please join us. Ravel implored me to invite you. Can’t wait to see you, mon ami. Eva.”
“Out of all the girls that would sell their baby brother to attend this party on my arm,” said George, “you’re my pick.”
“Zowie, George. Ravel!” Kay stared at the invitation. She set it on the table and attacked Meier’s sandwich with renewed courage. As she did so, she smiled inwardly. An invitation to a private party honoring Maurice Ravel and a battle with this greasy sandwich. All in the same afternoon.
* * *
Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter was the eldest and wildest daughter of Lammot du Pont, one of the inventors of blasting powder and, as a result, one of the wealthiest men in America. She had run away from Delaware to New York, where she took pleasure in horse-racing, flying airplanes, dressing like a man in a suit, tie, and top hat, and flaunting her obsession with the singer Libby Holman. She derived glee from the flashes of celebrity hounds’ cameras and the venom of Sunday preachers and split her time between her concierged Upper East Side penthouse and her lover’s Lower East Side walk-up. Louisa answered the door in her pajamas. “George, what a treat, you rat!” She kissed him on both cheeks and called, “Libby, my love, company!”
“You remember Kay Swift,” said George.
“How could I not?” said Libby, emerging from her bathroom in a towel, hair dripping. She slipped off the towel, propped her foot on a chair, and dried her leg.
“Such an exhibitionist,” Louisa exclaimed.
“Who’s complaining?” said George.
“Don’t worry,” Libby reassured her lover. “The garden may be in bloom, but the gate’s locked. Only you have the key, darling.”
Louisa turned back to George and Kay. “What’s the occasion?”
“You got a piano here?” asked George.
Wiping down her other leg, Libby shook her head. “Landlord forbids it. But Louisa knows her way around a guitar fretboard.” George nodded to Kay, who handed Louisa her hand-written sheet music for “Can’t We Be Friends?”
“Just write down the chords, will you, darling? We’ll give it a shot.” Louisa fetched a pen and paper, headed to the bedroom to grab her handmade Martin guitar, and sat on a chair to tune it while Kay, at the dining table, jotted down the chords.
“You’re slightly sharp,” commented Kay.
“How do you know?” asked Louisa. There was no tuning fork or piano at hand.
“Perfect pitch,” said George, pointing to Kay with his thumb.
Louisa retuned.
Libby looked at the sheet music and hummed the melody. Minutes later, still naked, Libby serenaded them with Kay’s song while her pajama-clad lover plucked the chords. When they finished, Kay applauded. “That was lovely. What a voice!”
“What did I tell you?” said George, beaming.
Libby retreated to the bedroom. “They’ve cast me in The Little Show,” she called.
“That Dietz-Schwartz revue?” asked George, removing a pitcher of tea from the ice box.
“It won’t hit the stage for months, maybe a year. And I’m not exactly chuffed with the numbers they gave me.” Libby stepped back into the room wearing a tunic. “You mind if I hold onto your song?” she asked Kay.
“It’s yours!”
George poured iced tea for himself and Kay. “Lunch was salty,” he explained.
“Maybe Dietz and Schwartz will switch things around,” said Libby looking at Kay’s music on the table.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier presented herself as French. Craving continental sophistication, America swallowed her pretentions without a burp. She wore Javanese robes that recalled Claude Debussy’s fascination with the music of Bali and decorated her New York apartment in belle époque opulence, with Lautrec and Mucha lithographs.
Maurice Ravel, who actually was French, dressed like an American businessman in a natty suit. A small, wiry man with an oversized head, he begged George to sit at the Pleyel grand and play the Rhapsody. George spliced together two handfuls of rapid passages and mixed in a few rags and show tunes. Ravel observed George’s fingers like a cat studying a fly. To Kay he commented: “I must say I find his technique astonishing.”
“That’s because it isn’t a technique at all,” said Kay. “It’s more like a seizure.”
Ravel sipped his wine. “Precisely.”
With uncharacteristic self-restraint, George yielded the keyboard after only a quarter hour. “Why don’t you play something for us, Kay?”
By way of reply, Kay turned to Eva. “May I have the honor of accompanying you, Miss Gauthier?”
“I would be delighted!” replied the singer.
From Eva’s towering bookshelves Kay removed a song she had studied with George, Ravel’s “Deux mélodies hébraïques.”
“Ah,” commented the composer. “This one has earned me the hatred of many nationalists in France. Their, how do you say, detestation is my pride.”
Kay sat at the piano. Eva sang Kaddisch and L’énigme éternelle in her resonant low range. Everyone applauded and the two ladies curtsied.
During dessert with the man generally considered the greatest living composer, Kay found him down-to-earth, contrary to the stereotype of the proud, detached Frenchman. “I am more Basque than French, you see. The French are not fond of me, I’m afraid, especially since I refused their Légion d’honneur. Even Erik Satie, whom I had promoted, attacked me.”
Kay wiped a dab of crème pâtissière from her lips. “Why did you refuse it?”
“I oppose all forms of nationalism.”
“Hey, I have a notion,” said George. “Duke Ellington’s lighting up the Cotton Club tonight. Remember, I told you about him at Le Belvédère?”
“Certainly.”
“What do you say we hop over there?”
“Avec plaisir,” said Ravel. “I would love to.”
* * *
Duke Ellington’s music saturated the Cotton Club and oozed through its doors and windows. Saxophones and bass clarinets leaped and fell in squiggly parallel motion; a muted wa-wa trumpet reached high for the melody and then toppled down; a banjo strummed the rhythm; the Duke chimed at the piano.
Maurice Ravel paused at the entrance to take it all in: the flappers hopping about; the “downtown men,” bankers and lawyers, wearing monocles, with watch chains dangling across their chests, at backgammon tables puffing cigars; the women slouching, twisting, laughing, sipping Rittenhouse Rye or Sweet Vermouth, displaying their calves and thighs.
George introduced the French composer to the proprietor, who did not seem to
recognize Ravel’s name. Owney Madden escorted them to a corner table and ordered drinks on the house. “Tell the Duke to swing by during his break,” George instructed Owney.
Ravel concentrated on the music, watching the players. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “You must understand, my dear Gershwin, what we are witnessing here—you, the Duke, your friends—it is new, it is brilliant, it is… how do you say?” he searched for the word, looking up at the lamps. “Incandescent.”
Ravel’s words astonished Kay. She had been taught to worship at the altar of European music, and here Europe’s greatest living composer was expressing admiration for the American music of George Gershwin and Duke Ellington, both largely self-taught.
“Maurice,” said George, “ever since I met you, even before, I’ve had this nagging idea.”
“Yes?”
“Do you take students?”
“A few.”
The waiter brought their drinks.
“Here’s what I’m getting at,” pursued George. “Do you think it might be possible… Could I study with you? A few months. Maybe six. Your place, mine, wherever.”
Ravel laughed. “My dear Gershwin, why should I endeavor to turn you into a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate you?”
“I sop up influences from everywhere,” said George. “That doesn’t make me not me.”
“All I can teach is style,” insisted Ravel. “You already have style, which is a far greater achievement than mere technique.”
“Right. But I’m sure if you let me dig in your tool chest, I could find a few useful gadgets.”
“They say the best teacher in France, for Americans, is Nadia Boulanger,” Ravel conceded.
“Well can you refer me to her?” On the table, George clutched Kay’s hand, perhaps to console her. He knew she yearned to be his teacher, and that she would balk at the prospect of his leaving the country again.
Ravel waved the waiter over and asked for a pen and paper. On Cotton Club letterhead, he wrote the date and “New York.” When he finished he handed the missive to Kay, who translated. “My dear Nadia,” she read aloud:
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