Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  He applauded as he never had before. The public reaction was more restrained. Most of the audience, surmised Jimmy as he looked at the other parents, was not convinced this kind of music held a legitimate place in the Finch School.

  In the lobby after the show Andrea seemed surprised and thrilled to see him. “Daddy!” She ran to his arms and hugged him. “Oh, Daddy. You heard it all?”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Jimmy. “It was masterful. I would wager a penny you will not say no to ice cream.”

  “Let’s get a banana split, Daddy.” Andrea took his hand. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so glad you came.”

  They walked out to the street. Whatever should happen between Kay and me, I shall always have this moment, thought Jimmy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  With two weeks to wander Paris until her booked return, Kay explored the fragrant cheese and flower displays of Les Halles, the city’s central market. The butchers’ shops, where whole pheasants and pigs dangled from overhead ropes. The singsong calls of the vendors.

  She climbed the steps to Montmartre, passed painters at their easels, and dined alone in a café of the Place du Tertre listening to a mournful chanteuse bewailing her heartbreak. She sat on a stone bench in the Parc Monceau finishing the novel Pauline Heifetz had given her.

  Thus, one entire day.

  The next morning she was chewing a crêpe suzette in a sidewalk cafe in the Rue Mouffetard when she realized: it was still last night in New York. Hours ago—probably around two in the morning, Paris time—her Andrea had played Gershwin’s “Liza” in front of a privileged audience.

  Kay had come all this way to meet George and had failed to find him. She had missed her daughter’s début, and for what? She washed down her disappointment with cidre breton. She closed her eyes and focused as keenly as she could: Andrea, I’m with you, darling. Mommy is with you. I missed your concert and I love you and I am with you.

  * * *

  That night, with nothing better to do, she visited the Folies-Bergère, a cabaret music hall in the ninth arrondissement where Josephine Baker, a dancer from St. Louis known as La Perle Noire, The Black Pearl, performed a savage burlesque clothed only in a mock-African skirt made of bananas. A place George might well visit.

  Beautiful and unchained, she twittered like a vireo. Her disciplined exuberance, the way she simultaneously expressed freedom and professionalism through her swivels, twists, tail-wags, reminded Kay of all she loved about home. Miss Baker’s French audience cheered, whistled, smacked their tables, and reached for her thighs and breasts.

  Later, Kay was sitting in a bistro listening to the rain and sipping a glass of raspberry eau-de-vie, wishing George was there, when Miss Baker strolled in with a half-dozen couturiers, poets, and business advisors. No longer wrapped in her banana skirt but in a pale-blue silk evening gown and a big hat adorned with ostrich plumes, she strutted to a table at the center of the front window and ordered une grande assiette de moules à la crème et au Pernod pour tout le monde. Her flatterers and hangers-on talked at the same time, gesticulating and raising their voices.

  Kay drained her snifter and rose to leave. As she was about to exit, her eyes caught those of the starlet and she decided to step over to her table. “I enjoyed your show tremendously, Miss Baker.”

  “Ah, une américaine!” warbled Josephine Baker. “Thank you, sweetheart. All alone here, in Paris?”

  Kay nodded, smiling.

  “Where are you from?”

  “New York,” said Kay.

  “Come, sit here, ma belle, join us for some moules, will you?” With a wave, Josephine ordered another plate for Kay. “I do so miss New York.”

  Kay sat down, glancing at Josephine’s devoted followers. “But you’re a star here.”

  “Yes, I’m a star! I give them what they want. La Bonne Sauvage, they call me. Do you know what that means?” She punctuated her question with a full-throated laugh. Despite their poor understanding of English, her guests joined her in laughter.

  As they dined, Josephine’s friends chattered in French, much of it too fast for Kay to grasp. Occasionally Josephine broke off her conversation to respond to something one of them had said, triggering more laughter, and then resumed with Kay.

  “You explain it, Emile,” she ordered a friend who wore a goatee and a monocle. “What does it mean, in France, my being une vedette and all that. Tell her just like you told me, mon chéri.”

  “It means,” said Emile in his Gallic accent, “that mademoiselle must behave on stage like a—how do you say?—like a singe.”

  Josephine laughed again.

  “A monkey?” suggested Kay.

  “Yes, a monkey with a playful and innocent disposition. A primitive,” said Emile.

  “Always making funny faces, jumping around, all that circus stuff,” added Miss Baker, crossing her eyes. “You got to give your audience what they expect. And what the French want is to feel supérieur. That’s really what this is all about. N’est-ce pas, Emile?”

  “Eh, oui,” agreed Emile dourly.

  Is that what Chopin was doing, giving his audience what they wanted? wondered Kay. Or Beethoven? And then she thought, maybe that was precisely what they were doing! “But in the States,” she said aloud, “they wouldn’t even let you onstage, would they?”

  “Some places would, some wouldn’t,” said Josephine. “But home is home, darling.”

  “We do long for home, don’t we,” confirmed Kay with a wistful smile.

  “Never forget that,” said Josephine. “Never forget where home is. No matter how far away you get.”

  Kay nodded, the words echoing in her mind. Where home is.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Upon returning from Paris, she found a letter from George.

  Dearest Kay,

  Today I wandered through the Buttes-Chaumont, a lovely park far from the usual tourist haunts, feeling lonely and thinking of you…

  The date on the letter revealed that she was, in fact, nearby. But not quite near enough.

  She rode to George’s West Side residence, where Paul Mueller greeted her with a warm smile but told her, “I’m afraid Mister Gershwin is indisposed, Misses Warburg.”

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, concerned.

  “A terrible headache. The doctor saw him. He prescribed rest. And solitude. No work for a few days. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Please, Paul, let me see him.”

  Paul finally relented and allowed Kay to climb the stairs and see George sleeping. He looked pale. She kissed his forehead. He smiled without awaking.

  Just a headache, she told herself. Of course George would have headaches. The man was under so many obligations. She yearned to be his pressure-release valve, if only she could. She felt worried and helpless.

  Sitting in the back of her chauffeured car, rolling home, she made a decision. If all her yearning, all the scales and arpeggios she had practiced for so many years, all the music she had composed, and all her efforts to find happiness had led to… wherever she was… then perhaps it was time to visit Jimmy’s psychoanalyst.

  * * *

  The cramped Upper East Side office of Dr. Gregory Zilboorg: Persian rugs; a sleigh-style ebony divan with paisley cushions; floor-to-ceiling asymmetrical bookshelves; and, scattered among the tomes, faceless sculptures in ivory and obsidian. Although he did not advertise it, Dr. Zilboorg specialized in the psychoanalysis of the wealthy and the famous. What fascinated him was not his patients’ celebrity or money but their megalomania and narcissism, the personality traits that drove them to succeed or, perhaps, resulted from success. A diminutive man with a round face, a receding hairline, and an exuberant moustache, he viewed personality through the triple lens of fantasy, sexuality, and religion. He maintained that the role of the psychoanalyst was not merely to probe his patients’ unconscious fears and motivations but to challenge their defense mechanisms. He wore costly silk-and-wool clothes in a slovenly
manner, with the jacket falling off his shoulder, the shirt collar protruding above the jacket collar on one side, and his wire-frame glasses perched askew.

  Because Jimmy had been consulting with him for years, he knew a great deal about Kay before she met him. He could hardly help seeing her, initially, through Jimmy’s narrative. Nor was Zilboorg reluctant to discuss her weak maternal instinct, her emotional instability, and her mutable libido. Whatever that meant.

  In his Ukrainian accent he urged her to pay attention to her dreams and to recount them in detail while reclining on his divan. It did not matter whether her descriptions were accurate since any associations and feelings that would bubble up through her words would hold as much meaning as the literal content of her dreams, if she allowed herself to relax.

  She closed her eyes and remembered a dream. “I’m about to board an ocean liner. Massive, gray. It’s night and the docks are crowded. Someone is singing somewhere. I feel this overwhelming sensation of dread.”

  Zilboorg asked Kay to free-associate about the melody, the singer’s voice, and the ship’s color. He also encouraged her to digress. She rummaged through memories of other gray objects including her father’s typewriter and the dirigible that had floated above her mother’s funeral. She remembered Al Jolson’s gray jacket at the Cotton Club. “He made George famous, Jolson did, with ‘Swanee.’ ”

  “Yes, and?”

  “And what?”

  “ ‘Swanee’?” said Doctor Zilboorg.

  “ ‘Swanee.’ George…”

  Zilboorg nodded.

  “Why do you want to know more about George? I thought this was about me.”

  “It is about you. Your feelings. Your obsessions. Please, free-associate. ‘Swanee.’ ”

  Kay closed her eyes. “We were at a party. George and I. We met a jazzman. Luckey Roberts. They talked about ‘Swanee.’ Jolson’s blackface makeup, which Luckey found offensive.”

  “Blackface,” said Zilboorg, nodding. “Is it wrong, do you believe it is wrong, for a person to borrow a mask, an identity, that is not his or her birthright?”

  “I don’t know,” reflected Kay. “Cultures borrow. Cultures enrich each other. But it can lead to misunderstandings. Hurt feelings. I guess one has to be cautious.”

  “And you,” observed Zilboorg, “a Christian living in a Jewish world. Not just your husband, not just Gershwin, but so many of your acquaintances. The music you gravitate to these days. Broadway. Jolson, Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers, Kern. Is there not a sense of cultural confusion?”

  She looked at him, trying to understand the implication.

  “Are you not wearing blackface every day?” asked Zilboorg.

  Kay shook her head. “I’m not really Christian. And Jimmy isn’t Jewish.”

  “We are not talking merely about belief,” said Zilboorg, “but about history. Cultural history, it is passed down through generations. Just like genetic history.”

  Doctor Zilboorg was starting to sound like Reverend Ganter. She sat up on the divan. “Maybe you’re talking about your own identity problem.” She glanced at the Byzantine icon on a bookshelf.

  “I don’t think so, Misses Warburg.” Zilboorg folded his hands on his lap. “Let’s get back to that dream about the boat. Surely your id is telling you something.”

  Her identity, as she saw it, was not her most pressing issue. Instead she talked about her feeling of inadequacy as a mother. “I want what’s best for my girls, of course. We are providing them with excellent caretakers. All and the same…” She finished her sentence with a shake of her head.

  Zilboorg nodded. “You were raised in one segment of society, with its norms of parenting and so forth. Now you find yourself in another, where you don’t feel quite at home.”

  Kay thought about this. “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “And where does Mister Gershwin fit in? More specifically, your obsession with him?”

  “I suppose my feeling about him is a little crazy,” she acknowledged. “The intensity of it. The way they hit me, out of the blue—out of the Rhapsody in Blue. Totally unexpected.”

  “And unreciprocated?”

  “What we share is unique, and George knows it. But he’s cautious about commitment.”

  “What kind of commitment are you looking for?”

  She removed a cigarette from her purse. “Commitment.”

  He leaned forward to light it. “So you have decided to quit Jimmy?”

  She puffed. “Jimmy would never allow it.”

  “You don’t need his permission.” Doctor Zilboorg relaxed back into his seat. “You could go to Reno. In Reno a woman can get a divorce just for asking. And for a fee of course. I am telling you this so your decision is not a compelled one. But I am not suggesting you go to Reno. The best solution in a chicken coop involves breaking as few eggs as possible.”

  “I’m tired of the chicken coop. I need the sky.”

  “But are you not rather talking about flying directly into another coop?” asked Zilboorg. “Jimmy loves you very much.”

  “There’s love, and there’s love,” said Kay. Zilboorg waited for more. “On the one hand, there’s the emotion,” Kay explained. “And on the other, what people call ‘bonds of loyalty.’ ”

  “Ideally,” said Zilboorg, “marriage transforms the first kind into the second kind. But perhaps marital union is not the kind of love you expected.”

  “Maybe I was expecting something that doesn’t exist,” said Kay. “But what can you do? Young women don’t decide what to expect. Their expectations are shaped by others. They’re told stories. Stories written by men. Passed down through our culture, which is shaped by men. ‘Cinderella.’ ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ Give your heart to a prince. Everything will be all right.”

  “Jimmy is the father of your children,” said Zilboorg. “If you left Jimmy for George, might you not be exchanging one highly driven egotist, incapable of sexual loyalty, for another?”

  “It’s not their egotism,” said Kay. “I don’t hold that against them. In fact, I find it attractive. And I don’t think egotism necessarily implies disloyalty, either.”

  Zilboorg adjusted in his chair. “Where does egotism come from? Where does ambition come from?”

  “You make it sound like ambition is a disease.”

  “It is.”

  “Would you say I am ambitious?” asked Kay.

  “Let’s just say, you seem to be attracted to a certain kind of man.”

  “If my attraction for George, the fact that we share skills and interests, represents ambition, mea culpa,” said Kay.

  Zilboorg nodded. “You mirror each other.”

  “You bet we do.” Kay snuffed out her cigarette. Glancing at the clock, she saw that the session was over. It was time to go home. And not a minute too soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  APRIL 1929

  The Little Show hearkened back to the first works with which George Gershwin had been associated, prior to the development of the musical play: collections of vaudeville skits loosely sewn together. And although George now preferred to write songs and orchestral settings for larger works, stories that unfolded through an entire evening, he attended The Little Show, appearing in the empty seat at Kay’s left just before the curtain rose. Jimmy, seated at her right, noticed his arrival, smiled, and nodded. Despite everything, he harbored mixed feelings about George, admiring him intensely as a musician, somewhat less as a man.

  The production included a scene called The Still Alarm by George S. Kaufman, a soliloquy by the comedian Fred Allen, and the bittersweet ballad “Can’t We Be Friends?” by Kay Swift and Paul James. Libby Holman, in a strapless carmine dress, stood alone between the closed stage curtains and twittered like a lark. George squeezed her hand. This is your moment. The audience exploded. “Can’t We Be Friends?,” in Libby’s dulcet voice, drew them to their feet. Kay rose slowly, dazed. George clapped, shouted, and whistled. Jimmy grinned at his wife.

  That nig
ht the cast, the creators, and the producers flitted from one party to another. To celebrate with Kay and Jimmy, Julie Glaenzer invited George S. Kaufman, Mark Connelly, Dottie Parker, Aleck Woollcott, and the rest of the gang, as well as the city’s dissolute mayor Jimmy Walker, to his apartment. Luckey Roberts, recommended to Glaenzer by Gershwin, bedazzled them at the piano.

  George shushed everyone for the toast. “Here’s to the two new crown princesses of New York City.” He held aloft his Mary Pickford. “Kay Swift and Libby Holman.” He glanced from one to the other, sipped, and added: “And to Kay’s terrific lyricist, Paul James.”

  Later, he introduced Kay and Jimmy to a slumped gentleman in a pin-striped suit. “Kay, Jimmy, or should I say Paul, I’d like you to meet Max Dreyfus, my publisher.”

  Dreyfus removed the cigar from his mouth. “That number, ‘Can’t We Be Friends?,’ was the showstopper. Why haven’t I heard of you before? Talent like yours, it’s no London drizzle, it’s a thunder shower. You’re gonna make a ruckus in this town. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” said Kay.

  “With your permission I’d like to publish ‘Can’t We Be Friends?’ Can’t promise anything but I smell a hit.” Kay wondered how he could smell anything past the stench of his cigar smoke.

  She turned to Jimmy. “I never agree to anything right away,” said Jimmy. “But yes.” Dreyfus shook his hand, and then Kay’s. “We have other songs,” said Jimmy. “In fact, we’re planning a full-scale show. It’s called Fine and Dandy.”

  Dreyfus removed the cigar from his mouth and wiped a speck of tobacco from his lower lip. “Fine and Dandy. Nice title. Come demo your material and we’ll take it from there.” Apparently he had no idea Kay had already done so.