“Mister Schuyler, I read your essay, The Negro Art Hokum,” Van Vechten gushed as Schuyler entered. “I thought it perfectly brilliant even as I took exception to every word.”
“Thank you,” Schuyler said. And then he turned to the woman at his side. “This is my wife, Jody.”
The woman who offered her hand, not to Van Vechten but to Gershwin, wore a rose silk dress trimmed in jade green. But her most astonishing trait was her skin color. Although her husband was Negro, she was as white as Biloxi sand. Kay marveled at the fact that they had found a reverend or magistrate to consecrate such a union.
In all, twenty-seven people celebrated the Hebrews’ crossing of the Sinai at Rose and Morris Gershwin’s table that year. Over unleavened bread, wine, chicken soup with matzo balls, brisket, and stewed carrots they exchanged reflections on the Jewish people’s memory of slavery and the trauma of colored folk in America, whom Rose called darkies.
“To this day, our bondage in Egypt remains the foundation of our identity,” observed Ira. “That’s what we share with American Negroes. And that is one damn powerful bond.”
He looked to Ellington for a response, an affirmation of this putative affinity but it was the poet, Langston Hughes, who spoke up. “I just don’t know. Maybe the Hebrews were slaves but that was so long ago. So many centuries of strife and cunning in the ghettos of Europe. And in between, the rise of capitalism. The Jewish success in business and entertainment.” He glanced from Ira to George. “Whereas with colored people, it’s a gaping fresh wound. We still have the smell of the cotton field in our nostrils, the sting of the whip on our backs, the wails of our women in our ears.”
George nodded, tasting the soup.
“What you’re saying is, you don’t care a whit for my patronizing balderdash,” said Ira.
“Precisely,” said Langston Hughes.
“I believe Sigmund Freud has a term for it,” suggested Zora Hurston, who had studied anthropology at Barnard. “It’s called projective identification. The Jews want to see their reflection in the Negro. They, or many of them, want to play the role of sympathetic benefactor.”
“I guess the question is, why?” asked Duke Ellington, looking at George as he sipped his matzo ball soup.
“Maybe to prove we’re morally superior,” said Ira, tasting the soup. “Since the Christians have always argued the opposite.”
“There’s plenty of projective identification to go around,” said George Schuyler. “In fact, there’s enough of it going on within both the Aframerican and the Jewish groups. In what sense was the slave experience your personal experience, Ira? Or yours, Langston? How about a peek at those stripes on your back?”
No one answered at once. Then everyone voiced their opinions at the same time, or so it seemed.
“By your logic, we colored Americans have no distinct culture at all,” Ellington told Schuyler. “And no possibility of one.”
“Precisely,” agreed Schuyler.
“The lore gets passed down,” said Zora Hurston. “Isn’t that an inheritance?”
“The lore—and the music—get reinvented, too,” said George.
“That doesn’t make them less authentic,” said Zora.
“Not at all,” he agreed.
“I believe that lore you refer to,” Schuyler told Zora, “comes from one sector of Aframerican society. My family never dwelled in the South. I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and upstate New York. A portion of my blood is Bavarian. Others of my forebears hail from the West Indies or directly from Africa. I may appreciate the blues but it remains as foreign to my experience as Tahitian conch-shell-and-nose-flute music. To imply that my skin color connects me to slavery is just as racialist as to claim that Mister Gershwin’s earlobe or nose shape ties him to medieval usurers.”
Gershwin nodded. Fascinated with the Adolph Hitler phenomenon, he was aware of the Nazis’ attempts to define the Jewish race in terms of phenotype.
“But when white folk look at you,” Langston Hughes told Schuyler, “they don’t see Bavaria. They see Africa.”
Shuyler shook his head. “I refuse to hand them the honor of deciding who I am.”
“If only it were that simple,” said Hughes.
“All right, shush all of you,” ordered Morris Gershwin in his Russian accent. “It’s time for the third bracha.”
“The fourth, papa,” Ira corrected him.
“The third, the fourth,” Morris waved away the interruption. “Either way, another glass of wine.” He held up his cup, intoned a Hebrew prayer, and swallowed most of the wine in one gulp the way a Cossack might imbibe a shot of vodka before jumping onto his horse.
Through all this, Kay had contented herself with listening. But when George’s mother started slicing the brisket, she touched her arm. “Please, Rose, let me help.”
Rose jerked back as if slapped. “What, I’m too old to slice the most tender beef in New York? Is my hand shaking?” She held out her hand.
“I didn’t mean to suggest that,” said Kay.
Rose resumed slicing, mouth pursed in discontent.
Kay looked at George. “What did I do?” she mouthed.
George shook his head, smiling.
Later, as she and George were about to leave, Kay heard Rose whisper to her son. “She’s a nice girl. She dresses well. But for you?” Rose shook her head.
As soon as the door closed, Kay turned to George. “How dare she say I’m not for you? What does she know about me? I hardly piped a word!”
“She knows you’re not Jewish.” He escorted her up the stairs.
“Can’t you stand up to that, George? Can’t you tell her it’s not her decision?”
“Kay, take my word: there’s no point trying.”
Kay believed him. What was the point of confronting Rose, as long as she remained married to James Warburg? But to leave Jimmy would be to break up her family and sacrifice her lifestyle. For what? In the hope that George would settle down and, against his mother’s protests, propose to her? How likely was that?
In bed that night, she asked: “George, if I were to get divorced, would you consider—?”
But he only mumbled something and turned onto his side.
* * *
During the Passover seder, George had spoken about his plans for Porgy. Zora Neale Hurston shared his interest in the book, and mentioned that she would be presenting a discourse about it, “from a psychological point of view.” A few weeks later Kay and George located her apartment in Harlem, which was packed with neighbors, Columbia faculty, and students. “DuBose Heyward’s fascination with the Gullahs,” said Zora, “is of a piece with Carl Van Vechten’s obsession with Harlem. And George Gershwin’s,” she added, noticing them entering.
“For context, you can think of Eugene Delacroix’s North African period, Gustav Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, Debussy’s use of modalities derived from Indonesian gamelan music, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. All these works spring directly from the Romantic fantasy of the primitive, which one can trace back to Rousseau. This fantasy incorporates two opposite poles of feeling: admiration and horror. Admiration for the innocence, freshness, and authenticity of primitive experience; revulsion at its cruelty and barbarity. But the underlying theme is the ego’s fascination with the id.”
Standing with George at the back of the room, Kay remembered her conversation with Josephine Baker. She understood that Zora’s approach to the subject of Primitivism differed from Josephine’s, just as Josephine’s differed from the view that Luckey Roberts had expressed at Fats Waller’s rent party. All were concerned, however, with how white people judged and misrepresented Negro culture, or how the self-described civilized world understood cultures they viewed as savage or pristine.
The problem, Kay knew, was crucial to composers like Gershwin, who thought of music as a means of communication between ethnic communities. If America was a melting pot, or rather a stewing pot that preserved the disti
nct flavors of all its cultures, and if that was what made America unique, then American music must celebrate it.
“Naturally the subjects of this fantasy,” continued Zora, “be they Indonesian or Negro, fail to see themselves in these Romantic fictions and resent the colonial mentality that interprets them in a symbolic manner. I propose however that we evaluate Porgy not on its merits as anthropology, but as a novel that examines what is universal in the human condition through its detailed construction of a microcosmos. Let us start from the premise that no story is real in the sense of literal, but that great stories are very real indeed in the way that fantasies—and nightmares—are real. Perhaps more real, indeed, from the point of view of the psyche than reality.”
“Let’s hit the road,” George whispered to Kay.
“This is interesting, George!” she whispered back. “Besides, she’s your friend.”
But he turned to leave, and she followed, and Zora saw.
“My beef with intellectuals,” George explained in the back seat of the taxi, “is they pepper everything with references to other intellectuals, to prove their membership in the club.”
“You’re just expressing your feeling of inadequacy because you haven’t read Rousseau,” said Kay. “Admit it!”
His eyes crinkled with amusement. “Hey, let’s hop out for a cream pie. Driver,” he leaned forward, “drop us at the Café Edison, will you?”
“You got it, bud,” said the driver.
Later, over key lime pie in the Café Edison, she tried again. “Zora’s right, you know. The same way my mother, as much as she came to love Jimmy, couldn’t understand the experience of his family—their history in Europe, how it still affects them—we can’t really appreciate the legacy of slavery, how it affects people like Josephine Baker or Duke Ellington. The Duke can play the Cotton Club, but his own family can’t sit in the audience.”
George smiled. “If only my grandparents had suffered like Jimmy’s.” His smile vanished and he gripped her hand on the table. “Kay, we’ve got to get Porgy off the ground.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
George began planning for the production of his as-yet-unwritten opera. He and Kay had visualized it on the stage of the Metropolitan. However, there was one glaring issue that had to be addressed at once.
Paul Mueller drove them down to Fifty-Third Street to meet with the Opera’s general manager. The rendezvous took place at the end of the working day. The cigar lounge setting that the general manager chose was dim as a cave. Although women were not allowed, an exception was made for George Gershwin’s secretary.
A tall, portly gentleman with an upturned waxed moustache, a matching wool vest under his long black jacket, and a heavy silver watch chain across his belly, the Italian-accented general manager explained the Metropolitan Opera’s ban on Negroes. “This has nothing to do with my personal views, or with those of any member of the board.” He offered George a cigar and started to offer one to Kay, then thought better of it. She lit a cigarette. “It is about tradition,” the general manager added. “Audience expectations. Comfort levels.”
“Comfort levels?” asked George incredulously. “How about challenging those comfort levels? Changing those expectations? How about making people squirm? Doesn’t Wozzeck do that? Not to mention Moses und Aron…”
“Have you seen those operas performed at the Met?” asked Giulio with rhetorical equanimity, leaning back in his seat.
George glanced at Kay. “Great to see you, Giulio. We don’t need to take more of your time. Thanks for the cigar.”
Giulio tapped his ash into a crystal bowl. “There is a possible compromise. I would urge you to consider lampblack. The audience likes that.”
“The entire cast, in blackface?” asked George.
“Why not?” Giulio spread his hands. “Now that would be a novelty we could all live with.”
“One I can do without.” George rose. “Come on, Kay.”
As they rode uptown to George’s apartment their conversation turned south to the show-business district. “We have no choice then but to produce Porgy in a Broadway theater,” said George.
“How will Broadway audiences react to that style of singing?” asked Kay. “Nonstop music, curtain-up to curtain-down? A tragic ending?” Broadway shows were supposed to end in a joyous, tout-ensemble finale. It was the tried-and-true formula. It worked.
“How will they react? Moved, hopefully,” said George.
“And then, there’s the cost,” said Kay. They both knew that Porgy, written and staged as George conceived it, with a large cast and a full orchestra, would be far more expensive to produce than any previous Broadway production.
“In our line of work, we take chances,” said George.
* * *
Over the years some of his shows had lost money. Others had earned beyond expectation. Some songs flailed initially and later soared. Others leapt skyward, looped around, and plummeted down. Such was the nature of the arts.
During the ensuing days and weeks George and Kay discussed Porgy with representatives of the Theatre Guild, individual theater owners, and theater managers. George was the most celebrated Broadway composer, both domestically and internationally, and they all longed to work with him. But in the end, if he insisted on staging Porgy as an opera, he would have to guarantee thirty percent of the budget.
“All my liquid assets,” sighed George. “And then some.”
“We have to scale it down,” said Kay, “or produce it elsewhere.”
George shook his head.
Returning to George’s apartment after a third meeting with the Theatre Guild, they found the playwright Guy Bolton waiting outside. He had written the books for several successful musicals, including a few of George’s. Although Guy’s parents were American, he had been raised in England and he exhibited his European patina like his gold-and-ruby tiepin, to establish his posh bona fides. At the same time, he offered a wink to those who detected his posturing, as if to imply you and I know it’s silly, don’t we, old chap. The whole culture game, just a socially acceptable way to snuffle each other’s behinds like bloodhounds confirming hierarchy.
Dapper in his linen jacket with shoulder pads, his sky-blue shirt with a maroon and yellow club tie, and high-waisted, pleated, tapered pants, Guy kissed Kay’s hand. “Heading off to sunny California. Palm trees, sand, starlets. Stopped to wave adios before hopping onto the transcontinental railway. And…”
They climbed to George’s apartment and settled in the living room.
“And, well, I thought I might give your wrestling arm a gentle twist,” Guy told George.
George glanced at Kay.
“We’re setting up a picture,” Guy resumed. “Top names, Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell. You did catch Seventh Heaven.” It was a question, posed as a statement.
“Missed it,” said George.
“Colossal box office. Sensational, actually. And with your music, and Fox’s new Movietone technology, Delicious is bound to surpass it.”
“Ah.” George folded his hands on his lap.
Bolton leaned forward. “Crossed-star antics aboard a luxury cruise. That’s the hook—the boat,” he said in a low voice, as if divulging a world-changing secret. “What do they all dream of? The farm wife, the telephone girl, the factory man. Transatlantic voyages.” And leaned back again. “And all this, over an orchestral setting, start to finish. Never been done before. You can deliver serious, romantic, upbeat, whimsical, all up to you, George.”
“Guy,” said George, “I know zero about movies. The culture, the art form, the process. It’s thick as mud to me.”
“There’s gold in that thar mud, Georgie!” said Bolton in a mock-Western twang. “We’ll tweak the story around your composition. The players are stupendous. So what do you say, old pal? Fourteen weeks of Eden and you come back pockets bursting. Opulent lodgings in one of the canyons,” continued Bolton. “Tennis, great jazz at the Cocoanut Grove, and…” He glanced at Kay,
then back at George. “Well, perks galore.”
“Tell me, Guy,” said George. “Does this production depend on my participation?”
“Would I pressure you like that?” Bolton smiled. His gold premolar flashed.
Guy stayed for a snack of cold smoked fish, onions, and cream cheese. George played him a song he had written for Porgy, a number he called “My Man’s Gone Now.”
“This is staggering, George. Phenomenal.” Bolton slapped him on the collarbone. “Not one to disappoint, are you.” He shook his head, half smiling. “An American opera!”
After he left, George and Kay fooled around at the piano. Finally he sighed, “This one, I may have to take. For Porgy’s sake.”
Kay mixed a Gin Rickey for herself and poured a glass of Chivas for him. “Do you really need to be gone fourteen weeks?”
He answered with a bluesy piano improvisation.
* * *
While Kay read through the music they had written the day before, George skimmed the mail. “That chord’s a little soggy,” he mentioned without looking up from the letter in his hand, or “let’s invert that.” She jotted the notation and moved on.
George opened another envelope. It was a request that he perform An American in Paris for a radio broadcast, after reading a short, scripted introduction. The remuneration offered was adequate but what George appreciated was the exposure.
He unsealed a letter from Paul Whiteman, asking George to perform in a movie he was producing about jazz. He set it aside, in the pile of mail that had to be answered.
A third letter was from Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and of the famous Concerts Koussevitzky series in Paris. Heralded as a bold champion of modern music, Koussevitzky had commissioned and performed works by Ravel, Prokofiev, Hindemith, and Stravinsky.
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