Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  The shiny, twin-prop Douglas DC-2 cut through the sky, a speck stretching into a blotch, and descended in a rumble and a thunder, its nose raised, its hind leg dangling, a giant three-footed goose. The smartly uniformed airport crew wheeled a metal stairway to the door and George stepped out before the other passengers, beaming in a dark cashmere coat, toting a leather suitcase. Ira followed in a camel coat and a burgundy scarf. Journalists’ flashes popped. Reporters shouted questions about the flight and how it felt to be back on solid ground.

  George’s amber complexion testified to hours spent on tennis courts and in the rear seat of a chauffeured Packard 906 convertible. Ira looked pale and greenish. At the foot of the stairs George set down his case. “Give us a minute, fellas,” he waved to the photographers, who ceased snapping long enough for him to hug Kay.

  They held each other until Ira pulled up his shirt cuff to glance at his wristwatch. The gesture was rhetorical since his timepiece was still set for California. “Come on already, it’s cold in New Jersey,” he grumbled.

  As Kay’s driver pulled into traffic, Ira apologized. “Sorry, Kay. The flight was noisy and bumpy and my stomach’s still in my neck. Besides which, let me tell you, California didn’t suit me one bit. Nothing there. No Broadway, no opera, no nothing. The Sahara. All anyone can blab about is B.O., by which they mean box office.”

  “How’d the show turn out?” asked Kay.

  Ira loosened his tie and rolled down the window. “Delicious? It was… atrocious.”

  “According to the papers, you alligators had a time of it. Splashing around in Greta Garbo’s swimming pool, horseback riding with Douglas Fairbanks, shopping with Paulette Goddard.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Kay, honest,” said George shifting in his seat. “It was, and it wasn’t.” He swung his arm around her.

  “When George wasn’t laid up with a headache, he was sulking,” explained Ira.

  “These movie-biz twits, they’ve got tin ears,” said George. “The big cheeses do, anyway. But they hold the purse strings and they’re convinced that makes them Toscanini.”

  “They think of music,” elaborated Ira, “the way you might think of…” He looked out the window, searching for a metaphor. “A diamond choker on a work horse.”

  She smiled.

  “And what they did to my Second Rhapsody!” groused George. “They chopped it up like confetti and glued it back together. They should be hanged for that alone. Shouldn’t they, Ira.”

  “You got what you needed,” Ira reminded him. “The Second Rhapsody is yours. You can return it to its virginal condition, dress it up, hand it to Koussevitzky, and début it in Boston, no apologies to anyone. Then you can perform it again at Lewisohn Stadium, and wherever else you like.”

  “And you got what Porgy needed,” added Kay. “Wasn’t that the point?”

  “Yeah, yeah, great,” agreed George. “We hauled off the cabbage. Just like farm laborers.”

  Their car turned into West 103rd Street. Looking out the window at his neighborhood market’s sidewalk display, George smiled.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  AUGUST 16, 1932

  The Lewisohn Stadium stretched from 136th Street to 138th Street and from Amsterdam Avenue to Convent Avenue. Seventeen thousand tickets had been sold, a record-breaking audience. Thousands of spectators were turned away.

  The day before the performance, George had been so ill that he thought he might have to call it off. He lay in bed unable to talk or even turn his head on the pillow without nausea and pain. Kay called his doctor, who knocked at the door, took George’s pulse, and prescribed rest and aspirin. None of which seemed to help.

  She spent that afternoon and night with him feeling helpless. George was unable even to swallow a spoonful of chicken soup. All Kay could do was to lie beside him.

  The morning of the show, the pain lifted. “You know something? All that pain was worth it,” said George. “It made me appreciate being alive.” He sipped his orange juice. “I feel reborn.”

  In the afternoon, Paul Mueller drove Kay, George, Ira, and Oscar Levant to the stage entrance through a cordoned-off back alley. Kay had never seen such a crowd, brilliantly lit with arc lamps, chattering and laughing. Other composers, of the serious ilk, might have shied away from such a blatantly commercial venue, which drew not only the wealthy and sophisticated but also the common men and women who swarmed the standing-room-only area. But Gershwin reveled in the adulation.

  Accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Oscar Levant delivered a sensitive and robust New York Concerto. “He plays the damn thing better than I do,” George marveled.

  “Far better,” agreed Kay. While George played the Concerto and everything else with a free, improvisatory flair, shifting tempos and adding or subtracting flourishes at will, Oscar attacked it with bravura and rigor, as he would a piece by Brahms.

  The orchestra followed with An American in Paris and then, as the audience cheered and whistled, George sauntered out to the stage, looking as graceful and dashing as ever despite his receding hairline. He bowed perfunctorily, sat at the piano, and released an energized Rhapsody in Blue as if letting a wild animal out of its cage. He followed with his Second Rhapsody, adapted from the long montage sequence he had composed for the movie Delicious and revised for Serge Koussevitzky. The spectators whistled, hollered, and stamped, demanding more and yet more. Looking at the crowd from the side of the stage, Kay pondered the phenomenon of mass hysteria, all this psychic energy focused on her beloved.

  Of course there were the melodies. The razzmatazz playing. But none of that explained the giddy emotion she was witnessing. What they heard in his music was a resounding statement about America, E pluribus unum. From the blues and spirituals and cantorial chant and hayseed fiddle playing and south-of-the-border rhythms, as well as the residue of European high culture, America could forge a sound all its own, accessible, addictive, and modern. What these people saw in George Gershwin was the personification of their dream: an immigrant’s son who had achieved wealth, American prosperity hammered in the factories of Tin Pan Alley, riveted with Pittsburgh steel. The child of an alien ethnicity who had not only mastered the techniques and fashions of European High Culture, but who had helped reinterpret that culture, chipping away its pretentions for a rugged New World. Because he dared to be uniquely and truly American, without apology, he had earned the esteem of European composers and playgoers in London and Paris.

  What Kay observed in that multitude of faces and heard in those cheers was not merely pride, but hope. Hope for a shared culture built on mutual respect. Richard Wagner had insisted that was the main purpose of art: to create and nurture the myths that fused a culture together. But Wagner had suffered from the European sickness. His vision of unified culture required the crushing dominance of one group to the exclusion of others.

  For days afterward, it seemed everyone in New York City was talking about the Lewisohn Stadium concert. Several music critics and composers, rising stars like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, now openly grumbled about the injustice of Gershwin’s fame. Their journalist-critic devotees echoed and amplified their gripes, without specific attribution. The New York Times noted that “critical opinion in many quarters expresses reservations as to Gershwin’s lack of technical resources” and called attention to “the generally self-conscious manner in which the young composer utilizes the popular rhythms of the day in the development of his themes.” The New York World offered a more nuanced, ambivalent appraisal: “Mister Gershwin makes the most gorgeous mistakes in orchestration.”

  Kay read this comment to George the morning after the show. He beamed. “That is the best compliment I ever received.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THANKSGIVING 1932

  Gershwin spent the holiday with Kay at Bydale savoring the success of his most recent Broadway show, Of Thee I Sing. Kay’s friend George S. Kaufman and his new writing partner Morrie Ryskind had scribed the book, an absurdi
st mockery of American politics with Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque lyrics by Ira. They had modeled the character of Wintergreen on Jimmy Walker, the affable, not-too-bright, regular-guy mayor of New York City whom George and Kay had met at the Cotton Club and at a few of Julie Glaenzer’s parties. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing Of Thee I Sing in the New York Times, wrote that the play was “funnier than government and not nearly so dangerous.” Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize against Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra, the Gershwin musical won, becoming the first Broadway production to earn such a distinction. Both its title-song spoof of jingoism and its romantic-depression ballad “Who Cares?” were fast-selling hits.

  With Of Thee I Sing, Gershwin thought, the Broadway show had completed its journey from vaudeville spectacle through burlesque revue to full-blown theatrical satire, in which characters expressed their emotions, however ludicrous, in song and dance.

  He had accomplished all he could within the show-business medium. His next step had to launch him beyond Broadway, beyond comedy. Porgy was commandeering his attention as well as Kay’s.

  Music now poured out of him in melodies and countermelodies that vied and tumbled, dissolved and reemerged like currents in a braided brook: racing xylophones and strings against a drawn-out two-note trumpet blast, swells and breaking waves of choral emotion, a vocal duet that started, stopped, and moved up and down like elevators sliding independently in side-by-side shafts. Kay notated his musical ideas, helping to organize them and suggesting ways to develop and interweave them.

  The concepts themselves—the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms—were George’s, not because Kay’s melodic imagination was failing but because she avoided violating his boundaries. Since the age of fifteen George had devoted every jot of his time and energy to two projects, writing brilliant music and gaining recognition as the greatest living American composer. Although not born into the appropriate socioeconomic class, although his parents had never heard of a conservatory education, he had always felt certain of his destiny.

  Unlike George, Kay had never aspired to be the greatest anything. She only wanted to be the best pianist and composer she could be, and to live up to the expectations of those who encouraged her. It was not about superiority; it was about striving.

  Midway through adolescence, George told Kay, he awoke from a dream. He had been standing on the top deck of a skyscraper watching automobiles, horses with buggies, and people running, skating, and jostling each other from narrow streets into a boulevard. In their midst, parades, strains of music. The airs of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner but also John Philip Sousa, Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, the Negro folk singer, the choirs of Southern Baptist churches, klezmer and cantorial chanting. All flowing together into this magnificent celebration in the wide avenue. “Like Bach’s Mass in B-Minor in a thousand keys at once, mixed with African drumming and honking horns and thunder,” he told her. “But you know what the feeling was, when I woke up?”

  “Elation?” tried Kay. “Exhilaration?”

  He shook his head. “Loneliness. Sadness. Like a taste of…”

  “Of what?”

  “Of my future, Kay.”

  “That future—your present—is hardly sad, George.”

  He shook his head. “Everyone wants to be loved. You want to be loved by as many folks as possible. But as that circle grows, the love…” His eyes wandered to the top of the wall, searching for words. “It loses its depth. Until it’s flat as a shadow. And you realize you’re all alone.”

  He said it with such gravity and finality, she shivered inside. She nestled her head in the crook of his neck. “You’re not alone, George.”

  He looked at her as if emerging from that dream and caressed her cheek. She had joined him up there, at the top of the RCA tower. The thrill of the view was their reward. But for some reason she could not fathom, a dark fog was creeping over him. It took the form of loneliness and incapacitating headaches but its source was a mystery. She held him tightly as they lay in silence in the quiet night.

  * * *

  With George back in New York, he and Kay wanted to dedicate every moment and every ounce of their energy to Porgy. Still, he needed to attend to contractual work. He had promised Max Dreyfus a definitive compilation of his best songs, written out as he composed them prior to Ira’s addition of lyrics: as solo piano pieces. It would be called The George Gershwin Songbook and again his purpose would be to blur the boundaries between so-called serious music and popular music. Instead of simplifying his pieces for the amateur pianist, he would capture on paper the flourishes and harmonic inventiveness he injected into them when he performed. Kay aided him, and he dedicated The George Gershwin Songbook to her. Not just out of gratitude, as he told her, but to shout to the world that she was the woman of his life.

  If that’s the best you can do, George, thought Kay, I’ll take it.

  Their lives were so intermeshed at this point, Kay did not know exactly where hers began or his ended. He depended upon her in so many ways, and she loved feeling indispensable. Perhaps, as Zilboorg insisted, this was not healthy, but her songwriting collaboration with Jimmy had apparently fallen apart and for the moment, George’s grand projects had stolen all her attention.

  The ballet for George Balanchine still seemed a distant hope, with little substance, although George insisted it was real. Lincoln Kirstein was searching for funding, and with the name Ballets Russes attached, he would most certainly find it. Kay began thinking about dance melodies and harmonies. George freely offered advice.

  Other than contractual work, the main impediment to their productivity was his debilitating, unpredictable headaches. All Kay could do, when they struck, was to lie with him, reading a novel but feeling helpless and frightened.

  In the hope of finding a solution, George finally agreed to meet with Doctor Zilboorg. Kay was not privy to their sessions but George told her that the idea of examining parts of his mind that were normally shut off to inspection fascinated him.

  He had never grown up, he learned. This explained why he still lived with his family and his inability to commit to an adult relationship with a woman. The piano was his sandbox.

  Kay threw her arms around his shoulders and searched his eyes. “That’s a pretty nice sandbox. Far as I’m concerned, you can stay a kid forever. Except the commitment part, of course.”

  “We’re working on that,” George assured her.

  Doctor Zilboorg insisted that George find a new home, to separate from his family. George objected that he needed Ira nearby since they worked together. “Fine,” agreed Doctor Zilboorg. “Ira can be nearby. But leave your parents where they are.”

  Kay offered to find and decorate George’s new accommodations. George had no time to spare and having grown up in the home of an apartment décor specialist, Kay savored the opportunity to channel her mother’s creative spirit.

  Lilly, Jimmy’s secretary—whose brother dealt in real estate—helped Kay locate two penthouse duplexes at 33 Riverside Drive, one for Ira and one for George. Kay clothed George’s in gray, black, silver, beige, and jade green, with Japanese-mat flooring and rice-paper partitions. She lined the walls with paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Utrillo, Soutine, and Rouault, which George had bought in Paris, as well as two of George’s paintings, one of his grandfather and one of a graceful African woman.

  While all this was going on, Kay too continued meeting with Doctor Zilboorg, probing the other side of the man-child issue. Why had she become involved with Jimmy Warburg in the first place, a man who considered himself, like a child, entitled to privileges far beyond the reach of other mortals? Why, later, was she so drawn to George Gershwin, who could be described in precisely the same way? Did she not detect a pattern?

  It all originated in her childhood involvement with her father, Doctor Zilboorg insisted. They discussed Kay’s recurring dream about the little girl in bows and ribbons playing the piano for workers in Sam’s factory and slowly losing control of the music. This d
ream seemed as vivid as a memory and yet she was certain of its unreality.

  “This fantasy is key,” said Zilboorg. “This is why your psyche repeats it to you. Who was your father putting on display for his workers? Was it you, really? Or was it that little girl in bows, that master of the keyboard, that he wanted you to be? When did Sam abandon you? At his death or long before? Somewhere deep inside, you know the answer.”

  Perhaps she did know the answer, Kay reflected. Perhaps she feared it. If she had been living out Sam’s dream her entire life, rather than her own, did that not make her life itself an illusion? Had Jimmy married a fantasy? And if so, what did that imply about her future?

  * * *

  If Jimmy had married a fantasy, he no longer really cared. He had plenty of hard reality to deal with. Since the death of his father, Paul, at the end of January 1932—and without quite realizing it at first—he had become the most respected and powerful man in his family’s financial empire. When voters in the United States, yearning for a path out of Depression, elected Jimmy’s former boss in the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the presidency, the new commander in chief offered Jimmy the position of undersecretary of the treasury. Jimmy declined but agreed to advise FDR on financial matters without title or compensation. He knew that his perspective on the banking system and on political developments in Europe was unique and he was eager to serve his adopted country without getting mired in the rough-and-tumble quid-pro-quo of politics and potential conflicts of interest.