Rhapsody

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  “So you can dredge it out after I’m gone? No, thank you, Deb,” laughed Kay.

  “Huh-uh, I swear,” said Deb.

  Kay took off her ring and looked at the diamond and the inscription. She remembered the day Jimmy had proposed to her in the Roof Garden Pavilion of the Century Theatre. The day he had slid this ring onto her finger in her mother’s apartment. How young we were. How unknowing. “My marriage may be over,” she told Deb. “But the memories are here to stay.” She pocketed the ring and with it, a large swath of her life.

  The court proceedings themselves took less time than that pause on the Bridge of Sighs, and offered less drama. A judge named Murray, with a New York accent, asked her to verify that her husband, James Warburg, was guilty of mental cruelty, the most common pretext for divorce in Reno, and that she intended to reside in Nevada. He stamped a document, handed it to her, and called for the next case.

  The Overland Limited to Chicago huffed and squealed to the platform. The conductor stepped halfway down the metal steps, blew his whistle, and called the passengers aboard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Kay and George attended the sold-out New York début of Alma Mater at the Adelphi Theatre on March 1, 1935. Kay had attended rehearsals prior to her trip to Reno but had not experienced the full show with Balanchine’s bold costumes, perfected choreography, and lighting. Its tone impertinent, its musical style eclectic, her ballet strutted and swanked across the West Fifty-Fourth Street stage. George grinned. She had tapped a vein of the musical mother lode, that precious ore that alloyed entertainment and art. Kay tried to summon a feeling akin to elation, or at least pleasure. She had fulfilled her father’s dream. And yet.

  It helped when she and George clinked champagne flutes at Sardi’s and a couple of strangers stopped by. Most likely recognizing George, they gushed, “you must be Kay Swift. Loved it.”

  The next morning, John Martin of the New York Times poured ice water all over her hangover. Alma Mater, he proclaimed from the top of his concrete-and-glass soapbox, was “really a revue sketch rather than a ballet.” George Balanchine’s new company, the American Ballet, was “a colossal waste of time and energy, and evidence of the decadence of the classic tradition as it is found in certain European environments, examples of what someone has aptly called Riviera aesthetics.”

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean, George?”

  “Artists aren’t allowed to eat prime rib, or ride in automobiles, Kay. Haven’t you seen La Bohème?”

  Kay reread the review. What if John is on to something? Maybe the tone of Alma Mater, or the concept itself, is indeed snide or shallow. She had always suspected as much. But contrary to Romantic myth, real artists did not labor in isolation, burning their overcoats to warm their garrets. Real artists in America today knew how to negotiate with the business people who could promote their work: music publishers, show producers, and stars like George Balanchine. When the world’s most celebrated choreographer calls you, you pick up the phone. If he is bankrolled by a Warburg who, like Jimmy and others in their clan yearns to prove his mettle in the fickle domain of the arts, well, then, as Scott Fitzgerald observed, where the money goes, there goes the culture. Even an artist with the power of a George Gershwin usually had to write not what he wanted, and not necessarily what audiences expected, but what Broadway producers imagined audiences wanted. Porgy was an exception, but he would have to finance it himself. It amounted to an experiment, the riskiest venture of his life. She shook her head, emptied her cup, and entwined her fingers with his. “The audience liked Alma Mater, though.”

  “They were nuts about it.” He glanced at the clock. “I have to clean up. Porgy tryouts. We’ll need you at the keyboard.” He could now play the entire score but he wanted to listen from the point of view of the audience. He frowned, sniffed, and looked around. “Do you smell that?”

  “Smell what?”

  “Something burning?”

  She shook her head. George and his hallucinations.

  * * *

  George had already selected his Porgy and his Bess but his producers, known as The Theatre Guild, were not comfortable with his choices. They had expected his name and clout to attract the likes of Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, both of whom had auditioned in his apartment while Kay sojourned in Reno. Instead, he had picked two unknowns. Porgy was to be played by Todd Duncan, a young baritone from Indianapolis who taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Anne Brown, a pretty Juilliard ingénue, would personify Bess.

  To demonstrate the astuteness of his choices George had invited Todd, Anne, and members of the Theatre Guild to his apartment. They sat on his Frits Henningsen sofas and armchairs, sipping Cristal Roederer champagne in Lalique flutes and munching on canapés. The singers faced them, sheet music in hand. Kay accompanied on the piano. Anne wailed a searing “My Man’s Gone Now,” Todd lit up the room with “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” and together they sang the love duet, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” their voices slithering over unexpected, nonparallel paths. Neither Todd nor Anne sang in the grand opera-house manner of a Gitta Alpár or a Lauritz Melchior. Nor did they belt the tunes like Broadway headliners. They performed with the naturalness and simplicity of well-trained neophytes. Kay, representing the orchestra, participated in their dialogue, answering and adorning their melodies.

  This was the first time that Kay and George heard professional singers perform the showstopper, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” Long before Todd and Anne’s concluding harmony faded, supported by a final high chord on the piano, everyone’s eyes glistened. George glanced at Kay, who smiled back with relief.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  On September 30, 1935, Porgy and Bess premiered at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. As the curtain fell the audience jumped to their feet and applauded for fifteen minutes. At their insistence, and the conductor’s, George strolled onto the stage in his tuxedo and bowed, his eyes wandering to Kay. The ovation increased and resonated long after she joined him in the wings.

  The show was an unqualified triumph, but later, meeting in their hotel lobby, the director expressed reservations about its three-hour length. He, George, and Kay decided which passages to excise or abbreviate. Kay and George worked all night, the following day, and the night after. They incorporated the changes in the third performance.

  The director timed the audience’s standing ovation. It clocked in at thirty seconds less than opening night. Still, he insisted, the cuts represented an improvement. In fact, he demanded more.

  The version that opened in New York City ten days later therefore lacked some of the subtle connective tissue of the original. It made up for this loss in concision and verve. George thought it better. Kay was not certain but knew, her heart bursting with pride, that either way Porgy and Bess was an American masterpiece that would endure.

  Most of the print reviewers cheered but some expressed puzzlement. Was Porgy and Bess a musical or an opera? It was performed in a Broadway theater, like a musical, but it lacked spoken dialogue, like an opera. In interviews George called it a folk opera. No one had ever heard that term. What did folk opera imply? George refused to provide a clear answer. He thought the question unimportant but many of the reviewers considered it crucial.

  In newspapers and magazines, the debate exploded. Critics questioned the scene: an impoverished ghetto in Charleston, South Carolina. Broadway shows usually took place in iconic American settings: New York City, the prairies of Oklahoma, a steamboat on the Mississippi. Operas had always been set either in Europe or in one of the mythological realms favored by Wagner or Debussy. The America that Gershwin had set to music was not the nation many wished to display to the world, the industrial titan, home of great institutions of education and research, the hope and freedom of the wide-open plains. No, this Catfish Row had little to do with mainstream American culture or its European heritage. In their few appearances, white people were portrayed as oppressors.

  And what t
o make of the dialect, officially known as Sea Island Creole English? It was neither grammatical American nor the cocky, colorful patois of Harlem. The idiom of the Gullah people combined English diction with syntax from the languages of West Africa and nineteenth-century plantation creole. It was difficult to understand, especially sung.

  And those characters. A cripple, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a community of ardent Baptists. Were such people worthy of glorification? What, precisely, was Gershwin’s intent?

  But the thorniest issue stemmed from the fact that a handful of genteel white people, George, Kay, DuBose and Dorothy Hayward, Ira Gershwin, had appointed themselves the artistic interpreters of a culture not their own. In discussions of his novel, years earlier, DuBose had referred to his approach as anthropological, suggesting a modern, objective aesthetic. In place of the villains and heroes of the Victorian novel, which had presented itself as a medium for moral commentary, DuBose championed a narrative that depicted men and women as complex and flawed, often emotional, sometimes brave, and deeply ethnic.

  But to many that very term, anthropological, also implied colonial arrogance. As the days passed, and then the weeks, reviews turned hostile. George’s rivals, unable to deny the powerful appeal of his music, seized on the cultural issues. The composer Virgil Thomson led the charge. “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself,” he wrote. “Which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.” Ironically, as George pointed out to Kay, Thomson himself was guilty of the charge he was leveling. A white man, he was advocating for the Negroes with this very comment, as if they could not speak for themselves.

  Neither George nor DuBose thought of Porgy as social commentary about Negro culture in general. For DuBose it showcased one small piece of the American jigsaw. George saw the story as an affirmation of humanity, a portrayal of the beauty and unseemliness, the simplicity and opacity of emotion and song, of shared humanity but also of the attitudes and idioms that lend a people its singularity. No one could credibly claim that George or DuBose did not love their characters, or that they reduced them to stereotypes or derided them. The denizens of Catfish Row were real, full-blooded human beings, with hearts bursting as they endeavored to forge a path through the muddle of life.

  Theater patrons initially loved Porgy and Bess, but the increasingly hostile reviews sank it. Audiences dwindled. Every performance now lost money. Porgy and Bess closed after 124 nights. Not a good run by Gershwin standards, and a catastrophe for such an ambitious, costly production.

  The night after the last performance Kay and George enjoyed a canard a l’orange with a blanc de blancs wine, prepared and served in George’s candlelit apartment by Fred Boursier, the premier sous-chef at the Waldorf-Astoria restaurant. Just the two of them. “George,” she told him, “mark my words. In fifty years, a hundred years, few people will remember Virgil Thomson. Even fewer will know the words of his arias. But everyone will know ‘Summertime.’”

  He smiled sadly.

  The event that pained him most was Edward Morrow’s interview with Duke Ellington in New Theatre magazine. The Duke’s remarks sounded ad hominem and scathing. “The time has come,” said Ellington, “to debunk such tripe as Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.”

  Stunned, Gershwin read and reread the interview. For days he lingered in bed or moped around his apartment in pajamas and robe. Finally he called the Duke and they arranged to meet for lunch at Small’s Paradise on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Kay accompanied him.

  “Lampblack Negroisms,” George read. He put down the magazine and wiped his forehead with his breast-pocket handkerchief. “Duke, there isn’t a pot of lampblack in any of those dressing rooms. These are real people. Do you have any idea how much pushback I got for insisting on these singers? You’ve known me how long?”

  “It’s the dialogue, George. Do you know a colored person who talks that way?”

  “Not here in New York, but in Charleston, among the Gullah people? You betcha. DuBose lived with them, worked with them, for years. His mother studied their language. I prayed with them, Duke.”

  “Is DuBose colored, himself?” asked the Duke.

  “Was Shakespeare colored, when he wrote Othello?” asked George. “Was Bizet a gypsy when he wrote Carmen? Was Rembrandt Jewish when he painted the Jews of Amsterdam—so respectfully that his portraits bring tears to my eyes? It doesn’t change a thing what he believed or what color his skin was. Othello’s a sympathetic guy. He’s flawed but we root for him. Same goes for Porgy. No one’s mocking him. This is no minstrel show, Duke.”

  “I guess you’re sensitive to this,” said the Duke, “having begun your career with ‘Swanee.’ ”

  “Damn straight I’m sensitive to it,” said George. “Take a swing at the segregationists. But not at your comrades in arms.”

  “Duke,” put in Kay, “when the novel Porgy came out everyone hailed it as a masterpiece. The Herald Tribune, the Chicago Daily News, everyone. Including the papers here in Harlem. They used the word authentic. Over and over. When the play opened on Broadway, same tune. No one objected. The dialogue hasn’t changed that much. George just set it to music. And now it’s inauthentic and condescending?”

  The Duke salted his fries. “I didn’t actually make that remark. Eddie made it up. And I’ll say so publicly.”

  George glanced at Kay. The Duke could be hard driving and cagey. But a liar he was not.

  “That said, I don’t imagine you read Porgy the way I do,” added Ellington. “Your Porgy isn’t about the Negro tenement.”

  “I’m not following you,” said George.

  “All this promised land stuff,” explained the Duke. “It’s about the ghetto. Your people’s ghetto.”

  George laughed. “You’ve never set foot in a church in South Carolina.”

  They finished their lunch and parted with a warm handshake. The Duke followed through, writing a letter to the editor of New Theatre magazine in which he stated that his comments about Porgy had been misrepresented. But the damage was done.

  After Porgy closed, George faced financial ruin. His health deteriorated further. His headaches struck frequently and were more debilitating. He smelled burning rubber at the strangest times. Or it might be invisible trash bursting into flames, or human hair sizzling somewhere just out of sight. Kay feared it was his own life force that was being consumed in the furious flames of his ambition.

  He caught a whiff of it when he and Kay watched workers remove the Porgy and Bess lettering from the Alvin Theatre marquee on Fifty-Second Street. As always, when Kay stood beside him on a New York sidewalk in daytime, she felt as if she were swimming in an aquarium. So many passersby looked at them in the intense yet restrained way of those who recognize a celebrity but pretend otherwise. “Why don’t we just do it, George,” she suggested slipping her arm through his. “Settle down somewhere in the countryside. Who needs this Coney Island roller coaster?”

  “Kay, you’re about the best thing that ever hit me,” said George. “But I have to get back on my feet.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “Another movie score. What choice?”

  Kay fetched a cigarette in her bag. George lit it for her. “An offer I’m not aware of?”

  He nodded. “Shall We Dance.” And then he chuckled. “Who knows, maybe it’ll click this time. Fred and Ginger! Kicking up a storm out there. She’s begging me. It’s been too darn long since I’ve worked with either one of them.” They walked up Broadway in the late summer afternoon. The colorful street thronged with vehicles and trams and smelled like asphalt and grease. Workers in smudged coveralls and neatly pressed suits trudged home from offices and factories, their heads low, their pace languid. “Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of work, yourself,” George told Kay with a sly smile. “You won’t even have time to miss me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  1937

  In the United States of FD
R and talkies, largeness was all the rage. New York had surpassed London as the most populous city. It erected the tallest buildings in the newest art deco style. Its sparkling Radio City Music Hall offered the broadest range of entertainment to the widest audience. Featuring the world’s biggest Wurlitzer theater organ, a full orchestra, and a choral group, Sam Rothapfel’s Radio City aspired to be everything for everyone: the capital of wireless broadcasting; the biggest stage for musical revues, with the longest line of sublime leg-kickers; and the most expansive movie screen, where six thousand spectators could share laughs and tears offered up by the latest entertainment technology.

  In the moviemaking industry, Thomas Edison’s legendary rapaciousness had backfired, causing New York to lose its dominance. But what the metropolis lost in production, it made up for in consumption. Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, which seated almost two thousand spectators, seemed quaint compared to New York’s Roxy Theatre and the Radio City, which accommodated not only larger crowds but also restaurants, art galleries, billiards rooms, and childcare facilities. The live orchestras played new song-and-dance numbers every week, with full-blown spectacles that preceded every movie. If America was the world’s capital of industry, the American culture machine served up art on an industrial scale.

  The task of writing the lyrics for Radio City, the hottest ticket for a New York versifier, fell to the Gershwin protégé Al Stillman. The equally enviable post of resident Radio City Music Hall composer, to Kay Swift. In this capacity, she wrote music full-time and heard it performed with little delay by esteemed musicians, many of them fellow graduates of her school, now known as Juilliard. In a phrase Ira Gershwin had coined, Who could ask for anything more?