May I ask you to compose a piece for the Boston Orchestra? Next season we will mark our 50th Anniversary with a concert in Boston followed by a second in New York City and we would very much appreciate if you would write a piece for these occasions.
George balled up the letter and threw it into a trash basket. “Hell, I’d love to, but where will I find the time?”
His valet, Paul Mueller, retrieved it and carefully unfolded it. “Agree to the movie—Delicious—but insist on owning the rights. That way, you can reuse the score for Koussevitzky.”
“You devil,” said George, smiling.
“As long as Koussevitzky premieres it before the movie release, he’ll be pleased as pie,” added Paul.
“You know, that just may work!”
Kay did not like the idea. It made George’s trip to Hollywood feasible. But she held her tongue.
Another letter: from Merle Armitage, the well-known impresario, suggesting an all-Gershwin concert at the Lewisohn stadium—“an honor previously accorded only to Beethoven and Wagner,” he read aloud.
“Make it a three-for-one,” suggested Paul, on a roll. “Perform the same Delicious score. But only after you premiere it with Koussevitzky.”
“Bingo,” said George, shooting him with his index finger.
On yellow stationery, DuBose Heyward, the author of Porgy, invited George to travel down to South Carolina to soak in the local color, the dialect, the speech rhythms, and the gospel music of the Gullah people, who filled the tenements of Porgy’s Catfish Row.
A fellow named Lincoln Kirstein wrote that he planned to produce the American début of the great Ballets Russes choreographer, George Balanchine. Together, Gershwin’s music and Balanchine’s choreography would “dazzle.”
George rubbed his chin. Finally he shook his head. “I can’t do it.”
The world’s most esteemed composers had penned scores for Balanchine. Celebrated artists including Matisse and Picasso had designed his sets. “You’re cracked,” said Kay. “It’s everything you want, wrapped up with a bow.”
George looked at Paul Mueller, who nodded. “You are cracked.”
“Porgy needs me,” said George. “And Of Thee I Sing, my next musical. Not to mention Delicious and a million hassles. Just can’t do it.” He pointed to Kay. “But you can do this.”
He picked up the telephone and connected through to the number on the letter. Kay heard him say, “Lincoln Kirstein? George Gershwin. Sorry, old pal, I’m booked from Monday to Mars. But I got an idea. Did you catch Fine and Dandy? Yes, it was. That score is by a lady named Kay Swift. No, not ‘good,’ Lincoln—brilliant. Why yes, that’s right, James Warburg’s wife. Of course we can.”
He hung up and turned to Kay. “Next Wednesday, three p.m., six three seven Madison Avenue. And don’t forget your cloche hat.”
“My cloche hat?”
He cupped his hand around her chin. “They’ll still see your sheyna punim but it will hide your feminine tresses.” He kissed her.
“My sheyna—?”
“Your pretty face,” said George. “Yiddish.”
George’s proposal almost defied belief. George Balanchine. The Ballets Russes. The most innovative and respected dance troupe in the world. Was it possible? she asked herself. Was she prepared? Would Balanchine take her seriously? Had she earned this privilege?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
JIMMY. BERLIN. SUMMER 1930
Another trip to Europe, another pause from the whirlwind of his marriage. Jimmy and Kay had long ago given up trying to maintain any pretense of happiness, balance, or normalcy. Even hope seemed a stretch at this point. At best, the tenuous status quo might last another year, or ten, until it snapped. Although he missed his daughters—and yes, his wife—Jimmy now depended on travel for reflection, reading, and refuge.
Wilhelm Kissel, the de facto chairman of Daimler-Benz, and Wilhelm Haspel, the head of the company’s business department, had invited Jimmy to a cabaret in Berlin. Haspels Frau ist Jüdin, the letter from Stuttgart had explained. “Haspel’s wife is Jewish.” As if to say, we’re all family, with a friendly Weimar wink.
A dank, crowded theater in the sweaty basement of a brick building in the red-light district. Panels of maroon-and-black cloth draped the walls and stage. Well-heeled businessmen, prostitutes, and a few Hitler-Jugend with their swastika armbands crowded the tiny tables, whistling and catcalling as heavily made-up, half-naked whores, homosexual hustlers, transvestites, and sadomasochists gyrated and pivoted, singing paeans to political dysfunction and social decay and acting out skits that glorified lust, dominance, and homicide. They mocked Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the republic, as a doddering stuffed shirt. They ignited and threw into the air fistfuls of paper money. In Jimmy’s estimation the musicianship, singing, and dancing were semiprofessional at best. It all seemed a depraved parody of recent New York culture—risqué innuendo, kickline dancing, jazz.
“Some call it moral laxity,” Haspel half apologized. “Others call it emancipation.”
“And the authorities?” asked Jimmy. “What do they call it?”
“That gentleman over there,” Kissel pointed at an obese man who puffed on a cigar and blew clouds of smoke into the air while fondling the adolescent girl on his lap—or was it a boy in lipstick?—“that is the chief of police. Of course we have laws against lewdness,” he added as the waiter refilled their brandy snifters. “But who is going to enforce them? In the current social climate, such a person would be considered a Spielverderber”—a party-pooper—“and would rapidly be voted out of office. Germany is a democracy. We prize self-expression.”
When they tottered down to the avenue to hail a taxi at two in the morning, the city was still buzzing. Jimmy observed posters slapped on stone walls that advocated for National Socialism, Communism, and other apocalyptic remedies. He saw adolescent boys and girls in garish makeup selling pleasure on street corners. A group of thugs kicked a man to a quivering pulp while others passed, apparently unconcerned. “Shouldn’t we get this man to a hospital?” asked Jimmy, horrified.
“Don’t even try. You would be killed,” Haspel warned him. “I shall put a call in to the hospital when I arrive home. Of course,” he added nonchalantly, “he will be dead by then.”
“Perhaps now you understand Herr Hitler’s message,” Kissel slurred as a cab pulled to the curb and they climbed in. “His fight is against degeneracy. He names the perpetrators. His purpose is to exhume the German will.”
Jimmy thought his logic confused, considering that they had just partied away their evening in a cavern of sexual exhibitionism.
Another night, Jimmy traveled to central Berlin to hear Hitler address a rally. The ceremonies began with a parade, which wound to a stop in the Alexanderplatz. As a brass band blew patriotic hymns, Hitler’s uniformed soldiers lined up in rows under the flickering light of tall torches. All beautifully choreographed and lit: an answer to chaos and darkness.
Hitler began speaking. At first he sounded reasonable. Little by little emotion inflected his voice, carrying his vast audience up with him as if on a Messerschmitt fighter cruising toward a golden sunrise. The individual words did not matter so much as the overall message of purpose, resolve, and hope. But as Hitler’s delivery grew impassioned, his tone rising all the way into high-yelp territory, Jimmy found himself dangling from a Made-in-USA parachute, floating back to earth.
Jimmy deplored the Austrian’s demagogic style but, as he wrote to his father during the return cruise, still thought it prudent to accord Herr Hitler the benefit of the doubt. He agreed with Hitler on many points, after all, particularly in his skepticism about religion and his embrace of science. Recent findings of physical anthropologists, applying the objective measurements of craniometry and phrenology, proved that multiple races did indeed exist and displayed distinct characteristics. Hitler’s rhetorical emphasis on the “hierarchical analysis of race” might well prove to be an electoral ploy rather than a rigid d
octrine.
Nor was Hitler’s professed hatred of capitalism an innovation. European priests and ministers had railed against usury and its practitioners—bankers—for centuries. Hitler’s desire to eliminate Jews had taken root in this long-fertilized soil. Fancying himself a skilled surgeon of modern statecraft, he sought to excise the parasite race for the good of Germany and the world.
If Adolph Hitler was anything like other politicians, Jimmy reasoned, he would eventually reveal himself to be susceptible to negotiation. All politicians balanced on the shaky stilts of cheap ideology and public naïveté. Their Achilles’ heel was and always would remain their need for a financial footing.
During the return crossing, Jimmy made the acquaintance of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. They met at a backgammon table during a storm. The two men played to win and shared a passion for books. Relaxing over cigars and cognac, they discussed Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, international finance, the upcoming presidential election, and of course Hitler. Knopf had seen Fine and Dandy and thought it fresh and delightful.
Within days, their rapport resulted in an informal agreement. Paul James would pen a book of poetry for Knopf. In a letter to Kay he described the meeting and his plans for the collection. The tone would be less solemn than his previous published efforts. That old seriousness had reflected the self-importance of youth. But these new poems would not be shallow, either. They would blend intimacy with irony. He spent so much of his time traveling these days, and pouring his heart into letters like this one, which he sealed with wax. Thus, he decided, he would call the volume Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, in a nod to the shape and substance of his life.
* * *
Kay sat at her desk, and picked up her Dunhill pen. “Dearest Jimmy,” she wrote,
You saw Herr Hitler! What a spectacle you describe.
And now, on the return cruise, you’re playing backgammon with Alfred Knopf, who wants to publish your poems. Not the poems you once wrote, bursting with romance and bluster, but verse that’s more playful, less high-toned. I suppose we’ve both learned a thing or two from our Georges, Kaufman and Gershwin. You’re well on the way to realizing your dreams, Jimmy.
Do you remember when our marriage was a dream? I do. You were in Washington and I in New York, and the thought that we would soon be sharing our lives seemed too wonderful to be entirely true.
Which I suppose it was.
I’m so happy for you.
Love,
Kay
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
FALL 1930
Once upon a time, at the cusp of adulthood, Kay had convinced herself that she had discovered a kindred spirit in Jimmy. They had emerged from dissimilar childhoods and twisted a psychological tightrope from the strands of their differing hopes and expectations. They had crossed that high wire in tandem for more than a decade. It could no longer support them, but where was the safety net? With George she had found a pair of wings. Buoyed on the breeze of music, she might not need a cable. But now, with George far away in California, the wind had died and she was falling.
Walking to her appointment with Doctor Zilboorg, she paused at a newspaper kiosk. As her eyes wandered, a photograph at the bottom right-hand corner of the New York Evening Graphic jumped out and struck a blow to her plexus. The Graphic was one of those alchemical celebrity rags that transmuted scandal into gold, and this picture portrayed George Gershwin lounging with the starlet Paulette Goddard “at William Randolph Hearst’s extravagant Mediterranean Revival love nest, a day’s ramble and a world away from the City of Angels.”
She studied the photograph. George’s body turned toward the starlet’s. Paulette Goddard laughing, her striking hazel eyes gleaming under her dark hair, her skin glistening under the sun, her hand on George’s arm. His legs suntanned and toned. His smile.
Kay handed the kiosk attendant a nickel and skimmed the article, a hit piece that focused on Miss Goddard’s “seductive and ruthless” movie star aspirations. Hearst had invited George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, and Harry Houdini, as well as Goddard and several “Hollywood nymphettes” for a frolicking weekend of tennis, movies, and feasts. The wily Miss Goddard, née Marion Levy—and “about as French as gefilte fish”—had eyes only for Mister Gershwin, who seemed to delight in her attentions.
The boy, looking over Kay’s shoulder, whistled. “That Paulette Goddard, what a dish. Wooh!” He tugged on his collar for emphasis.
Kay winced. “I’ll take them all.”
“You’ll take ’em… what?”
“This… this vulgar, indecent rag, the Evening Graphic. The pile of them.”
The boy glanced at the picture again, straightened his cap, and frowned. “All of ’em?”
She nodded, fishing in her purse for her wallet.
“Wow!” he said.
Kay lugged the tabloids to the corner, where she stuffed them into a garbage bin.
* * *
“So there he is, enjoying himself in California,” remarked Doctor Zilboorg, “while you are here, with only your husband to keep you company—for whom you no longer feel that libidinal zing.”
“It’s not just about that,” said Kay.
But Zilboorg pursued: “I understand Mr. Gershwin has helped you, but so long as you remain emotionally knotted up with him, you will continue to suffer from waves of negative feelings, a sense of loneliness and abandonment. Has it occurred to you that your neurosis makes you vulnerable to being taken advantage of?”
“Does George take advantage of me?” asked Kay. “Do I take advantage of him? Did Jimmy take advantage of me?”
“Jimmy?”
“I don’t know, for sex, for the prestige of being married to a classical musician? Did I take advantage of Jimmy’s position, his wealth? You can look at it that way. But when both parties are giving freely of themselves, sharing, learning together, growing together, discovering… I’m not sure taking advantage is the right term. I see it as an exchange.”
Doctor Zilboorg raised one eyebrow.
“Maybe that’s something you noggin twisters get wrong,” added Kay. “You think of love as desire, wanting to get something from another person, not as altruism, which is wanting to give something.”
“This is playing with language, Misses Warburg. One of the ways the ego shields itself. Let us try another tack. Tell me more about Mister Gershwin. What is it about him that so fascinates you?”
“I don’t know,” said Kay. “Sometimes I think it’s the music. Or his eyes, or the way he smiles. I wish I knew why I felt the way I feel.” Uncomfortable with the way Zilboorg was looking at her, she adjusted her posture.
“Are you quite certain all you feel about Mister Gershwin is love?” he asked. “Maybe you are experiencing other emotions, as well.”
“I also worry about him,” she said. “He hears things. He smells things. One day, a headache will lay him low. Another day, it’ll be a stomachache. No doctor can figure it out.”
Doctor Zilboorg nodded. “We are speaking of a man with a great deal of psychic energy, repressed emotional turmoil, which he attempts to sublimate through his music, with limited success. What’s left over finds expression in other ways.”
“Do you think psychoanalysis would help?” asked Kay.
“It is essential,” said Dr. Zilboorg. “In the meantime, though, with Mister Gershwin whooping it up in California, why don’t you and Jimmy write some songs together, another show perhaps. The two of you are now an established team. This will be good for you and good for your marriage. Jimmy is back from Germany, is he not?”
“I’ll discuss it with him tonight,” said Kay.
* * *
Jimmy and Kay dined at Pail & Fork, a seafood restaurant on the East River, where he expressed his growing despair about German society. “The country is divided against itself. On one side, the Communists. On the other, the National Socialists. Each side hollering, neither listening. Meanwhile, the cultural middle class, or what’s left of i
t, distracts itself with debauchery and toys with the romance of death. It’s all spiraling downward like water into a sewer and if it continues, I fear another war.”
“And Herr Hitler?” Kay cracked a crab claw.
“He’s a symptom, not the disease.” Jimmy sipped his Guinness.
“So what can be done?” asked Kay.
“I don’t know if we can save Europe,” said Jimmy. “But here in the States, we have to do everything we can to prevent the kind of out-of-control inflation that has ruined Germany.”
“You can’t fix the world all by yourself,” said Kay as they walked home. “But you can write a darn good lyric.”
“The world will survive without Paul James’s songs. I have a book of poetry to write.”
“Who reads poetry?”
“The bemused, patronizing New Yorker crowd,” said Jimmy, quoting their friend Stewie. “Which is good enough for me.”
Kay tugged at Jimmy’s elbow lest he step on a sleeping man’s leg. Even on the Upper East Side these days, entire families used concrete for mattresses and steps for pillows. “People need entertainment,” she said, “maybe as much as money.”
“That’s easy to say when you have servants and several sets of porcelain you never touch,” said Jimmy as he turned keys in the triple locks of their front door.
* * *
George’s contract with the Fox Film Corporation included a provision for first-class transportation. Only twenty-six hours from Los Angeles to New Jersey in a five-foot-wide, wood-paneled cabin with a wet bar, a smoking lounge, upholstered seats, and nurses holding sandwich trays for fourteen privileged passengers.
So many innovations in such a short span of time. The motorcar, the washing machine, the telephone, the radio, the airplane, the moving pictures, and now the talkies—including the soon-to-be-released Delicious, with its first-in-history full musical score. Each invention carried the hope that mankind’s burden would be lightened and each had, in one way or another, delivered on its promise. Still, all the technology in the world could not relieve loneliness, sorrow, or regret, Kay reflected as she stood in furs among journalists and family members on the recently paved Newark airport tarmac, her breath clouding in the chill.
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