Fine Romance - Jewish Songwriters, American Songs

Citation preview

DAVID

A .

LEHMAN# JEWISH SONGWRITERS,

MERICAN SONGS

A

IN numbers

Lehman

looks at the formation of the

American songbook— the timeless

that

love songs,

Fine Romance, David

became

jazz standards, iconic

and sound tracks to famous

movies— and explores the extraordinary fact that this

songbook was

written almost

exclusively by Jews.

An acclaimed critic,

poet, editor,

and

cultural

David Lehman hears America sing-

ing—with a Yiddish accent. He guides us through America

in

when "Embraceable

the golden age of song, You," "White Christmas,"

"Easter Parade," "Bewitched, Bothered, and

Bewildered," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man,"

"My Romance," "Cheek

to Cheek," "Stormy

Weather," and countless others

became

nothing less than the American sound track.

The

stories behind these songs, the

shows

from which many of them came, and the

composers and

lyricists

who wrote them

give

voice to a specifically American saga of love, longing, assimilation,

and transformation.

Lehman's analytical exuberance infuse

and a tone

like

this

skills, wit,

and

book with an energy

no other:

at

once sharply

observant, personally searching, and attuned to the songs that

all

of us love.

understand how natural

it

He

shoulo

Wizard of Oz composer Harold

A

(continued on back flap

help*; t,

JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

Jonathan Rosen, General Editor

Jewish Encounters

is

a collaboration

between Schocken and

Nextbook, a project de\oted to the promotion of Jew ture, culture,

and

ideas.

>nextbook

ish litera-

PUBLISHED

THE LIFE OF DAVID Robert Pinsky MAIMONIDES Sherwin B. Nuland BARNEY ROSS Douglas Century BETRAYING SPINOZA Rebecca Goldstein •

•

EMMA LAZARUS THE WICKED SON MARC CHAGALL JEWS AND POWER

Esther Schor

•

•

David Mamet

Jonathan Wilson •

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Ruth R. Wisse •

Adam

Kirsch

RESURRECTING HEBREW Ilan Stavans THE JEWISH BODY Melvin Konner •

•

A FINE

ROMANCE RASHI

•

•

David Lehman

ElieWiesel

FORTHCOMING

THE CAIRO GENIZA Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole THE WORLDS OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM Jeremy Dauber •

•

MOSES

Stephen J. Dubner

•

BIROBIJAN

MashaGessen

•

JUDAHMACCABEE Jeffrey Goldberg YEHUDA HA'LEVI Hillel Halkin N AC H M A N / K A F K A Rodger Kamenetz THE DAIRY RESTAURANT Ben Katchor THE SONG OF SONGS Elena Lappin ABRAHAM CAHAN Seth Lipsky THE EICHM ANN TRIAL Deborah Lipstadt SHOW OF SHOWS David Margolick JEWS AND MONEY Daphne Merkin DAVID BEN GURION Shimon Peres and David Landau WHEN GRANT EXPELLED THE JEWS Jonathan Sarna •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

HILLEL Joseph Telushkin MESSIANISM Leon Wieseltier •

•

A Fine Romance

DAVID LEHMAN

A FINE

ROMANCE Jewish Songwriters, American Songs

NEXTBOOK

•

SCHOCKEN

•

NEW YORK

Copyright

© 2009 by David Lehman by Schocken Books,

All rights reserved. Published in the United States

Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

a division of

Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House, Grateful acknowledgment

is

made

to the following for permission

and unpublished material:

to reprint previously published

Alfred A.

Knopf and Brad

Inc.

Leithauser: Excerpt from "A

and Angles: Poems by Brad Leithauser, copyright

Good

List" from Curves

© 2006 by Brad Leithauser.

Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf and Brad Leithauser.

"War Song" by Cole Porter, (ASCAP). All rights reserved.

Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from

copyright

© by Chappell & Co., Inc.

Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co.,

Inc.

Commentary: Excerpts from "Jerome Kern and American Operetta" by Kurt List (Commentary,

May

1947). Reprinted

by permission of Commentary magazine.

The Literary Estate of May Swenson: Excerpt from "An Exuberance, Not a Dump" by May Swenson. Reprinted by permisson of Carole Berglie, executor of the Literary Estate of

Sony/ATV Music

May

Swenson.

Publishing LLC: Excerpts from "Love

Corner" by Leo Robin, copyright All rights reserved. Reprinted

Is

Just

Around the

© 1934 by Sony/ATV Harmony.

by permission of Sony/ATV Music

Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville,

TN 37203.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A fine romance

Lehman, David, [date]Jewish songwriters, American songs / David Lehman, :

p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-805-2-425-0-8 1.

Popular music 2.

3.

—United

Popular music

Jewish composers

States

—United

—United

States. I.

—History and

States 4.

—Jewish

Jewish

criticism.

influences.

lyricists

—United

Title.

ML3477.L45- 2009 782. 42164089*924073

dc22

2009005-942

www.schocken.com Printed in the United States of America First Edition

2468975-31

States.

For Stacey

TIME AFTER TIME

CONTENTS

Apologia: Little White Lies

Prelude: Jewish Genius I.

ix

3

My Romance

25-

EL

Tales of the Uncles, Part

I

41

III.

Tales of the Uncles, Part

II

70

IV.

V VI. VII. VIII.

Last Night I

Didn't

When We Were Young

Know What Time It Was

The World on

A Right

a String

to Sing the Blues

Some Other Time

90 117

iy4 183

208

Chronology

223

Notes

235-

Acknowledgments

251

APOLOGIA

Little

And heaven was

in

White

your eyes.

WALTER Donaldson,

Mark Twain

Lies

" Little

White Lies"

opens The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

with a disclaimer. Huck, the narrator, says that readers of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer have already

him. "That book was

encountered

made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he

told

the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but

mainly he told the truth." In the

book you have before you, the author has likewise

endeavored to his heart. as

tell

the truth, mainly, about a subject close to

A Fine Romance

is

conceived, in

Huck

Finn's words,

"mostly a true book, with some stretchers." The stretch-

ers occur principally in the narrator's

autobiography and

in

accounts of his relatives and friends.

Otherwise, this

is

about the songwriters edge, accurate.

a is,

work of

nonfiction.

Every

to the best of the author's

detail

knowl-

A

Fine Romance

PRELUDE

Jewish Genius

I'll

write Jewish tunes.

COLE PORTER

That Old Black Magic

Whether

you date the genesis to Irving Berlin and

"Alexander's

Ragtime Band"

Kern and "They Didn't Believe Me" Great War, sooner or

later

you have

—

about American popular song that a great

manv

in

Jerome

or to

1911

in the first year of the

to explain

what

is

Jewish

apart from the simple fact

of the songwriters were Jews.

A

lot of

it

has to do with sound: the minor key, bent notes, altered

chords, a melancholv edge.

Even happy songs sound

mournful. Marian McPartland

is

Gershwin's "Love Walked In" as

at the I

walk

the words sav that love has driven

all

piano playing George in

on

her,

mind,

bye, and

Ira's I

and lonelv

tender love lvric

is

and though

the shadows away,

the sound of the shadows and their echoes that

mv

I

hear,

it's

and

in

really a tear-filled good-

think of his brother's early death and a

a little

man George would have been

if

how

sad

he'd had his

A Fine Romance Anyone who doubts

brother's introspective nature.

there

is

that

a distinctively Jewish character to, say, Gershwin's

music or

Berlin's or

Harold Aden's should

Me"

one to Watch Over

(lyrics Ira

Face the Music and Dance"

"Stormy Weather"

(lyrics

"Some-

listen to

Gershwin) and "Let's

(lyrics

Irving Berlin), and

Ted Koehler),

respectively

It's

there in the plaintive undertow, the feeling that yearning is

eternal and sorrow not very far from the moment's joy.

You can hear

it

at the

end of the bridge (or "release")

"Stormy Weather." The wish

more" occurs

to

"walk

like a religious epiphany,

in that

in

sun once

an exclamatory in-

stant of elation in a bluesy prayer that modulates from

com-

plaint to resignation.

Or

consider the rhymes in Berlin's invitation to the dance

as suavely

and persuasively sung by Fred Astaire. "Let's Face

the Music and Dance" begins with a forecast of "trouble

ahead." Soon enough

we won't have

light that lead to love

and romance. After "the

fled," we'll

have to pay the

bill.

Tomorrow

is

teardrops to shed," and our one consolation

dance invitation ever sounded so threatening. "face the music" in both senses

how

—

moon-

the music and

fiddlers scary,

have

"with

today.

is

It's

to face the facts,

No

time to

no matter

disturbing, and they are plenty disturbing in the

Depression year of 1936, and to face your partner and dance,

dance

defiantly, regardless of the

many, Spain,

meaning

is

Italy,

a grand

example of

avoid cliches, he embraces

The popular

bad news breaking

in

Ger-

and the rest of Europe. That double Berlin's wizardry:

them and

gives

He

doesn't

them new

life.

songs that Jewish songwriters wrote were ones

"

5 that Americans of

all

ethnicities

and every brow

middle, low) could sing along with and dance In The

Rome

That George Built, his

Berlin, Arlen, et

al.,

level (high,

to.

homage

to Gershwin,

Wilfrid Sheed uses the key phrases

"Jewish music" and "Jewish songs." The nearest he comes to defining either term

is

when he speaks of "the mystery

ingredients of jazzness and bluesness," which enabled a certain decidedly non-Jewish songwriter of sophistication

and

1

elan to surpass himself. In an appreciation of Harold Arlen

John Lahr makes

on the centenary of

his birth in 2005",

ilar association. In

addition to "crazy jazz," Lahr writes,

Arlen's sound "incorporated the Jewish wail

a sim-

and the wail of

2

the blues." This line of thinking goes back to Gershwin,

who

felt

that jazz sprang from "the negro spiritual" and that

"the American soul" combines "the wail, the whine and the exultant note of the old

black and white.

mamy

[sic]

It is all colors

and

great melting-pot of the world. Its

syncopation.

songs of the South. all

It is

souls unified in the

dominant note

is

vibrant

?

Let's begin, then,

with the mysterious "bluesness" and

"crazy" jazz that links Jewish songwriters tonally and rhythmically with black singers and instrumentalists.

hear the wail?

It fills

the air

when

off Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

the clarinet glissando kicks

Nor can you miss

Arlen's early collaborations with lyricist Fall in

Can you

Ted Koehler:

it

in

"Let's

Love" and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue

Sea" and "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," several of them written

when Arlen and Koehler were house musicians

Cotton Club

in

Harlem.

If

at the

anything, the Jewishness of

A Fine Romance Arlen's songs enhances their appeal for a soulful non-Jewish

performer (the white Lee Wiley, the black

Billie

Holiday),

who can

insinuate the sound of heartbreak into a declaration

of love.

The

on-again, off-again love affair between Jewish

songs and black musicians in particular cated one. But

it's

is

not an uncompli-

an important part of the story, evident

not only in jazz standards written by Jews and interpreted

by blacks

(as

when Art Blakey and

the Jazz Messengers play

Harold Arlen's "Come Rain or

Come

landmark theatrical events

Show Boat

Jerome Kern, in 1935"

(music George Gershwin,

on one

in

1927 (music

Oscar Hammerstein) and Porgy and Bess

lyrics

DuBose Heyward) are,

as

Shine"), but in such

lyrics Ira

Gershwin and

which African American characters

in

level, allegorical

representations of Jews.

Whenever Show Boat and Porgy and

Bess are revived,

it is

always a noteworthy event and often one that sparks some protest.

and

Some

critics resent

specifically

what they consider the white

Jewish appropriation of the

blacks of Catfish

Row

in Porgy and Bess.

the perpetuation of racial stereotypes. strel

shows played a

can popular song

vital part in the

is

lives

of the

Others object to

The

fact that

min-

development of Ameri-

a retrospective

embarrassment. The

sight of Al Jolson in blackface in The

Jazz

Singer or

Fred

Astaire in blackface as Boj angles of Harlem in Swing Time requires explanation and apologia. But protests reflect the

temper of their age and these misgivings are

likely to fade;

the excellence of the music and the honor and dignity fers

on performer and audience

other considerations.

When

alike will have

it

con-

trumped

all

the black male chorus in Show

Boat reaches the end of the second verse of

"OP Man

— 7 River"

—

the part where the singers can envision the river

Jordan, the "old stream" that they long to cross

visionary

—

it

is

moment, and Kern's majestic music makes you

a

feel

that unreachable heaven looms near as a prayer or a worker's

dream of

liberation from "the white

man

boss."

As Ham-

merstein's peroration climbs in keeping with Kern's music,

the

human

condition

is

humbly

singer and listener not because is

common

our

lot

stated.

it

—we —but because we are

all

it

failure

sick of trying, tired of living,

and scared of dying about

The song ennobles

acknowledges that

are

moved

to sing

with robust voices and to celebrate something

greater than ourselves: the natural

wonder of the Missis-

sippi River that just keeps rolling along, powerful less, like a divinity.

At such

a

"moment

and time-

divine" (to use a

Hammerstein phrase from another standard he wrote with Kern), you almost

feel that

the Jewish songwriters and black

performers have achieved a momentary but transcendent fusion of identities.

The Jewish element

in

American popular song

is

a prop-

erty not only of the notes and chords but of the words as well, or,

more

exactly,

the union between words and

music. Perennially regarded as secondary partners

—

the

way

Lorenz Hart was to Richard Rodgers or Ira Gershwin to younger, taller genius brother, George their

own

order of greatness.

lowed a Jewish imperative

It

his

the lyricists had

could be said that they

in their

cleverness and in their ability to

—

fol-

abundant humor, wit, and

mix sadness and

elation

and

4

I'm

to produce thereby the mysterious tingle of romance.

prepared even to argue that the great American standards such as "Blue Skies,"

"The Lady

Is

a

Tramp,"

"I

Got

A Fine Romance Rhythm," "The Way You Look Tonight," "My Funny Valentine," "Tea for

Two," "Love

Me or Leave Me," "All

Things You Are," "Over the Rainbow," and

My

Under

Skin"

—

are in

the

"I've

Got You

some fundamental way

inflected

with Judaism even when the composer or the

lyricist

was

neither by birth nor conviction Jewish. (Only one song

of the ten

I

mentioned was entirely the work of

just

a

non-Jew, and he acknowledged that he was "writing Jewish.")

Whether performed by Sinatra or

Ella,

Bing or Peggy

Benny Goodman or Miles Davis, the songs

Lee,

brated, bewailed, orchestrated, and

romance

—

a fine

romance, though one sometimes lacking

kisses or other signs of requital or affection.

Dorothy

ited sarcasm, as in

No

clinches,

a in

Some cases mer-

Fields's lyric for a delightful

Kern tune that Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sing Time.

cele-

maybe even enacted

in Swing

no pinches; you won't nestle or wrestle.

I

never "muss the crease in your blue serge pants," Rogers laments.

It's

line that

is.

a fine

romance nevertheless. And what

Miss Fields got Mr. Kern to swing

a sexy

—not

alto-

gether an easy thing. take romance."

"I'll

sorrowful note." "I

romance." "Here's to tic?"*

"Our romance won't end on

know

my

that music leads the

first

romance." "Isn't

it

way

a

to

roman-

"Romance" and "romantic" recur as they do not

only because "romance" rhymes with "dance" and because so

many

but

songs are variations or elaborations of "I love you"

for a third reason

combining the other two. The Jewish

songwriters, in their lives and works, were conducting a passionate

romance with America

—from

initial attraction to

courtship, consummation, joy, disenchantment, despair, and

9

then the whole sequence over again. As in

The promised

there were ups and downs.

promised more than

such

all

affairs

land of America

could deliver. In "Ten Cents a

it

Dance," the song that launched Ruth Etting's singing career,

Lorenz Hart cleverly rhymes "hero" with the middle bles of "queer romance."

view of as

The song

—"rent" guys"

"rough

romance with be "queer"

on

a ticket-buying

meanings of "queer"

"pansies" as well

fact,

self-destructive end.

He

—

she has a

it is

own

homosexual

a

Hart

at a

going to

both

case,

time when

self-conscious to begin

five feet tall

and thought himself

The romance

suffered and drank.

If

basis.

would-be "hero,"

As

apply.

with because he was barely

—

a cash

—

in the sense of odd. In Hart's

you had to conceal the

ugly

represents the point of

whom men

a dance-hall hostess,

sylla-

for

him came

to a

died in despair at forty-eight. But

the frustration and pain equipped this naturally ebullient

punster to write great

The

lyrics that

name many

artists

who

first

Lawrence

said.

astute observation

writing partner. "You can

it

more than almost anybody,"

"Because of being a songwriter he had to

write love songs, and almost

all

his love songs said,

would you ever love me? Spring

other people, not for me.'

masochism."

lust.

constantly fight their unworthiness,

but Larry Hart articulated

Why

made an

writer Jerome Lawrence

about Richard Rodgers's

combine sadness with

He was

is

here,

I

'I

hear,

stink.

but

for

the poet laureate of

6

Perhaps only a disillusioned enthusiast could produce such effects of anguish without sinking into sentimentality or self-pity. But then, the American romance in popular song exerts

its

pull because, in Ira Gershwin's words, the

romance

A Fine Romance "won't end on a sorrowful note," though end

would be an

relies

sion of timeless

on

It

but what's wrong

illusion to think otherwise,

with that? Art

must.

it

illusion. Illusions, including the illu-

truths and undying love, are a neces-

sary part of any imaginative strategy for dealing with and

maybe even redeeming the

failures of experience, the insuffi-

ciency or inadequacy of actuality.

Rodgers and Hart song, song

rises to the

Romance," another

defense of illusions.

A

an abbreviated vision or waking dream, a statement

is

of desire and a supposition of praises the

come

"My

power

to

make

true." All that the

flexible of

its fulfillment.

one's

"most

romance needs

is

"My Romance"

fantastic

"you"

—

dreams

most

that

pronouns, more intimate than any other, conve-

naming the beloved,

niently genderless, masking rather than

and yet so powerfully immediate that the word can stand easily for an

unknown

as

or an imaginary personage as for the

flesh-and-blood creature with

whom

you

are,

right now,

dancing in the dark or dancing cheek to cheek.

The Jewish songwriter had an pate in this aesthetic adventure:

extra incentive to partici-

He or

versally despised for reasons racial

to

and

compose the music and words of the

she, an outsider, unireligious,

was getting

insider's

dream. This

was America, where almost everybody could outsider, a

newcomer

to the inheritance,

nological marvels of the

modern age

feel like

an

and where the tech-

—

the radio and the

telephone, the movies, the microphone, the long-playing record, the television set nality

and enterprise

wrote

a

—welcomed and rewarded

in the

book winningly

popular

arts.

origi-

John Bush Jones

called The Songs That Fought the

War

about the value of popular music on the home front during

II

World War

The

II.

songs did fight in the ideological battle,

the propaganda war; they sold bonds on the one hand and on the other offered consolation to the lonely and daydreams of

how

nights on the

town

a lyricist like

Frank Loesser ("Praise the Lord and Pass the

Ammunition")

or

after

our boys took Berlin. That was

Sammy Cahn

Time") contributed

to the

war

("It's

Been a Long, Long

But whatever the

effort.

stated content of the songs, they served as linkages, messages between the soldier abroad and the people back home.

They conveyed

And

the romance of illusions.

if

you heard

the strains of "But Beautiful" or "You and the Night and the

Music" and there were tender, people

ladies present

were the most natural thing movies

And

in

and a friendly bar-

would spontaneously begin

which

in the world.

this happens.) The songs

dance

to

as if it

(Think of made people

all

the

dance.

the dance, the conventional fox-trot or old-fashioned

waltz, acquired, in Arlene Croce's phrase, a "special lumi-

nosity ... as an

dance"

is

code

emblem of

for

sexual union."

7

In a song, "to

something more intimate that could not

be stated explicitly when concepts

like

"mixed company"

still

had currency. As George Bernard Shaw said about danc-

ing,

it's

It

"a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

could even be argued that the songs that

8

made people

dance were the most important part of the whole dating and

mating

ritual.

Oh,

it

romance, irresistible

on you,

this

American

as that old black magic that spins you

around and makes you tor rapidly going

cast a spell

feel like

down.

you're in a skyscraper eleva-

A

Fine Romance

The Secret of Writing I

return to

my

original question: In

American popular music flip

way

to

make

the case. Leave

it

what sense

urban

is

phenomenon? There to

a

is

Lenny Bruce: "To me,

New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. if you're Catholic; if you live in New

if

you

It

doesn't matter even

live in

a Jewish

Hits

York you're Jewish." Then there

is

hear it" school of thought. Virgil

whose music criticism

him one of the

in the

New

the

"know

it

when you

Thomson, the composer York Herald-Tribune

George

nation's leading arbiters, dismissed

Gershwin's "gefilte fish" scoring in Porgy and

you regard the comment register a criticism,

it

Bess.

9

Whether

way

as a slur or just a colorful

makes

it

plain that

made

to

Thomson's edu-

cated ears picked up the synagogue rather than the indige-

nous Gullah sound of Charleston, and

this

meant that the

putative folk opera was, in his view, "fake folk-lore." are

more

10

There

favorable ways of considering the fusion of black

and Jewish elements

in

Gershwin's treatment of the deni-

zens of Catfish Row. But what

I

want

to note here

is

the

assumption, general in the 1920s and 1930s and shared by

Thomson,

that the "jazz" Gershwin epitomized was, in a

phrase, "Africanized Jewish music." In 1941, the music historian

John Tasker Howard asserted that jazz was "a Jewish

interpretation of the

Negro" and added, "What could be

more American than such does ignore those of us

An

a combination, even

who have Puritan

though

it

11

ancestors?"

anecdote in Richard Rodgers's autobiography ad-

vances the thesis that the Jewish quality of American popular

song

is

—

religion

so

fundamental

that

you

corn-fed Hoosiers

—and

so unrelated to the actual

even in the work of the

will find it

(Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter) and

Savannah songbirds (Johnny Mercer) among the many other white musicians not of the faith (Harry Warren, Vincent

Youmans, Walter Donaldson,

for starters)

who kept up with

the Gershwins, the Berlins, and the Kerns. It

then

was

in Venice in 1926 that

unknown

to him.

But Porter knew who Rodgers was.

Rodgers and Hart had made

was the

Rodgers met Cole Porter,

it

on Broadway "Manhattan"

toast of the town. Porter, in contrast,

had written

the scores of several shows, none of which had, well, scored.

According to Rodgers, who often complained about Hart's penchant

no sooner did he and

for disappearing,

his partner

reach Venice than the lyricist ditched the composer and

headed

for the nearest bar.

on the Lido,

whom

When Dick went

for a stroll alone

should he run into but his old friend Noel

Coward, and Noel had

nearby cabana, and there

a friend in a

stood Porter, a "slight, delicate-featured

man with

soft

saucer eyes and a wide, friendly grin." That evening Rodgers

and Hart dined with Coward and the Porters, Cole and wife, Linda,

in

his

the Palazzo Rezzonico, the grand palace

where Robert Browning had

died.

Coward had rented

it for

the season. All through dinner Porter peppered Rodgers

with questions. After they

When

ate,

Porter played "Let's

Do

they took turns at the piano. It"

Rodgers knew that here was a major

and "Let's Misbehave," talent.

He conveyed his

enthusiasm, and Porter confided that despite his failures on

Broadway, he thought he had

finally figured

out the secret of

A Fine Romance writing

hits.

Rodgers leaned over expectantly.

"I'll

write

Jewish tunes," Porter said. Rodgers laughed at the time, but looking back he realized that Porter was serious and had

been right. "Just beneath the

hum

the melody that goes with 'Only you

moon and under

the sun' from 'Night and Day,'

'My

or any of 'Begin the Beguine,' or 'Love for Sale,' or

Heart Belongs to Daddy,' or

'I

Love

These minor-

Paris.'

key melodies are unmistakably eastern Mediterranean,"

Rodgers writes

in Musical Stages. "It

surely one of the

is

ironies of the musical theatre that despite the

Jewish composers, the one

who

abundance of

has written the most endur-

ing 'Jewish' music should be an Episcopalian millionaire

was born on

a farm in Peru, Indiana."

doesn't spell

it

out,

it is

Porter, the gay Yalie,

common

with the

Columbia. tin sing

Though Rodgers

may have had more than one

New

who

easy enough to understand that thing in

York Jewish boys who went

Do what Rodgers

"My Heart

12

suggested. Listen to

Belongs to Daddy"

—

to

Mary Mar-

to that part of the

song where she says "Da" and repeats the syllable eight times. talk,

you

What you

get

is

a patter of

and a pun on "Dada." But

also hear the

if

baby

in the

da, da da da, da da da.

on

his

album

In the

temple on the

Can you hear it? To

my ears, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" tra sings it

baby

you slow down the tempo

sound of lamentation

Ninth of Av: da da

talk, or fake

(as

Frank Sina-

Wee Small Hours of the Morning)

and the lesser-known masterpiece "Looking

at

You"

recorded, unforgettably, by Lee Wiley on April

iy,

1940) are

as

(as

"Jewish" in sound and in attitude as anything by Rodgers,

Kern, or Arthur Schwartz. Can you hear the klezmer sound in "I

Love Paris"?

13

There

is,

component of

then, a sense in which the Judaic

popular American song stands as an entity unto

itself.

didn't have to be Jewish to write "Jewish tunes."

As

poser you just needed an ear for

The

it.

cantor's sons

other temple-goers had a natural advantage, of course.

You

com-

a

and

They

could rely on the praises and lamentations from the liturgy that were buried in their brains.

One day

listening to an Al Jolson record.

had heard many other ver-

sions of "Swanee," son's

Was that

I

that where it.

happened to be

first hit,

but in

Jol-

of the verse sounded

first line

in

an uncanny way.

remembered the Sabbath

was

I

been away from you a long time." Or rather,

sounded familiar

then

George Gershwin's

animated rendition, the

different. "I've it

I

it

I've

What was

it?

And

prayer: Hashkivenu adoshem.

came from? Hashkivenu

... a

long time. Yes,

been away from you, God. The verse

minor, the chorus in triumphant major.

It

in

could be said that

the jazz age began with this 1919 song ironically glorifying a

mythical Deep South ter's

"Old Folks

writers

who

at

had,

—

the Swanee River of Stephen Fos-

Home" as

—by

the

a pair of

song's

New

lyricist

York song-

Irving Caesar

quipped, seldom ventured "south of Fourteenth Street," alone south of the Mason-Dixon line,

"Swanee." And who better to make son of a cantor? Bess

A few years

and realized where

I

ago

I

when they wrote

a hit than Jolson, the

it

saw a revival of Porgy and

had previously heard the musical

phrase for the words "it ain't necessarily so." bima on Shabbos^

when

a

congregant

blessing over the Torah. Borchu I

let

es

is

It

summoned

was

at the

to recite a

adoshem hamvoroch.

Hear

it?

understand from Gershwin's biographer Howard Pollack

that "mornin' time

and evenin' time"

in "Bess,

You

Is

My

A Woman Now" comes

Fine Romance

Ma

from the

Nishtanah, the four ques-

tions that the youngest at the Seder asks on the first

nights of Passover, and though this,

I'm prepared to believe that a Pesach niginah provided

that musical phrase. sic

two

can't independently verify

I

14

But that

only one

is

American popular song finds

its

way

in

Hippocrene

which

clas-

in the Jewish

sector of town.

As

a lyricist of "Jewish tunes,"

you needed

to

modify

your melancholy with the wit of insubordination or the gleedouble entendre. You needed cheek

ful

as well as

cheek-

to-cheek, and you needed the ability to sound glad and

unhappy you had

at the

same time. And of course words

a fund of Yiddish

at

it

didn't hurt if

When

your disposal.

the

chorus in Animal Crackers (1930) sings "Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer," Groucho Marx, the object

of adulation, comments, "Did someone

Nor

is

needed when

a footnote

No one's in select

the

title

1

schnorer?"

in

writes the

song of the movie

Come Blow Tour Horn (1963).

Guys and Dolls (19 p) and

How

to

Succeed

Without Really Trying (1961). In the former, there

moment when Nathan

"permanent

floating crap

burlesque dancer to

number of

years,

*

sounded more Jewish than Frank Loesser's

lyrics

moments

in Business

first play,

me

Sammy Cahn

phrase "the whole megillah" in the version of Neil Simon's

call

is

some minor betrayal or

his

more committed

game" than

whom on

Detroit,

is

to his

to Miss Adelaide, the

he has been engaged for a record knees begging her forgiveness for

other.

Alright already,

Vm just a nogoodnik.

Alright already,

it's

true, so

nu?

The incomparable

nu

"well" in English or

—

is

It

makes these

plus meaning

the rhyme. sing

16

without

—which

Nathan Detroit

like

rhyme but not only

there for the

New

a

somewhat

functions

French but with much sur-

alors in

speak or

lines impossible to

York Jewish intonation.

in the movie, Sinatra never

for

Playing

sounded more

Jewish.

Sometimes an inversion of customary word order stamps a

song

as defiantly

Detroit tary

Is

Succeed^

tells

Not

New

Adelaide.

York Jewish. "So sue me," Nathan

"What can you do me?"

a Toy," a big playful chorus

number

in

Loesser makes merry with a pun on "pad"

slang for "apartment"

—

Her pad

is

is

—

to

1960s

to write in

in another big chorus

pany policy

How

in this couplet:

And not spend the When,

In "A Secre-

by me okay,"

night

in.

number, the cast sings "com-

it's

as

York Jewish phrasing has become

though the typically as

American

But, then, the audience has been prepped. plot of Bringing Up Baby (1938) requires

New

as the bagel.

The

screwball

Cary Grant and

Katharine Hepburn to sing "I Can't Give You Anything but

Love" (music Jimmy McHugh,

lyrics

Hepburn's pet leopard, Baby, who the house:

"Diamond

is

Dorothy

sitting

Fields) to

on the roof of

bracelets Woolworth's doesn't

sell,

/

—

in

Baby."

The argument

has been

made

that the Jewish genius

the sense of a tutelary or attendant "spirit" tightly with Jewish wit and humor.

most Jewish element of the

lyrics

—

is

bound up

You could argue

that the

written for classic Ameri-

A can popular songs

Vine Romance

the wit that informs them, whether

is

jubilant or downhearted, buoyantly clever or wryly ironic.

Consider Gershwin's couplet

You Can Get

The only work that Is the

The

kind that

inversion of the

would disqualify lyric, for it

spirit

it

is

really brings

for girl

word order

If

enjoyment

in the

second its

combines the romantic vision of

of the comic vernacular.

The

"Nice Work

and boy meant.

accounts for

as poetry,

with "and boy meant"

show

in the verse for

It":

is

which

bliss

with the

of "enjoyment"

Jewish genius.

rhyme

multisyllabic

The rhyme

line,

greatness as a

gives the lyricist the chance to

off his virtuosic powers, as Ira does in retelling Bible

stories for "It Ain't Necessarily So."

Here

in

two

lines is the

crux of the story of Jonah:

He made

his

home

in

That fish's abdomen. It is

hard to outdo Hart in this department. "Mountain

Greenery," the pastoral counterpart to "Manhattan,"

is full

of astounding examples: While you Blue

Leo Robin, fies

in

love

skies be

your

your

"Diamonds Are

lover let

coverlet.

a Girl's Best Friend," exempli-

Alexander Pope's definition of true wit

as

"what

oft

was

thought but ne'er so well expressed." Your average cheating

husband

will treat a girl all right

when

the market's up.

It's

19

when

crashes that "those louses /

it

spouses." There

rhyme

"Love

in

is

Is

Vm

is

back to their

a decidedly Jewish inflection in Robin's

Just

Around the Corner":

a sentimental mourner,

And I couldn't Hart

Go

be forlorner.

peerless at the melancholy of sexual attraction,

the masochism of the smitten lover. Given the choice

between and "I

a quiet, healthy life

wife, Hart's lover

Wish

whole

I

Were

logic of

in

classic quarrel of a

knows exactly which

Love Again,"

romance

love

to prefer.

this couplet

man

From

sums up the

mode:

in a noir

The words "Vll The

and the

you

till

the

day I die,"

self-deception that believes the

lie

—

Sex enters the lyrics sometimes sneakily, sometimes wantonly.

my

Hart rhymed "romance" with the "ants that invaded

pants." Cole Porter uses a geographical conceit that

recalls

John Donne

You" wants

When

at his raunchiest.

The

lover in "All of

to take a tour of his "luscious lass": arms, the mouth ofyou,

The

eyes, the

The

east, west, north,

Porter wrote "Let's

and

Do

the south

It,"

ofyou.

and repeated the word

"it" in shifting zoological contexts, everyone

was a better euphemism

"whoopee" or Dorothy

for

knew

that "it"

sex than Walter WinchelPs

Fields's

"digga digga do." Even

Irving Berlin gets in on the action in "It's a Lovely

Today":

Day

A Fine Romance And whatever you've Vd

got to do

be so happy to be doing

with you.

it

Stairway to Paradise

It

may sound

ultimate paradox, but one distinc-

like the

tively Jewish thing about the authors of the

book

is

American song-

the determination to escape from their Jewish origins

and join the American adventure. America represented

dom

free-

not only from persecution but also from the past, from

outmoded

rules

and obscure regulations, esoteric doctrines

and archaic habits of dress. America was an

idea, a

good

idea,

even a revolutionary one. You had the freedom to worship

and the freedom not to worship, tant

it

was

for Berlin

to

if

you so chose.

trumpet

Rodgers and Hammerstein to

his

criticize

How impor-

patriotism or for

racism at a time

when

world Jewry faced the specter of annihilation. The art they

made was not an

art of defiance

protest in a Rodgers and ballad.

But

—

there

anger or

little

is

Hammerstein musical or

in their affirmations of

American

a Berlin

ideals as they

understood them, the writers were pressing back against the forces that

aimed to extinguish them.

Oklahoma! opened on March

31,

1943.

^n

tnat

month

in

Czestochowa, more than one hundred Jewish doctors and their families

were rounded up and

each of the wicked Hainan's sons, of the Book of Esther.

who

Ten would

die for

are hanged at the end

The Purim month began with

sage from the Fiihrer to party his

killed.

a mes-

members assuring them

"struggle" (kampf} "would culminate with the

that

liquida-

21

tion of Jewry in Europe."

On March 22

new crematoria was put

of four

opened, Crematorium

II

made

to use.

its

them

station, drove

On

Men

to the

in

Auschwitz the

On

debut

my

during that month, too, that

were deported to Riga.

at

the day Oklahoma!

Auschwitz.

in

It

was

maternal grandparents

uniforms met them

Rumbula

first

at the

Forest, and shot them.

the surface, Oklahoma! took no notice of the war

against inflicted

Germany and

Japan, of the atrocities the Nazis

on the Jews, or of the grim Depression that ended

only with the coming of war and the

industry But in an indirect

way

boom

in the

the show touched upon

these things by offering a redemptive vision, an

fight for.

The

as

Jews

show's celebration of

—

—and what we had

cowboy

all

Oklahoma of

who "we" were

the imagination. Oklahoma! expressed

Americans and more narrowly

munitions

as

to

territory seems

to reinforce Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis on the impor-

tance of the frontier in the American psyche (1893). frontier the tics,"

American

intellect

owes

its

"To the

striking characteris-

such as "restless nervous energy," "dominant indi-

vidualism," and "that buoyancy and exuberance which

comes with freedom," Turner argued. Oklahoma! bursts with

"buoyancy and exuberance," love story,

and

territory as if

it

to be sure.

But Oklahoma!

chronicles the domestication of

"we" were wedded

is

a

cowboy

to the land. In the course of

the play, the structural conflict between the farmer and cow-

man is not only resolved but resolved

("Territory folk should

in favor of the former: that

forces of civilization.

Cowboy

Curly, a

buster, sells his saddle, his horse, his for the sake of

farm

girl

gun

Laurey, and the

is,

all

be pals")

in favor of the

champion bronco belt,

show

and

his

gun

closes not only

\

A Fine Romance with a wedding but with a celebration of union in a second

Oklahoma,

sense.

still

a territory as the

the verge of statehood in the

show

begins,

is

on

decade of the twentieth

first

century. It will join the Union, and

it is

just possible that in

the logic of displacement favored by Jewish songwriters and librettists, the relation

a

of Oklahoma to the United States as

whole resembles that of the Jewish immigrants to the land

that offered

them and

their kinfolk refuge from the barking

nightmares of Europe. As Andrea Most writes in her excellent book,

Making Americans: Jews and

the

Broadway Musical

the title song "tapped into wartime nationalism," but the exaltation

it

releases

endures to this

day.

"The joyous

applause that inevitably follows the number joins audience

members and performers

in the

communal Utopian

vision of

Rodgers's and Hammerstein's America," where no one "better than anyone else."

new

idea of

What

Oklahoma! offered was "a

what America should be

—an

idea that entailed

openness to ethnic outsiders," such as Ali Hakim, the tious peddler,

whose Jewish identity

can be inferred.

To

is

flirta-

never indicated but

17

claustrophobic

New Yorkers,

beset by wartime short-

ages and brownouts, here was the American character at

most appealing. The optimism of Oklahoma! is the that hits one. There's a

and the sky

is

is

first

its

thing

bright golden haze on the meadow,

an endless blue.

I

have in front of

me some

of

the stamps the U.S. Postal Service has issued in the last few years to celebrate the fifty states in the union.

nine-cent stamp representing state's

Oklahoma

is

On

the thirty-

the year of the

admittance to the union, 1907, and next to

it,

in a

bright cursive script, the words "Oh, what a beautiful morn-

*3

ing!

..." Those

lyric

he presented to Rodgers. Together (and in collabora-

are

Hammers tein's

words, from the

first

Agnes de Mille and others)

tion with the choreographer

they created an idea of Oklahoma to counter the grim real-

by the thousands

ity of the dust storms that caused Okies flee for places

west during the

The exclamatory

1930s.

to

Okla-

homa! was an answer to the Oklahoma of The Grapes of Wrath

,

And the Oklahoma! of sunny optimism won out. The land was new and fertile; the country was young and proud of itself. "We know we belong to the land," Hammerstein wrote in the title song, "and the land we belong to is grand." The line recalls the opening of Robert Frost's poem "The Gift Out-

John Steinbeck's novel and,

right,"

which he read aloud

tion but

which was

first

John Ford's movie.

later,

at

John

F.

Kennedy's inaugura-

published in 1942, a year before the

debut of Oklahoma! The poem begins: "The land was ours, before is

we were

the land's." Like Frost's line, Hammerstein's

a statement of manifest destiny, affirming the

westward

expansion of the American idea from sea to shining

white with foam. But both of the Promised Land, and stein's

in

evoke the biblical idea

lines also it

sea,

might be said that Hammer-

was fueled by two millennia of

statelessness. Zionists

Poland were singing the same song with their hands and

feet

that

Hammerstein was voicing

though he read the Bible sideways tans, transforming

in

in the

America.

Sinai.

In Oklahoma! Rodgers achieves the illusion of

Fringe on Top," he gives so

cowboy music might be

fair

like that

as

manner of the Puri-

Plymouth Rock into Mount

music. In the clip-clop rhythms of

It's

cowboy

"The Surrey with

the

an approximation of what

people listening to the song

A Fine Romance often assume that

They echt

it

comes from the west of the

are invariably surprised

when they

American song was the work of

But the

fact

is,

the

prairies.

learn that such an

a pair of

New York Jews.

"cowboy" rhythms of "The Surrey"

sprang entirely from Rodgers's musical imagination

I.

as

was

and "The March of

also true of "Bali Ha'i" in South Pacific

the Siamese Children" in The King and

—

Those melodies may

sound wonderfully foreign and exotic, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the indigenous music of Polynesia or Southeast Asia. Rodgers was exercising both his genius and his artistic license.

as

it

but

was but as

stein

as it

And in proffering a vision of America not

might be

—not

permanently

as a fact fixed

an artistic work-in-progress

—Rodgers and Hammer-

were honoring the imperative issued by Ralph Waldo

Emerson

in his essay

"The Poet"

(1842).

genius in America, with tyrannous eye,

"We

have yet no

who knew

"Our

log-

fisheries,

our

of our incomparable materials," Emerson wrote. rolling,

our stumps and their

politics,

our

the value

Negroes and Indians, our boats and our reputations, the

wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,

Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America our eyes, will

its

a

poem

ample geography dazzles the imagination, and

not wait long

for

meters." Oklahoma!

prophecy and demonstrated America's

is

praises,

Jewish

fulfilled

in it

this

in the process that in singing

songwriters

were reinventing

themselves as American and changing America itself at the

same time.

18

I

My Romance I

love the old folks at home.

irving caesar,

Jerome Kern and Harold gogue of

my boyhood

"

Swanee"

Arlen were

my uncles

dreams, where

I

in the syna-

attended services

regularly on Fridays nights and Shabbos mornings until

away

my mind

to college. In

the music of

I

went

"Smoke Gets

in

Your Eyes" and "Over the Rainbow" was written by Uncle Jerry and Uncle Harold, respectively, and ble presence beside

and praised the "tree of ark.

My father was

got to go to

many

life"

Luckman of

for "love the peace"),

official social

politics.

and

functions and

who

liked

as a result sit

next to

schmoozing

Hank Greenberg of the Tigers,

Sid

the Bears, and Benny Leonard of boxing fame

were perennial

favorites.

good reputation Yugoslavia.

stood up

on returning the Torah to the

the honored elders, talkative gents

about sports and

their invisi-

the president of the shul, Congregation

Ohav Shalom (Hebrew I

I felt

me at choir practice or when we

My

for

Congressman Jacob

Javits

helping get your relatives

had a out of

parents voted to elect him senator even

A Fine Romance FDR Democrats

though he was a Republican and they were

moment

from the

they set foot in America. In those days

when people asked me how "like the governor"

I

spelled

my

name,

always said

I

and was understood, though Thomas E.

Dewey, Averell Harriman, and now Nelson Rockefeller had succeeded Herbert H. Lehman (no relation) in the governor's

mansion

in

Albany One thing

I

win's lyric for Vernon Duke's "I Can't

mentions "Mr. Lehman This

mine

is

—

like

about Ira Gersh-

Get Started"

is

that

it

you know, the Gov."

the story of a romance, mine, though scarcely

alone, with an

marily Jewish

America of the imagination and the

men and women who

pri-

got to write the book,

the lyrics, and the music for the dream. Kern and Arlen and the wordsmiths with

romance

in

whom

they collaborated depicted this

popular songs that set store by their wit and pas-

sion and sophistication.

They

created, without quite

mean-

ing to do so, an art form, and they had a lot of fun doing

"They Can't Take That Away from Me," "They Laughed," and "They Didn't Believe

the

many

— —

Me"

songs that begin with the same pronoun

it.

All

three great

can stand for

songs that beguiled multitudes, proving them-

selves in the

box

office

and proving

as well that the

means of popular culture and high could coincide.

The

artistic

aims and

achievement

songs of the Gershwins, of Rodgers and

Hart, of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, and the rest of a list too long to

power and charm cent heyday 1965-

—

—popular

The Broadway

as

fit

in

one sentence retain their

only true art does. During their efferves-

a roughly fifty-year period

between 1914 and

songs fed a nexus of other arts and pastimes. musical, jazz of the swing and

bop

eras,

Big

27

Band music and popular vocalists:

All

depended on the song-

writers for their very existence. In a different sense, so did

nightclubs and real or make-believe ballrooms. forget the movies that

Hollywood turned out

and-white 1940s, when noir was new.

It's

those dialogue-heavy films without "Isn't

"Body and Soul" (music Johnny Green,

And

in the black-

hard to imagine It

Romantic?" or

lyrics

Edward Hey-

man), "Baltimore Oriole" (music Hoagy Carmichael, Paul Francis Webster), or "I Get a Kick

don't

lyrics

Out of You" (Cole

Porter) in the background as the plot requires.

Or

A

in the foreground:

Me

movie Love

marvelous sequence

Tonight (music

in the 1932

Richard Rodgers,

Lorenz Hart) commences when Maurice Chevalier lor

shop sings a stanza of "Isn't

It

lyrics

in his tai-

Romantic?" His customer

continues the catchy strain as he walks out the door, where a taxi driver overhears

composer on notes, adds in,

his

and whistles

way

train,

and then the tune becomes hill.

his passenger, a

to the train station, takes

words on the

meadow and

and

it,

a

band of

down

the

where

a

march

as the soldiers drill

soldiers join

on

Next, a gypsy violinist plays the tune as a

melancholy serenade, and

finally the princess (Jeanette

Mac-

Donald) sings a stanza on the balcony of her chateau boudoir. In this Great Depression fantasy, the tailor and the princess are destined to

become

lovers,

you

see, despite

the

vast discrepancy in their social classes, and the song itself

the magic chain that links them. It

was the songbook

identity of

its

to

which

I

responded, not the Jewish

authors, though this was a source of pride for

me, the son of refugees. Let's put

someone

in a

is

1

it

this

way: Every time

movie sings "Hello Mr. Cohen / How's

it

A goin'?"

is

a

Vine Romance

minor victory

for the

2

Jewish people.

To me

it

remains a source of endless wonderment and speculation that certain Jewish immigrants or their American-born chil-

dren managed to re-create whole parts of American culture. All right, then. This time the dream's

on me. Where or when

How long has this been going on? Shall we dance? Who stole my heart away? How high the moon? Why did

it

was

I

come from?

born?

Fair questions,

all,

but this being a romance,

you more about where I'm

my

York

City.

It's

my

is

in the

need to

tell

Home, where I hang

calling from.

hat of choice, a fedora,

I

Inwood section of

birthday, June n,

195-6.

New

Bing Crosby

recorded Rodgers and Hart's "Mountain Greenery" with

Buddy Bregman's orchestra

Rodgers

this afternoon.

cheerily melodious as ever, and the lyric

is

as

one of Hart's

is

smartest displays of polysyllabic wit. Here's a city boy

by rhyming the

extolling the "greenery" of God's country

word with "beanery," "machinery," and

a

word formed from

the suffix of "cleaner" and the prefix of "retreat." Bing

doing

it full

justice,

I

must

even unflappable. In terms that Marshall

make

fashionable,

that's

why

Crosby

is

McLuhan would

cool and Sinatra

is

hot.

Maybe

Sinatra never did as well on television, a notori-

ously cool medium, as Perry

sweater

is

No one sounds more relaxed,

say.

—maximum

and Crosby with

his

cool.

Como

did lounging in his

But Sinatra with

his

high range

deep baritone did harmonize perfectly

on a medley of "Among

My Souvenirs,"

"September Song,"

and "As Time Goes By" on the GE-sponsored Crosby show

we saw on

TV

two years

ago.

schnitzel this evening with

My

mother

cucumber

is

salad

making wiener and roast pota-

29 toes,

and

my

father has promised

wine and make

and

open

will

a special toast. Last night

Man Who Knew

Hitchcock's latest. The

my

James Stewart,

we

Much.

Too

Sera," which

kept hearing

I

we went

to see

liked

I

my mother

father liked Doris Day, and

my sister liked "Que Sera,

movie and which

a bottle of

Day

sings in the

year on the radio, even

all

m

the Yankee clubhouse in October. That turned out to be the last

time

New

York fought Brooklyn

World

in the

Series.

Well, the Yanks won, Ike was reelected, and inevitably the

Rav Evans and Jav Livingston tune copped Award. Meanwhile,

I

have choir practice

tomorrow evening. The youth group for a discussion of the function of

is

Academy

the

the temple

at

meeting next Sunday

popular culture during

the Great Depression followed by a screening of the Preston Sturges

Travels,

Hollywood director looking

comedv with for the real

Mr. Birnbaum, a furrier on

Joel

McCrea

and making

Israel give

for

Street in daily

back the Suez Canal to Nasser It

when he gave somebody

mind

that everv time

it

a piece of his

happened,

rubber

my

ball

life,

father

shaming England and France

Mr. Birnbaum had a terrible temper.

a Spaldine, the

as a

America.

Dvckman

was the choirmaster of Ohav Shalom. Both he and blamed John Foster Dulles

Sullivan's

his face

we used

in 1956.

used to scare until

I

me

noticed

would turn redder than

for

games of punchball

the playground, and the veins in his forehead looked as

they would pop.

From then on

him when somebody I

was good But

I

at

liked

keeping a straight it

I

couldn't take

in choir practice

if

eyes off

goofed off on his time.

face.

best when Mr. Birnbaum

actors he claimed to have

my

in

known.

"I

talked about Jewish

knew John

Garrield

A Vine Romance when he was for

still

Julius Garfinkel," he said.

"And the same

who became, and Danny Kaye

Bernie Schwartz and David Kaminsky,"

he didn't need to explain, Tony Curtis

as

in

another space-time coordinate. Sir Laurence Olivier fancied

both of these good-looking Jewish boys from Brooklyn, did

you know itch!"

that?

No,

I

didn't.

"And don't forget Joey Lev-

How could I possibly forget Joey Levitch? I remember

being eight years old and totally enthralled with this funnylooking, wide-grinning, overgrown kid in a

crew cut playing

an army chef leading a chorus of GIs in the mess hall singing

"Oh And

army

the navy gets the gravy and the

gets the beans."

then the sergeant comes in played by Mr. Cool, Dino

Crocetti of Steubenville, Ohio, tin singing "That's

who had become Dean Mar-

Amore" (music Harry Warren,

lyrics

Jack Brooks) through the same process that turned Joey Levitch into Jerry Lewis,

crown prince of Borscht Belt comics.

Mr. Birnbaum and his wife had caught Martin and Lewis at the Copacabana in 1949. their jokes.

I'll

"Did you take

give

you an example of one of

a bath this

morning?" "No,

missing?" Here's another. "Daddy, take the zoo wants you, let

Born

in Fiirth,

and industrious

not

me

is

one

to the zoo." "If

them come and get you." far

in the

from Nuremburg

in Bavaria, solid

German manner, my

father ran a

small trading firm specializing in the import and export of steel angles,

beams, and reinforcing bars.

downtown on Liberty

Street, a secretary,

He had

ners in places like Belgium and Venezuela,

stamps he brought home asked what

my

businessman."

for

my

My father liked

that

I

—

office

whose postage

collection.

father did for a living,

an

and trading part-

When

I

was

always said, "He's a

just as he liked going

m to

work with

a briefcase every

day on the subway. But he

was a Talmudist to the core, and he loved nothing better than to study the Gemorah with like-minded gentlemen, Yeshiva buchers from the old country.

kept the religious law

my

of a struggle

strictly,

A

devout

man who much

he tolerated without

widening deviations from the path. After

the experience of growing up in Germany, he liked American

West

institutions:

Point, "Hail to the Chief," ice

Monroe, South

sodas, Marilvn

used American idioms

Pacific,

as well as

and

Kiss

Me,

cream

Kate.

He

he could, calling this fellow

"chief" and that one "Mac," but of course his thick Bavarian accent gave

him

away.

I

think he winked at the liberties

took because he could see that

I,

I

American-born, would have

opportunities that would always be denied him, an immi-

grant with a heart condition, and he didn't want to get in wav.

I

remember the evenings he

lav in his

my

bed listening to

Jean Shepherd's radio monologues in the dark.

He was

also a

voracious reader of the Encyclopedia Britannica, his favorite purchase.

my college years I came home late my room because my father was asleep in his

Manv

and tiptoed to

a night in

green reclining armchair with the lights on and a volume of the Britannic a open on his lap to Disraeli's foreign policy or

the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus.

Unlike

my

my mother was girlhood. When with a

very serious father,

hearted as befit her Viennese

propism she generated laughter, she joined right an

inveterate

painful detail

storyteller

and told

— about how

me many

1939.

My

mala-

She was

times

—

she escaped from Nazi-annexed

Austria to England in 1938 and finally arrived in

Thanksgiving of

in.

light-

New York on

mother loved The King and

I,

A which we saw

Know You"

in

Fine Romance

at a drive-in,

and would sing "Getting to

The

the kitchen while preparing dinner.

Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the King of Siam

and the English governess remained her favorite until Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe came along with their musical

based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

knocked out

all

On more

competition.

original cast recording with

Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews

And why

played continuously on our record player.

Even

T.

S.

Eliot loved

"I

it.

must say Bernard Shaw

improved by music," Eliot singing "I Could

My Fair Lady

than one Sunday, the

said.

Have Danced

The young

All

Julie

is

not?

greatly

Andrews

Night" caps the purest

expression of joy in a Broadway musical, the triumphant

sequence that begins with "The Rain in Spain." For a

man

with a very uncertain voice, Rex Harrison talked his way

through his songs with such artistry

anyone

Man?"

make

else

doing

"Why

Can't a

or "I'm an Ordinary

Woman Be More

the movie version, they replaced Julie

retained

Rex Harrison

parents and I

saw

it

I

as

Like a

Man." When the time came

Audrey Hepburn (and Marni Nixon's

and

hard to imagine

it's

saw the movie together when again, this time

dubbed

Andrews with

voice),

Henry Higgins

to

but they

personified.

My

came

out,

it first

into French, with

my

friend Jamie in Aix-en-Provence in 1971.

Improbably enough, 1939

when

my

mother had met Rex Harrison

in

she worked as a parlor maid in the house of a

wealthy London theater producer. One night Rex Harrison

came

to dinner.

mother

said.

"He was very friendly,

That was

a few

permit to go to England

months

as a

a real

gentleman,"

after she

my

had obtained

mother's helper.

"When

I

a

saw

33

how bad

the situation was and

Vienna,

tried to get

I

them out

my

parents were

in

still

to England. For America,

they had to wait too long, their quota was very small, since

my

parents were born in Poland." There were sponsors to

find,

papers to notarize. "Everything took so long,

finally got

when

everything together England was at war, and

parents couldn't come.

I

my

had no way of getting in touch with

I

them."

How

often

I

had heard the

was even though

knew

I

story,

and how suspenseful

the outcome in advance.

"We

it

all

received the gas masks and instructions for the air-raid shel-

The American

ters.

doors again, and

How

we had

home. But the American consulate

a refugee its

consulate closed, and

happy

I

was. Naturally

English ship, so

money, and

I

my

It

my

think

I

I

my

it

was worried

we

We

me

on an

additional

American

was the

Atlantic crossing

last

ship, the it

took us ten days of the most terrible shaking.

all

the safe drillings.

had, and for

me

it

The

die.

We

were so

was the

last

day was Thanks-

first

time, a delicious

Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and c

they played Oh,

say,

Statue of Liberty, live

to travel

weren't even afraid of hidden mines, and as in a

dream we did giving.

to

opened

ticket to an

Everyone on board was sick and wanted to sick that

finally

move

visa to go to America.

cousin from America sent

changed

President Harding.

ever made.

received

I

to

I

can you

was

see,'

all

and when

really grateful to

the trimmings, I

finally

saw the

God, that he

let

me

and see America."

My

father

wanted

to speak English exclusively

and to

memory of Germany and the past, and my mother wanted to please him. The reason I speak any German at all banish

all

A Fine Romance was that

my

my sisters

parents spoke

and

me

German when they

to understand

what they were

my

father spoke with a Bavarian accent, lighter,

didn't

want

saying.

My

mother with the

more musical accent of her Viennese

dialect.

One

day they had an argument. Each accused the other of speaking English with an accent.

They appealed

to

me

to adjudi-

cate. I said that neither

of them had an accent. This

sound diplomatic, even

gallant,

but

my father and after my father's

heard no accent;

I

heard the voice of

the voice of

Not

death,

until years

voice on tape, did

when he spoke

I

realize

tell

about

how it

my

when

I

German

thick his

I

mother.

heard his

accent was

English.

Some congregants to talk about

how

may

at

Ohav Shalom had

great stories to

they escaped from the Nazis but didn't want except in

German among

ing us kids to tune out and wonder

themselves, allow-

how many

points

Kenny

Sears had scored for the Knicks against Elgin Baylor and the

Minneapolis Lakers the night before.

enough, but to

me was

I

liked history more.

I

liked basketball well

One person who opened up

Mrs. Gottlieb, mother of Joey,

who

served the

best chocolate milk in the neighborhood, using the same

syrup they used for egg creams at Nat and

Phil's

on Sherman Avenue. Joey's mother had been grade history teacher in the yeshiva, and

I still

candy store

my

fourth-

enjoyed talk-

ing about history with her though she had long since retired. I'll

never forget the day in August 1964

that

Lyndon Johnson would win

when

she predicted

reelection and then escalate

the war in Vietnam, belying his self-presentation as a reasonable alternative to Barry Goldwater the hawk. Everyone else at the

Democratic National Convention

in Atlantic

City was

35 singing "Hello,

Lyndon"

to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," but

Mrs. Gottlieb was not impressed. "He's the biggest faker in the United States," she said.

though not nearly so big lier

when

she told

me

made

a big impression,

as the afternoon a

few months ear-

about leaving Belgium on foot on

May

Germans invaded France and Belgium.

the day the

10, 1940,

It

She and her husband had owned and operated a thriving jewelry-export business in Antwerp but

They were

behind.

everything

left

part of a mass exodus, but they didn't

panic despite the desperation of their plight. Mrs. Gottlieb felt

that keeping a cool head was one of the things that

enabled them to survive.

They

also lucked into an acquain-

tance with Andree de Jongh, a young Belgian

own

age

who helped many

woman

their

refugees over the Pyrenees and

across the Spanish border. "She told us to call her 'Dedee,'

which was her code name. looked like a schoolgirl. creature help us? Yet

A

Spain and freedom.

It

means

How

'little

mother.' But she

could this undernourished

somehow

she did. She guided us to

true heroine, one of the righteous,

it

was she who gave us the documents that allowed us to cross the border. You cannot believe

afterward

we heard

that her

how

own

risky this was.

And

father had been captured

and executed by the Nazis, and then the Gestapo caught up with

her.

briick.

They

couldn't break her.

She never betrayed a

soul.

They

Not

don't write to her on her birthday, live to

but

be ninety."

first

3

I

May

a year goes

November

by that we

30.

May

she

asked Mrs. Gottlieb for more details,

she quizzed

happened on

sent her to Ravens-

10,

me on my 1940?"

retention of facts.

"What

"The Germans marched

into

Belgium and France, and you and Mr. Gottlieb began your

A Fine Romance escape." "And what else happened on

May

1940?"

10,

I

shrugged. "Churchill became prime minister," she said.

"You have

a

good head on your shoulders," she told me. She

deplored the

new trend of ignoring dates and events

in favor

of analysis of root causes. "They're going to destroy the

study of history. at." It

A good mind for dates

is

nothing to sneeze

May 10, 1964. 1 went to the New York World's Fair spring and summer. On Broadway Barbra Streisand

was

a lot that

played Fanny Brice and sang "People" in Jule Styne's musical

Funny

"Wouldn't you

Girl.

On

they were

television

really rather have a

new

singing,

Buick than any other car

this year?"

Erik Schnupp, by day an accountant with a solid

was nominally

service job,

in

civil

charge of our synagogue's

youth group, which meant he scheduled lectures and an occasional movie field trip.

he denounced

Story,

dismissed

it,

the

moment we

left

to see West Side

the theater, just

and then he ostentatiously read an oversized

Hebrew book on stand him.

it

The time we went

the long quiet subway ride home.

From time

couldn't

I

to time, however, he brought in a

worthwhile speaker, such

as the

army veteran who came

to

tell

us about his wartime experiences and those of other Jew-

ish

men

Army

in his

unit

company. Karl Frucht had served

composed of European refugees that landed on

Utah Beach on D-Day plus one

in 1944. In

taught history at the university; in jobs.

The army

tion

(PWI) team

odd

it felt

ond

looey.

in a U.S.

assigned him to a Prisoner of in

France and Germany.

to be a refugee from a place

The Germans had

Vienna he had

New York he worked odd He

War Interrogaexplained

and to return

how

as a sec-

trained thousands of soldiers

— 37 in English, outfitted

them

in counterfeit U.S. uniforms,

dropped them by parachute near said) that at checkpoints the

U.S. lines.

PWI officers

the routine things with extra care

—

This meant (he

not only had to do

passwords, dog tags

but also had to add methods by which to

Americans

tell real

from Nazi saboteurs. They asked what Sinatra's was,

who won

way musical began with

They never used

—

if it

would

meant the

the end of a rope. to the core

When

firing

Some of

and stared

at

first

name

and what Broadon the meadow

But they found that even

tell

you things

—important

squad rather than hanging

at

the "false Americans" were Nazi

them with hatred and contempt.

the boys on the firing squad stood up, their knees

shook but

They

Series,

a bright golden haze

torture. Never!

a fanatic Fiihrer-lover

things

World

last year's

and

at least

they had fired a shot for righteousness.

interrogated one

for the deaths of

thing was

how

man who was

personally responsible

thousands by lethal injection.

little his

The amazing

conscience bothered him. Between

interrogation sessions he would read Schiller under a blos-

soming apple Paris in

tree.

One day

August 1944,

a

PWI

following the liberation of

named Dreyfus stood

captain

under the Arc de Triomphe and was wounded when a Nazi prisoner, not properly disarmed, tossed a grenade.

Frucht that was the meaning of World War fus

II:

To Mr.

Captain Drey-

wins Purple Heart under Arc de Triomphe. 4

My

father's closest friend in shul

broker at Bache

was Mr. Rosenblatt,

who recommended IBM when

people

a

still

thought the phone company was a good stock. Mr. Rosenblatt

wore

collars

first-class

Brooks Brothers

with four-in-hand

ties,

suits,

no vest, spread

and cream-colored

shirts.

He

A

Fine Romance

was the most elegantly attired Holocaust survivor

in the

congregation, with tattooed numbers on his arm to prove it.

Bernhard Rosenblatt was seventeen when

his family

deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His mother and

were put to death immediately. His father was weeks

later.

was

sister

killed a

few

Mr. Rosenblatt escaped, survived a death march

through the snow, and was blue with typhus when a bunch of GIs rescued him.

One

of the GIs was the Sutton Place scion

of a major brokerage firm.

And

oh!

—

look at him now. Bern-

hard Rosenblatt made his name on Wall Street

proponent of index funds.

why people should go

father asked Mr. Rosenblatt

to outperform an actively

managed

Rosenblatt smiled and said he had more

clients than ever.

baby

an early

to a broker for advice if a basket of five

hundred stocks tended portfolio? Mr.

My

as

"Most people want

to find a million-dollar

he

in a five-and-ten-cent store,"

said.

"They look

me, and they see a rich man, and when you're think you really know."

My father

rich,

at

they

smiled in appreciation of

Mr. Rosenblatt's allusion to Fiddler on

the Roof.

Both men

shared a love of Zero Mostel's performance as Tevye, particularly his renditions of "Tradition"

Man."*

When

Mr. Rosenblatt's son

and "If

I

Were

a

Rich

Noah and I produced our

youth group's variety show, we assigned "Standing on the

Corner Watching All the Girls Joey Gottlieb.

Amy Grossman

Go By" and

I

to ourselves

and

little

did a duet of "Love and

Marriage," and the whole company closed the show with a chorus of "There's

Of all

No

Business Like

the congregants in

fascinated

me

the most.

Show

my dream

From

as far

Business."

synagogue,

back

as I

6

my uncles

can remember,

39 I

knew

the words and music to

Show Boat

Oscar

(lyrics

I

the songs in Uncle Jerry's

Hammers tein),

Harbach and Dorothy Fields).

all

Roberta (lyrics Otto

and Swing

Fields),

loved Uncle Harold's Wizard of

Harburg) from the

start,

and

I

had

Time

Oz

Yip

just discovered the jazzy

"Stormy Weather"

side of Arlen, the Arlen of

(lyrics

(lyrics

(lyrics

Ted

Koehler) and "Blues in the Night" (lyrics Johnny Mercer).

Between them, Kern and Arlen represented the two major waves of Jewish immigration to the United consisting mainly of well-off

German

States: the first

Jews, the second and

really massive influx consisting of desperately

poor Jews

from Lithuania and Galicia, the Ukraine, Siberia, and other places in faraway Russia and Poland.

Jerry (born i88y) always had a soft spot in his heart for

Harold (born

1905")

and put up with

practical jokes from the younger

all

and complete

to the piano, else

a

Jerry by making a great

come

Kern tune

would have dared do

and

man. Sometimes when

Jerry was playing cards, Harold would

one

sorts of antics

that.

in

by,

wander over

No

manuscript.

Sometimes he razzed

show of opening the windows

to

achieve the atmosphere of "tinkling chandeliers" that Kern's

music demanded. Jerry had

a

prized walking stick that once

belonged to Jacques Offenbach. This he gave to Harold, 8

was touched. Mind you, Harold was Jerry that he called

them played

golf,

him Mr. Kern

shoes. This

was

for years.

When

who

awe of

the two of

Jerry sported jockey caps, captain's caps,

or other flamboyant headgear,

right at

initially so in

in

and Harold wore equally zany

Hollywood, where Kern and Arlen

home: playing cards,

golf,

felt

sometimes tennis, smok-

A Fine Romance ing cigars, driving cars, and going to the track. at

all. I

left.

a

bad

life

have a group photo taken at a black-tie event with a

beaming Uncle Jerry standing next right

Not

arm

to Uncle Harold, his

affectionately tucked inside the younger man's

II

Tales of the Uncles, Part

And I brought some

sammy cahx,

The

individual ways,

itself as

It

Snow, Let

It

made happen

powerful a

in

metonymy

Berlin, or

two important

—which

acquired the

—

in their

New

York

the Great White Way,

for the

The other was an undistinguished Avenue

Snow"

both

whole business of Hollywood.

as its rival across the continent,

Flatiron district

It

popular song was the fruit of a revolu-

One was Broadway,

show business

Snow, Let

Something Big

Jerome Kern or Irving

tion that

institutions.

corn for popping. "Let

Start of

Classic American

I

street in Manhattan's

28th Street between Broadway and Sixth

came

to be

known

name because music

as

Tin Pan

Alley.

It

publishers had set up their

shops there and a cacophony of pianos

filled

the

air.

This was

during the era just before radios became a fixture of every household's living room. sisted largely of a piano

Home

entertainment

still

con-

and voices, and the music industry

revolved around the sale of sheet music.

News

of the

new

A Fine Romance got out through public places the

way

men. Before

who demonstrated

on the road,

office or

1911,

hits as "After the Ball" (Charles K.

Good Old Summertime"

But

as traveling sheet-music sales-

"The Sidewalks of New York"

Harris, 1892),

Game"

to

and "Let

"Take

(1904),

Me

Call

Me Out

to the Ball

You Sweetheart"

when

that changed in 1911

(1894), "In the

George M. Cohan's "Give

(1902),

Broadway"

(1908),

all

the music in the

the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley had pro-

duced such durable

My Regards

songs for tips in

guitarists today play Beatles songs in

the subway, and pluggers,

home

who performed

buskers,

(1910).

Irving Berlin wrote

"Alexander's Ragtime Band." Technically, the song was a

march, not a rag, and incorporated elements bugle

River"

as

unusual as a

and a quotation from Stephen Foster's "Swanee

call

But "Alexander" rapidly sold a million copies,

(1851).

made ragtime

the rage and Berlin the

new "king of

rag-

time," revived the musical idiom that Scott Joplin had done

more than anyone

and modernized Tin Pan

song also launched a new craze

Alley. Berlin's ing, since

else to establish,

you could dance more

vaudeville ditties or sentimental ballads

Though Berlin's mega-hit had those

who trace

the birth of

atrical event: a ballad 1914.

me

August

all

displaced. I

hold with

modern American song

Kern wrote

1914, to be exact

—

for a

to a the-

Broadway show

in

not a slow news month. Let

Benny Carter

(alto

Oscar Peterson (piano), and Buddy Rich (drums) and

play their that'll

told

it

these effects,

set the stage. First I shall turn to

sax),

for social danc-

easily to ragtime than to the

put

me

195-4

me

that

recording of Kern's

in the

"The Song

Is

You." Yes,

mood. Just the other day John Ashbery

"The Song

Is

You"

(1932)

is

his favorite

Kern

43

song, though this

Guy

might be explained by

Maddin's film The Saddest Music

Kern's

melody recurs

Modern

like a leitmotif.

history began

in the

his fondness for

Worlds in which

Okay, here goes.

when Gavrilo Princip,

a

young

Ser-

bian agent of the Black Hand, assassinated the Archduke

Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian imperial throne, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. There followed tense weeks of negotiations, threats, and

heading of "saber-rattling." rein in the

the noise that goes under the

all

When

the diplomats failed to

runaway horses of imperial armies intent on

showing their muscle, Europe galloped giddily into the global conflict that led to the dissolution of empires, the

end

of royalty, the beginnings of colonial revolt, and a lopsided treaty that virtually guaranteed a reprise of world warfare,

not to mention the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the United States, latecomer to the conflict, as a dominant player on the international scene. For

catastrophe,

I

more on

recommend Barbara Tuchman's

this epic

The Guns of

August. She makes you want to write sentences of epic sweep. For example,

The Battle of

the

Marne was one of the decisive battles

of the world not because

would ultimatelv war but because go on.

New when

it

determined that Germany

lose or the Allies ultimately it

win the

determined that the war would

1

York was enjoying

hostilities

its

isolation from global events

broke out and war fever swept over the

heroic idealists and militant munitions-makers of Europe.

On August 24, German

troops occupied the city of

Namur in

A Vine Romance Belgium.

opened

most

On

the same day in

New

York, The Girl from Utah

the Knickerbocker Theater on Broadway. Like

at

hits of the time, this musical originated in

featured a plot as familiar to theater audiences

London and

as, in a differ-

it

would have been

to readers of

Henry James. The American

girl is slated to

become

Mormon's

ent register and with different personnel,

a rich

latest wife, a fate to despise, so she

packs up her bags and goes to London to find romance. Serviceable,

debut

in 1913,

needed

act in

and the musical did well enough but the Broadway producers

in its felt

West End

that the first

So on that opening night

a jolt of tuneful energy.

August the tenor Donald Brian and the soprano

Julia

Sanderson introduced a new song that the producers had

commissioned Jerome Kern to interpolate into the

"They Didn't

Believe

Me" was

first act.

short. It consisted of six-

The vet-

teen bars, half the length of the standards to come.

eran lyricist Michael E. Rourke,

who wrote under

the

name

Harold Reynolds, contributed the words, which expressed the singer's joyful disbelief that he (or she) has

wondrous and

its

lass (or lad). It

harmonic

lar

and so

in

this style yet

was not the

—

the

but the melody

made

the song so popu-

"No one had begun

writing real songs

possibilities that

influential.

lyric

won

until suddenly here

it

was: a perfect

loosey-goosey, syncopate-me-if-you-care, a relaxed and smil-

ing American asterisk-jazz song," Wilfrid Sheed writes in

The Rouse That George Built! Alec Wilder in American Popular

Song praises the song's melodiousness ("as natural as walking"), noting that

it is

formally unconventional (consisting

of four eight-measure phrases) and "evocative, strong, shapely" David Lloyd George, soon to

tender,

become prime

45 minister of England, said

"They Didn't

Believe

Me" was

the

"most haunting and inspiring melody" he had ever heard. George Gershwin heard to write songs like for

it,

it

on Broadway, decided he wanted

and went to work

two Kern shows, Miss

The song marked

(1918).

1917 (1917)

as a rehearsal pianist

and Rock-a-Bye Baby

the liberation of

its

composer from

the European operetta tradition (Offenbach in Paris, Strauss

and thereby altered the course of both the

in Vienna),

Broadway musical and the American songbook. Kern, Mel

Torme

"invented the popular song" when he wrote

said,

"They Didn't

Believe

Me."

The song had an unusual shadow

life.

So catchy was

Kern's melody that a parody version circulated British soldiers during

the lyrics of

as it

"War Song" were written by Cole

And when

they ask us,

Oh, we'll never

We

World War I. Unlikely

tell

how dangerous

it

them, no, we'll never

among

may

seem,

Porter:

was, tell

them:

spent our pay in some cafe,

And fought

wild women night and day,

'Twas the cushiest job we ever had.

And when

they ask us,

and

they're certainly going to ask us,

The reason why we didn't win the Croix de Guerre, Oh, we'll never

tell

them, oh, we'll never

tell

them

There was a front, but damned if we knew where}

Two great

million

many

men

served on the western front and a

of them sang this song. You'll hear

it if

you see

the 1969 film version of Joan Littlewood's antiwar satire Oh!

What track.

a Lovely

War

(1963). It's the final

song on the sound

A Fine Romance

Uncle

Jerry

Jerome David Kern was born ary

Mozart's birthday, in

27,

solid middle-class family.

in

1885-,

New

York City on Janu-

the sixth of seven sons in a

Having grown up

in a musical

household, he never seriously considered doing anything else

but writing music. This he would do

phon-

at all hours,

ing friends and collaborators with the results at three or four in the

if

when he

that was

life.

A bon vivant with a sunny outlook,

bridge, and pinochle,

played

golf,

went

to the track

When

did he all

he played poker,

and

bet.

He

also

mostly on pitch-and-putt courses, and was an

avid collector of stamps, coins, old tions,

finished.

When he felt like it, or never. He kept artist's hours

sleep? his

morning

and rare books. Though

silver,

antiques,

a lousy gambler,

first edi-

he was a

shrewd businessman, and he had the temperament off his losses.

He was

also a very lucky

to laugh

man away from

the

card table or casino. Because an alarm clock failed to ring, he did not wake in time to accompany the producer Charles

Frohman on an Atlantic crossing departing May ship turned out to be the Lusitania^ which a rine sank off the coast of Ireland a

on

1, 1915".

That

German subma-

May 7, killing more than

thousand people. (Though an early Kern biographer

debunked the

story, it

remains credible.) 4

Newspapermen thought Kern mildly ascot

ties.

Who wears ascot

book dealers would hike

ties?

He was

their prices if

est in a Shelley first edition or a

eccentric.

He wore

an easy mark. Rare-

Kern expressed

inter-

Tennyson manuscript. He'd

47

pay outrageous sums. The joke was on them

in the end,

because Jerry's instincts told him to auction his extensive

and autograph

collection of first editions

letters early in

months before the stock market crashed. He netted

1929,

more than

$1.7 million,

the same dealers

turning a nice profit at the expense of

who thought they had fleeced him but were

now buying back

their wares.

a yacht that he naturally

collector

was he that

a

With the

enough

day

profits Jerry

bought

called Show Boat. So avid a

he sold his collection he

after

said to have stopped at a bookstore

is

and bought something

that caught his eye, an autograph letter or a first edition

containing a note in the author's hand.

Born

in

Germany, Henry Kern, Jerry's

father,

prospered in

America, operating a merchandising business in Newark.

His American-born wife, Fannie, came from a well-to-do family of Austrian Jews. She played piano skillfully enough

was she who

to have considered a professional career,

and

made

sure that

piano lessons

ously.

From the time he was

young Jerome took five,

ping his knuckles with a ruler

she

if

his

it

made him

seri-

practice, rap-

he hit a wrong note. Her

strictness did nothing to reduce the boy's ardor for impro-

vising on the keyboard. For his tenth birthday, he received

the present that changed his

life.

Either his mother (accord-

ing to one account) or his father (according to another) took

him

to see his first

The

Broadway show.

family lived on East 74th Street.

nal grandfather

Though

his mater-

was the sexton of Temple Emanu-El

in

New

York City, Kern's parents were not observant, and Kern himself

married a gentile and lived a thoroughly secular

life.

In

New York, he would go to the Polo Grounds once a week and

A root for the Giants.

Fine Romance

He

wasn't the most ethnically Jewish

young man you've ever met, but with curly

at five feet six, bespectacled

he was well aware of his Jewish identity. At a

hair,

poker game somebody made a crack about Jews, and

who rebuked

Kern, one of several Jews present,

it

was

the anti-

Semite/ Oscar Hammerstein said he came to Kern with the idea for a musical based on "a story laid in China about an Italian

and told by an Irishman." Kern liked

it.

When Ham-

merstein wondered what kind of music he would write, Kern replied

be good Jewish music."

"it'll

6

At the age of eighteen, Kern was expected father's

to join his

merchandising business. What happened next

illus-

trated Freud's then-novel notion that our mistakes give us away, big-time: Jerry messed

up an order

and ordered two hundred instead. With

his

for

two pianos

customary good

luck, the miscalculation turned into an unlikely commercial success. His father

made shrewd use of

on the two hundred pianos. But the episode

to turn a profit

persuaded Henry Kern that ness,

and he

let

his son wasn't cut

Jerry attend the

and generously financed

way

At the time,

stage,

out for busi-

New York College of Music

a year abroad.

studied music. In England, he theater.

the installment plan

made

7

In Heidelberg, he

friends

British imports

and went to the

dominated the Broad-

and Kern wanted to be where the action was.

traveled regularly to

twenty, teamed up with

He

London from the time he turned P.

G. Wodehouse

among other word-

smiths, and grew proficient at writing the kind of songs

then in fashion. lyrics to the

(It

was Wodehouse who wrote most of the

show-stopping "Bill" that Kern saved up

for

Show Boat.) Kern became a full-fledged Anglophile. In 1909

49

he met Eva Leale

at the

Swan, a pub managed by her father

m the village of Walton, where Jerry and two London friends had gone

for a holiday.

he knocked and asked

When

he heard her practicing

he could use her piano to work

if

out a melody that had just occurred to him.'

wed

He was

a vear later.

London honeymoon they

a

reviewer of Kern's got

ham.)

it

right:

music towers

"Who

He and Eva

twenty-five, she nineteen. After

a

first

scales,

settled in

New York City.

In 1910,

Broadway show, Mr. JVix of Wickis

this

man Jerome

way above

in an Eiffel

Kern, whose

the average primitive

hurdy-gurdy accompaniment of our present-day musical

comedy?" 9

Legend has

it

that Kern caught his first break from pro-

ducer Charles Frohman onlv because Frohman thought he

was an Englishman and would thus have

a native

standing of the London musical stage. In

American accent disclosed

Jerrv's his

fact,

under-

however,

his national origins,

and

amiable hosts had no trouble placing him on the sociocul-

tural

map. George Grossmith,

innovative producer of West

made

a

name

for

End musicals whose

voung

New York Jew.

a penniless little

hailed from America, but as Jerry

10

made

to us.

He

of his kind, with a tremendous

Kern toiled

had

Grossmith

his

Jewish songwriter

home

in

I

who

knew to

played divinely like nearly

all

5

gift for 'tune.

at the songwriter's

real originality until

London.

1905"

He came often

Kern and liked him immensely.

my house and plaved

with no

father

Kern vividly "Somewhere between the vears

and 1910 there was

him

an actor, lyricist, and

himself performing in Gilbert and Sullivan

operettas, befriended the recalled

Jr.,

"n

trade successfully but

he broke

new ground with

A "They Didn't

Believe

1946, soaring as the

sang

it

Fine Romance

Me." Sinatra sang

melody

Julie

London.

It

on the radio

in

and Johnny Hartman

dictates,

—and Johnny Mercer

Haymes and

it

and Dinah Shore and Dick holds up brilliantly and has

everything you want in a romantic ballad.

The music

climbs

from reverent sincerity to the heights of ardor. Perhaps no other popular composer rivals Kern in the ability to reach an operatic climax in a love song.

The

amounts

lyric

to several

reiterated statements: You're so beautiful (or wonderful), it's

incredible,

and

also incredible that you,

it's

have picked anyone, have picked me. In the

who

could

lyrics three lines

are repeated (four in Sinatra's version). But the music, as

William G. Hyland notes in The Song itself," a

Is

Ended^ "never repeats

major departure from the era of "After the Ball,"

which chorus

piles

on chorus.

"It was,"

Hyland

says,

in

"the

beginning of that curious Kern blend of European sophistication and American innocence that

mark."

It

was

became

his great trade-

also Kern's first million-copy sale.

Kern was the link between the Viennese operetta and the

modern Broadway show, the

creator of "the

American theatre music,"

Richard Rodgers wrote

Musical

Stages.

as

In a way, Jerry

was everyone's

first

uncle.

truly in

He had

a

who was hooked on Broadway Very Good Eddie (191 f) when he

decisive influence on Rodgers,

from the time he saw Kern's

was thirteen. That event had

a greater

impact on Rodgers

than the bar mitzvah he celebrated that same year (1917): "A large part of one winter

most of

my allowance was

a seat in the balcony listening to Love

"captivated

me and made me

wrote. "It pointed the

way

I

a

0'

Mike"

spent for

Kern's music

Kern worshiper," Rodgers

wanted

to be led." Gershwin,

S1

acknowledged Kern's preeminence.

too,

"I followed Kern's

work and studied each song he composed. tribute of frank imitation, and

many

I

things

paid him the

I

wrote

at this

period sounded as though Kern had written them himself."

Life

If this sic

were

Upon

the

Wicked Stage

a chronological narrative

American popular song

Kern

at this point

12

—

the story of the clas-

—we would

break away from

and turn our attention to others who

joined him on center stage during the 1920s, the decade that

marched

in like a roaring lion

before exiting like a

and gave us much to sing about

wounded lamb. George Gershwin

wasted no time reaching the heights. Irving Berlin offered

him a job

as his musical secretary

but advised the young man

to decline: "You're too talented to be anybody's secretary."

George turned twenty-one

in 1919, the year

he took Tin Pan

Alley by storm with "Swanee," which remains to this day his all-time best-selling song. Irving Caesar, lyrics,

recalled the

young Gershwin

as a

who wrote

piano virtuoso:

"George was a much-sought-after accompanist. They loved to have George play the

exposing the inventory

The

new

songs.

It's like

faster than

was the golden boy who could do

it all:

for

all

a salesman

songs were inventory."

was soon adding to the inventory

the

13

anyone

George else.

He could write

He

songs

Al Jolson, then the most popular entertainer in the land,

and big orchestral works that fused jazz and the dition.

When

for the first

classical tra-

the clarinet glissando began Rhapsody

time

in 1924,

with Gershwin himself

in

Blue

at the

A Fine Romance piano,

it

altered the history of

the presence of a

new

first

the Gershwins'

more

the

That same year he found

hero.

when he and

ideal writing partner

score for their

modern music and declared

his brother Ira

Broadway show, Lady, Be Good! It was

sister,

Frances, recollected,

intellectual

one

—

he's the

his

wrote the

who "was

Ira,

always

one who was reading

Shakespeare when he was eleven and twelve."

14

To

Ira

went

the daunting task of fitting words to such complex songs as

"Fascinating

Rhythm"

(1924),

which the Astaires, Adele and

What

Fred, sang and danced to on Broadway.

honor

roll

career unlike anyone

The

followed was an

of classic American popular songs and a musical else's.

next to achieve a breakthrough on Broadway were

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, with "Manhattan"

was the

1925-. It

madly

first in their

successful

in

succession of great hit songs in

Broadway shows. Vincent Youmans teamed

up with Irving Caesar, and No, No, Nanette contributed "Tea for

Two"

canon of popular songs. Irving Berlin wrote

to the

"Blue Skies"

as

an interpolated song for a Rodgers and Hart

musical in 1926, and in Hollywood a year later Al Jolson sat at the piano and sang a jazzy version of Berlin's song to his screen mother in The Jazz

Singer.

The

of Walter Donaldson (music) and

duced Whoopee!

in

1928

inspired partnership

Gus Kahn

(lyrics) pro-

with Eddie Cantor introducing

"Makin' Whoopee" and Ruth Etting doing the honors

"Love

Me or Leave Me."

Kern himself turned out "Look

the Silver Lining" (1920, with lyrics

"Who"

(1925",

with

lyrics

for for

by Buddy DeSylva) and

by Oscar Hammerstein and Otto

Harbach). It

was with Show Boat

in

1927

that Kern

decisively

S3

advanced the history of the Broadway musical. Kern and

Hammerstein broke with precedent when they adapted

Edna Ferber's novel a revue, not a cal pretext,

for

Broadway.

What they offered was not

bunch of songs linked by some flimsy

theatri-

but a play with characters and a coherent plot

and with songs appropriate to their changing circumstances.

When

the

show opened,

at the

end of the year

in

which

Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic and Babe

Ruth

hit sixty

home

Broadway musical

runs,

as a

it

marked the emergence of the

popular art form that would generate

material for several other art forms (jazz, popular vocals, big

band music) and would meet critics

by drama and music

criteria set

on the one hand and by the ticket-paying public on

the other. Show Boat was the

consummate blending of

narra-

tive

and song, the plot neither fatuous nor absurd, the score

full

of marvelous tunes that could be abstracted from their

dramatic context for dancers to dance to and singers to

There are no fewer than

Two

mates. is

five

of the relationships

When Julie,

revealed to have

sing.

romantic couples in the plot.

fail;

spouses desert heartbroken

show boat troupe,

the leading lady of the

Negro blood, the consequences

are nasty,

and neither her marriage nor her vocation can survive the shock of the injustice. This was grown-up stuff ing love at

first sight,

vows of eternal

fealty,

—proclaim-

and the

efficacy

of fantasy, and then proceeding to debunk these very central tenets of the

Broadway musical romance.

Boat performed in a Brian lessly.

many

times, and

I

love

it

de Palma movie love Puccini

I

have seen Show

the

way

arias. I

gangsters

cry shame-

Cotton Blossom, Captain Andy, only make-believe.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta

fly.

There's an old

man

called

A

Fine Romance

the Mississippi. Life upon the wicked stage ain't ever what a girl

supposes.

Why do I love you? Because he's just my Bill. who thought

For a composer

music that lends

and

the Things

I," "Bill," "All

Ever Leave Me," "Some Girl

Was

I

Born?" That

all

is

Is

Sinfo-

McGlin recorded "Here

You Are," "Who?" "Don't on Your Mind," and

"Why

these and other Kern songs received

such operatic treatment

nary

requirements of opera

Ambrosian Chorus and London

jazz. In 1991 the

nietta under the direction of John

Am

Kern wrote

theatrically,

itself equally to the

how many Kern

is

not surprising.

What

is

extraordi-

tunes have become jazz standards.

spent the afternoon listening to

"Smoke Gets

in

I

Your Eyes"

with trumpeter Clifford Brown, "Yesterdays" with Art

Tatum

at the piano,

ing in Art's place,

"Pick Yourself

"The

Powell on the bench,

Last

Up" with George

Time

I

Saw

Shear-

Paris" with

Bud

"The Way You Look Tonight" with

Roy Eldridge on trumpet and another Art Blakey and Clifford Brown

in

version performed by

New

"Long Ago and Far Away" with Sonny

York

Stitt

in 19 5-4,

on alto

and

sax.

Kern hated the words "serious music," because they were always used against him; he thought what he was doing was

plenty serious even though 1

popular.

*

He might

it

committed the crime of being

have quoted Poe to good

are few cases in which

effect:

"There

mere popularity should be considered

a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing

is,

I

think, one of the few." Kern's popularity was incontestable.

Johnny Mercer, who may have been everybody's cist, called

purists

Kern "everybody's

paid Kern homage.

operetta beyond the level

it

favorite lyri-

favorite composer."

"The

16

Even

task of carrying the

has reached in Vienna required

55 a

composer American

by birth and background, but

European-trained, and with sufficient taste to discard the

outworn sentimentalities and America (even

if

illusions of

only to create

new

Kurt List wrote. "Temperament, upbringing,

illusions),"

and experience made Jerome Kern

this

Jerome Kern Jubilee was proclaimed

for

1944,

both Europe and

sentimentalities and

composer."

December

17

A

11-17,

and Kern's music was played across the nation. Did the

adulation and acclaim go to his head? Let's just say he was an

intimidating figure in his later years. Kern liked playing golf

with Richard Whiting, cer's lyrics for

who wrote

"Too Marvelous

the music to go with Mer-

for

Words." After their tour

of the links, Kern would play his latest tunes for Whiting.

Four years

after Whiting's

death in 1938, his daughter Mar-

garet, then eighteen, received a

ing her to listen to his

phone

call

from Jerry

invit-

new songs and comment on them.

"Your father said you were the greatest judge of songs business," he told her. She was floored.

It

in the

was one thing to

speak her mind to her father. But Jerome Kern! Luckily for

Margaret, herself one of the finest of 1940s singers, the two songs Kern asked her to "judge" were his

new collaborations

with Mercer, "Dearly Beloved" and "I'm Old Fashioned."

Margaret murmured, "Well, what can you say about perfection?" She found one tiny thing that

might be changed.

"That's very good advice, Margaret," Jerry said.

"I'll

con-

18

sider that."

Jerry Kern had great times with "Ockie" (as Oscar

mers tein

were

II

was affectionately known). "Somebody

Ham-

said

we

like a pair of truant schoolboys," Jerry recalled with a

cold cigar in his mouth. His feelings toward Gershwin were,

A Fine Romance naturally,

more complicated. George had apprenticed

mood

Kern, serving as his rehearsal pianist. In a bantering the older composer said, "And here's Gershwin, a lot of promise,"

wished he had lot

of shows."

Ira

fired back, 19

George would, bench

and

as if it

who showed

Gershwin, overhearing the remark,

"And

here's Kern,

Jerry wasn't sure at

for

who promised

how much he

liked

it

a

that

every party, seat himself at the piano

were a throne and he the king by universal

acclamation and could play as long as he wished though other composers might be present. But no one else played as well as George and

it

was impossible to stay mad

at

him. His

conceit was accompanied unfailingly by courtesy and charm.

When

at the age of thirty-eight

Gershwin died suddenly of

an undiagnosed brain tumor, shocking everyone, Ockie kept the news from Jerry,

who was

himself recovering from a

heart attack. But Jerry figured out what had happened

when

he turned on the radio that July day in 1937 an

When We Were Young

(repr.,

New

Da Capo

York:

Press,

~ PP- l6 l 7-

2.

Pollack, George Gershwin, p.

3.

Ibid., p. 110.

15-3.

4. Ibid., p. 112. 5-.

Bergreen,

6. Ira

As

Thousands Cheer, p. 347.

Gershwin, Lyrics on

Several Occasions

(New

York: Knopf, 19^9),

p. 48. 7.

Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and

Simon and Schuster, 8.

Thomas

Pianos:

A Social History (New York:

1954), pp. ^99— 608.

L. Riis, Frank Loesser

(New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University

Press, 2008), p. 228. 9.

Vincent Youmans wrote Hit

Clifford Grey,

Deck with lyrics by Leo Robin and

the

Rodgers and Hart wrote

A

Connecticut Yankee, the

Gershwin

Brothers turned out Funny Face, and Kern and Hammerstein were responsible for

Show Boat.

10. If

you worked on Wall Street

you wore

in 195X),

Rogers Peet, Brooks Brothers, or Hart Schaffner 11.

stein

Me

In a ten-year period in which Porter's Kiss

Hammerstein's South

Pacific,

and Sondheim's West

that Guys and Dolls

is

Lerner and Loewe's

Side Story

have superior scores, but Guys and Dolls York musical

and the most

My

had their runs,

a singular achievement. is

"nothing

and because

it is

Rodgers and

Kate,

I

join Sheed in feeling

less

the others

may

than the great

New

brilliant evocation ever of the city

it is

content to

made by

Fair Lady, and Bern-

A couple of

and shows and so many of the writers came from."

Broadway show because

suits

& Marx.

It is

where songs

the epitome of a

so vividly of the very place that produced be

what

it is

—

it

to observe the rules of the

genre. See Sheed, The House That George Built, p. 272. 12.

Sammy Cahn,

House, 1970), itzianer,

p. 21.

I Should Care: The

To

give

Sammy Cahn

Story

you an idea of the alleged

(New

consider this excerpt from a 1906 letter sent by "a

to the editor of

New York's Yiddish newspaper,

York: Arbor

inferiority of the Galgirl

from Galicia"

the Jewish Daily Forward.

Notes In the shop

whom

I

where

work

I

I sit

near a Russian Jew with

was always on good terms.

Why

should one

worker resent another? But once, cians

in a short debate,

When

were no good.

he stated that

all

asked him to repeat

I

Galiit,

he

answered that he wouldn't retract a word, and that he wished

all

Galician Jews dead.

was naturally not

I

expression.

and

fine

He

intelligent.

inhuman

are

them

silent in the face of

such a nasty

maintained that only Russian Jews are

According to him, the Galitzianer

savages, and he had the right to speak of

so badly.

Dear Editor, does he

really have a right to say this?

Have the Galician Jews not

sent

enough money

unfortunate sufferers of the pogroms in Russia? Gentile speaks badly of Jews,

it's

for the

When

a

immediately printed in

the newspapers and discussed hotly everywhere. But that a

Jew should express himself

brothers

is

really so bad?

And

and intelligent Isaac Metzker, ed.,

East Side

the

to

so about his

own

nothing? Does he have a right? Are Galicians

A

Jewish

does he, the fine Russian, remain fine

in spite

of such expressions?

Bintel Brief: Sixty Tears of Letters from the

Daily

Forward (New York: Schocken,

Lower 1971),

pp. ^8-5-9. 13.

Cahn,

14. Ibid.,

I

Should Care, p.

pp.

75",

5-9.

149.

15-.

Ibid., p. 67.

16.

Wilk, They're Playing Our Song,

17. Ibid.,

p. 172.

pp. 15-4-57-

18.

Wilder, American Popular Song,

19.

Will Friedwald, Sinatra! The Song

p. 289. Is

Tou

(New

York: Scribner,

1995"),

P- 57-

20. Jesse

New

Green, "Tolstoy Was Right: Flop Musicals Are All Unique,"

Tork Times, April 8, 2007.

243 Jo Stafford interviewed by Bill Redd, Songbirds, Winter 2000

21.

www.mrlucky.com/songbirds/html/aug99/9908_stafford.html. 22.

Gene

23.

Robert Gottlieb, "Wake

Lees, Portrait of Johnny

August

Books,

2007, p.

16,

16.

Up

(New

York: Pantheon, 2004),

p. 297.

and Dream," The New Tork Review of

Gottlieb has himself done tremendous ser-

vice to the American songbook. Together with Robert Kimball, he edited

the anthology Reading Lyrics (Pantheon, 2000), one of three books that

regard as indispensable. can popular song and 24.

Second

Max

Wilk's

Don

Half Century,

(New

Bob Dylan,

195-0—2000

I

Didn't

Chronicles:

I

are Alec Wilder's study of Ameri-

book of interviews with songwriters.

See David Jenness and

V.

1.

The other two

Velsey, Classic American Popular Song: The

York: Routledge, 2006).

Know What Time Volume One

(New

It

Was

York: Simon and Schuster,

2004), p. 126. 2.

Ibid., p. 49.

3.

The major Broadway composers

wrote the words Porter,

as well as the

fall

into three categories: those

who

music (Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, Cole

Stephen Sondheim); those who collaborated primarily with one or

two partners (George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers); and those who

worked with many (Harold Arlen, Cy Coleman, Jerome Kern, Jule Styne). 4.

(New

Meryle Secrest, Somewhere for Me:

Frederick Nolan, Lorenx Hart:

Oxford University Press, 1994), 6.

A

Biography of Richard Rodgers

York: Applause, 2001), pp. 102, ^9.

"Now,

that a song

this

A

Poet on Broadway

whole business of integration

come out of

(New

York:

p. if. is

a

tough one.

the situation in the story and

make

It

demands

sense with the

given characters. In a way, the whole growth of our musical

comedy can

be seen through the growth of integration." See Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music

(New

York: Simon and Schuster,

I95"9), p. 164.

7.

Secrest, Somewhere for Me, p. 117.

8.

Eleanor Wilner in First Loves, ed. Carmela Ciuraru

ner, 2000), pp. 247-48.

(New York:

Scrib-

— Notes

McHugh (New

See The Best American Poetry 2007, ed. Heather

9.

York:

Scribner, 2007), pp. 61—62.

James Maher, "Introduction,"

10.

in Wilder,

American Popular Song,

xxv—xxvi.

pp.

11.

Most, Making Americans, pp. 10—11.

12.

Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley

(New

York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1992), pp. 9-10. 13. 1

was about to

cite

"There

Is

Nothing Like

a

Dame"

to South Pacific that only in its stage performance can

but

I

Hyman's piano

just heard Dick

version, and

14.

Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, p.

iy.

Mel Torme,

(New

My

I

as so intrinsic

you savor

take

it

it

fully

back.

y.

Singing Teachers: Reflections on Singing Popular Music

York: Oxford University Press, 1994),

p. 112.

16.

Secrest, Somewhere for Me, pp. 299—300.

17.

Rodger s, Musical Stages,

18.

Hyland, The Song

19.

David Ewen, Richard Rodgers (New York: Henry Holt,

20.

Mary Rodgers,

Is

p. 103.

Ended, p. 289. 1957), P- 2 9-

"Introduction," in Richard Rodgers, Musical

Stages,

p. vii.

Ewen, Richard Rodgers,

21.

22.

(New 23.

the

p. 29.

Kitty Kelley, His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 165-66.

Remarks during "Harry, Hoagy, and Harold,"

a concert recital of

New York Festival of Song at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital

ruary

7,

24.

Edward Mendel son, Late Auden (New York:

Giroux, 1999),

Farrar, Straus

and

p. xvii.

VI.

1.

Hall, Feb-

2008.

The World on a

Jerome Kern, "Tribute"

String

(1938), in The George Gershwin Reader, ed.

Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson

(New

York: Oxford University

Press, 2004), p. 280. 2.

William G. Hyland, George Gershwin:

Conn.: Praeger, 2003),

p. 2iy.

A

New

Biography (Westport,

245 "J azz Is tne Voice of the

3.

American Soul,"

in The George Gershwin

Reader, p. 94. 4.

Hyland, The Song

5-.

Hyland, George Gershwin,

6.

Jonathan Schwartz, All

Is

Ended, pp. 103, 108. p. 216.

in

Good Time:

A Memoir (New York: Random

House, 2004), pp. 108-9

The

See Kurt List, "George Gershwin's Music:

7.

Composer

—

Alas!" Commentary (December

may

Mr. List

8.

tirades collected

1945"),

PP-

Greatest American

2 7? 2 9> 11-

not have been aware of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic

and published under the

title

The International Jew (1922).

Ford was considered a genuine American folk hero, and

Gershwin wrote lyric

and

for the

show

rhymes the automaker's name with "our Lord." As

1931 the

Gershwin brothers and

Hills house in

in

Sweet Little Devil (1924), the

which Garbo had

Ira's wife,

lived.

an early song

Buddy DeSylva

for

Garbo,

in 1930

Leonore, rented a Beverly

"Gershwin joked that the

fact that

he was sleeping in Garbo's bed kept him up some nights" (Pollack, George Gershwin, p. 9.

195-).

See Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish

York: Pocket Books, 1970), 10.

.

.

New

."

York Times,

11.

Cahn,

12.

Ibid.

13.

Friedwald, Sinatra!^,

14.

Torme,

Should Care,

I

"Love

My Singing

Is

music by Lewis

New

Just

November

21,

2007, p. Ei.

p. 25-0.

iyy.

Teachers, pp. 117— 18, 133-34, 138.

Around the Corner"

(1934). Lyrics

My Singing

Torme,

17.

Jody Rosen, White Christmas

18.

Gershom Scholem, "Jews and Germans," Selected Essays, ed.

Books, 1976),

by Leo Robin,

E. Gensler.

16.

Crisis:

Hill, 1968; repr.,

A. O. Scott, "Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Another, and

Another

15-.

(McGraw

p. 93.

Teachers, p. 66.

Werner

(New

J.

York: Scribner, 2002), in

p. 23.

On Jews and Judaism

in

Dannhauser (New York: Schocken

p. 78.

19. Ibid., p. 83.

20. Ibid., pp. 21.

89-90.

Philip Roth, Operation Shy lock:

Schuster, 1993),

p. 157.

A

Confession

(New

York: Simon and

Notes 22.

George

S.

Right, a satirical

Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote the book

Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. See Our Musicals,

Ourselves,

(Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 23.

"The

steerage passengers

drink in their

for I'd Rather

first

by John Bush Jones

p. 214.

would go onto the deck, wanting

impressions of their

name of

He had

New

tucked

the family's only contact in America inside that hat."

From Lawrence J. grants on

to

new home. George Gershwin's

father leaned out so far his hat flew off in the breeze.

the

Be

show about President Roosevelt, with score by Richard

Epstein,

York's

At the Edge

Lower East

of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immi-

1880—1920 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

Side,

2007). 24.

Sinatra sang the song in the

White House more than once:

at

JFK's inaugural ball in 1961 and again years later when Nixon was the

incumbent. 2