George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait

17. Limbo

seventeen Limbo While George was encountering these difficulties with Porgy and Bess, Ira was finding solid success collaborating with others. His show Life Begins at 8:40, written with Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, had done very well in the 1934–35 season. In the late summer of 1935, as the final touches were being put on the opera, he turned to another collaborator, Vernon Duke. Born Vladimir Dukelsky in Belarus and trained at the Kiev Conservatory, Duke had started out as a gifted pianist and composer of concert music (he was a good friend of Prokofiev and had written a ballet for Diaghilev). He left Russia during its postrevolution civil war and went to Constantinople, where he first heard American show music and where he found George’s then-current hit “Swanee” so irresistible that it permanently bifurcated his career. When he got to America, he continued his symphonic work as Dukelsky, but Gershwin welcomed him to the fold and gave him the moniker Vernon Duke, which would be attached to such great songs as “April in Paris,” “I Like the Likes of You,” and “Autumn in New York.” In these songs, he showed both his musical erudition and a total command 116 george฀gershwin of the American musical vernacular. In the fall of 1935, he and Ira began work on the score of Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 (Ziegfeld was dead but his name was still selling shows), which would be as successful as Life Begins at 8:40. The Follies spawned one big hit, “I Can’t Get Started,” but it contained a wealth of fine material. In it, Ira wrote skits for the first time, collaborating with the renowned comedy writer David Freedman to create some of the show’s best scenes. Meanwhile, George was doing all he could to keep Porgy and Bess alive. On October 14, four days after the New York opening, he supervised the first commercial recording of its music. Conductor Smallens was brought in from the stage production, as was the chorus, but the featured singers were not Duncan and Brown. Instead, two big stars of the Metropolitan Opera Company were hired: Helen Jepson and Lawrence Tibbett. Jepson recorded “Summertime” and “My Man’s Gone Now.” Tibbett sang “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “The Buzzard Song,” “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess,” and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’.” Together they did “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” and portions of act I, scene I (“Summertime,” the crap game music, and “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”). Oddly enough, the record label wrongly gave Heyward credit for the lyric to “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Also, Gershwin ’s old friend Nathaniel Shilkret was brought in to handle conducting chores for “My Man’s Gone Now.” Shilkret had been at the helm of the very successful first recording of An American in Paris, made in early 1929. During Porgy and Bess’s rehearsals, Duncan and Brown had watched in awe as Jepson and Tibbett came in day after day to watch them work. The handsome, broad-shouldered Tibbett had recently sung the lead in the Met’s production of Louis Gruenberg’s operatic version of The Emperor Jones—appearing in blackface. Jepson was a blonde beauty who had come to the Met via a career in radio. Duncan and Brown were hoping that these two stars were there as talent scouts to appraise them. In fact, they were learning the music so they could be the first to record it. When Brown complained about this to Gershwin, he replied, “I would prefer that you and Todd would sing these parts but I don’t have much to say about it. This is business.”1 It may have been business but this first recording sold poorly. “Poor Lawrence Tibbett!” Brown recalled. “He never got the feel of 117 Limbo the dialect or the inflection in the voice needed to sing an effective Porgy, he simply never got it.”2 It was left to the swing bands to popularize the songs. A month after the opening, Edward Matthews, who was playing Jake in the show, recorded “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” with Leo Reisman and His Orchestra. Those songs and “Summertime” quickly became hits, as versions by Billie Holiday, Guy Lombardo, Bob Crosby, and others reached the public. This helped popularize the music and keep it alive...