George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait

20. Final Concert, Final Affair

twenty Final Concert, Final Affair In early January 1937, George and Ira went to a ranch outside Carmel to meet with RKO Pictures’ production chief Pandro Berman and director George Stevens to discuss the new Astaire film, but this was only a brief stop on the way to the Bay Area, where George was to appear with Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony. Two months would pass before he and Ira got to work on the new songs. In the meantime, there would be five concerts. Present at the San Francisco and Berkeley performances were Ira, Rose, Leonore, Jerome Kern, Kern’s wife Eva, and their daughter Betty. George then went alone to Detroit (literally alone; he was the only passenger on the DC 3, the public being air-shy at the time due to several recent crashes). All of these concerts were well received and when he returned to Los Angeles, he put his energy into preparations for the next two and biggest events, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra downtown at the Philharmonic Auditorium. His plan was to use this venue, as he had tried to do at Lewisohn Stadium, to introduce Porgy and Bess to a new audience. As had 140 george฀gershwin been the case at Lewisohn the previous July, he eschewed the orchestral suite. Instead, Duncan would sing and Smallens would conduct. The hope was that the Porgy music would stir up demand for a new production and/ or a movie version. Gershwin wrote Heyward on January 26 to tell him about this, saying the studios were “keen” about a filmed version, if “slightly afraid on account of the color question.” He also sounded Heyward out about doing another opera, telling him to “put your mind to it, old boy, and I know you can evolve something interesting.”1 He had other projects in mind as well. He met with Native American playwright Lynn Riggs to discuss collaborating on an opera to be called The Lights of Lamy, about the tribulations of Mexican Americans in New Mexico. He had been asked by Chicago’s Ravinia Festival to return in the summer of 1937 with a new orchestral composition and was thinking about what he might write. At that moment, he was favoring “a bright overture.”2 Also, he was composing a string quartet. It was taking shape in his mind, away from the piano, away even from manuscript paper. He told the impresario who was producing the upcoming Los Angeles concerts, Merle Armitage, that it was “going through my head all the time and as soon as I have finished scoring the next picture, I’m going to rent a little cabin in Coldwater Canyon, away from Hollywood, and get the thing down on paper. It’s about to drive me crazy, it’s so damned full of new ideas!”3 And there was talk of a new Broadway musical with writers George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. To be called Curtain Going Up, it was to have Hart, Kaufman, and the Gershwin brothers playing onstage roles. That George entertained such an idea indicates that, despite his talk about devoting himself to opera, chamber, and symphonic pieces, his love for Broadway musicals and show business was undiminished. It is also indicative of how hard it was for him to say no, especially to old friends like Kaufman and Hart. Not that the idea of his going on stage as an actor was completely unprecedented. On his World War I draft card, he had listed his occupation as “actor-composer.” And as recently as May 1936, he and Kaufman had appeared at New York’s Vanderbilt Theatre in a one-performance show called Spring Tonic, which featured skits by Kaufman and others, and music— nothing new—by Gershwin and others. On that night, for tickets ranging in price from $2 to $4, the audience could watch sketches performed by 141 Final Concert, Final Affair Gershwin, Kaufman, Ben Hecht, and striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. The idea of treading the boards before an audience did not, needless to say, appeal to Ira, who quickly nixed the project or, at least, his part in it. These plans brought a renewed optimism. Also salutary was the fact that he, along with Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, had been elected to honorary membership in the Academy of Santa Cecilia, Rome. George was informed of this in a...