Mother's Pearls

A real staircase writing post. If I had known of this exchange, I would have been delighted to tuck it into The Memory Of All That. (Picture is my grandmother, Kay Swift, not wearing pearls.) The writer David Margolick sent me this little find in the S.N. Behrman papers at the New York Public Library.

Letter from Kay Swift to SNB, MAY 21, 1972:

 

     Dear Berry,

 

     Thank you for that keen edge of delight I felt while reading the first two instalments [sic] of ‘People In A Diary,’ in the New Yorker. I can hardly wait for more.

     At the risk of sounding fancy-schmancy, I’m compelled to tell you something I’ve told only Emily Paley – and that just now on the telephone. After reading the piece and noting your extraordinary use of words, and thinking about the fact that nobody else quite possesses this faculty, I went and found my mother’s real pearls in a hiding-place, and put them on. I’m wearing them right now, (in bed, after a fairly trying day) and there is some connection or other between these beautiful pearls and your writing.

 

 Three days later, SNB to Kay Swift:

   Thank you for your enchanting note...I have never driven a girl to wear pearls before, and thank you for initiating me into this revolutionary activity.

HERE TODAY is almost here!

I am delighted to announce that playwright David Caudle [http://davidcaudle.org/home] has written a new musical play HERE TODAY, inspired by my memoir, The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities. The show, which is based on the love triangle of Kay Swift, her husband and collaborator Jimmy Warburg (in other words, my grandparents), and George Gershwin, will feature the score to Fine and Dandy, along with other Kay Swift songs. The first showcase will take place at the Ziegfeld Society meeting in New York City on Saturday, April 27th at 3:30 in the Lang Recital Hall at Hunter College.

 

 I will participate in an after-show discussion along with David Caudle and Music Director Aaron Gandy. Tickets are on sale now! More information is here (scroll down to April 27th):  http://www.theziegfeldsociety.com/

 

Must Have Names and Facts

My memoir, THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Families Legacy of Infidelities will be out in a pretty new paperback edition from Broadway Books in a couple of weeks.

A question I have been asked a few times since the book's publication last July is about my motivation and indiscretion in writing about family history. Why did I delve into such personal stories about my grandmother Kay Swift, in particular?  My answer each time has been the observation that unlike most family stories, numerous versions of the central events in my family's  history have been in the public view all along. The events and personalities have been scrutinized and gossiped about and picked over for decades, in newspaper stories, magazine articles, gossip columns,  cultural histories, and biographies. Countless people think they know all about my family members. And so what I have written is in many ways a counter-story, a push back against the distorted narrative that has been in public view for a very long time. I know that what I have written is an act of loyalty, love, and devotion. I also know that certain people are both judgmental and truly uncomfortable about my choices.

Last week I came across a particular letter, dated Saturday November 9th, 1940, one of hundreds of letters from my grandmother to her lifelong friend Mary Lasker, to whom she wrote nearly daily from the ranch in Oregon where she had lived for a year by then with her second husband, a cowboy. At the time of the letter, Kay was 43, thirteen years younger than I am now.

I read through all the letters a few years ago, but I didn't recall this particular passage, which seems especially pertinent at this moment, and I am very glad I found it.  She ended the eight-page rambling and reflective letter to her closest confidante with this passing thought: "When I'm 75 my autobiography would be good reading -- but that is fairly far off; and no discreet autobiog. is any good at all. Must have names & facts."

Not Exactly Family

My mother's first husband, Justin N. Feldman, has died, at age 92. He was a lovely man whom I enjoyed knowing, though ours was an odd connection. His New York Times obituary today was lengthy and fascinating. He was someone who made things happen, most notably as a manager of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 New York Senate campaign. Earlier, he was a campaign aide for John F. Kennedy, having entered reform politics in the late 1940s as a leader of the Fair Deal Democratic Club, a group of reform Democrats dedicated to breaking the political influence of Tammany Hall.

My mother, to whom he was married in 1942 (a complete fizzle of a marriage that lasted three years on paper though it was over in half that time), was omitted from mention in his obituary, and his second wife is described as his first. His third wife, to whom he was very happily married for many years, is Linda Fairstein, the former sex crimes prosecutor who is now well known for her thrillery crime novels. We had a warm friendship, my husband and I, as well as our daughters, with Justin and Linda, and the omission of my mother from the story of his life is strange, yet somehow it is not unexpected.

The New York Times itself (Mr Grimes, the obit writer, surely could have found this in his own paper's archive, if I can read it with two clicks) reported at length on their wedding on April 25th, 1942: "The marriage of Miss Andrea Swift Warburg, the daughter of James P. Warburg of this city and Mrs. Faye Hubbard of Bend, Oregon, to Justin N. Feldman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Hyman Feldman of Yonkers, New York, took place yesterday afternoon in the home of the bride's father and stepmother, Mrs. Warburg, at 34 East Seventieth Street...The bride and bridegroom dispensed with attendants. The bride wore an afternoon gown of beige crepe and a small matching hat, and a corsage of white orchids."

My mother's mother, "Mrs Faye Hubbard of Bend, Oregon," a.k.a. Kay Swift, was not there that afternoon. She was not present at any of her daughters' weddings. (When my aunt April was married soon after this, she wrote a letter to a friend remarking on this, saying "April has married her Italian, surrounded by no relatives, on Staten Island.")

I cannot imagine my mother even knowing what "an afternoon gown" might be, let alone wearing one in beige crepe with a small matching hat. It was another life, but a false start -- the start of another life she almost led -- a life I like to imagine would have been far happier than the one she lived, though I would not exist. Had Justin died before my book went to press, I would have written about this odd experience of reading his obituary which made no mention of my mother.

UPDATE October 3 -- The NYT ran a correction, not naming my mother, simply saying that they had omitted one of Justin's divorces.

The Secrets of the Knife and Fork

In The Memory Of All That I write about my grandmother's influence on George Gershwin as their friendship and then their romance deepened. She dressed him, she decorated his apartment, she taught him to ride (note the shiny new riding boots), and in countless ways she encouraged him to develop his own taste and style. They had so much fun!

Written some two years after this photo was taken of Kay and George at Bydale, the Warburg country house in Greenwich, is it possible that Jimmy Warburg's witty lyrics for Kay Swift's elegant music for the Fine and Dandy number "Etiquette" were a pointed commentary on this aspect of his wife's complex romantic involvement with George? Was this an aristocratic Warburg making a dig at George's origins and aspirations? The song is about lower class factory workers who "aspire to acquire proper etiquette," instructed by the shop foreman, Edgar Little. Here are just some of the lyrics:

"Murphys and O'Gradys, gentlemen and ladies all/they have made your life a perfect Hades/paying you a wage that was too small./You who are the masses/working lads and lasses should/live like all the so-called upper classes/You have been too long misunderstood!

I will raise your/standard of living right away/Now that I am head of the business, hear me say:

Murphys and O'Gradys, you shall join the smartest set/You shall all be gentlemen and ladies/I will teach you perfect etiquette!

Blums and Blaus and Blitzes, Steins and Lipkowitzes, you/Ought to be at home in all the Ritzes/I will show you what you ought to do/How to tell a waiter 'Bring an al-li-ga-tor pear,' how in fact you always tell a waiter/In a word, I'll teach you savoir-faire/I will teach you how you should greet a King or Queen/How to dress for wedding, divorce, and everything/Blums and Blaus and Blitzes, you shall join the smartest set/You shall all be Vans and Macs and Fitzes!/I will teach you perfect etiquette!

Chorus: What's your proposition? We have got ambition/Show us the way/to be a la-dy./Up the social ladder/how I wish we had a/friend who would help us on our way./We would like to learn the proper way to eat and talk./We would like to learn the secrets of the knife and fork/How are we to know what clothes to wear?/Tell us how to part our hair!/We long to break away from all this life of toil/We'd like to have the leisure time to study Hoyle./We should like to join the smartest set/We aspire to acquire proper e-ti-quette!"

Bracelets from George Gershwin

In this photo of my grandmother, Kay Swift, taken in late 1928, she is wearing the antique gold cuff bracelets that George Gershwin gave her to celebrate the success of "An American in Paris." At this point, she had been married to my grandfather, Jimmy Warburg, for ten years. (They were not divorced until the end of 1934.) Kay's involvement with George was well underway, and she had recently been employed, at George's suggestion, as the rehearsal pianist for a Rodgers & Hart musical, A Connecticut Yankee. Kay and Jimmy had now started writing popular songs together, and the following year would bring their first big hit, "Can't We Be Friends?"

What do you suppose Jimmy thought about her having and wearing these bracelets?

They Were So Young!

Here they are, my grandmother Kay Swift and her great love George Gershwin, with horses, before or after a ride through the woods of Bydale, the country house in what was then rural back-country Greenwich, Connecticut, where my mother spent her childhood summers. George spent much time there as a houseguest, especially during almost the entire summer of 1928, when he was ensconced in the guest cottage, writing An American in Paris. This photo was taken that summer. The horse he liked to ride was named Denny. He always called it "horse riding," and my grandmother, who dressed the city boy from Brooklyn in riding clothes and taught him to ride, would correct him, ""Horseback riding, dear."

George would turn 30 in September, two months after this photo was taken, while my grandmother had turned 31 three months earlier. They were so young!

July 11, 1937, and a July day in 1935

On July 11th, 1937, George Gershwin died a tragic and lonely death at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, where he had just undergone extensive surgery for a brain tumor, the symptoms of which had plagued him intermittently for many years. His final months were a misery, compounded by his doctors' failure to recognize the true nature of his illness and by what could almost be called a conspiracy to isolate him and keep at a distance the most significant people in his life -- his good friend Mabel Pleshette Schirmer, his sister-in-law's sister Emily Strunsky Paley, and the love of his life, my grandmother Kay Swift.

"Why has everyone left me?" he would ask his nurse plaintively as he lay in a darkened room, drugged and miserable with excruciating headaches and vertigo. Mabel, Emily and Kay, each deeply devoted to George, would have provided him with the comfort and tenderness he needed. Any one of them might have insisted on better and different medical treatment when it would not have been too late to save him, if only they knew the truth. But Leonore Gershwin preferred to keep George isolated, following instructions from his psychoanalyst in New York, Gregory Zilboorg, she always said. As George's condition grew critical, he fell into a coma, and only then was rushed to a surgery that came too late (even after some fourteen years of symptoms, at the end, if sugery had occurred just two days earlier, it would probably have saved his life). Even then, during and after the surgery, Leonore Gershwin withheld crucial information about his condition from the people who loved him the most. He died alone.

Here is a glimpse of a happier July day, just two years earlier, when George and Kay spent a weekend with Kay's good friend Mary Woodard Rheinhardt (the future Mrs Albert Lasker) on Long Island. Kay had divorced Jimmy Warburg the previous December. Porgy and Bess was in rehearsal for its Fall premiere. What are they eating? Why are Mary and Kay in beach attire while George is more formally dressed? Has he just arrived from the city and joined them at lunch, or is that the remains of brunch? As always, he needs a shave. Is Kay saying to him, "Here, dear, why don't you finish mine?"

The Memory Of All That Artifacts

I am going to be posting a number of items in the coming weeks, as The Memory Of All That makes its appearance in the world, things which aren't quite staircase thoughts (as you may have noticed, I post lots of things here that don't really qualify) so much as they are things that could have been in the book, but in the interest of making the book less of a loose, baggy monster, are not. Or they are mentioned in the book only en passant, or only implicitly, and so I will have a little more to say about the subject here. Not to mention the actual staircase thoughts that will no doubt arise.

We begin with this fish knife, one of eight in my possession, part of the remains of the silver service which belonged to my grandparents at the time of their marriage, the first of three marriages for each. The monogram is a J and a K nestled inside the W -- James and Katharine Warburg. I don't know if this set was used in the city (East 70th Street) or the country (Bydale, in Greenwich), but I suspect that when my grandmother left the marriage at the end of 1934, it was the silverware she had in her post-divorce apartment. It is very likely that George Gershwin used this fish knife at some point in the years (1925-1936) during which he was a constant in my grandmother's life.

In 1838 a book of etiquette for ladies recorded that, 'in first rate society, silver knives are now beginning to be used for fish: a very pleasing, as well as decided step in the progress of refinement.' The elaborate dining etiquette of the Victorian era made it a time when all sorts of weird utensils were created for eating particular foods. The proper use of cutlery required lengthy explanations in etiquette manuals. Often the standards of behavior reflected the manners and status of 'old' versus 'new' money. The development of fish eaters, as they were originally called, is a good example of this. Until the 1880's, it was traditional to eat fish using two ordinary table forks or one fork and a piece of bread. It was the middle-class who would have bought the newly developed utensils like fish eaters, thus distinguishing them as socially inferior people who have to buy silver because they don't already have it.