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.

(Re)Publication Day

The Broadway Books paperback edition of The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities is on bookstore shelves now, with the official pub date being tomorrow, June 12th.  The new cover puts emphasis on the New York-ness of the story, complete with a not-quite finished Chrysler Building in the background. It also features a really terrific, slightly come-hither photograph of my grandmother circa 1928 in her leopard coat and a fetching cloche hat. Here's hoping new readers are attracted by the new cover!

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."

The Culminating, Superb "Miss Gandy"

Last night I saw the new, nearly perversely static Clint Eastwood-directed movie, J. Edgar. Sitting through this bizarre film (awards for makeup and costumes, for sure), it was hard not to think about my father's FBI records, some 800 pages on Sidney Kaufman gathered over nearly forty years, especially given that Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson were the two supporting characters in the film. Here is some of what I wrote about them in The Memory Of All That:

"There is a marvelous rubber-stamped list of names of FBI personnel to whom copies of the Kaufman documents were circulated. This was their work; this is what they got up every day to do — process this Confidential, Classified, Secret, and Top Secret information about my father. I like to imagine them, sitting at their desks, typewriters clacking and phones ringing in the background, like a newsroom. There is much to do, fresh reports on the Subject: Sidney Kaufman to pore over, there is new information gathered by SA [redacted] or reported by “[redacted], an informant who has in the past furnished us with reliable information” (or even better, information provided by the occasional “[redacted], an informant who has in the past furnished us with reliable and unreliable information”). Presumably there were reports written about these reports. Individuals must have been assigned to analyze and come to conclusions about the information that had been so painstakingly compiled about the Subject: Sidney Kaufman. Meetings must have occurred, decisions must have been made about further interviews with informants reliable and unreliable, and all those pretext phone calls must have been scripted and scheduled. And all of the reports were typed up, copied, circulated, and filed with all the other accumulated Sidney Kaufman information.

By the late sixties, the rubber-stamped copy list had been streamlined to simple names, but I must admit to a preference for the more traditional earlier iterations, when each name is given the honorific “Mr.” and then there is the culminating, superb “Miss Gandy.” This list of names reads:
Mr. Tolson
Mr. Boardman
Mr. Nichols
Mr. Belmont
Mr. Harbo
Mr. Mohr
Mr. Parsons
Mr. Rosen
Mr. Tamm
Mr. Sizoo
Mr. Winterrowd
Tele. Room
Mr. Holloman
Miss Gandy

I really love this list, which changes only slightly through the years of documentation of Sidney Kaufman’s activities. It is a sequence of names rich in possibility, yet, seeing it repeat throughout the pages of these files, it becomes reliable and familiar, like a wallpaper pattern or a melody. The names, when seen again and again, start to have a delightful rhythm and inevitability that invite memorization, like the presidents of the United States, or Latin declensions.

The roster of FBI employees who were copied on the steady flow of classified information about Sidney Kaufman over all those years is intriguing. Clyde Tolson was Associate Director of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover’s sidekick. Lou Nichols and Alan H. Belmont were Assistant Directors. John P. Mohr was head of five FBI divisions; he was the number three man after Tolson in FBI hierarchy. Alex P. Rosen was the FBI supervisor on the John Dillinger case and on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Joseph A. Sizoo was in the Domestic Intelligence Division. E.A. Tamm was an Associate FBI Director. Frank C. Holloman was s supervisor in the FBI Headquarters in the Crime Records Section, the Fugitive Desk, Plant Survey Section, Special Intelligence Section, Informant Section, and the Records Division.

“Miss Gandy” was Helen W. Gandy, J. Edgar Hoover’s ferocious and devoted executive assistant for fifty-four years. It is known that over a period of months following his death in 1972, she destroyed tens of thousands of pages of his “personal” files thought to contains the fruits of illegal wiretaps and a vast array of incriminating information about numerous public figures and government officials and their family members, as well as detailed reports from the spies Hoover maintained in every White House administration. Her devotion to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover was that of a nun’s devotion to the Church and the Pope. Their relationship was decidedly odd; Hoover never once called her by her first name. Her mother was painted by Thomas Eakins.

J. Edgar Hoover is not on this list, because just about every document in my father’s files is a memo to The Director. The FBI surveillance of Sidney Kaufman that began in 1936 and apparently ended in 1972 is almost identical to the span of Hoover’s FBI Directorship."

What Did My Father Do in the O.S.S.?

The Office of Strategic Services was an intelligence agency created during the Second World War, with a principle mission of coordinating espionage activities of the different American armed services. After the War it was transmogrified into the C.I.A.

My father, Sidney Kaufman, about whom I write extensively in The Memory Of All That, served in the O.S.S. during the war, making training and propoganda films. But the details of his activities are few and I don't really know what he did.

Though in recent times (in August, 2008), O.S.S. records became available through the National Archives, ten years ago, my request for my father's military records was met with a form letter stating that there was no record of Sidney Kaufman (with his birthdate and Social Security number) ever having served in any branch of the military. This is because O.S.S. files were in the C.I.A. archive and were entitely classified -- n personnel were identifiable, period. For many years, the only absolute proof I had for his service in the O.S.S. was this identification badge. I will never know the details of his wartime service.

You Say To - MAY- to

In 1998, the Library of Congress hosted a symposium with musical performances over several days in honor of what they called George Gershwin's "centennial" and I call his centenary. (For some reason, the Library of Congress did not take my advice on this, though I did seriously try to influence what they were calling the event. I just cannot win on the centenary vs. centennial front.)

I was part of it, with the concluding performance being a salute to Kay Swift, at which I spoke, in effect narrating, with the late arranger Russell Warner, a concert performance of "Fine and Dandy" by Bill Bolcom, Joan Morris, and Max Morath.

During those days in Washington, I was privileged to spend a lot of time with a fantastic range of Gershwin people, from Anne Brown, the original Bess of "Porgy and Bess," to English Strunsky, the delightful brother of Ira Gershwin's not-so-delightful wife Leonore. (They are both dead. There were a lot of elderly people who knew George at this event, and most of them are now gone.) English was fond of my grandmother, and he recognized her role in George Gershwin's life. Among our many chats, over a range of topics, was a particularly resonant story that he told me. It had the feeling of a story told many, many times. I didn't include it in The Memory Of All That, though I wish I had, so this is a true staircase thought.

English Strunsky was an entrepreneurial soul with many interests, and one of them was a large tomato farm in New Jersey, what would be called a truck farm. (Do you see where this is going?) One day, Ira and Leonore went out to New Jersey with him to visit the farm. Observing English talking first to his workers in the field, and then later to some buyers, Lyricist Ira, ever alert to words and language and turns of phrase, asked him why it was, when English talked with his workers, he said "to-may-to," but when he spoke with certain buyers, he said "to-mah-to." Was he aware of this? And English replied with a shrug, "Oh, to-may-to, to-mah-to..."

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!"

The 1700 Typewriters of Sidney Kaufman

In The Memory Of All That, I refer often to the FBI records concerning my father, Sidney Kaufman. Here's a page from among nearly 800 pages. Note the generally insane look of this document, which could have been a prop page created by the mad mathematician in A Beautiful Mind. Your tax dollars at work! The 1700 typewriters of Sidney Kaufman were a minor obsession of the Bureau for years. What was he up to, what master plan for world domination was taking shape in our garage, where these 1700 flimsy East German typewriters (which did not have a QWERTY keyboard) were quietly rusting into a solid coral reef of uselessness?

Why Did My Mother Marry My Father?

Of course, there is always a bit of mystery to any attraction. I make the case in The Memory Of All That for a significant factor in what drew my mother to my father being his passing resemblance to George Gershwin, who loomed large in her childhood. Can you see it? They were both self-made men, brilliant Jewish boys, the children of immigrants. Both took themselves from the streets of Brooklyn to the uptown world of culture and refinement. But George Gershwin acomplished monumentally great work as a composer in his 38 years, while Sidney Kaufman died at 73 without ever meeting his grandchildren, whose mother he had rejected, and left only a few bad movies, a couple of good ones, and the gift to mankind that was Aromarama.

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.

Words I Never Use

This is, I suppose, the precise opposite of a staircase thought, or perhaps there should be a term for something you are glad you haven't said. Is there such a term? Anyway, there are certain words I simply cannot abide. In The Memory Of All That, I went out of my way to avoid "scion," "prestigious," and "socialite." Those very words have already been used, and I am sure will continue to be used, by others who have something to say about the book.

My word prejudices run deep and wide. For example, I am very unfond of "veggies." It's familial. My sister-in-law feels faint at the mention of "brunch." One of my daughters gets the cringies from "moist." What are your no-no-no-never! words?

Literally Walking Off the Page

The first three "industry" reviews for The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy Of Infidelities have come in. They are positive, selling reviews, to be sure, but two of them are the kind of reviews the publisher is happier about than is the author. Here's why:

Publishers Weekly called the book "a wry and engaging portrait of a powerful, talented, but troubled family." It summarizes certain elements of the story, concluding with this: "The most touching passages describe the impact of unavailable adults on Weber (she was left alone for five days on a film set) and Weber's relationship with Swift, who took her to Broadway shows, Central Park, and Schrafft's soda fountain." No characterizing final conclusion, no context with regard to my novels, and not a word about the actual writing. A strangely incomplete review. Not to be ungrateful for the coverage, but, hey, PW reviewer, what did you think of the book?

Kirkus had a more knowing reviewer on the case, I suspect, though that review was also muted and a bit ungenerous. After some useful summarizing and quoting, the review concludes: "The book is strongest in its rich details of a dazzling but painful family past fraught with betrayals, infidelities and other assorted dysfunctions, including-in the figure of art historian Aby Warburg-mental illness. However, Weber is overly reliant on historical narrative to convey a very personal recollection, which creates an unintentionally brittle objectivity that makes it difficult for readers to connect with either Weber or her account, except at a distance. Illuminating but often dry." I don't agree with this last opinion at all! But I certainly welcome a review that has something to say.

Booklist gets The Memory Of All That best of these three. Here is the whole review: "Novelist Weber (True Confections, 2010; Triangle, 2006) mines her rich family history, hitting the mother lode of pedigreed romances and remembrances. While it may be a stretch to call the infidelities of several generations love stories, many of the eccentric characters on Weber’s family tree are more than a touch quixotic, imbuing their often sordid relationships with an intriguing aura of romance. With a novelist’s light, sure touch, Weber propels this fascinating family memoir with stories and recollections of the prominent relatives who informed her life. Grandmother Kay Swift, the first female Broadway composer and George Gershwin’s longtime lover; grandpa James Paul Warburg, FDR’s economic adviser; and daddy Sidney Kaufman, serial womanizer, unconventional filmmaker, and producer of the first feature film that literally smelled, thanks to a process called Aromarama, literally walk off the pages of this captivating multigenerational saga."

THANK YOU, thank you! Booklist reviewer, for your appreciation, and for recognizing that I am a novelist (it is likely that the PW and Kirkus reviewers had little or no awareness of my five novels), and for suggesting that the memoir is actually a literary work. The unintentionally hilarious "literally walk off the pages" is entirely forgiven. (Book critics no doubt have staircase thoughts of their own.)

Memo to that Certain Family Member

Dear You Know Who You Are:

Perhaps you wouldn't lie awake nights wondering if my forthcoming family memoir has "all those bad things" in it if you hadn't done all those bad things in your long, long life! Give it a thought one of these 3 a.m.s between now and pub date in July.

I am far kinder and also far more discreet than you deserve. For example, I just wrote that.

The Final Moment Before Staircase Writing Sets In

I have turned in all corrections to second pass pages for The Memory Of All That. From this moment on, anything else I want to include in those pages will consist of staircase writing here.

The last new writing, in these final corrections, was a parenthetical sentence about my great-aunt the psychoanalyst, inserted into a late chapter in a paragraph about the imperious old ladies in my family and their hierarchies: (Bettina always cheated ferociously at croquet, to ensure that Nick won, she came in second, and I finished last.)

Just a Few STETs, Please

The copy edited manuscript for my forthcoming memoir, The Memory of All That, arrived on my doorstep this morning. Working with this, I have to complete all final revising in the next few days, because from here it goes to typesetting. Next time I see these words they will be set in first pass pages (those are the pages from which galleys are made and sent to reviewers), and no further changes will be possible beyond the corrections of typesetting errors.

I have been anxious about the copy edit because, frankly, strictly entre nous, I had some very terrible copy editing on my last two books. Great copy editing is an elegant, subtle art. I absolutely love skilled copy editing which helps the author say and mean what she means to say. Copy editing is essential. It saves the author from repetitions and other artifacts of revision and rewriting, and it saves the author from her own weaknesses. (I have a tin ear for "that" and "which," no matter how many times I check Strunk and White.)

Bad copy editing, on the other hand, introduces new errors while overlooking existing errors. Bad copy editing cites Wikipedia as a definitive source. Bad copy editing betrays cluelessness about the author's tone and style while revealing far too much about the copy editor's own limitations (and, perhaps, failed ambitions). Bad copy editing is painful. It takes time and is horribly enervating. Bad copy editing causes one to wear out pencils writing STET over and over. Stet is Latin for "let it stand," which is to say, it is a veto of a correction. But if you have to write it too many times on a manuscript you begin to think it is actually the Latin for "fuck off."

The fantastic news of the day is that I had a fabulous copy editor for this manuscript! The copy edits are reasonable, attentive, thorough, and intelligent. They are also respectful of the author's intentions, for which I am profoundly grateful. I have work to do, the kind of work I love, and I am diving in now.

THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT

Not a staircase thought, but I am sure I will soon be thinking about things I meant to include in the revised manuscript for my forthcoming memoir which went back to my editor today. It isn't too late yet, but it soon will be.

July 2011 pub date. Watch this space.