The lyricist Ira Gershwin once suggested his epitaph should be “Words Failed Me”: a joke tinged with ineffable sadness.
Bespectacled and diminutive of stature, he was and will be forever overshadowed by his younger brother and collaborator George, the glamorous genius composer who died at 38 of a brain tumor many in his circle had dismissed as a nervous ailment.
As has been told many times before, but not from the close P.O.V. that Michael Owen assumes in his new biography, “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” this seismic event in musical history left his subject both bereft and, for the rest of his own much longer life, sweeping up after a fallen star while trying, faintly, to keep emitting his own light.
Ira spent plenty of time vetting George biographers, whose number could populate a healthy chorus line. But his own “potpourri of musical memories,” titled “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” sold so poorly he bought up the remaining copies. A decade after his own death at 86 in 1983 came Philip Furla’s “Ira Gershwin,” which also focused to its detriment on the lyrics, not the man.
Now Owen, an archivist who has previously published a biography of the torch singer Julie London, has stepped up to give this perpetual supporting player an infusion of main-character energy. He succeeds. “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words” is dignified but not starchy, efficient but not shallow, and honest about grief’s unrelenting toll. It concerns family ups and downs as much as show business, and everyone — happy holidays! — has some of those.
Ira was born Israel in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City, a name quickly switched to Isidore (Izzy or Iz) before he settled on one that, appropriately, can mean “watchful” in Hebrew. There would be four children, and their parents’ many business struggles and frequent moves left the oldest son cautious and introverted.
He loved to read: pulp adventure stories, Everyman’s classics, all the newspapers then thriving. In his accelerated public high school, he edited one of his own, The Daily Pass-It, with another Isidore, Hochberg, who would grow up to be the lyricist Yip Harburg, and he kept a diary in the style of the then-popular columnist Franklin P. Adams.
Prodigious, libidinous and ambitious, George was still a teenager when he began to earn money as pianist and Tin Pan alley “plugger,” and rattle off his own tunes without apparent effort.
Meanwhile, Ira toiled as a bathhouse cashier and secretary-treasurer at a traveling carnival, timidly dating while submitting pieces to magazines like The Smart Set, collecting rejection slips along with self-effacing pseudonyms. In 1918, he dryly called his expected draft to the war in Europe “Invitation to the Dance.” (It was forestalled by the flu epidemic.) He would be, Owen writes, “an observer, not a doer,” tortoise to George’s hare, inching into partnership with him.
And yet it was Ira, moved by an afternoon looking at Whistler paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, who proposed that the more glittery Gershwin change the title “American Rhapsody” to “Rhapsody in Blue”; Ira who furnished the lyrics for George’s first Broadway smash, “Lady, Be Good!,” starring Fred and Adele Astaire; Ira whose agonies over the couplets of “I Got Rhythm,” from “Girl Crazy,” helped hoist Ethel Merman all the way to the disco era.
He had an ear for slang — “a good lyric,” he told The New York Herald Tribune, “should be rhymed conversation” — and his lines became themselves part of the argot: “Of thee I sing, Baby!” attendees of that musical greeted one another in the theater lobby at intermission. The show won Ira a Pulitzer Prize that he was conflicted about accepting, indignant that George wasn’t recognized. (Composers didn’t get Pulitzers until 1943.)
“A Life in Words” conveys a strong sense of how songwriting is fractional in creation, fractious in catalog. Owen does his best to untangle disputes over credit and royalties for George’s operatic magnum opus, “Porgy and Bess,” shared with DuBose Heyward, but these portions might be eye-crossing even for accountants. Heart-clenching is the Gershwin matriarch, Rose, not understanding the extent of Ira’s contribution when she seized the estate of her famous and favorite offspring.
Ira didn’t fight. Owen captures elegantly his survivor guilt, flying home for the grand funeral of his brother: the Salieri feelings of being a talented but ordinary man still around when this “‘stupor mondi’ — the wonder of the world” was gone.
George Gershwin’s presence in this book is not only spectral; it’s almost holy (let’s just say there’s more about Goddard Lieberson, the record producer, than Paulette Goddard, the movie star and his rumored lover), but this seems intentional. Life’s plodders can be as interesting and amusing, in their way, as the sprinters.
In careful increments Ira emerges, wry and resigned. George, who painted as a hobby, does a self-portrait in evening clothes and his older brother responds with one of himself wearing underclothes dyed yellow in the bathtub, paunch visible: “My Body.” He hated driving but loved and long lived in Los Angeles. He liked to gamble and, like many of his generation, popped plenty of pills with his longtime wife, Leonore. (He forgot her 50th birthday.) They never had children, but he was godfather to Liza Minnelli.
He was comically underactive, congratulating himself for what Owen calls “peregrinations,” and work-avoidant: “Upstairs to get typewriter ribbon,” he’d say, jumping up from the piano. “It’s the only way I get exercise.”
He had a weakness for puns that some found fatal. “Lust Horizon,” he proposed as an alternate title to Billy Wilder’s “Kiss Me, Stupid,” his last Hollywood collaboration, and a bomb. After repeated falls he called himself a “rhapsody in bruise.”
The world of songwriting is collaborative, but not always collegial. When he met Ira Gershwin in the early ’60s, Stephen Sondheim praised his lyrics for an obscure song from the failed musical “Park Avenue.” But in his own book of lyrics and memories, “Finishing the Hat,” Sondheim took a full page to diss the older man’s work as “clenched” and “convoluted.”
You feel deeply for the oldest Gershwin brother, who tended George’s legacy like a faithful gardener and supplied the perfect coda for Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” lyrics, and another possible Ira-taph:
If happy little bluebirds fly/beyond the rainbow/why, oh why, can’t I?
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