Booksology 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?
IRA GERSHWIN: A Life in Words | By Michael Owen | Liveright | 416 pp. | $37.99
