Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words
By Michael Owen
Liveright; hardcover, 416 pages; $37.99
Michael Owen is a historian, researcher, and archivist. He is the author of Go Slow: The Life of Julie London, and the editor of the forthcoming volume The Gershwins Abroad, on their time in Europe in 1928.
In the voluminous new book, Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words, which has been named placed on Broadway World's "Theater Books for Your Winter 2025 Reading List," Owen spotlights the man behind the most memorable lyrics in the Great American Songbook.
While his brother George Gershwin became more renowned, it was Ira who was the first lyricist to win the Pulitzer Prize. With extensive archival sources, shown throughout the book with plenty of pictures and original documents, and using Ira's own words, this is a rich depiction of the modest man who wrote the words to a lot of America's best-loved songs.
Ira, who wrote the lyrics, and George who composed the music, collaborated on a string of hit Broadway shows in the 1920s and 1930s, which brought them popular and financial success, and let to their long string of classics, including "Fascinating Rhythm," "Embraceable You," and "They Can't Take That Away from Me."
Their first collaboration came in 1923, and it came about after producer Alex Aarons made siblings Fred and Adele Astaire stars with the production Stop Flirting! in London. Aarons knew he could make them stars back in the United States, and he signed them for a contract for a show after the show ended in Europe.
Who would write the songs was the question, and Aarons realized, if the Astaires worked, would another set of siblings find the same success? The Gershwins expanded on songs they were already working on, including one that was called "Syncopated City" that turned into "Fascinating Rhythm."
The show was originally called Black-Eyed Susan, and it was renamed Lady, Be Good! before it opened in Philadelphia in November 1924. The simple book gave the Astaires many chances to show off their dancing, and for Ira, it was the first time his songs got rave reviews in the press.
It wasn't long before the show would move on to New York, where it was instantly sold out. That brought about changes, as Owen writes, "One number that was cut had been sung in Philadelphia by Adele Astaire 'charmingly and to an appreciative hand' in the opening scene, but 'seemed to slow up the show,' which Ira admitted was 'really a dancing show': In the spring of 1924, when I finished the lyric to the body of a song - the words and tune of which I now cannot recall - a verse was in order. My brother composed a possibility we both liked, but I never got around to writing it up as a verse. It was a definite and insistent melody - so much so that we soon felt it wasn't light and introductory enough, as it tended to overshadow the refrain and to demand individual attention. So this overweighty strain, not quite in tune as a verse, was, with slight modification, upped in importance to the status of a refrain. I gave it a simple set of words, then it had to acquire its own verse; and 'The Man I Love' resulted.'"
Their work on the play with the Astaires straight to one of the Gerswhins' most famous masterpieces, Rhapsody in Blue. Late in January 1924, while watching a play in a songwriters' apartment in Midrown Manhattan, Ira read in the Tribune about George writing a new composition for a concert at Aeolian Hall on Lincoln's birthday.
George admitted he first that he forgot about the request, and he worked on a piece for piano and orchestra that was all rhythm. It's made the suggestion to add a slow theme that he already heard George perform from one of his notebooks, and American Rhapsody was born. Ira suggested changing it to Rhapsody in Blue because he felt it would be more evocative after he spent an afternoon looking at James McNeill Whistler's paintings Nocturne and Harmony at the Met Museum.
As can be seen here, one of the strengths of this book is how Owen lets the reader in to their creative and collaborative process. After their Broadway hits in the 1920s, it wasn't long before they were off to Hollywood and went to work in the movie business in California.
Then, tragedy beckoned, as George Gershwin died in a Los Angeles hospital in July 1937. He was only 38 years old, and his death marked a stark dividing line in Ira's line. From that moment on, Ira devoted most of his time and energy to the management of his brother's estate and the care of his legacy.
Though Ira was used to living in his brother's shadow, it now had the possibility of overwhelming him. His aim was to balance his administrative tasks with a new series of collaborations with composers like Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, and Harold Arlen.
Ira's last Broadway work was in 1946, and several films and a book project, which was a collection of his lyrics and the stories behind them, occupied his later years, along with the ongoing management of George's affairs.
The Gershwins' work has left a long-lasting legacy on American culture that it was recognized by the Library of Congress in 2007 when the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song was established. It has been awarded to artists such as Paul Simon, Carole King, Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney, and Elton John.
In this excerpt, writes of Ira's parents, Morris and Rose, arriving in New York: "They were among the more than two million Eastern European Jews who emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century and changed the demographics of the cities in which they lived. In 1870, there were only sixty thousand Jews in New York City, or less than 1 percent of a total population of 1.2 million; forty years later, there were 1.1 million Jews, or 23 percent of the population of 4.8 million. Morris and Rose were better prepared 'for urban life than...most of the other immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.' Morris's profession kept him away from the sweatshops and pushcarts of the Lower East Side and gave him the money to live in reasonable apartments rather than squalid tenements.
Ira's parents settled in Manhattan's Lower East Side, an area of less than one square mile packed with 455,000 residents by the turn of the twentieth century. The Lower East Side was the scene of never-ending cycles of change. The Irish and German immigrants who had populated the area through the 1870s had been displaced by Eastern European Jews, many who would never entirely assimilate; the Gershwin family was not among them. Morris and Rose, and their four children, were eager to become part of their new country and its culture to be successful - in short, to become Americans.
Before the birth of their first child, the couple rented a walk-up apartment above Simpson's Pawnshop in a building at the corner of Eldridge and Hester Streets. It was here that Israel Gershowitz was born on Sunday, December 6, 1896. His given name was quickly replaced by Isidore and typically abbreviated to Izzy or Iz; it was the name by which his family and friends knew him until the early 1920s, when he adopted the Ira moniker. When Ira's father applied for American citizenship in December 1897, his last name was listed as 'Gershvin,' which was soon modified to Gershwin.
Morris Gershwin liked to live within walking distance of his place of business, and in late 1897, he relocated to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, 'then regarded as a pastoral village' for Jews, to pursue a better opportunity. He rented an apartment in a two-story house on Snediker Avenue, and his weekly salary of $35 made him 'the most prosperous member of his lodge in those days.' The Gershwins had a front room, a dining room, and a kitchen, with three or four 'smallish but comfortable enough' upstairs bedrooms. The neighborhood was rife with open spaces, and trees bordered both sides of the house, where a fenced-in yard was used for growing grapes.
The most notable event of the Brooklyn sojourn was the birth of the couple's second son, named Jacob after his paternal grandfather, on September 26, 1898. Ira, not yet two years old, was blissfully unaware of the arrival of the new addition, whose given name was quickly Americanized to George. By 1900, they had moved to the more desirable Park Slope neighborhood; for a time, their residence was just a block from idyllic Prospect Park, where Rose and her three sons (Arthur having arrived in March of that year) were often found picnicking with the family maid, a sign that the Gershwins were financially secure, if not well-off. But Brooklyn lacked culture and friends, and an offer from Rose's parents for Morris to become part owner of a Turkish bathhouse in Manhattan could not be resisted. With that move, Morris became part of the Lower East Side immigrant 'middle class of independent businessmen' in search of the American dream of freedom and prosperity."
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