💔The Tragic Death of George Gershwin

This excerpt is from a much longer, and at times kind of tedious, bio of George Gershwin. The best part of it is the way they use paintings as "animated stills" which the camera pans across and zooms in on. I especially loved the bit where George, addled by a soon-to-be-fatal brain tumour, takes a handful of chocolates and smashes them into his chest. It was a horrible death, made that much more horrible by medical ignorance and the denial of his friends and family, who chalked up his weird symptoms to "love troubles" and struggles with his new boss, Sam Goldwyn. 

In fact, one of the last things George ever said - miserably - was, "I should live so long as to hear Sam Goldwyn say to me, 'Why can't you write hits like Irving Berlin?'" It's true - George COULDN'T write hits like Irving Berlin because he was too busy skating rings around him, and everyone else in the competition.

So everyone, "friends" and doctors alike, ignored the fact that George was spilling his food, falling down the stairs, stumbling in his piano playing, saying nonsensical things, and pushing his chauffeur out of the driver side of a moving car. Love troubles, you see. Then he collapsed in the bathroom during one of his agonizing headaches, fell into a coma, and died, but not before they cracked his head open and "discovered" a grapefruit-sized tumour. Brain surgery wasn't what it is now, but some now believe that he could have been at least granted a reprieve, or had the worst of his agony relieved. 

So what happened? George just WASN'T a sick person, he wasn't - and part of this ludicrous denial was his own myth of invincibility. It's ironic, because he suffered from chronic digestive problems for his entire life which could also be agonizingly painful. Some believe the chronic gut pain may even have been related to the cancer which eventually ate his brain.

George's story is sad, and sweet, and not like anyone else's. He was a Mozart in his time, flaming out in a brilliant streak across the sky. No one knows what he would have achieved had he lived, but it is not a sure thing that he would have kept producing at the same phenomenal rate. Some artists are products of their time, and never quite make the transition. Harold Lloyd is an example of someone whose character would always and ever be "a youth", a young man either totally unskilled in the ways of the world, or (in a few cases) a spoiled and ridiculously-entitled rich kid. 

By the time the talkies came around, he was still playing "youths", as in Movie Crazy where he played a 40-year-old virgin still living with his parents and setting off for a great adventure in Hollywood. It wasn't just that irritating, dithering nasal voice of his, which still drives me crazy. Not everyone beat the cull. Garbo could talk like a man, but not Tallulah Bankhead. It was his 1920-ness, the way he embodied a certain era which would never come around again, and his inability to evolve into someone or something else.

In Gershwin's case, only death stopped him. It seems that nothing else could.