I was amazed but not surprised to see this fascinating obituary in the New York Times about the extraordinary life of Alan Gershwin, who was either an uncrowned prince cheated of his musical and financial heritage, or a complete fraud.
It surprises me that I still get comments on the blog post I did in 2015 about AG and GG (link below) and the complicated relationship they had, whether face-to-face or only in Alan's imagination. There is just no simple version of this story, and I
think it has the makings of a movie. I have heard that William Shatner has a
phantom son who keeps threatening him with exposure. So far he’s ignoring him.
I
have had a bit of a problem with his “uncanny” resemblance to GG. People see
what they want or need to see. GG was so cruelly yanked out of the world, with
so much unfinished business, that maybe a lookalike son was an emotional need
for some people. Some make their living “being” other people at parties, etc. –
professional lookalikes, and AG didn’t look any more like George than a
convincing lookalike. But then, I didn’t know him.
Some of the commenters on my
blog piece are kind of upset or even angry that I don’t just accept the reality
of AG being who he says he is. Others kind of dismiss him or talk about how
terrible his music was. Yet he’d show up at music festivals and no one would
question him. Maybe Alan Gershwin was the unlived life, the continuation in very
watered-down form of George once he prematurely dropped away.
In my unofficial
research on GG, I kept coming across stories where people would “see” him in his
old haunts after he died. He’d just appear for a moment. Elvis sighting stuff?
Could be, or just more of that desire to see someone who left too soon. I read
that Ira Gershwin whispered on his deathbed that he “saw” his brother after his
death – he waved at him cheerily from the sofa in his workroom. IG was terrified
to tell anyone lest they think he was crazy. Another time he appeared at a
player piano for a second in front of a crowd, and several people “saw” him. But
people see what they want or need to see, which is why AG went so far.
Maybe.
Ah, those days: the days of Johnny Larue and William B. and Dr. Tongue and all the other surreal characters taken over by John Candy. For the characters didn't take him over - it was the other way around. He invaded them and became.
Johnny LaRue, the chimney-smoking, booze-swilling, dame-exploiting would-be politician of Melonville was one of my favorites. In this clip he pitches himself as a candidate for City Council, and even that untidy flop of hair is reminiscent of Donald Trump, along with all the ranting bullshit.
But LaRue had a signature phrase he used in every sketch: "And I'm not gay!" I was reminded of this when I opened my email this morning and found a comment from someone about my Alan Gershwin post (which got a good response, believe me, in light of the 13 views I get for some of them). The reader vehemently denied any suggestion that either George or Alan Gershwin was gay. This is typical of the indignant, deeply insulted, even infuriated tone of people who perceive any such suggestion in biographies of famous (and usually it's) men. Lost and Found: the mystery of Alan Gershwin
No one ever thinks - it doesn't occur to them even for a moment - that their fury reveals the slightest degree of homophobia. But even a suggestion the person in question MIGHT have been gay is automatically seen as vicious slander which has to be vigorously denied and argued into the ground. No, he was NOT "one of those". There is no EVIDENCE he was "one of those". He had hair on his chest, for God's sake! Don't defile his good name like that!
What???
I'm not defiling anything or anyone when I say there were suggestions that Gershwin might have been gay. Most of his biographers (including Howard Pollack, who wrote a definitive 885-page doorstop) have pondered the fact without coming to any hard conclusions. In Gershwin's rarefied world, being gay or bisexual was not the big and horrifying deal it was in the general populace. Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and many other movers-and-shakers of composerhood were gay, some of them quite openly. It was an arts-saturated environment, and its most celebrated figures seemed to believe they were above convention.
It doesn't matter to me if Gershwin was gay, bisexual or a racehorse (though he was certainly that). But what interests me is the utter fury with which people deny and denounce such "accusations", even if they're stated as mere surmise. I'm apparently attempting to throw mud at an icon, drag him down into the slime. Hey, wait a minute!
I did a piece on Nietsche not long ago, and the same "accusations" came up in his biographical material, along with that same strident, near-hysterical denial. It's a lie! He had a girl friend in university once and took her to the Philosopher's Ball! The implication is that I'm giving him a black eye just to be spiteful. And, of course, getting my facts wrong. All wrong. This reminds me of that classic Seinfeld episode where, whenever the issue of gayness came up, the mantra was, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Denial of the denial? Let's begin the beguine.
And Cole Porter? Are you kidding? And Noel Coward, let's not forget him. Gay! Gay! Yes, I'm going to ruin their reputations right here and now by saying they loved men (which is obviously a horrific crime - it goes without saying, doesn't it).
Huh??
Come on, people. The suggestion that some great literary or musical figure might have been gay is not automatically slander. In expressing that view, you're revealing a small and very homophobic mind. But your small-mindedness is such that you don't even see it, or at least won't admit it.
"Oh, I knew someone who was gay once and he was a real nice fella." But he's not Gershwin. Or Cole Porter. Or Johnny LaRue.
Imagine these same people were claiming, vehemently and furiously, "he was NOT black!", "he was NOT disabled!', "he did NOT have PTSD!", or any other sensitive categories, and these same people would be horrified. It's OK to be those things now - maybe - supposedly. Or not, but we have to say so, even if we don't believe it. (Though, think about it. A hundred years ago, would it have been acceptable to claim that some important/famous white figure "might have" had black lineage? Think of the outcry, the insistence he was blonde and got a suntan, or something equally ludicrous.)
But why then isn't it OK for Nietsche or Gershwin or any other major figure to be gay or bisexual (bisexual being a category that seems to have been lost in the shuffle, the implication being, for God's sake, make up your mind! Being on the fence like that is oh-so-politically incorrect, even disloyal to the cause.) Sexual orientation still seems to be fraught with confusion. If a man gets married at any time in his life, and (especially) if he fathers a child, he's "not gay". The assumption is, a gay man would not touch his wife with a ten-foot pole. She would remain chaste and pure for 25 years while he pulled out the bodybuilding magazines he kept under his mattress.
People's minds are still in brontosaurus mode. They're stuck, and their thinking is very dusty. Is social change just hurtling along too fast, or what? Is this trapped-in-amber mode of thinking just simple physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?
Whatever. They piss me off! So Gershwin was gay. Or might have been. Does that take away anything at all from his contribution to music? In some distant universe, not this one, we might even see it as a positive attribute, something that adds to the richness and complexity of that extreme rarity, the blazing miracle of creative genius.
BONUS POST. This is the piece I kept finding during my GershQuest of last year.
Michael Feinstein’s book on the Gershwins called, sensibly, “The Gershwins and Me” (Simon & Schuster) was published in October. While he was still working in piano bars, Feinstein got to know Ira Gershwin intimately, cataloguing his collection of records, unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in the Gershwin home over a period of six years.
The gay or not gay question has floated about George Gershwin even during the more restrained time when he was a young composer. It is an issue Feinstein tackles in his book. America’s National Public Radio asked him about it:
So many speculated that George Gershwin was gay because he never got married. And somebody once said to Oscar Levant, you know, George is bedding all those women because he’s trying to prove he’s a man. And Oscar Levant said: What a wonderful way to prove it. There have always been rumours circulating about George’s sexuality, and I addressed it because so many people have asked me about it, and it’s important to the gay community to identify famous personalities as being gay. In the case of George, it’s all rather mysterious because I never encountered any man who claimed to have a relationship with George, but a lot of innuendo.
Yet Simone Simon said that she thought that Gershwin must be gay because when they were on a trip together, he never laid a hand on her, she said.
Cecelia Ager, who was a very close friend of George’s and whose husband Milton Ager was George’s roommate, once at the dinner said, well, of course, you know, George was gay, and Milton said: Cecilia, how can you say that, how can you say that? And she just looked at him and said: Milton, you don’t know anything. But when I asked her about it, she wouldn’t talk about it. So it still remains a mystery.
My own theory is that I think that the thing that mattered most to George was his music. I think he could have been confused sexually. I don’t know. I think that he had trouble forming a lasting relationship.
Kitty Carlisle talked about how George asked her to marry him, but she said that she knew that he wasn’t deeply in love with her. But she fit the demographic of what his mother felt would be the right woman for him.
This is an extract of NPR’s long talk with Michael Feinstein.
Photo: left to right, George Gershwin, Michael Feinstein, Ira Gershwin
NOTE: here is the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of innuendo:
Here we touch on the interesting issue of "unpleasant" being juxtaposed with "sexual", which opens up a whole new can of worms: that there's something unsavory and reputation-destroying about sex itself, unless it takes place in the heterosexual/marital bed, infrequently, in the missionary position. And only when you want a kid.
This might be categorized as a Separated at Birth of a very different stripe. I love a mystery, but this mystery has pushed me back time and time again, leading to more frustration than information. I've been chopping my way through several of the multitude of George Gershwin biographies. Surely no American composer has ever been more sliced, diced, hashed and rehashed than GG. I finally found my way to the really smutty one (The Memory of All That, 1998) by Joan Peyser, the one that reviewers vilified for being inaccurate and making "outrageous claims", including the insistence that GG sired an illegitimate son with a chorus girl in 1926. One indignant review of the Peyser book sniffily claims that "the family has never recognized Alan Gershwin's claim to their", etc., etc., blah blah blah, but why would they? The stigma of an illegitimate child could ruin a career back then. No doubt the woods were full of opportunists and pretenders, not to mention gold-diggers. After his death, GG's affairs (literally) were hermetically sealed by Ira and Lee Gershwin, his brother and sister-in-law, who lived a long time and were bound and determined to show only the more brilliant facets of this enigmatic jewel to the public. That restriction remained in place long after both of them were dead.
Strangely enough, in subsequent reviews and commentaries on Peyser's book, critics have become more forgiving. Over time, her formerly sleazy tell-all has found its way into the Gershwin canon (not the boom-boom kind: I keep telling you!). A three-inch-thick Gershwin tome by Howard Pollack, the "definitive" bio until the next one comes along, admits Peyser's scholarship is a bit wonky, but nevertheless cites her work three or four times in a fairly straightforward manner. It's included, which in itself lends her work validity. By some mysterious process that I don't understand, her controversial, vilified, preposterous and completely discounted biography now "counts". Could it be that she got it right?
But here's the thing. When I try to dig up some hard, plausible evidence that Alan Gershwin exists, or ever did exist, I can't findanything. There is a glorious photo gallery of "someone" - the photographer claims it's AG - taken when he would have been 88 years old. The fine facial bone structure that has kept him photogenic all these years is a trait he shares with George (who never had the misfortune of growing old). But I can't post these, they're protected by the web site, and there's no text with them that I can find. Nothing to explain the photos. Nothing at all.
The few sites I found that even mention Alan Gershwin now identify him as "son of George", not "supposed" or "alleged" or any of that. No one seems to question it any more. But except for a claim to be a composer in his own right, this man of nearly 90 left very little trace. I found a YouTube video of just one piece he wrote called The Gettysburg Anthem, performed a few years ago at a small church for a commemorative Lincoln event. But the piece was composed FIFTY years ago - a bit longer than the time it took for GG to snatch his notation paper off the piano and perform it in public the same night. In his case, the smoke was still rising, the ink was still wet. And that is all. No more videos. No more compositions. Nothing. I modestly have to tell you that there is a hell of a lot more of MY stuff on the internet, maybe because I don't know when to keep my mouth shut.
Tantalyzingly, there is a Facebook page that had me racing to find it, but in essence there's nothing on it except a link to a review from the late 1990s of the Peyser bio, one of the very few positive ones that thought her claims of an illegitimate son were valid. There's also a cropped photo of AG's mouth, the feature that most resembles GG's. Hmmmmm.
If you're to believe this strange and ultimately unproven story, people would see the young Alan Gershwin and nearly fall over backwards because they thought they were seeing a mini-George. Imagine what a shock it must have been after GG's untimely death in 1937. Alan Gershwin was a walking stigma, or else just an oddity with a chance resemblance. But it wasn't just the way he wore his hat, the way he sipped his tea. His gait, his way of inhabiting his lanky body, his nervous energy and the smile that made you hear bells and the intoxicating rattledy-bang of trains - they really did seem to match up. Or did they? AG has never submitted to a DNA test. And of course, there are lots of examples of the Separated at Birth phenomenon (many of which I've posted here) that are almost creepy in their similarity. Might AG be one of these? Now that he has aged, the resemblance isn't quite so startling, except at certain angles. The photo most widely circulated plays that up. And yet, and yet.
One of the tidbits I found, deep in the archives of a website called The Blacklisted Journalist, was this piece of information, true or not:
Alan Gershwin was born in Brooklyn on May 18th, 1926, his birth certificate recorded in the name of Albert Schneider, with Mollie Schneider, Alan's mother's sister, listed as his mother.
In Alan's early years and during his occasional visits with his famous father, Gershwin could never find the courage to acknowledge Alan as his son and introduced Alan as a "son of a friend".
For what appears to be endless years, Alan waged a futile battle for full acknowledgement. And while the evidence is overwhelming, denials rage on.
After a sad childhood, lacking even a shred of his father's musical genius, Alan approaches the waning segment of his life still hoping the world will, at the very least, announce him as "the son of George Gershwin," not Gershwin's "son of a friend."
Now that the world is paying at least a scrap of attention, at least enough to take his picture and set up an empty Facebook page, perhaps Alan Gershwin (IF he's Alan Gershwin) feels vindicated. Believe me when I say that I am a bloodhound, and if there is any more information to be found, I will find it. But I haven't found it yet. Some people coat-tail all their lives, and it's sad. Meanwhile, a weird thing has happened: Alan Gershwin has morphed into someone who looks sort of like George's grandfather, if grandsons bore that much resemblance (which they don't). In fact, in a rare photo of George's father, we see no resemblance at all.
Just when I am ready to write this off as a strange posthumous form of stalking, I think of Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was a bona fide American hero, an aviator who flew solo from New York to Paris in 1927. Tickertape parade, picture on the cover of Time, the whole works. (Except Time probably didn't exist then.) Though he was supposedly happily married to the longsuffering Anne Morrow Lindbergh, rumors dogged him throughout his life that he in fact had several families scattered all over Europe, and that he had fathered, according to the garbled information I found, either four, five or nine illegitimate children (along with the six he had with Anne). These rumors seemed as preposterous as the murmurings that he was a Nazi sympathizer, until the surviving children took DNA tests in the mid-2000s and proved to the world that it was all true.
This one is truly bizarre, one of the strangest photographs I have ever seen. I have no idea where it came from, who took it, and why. Like all the other shreds I found, there's no explanation for it. It appears to be a shot of Alan Gershwin's face in profile, directly behind that of his father, perhaps made as a deliberate comparison. This would have been hard to accomplish, I mean technically, back in the day, so it may be a sophisticated form of photoshopping. The scribbles all over it are somewhat similar to the scrawling George liked to do when he gave someone a photo. He was even known to write little musical phrases, like-a so:
Or were the scribbles by George himself? Unlikely - they're big and sloppy and nothing like George's small, neat, upright hand. (Sidebar note: apparently George's original manuscripts were as immaculate as Mozart's, often without a single correction.) They also obscure the photo, which would have driven him crazy. In spite of the dash and verve of his music, his vibe suggests to me obsessive attention to detail and an insistence on order. On top of that, like most geniuses he was an inherently narcissistic personality who needed the world to see that incredibly beautiful face.
So we are left to compare basic features: the flattish face, the aristocratic high-bridged nose with its handsome Jewishness, the long clean jaw reminiscent of a movie star's. The sloping forehead with its receding hairline. The sweet, sad, expressive eyes that one jilted girl friend described as "heavenly". But most of all, and perhaps this is why it is on the FB banner, the "Hapsburg lip", pouty, sensual and a little sardonic. George had a killer mouth, with the kind of insolently brilliant smile that would light up a foggy day in London Town, or anywhere else. What do you think? Are you with me here? Am *I* even with me here? Due to the frustrating lack of information, I don't think I will ever know for sure.
BONUS! Just found an incredible version of the "superimposed" GG with Alan Gershwin. It was for sale on Etsy, of all things, for five bucks, an "original", and that's all it said. The mystery deepens. . .
THIS IS HUGE! Recently I sadly learned of the passing of Alan Gershwin. But with his death, yet more mystery is emerging. Anyone who is interested in this strange case should read the article by David Margolick from the New York Times. The mystery may be solved - or is AA more enigmatic than ever?
