By Steven Suskin
28 Aug 2011

	Cover art for "The Memory of All That"

Who is Sidney Kaufman, and why should we care to read about him? That's the question I had 60 pages into "The Memory of All That" by Katharine Weber [Crown]. My puzzlement grew 80 pages in, 100 pages in, and on. "George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and my family's legacy of infidelities" is the legend emblazoned on the top corner of the cover. Kay Swift, as many readers of musical theatre literature are aware, was the talented composer — Broadway's first female to write a mainstream hit musical — who left her husband and three young children to become mistress, muse and musical companion to Gershwin. The story of Kay and George, told by Katharine Swift's granddaughter Katharine Swift Kaufman Weber, sounds promising. Especially if the author happens to be a decent writer — and Katharine Weber turns out to be a fine writer, indeed.

But who wants to spend the first half of the book — literally, the full first half — reading not about Kay and George but about one Sidney Kaufman, who've we've never heard of and never had reason to. Kaufman was a serial underachiever, all bluster with little accomplishment, a minor cog in the world of motion pictures. (According to his daughter, he more or less developed the use of completion bonds for independent films, which is sort of an insurance policy for motion pictures.)

Kaufman was a spectacularly poor provider, insolvent, unreliable and worse. At one point, Weber reports, her father left their Forest Hills (NY) house and disappeared for 18 months. Kaufman was a good talker with outsized charm, and a serial adulterer; Weber tells us, in one fascinating stretch, that one of his mistresses had affairs with Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe, another with Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells. (Weber accumulated bits of the story over the years, with many perplexing shadows filled in courtesy of her father's FBI file, some 800 pages-worth.) So yes, Sidney Kaufman makes interesting reading. From the moment of his birth, in fact: Kaufman's mother left her job in a sweatshop to give birth, not long before the place — the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory — burst into flame in Manhattan's deadliest workplace tragedy of the 20th century.

But "The Memory of All That," title borrowed from an Ira Gershwin lyric, is supposed to be about grandma Kay, who only comes along in the second half. It turns out, though, that Ms. Weber knows what she is at; her memoir consists of numerous nonmatching strings, which she somehow manages to masterfully pull together. Kay had been married to James Warburg, scion of the ultra-wealthy banking family, for eight years when she met and fell in love with George. Two of Kay's children seem to have rejected their mother for destroying their family; the middle daughter, Andrea, appears to have just as irretrievably fallen under George's spell. (For a short period of his brief life, Gershwin avidly took up photography. One of his most striking compositions, a self-portrait from 1934, is centered on 12-year-old Andrea; George sits behind her — or maybe she is on his lap — taking the photo in a mirror, the Leica obscuring his face.)

 

	Kay Swift

Andrea, the author's mother, is present throughout the book but the often-absent Sidney gets far more coverage. The question, though, is why Andrea Warburg — raised in a splendorous mansion on the Upper East Side — chose to marry and stick by this disastrous Sidney Kaufman. And that's where Ms. Weber starts to unpeel her story like an exotic artichoke. She describes a fascinating, outgoing, swarthy man with boundless energy, a Brooklyn-born child of Russian immigrant parents with the energy and confidence to change the world. That describes the man who walked into Kay Swift Warburg's life in 1926, mesmerizing her and little Andrea as well; and that description also fits Sidney Kaufman. Who claims to have been an uninvited but undisturbed visitor at George's bedside at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital while the composer was undergoing tests, two weeks before his death from a brain tumor in 1937; Kaufman was sitting vigil with a friend in the next room. Maybe true, maybe not; but a story that would undeniably appeal to Andrea when he met her a decade later.

Weber spends less time discussing her mother and more on her grandmother, who started the next stage of life after Gershwin by marrying a rodeo cowboy, writing a book about it, making a film about it (starring Irene Dunne as Kay), and divorcing said cowboy. And there's plenty more to be said about the fascinating Kay. Swift spent a good part of her 95 years as the unofficial artistic guardian of George's music; having sat beside him on the piano bench for half his adult life — and being an accomplished musician herself — Kay was the person to go to for songs, for information, and for demonstrations of how George intended his music to sound. Swift was also our prime expert on the score for Porgy and Bess, having been deeply involved in its creation. Would that she was around just now.

(On a personal note, let me add that I consulted Kay several times on matters Gershwin. The last time I saw her was especially memorable. The 93-year-old Swift turned up at a show I produced in 1990, offhandedly introducing me to her 84-year-old friend Frankie. Who turned out to be Frances Gershwin Godowsky, kid sister to George. They both especially loved the score and the show, Bill Finn's Falsettoland.)

All said, "The Memory of All That" does indeed tell us about George and Kay, offering new insights that will be of interest to Gershwin followers. Weber also tells us about her father; his numerous associates, some of whom were decidedly shady; her grandfather James Warburg, a central cog in the bogus "International Jewish banking conspiracy" that still circulates in some circles; and numerous passersby. There's even a glamorously beautiful Englishwoman with one arm, along with plenty of memories that might raise an eyebrow. Like the night Zero Mostel came to dinner, circa 1962. The then seven-year-old author watched as he "reached into the basket of dinner rolls on the table and licked each one before putting it back, while everyone laughed uproariously." Did that sort of thing ever happen at your house?

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