Jonathan Schwartz - All in Good Time

In the summer of 1936 on a muggy Sunday afternoon, two years before I was born, my mother fell ill on a tennis court in Great Neck, Long Island. I'm told that she dropped to her knees, then to her back, complaining of dizziness, of swirling. In the group of five or six who immediately gathered around was a doctor, who asked for an ambulance. In the hospital it became apparent that my mother's disorder was grave. There was nothing to be done for malignant hypertension. In later years, my father would use the word catastrophic to describe my mother's sickness. I didn't know what it meant and never asked, for fear of the answer. In seeking the answer for myself, so I could come upon it in private, I tried to find it in the dictionary under the letter K. At the age of six, I stood no chance. During an evening sometime later, my parents gave a party. One of the guests, Jimmy Durante, performed. At the piano, he played and sang Inka Dinka Doo. I sat by my mother on a light blue couch behind him. In the middle of the song, one of its many asides that caused the special splattering laughter that only Durante could produce revealed, for me, the definition I'd sought. What a catastrophe! Durante roared, with comic indignation. I heard the word as the secret in catastrophic. I whispered to my mother, What's a catastrophe? She whispered back, It's a terrible disaster, like a plane crash.

There's a photograph of me with the family dog, Maud. A wire haired terrier who seems to be laughing, Maud sits to my right on the brick stairs leading up to our front door. The house on La Brea Terrace has been rented for a year. It's a snug little place with a front lawn and no backyard, atop La Brea, just a bit into the Hollywood Hills. It is December 7, 1941. In short pants, suspenders, a white short-sleeve shirt, and black high shoes, I look bathed and scrubbed for the Sunday to be. It is morning, perhaps ten. My father, ever the photographer, is taking his time. No, hold it right there. Hold it. Now. One more. My face does not reflect irritation. That would come years later. In fact, I appear to be happy, smiling in the sunshine, with Maud, the smartest dog who ever lived my mother's view of Maud, alwaysright there next to me. The smartest dog, the smartest boyme. The best movie, the most delicious piece of pie, the most succulent pear, the most wonderful, the most beautiful, the most thrilling, the greatest. Katherine Carrington Schwartz, a natural hyperbolist, was also inclined to the malaprop. My, how time passes so fly. And always that strong clear speaking voice, with a song inside. Katherine had been an ingenue on the Broadway stage. Arthur Schwartz had spotted her in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Music in the Air singing I've Told Every Little Star to a young Walter Slezak. My father had attended the opening on election night 1932, a secondary event to FDR's first plurality but not secondary to the composer of Dancing in the Dark. He sought out the ingenue almost before the curtain went down. I've occasionally imagined him, oh so eager, leaping upon the stage midway through the second act. Good evening, I'm Arthur Schwartz, he might have said. Katherine, still in character, might have attempted to incorporate him. Well, hello, she might have replied. We've all been waiting for you. She might have extended her arm to the rest of the bewildered cast. The orchestra, trying to cover the disruption, would almost certainly have struck up The Song Is You, a ballad in the score, while Arthur was hustled away by stagehands, his friends and peers Kern and Hammerstein in the back of the theater, burying their faces in their hands.

In the year to follow, Arthur leapt upon every stage that Katherine traversed. Here was a blond woman with a white round face, a curvaceous form, a delightful laugh, and a clarion voice with a song inside. Arthur played her everything he'd ever written. He began to compose for her. She sang his songs, to his great satisfaction. Upon occasion, at George Gershwin's Riverside Drive apartment, George would play the piano and then invite Kay and Arthur up. My father at the keyboard was fluent and unafraid, and always generous to other composers, especially Richard Rodgers, who was frequently present. Kay sang Lover, her favorite Rodgers. Dick was greatly satisfied. Kay sang With a Song in My Heart, Rodgers's favorite of his own makinghe told me that, many years later. Arthur played Gershwin and then some of his own things, melodies that Kay had inspired.

It turned out that she had been first married as a very young woman. The boy, Clifford Dowdey, whose name is still recognized by scholars, wrote voluminously (and I mean voluminously) on the Civil War, a man possessed, pausing momentarily to marry a girl from Toms River, New Jersey, just about twenty-two years old, a looker, but oh, the noise! Poor Dowdey, who was onto new material, fascinating brand-new stuff about Robert E. Lee's father, Henry; and in the other room in a small New York City apartment, the soprano rang out with pop songs, not the Bach of Dowdey's delight. Jerome Kern is a trifle, he told his wife. Kern was the reason that Kay had crossed the Hudson River to where the songs were written. Instead she had been diverted by the historian and had accepted his proposal of marriage. Perhaps it was his erudition; Kay had none. Perhaps his reputation; Kay had none. It doesn't seem possible that it was his humor: look him up, Dowdey, Clifford.