Gershwin Bros.

Maneuvering around two grand pianos which took up most of the available floor space of a small Manhattan apartment, a young Jew last week went about the business of packing a suitcase. Old newspapers--the inseparable, useless adjuncts of this operation--lay here and there in crumpled disorder, but two, each containing an item which had been circled with a pencil mark, reposed on a table. The first item related how Composer George Gershwin, famed jazzbo, had recently returned from Europe; the second stated that this Gershwin, when he had finished the piano concerto which Dr. Walter Damrosch has commissioned him to write for the New York Symphony Orchestra (TIME, May 4), will compose the score of a new musical comedy for the producers of Lady, Be Good. Soprano excitement abruptly galvanized the telephone at the young man's elbow: he began to address its black aperture. "Yes," he said, "this is Gershwin. . . . No, no, it's too hot. ... . I'm going away for the weekend. ... I can't see anyone" Smiling, he hung up the receiver, tossed a last striped shirt into his bag. It was sometimes a nuisance, but he could not honestly pretend that it bored him, this growing public interest in his movements, his past, his plans.

George Gershwin, 27, was born in Brooklyn. At an early age, he contributed to the music of a rickety, rollicking, tenement street, at first with infantile muling, later with a stout, pubescent chirrup. He skinned his knees in the gutters of this street; he nourished himself smearily with its bananas; he broke its dirty windows and eluded its brass-and-blue clothed curator. When he was 13, his mother purchased a piano.

It was not that Mrs. Gershwin detected any seeds of musical talent in her grubby young son. Se bought the piano because her sister-in-law had one. There it stood, big and shiny; it had cost a lot of money, and no one in the Gershwin family--not even Ira, the oldest, who was certainly a smart boy-- could make music on it. George would have to learn. For some time the neighbors suffered; then they advised him to study in Europe. His first teacher died when he was still torturing Chopin's preludes. Max Rosen, famed violinist, told him he would never be a musician. When he was 15, he tried to write a song. It began decently in F, but ran off into G, where it hid behind the black keys, twiddling its fingers at Gershwin. Discouraged, he went to work as a song-plugger for a music publisher.

He plugged songs on tin-pan pianos-- those renegade instruments that stay up late, every night, in the back rooms of cafes, in the smoky corners of third-string night clubs, till their keys are yellow, and their tone is as hard as peroxided hair. Gershwin's fingers found a curious music in them. He made it hump along with a twang and a shuffle, hunch its. shoulders and lick its lips. Diners applauded. "What's the name of that tune, honey?" asked a lady of Gershwin one night.

"No name," said Gershwin. "It has no name."

The ditty in question, afterward entitled I Was So Young, and You Were So Beautiful, became Gershwin's first hit. Within a few years, he had written Swanee, I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Yankee Doodle Bines, The Nashville Nightingale, Do It Again, I Won't Say I Will, Somebody Loves Me, Lady, Be Good, Fascinating Rhythm. Last year, he composed his famed Rhapsody in Blue, a jazz concerto constructed after Liszt. It took him three weeks to write it. He played it through twice with Conductor Paul Whiteman's celebrated jazz band. It was acclaimed in Carnegie Hall by a huge audience, hailed by daring critics as "the finest piece of music ever written in the U. S." Conductor Willem Van Hoogstraten asked Gershwin to arrange it for a Symphony Orchestra. Next season he will play his concerto with the New York Symphony in Manhattan, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia. It is to be more serious than the Rhapsody, unconventional but in strict form. In the winter, he expects to write still another musical comedy, in collaboration with his brother. Ira Gershwin writes the words to George's songs. Quieter than his more brilliant brother, he once tried to be an author. He spent two days polishing a poem, submitted it to a magazine. It was accepted. Ira Gershwin received a check for $1.00, abandoned literature, took to composing words for George.