Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (31 page)

The Gershwins had reason to worry about young George, the second of their four children (which included another brother, Arthur, along with Ira and Frankie). As Ira, the studious one, read classics by Horatio Alger, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Harriet Beecher Stowe inside the family home, George got into brawls in the streets. He stole from pushcarts, set a few fires, got kicked in the nose by a horse, and had at least one run-in with police after he urinated behind a wagon, according to his biographer Howard Pollack. Once, he reportedly suffered a concussion after trying to run away from an Irish gang. His aunt described George as a “wild boy.” Goldberg's assessment was even blunter: “He was, frankly, a bad child … With a little less luck he might have become a gangster.”

He didn't fare a whole lot better in the classroom. Mischievous and impatient, Gershwin considered school a nuisance and often got into trouble with his teachers and school administrators. He had trouble sitting still and paying attention, and neglected to do his homework. Some of the time, he just didn't bother to go to class at all. When Gershwin's teachers sent notes home, Ira would come to the rescue, noted another biographer, Joan Peyser, assuring the authorities that his little brother would do better next time. The Gershwin brothers' collaboration started early.

Young George, it would seem, was more rambunctious and unruly than other kids inhabiting the whirling streets of New York at the turn of the 20th century. Dr. Richard Kogan, a Juilliard-trained pianist and a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, has a theory about what might have driven Gershwin's behavior. Kogan has analyzed the lives of myriad composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, to better understand how their minds influenced their music. He presents his accounts in riveting performances, where he plays biographer, shrink, and musician all in one, weaving anecdotes and history with dazzling piano playing.

In his analysis of Gershwin, Kogan found classic traits of childhood impulsivity and hyperactivity. One spring evening, Kogan presented his hypothesis at a performance at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, New York. After providing an overview of Gershwin's early life, Kogan wagered that the composer might have met the criteria for one of the most prevalent modern-day diagnoses in childhood. If Gershwin were growing up today, Kogan told the audience, “it's easy to envision him being sent by his school guidance counselor to a child psychiatrist who probably would have diagnosed the young George Gershwin with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and might have started him on a psychostimulant medication like Adderall or Ritalin.”

Gershwin on Ritalin? Preposterous. Or is it? Gershwin's fevered energy propelled him throughout his life. “Whenever Stravinsky was asked about Gershwin, he always said the same thing: ‘That man is just one bundle of nervous energy,' ” Kogan said. “You can hear it in his music.” To make his point, Kogan took to the keys and played a fast and spirited passage from
Rhapsody in Blue
. “Could that have been written by somebody who was
not
hyperactive?” he asked. “Any of you know this Gershwin song?” Kogan went on. He started with a slow and silky rendition of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” Gershwin's hit from the musical
Oh, Kay!
Then he stopped and turned to the crowd. “This is how Gershwin played that song,” Kogan said, setting a pace so brisk it sounded more like Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag.” Gershwin once wrote, “We are living in an age of staccato, not legato.” Kogan put his own spin on it: “I think Gershwin lived in a central nervous system of staccato, not legato.”

Anybody whose child has been assessed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will find Gershwin's early behaviors familiar. The condition is defined by three overriding features: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, which play out in a variety
of ways. Eighteen symptoms are described on the ADHD diagnostic checklist, including fidgeting and squirming, an inability to focus and pay attention, interrupting others, talking excessively, and restlessness. People with ADHD often feel as if they're “on the go” or “driven by a motor.” To warrant an ADHD diagnosis, children must exhibit at least six of these symptoms, and their behaviors must interfere with how they function at school or in social settings.

Kogan says his proposition about Gershwin is pure speculation, but it rings true to Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and ADHD expert who has been treating children and adults with the condition for more than 30 years. Hallowell, who has ADHD himself, frames the intense energy of the condition in a positive light for his young patients, using analogies to explain what's going on in their heads. “I say to kids, ‘Look, you're really lucky. You've got a Ferrari for a brain,' ” says Hallowell. “ ‘The problem is you have bicycle brakes.' ” The challenge is sorting out how to control all of that power and energy. Using Niagara Falls as another example, Hallowell explains that the force of the waterfall is phenomenal—but it needs to be strategically harnessed to make it productive. “Until you build a hydroelectric plant, it's just a lot of noise and mist,” he says. “But once you build the hydroelectric plant, you light up the state of New York.”

With all that noise and mist, it's not surprising that children with ADHD can find it hard to concentrate. The irony is that they often turn to risky and disruptive actions—not because they are inherently drawn to mayhem or danger, but as a way to calm themselves. The external commotion relieves them from their own internal chaos. “People with ADHD are always looking for ways to find focus, and one way to find focus is through stimulation,” says Hallowell. There are maladaptive forms of stimulation (setting fires or pilfering) and adaptive forms (painting murals or starting a business). The goal must be to find positive inspiration that works.

For Gershwin, it was music: his stimulation, his calm, his focus—his hydroelectric plant. Interestingly, music was not particularly important to either of his parents. Morris enjoyed opera, had a knack for imitating the sound of a trumpet, and whistled a pretty good tune, but that was about the extent of it. Rose Gershwin hoped her son would go into business or law.

Gershwin's two most important introductions to music took place outside of the family home. The first occurred when he passed a penny arcade at the age of six and heard the strains of an automatic piano playing Anton Rubinstein's Melody in F. “The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted,” he later recalled. “To this very day, I can't hear the tune without picturing myself outside that arcade on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, standing there barefoot and in overalls, drinking it all in avidly.”

The second turning point took place several years later, when Gershwin was about ten. At P.S. 2 elementary school in the Lower East Side, he heard Maxie Rosenzweig, a fellow student, play Dvořák's Humoresque on the violin. The notes wafted out of the school auditorium, riveting Gershwin, who was entertaining himself outside. “It was, to me, a flashing revelation of beauty,” he later recalled. Despite a heavy rainstorm, the story goes, Gershwin tracked down Rosenzweig's address and arrived at his house, dripping wet, to announce himself as an admirer. “From the first moment we became the closest of friends,” Gershwin recalled. When they weren't wrestling, they talked, eternally, about music.

Within a couple of years, around 1910, the Gershwins acquired a secondhand upright piano of their own, which was hoisted through a window into the family home. It was meant, initially, for Ira, who had started taking piano lessons. But it was George who leapt onto the stool, lifted the cover off the keyboard, and began to play. The family was stunned. It turned out that George, then
about 12, had been teaching himself how to play on a piano player at a friend's house. He had also been tinkering on the keyboards at a local piano store where he ran errands, according to biographer Pollack. Hooked, Gershwin asked his parents for lessons. Music became his salvation. “Studying the piano made a good boy out of a bad one,” he said. “It took the piano to tone me down.”

It is a common misperception that people with ADHD are incapable of focusing. What they need, says Hallowell, is to find a passion big enough to rein them in. When bored, the ADHD mind will wander, “like a toddler on a picnic,” says Hallowell. “It's forever crawling around the woods looking for snakes and lizards. It goes wherever curiosity leads it, without any regard for danger or authority.” But when these same people are captivated by what they love, they become hyperfocused and can concentrate better than even the most quiet of contemplators.

This was certainly true for Gershwin. His formal musical education began with 50-cent lessons from local neighborhood teachers, then progressed to a Hungarian band leader, who upped the price to $1.50. But it was Charles Hambitzer, a talented pianist and teacher who introduced Gershwin to Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy, who turned out to be what Gershwin called the “greatest musical influence in my life.” As he studied with Hambitzer as a young teenager, Gershwin began attending concerts, where he heard eminent pianists of the time and familiarized himself with a sweep of composers, which almost certainly would have included Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven. The “bad boy” of the streets found himself consumed by notes and melodies. He listened intensively, “not only with my ears but with my nerves, my mind, my heart,” Gershwin wrote. “I had listened so earnestly that I became saturated with the music.”

Gershwin's musical ear was evident from early on. At home after the concerts, he re-created the melodies in his head and played them
on his piano. “I was becoming acquainted with that which later I would try to interpret—the soul of the American people,” he later wrote. At 15, Gershwin dropped out of school to become a “plugger” for Jerome H. Remick, one of many music publishing companies clustered together on New York's west side and known collectively as Tin Pan Alley. It was 1914, a time when piano patrons flocked to hear pluggers like Gershwin play new sheet music before they purchased it. Gershwin plugged at Remick's shop and in cafés around town, where he accompanied singers and observed what inspired listeners and what did not. “Syrupy melodies” and worn-out harmonies were starting to feel old, like “tasteless filler for equally meaningless tunes,” wrote biographer Isaac Goldberg. They were looking, happily, for precisely what Gershwin could offer. “The café patrons, he saw, wanted snap and ‘pep,' ” Goldberg wrote. “And pep was part of George's nature. He had been made for the new day.”

Soon, Gershwin was performing around town as a concert accompanist and experimenting with his own compositions. He published his first song, “When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em,” when he was just 17. An early collaboration with songwriter Irving Caesar produced “Swanee” in 1919, which Al Jolson incorporated into the Broadway musical
Sinbad
. “Swanee” became an instantaneous hit and sold one million copies of sheet music, making it the top seller of Gershwin's entire career. The lyrics “How I love you, my dear old Swanee” could not have been more appropriate. The song brought the composer stardom and fortune at the age of 21.

George's brother Ira, meanwhile, had bounced around from one job to the next, including a stint as a cashier for a traveling carnival. Along the way, he started writing song lyrics, and he and George began collaborating. The two teamed up to produce their first Broadway musical,
Lady Be Good
, in 1924. “The Gershwin brothers,” as they came to be known, stayed close in every possible
way, even living together—along with their parents, brother, and sister—in an apartment on the Upper West Side for several years in the early 1920s. George Gershwin's ability to focus amid the family din awed the playwright S. N. Behrman, who visited the composer there. “It was a perpetual wonder that Gershwin could do his work in the living room of this particular flat, the simultaneous stamping ground of the other members of the family and the numberless relatives and visitors who would lounge through, lean on the piano, chat, tell stories, and do their setting up exercises,” Behrman wrote in a
New Yorker
magazine profile published in 1929. “I have seen Gershwin working on the score of the Concerto in F in a room in which there must have been six other people talking among themselves, having tea, and playing checkers.”

George, handsome and lively, had an abundance of girlfriends, a ten-year love affair with the composer Kay Swift, and a yearning to be married. But he never settled down. Ira did, but his partnership with George never wavered. He and his wife, Leonore, spent their lives entwined with George—either living with him in one of the rambunctious Gershwin family homes or residing in separate apartments on the same block. As Leonore once commented: “I never saw a greater love than the love George and Ira had for each other.”

The Gershwin brothers collaborated on lyrics and music throughout their lives, producing more than two dozen scores for the stage—including
Strike Up the Band
and
Girl Crazy
—and for Hollywood films. But they operated on very different metronomes: one slow, one fast. Ira labored over his words; George knocked his tunes out swiftly, working in a fury, sometimes all night long. Sleepless bursts of creativity can look like mania, a key feature of bipolar disorder, which is sometimes confused with ADHD and at other times overlaps with it. But hyperactivity can also kindle the mind at all hours. Many adults with ADHD
characterize themselves as night owls whose lively minds surge with ideas after the sun goes down.

Gershwin's creative powers defied the clock, inspiring him with a velocity that captivated the music world. His Concerto in F, for piano and orchestra, was written at the same time that he was working on two musicals. He composed
An American in Paris
, which debuted at Carnegie Hall in December 1928, in just a few months. If you see “a tall, slender young man with thick, dark hair and large brown eyes toying with a bowl of porridge at a marble-top lunch on upper Broadway anywhere from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.,” a
New Yorker
“Talk of the Town” piece advised, “you may be watching the recuperation of a popular hero from the creation of a foxtrot or a piano prelude.”