GEORGE GERSHWIN’S FIRST--AND LAST--HOLLYWOOD YEAR

On a day 50 years ago this summer at Newark airport, George Gershwin boarded a plane bound for California. He was off to Hollywood with his brother and lyric-writing partner, Ira, to score an MGM musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He would never see New York again.

Within 11 months of moving to Los Angeles, Gershwin was dead of a brain tumor at 38. He left behind a legacy of countless popular songs, a handful of fine concert pieces and one masterful opera (some of his music--”Rhapsody in Blue,” “An American in Paris” and a selection of songs--will be performed by Sarah Vaughan, Christopher O’Riley and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Lawrence Foster at Hollywood Bowl Friday and Saturday).

George Gershwin’s last year--the Hollywood year--is a fount of myths, misconceptions and contradictions about one of America’s great composers. He was bitter and depressed about the failure of “Porgy and Bess,” some say, a depression linked, perhaps, to the tumor. Yet others claim he rebounded from “Porgy” with amazing swiftness.

The movie biography, “Rhapsody in Blue,” painted a friendly Gershwin at the end, a man subliminally aware of his approaching death and obsessed with the passage of time. But the contrary picture of an easygoing, same-as-ever bon vivant has also been offered.

When it comes to Gershwin, it’s difficult even for the experts to tell the true from the apocryphal. Throughout many editions of “The Gershwin Years,” the standard Gershwin biography, authors Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart steadfastly maintained the falsity of a certain story about Gershwin’s Hollywood encounter with Igor Stravinsky. According to the story, Gershwin, always eager for new musical expertise, asked the Russian-born master for lessons. Stravinsky inquired about Gershwin’s annual income and received an answer in handsome figures.

“Young man,” Stravinsky said, “perhaps you should teach me.” After years of labeling this a tall tale, Jablonski wrote in Ovation magazine early this year that the story was true after all.

This much about the Hollywood year is undeniable: George and Ira moved to adjacent houses on North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, where they penned some of their most enduring material. (In fact, Ira continued to live there until his death in 1983.) The decision to go west in 1936 had been primarily a financial one, Broadway having been without a Gershwin hit since “Of Thee I Sing” nearly five years before. The plan was to make quick money in Hollywood, then return to New York for any number of other, largely less commercial, projects. As it turned out, the brothers scored the first film (“Shall We Dance”), picked up the option on a second (“Damsel in Distress”) and were starting to work on a third, “The Goldwyn Follies,” when George died under a surgeon’s knife.

In that last year, busy though it was with starlets and studios, Gershwin was continuing his first strides to mastery, and had he lived, there is every reason to believe he would have produced work to equal and even surpass his earlier efforts.

“Shall We Dance” yielded the perennials “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “They All Laughed.” From “Damsel in Distress” came “A Foggy Day (in London Town)” and “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” while “Goldwyn Follies” gave us “Love Walked In” and “(Our) Love Is Here to Stay.”

During this time, George also toured the West Coast as a pianist, hobnobbed with Hollywood intelligentsia, dated the likes of Paulette Goddard and Simone Simon, pursued his serious hobby of painting and planned all manner of musical projects, from a second piano concerto to a new musical comedy with Kaufman and Hart. If he was downhearted and depressed, he put on a good front.

“He wasn’t the sort to linger over disappointments,” says Kay Swift, Gershwin’s close friend of more than a decade. A composer in her own right (“Can This Be Love?,” “Fine and Dandy”), Swift lives today on New York’s East Side.

“You were always at ease with George,” she said in the living room of an apartment dominated by Gershwin memorabilia. “He had a naturalness about him. If he were here right now, he’d probably walk over to the piano and play.”

Like so many aspects of Gershwin’s life, his emotional relationships with women are a mass of question marks, although his amours, per se, are well documented. He never married, but some have said that Swift was a top nominee for Mrs. Gershwin in her day.

“We were devoted to each other, there’s no question about it,” she says. “But we never thought of marriage. When I met George, I left off being married to someone else, and, well, that was it. George could never have married anyone.”

The contemporary view of Gershwin’s Hollywood year is tainted by the knowledge of how it ended. But had he lived, how would we look at it? The year 1936-37 was filled with busy work for MGM, but it was also comparatively restful time. He and Ira had visited Hollywood once before, in 1931, but this time it was “much more agreeable,” the composer once wrote in a letter.

“We have many friends here from the East so the social life has also improved greatly. All the writing men and tunesmiths get together in a way that is practically impossible in the East. I’ve seen a great deal of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern at poker parties and dinners and the feeling around here is very gemuetlich .”

Far from “killing” Gershwin, as the anti-California myth goes, Los Angeles seemed to work like a tonic on the composer’s post-”Porgy” blues. That opera had represented a transformation of sorts for Gershwin, opening up new realms of harmonic and melodic possibilities in a serious world, and now this transformation, after a brief hiatus in early 1936, was continuing in the popular arena.

Pianist/conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, whose CBS Gershwin album with the Los Angeles Philharmonic has been in the Top 10 of Billboard’s classical chart for a year, thinks Gershwin’s music in the years just before his death was “becoming more abstract, more operatic and symphonic. Some of it includes dissonance and abstractly conceived counterpoint and his own approach to using them.”

Tilson Thomas hears in the movie songs of 1936-37 “a new style, a longer-lined kind of song, and a tremendous sophistication born of the use of exactly the right notes.”

Instead of making a song out of one or two standard progressions, as had been the case in many early songs (for example, “I Got Rhythm,” “But Not for Me” and “The Man I Love”), Gershwin now crafted extended legato lines that turned on “one or two carefully placed blue notes,” as Thomas puts it. “This is a very deft kind of writing. It suggests to me Mozart and Schubert.”

Such was the level of melodic refinement Gershwin had reached by 1937. And the ideas he had for employing that considerable gift ranged as widely as the genius of the man himself.

The commercial failure of “Porgy and Bess” having left his theatrical urges undaunted, Gershwin discussed with Santa Fe playwright Lynn Riggs the possibility of an opera. He also conferred with George Balanchine about a ballet, and talked with friends about writing a symphony. We’ll never know if these works might have equaled the originality and beauty of the Concerto in F, “Rhapsody in Blue” and “An American in Paris.”

The ultimate, irresistible gain for Gershwinophiles is the what-if of Gershwin living past 1937. Would he have adopted the 12-tone methods of his Hollywood tennis partner, Arnold Schoenberg? Perhaps, but you would never have recognized them when he got through. Gershwin’s two major musical strengths were his humility and his pride. His humility allowed him to hear potential in any new idea. His pride, a form of naivete, altered those ideas to his own, unique genius.

There’s little use in second-guessing history and the only truth about Gershwin after 1937 is the sad one. Our what-if game breaks down shortly after World War II anyway, for while it’s conceivable that Gershwin would have completed any number of masterpieces in any number of genres, it would not have been possible for him to have stopped the flow of history, and those masterpieces would have ended an era. Even Gershwin could not have stopped the coming of the post-Webern avant-garde in the world of concert music and the parallel decay of American popular music in the 1950s, with its consequent effluent of rock ‘n’ roll.

Gershwin gave his last public performance, the Concerto in F with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on Feb. 11, 1937. The concert was a success, but at one point a very un-Gershwinian thing happened: He stumbled over some chords in a difficult passage. In retrospect, this was surely a sign of the encroaching tumor, and the incident bothered Gershwin sufficiently that he went to a doctor for a checkup. The checkup showed nothing abnormal.

By June, Gershwin was experiencing coordination difficulty and extreme irritability, a highly uncharacteristic trait for easygoing George. This time, a checkup revealed the presence of a tumor, but it was too late.

Swift was not the last to see him; she had waved goodby to him for the last time on that fateful day at the Newark airport. But she was perhaps the first to know that he was dead.

“I was at a movie at Radio City with my daughter, April,” she recalls of the afternoon of July 11, 1937. “Suddenly, I stood up and said, ‘We’re leaving.’ We got up the aisle and April asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘George is dead.’ ” When she got home, the phone call came.

“I think when something happens to someone you love, you know it, don’t you?”