Frankie Gershwin

Remembering A Friend

When you sing George Gershwin's music, it's easy to believe that he's still alive. How can he have died in 1937 when his material is so fresh and alive today? But gone he is, and, now, so is our last direct link to him.

Frances (Frankie) Gershwin Godowsky, George and Ira's little sister, died on January 18, at the age of 92.

I met Frankie when I sang at the party celebrating her 85th birthday, and later I had the privilege of appearing with her at her American singing debut. Later, you ask? After her 85th birthday, you ask? Her American debut, you ask? Yes to all three, but give me a few minutes to get there.

Frankie Gershwin was born on December 26, 1906, ten years to the day after her brother Ira. Though the youngest of the four Gershwin children, she was the first big hit in showbiz. At the age of 11, she was dancing in a children's musical called Daintyland and bringing home $40 a week. Big brothers George and Ira, still humble song pluggers in Tin Pan Alley only brought home $15 each. Later, she recalled that she would walk through the streets of the neighborhood thinking "If only the knew who I am!" So maybe it's a good thing, for the sake of her modesty, that George and Ira's careers began (to understate the matter) to take off.

If she resented being overshadowed, it's nothing she ever mentioned to me. George doted on her, and she became the singer who performed his songs for the first time, so that he could hear them in something other than his own, admittedly terrible, voice. She even helped him with the dances for Lady Be Good.

George loved the way Frankie understood his music and the way she interpreted it. When she and George and Ira went to Europe in 1928, Cole Porter heard her sing Embraceable You (perhaps the most perfect ballad ever written, if you can believe the judgment of ... George Gershwin) and was so taken with her singing that he momentarily gave up his systematic debauching of European nobility and insisted of personally hosting her European singing debut in Paris. George played and Frankie sang and the crowds loved it. She might have started a career in earnest right there, but George insisted on dragging her back to the states with him. And (as if she was providing future screenwriters with the perfect plot twist for a biographical film) she fell in love on shipboard with Leopold Godowsky, son of a famous Russian pianist and a friend of George.

So she became Mrs. Godowsky. But even as a housewife, she just couldn't do things the way an ordinary person would. She became a painter and a sculptor. When her husband invented Kodachrome film, she became his model for color tests. And she recorded an album of her brothers' music in 1975.

Even with an album under her belt, she did nothing with her largely untrained voice for more than another 15 years. After we first met in 1991, Frankie decided to take voice lessons and get into shape for a real appearance on a real stage for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century. So there it was — Ira's hundredth birthday. Ira had been gone for 13 years, George for nearly 60. But Frankie was there and going strong. She hosted my concert, in fact. So for just a little while, I close to the inner core of the Gershwin legacy.