Alumni News Spotlight "Dorothy Parker of the Piano"
Remembered in certain circles for her professional and romantic association with George Gershwin, Kay Swift (DIP '17, piano) was herself a pioneering composer—the first woman to write an entire Broadway musical. The show was the 1930 hit Fine and Dandy, and on the 75th anniversary of its premiere, a first-ever recording of the work (and first full biography of its composer) shed some long-overdue light on this spirited and complex woman. In observance of Women's History Month, we feature her in our Alumni Spotlight column.
Kay Swift in a leopard coat, c. 1934 (Courtesy of Katharine & Nicholas Weber, Trustees, The Kay Swift Memorial Trust)
Born into a cultured New York family of modest means, young Katharine Faulkner Swift (1897-1993) often accompanied her father, a music critic, to performances at the Metropolitan Opera, developing a passion for Wagner. Her father's friend Frank Damrosch—who founded the Institute of Musical Art, Juilliard's predecessor—recommended the precocious child for piano lessons with Bertha Tapper when I.M.A. opened its doors in 1905. Katharine later returned to earn both a certificate and a teacher's diploma in piano. As a theory and composition student of Percy Goetschius, she already displayed the ability to combine classical rigor with inventiveness, blending ragtime and fugue in her graduation piece.
Touring the New York area with the Edith Rubel Trio after graduation, Katharine performed at the summer home of a friend and met rising young banker James Paul Warburg, whom she married in 1918. The marriage launched Katharine into a privileged milieu that fairly crackled with wit and sophistication. It was at one of the couple's boisterous parties that she met George Gershwin. Despite considering herself a "terrible snob about musical comedy," she was enchanted with both the man and his music and set out to explore a new professional world. Gershwin was the one who transformed Katharine Warburg into "Kay Swift." She joined the musicians' union and worked as a rehearsal pianist for Richard Rodgers as he readied A Connecticut Yankee for Broadway.With her husband collaborating as lyricist (under the name Paul James), Swift penned numbers for several shows before capturing the brass ring with the madcap Fine and Dandy. This machine-age musical—set in a factory and highlighting the comic potential of interactions between both workers and management and men and women—ran for 236 performances and tied with Girl Crazy as the top hit of the 1930-31 season. But Swift's continuing relationship with Gershwin strained her marriage, and in 1934 she and Warburg (with whom she had three children) divorced.After a four-year compositional hiatus (during which she assisted Gershwin with several projects, including Of Thee I Sing), Swift's next undertaking was the score for the 1934 Alma Mater, a ballet parodying the annual Yale-Harvard football game that was Balanchine's first work for the new American Ballet Company (which became the ballet company of the Metropolitan Opera). The following year she was hired to write music for the Rockettes' routines at Radio City Music Hall. One of five composers and arrangers on the staff (which included Ferde Grofé and Earle Moss), she described herself in a publicity brochure as "a sort of Dorothy Parker at the piano," turning out witty numbers on the spot. Her stint at Radio City led to a position as director of light music for the 1939 New York World's Fair, where she became enamored of a cowboy starring in the rodeo and eloped with him to a ranch in Oregon. (Her 1943 memoir of their life together was later made into the 1950 film Never a Dull Moment, starring Irene Dunne and Fred MacMurray.)By now divorced again and remarried, Swift returned to New York in 1948. Her work there included music and lyrics for Cornelia Otis Skinner's 1952 one-woman show Paris '90, along with piano works and a song cycle for her grandchildren that was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra (among others). The years from 1960-74 brought "industrial" commissions for the Campfire Girls; three World's Fairs in Seattle, New York, and Montreal; and the American Medical Association.Swift outlived Gershwin by 56 years, and was of invaluable help to biographers, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars who sought to understand his working methods and recreate his performing style. If Gershwin had lived to return to New York from his year in Hollywood, might he and Swift have married? If she hadn't become involved with him, would she have been more prolific? These are among the fascinating questions raised by Vicki Ohl's biography, Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift, published last June by Yale University Press. And the complete 1930 show has been brought to life and recorded for the first time by PS Classics, a new nonprofit company founded to preserve forgotten American musicals. Together, they will surely renew interest in this talented and important figure in American popular music.—Jane Rubinsky
