Composer Spent Time In Palm Beach

Q: Recently you wrote about famed songwriter Hoagy Carmichael’s stint as a law clerk in West Palm Beach. Didn’t the brilliant George Gershwin also write some of his great songs in Palm Beach?
A: For the answer, we looked close to home, to Gershwin biographies and to veteran journalist and Gershwin lover Howard Kleinberg. He wrote about the composer’s Florida visits in a September 1998 Miami Herald column for what would have been Gershwin’s 100th birthday.
As early as 1925, Gershwin’s visits to Florida, and the public’s fascination with the state’s real estate boom, inspired his Broadway musical Tip-Toes, set in Palm Beach. Gershwin spent the winter of 1933 at a Palm Beach home on South Ocean Boulevard that oil tycoon Emil Mosbacher had rented with his wife and three children. It was there that Gershwin wrote variations on I Got Rhythm. And in 1935, after studying black culture in Charleston, S.C., he returned to the island to write much of the groundbreaking opera Porgy and
Bess.
“Palm Beach is once more itself after a few days of cold weather,” the composer wrote his brother and songwriting partner, Ira. “I’m sitting in the patio of the charming house Emil has rented, writing to you after
orchestrating for a few hours this morning . . . it goes slowly, there being millions of notes to write.”
Mosbacher later said in a Gershwin biography that Palm Beachers were constantly inviting the composer to their parties. He said Gershwin often complained, but Mosbacher didn’t buy it.
“He’d go, and play all night, and come home and complain like hell the next day,” the millionaire said.
Just two years later, in 1937, Gershwin would be dead of a brain tumor. He was only 38.
Read More: The Gershwin Years, by Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart; The Gershwins, by Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon; Gershwin: His Life and Music, by Charles Schwartz.

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