Of Thee I Sing
Of Thee I Sing can use all the topical spin it can get. The play enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success in the 30s, even winning the Pulitzer Prize, but it’s never risen to the top of our musical-comedy canon. George and Ira Gershwin’s score was masterfully integrated into the play’s action, and as a result it produced few hit songs. George S. Kaufman, who wrote the book with Morrie Ryskind, is better remembered for evergreens like Dinner at Eight, You Can’t Take It With You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. And, truth be told, Of Thee I Sing hasn’t aged particularly well: its once-brutal satire of electoral politics has been far outstripped by our venal culture of focus groups, negative ads, and tabloid journalism. But the unique blend of temperaments that created it still speaks to us at the close of this godforsaken American century: like the play itself, we seem to swing wildly between naive sentimentality and heartless cynicism.
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Privately, Kaufman was a kind and generous man, but his moroseness blotted out any sense of romance. He hated love scenes in plays, and he’d never been particularly fond of having music in his own, believing that songs stopped the action dead. Once Irving Berlin played Kaufman a tune he’d been working on, the now-classic “Always,” with its line “I’ll be loving you / Always.” Kaufman pointed out that the lyric was hardly realistic and suggested “I’ll be loving you / Thursday.” Yet Ryskind, by most accounts, was at least as cynical. Their first collaboration, the Marx Brothers vehicle The Cocoanuts (1925), gave Groucho Marx such heartwarming lines as “Oh, I can see you now–you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I’ll know you.”
The very title made Kaufman jittery. If the original version of Strike Up the Band had bombed, who would even approach a show that seemed to mock the lyrics of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”? He was even more fearful after a friend stopped him on the street to report that George Gershwin, in Hollywood working on a movie, had regaled partygoers with a new tune whose chorus declared, “Of thee I sing, baby.” The two brothers had turned the title into a warmly comic love song: “Of thee I sing, baby / Summer, autumn, winter, spring, baby.” As it turned out, the Gershwins’ instincts were on the money: the lilting melody worked as a joke but also as a sincere sentiment. Ira later wrote, “Opening night, and even weeks later, one could hear a continuous ‘Of thee I sing, baby!’ when friends and acquaintances greeted one another in the lobby at intermission time.”
Yet without his music–and more important, his emotional involvement–the show could never have succeeded. According to Scott Meredith’s George S. Kaufman and His Friends, Kaufman and Gershwin were watching the audience during a performance one night, and Kaufman was stunned to see people’s eyes moistening as Wintergreen pledged his love to Mary. “What’s the matter with them?” he asked. “Don’t they know we’re kidding love?” Gershwin shot back, “You may think you’re kidding love–but when Wintergreen faces impeachment to stand by the girl he married, that’s championing love. And the audience realizes it even if you don’t.”
