The Memory of All That:

George Gershwin, Kay Swift and my Family's Legacy of Infidelities

by Katharine Weber

Crown Publishers, 270 pages.

An unusual memoir penned by novelist Katharine Weber, The Memory of All That is essentially two books in one: the first concerns Mrs. Weber's relationship with her enigmatic father, the inimitible Sydney Kaufman who disappeared from the house for months at a time, worked in the movies, was either loved or reviled by his contemporaries and has a FBI file that corresponds with the career of J. Edgar Hoover. The other is largely an anecdotal biography of Mrs. Weber's grandmother, Kay Swift, who is remembered either as the first woman to have a musical on Broadway or George Gershwin's longtime paramour (sadly few people, I've found, seem to remember her as both). Despite my own Gershwin-mania, it's the novel's first half that made for a much more invigorating read; although of academic interest, the second half was less focused. For a hundred pages, Mrs. Weber fights an intriguing battle to understand her peculiar father; but she was so close to her grandmother and much of the second half is, to use Kay Swift's own word, mumpsy.


Still, this memoir remains a stand-out in the ever crowded field of personal memoirs, in which authors turn their terrible childhoods into books about triumph and emotional redemption. Those elements are here, but they are only hinted at; Mrs. Weber does not give us the traditional memoir, nor does she give us the traditional chronological version of her life. Instead, she leaps madly through time and space as she outlines the strange lives of her family. She's a beautiful writer, moving easily from elegant prose to wry humor. She has far too many well-known next of kin, which for a writer is a wellspring of material. Aside from her famed grandmother, she is also descended from the Warburg clan, one of America's famous Rockefeller-like families who (I learned here) are frequently cited in books about Jewish conspiracies to take over the world. Then there is her mysterious father who, when not amusing the FBI, was bringing the world Aromarama, the first film to incorporate scent into presentation (it pre-dated Mike Todd's Scent of a Mystery by a month).

Mrs. Weber's father is one of those bizarre, quirky creations that only fiction wrters can create - there were times when it felt like he had stepped out of a novel by John Irving. For this reason the first half of the book reads like a comic mystery of the "Why'd-He-Do-It" variety. To answer this, Mrs. Weber slowly peels back the layers of her father's life, even though so many parts of it had been redacted by the FBI. Much of Kay Swift's life has been equally redacted - there are elements of her affair with George Gershwin that we will never known, especially since upon his death she burned all his letters (and had George's brother do the same). In addition to the theme of infidelity, then, this is the central link between the two halves of this book: betrayal breeds secrecy and secrecy clouds history, making it difficult for future generations to pinpoint the exact nature of the legacy left behind.

The book does reveal several points of interest for Gershwin fanatics, including some speculation that Mrs. Weber's own mother, who was a teenager at the time of the affair, may have been closer to Gershwin then anyone has let on. Mrs. Weber also reports on gossip that Gershwin may have had an affair with his sister-in-law before she was his sister-in-law and suggests that in later years, the Gershwins tried to trivialize Swift's importance to Gershwin's life. The book also features what might be the best analysis of Oh Kay!, a silly musical that seems decidedly less silly under Mrs. Webber's clever gaze.

All this is good fodder for the scholar, but the casual reader may find their head swimming from the swirl of famous figures who march by far too quickly in this section of the narrative. The New York Times, in their review, described this part of the book as being filled with "scattershot recollection by one helluva family photo album", which seems to me a most fitting description.


As a side note, my journey to this book is thanks entirely to Anonymous, who left a comment following my remarks about Vicky Ohl's 2004 biography on Kay Swift; so a special thank you to Mr. / Mrs. Anonymous. You may just be some Crown Publishing publicist, but in case you're Katharine Weber herself, you'll be happy to know that while I usually buy my books used, I got this one the day it came out specifically so you'll (hopefully) get a royalty.