Who Was Vernon Duke?

I’ve been familiar with at least a few of Vernon Duke’s songs — among the most famous of them being “April in Paris,” “Autumn in New York,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” — for as long as I can remember. But until I read his newly reprinted autobiography, the delightful Passport to Paris (originally published in 1954), I knew almost nothing about his life. All I knew was this: he was born in Russia and composed a great deal of serious music under his birth name, Vladimir Dukelsky, before fleeing to the West and starting to write American-style popular songs under the pen name Vernon Duke.

Well, Duke’s story turns out to be a fascinating one. Born in 1903, he grew up speaking both Russian and French, attended the conservatory in Kiev with Vladimir Horowitz, and composed his early music — all of it classical in style — under the influence of Debussy and Prokofiev. While he was still a conservatory student, just before the Bolshevik Revolution, his teachers disappeared overnight, replaced by young men who, instead of using musical terms in their lessons, spoke of “class war” and “bourgeois tendencies.” When the October Revolution took place, Dukelsky’s grandfather, who owned a conservative newspaper, was one of the first to be arrested. Soon almost everyone was spying on everyone else, including their own families. At the conservatory, Dukelsky and his fellow students were ordered to collaborate — in good collectivist style — on a Soviet propaganda opera. Dukelsky complied, but his appalled mother refused to let him attend the performance.

During the next three years, Kiev underwent 19 changes in government — each of them accompanied by street battles, bombings, and machine-gun fire. Eventually, with Soviet troops closing in on the town, Dukelsky, his mother, and his younger brother, Alex, fled to Odessa. Not long afterward, with the Communists bearing down on that city, they escaped to Constantinople, where Dukelsky played piano in lowbrow saloons whose patrons wanted only to hear the latest hits by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin — whose “Swanee” sent Dukelsky “into ecstasies” and inspired him to write tunes that “sounded as if they were in the authentic American jazz idiom.” In 1921, the family relocated yet again, this time to New York. “Russians used to flee from the czar,” writes Duke, “we fled from the czar’s murderers.”

In New York, Dukelsky began to meet the musical glitterati of the day. When he played one of his pieces — “an extremely cerebral piano sonata” — for Gershwin, the latter disapproved: “‘There’s no money in that kind of stuff,’ he said, ‘no heart in it either. Try to write some real popular tunes — and don’t be scared about going lowbrow. They will open you up!’” That last sentence, recalls Duke, “stayed with me through all the years that we were friends.” And with good reason: “opening up” was, after all, an American concept, alien to the Russian mind but key to Dukelsky’s musical assimilation. Gershwin did Dukelsky another favor: he came up with the name Vernon Duke, which the Russian, while continuing for many years to sign his serious music as Dukelsky, began using to distinguish his American-style pop music from his still Russian-flavored classical works.

Living in New York was a heady experience. At swank Manhattan soirees, he met Marcel Duchamp, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, and H.L. Mencken, among many others. Professionally, however, he struggled. Although he got a piece played at Carnegie Hall, there was no money in it. He made small sums playing inferior popular music at down-at-heel night spots, an activity that he found mortifying; phoning Gershwin in desperation, he was taken him to meet Max Dreyfus, heads of the Harms Music Publishing Company. Alas, Dreyfus didn’t cotton to the kid’s work. One feels for the youth, whom the elder Duke does a wonderful job of bringing to life: he loves nice clothes and enjoys parties but is not good “at either drinking or lechery.” Indeed, the idea of sex, Duke confesses, “still filled me with uncomprehending terror.” On the whole, then, “I was a badly frightened young man.”

A sojourn in Paris changed his luck. He earned some of the money for the trip by arranging the piano solo version of Rhapsody in Blue (the job paid $100). In Paris there were more big shots: Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel. He met Diaghilev, who loved his first piano concerto. “I began to feel important,” he writes, “a dangerous feeling when one is twenty.” Just as he credits Gershwin with having done more for Duke’s songwriting career than anyone else, he credits Diaghilev with doing more than anyone else to help Dukelsky succeed in the classical realm. Like Gershwin, Diaghilev had advice for him, which Duke records in a characteristically amusing passage:

Diaghilev warned me to keep away from women, whom he professed to abhor, not merely as useless (to him) sexually but because of their colossal stupidity and greed. Sergei Pavlovitch was, I’m afraid, overfond of such generalizations; along with women, his pet peeves were homosexuals and balletomanes. This intelligence might appear startling in view of his being both of these things himself. However, he explained the paradox by insisting that he only liked manly and virile youths….Simpering and mincing tantes [fairies] he detested and thought worse than women.

While in Paris, Duke sat for a portrait by Picasso. He triumphed with a ballet, Zephyr et Flore, which took him to Monte Carlo and London — where there were still more marquee names, including William Walton, P. G. Wodehouse, and Cecil Beaton. In London, he wrote pop songs with lyrics by the author Beverley Nichols and signed the name Vernon Duke to his first published popular song. He met George Balanchine, “probably the most lovable creature that ever lived,” with whom he visited a bordello in Turin where both men, upon inspecting the availablle ragazze, decided not to avail themselves of their services after all. He made a road trip with Prokofiev to the south of France. Back in Paris, he was slapped at a party by Jean Cocteau. The Soviet government invited him to translate Gershwin shows into Russian — a proposition that “greatly intrigued me, as I felt that no better anti-Soviet propaganda could be imagined than a big, healthy dose of Gershwin music, and all the good American things it stands for.”

Soon enough Duke was back in America, a country that he frequently pauses to celebrate. America, he notes, is “the country to which we Dukelskys owed everything — our exodus from enslaved Russia, our subsistence in Constantinople, Alex’s brilliant scholastic career [he attended MIT], made possible by Americans who had faith in him.” As for Russia, Duke regards the change of St. Petersburg’s name to Leningrad as an “unspeakable sacrilege” but consoles himself with the thought that the now vanished St. Petersburg “will live forever in the music of Pushkin’s poetry.” (I would like to think that Duke, who died in 1969, somehow knows that the city’s old name has been restored.)

Time went on, and Duke accumulated more celebrity friends: Oscar Levant, George Kaufman, Yip Harburg, Fanny Brice. He composed songs for Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. In 1932, missing the City of Light, he wrote “April in Paris,” which, like his later song “Autumn in New York,” made no impact at the time, even though both would go on to become standards. One person who appreciated his pop music, it turned out, was none other than Jerome Kern, the father of modern American popular song, who, encountering him in the offices of Harms, staggered him by saying: “I’m under your influence.”

Prokofiev was less impressed by Duke’s — as opposed to Dukelsky’s — output. From the moment Duke began writing pop songs, his mentor referred to them as “whoring.” This didn’t reduce Duke’s affection for Prokofiev, whose story, as told here, is particularly poignant. Having fled to the U.S. from Russia in 1918, Prokofiev spent much of his life in Paris before returning to the USSR in 1936. When asked by Duke how he could bear to live under Communism, Prokofiev replied loftily: “I care nothing for politics.” Alas, it turned out that politics cared about him. Although the Soviet Union treated him as a national treasure and supplied him with a chauffeured limousine, he was forced to write propaganda music and was obliged, when he traveled to the West, to leave his sons at home as hostages. Inevitably, the ax fell: in 1948, he was officially denounced, his works banned, his finances ruined, and the right to travel to the West denied him. In a cruel irony, he died on the same day as Stalin.

Meanwhile, back in the West, Dukelsky’s career as a serious composer was moving along nicely, although Duke’s efforts to churn out hits were hit-and-miss. After Cabin in the Sky (1940) conquered the Great White Way, his luck ran out. Self-deprecatingly, he claims to have spent years as “Broadway’s No. 1 Composer of Unproduced Shows.” Tired of failure, he returned to Paris, where his serious music was still being enthusiastically performed and respectfully reviewed. In his closing pages he deplores the state of serious music “today” (i.e., in the 1950s), most of which, composed by the melodically challenged disciples of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, didn’t — and still doesn’t — appeal to wide audiences. Duke’s own taste ran to the more traditional and melodic — Gian Carlo Menotti, Kurt Weill, Walter Piston, Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free, and, not least, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which he pronounced America’s best opera.

For what it’s worth, I share Duke’s musical taste. I haven’t heard all of his songs, but I love the ones I know. I love his love of America and his withering contempt for the upscale “progressives” he encountered in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris who were appalled that he’d left the Soviet Utopia for the capitalist hell of the U.S. I love the humor, humility, and frankness with which he recounts his life story, telling us as much about his professional failures as his successes, and not omitting the several occasions on which he experienced unrequited love and had his heart broken. I’ve never been familiar with his classical work, but I’ve started to acquaint myself with it, and what I’ve heard is beautiful. (I can’t promise to learn it all: his catalog, both as Duke and Dukelsky, is voluminous.)

How to sum up? Easy. The life story of Vladimir Dukelsky, who officially changed his name to Vernon Duke when he took U.S. citizenship in 1939, is a stirring account of the American dream made real. It’s the story of a man who deeply loved the freedom and the people of his adopted country and who, in turn, became one of that country’s undying cultural ornaments. Perhaps it was his fellow songwriter Alec Wilder who, in the section devoted to Duke in his definitive, delicious 1972 book American Popular Song, said it best: “although he was born in another culture, his absorption of American popular music writing was phenomenal.” Indeed. And the immensely charming Passport to Paris is an ideal introduction to this two-headed musical marvel.

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