Alan Gershwin
Struggling songwriter who claimed, controversially, to be the illegitimate son of George Gershwin
ALAN GERSHWIN, who has died aged 91, was an impoverished songwriter whose claim to be the son of George Gershwin continued to arouse speculation until his death.
Gershwin’s music forms the backbone of the jazz repertoire, but the details of his personal life have always been something of a mystery. So when, in 1959, Confidential magazine published an article under the headline “I am George Gershwin’s illegitimate son”, it precipitated a flurry of interest, not least on account of the potential financial implications. Gershwin had never married and, after his death in 1937, his fortune eventually passed to nieces and nephews.
The article featured superimposed profiles of George and his “son”, revealing a striking similarity between the two men, from high forehead to prognathous jaw. Members of Gershwin’s family, however, strongly denied the claims, George’s brother Ira even opening an “Impostor File”, in which Alan Gershwin was variously described as a “jerk”, a “phoney” and a “mental case”.
Alan Gershwin’s real name was Albert Schneider (he adopted the name Gershwin in his teens), and he was born on May 18 1926 in Brooklyn, his birth certificate naming Fanny and Ben Schneider as his parents. His real mother, he maintained, was Fanny’s younger sister, Molly Charleston, a showgirl who went by the name Margaret Manners, whom George Gershwin had helped get into a Broadway revue in 1924.
Molly and George, he said, had had a five-year affair, which the composer had tried to conceal even from his brother Ira – a story which sat oddly with his claim that it was Ira who had fobbed him off as a baby on to the Schneiders, persuading them to pretend he was theirs. (Mollie, according to this version, had masqueraded as her sister when she gave birth, so Fanny’s surname went on the certificate.)
Alan claimed that as a child he had received regular visits from his father and had been supported by him financially until the age of 11. He would recall their sitting together at the piano, picking out tunes which the elder Gershwin would harmonise into 16-bar pieces. In 1930 they had gone to see the musical Girl Crazy and his father had taken him backstage to see its star, the young Ethel Merman.
Despite his strong physical resemblance to the composer (the result, some suggested, of plastic surgery), Alan Gershwin’s claims, which became increasingly bizarre over time, were given little credibility. Among other things, he claimed to have lived for some time after the war hidden away by his Uncle Ira and Aunt Leonore at their house in Beverly Hills. He also claimed that Uncle Ira had killed three people to secure his brother’s secret.
In 1993, however, Joan Peyser, a former New York Times journalist, published an unauthorised biography of George Gershwin, The Memory of All
That, in which she concluded that Alan Gershwin was indeed the composer’s son. She quoted several sources – Gershwin’s elderly valet and Alan’s stepbrother among them – who corroborated his story of childhood visits to the composer and spoke of regular payments made to the Schneiders.
“There is not a smidgen of doubt,’’ Joan Peyser said in an interview. “A deal was made, a lot of money changed hands.” Gershwin, she claimed, “was very promiscuous, very virile and he connected with women”. The stress of concealing his son, she argued, had fed the brain tumour that had killed him.
Despite the huge sums of money at stake (in 2003 the Gershwin estate was estimated to be worth $1.5 billion), Alan Gershwin never pressed for DNA tests. The possibility that he might be a Gershwin was enough to win him invitations to jazz clubs and cabarets and to give lectures at conventions and on cruise ships. “I worked as a cultural attaché for the State Department between 1958 and 1972, producing my father’s shows in Russia, South America, Japan and the Far East,” he claimed. “But my name wasn’t attached. The executors didn’t know I was involved.”
It was an unlikely story, but the engagements helped to supplement the modest income he derived from royalties from his own compositions (he had had a hand, he claimed, in the Elvis Presley hit I Want You, I Need You, I Love You, but had sold off his rights before getting the credit) and disability payments from the military.
In 1999 DNA tests on hair from the head of George Gershwin’s sister, Frances, taken by a former FBI agent post mortem, showed that she and Alan Gershwin were not related. Yet the revelation seems to have done little damage to his career. In 2003 he appeared in a “Gershwin Celebration” presented by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.
Mollie Charleston, a second cousin who was quoted in the New York Times, said that while none of the family knew anything about a family connection with Gershwin, they knew Alan as an eccentric child, recalling that, after seeing action during the war at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, he had been diagnosed with “psychoneurosis, anxiety” unrelated to combat, and subsequently “schizophrenic reaction”.
Alan Gershwin was said to have been twice married. He is survived by two daughters and two sons.
Alan Gershwin, born May 18 1926, died February 27 2018