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But he didn't take it as an insult really.

He said, “What are you laughing at?" He was astounded that I wasn't deeply interested in knowing that he hadn't been to the bathroom in four days.

Several things happened on the cruise that we took together. Of course the minute that the word got around the boat that George Gershwin was on board, all of the girls flocked around him. George had no aversion to girls let me say--no aversion whatever. Kay Swift was George's real girl. She wanted to divorce Jimmy Warburg and marry George but she had three children and George couldn't bring himself to marry somebody who had had babies with somebody else. He blamed it on a psychiatrist. He was always being psychoanalyzed because it gave him a chance to talk about himself uninterruptedly. On the boat they wanted him to play, but the piano on the boat was terrible and George refused. He said, “When we get to Nassau I'll play for you.” The boat's first stop was Nassau.

This was when winter cruising was rather new and all of these places that you can now get to by jet in an hour were relatively remote. Nassau was not what it is now. We arrived there about seven in the morning; and trouped over to the New Colonial Hotel, which was then the big hotel there. There are now a hundred of them.

George immediately went to the piano, as he had promised, with about fifty adoring females around him, and