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It was passed all around the room--Toscanini and heaven knows who else had signed it. After it had been passed all around the room, he put it back in his pocket. Ira, his brother, who loved to kid him, thereupon produced a crumpled pack of Camel cigarettes and said, “Anybody want a cigarette?" I can't tell you how funny this was at the time.

Another day we were walking, playing golf--Ira, George, and a popular movie star named Thomas Meighan. Suddenly, in the middle of the round, about the sixth or seventh hole, George suddenly stopped and accusingly said to his brother Ira, “Do you know why ‘The Man I Love‘hasn't sold more copies?" This was apropos of nothing. Ira, quite surprised, said, “No. Why?" George said, “The lyrics stink.” It was Ira that had written the lyrics, and it's one of the Gershwins‘greatest songs, but a hard one to sing! This was the way that George's mind worked. Ira was the most easygoing man alive. He simply said, “All right. The lyrics stink. Come on and play golf.”

Another Gershwin story...He had his failures like everybody else. There was one show that opened that ran only two or three weeks. It was called Pardon My English. It was a complete failure. After it had folded, we went down to Florida for vacation. Four of us were lying stark naked on the second balcony of a cottage where we were staying as non-paying guests. There were no girls around. We started kidding George. He was the easiest man in the world to kid because he took everything so seriously. We