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week—and she couldn’t wait for the engagement to begin. And then, one night toward the end of the run, Broadway producer Vinton Freedley came to the Paramount and heard her sing.

Chapter Three
     
    B y the time he heard Ethel at the Brooklyn Paramount, Vinton Freedley had become established as one of Broadway’s most successful musical-comedy producers. Nothing in his background indicated that he might carve out a career in the theater: he was born in 1891 into a prominent Main Line Philadelphia family, and it was expected that he would become a lawyer. He buckled to family pressure up to the point of studying law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, but once he graduated, he immediately started scrambling for acting jobs. In those days of honey-toned matinee idols, his squeaky voice proved a major handicap, and early on, he flubbed an audition with the great stage actress Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske. By Freedley’s own admission, he was never much of an actor, but during the five years that he spent touring the United States, he picked up an enormous amount of knowledge about stage direction, lighting, script doctoring, and all other aspects of production. In 1923 he joined forces with the successful Broadway producer Alex A. Aarons. For Freedley the partnership came with a built-in advantage: Aarons had an association with George Gershwin that stretched back to his production of Gershwin’s 1919 musical La, La, Lucille . In 1924, one year after they formed their partnership, Aarons and Freedley produced Gershwin’s new Lady, Be Good! , the show in which Gershwin truly found his jazz-based voice. It ran for 330 performances, and the Aarons-Freedley team stuck together, producing many more Gershwin works— Tip Toes (1925), Oh, Kay! (1926), and Funny Face (1927)—in addition to other musical hits. Aarons and Freedley were smart producers: most of their shows came in at around $60,000 and earned their investments back in fourteen weeks or less. The partners were so successful that by 1927 it felt natural enough for them to open their own Broadway theater at 250 West Fifty-second Street. They dubbed it the Alvin—a conflation of the first syllables of both their first names.
    The Aarons-Freedley-Gershwin team did much more than make money; it helped establish American musical comedy as a viable and popular genre. Prior to the 1920s, operetta had been the favored musical style on Broadway. Audiences loved the lavishly upholstered productions, the reassuringly old-fashioned plots that dealt with romantic intrigues among European royalty, the thundering choruses of soldiers and peasants. Best of all, there were the lovely, lyrical melodies—easy to listen to and easy to remember but just “legit” enough to satisfy people’s cravings for something on the highbrow side.
    There was something inevitable about George Gershwin’s breakthrough into popular culture. The 1920s gave him the perfect climate in which to launch his new sound, because the United States was caught up in the dizzying process of reinventing itself. The nation had finally stepped out of the long shadow cast by European culture and asserted itself as never before. It was the age of a frantic new consumerism, of the explosion of advertising, an industry that had previously been relatively genteel in its scope and ambitions. Everything was suddenly being pitched to the youth market. (As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, “After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth.”) Prohibition was going strong, and with it came the growth of speakeasies. Literature was dominated by a new breed of writers—among them Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos, whose daring and provocative works made the florid bestsellers of only a few years earlier seem laughably quaint. A new sexual candor was spreading by the day; all anyone had to do was to see how many women had shortened their skirts, rolled their stockings below the knees, and