How an Exiled Russian Noble Became a Great American Songwriter

His story spans everything from Belarus to Balanchine to Bacharach

You may have heard Frank Sinatra sing “Autumn in New York”—one of his trademark songs. He praised it as a “perfect song” when introducing this famous rendition from Madison Square Garden in 1974.

Or perhaps you’ve savored Billie Holiday’s classic recording of “I Can’t Get Started.” I listened to that track over and over as a teen. Or you might have heard Tony Bennett singing “Taking a Chance on Love”—a charming song that I’ve been performing since my student days.

Or maybe you’ve danced to Count Basie’s hit arrangement of “April in Paris”—which shows up in surprising places (including the Wild West as depicted in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles).

But you’ve probably never heard of their composer Vladimir Dukelsky—perhaps the most unlikely hero of American songwriting during its Golden Age.

Dukelsky was born to a noble Belarusian family in 1903 and later studied at the Kiev Music Conservatory. He seemed destined for greatness at a young age—composing music for Sergei Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes, and gaining the support of Sergei Prokofiev, who was impressed by the young man’s harmonic depth and gift for melody.

In this environment, Dukelsky could have turned into the next Mussorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov. But a different destiny awaited him.

The Russian Revolution forced his family to flee. So Dukelsky came to New York as a refugee in 1921. Here he changed his name, and reinvented himself as songwriter Vernon Duke.

Encouraged (and later hired) by George Gershwin, Duke gained renown as one of the finest American songwriters of the 1930s and 1940s. But he nurtured other talents—composing classical works, and also writing poetry (in Russian) and his autobiography (in English).

I'm happy to announce that Boris Dralyuk, an esteemed editor and author, has given Vernon Duke fans a great gift. He has undertaken the reissue of Duke’s memoir Passport to Paris—and is also publishing his translations of the composer’s poems.

Boris has given me permission to share his introduction to Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems, a fascinating firsthand account of Duke’s personal transformation from Russian refugee to popular music hit-maker.

I highly recommend this new book—which just got released today. You can learn more about it at this link.

---

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

---

Vernon Duke and His Passport to Paris

By Boris Dralyuk

What can I say about Vernon Duke that he hasn’t said himself, with greater charm than I could ever muster, in the memoir you now hold in your hands? A contemporary of his friend Sergei Prokofiev, his nemesis Igor Stravinsky, and his fellow polyglot Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-American composer, songwriter, and poet was a cosmopolitan raconteur of the old school. I am tempted simply to get out of the way and let him cast his verbal spell, as he did one evening in the late 1950s in the company of music historian Arnold Shaw:

After [Burt] Bacharach and David became hot in pop, show composer Vernon Duke asked me to arrange a meeting with lyricist Hal David. The three of us spent part of an afternoon together, during which Duke, who was a fast, bright, nervous talker, regaled David with anecdotes, analyzed music trends, discussed different lyricists with whom he had worked (an impressive list), and pitched for their collaborating. It was quite a performance and Hal, who is not chit-chat verbal, was overwhelmed by Duke’s display of enthusiasm. Afterward, Duke exclaimed: “I had him mesmerized, didn’t I?”

Duke might as well have handed David a copy of Passport to Paris, the strangely mesmerizing pages of which overflow with his colorful anecdotes, acerbic comments on musical trends, and uniquely vivid accounts of collaboration with the giants of classical and popular music, from Sergei Diaghilev and George Balanchine to the Gershwin brothers. Passport to Paris appeared in 1955, when Duke was 52, and the book to which it begs to be compared is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which first appeared four years earlier, when that émigré author was 52. The contours of Duke’s and Nabokov’s stories are strikingly similar.

Both were precocious children raised in opulence by noble families in the Russian Empire (Nabokov in and near St. Petersburg, Duke largely in Ukraine); both were forced to flee their homeland in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War, along with as many as two million of their countrymen (Nabokov from Crimea, Duke from Odesa); and both established successful dual careers abroad (Nabokov as a bilingual author, Duke as a composer of classical and popular music). They even share a name; Vernon Duke was born Vladimir Dukelsky and continued to sign that name to his “serious” music. Yet the contrast between Duke’s and Nabokov’s approaches to autobiography is equally striking.

Duke’s lightness of tone bordering on carelessness, his conversational looseness, would have made a sophisticated craftsman like Nabokov wince. But one of the great values of Duke’s account lies precisely in this lightness and looseness: his irrepressible buoyancy counterbalances the well-worn image, still haunting our culture, of the morose, melancholy East European émigré, mourning irrecoverable losses. Passport to Paris is not without its wistful notes, but its author keeps his focus on what he’s gained over the years—no small amount of success, no dearth of wisdom, a wide network of luminous friends and colleagues, a handful of hilarious grudges, and winning stories to beat the band.

There is another important difference between Speak, Memory and Passport to Paris. Their authors might have been the same age when their memoirs were published, but they were at different points in their respective careers. Nabokov’s American masterpieces—Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire—still lay ahead of him, while Duke had already made his major contributions to music. Those contributions had come in a variety of genres, much to the chagrin—as Duke grumbles at the very start of this book—of musical critics in both the classical and popular camps. It must be said, however, that his classical compositions, though highly accomplished and enjoyable, would not in themselves have earned him eternal fame. His claim to immortality rests on the irresistible tunes he managed to lodge in the Great American Songbook.

Three of those tunes—“April in Paris” (1932, with lyrics by Yip Harburg), “I Can’t Get Started” (1936, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin), and “Autumn in New York” (1934, with lyrics of his own)—are enshrined in Ted Gioia’s definitive The Jazz Standards (2012), and a third, “Taking a Chance on Love” (with lyrics by John La Touche and Ted Fetter), has been a hit for many artists since Ethel Waters introduced it as part of the all-Black cast of Duke’s musical Cabin in the Sky (1940). The stories behind the music are best told by Duke himself in these very pages, but a number of critics have highlighted the qualities that make his standards stand out. Of “Autumn in New York,” Gioia writes:

[T]his piece, more than any of his other popular efforts, seems to straddle the divide between conservatory ambitions and commercial considerations, especially in its unusual harmonic movement. When the song eventually resolves into F minor, you can look back and contemplate the intricacy and misdirection of a structure that never states that chord at any point in its first 24 bars. The melody, with its alternation of downward-stepping and upward-sweeping phrases, perfectly matches the emotional arc of the words.

And he is just as full of praise for the lyrics: “Duke gets kudos for the daring of his wordplay. How many tunesmiths, seeking a rhyme for ‘inviting,’ would settle on the syntactically challenged ‘thrill of first-nighting’? Or, with New Yorkers in mind, envision ‘dreamers with empty hands’ sighing for ‘exotic lands’?” Indeed, only an émigré—and not just any émigré, but one as witty and as comfortable in his bicultural skin as Duke.

It should come as no surprise that the man behind the lyrics to “Autumn in New York” also dabbled in poetry. The truth is that he did more than dabble. Duke had begun to write verse as a teenager in Ukraine, and he refined his skills in the early days of his exile, in Constantinople, where he formed a “Guild of Poetry” with one of the most original Russophone poets of his generation, the tragically short-lived Boris Poplavsky (1903-1935). Duke paints a colorful portrait of “Russian Constantinople” in his American memoir, but his touching memories of Poplavsky were, appropriately enough, committed to Russian verse. My translation of that elegy follows the text of the memoir, along with eighteen other poems Duke composed in the last happy decade of his life, which he spent in California with his late love, Kay McCracken Duke Ingalls.

A mezzo-soprano from Bozeman, Montana, who had come to Southern California to learn from Lotte Lehmann, Kay was less than half Duke’s age when they met in the mid-1950s. The romance was a whirlwind, and the two tied the knot on October 29, 1957. Their wedding day is the subject of another of the translated poems at the end of this book, and I had the distinct pleasure of sharing my version with Kay over the phone a couple of years ago. Duke had told her that she’d inspired him to return to verse, and she vividly recalls picking up copies of the four collections he had printed by an émigré press in Munich in the 1960s—The Sorrows of Elderly Werther (1962), Epistles (1962), Picture Gallery (1965), and A Trip Somewhere (1968)—but their contents remained inaccessible to her, locked away in another language, for exactly six decades.

The poems these books contain range from Duke’s earliest juvenilia to translations into Russian of everyone from Ezra Pound and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Ogden Nash and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The best of his original poems, however, take in the new views and new experiences of life in the Southland, which also happens to be where I, another émigré from Ukraine, spent my youth and young adulthood. Much of the poetry by Duke’s Russophone émigré peers is shot through with despair, but our man, though never blind to suffering, is dead set on enjoying himself. He infuses his portraits of faded starlets, frugal dowagers, gap-toothed beatniks, gyrating hippies, and short-order cooks with ironic humor and measured sympathy; however sad a state the world appears to be in now, the poet’s tone suggests, he’s seen worse. That tone is set by means of playful diction, jaunty rhythm, and clever rhyme—the specialties of songwriters. Lucky for me, Duke had left a template for what his verse would have sounded like had it been written in English. “Autumn in New York… It spells the thrill of first-nighting…” Lovingly attentive, sparklingly inventive, and enjoying every moment precisely because he knows it has to end.

Duke’s journey ended suddenly on January 16, 1969, when he passed away while undergoing surgery for lung cancer. In his biography Taking a Chance on Love: The Life and Music of Vernon Duke, George Harwood Phillips quotes a letter the Russian-American musicologist and composer Nicolas Slonimsky sent to Kay upon learning of her husband’s death:

Dearest Kay—how can it be? Vernon, Vladimir, Dima—the most vital, the most imperishable, indestructible of my longtime friends, filling the world about him with wonderfully stimulating talk and action, marvelously gifted in so many different fields, full of intellectual and physical energy and inexhaustible vitality, establishing personal relationships in a vivid, lively, affectionate, assertive manner….An enfilade of scenes passes before my mind. Fifty years! Kiev in 1919, Constantinople in 1920 and 1921, Paris, New York, Pacific Palisades. And Boston in between. I recall Vernon’s sayings, his chuckles, his youthful triumphs in music, his amazing culture and eagerness for knowledge. There is no one like him in life, and I have a sense of loss that is a loss of a part of me that was related to Dima.

That enfilade of scenes, that cosmopolitan culture, all captured in a vivid, lively, affectionate, assertive manner, are what await the first-time reader of Passport to Paris. Anyone with even a passing interest in the vanished worlds of Civil War-era Ukraine, of Russian Constantinople, of Montparnasse in the time of the Ballets Russes, and of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley during the golden age of popular song would be hard pressed to find a more engaging tour guide than Vernon Duke. And once your tour is concluded, spread a blanket on the beach in Santa Monica, where

[t]he smoke of time swirls like a curly cloud
above the figure of a tanned old man,
who lies with fingers laced behind his head.
He smiles, recalling his unlikely story.
America, Crimea—does it matter
where I cross over into Purgatory?

---

You can learn more about Vernon Duke’s Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems at this link.

---