Alan Gershwin. Maybe

"...your daddy's rich, and your mamma's good lookin'..."

And that would be the case if George Gershwin was really your father, and the "interpretive dancer" Molly Charleston was really your mother.

I always thought Clifford Irving pulled off one of the greatest frauds by claiming the billionaire recluse Howard Hughes gave him the rights to write his biography. But now I read that there was a dead-ringer of George Gershwin who for decades claimed he was the illegitimate son of George Gershwin, the American composer.

By now some of us have heard the claim that if you're one-in-a-million, then there are 2,000 people just like you in China. The same if you're in India. Alan Gershwin's claim of direct lineage to George apparently was met with a good deal of skepticism when someone claimed,"there are a lot of Jewish guys in Brooklyn today who look like that."

Apparently, Alan Gershwin made a bit of a livelihood for decades passing himself off, quite convincingly, as George's son when he made paid appearances and talked of his famous "father." He doesn't seem to have ever gotten claim to any of the estate, and the best DNA test of matching a saliva swab from Alan to a tuft of hair from George's deceased sister, Frances Gershwin Godowsky, proved there was no relation.

The full-page obituary in today's NYT by David Margolick is an obituary as well as a piece of investigative reporting. It requires careful, repeated reading to suss out the conclusion that Alan's claim of being the illegitimate son was itself illegitimate, but one he never paid any penalty for in the eyes of the law.

As the lyrics to Summertime from Porgy and Bess end..."there's a' nothin' can harm you, with daddy and mamma standing by" certainly remained true for Alan, whoever his parents were.

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