He quit school and did nothing but play his instrument. Shaw subsequently reasoned that money, success, and fame would fulfill his yearnings and felt he could achieve these as a musician -first as a saxophonist, then as a clarinetist. “I had an enormous need to belong, to have some feeling of roots, to become part of a community, all out of a terrible sense of insecurity coupled with an inordinate desire to prove myself worthy, ” Shaw recounted years later in his autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity.
Already a sensitive child, he withdrew further.
When he was seven years old, his family moved from his birthplace, New York City, to New Haven, Connecticut, where, for the first time, Shaw -n ée Arthur Arshawsky -was reviled for being Jewish. The desire that precipitated this transformation developed in Shaw ’s childhood. ” Gunther Schuller noted in his book The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 that to begin to solve the mystery of Artie Shaw one must answer “how the rather mediocre clarinet player that Shaw was ” early in his career could become within ten years “one of the two or three most outstanding clarinetists in all of jazz -some would say the greatest of them all. At the age of 44, he simply walked away from his greatest accomplishment, confirming what author George Bernard Shaw is credited as having said, “There are two tragedies in life. Yet he disbanded groups soon after he formed them, scorned the money he earned, and divorced eight wives -some within a few months after marriage. One of the most popular and lauded musicians of the late 1930s and 1940s, he formed successful bands almost at will, earned up to an estimated $30,000 a week, and married some of the most desirable women in America. Clarinetist, bandleader, composer, writerĪrtie Shaw had everything at the height of his career.
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