IRVING BERLIN. Where does one begin to write about this American phenomenon?
In December, 1972, Mr. Irving Berlin presented his upright piano to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. where future generations of Americans will be able to stare at the set of piano keys on which, for nearly six decades, were fashioned hundreds of popular songs.
The Smithsonian may have the Berlin machine tool, but the vast output of the “little man with the melodies in his head” will always belong to anyone who can hum, whistle or sing.
Apart from newspaper stories and other publicity pieces, there is very little in print about him. In 1925 Alexander Woollcott composed an effusive biographical paean about America’s most successful songwriter; and a quarter-century later a somewhat simplified story of his achievements, obviously intended for a juvenile audience, appeared. But since then nothing, not even a filmed biography.
“This is a paradox of Irving’s character,” commends Abel Green of Variety, a longtime friend of the little man with the melodies in his head. “He was normally one of the most inaccessible people in show business. But when he made a picture or did a Broadway show, he, usually reticent, became an open sesame to disc jockeys and the press. Nobody knew the value of publicity better than he. He’d give away hours of marvelous material in order to get coverage for his picture, or his show, and his songs. But as far as an autobiography is concerned—well, today he probably figures, ‘What’s there to plug now?’”
Irving Berlin
A. L. Berman, Berlin’s lawyer for many years, was more explicit. “Irving doesn’t like to talk much for publication, especially about himself,” he cautioned.
But in any book about popular American songwriting, how could Irving Berlin possibly go unrepresented?
Some months later Mr. Berlin consented to talk, albeit from his end of the telephone.
“All right, all right, tell me, what is this thing of yours all about?” demanded the familiar high voice. “If it’s a collection of gags about the music business, don’t bother talking to me—I’m no comedian.”
When the book’s intention was explained to him, he was unimpressed.
“You’re wasting your time,” he scoffed. “Nobody ever wants a song-writer to talk—all people want to hear is his music! Besides, who cares any more? There’s a whole new public out there, and they don’t even know people like me are still around. Don’t you read the papers? We’re antiques, museum pieces. Today it’s all kids!”
But if that was so, how could he explain the growing wave of nostalgia that seemed to be engulfing audiences of all ages? Even the “kids” are turning more and more toward the roots of today’s music, trying to identify the sources, to enjoy the old “museum pieces.”
“Never mind the sales talk,” said Mr. Berlin. “Who’ve you been to see?” And added, with a chuckle, “Most of us songwriters are terrible liars, anyway.”
He was supplied with a list of some of the men and women who had consented to discuss their careers.
What had they discussed?
After some twenty-odd interviews, a rather omnibus question to answer. Perhaps the spine of what had been discussed was that evanescent X factor, that electric connection between a songwriter and his audience that turns his song into a hit.
“Oh, good,” chuckled Berlin. “Go ahead, let me in on the secret. I’d love to have it!”
Hadn’t Mr. Berlin been born with it?
“Stop selling me,” he answered. “You still haven’t told me what anybody said. Tell me one. And give me his formula.”
The name of a major songwriter was raised, one who had said that when he writes, the song must please him first—and then if his own taste is lucky enough to coincide with the public’s, he has a popular song.
Berlin burst into laughter. “He told you that, did he?” he chortled. “All right, I’ll tell you what I think about that. I write a song to please the public—and if the public doesn’t like it in New Haven,1 I change it!”
Might he be quoted?
“Why the hell do you think I just told it to you?” demanded Mr. B. (“You should be very pleased,” remarked Abel Green when this remark was reported to him. “That’s more than anybody’s gotten out of Berlin for years—and, come to think of it, it’s as valid a wrap-up of his secret as he’s ever given anybody.”)
Some months back Mr. Berlin was housecleaning in his office files. Tucked away in a musty drawer, he unearthed the printed menu for a stag dinner which was held in New York almost six decades ago. The exact year remains cloaked in vagueness. But when Mr. Berlin had the menu photocopied and sent to certain of his contemporaries, he placed the time at “a year or so before we organized ASCAP” (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, established in 1914).
The cover sheet of the menu, in ornate steel-gravure typography, heralds:
BEEFSTEAKDINNER
UNITED SONGWRITERS OF AMERICA
(For Tonight Only) (In Name Only) (By Tolerance Only)
E. RAY GOETZ, Chairman
BERT GRANT JAMES V. MONACO
JOS. MCCARTHY EDGAR LESLIE2
KEEN’S CHOP HOUSE
107 West 44th Street
New York
On the second page is the dinner menu. The next page contains an ode, obviously written for this occasion, by Irving Berlin. Still in his twenties, he had already achieved considerable success as a songwriter. What songs were played and sung that night, what was the small talk, all are lost to us. But Mr. Berlin’s words remain.
THE POPULAR SONG3
Born just to live for a short space of time,
Often without any reason or rhyme,
Hated by highbrows who call it a crime:
Loved by the masses who buy it;
Made by the fellows who stay up at night,
Sweating and fretting while getting it right—
Publisher pleading with all of his might
With some performer to try it;
Heard by the critic without any heart—
One of those fellows who pick it apart.
Cares for the finish, but don’t like the start—
Makes many worthless suggestions;
Sold to the public—that is, if they buy—
Sometimes they do, and the royalty’s high—
Most times the statement brings tears to your eye— Take it without any questions:
Popular song, you will never be missed
Once your composer has ceased to exist,
While Chopin, Verdi, Beethoven and Liszt
Live on with each generation.
Still, though you die after having your sway,
To be forgotten the very next day,
A rose lives and dies, in the very same way—
Let that be your consolation.
Pragmatic words from one so young—and yet, oddly wistful. A rude form of true poetry, unsophisticated, easily assimilated, hard to forget. And typical of Berlin.
For this is what Irving Berlin is. An American bard, a minnesinger to the man on the street. Born in 1888, Irving Berlin arrived on the American scene in time for the invention of the talking machine, the radio, the motion picture, and television, and we are the luckier for it.
If Berlin is the one authentic genius of twentieth-century popular song, what is it that makes him so?
It isn’t the sheer volume of his work (although a book compiled in 1966, a songography which lists all of his songs since 1907, as well as their recordings, runs to an amazing 170 pages). It isn’t the rich and dazzling variety of his output—rags, fox-trots, comedy songs, topical numbers dealing with fads of the day, love songs and ballads—for other composers, such as Gershwin and Kern and Rodgers and Hammerstein, have proved equally versatile.
But consider: Berlin is both composer and lyricist. Very few of his American contemporaries managed that incredible feat. Consider, also, that Berlin has been his own publisher and promoter. And, in most cases, the producer of his own shows. With no formal schooling, little or no musical education, and nobody to help him get started but himself.
So we cannot indulge in vague generalities about “genius.” In trying to discover what makes Berlin the composer he has been, one must deal in specifics, and hope that they will provide us with some random insights that, when put together, will show the shape and depth of his intricate character.
“What impresses me most about Irving Berlin is that his inner ear is tremendous,” says Robert Russell Bennett, the dean of American orchestrators. “Irving can’t express himself; he has to go to the piano. Bobby Dolan used to do a little imitation of Irving running his fingers over the piano before he started to play. It was really comical, because Irving couldn’t play a scale, an arpeggio—nothing. He had no piano technique at all. Now inside, he hears it. I remember in particular when we were together and he was doing a song for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the picture Carefree. It’s called ‘Change Partners.’ He came to a spot in this where he played a plain diminished chord, and he turned to me helplessly and said, ‘Is that the right chord?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think it’s the chord you hear, somehow or other.’ He said, ‘No, that’s not it. You play me a chord there.’ I played him one. He said, ‘No, that’s not it.’ I played another. ‘That’s it!’ he said.
“He couldn’t put his fingers on it, but he knew which one it should be. Fantastic.
“But I say the great people come into this world without any clothing at all, just naked geniuses of some kind, and out it comes. They may not be able to express it. They don’t even speak your language. They just sit there, and they bring you something, and that’s all there is to say about it.”
Bennett’s description of the arrival of geniuses sans clothing may, in the case of Berlin, be only a minor exaggeration. For Izzy Baline, who was born on May 11, 1888, was the son of Moses Baline, of Temun, in Siberian Russia, and one of a family of ten. Whatever clothes Israel wore were minimal. The Balines were poor, very poor. The father was a cantor who sang in a small shul—until the czar’s soldiers began their pogroms. The Balines fled to America, the Promised Land, in 1892. For the next four years Cantor Baline struggled to support his family. When Izzy was eight, his father died.
In the battle for day-to-day survival, everyone in that emigrant family had to pitch in, and Izzy was shortly out on the streets selling newspapers. An incident will serve to measure the strength of his determination, even at such a tender age. One afternoon, walking by the East River docks, he was inadvertently struck by a large crane and knocked into the river. When he was fished out by passersby and saved from drowning, still tightly clasped in Izzy’s small fist were the five or six coppers he had earned that day from his newspapers.
When survival is paramount, who has time for school? The life around the small boy was more of an education. He passed by and peered inside the doors of the many Lower East Side saloons; there waiters served drinks and sang the popular songs of the day. Something inside him must have responded intuitively to that music. But when he proposed to his mother that he take a job singing in one of those places, she objected strongly. Holy music in a synagogue? Yes, fine, that had been his late father’s high calling. But vulgar ragtime, cheap music in a low barroom? No, no!
By the time he was fourteen he had run away from home; it was his way of reducing the family overhead. He joined a street singer named Blind Sol, who wandered from bar to bar, singing for coins from the customers. With Izzy as his seeing-eye boy and assistant, Blind Sol made the rounds—and Izzy absorbed more of the music of the day. His voice was high-pitched and quavering; soon it became known around the streets. Then it was merely a matter of time before he found himself a job as a song-plugger for Harry Von Tilzer, a famous composer of the day. In the balcony of Tony Pastor’s Music Hall, in Union Square, young Izzy stood up and bravely sang out Von Tilzer’s latest songs to the crowd.
So Berlin’s piano playing is rudimentary? Certainly. He is self-taught. Whatever he learned, he picked up not at Juilliard but at barroom pianos, where indulgent owners allowed him to explore the keys of their uprights during slack periods.
The next stage of his upward journey took place in Pelham’s Café, on the Bowery, run by “Nigger Mike” Salter. There, in 1906, young Izzy was employed as a singing waiter; at last he was one with all those others he’d heard through the swinging doors. He’d arrived. Nigger Mike’s was not a typical lowdown Bowery joint. It attracted a large drop-in clientele from uptown, a high-class crowd fascinated by the atmosphere and the music and the Bowery “types.”
And where did the first Berlin song come from? The most inventive screenwriter could not have dreamed up a more improbable set of circumstances. Nearby, at another Bowery joint called Callahan’s, there was a piano player named Al Piantadosi. (Later, he was to be co-author of “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France.”) In partnership with “Jerry-the-Waiter,” Al had delivered himself of a ditty called “My Mariucci Taka de Steamboat.” Said song had been played and sung into a popular hit, and Nigger Mike got very annoyed at the publicity accruing to his rival. He instructed his singing waiter, Izzy, to run up a song that would publicize his joint. Collaborating with Nick Nicholson, another house employee, Izzy, who had already regaled the patrons with improvised parodies of current song hits, went to work to construct one of his own.
In his 1925 biography of Berlin, Alexander Woollcott gives the following account of what took place thereupon:
This masterpiece was wrought with great groanings and infinite travail of the spirit. Its rhymes, which filled the young lyricist with the warm glow of authorship, were achieved day by day and committed nervously to stray bits of paper. Much of it had to be doctored by Nick, with considerable experimenting at the piano and a consequent displeasure felt by the patrons at Nigger Mike’s, who would express their feelings by hurling the damp beer cloths at the singer’s head. Truly, it might be said that Berlin’s first song was wrought while he dodged the clouts of his enraged neighbors.
Neither Berlin nor Nicholson knew enough about music to write their masterpiece down; it was finally committed to paper by a man named Fiddler John, cobbler by day, violin player by night. The name of this first masterpiece? “Marie, from Sunny Italy.” Royalties accruing to the writers? Seventy-five cents. And on the title page the publisher printed, “Words by I. Berlin.” At which point our young songwriter decided that Israel was no longer suitable to such an elegant Americanization of his last name. He went the whole distance. He cast off the Izzy and became henceforth Irving Berlin.4
“Marie” made a small stir, but as yet there was no sign of the musical career that was to follow. However, it was at this time that Berlin first displayed his intuitive feel for le beau geste. One evening a party of upper-class “swells” appeared at Nigger Mike’s, among them royalty, one Prince Louis of Battenberg. Manhattan café society was showing the Prince the town. So impressed was the titled gentleman’s party by Irving’s singing that, upon leaving the Bowery café, the Prince proffered a five-dollar bill as a tip.
Five dollars, in 1907, was a solid piece of security. That fin backed by Uncle Sam’s good gold could support one thin waiter for a week. Nevertheless, young Berlin airily waved aside the Prince’s pourboire. It had been his pleasure to sing for nobility; let that be its own reward.
A young newspaperman was witness to this incident; he hurried uptown to his office desk and wrote down the story. When it appeared in the paper, I. Berlin’s name was properly spelled. The report was named Herbert Bayard Swope. In time, both he and Berlin would be famous, Berlin making headlines, Swope reporting them as one of New York’s most important editors.
In 1908 three more songs from Berlin, one of his own, two with collaborators. Still not much of a stir. A year later, now graduated to a place called Jimmy Kelly’s, he came up with the first manifestation of his ability to cash in on current events. A passing vaudevillian asked Berlin if he could write some “special material” for his act, something to do with affairs of the day. Berlin picked on Dorando, an Italian long-distance runner who had come to America to race, and who was defeated by Johnny Longboat in the 1908 Olympic marathon. He set to work and composed a set of verses in Italian dialect, in which an Italian day laborer explains what took place at that great event.
“I remember it from when I was a kid; it was a great song,” said Irving Caesar. “You see, in those days you could deal in stereotypes, like this Italian day laborer who’d bet his hard-earned money on his countryman. You could have a little fun, and nobody’s feelings got hurt.” To illustrate his point, Mr. Caesar then sang “Dorando” from memory, some sixty-three years ex post facto.
Dorando! Dorando!
He run-a run-a run-a, run like anything.
One-a two-a hundred times around da ring.
“Please-a,” I cry, “Nun-ga stop!”
Just then Dorando, he’s-a drop!
Good-bye poor old barber shop.
It’s no fun to lose the mon’.
When da sun-of-a-gun no run,
Dorando, he’s good-a for not’!
The vaudevillian who had commissioned the song from Berlin for $25 never reappeared to claim it, nor to pay the fee. Unwilling to discard his work, Berlin made his way uptown to a song-publishing house in what was beginning to be known as Tin Pan Alley.
In the offices of Watterson and Snyder he demonstrated his lyric. Watterson was sufficiently impressed to purchase it on the spot. As an afterthought, he inquired of the young man who had just run through it, a cappella, “You have a tune for it, don’t you?”
Even though he did not, Berlin maintained that he had. And having sold the song, he hastily repaired to another office in the same firm, where, with the help of an amiable piano player, he improvised a tune and managed to get it written down on a lead sheet so that it could be played, published, and subsequently sung … and remembered by young Irving Caesar.
The topical scene, the passing parade, was to serve the young song-writer as an unending source of material through the years; in fact, in the year following “Dorando” he came up with a song which drew on the current public craze for the classic “Spring Song” of Mendelssohn. “That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune” was to be the first of a long series of popular hits that would draw attention to fads and fancies of the day.
But the first big authentic Berlin hit was a song with a somewhat more universal theme. It bore a title which couldn’t possibly miss with at least fifty percent of the public. Consider this from 1909, dear Ms’s of Women’s Lib: “My Wife’s Gone to the Country (Hooray, Hooray!).” Berlin’s co-author on lyrics was George Whiting. According to legend, the writing of this song led to the breakup of Whiting’s own marriage.5
By now Berlin was established, and firmly under contract to Watterson and Snyder. Throughout 1909 and 1910 he collaborated on songs with Ted Snyder, but also turned out works that were completely his own. In the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, one of the major showcases on Broadway, he provided Fannie Brice with the first of his major theatre numbers, “The Dance of the Grizzly Bear.” For May Irwin, another leading performer, he wrote “That Opera Rag,” and by the end of the year he was already treading the boards as a full-fledged performer. In a show produced by the Shuberts, entitled Up and Down Broadway, out came Messrs. Berlin and Snyder, fashionably attired in collegiate sweaters and brandishing tennis racquets. What those costumes had to do with their songs, “Sweet Italian Love” and “That Beautiful Rag,” only the Shuberts knew.
Young Berlin was now a bit more familiar with the piano, although, in the words of Mr. Woollcott back in 1925:
Like most men who play only by ear, Berlin is a slave of one key. Since he always plays helplessly in F Sharp, he has had to have a piano especially constructed with a sliding keyboard, so that when he wants to adventure in another key, he can manage it by moving a level and rattling away on the more familiar keys.
Berlin has continued to use that piano through the years. He refers to it as “my Buick.”
Somewhat rapturously warming to his subject, Woollcott continued:
To the man who has written more than any one man’s share of the songs this land has liked, the hieroglyphics of written music are still a trifle baffling. That incongruity is more striking to those of us who spent all our youth in the rough and ready company of text-books. It might not be amiss for the likes of us to remember from time to time that a not unsuccessful poet named Homer was, in all probability, unable to read and unable to write.
It was with exactly that sort of ingenuity and inventiveness that young Berlin was fueling his forward thrust through the fiercely competitive Tin Pan Alley scene. Everything that his sharp eyes saw or his ears heard, in the cafés, on Manhattan streets, in theatre lobbies, or in the newspapers, was to be raw material for his output. It was to be a lifelong work pattern.
In those early years he was finding his way. In time to come he would develop a fine sense of the right subject at the right time, be it war, love, peace, patriotism, or a Presidential candidate. But in 1911 he was still unselective. In the space of one year he turned out some forty-odd songs, alone or in collaboration. He went off on all sorts of gambits. For the shopgirl it was “How Do You Do It, Mabel, on Twenty Dollars a Week?” For assorted ethnic groups there were “Business Is Business, Rosey Cohen,” “That Kazatsky Dance,” as well as “When You Kiss an Italian Girl.” For the Irish, “Molly, O!, Oh Molly,” and then “Sombrero Land.” Not to forget “Dat’s-a My Gal,” as well as “Yankee Love” and “Italian Love.” Gone, most of them, and happily forgotten.
But in that same year, in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1911 he had placed four songs. With Vincent Bryan he wrote “Woodman, Woodman, Spare That Tree,” which was sung by the great Bert Williams, the reigning black comic star. Another of Berlin’s solo ventures, “Everybody’s Doing It (Doing What? Turkey Trot),” was a popular success. And out in vaudeville an equally youthful Eddie Cantor, also an upwardly mobile youngster from the Lower East Side, was touring theatres and singing Berlin’s “That Ragtime Violin.”
Getting a new song placed with a performer for “plugging” was the important aspect of the business. In years to come, there would be talking pictures, radio, phonographs, television, and in a matter of hours a song could be heard everywhere. But in this live-entertainment era the “plug”6 was primarily the performer, be he a singing waiter or someone in the legitimate theatre or vaudeville. The newly developed phonograph record helped disseminate songs, but sheet music was still the true indication of a song’s popularity. When people bought it, that meant they had heard some performer do a song and wanted it for their own pianos.
Stars were plugging Berlin’s output, people were humming and whistling his songs, and sheet music with his name on it was selling nicely, but in that year of 1911 his real triumph was to be a song which he introduced himself at a Friars Club Frolic.
The Friars, a theatrical club, enjoyed it, but nobody in the audience that night can be reported to have gone wild about the new song. When Berlin next offered it to the management of a new Broadway production called Folies Bergère, he was turned down. The myopic management subsequently folded the show. Perseverance being a Berlin trademark, he allowed the song to be used by the performers at the far less prestigious Columbia Burlesque. It was also “placed” with vaudevillians, among them young Al Jolson, who was touring with Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels. Out in Chicago, Emma Carus, a variety star, made it part of her act.
Considering the relaxed tempo of the day, and the size of the audiences which heard “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—for that is the song Miss Carus was plugging—its eventual success was amazingly immediate. And the word “hit” cannot begin to describe its impact. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” has to be considered the keystone work of a whole new trend in American music. Those infectious lyrics which announced the arrival of jazz were not only spread across our entire continent, but were rapidly exported across the Atlantic, to let all of Europe in on what was happening.
Berlin’s output over the twelve months of 1912 was as prodigious as that of the prior year, but a certain amount of variation had begun to creep into his subject matter. His favorite theme—American ragtime—was duly celebrated with “Ragtime Soldier Man,” “Ragtime Jockey Man,” “That Mysterious Rag,” and “Ragtime Mocking Bird,” to name but a few. Current events, however, were moving into the fore. There was “Keep Away from the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile” and “I Was Aviating Around.” The vast area that lies below the Mason-and-Dixon line, which all native New York songwriters used to call “de Souf,” was saluted with “When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam—All Aboard, All Aboard!” Berlin tried his hand successfully with comedy, in “In My Harem,” and with that marvelously wry lover’s complaint, “All Night Long She Calls Me Snooky Ookums.”
There was yet another song, one which has since become a permanent part of the repertoire of Yale’s Whiffenpoofs. It is a peculiar work, amiably chauvinistic in its simple-minded way, called “Those Pullman Porters on Parade.” (The song was written in collaboration with Maurice Abrahams, who also wrote “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” and was to be the husband of the great vaudeville star Belle Baker. Contractual clauses kept Berlin’s output exclusively at Watterson and Snyder, so you will not find Berlin’s name on this song issued by another publisher, but you will find the credit “Ren G. May.” With this clever anagram he left his mark. “Ren G. May” is an anagram for Germany.)
In 1913 the very successful composer fell in love with a beautiful young girl named Dorothy Goetz, the sister of E. Ray Goetz, the songwriter. The couple were married and went off to Cuba on their honeymoon. Upon their return to New York, the bride suddenly became ill and, within a very short time, died. Shocked into despair, Berlin was able to express himself in only one fashion; he wrote a haunting and heart-felt ballad, “When I Lost You.”
For the first time Berlin was drawing on his own emotions, rather than commenting on fads. It would not be the last time; when the public responded to the simple lines of “When I Lost You,” it was teaching Berlin a valuable lesson. Simplicity + honesty + truth = hit. He was to employ that formula for the next half-century.
A year or so later Berlin went to London to embark upon a triumphant vaudeville tour, singing his own songs to the English audiences. The legend goes that the young American songwriter was so stimulated by the sights and sounds of London that he sat up until four A.M. in his hotel room on that first night of his stay, and dashed off a song called “That International Rag.” He sang it the next night at his opening performance. The event was properly celebrated by the press—Berlin had already developed his knack for gaining publicity—and the song went on to become, as its author had predicted in his lyric, an international smash.7
In December 1914, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, Berlin did his first complete score for a Broadway show. For this solo venture, which starred Vernon and Irene Castle and was called Watch Your Step, the composer wrote no less than twenty numbers. One of those 1914 efforts has shown remarkable staying power; it is an intricate duet in which the lead melody, a very clear line, is sung to a patter-lyric counterpoint. Singers like Bing Crosby obviously enjoy singing it as much as their audiences enjoy listening to it; it’s called “Play a Simple Melody.”8
Another song in Watch Your Step was called “We’ll Settle Down in a One-Horse Town.” It may serve to illustrate how much slower in 1914 was the process of exploiting popular songs, as compared to our high-speed electronic era. In conversation last year Ira Gershwin fell to discussing the simpler era in which he had grown up. “We lived in a brownstone down on the Lower East Side, above a doctor,” he recalled. “And I noticed a man walking down the street—I was looking out the window on Second Avenue—and he was whistling ‘Then We’ll Settle Down, Dear, in a One-Horse Town, Dear.’ I said, ‘He’s from uptown!’ Because I had seen that show—it was Irving Berlin’s first complete show. I went with George, and we sat in the second balcony at the New Amsterdam. And it took a year— this was 1915—before that song came downtown. He was whistling it— that meant there was somebody else on the East Side who knew that song. Oh, it was a different world, entirely. In those days, if a song did become popular—one like, say, ‘How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?’—it was good for three or four years.”
The years prior to the U.S. entry into World War I were extremely busy ones for Berlin. Not only did he continue to turn out popular songs and dance numbers by the armful, but he now had made the legitimate theatre his stamping (or should it be stomping?) ground. In 1915 another Charles B. Dillingham show, Stop! Look! Listen!, starred Gaby Deslys, and had its audiences humming “I Love a Piano” and “The Girl on the Magazine Cover.” The following year Berlin and the other reigning composer of the day, Victor Herbert, jointly contributed the score to a revue called The Century Girl, which starred Elsie Janis and Van and Schenck. In 1917 there were two shows—one with George M. Cohan called The Cohan Revue of 1918, and another called Dance and Grow Thin.
But by 1918 we were fully engaged in the war that would end all wars. And of all the men drafted to serve in Uncle Sam’s fighting forces, who could have been less likely doughboy material than a thirty-year-old song-writer whose prior skirmishes had been fought not with hostile enemies but with critics and audiences, far from No-Man’s-Land, in theatres and cafés?
What Berlin’s draft board did not know, when it pulled his number from the glass bowl and sent him off for induction, was that the Army wasn’t gaining another fighting man; it was enlisting what was to be the most powerful one-man entertainment force ever to don khaki.
Arriving at Camp Upton, then known as Yaphank, the new draftee proceeded to defy Army protocol—which from time immemorial has suggested that a doughboy should keep his bowels open and his mouth shut. Listen to old friend Harry Ruby, who was also on the scene:
“I can tell you how Yip, Yip, Yaphank started. It’s amazing. I tell these stories and people think I’m making it up. I don’t have to make ’em up— they’re too good the way they happened!
“Berlin gets into the Army at Upton, and now he’s getting up with all the other soldiers, five A.M.! Irving had never before gone to bed before two or three in the morning. He would work until two, three, and then sleep, and get up around ten. All of a sudden, he’s getting up with the birds at five, and he’s going out of his mind!
“This is not for him, believe me. So he has to get an angle. Some sort of an angle so he won’t have to get up. He goes to see General Bell. Now, you have to know that this is 1918 and Berlin is already a famous man. He asks to see the General, and he gets in, and the General says, ‘Yes, Berlin, what is it?’ And Berlin says, ‘I have an idea and I wonder what you think of it.’ ‘Go ahead,’ says the General. ‘General,’ says Berlin, ‘do you know how many people are in this Army who are from show business? The camp is full of them. Fine actors, vaudeville headliners like Dan Healey, acrobats, singers—you never saw anything like it. Why don’t we do a show with all these people? We could even play it on Broadway in one of the theatres— boost morale, help recruiting, everything!’
“Well, the General thinks that’s a fine idea, and he’s all for it, and he wants to know how they’ll do it, and Berlin says he’ll write it. ‘But here’s the thing, General,’ he says. ‘I write at night. Sometimes I work all night when I get an idea. And I couldn’t do that if I had to get up in the morning at five, you understand.’ ‘Why, you don’t have to get up at five,’ says the General. ‘You just forget about all that. You write this show.’
“Berlin sends for me. I was working for his firm, Watterson, Berlin and Snyder—by that time he was a full partner. They called me in and said, ‘Irving Berlin wants you to be his pianist. He wants you to go out to Upton and live there and work for him.’ It was a big thrill for me, I can tell you.
“You see, he always had a piano player to take down his melodies—at one time he had four of them working for him, just to take down his songs. He’d come up to me in the morning while I was out there at Yaphank with him, and he’d say, ‘Harry, got a pencil and some music paper?’ and I’d say sure, and he’d say, ‘Take this down,’ and sing me a melody—some song that’s become a classic now. I’d take it all down for him, and I’d ask him, ‘When the hell did you write that?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, I was up all night. Do you like it?’ And I’d say it was great, and I’d play it back for him to hear what he’d dictated—and he’d listen, and he’d say, ‘You got one chord wrong in there.’ And he’d be right—he couldn’t play the chord, but he could hear it all right!9
“I tell you, it’s hard for me to put down on paper this man’s talent in words. Writing about him is almost impossible. I wrote Berlin once and I said, ‘The only word I can find to express your talent is uncanny.’ And I still think so. No education, no schooling. No music. Sure, his fingers know how to play the piano, and he’s self-taught—but he learned on the black keys!
“Here’s my big regret, schmuck that I was—why didn’t I hang on to those lead sheets I was taking down for him? Today I wouldn’t part with them for half a million bucks. ‘Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,’ ‘Poor Little Me, I’m on KP,’ ‘You Can Always Find a Little Sunshine in the YMCA.’ He even wrote ‘Mandy’ out there, and put it in the show for a minstrel number. I took ’em all down, wrote harmonies for his chords, gave them to the arranger who was doing the orchestral parts, and then I forgot about ’em—can you believe it? Even Irving’s ‘God Bless America.’ I did the original lead sheet. Of course, that wasn’t in the show. He took it out, and for twenty years it stayed in his trunk.
“As a matter of fact, I’m partly responsible for ‘God Bless America’ being taken out of Yip, Yip, Yaphank,” admitted Ruby, smiling mischievously. “See, there were so many patriotic songs coming out everywhere at that time. It was 1918, and every songwriter was pouring them out. He’d already written several patriotic numbers for the show, and then, when he brought in ‘God Bless America,’ I took it down for him, and I said, ‘Geez, another one?’ And I guess Irving took me seriously. He put it away.10
“Twenty years go by. I’m in Hollywood now, writing movie scores with my partner Bert Kalmar, and it’s 1938. Out of the blue, I get this wire from Berlin—all it said was: BE SURE TO LISTEN TO KATE SMITH TONIGHT ON THE RADIO. I said to my wife Eileen, ‘What’s this all about?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know, but you know Irving. There must be a reason.’ So that night we tune in Kate’s program, and on the air she introduces a song by Irving Berlin—‘God Bless America’! And the audience in the studio goes crazy. And Eileen says, ‘That’s the same song you transcribed for him—no wonder he wanted you to listen!’
“You see, he’d figured, by 1938, with all the trouble in Europe and those dictatorships—Hitler and Mussolini—that the mood of the country was changing, and that we could use a little patriotism. He was so right. As I said before, his sense of what the people will want is uncanny.
“Oh, sure, Irving can be tough. A very tough businessman. But underneath, he’s a warm human being. He wrote me a couple of months ago and said, ‘Of all the songs I’ve written, “God Bless America” is the closest one to my heart.’ You know he’s turned over all the royalties to the Girl Scouts of America—and I think he said that to date they’ve received over $350,000 from that song.
“And do you know what he did just the other day? He bound up in leather all the sheet music from Yip, Yip, Yaphank and sent it out here to me … so I’d finally have all those numbers I transcribed for him in 1918 at Camp Upton.”
The war ended, and Berlin hurried back to civilian life, the music business, and Broadway.
His first venture was the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 and the cast included Eddie Cantor, Bert Williams, Van and Schenck, and that delightful young dancing star Marilyn Miller. “Mandy” was demobilized from the Army and restaged as a splashy minstrel-show number in which Miss Miller re-created that great star George Primrose. Eddie Cantor scored with Berlin’s “You’d Be Surprised,” and Bert Williams had a number which Berlin wrote with Rennold Wolf, a wry comment on the oncoming Prohibition era which prophetically warned “You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea.”
Ziegfeld, who specialized in filling his stage with parades of beautiful girls, asked Berlin to furnish this production with some sort of musical number to accompany the sedate parade of “long-stemmed American beauties.” Berlin obliged by quickly writing another song. Half a century later that simple statement of his is still standard entrance music for displays of femininity in our society. Can one imagine a fashion show, or a beauty parade, being held without “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” being played in the background?
Then came the building of the Music Box Theatre.
Fifty years later, in 1971, Berlin recalled how that theatre had come to be, in an interview with Mel Gussow of the New York Times.
He said that in 1919 Sam Harris, the producer (and an old friend from the Lower East Side), said to him, “I may build a theatre.” Berlin responded, “If you ever do, I have a great name for it—The Music Box.”
A year later Harris said to him, “I bought a hundred feet of the Astor property on 45th Street. You’re my partner.”
Berlin went to the motion-picture producer Joseph M. Schenck—they had been friends since the days when Schenck had been a clerk in a drugstore while Berlin was a singing waiter on the Bowery—and said, “Joe, I’m in trouble.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“Not a girl, a theatre.”
Said Schenck, “Why do you want me?”
Said Berlin, “You’re my partner.”
Schenck put up half of Berlin’s half, and the theatre was built as an elegant, intimate musical house. “It stinks from class,” Berlin remembers Sam Bernard, the comedian, as having commented. On September 22, 1921, the Music Box opened with the first edition of Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue, starring William Collier, Florence Moore, and Irving Berlin.
After the opening, reported Berlin, “Sam [Harris] and I were in a room at the Hotel Astor. Very frightened men. We spent more money than we should have on the theatre [$930,000, in 1920 dollars]. But the notices were ecstatic. The show-stopper was ‘Say It with Music,’ which became the theme song of the show and of the theatre.”
The Music Box proved to be a lucrative investment except during the Depression, but he and Harris stubbornly held on, and soon Of Thee I Sing bailed them out.
The second edition of The Music Box Revue offered another lovely Berlin ballad, “Lady of the Evening,” and a double-time rousing finale, “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil.” These were opulent, lavish shows, where audiences which paid $5.50 per ticket were treated to talented casts in spectacular production numbers. When, in the third Music Box Revue, young Grace Moore sang “An Orange Grove in California,” the audience was sprayed with orange scent. It was in that same edition that a Harvard graduate turned drama critic and humorist, Robert C. Benchley, made his stage debut. His “act” was a monologue of his own creation called “The Treasurer’s Report,” a deathless parody on those fumbling speeches delivered at annual meetings by ineffectual clubman types.
“Bob had done it first at a little show that was put on by members of the Algonquin Round Table, most of whom were friends of ours,” recalled Donald Ogden Stewart, Benchley’s close friend and fellow humorist. “There had been a recent production on Broadway called Chauve Souris, so we called ours No Siree! That should give you a general idea of the level of the humor.
“Irving Berlin and Sam Harris came to see the show, and they insisted that Benchley do it professionally. They offered him such a large salary that he finally agreed, and from then on, Benchley had himself another career, as an actor. That was in September 1923. In November I had a birthday party up at Neysa McMein’s studio, which she and Dorothy Parker gave me, and Irving Berlin showed up. He brought a bottle or two of champagne along, under his coat, to celebrate. (This was during Prohibition, remember.)
“While we all sat around, celebrating and drinking the champagne, Irving went to the piano and kept on playing the first part of a song he had written. It was called ‘What’ll I Do?’ But he hadn’t been able to finish it. He played the part he had over and over, and we all liked it—but the best part of the evening was that after Irving had had enough of his champagne, he was finally able to finish the song that night. So you might say everybody got a present out of that birthday!”
“What’ll I Do?” went into the Music Box Revue promptly thereafter, and became another Berlin standard. It should also be noted that it was the first of a series of love songs that Berlin wrote for a young lady with whom he had recently fallen in love. She was Ellin Mackay, the beautiful and talented daughter of Clarence Mackay, a wealthy businessman.
The story of their romance could easily have been derived from a current operetta. Mackay bitterly opposed any union between his socialite daughter and a man whom he had to consider a parvenu of the most obvious sort—an upstart Russian immigrant’s son who had written and sung his way out of the East Side slums and the Bowery cafés to a certain notoriety as a songwriter, whose clubs weren’t Union League and Piping Rock, but Lindy’s Restaurant and the Friars, and whose wealth was nouveau to the last dollar.11
In the fourth Music Box Revue another of Berlin’s love songs to Ellin Mackay was interpolated after the show’s official opening—the ballad “All Alone.” The courtship of Miss Mackay, despite all the obstacles which her father was able to place in its path, persevered. Berlin wrote a third love song to his lady, this time calling it “Remember.” Never has the anguish of love been so publicly celebrated. All of America (as well as large sections of Great Britain) was serenading Miss Mackay by proxy, along with Berlin.
When Miss Mackay defied parental disapproval and married Berlin, he made her a wedding present of—what else could a songwriter bestow upon his beloved?—a new love song: “Always.” A magnanimous gesture not only toward the new Mrs. Berlin but also toward the American populace, which happily played it on the piano, sang it, and cranked it up on the parlor phonograph.12
It may have been the euphoria of happily wedded bliss that underscored the writing of Berlin’s subsequent hit, “Blue Skies,” but its public introduction in December 1926 perhaps has less to do with inspiration than with a certain amount of desperation.
Belle Baker, the vaudeville star, had been signed by Florenz Ziegfeld to star in a Broadway musical called Betsy. “How my mother came to do that number is a saga in itself,” recalled Herbert Baker, a film and TV comedy writer, lately responsible for the Flip Wilson Show.
“Betsy had a score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who were even then very clever and accomplished men with a raft of hits to their credit, but when they did this score, they’d concentrated on songs that would fit into the book—what there was of it. But as my mother said—and she said it a lot, believe me—there wasn’t a ‘Belle Baker song’ in the score. By that, she meant something which she could really belt out to her audience. Remember, in those days microphones didn’t exist. A performer sang— and my mother wanted something she could sing.
“Betsy tried out in Boston, and it did fairly well, but it wasn’t anywhere near a hit. The night before Belle opened on Broadway, she was brooding because she felt she was missing that one big song, so she picked up the phone and she called Irving Berlin.
“She’d introduced a lot of Berlin songs before. You have to understand that my mother, who’d broken into show business when she was only nine, had become one of the most important ‘plugs’ that a songwriter could have. Berlin had given her such fantastic successes as ‘Russian Lullaby’ and ‘Remember’ and ‘Always’ and even comedy material—‘Cohen Owes Me Ninety-seven Dollars.’ So you can readily understand how much faith she placed in the man.
“She said, ‘Irving, I’m opening in this show tomorrow night, and there isn’t a Belle Bake song in the score, and I’m so miserable—what can I do?’
“Berlin said, ‘Belle, I’ll be very honest with you. All I have is a song in my trunk. I’ve often thought it would be great for you, but I never got around to finishing it.’
“She said, ‘Irving, please come over here. Maury13 is here. We’ll feed you, and he’ll help—because even something half finished by you is better than what I’ve got now, which is nothing!’
“Berlin agreed to come over, and my mother sent me off to bed.
“Now, try to imagine what it’s like to be six years old, and trying to get to sleep, and constantly being awakened by the sound of four hands on the piano in the living room. My father was playing along with Berlin—playing, over and over again, the first eight bars of ‘Blue Skies.’ That’s all Berlin had. Da, da—da-da-da-da! Da da da di da—da da da! Over and over it went, that same refrain, pounded out on the piano from our living room. He couldn’t get the middle eight. The first time I went out to complain I couldn’t sleep, I remember my mother saying, ‘Sweetheart, darling, I know it’s annoying, but try to get to sleep.’
“The second time I went out, my father turned around from the piano—he was ordinarily a very gentle man—and he said, ‘Get out of here or I’ll kill you.’
“I remember Berlin turning around from the piano and looking at me, and then saying, ‘Say, Herbie’s getting fat, isn’t he?’ and my mother saying, ‘Never mind him, Irving, get back to the song!’
“Finally, I did doze off, and I must have slept until about six in the morning, and then I was awakened by shouting from the living room, and this I remember distinctly—I heard the two men playing the middle eight-bar bridge of ‘Blue Skies.’”
Berlin had finally gotten the strain he wanted, and he’d also written the lyric to go with it. It had taken all night, but he had the middle eight bars he needed.14
“It’s now about seven in the morning, and the show is due to open that night. My mother gets on the phone and calls Florenz Ziegfeld. She wakes him up and she tells him that Irving Berlin has been up all night working on a song for her, and it’s finished, and it’s great, and she wants to sing it tonight, and if she can’t sing it tonight, she doesn’t want to open in the show.
“You have to realize that there was a big problem here. Two. Rodgers and Hart. They had a contract with Ziegfeld that stipulated specifically that there would be no interpolations of songs by other composers in this show. So Ziegfeld said, ‘Belle, you can do it—but, for God’s sake, don’t tell Rodgers or Hart.’
“I went to the opening that night. I was up in the balcony. At about eleven my mother came out and she sang ‘Blue Skies’ for the first time. The audience went crazy. They really had been starved all night for her to do one like that. Would you believe that the audience made her sing that song over and over again, twenty-four times? And that on the twenty-third reprise she forgot the lyrics? Berlin stood up—he was sitting down in the front row—and he threw her the words—and they finished the next chorus singing together!
“Betsy got fair notices, and it ran for a while. But ‘Blue Skies’ became a terrific hit … and Rodgers and Hart didn’t speak to my mother for the next twelve years.”
Al Jolson sang “Blue Skies” in The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture with music that the Warner Brothers made with their new Vitaphone process, in 1927. In succeeding years the musical film was to become Berlin’s widest-ranging and most successful plug, but for the first few years of sound’s infant existence he sat back and allowed others to experiment with the noisy brat.
True, in 1928 he dabbled with “theme songs”—to a Vilma Banky epic called The Awakening he contributed “Marie.” Later it was to be adopted by Tommy Dorsey as his song—at a somewhat more rapid beat than Miss Banky’s. When America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, tried her first “talkie,” Coquette, it was with a Berlin tune of the same name for Mary’s personal security blanket. In contrast, when Lupe Velez starred in Lady of the Pavements, her theme song had nothing to do with sidewalks; instead Berlin had Miss Velez ask (somewhat rhetorically), “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”
The following year Berlin provided Harry (Yeth-thir!) Richman with one of that singer’s biggest hits, the title song to an all-talking, all-singing, all-lisping film, Puttin’ on the Ritz. And in 1930 he wrote a score for his old friend Al Jolson’s follow-up film to The Jazz Singer, a little number called (what else?) “Mammy.” The film was not to be noted for advancing either Berlin’s or Jolson’s career, but it did contain Jolie’s most autobiographical lyric, “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy.”
This was far from Berlin’s most fruitful period.15 “Irving had a very happy marriage, but he wasn’t producing much musically,” comments Abel Green. “There were the usual Broadway wise-guys around who said he’d gone society, but that wasn’t true at all. He was still going to Lindy’s every day and seeing the boys there, but nothing much was coming out. Maybe it was just a dry spell. It can happen to anybody, even to as talented a man as Irving.”
Whatever the cause of his temporary slow-down, there is no problem in pinpointing the time when Berlin’s creative oil well began to gush again. It was 1932, the very depth of the Depression. A dire period for the populace, but for Berlin a vintage year. In that one year, not only did he write “Say It Isn’t So” and “How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky)?”—two of his most effective torch songs—but he also did the score for a sharp-edged, satiric Broadway musical, Face the Music, in which were the lilting “Soft Lights and Sweet Music” as well as a gay chin-up song which attempted to cheer a depressed world, “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee.”
Face the Music proved to be simply a warm-up session for what was to come in 1933—the brilliant revue As Thousands Cheer, at the Music Box, which amply demonstrated that the old master was back at the top of his form.
“I’ll never forget when I was a kid, just out of Princeton, and acting in She Loves Me Not,” said Joshua Logan. “It was in the summertime, when they opened the theatre doors to cool the house off—no air-conditioning in those days. And I could look onto the stage of the Music Box next door to us and watch As Thousands Cheer. He had a great opening chorus—it was a topical show, based on all the headlines of the day.
“Now, having given the audience ‘Heat Wave’ and ‘Supper Time’ and a batch of other marvelous songs, he came up with a finale. Not ‘Easter Parade,’ which ended the first act—and which anyone else would have cheerfully reprised and let it go at that—but he had the chorus come out at the end of the show with lyrics to the effect that ‘We can’t bring the curtain down until we’ve sung you the hit song.’ And that’s where he introduced ‘Not for All the Rice in China’—in the very closing minutes of the show. What a way to bring down a curtain!”
With that triumph behind him, Berlin was prepared to do labors for the musical films—on his own terms. The Hollywood studios plied him with offers. Once again he was “hot.” What would Berlin deign to do? He chose the hard way, as usual. He crafted an entirely original score for the brightest pair of dancing stars who ever hoofed across the screen, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
In his first film, Top Hat, he provided them with the title song, with “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?,” “No Strings,” and “The Piccolino.” The following year he replenished RKO’s coffers with another shower of box-office takings when he did the score for the next Astaire-and-Rogers film, Follow the Fleet, again with a ship’s roster of Hit Parade numbers.
“Nobody can sell you better than a great agent,” says Abel Green. “That’s why the biggest talents need agents. But Irving is the greatest agent in the world. He can sell himself like Fort Knox. It’s amazing how he sold himself, especially to all those so-called Hollywood moguls. Toughies like Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer—he had the Indian sign on all of them. His attitude was, ‘So you want to use my songs? You’re lucky to have them! You could have been stuck with some junk; instead, you’re getting the best!’”
In the light of the ’30s and ’40s in Hollywood, such an attitude cannot be considered arrogance. Berlin was merely countering their stupidities with his own self-confidence. Producers had never been known for their humility, and when it came to the question of supplying music to their new toy, the film musical, more often than not they exhibited abysmal ignorance. “Everyone in this town,” complained Alfred Newman, one of Hollywood’s leading musical directors, “has two businesses—his own, and music.”
Someone, then, had to stand firm on questions of talent and taste. Too many of his fellows were being pushed around by know-nothings. Not Berlin. He had long since earned the right to put the Beverly Hills nabobs in their places, and he did so. The late Robert Emmett Dolan, a long-time friend who was later to produce Berlin’s musical White Christmas for Paramount, liked to tell of the time when a producer for a rival studio stopped Berlin at lunch to inquire what Berlin would charge to let one, only one, of his songs be included in the man’s current film. Berlin shrugged him off. “You couldn’t afford it,” he said.
Underlying everything he did was a basic desire to go first-cabin in all departments. “Irving has always had a special respect for quality,” says Abel Green affectionately. “He’s seen through the fakery and the dross, and goes directly for the best.”
So for the next few years out West he called the tunes—and they were his own. Not only did he score high marks for On the Avenue at Fox, and for Carefree, his third Astaire-and-Rogers musical, but then he came up with his canniest formula. For Darryl Zanuck he created a mammoth project, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, in which the screen echoed to the strains of nearly thirty Berlin “oldies,” as well as three new songs. Thus he became the first composer to demonstrate that incredible nostalgic value of popular music of the past. One of his own titles says it—“An Old Fashioned Song Always Is New.” In later years, golden hits from the Berlin catalog were to grace the sound tracks of Holiday Inn, Blue Skies, White Christmas, and There’s No Business Like Show Business. If there was ever such an item as “insurance”—a guarantee of a film’s eventual success at the box office— then for years fortunate producers could buy it with a package of Berlin “standards.”
But Hollywood was never home to Berlin. It was always a nice place to visit, or in which to work and then hum all the way to the bank … a New York bank. The California sun could be shining, but he was dreaming of a Broadway Christmas. He returned to the theatre with another smash musical-comedy score, this time Louisiana Purchase, produced by his fellow songwriter, the late B. G. De Sylva. Later, when De Sylva became head of Paramount, he lured Berlin back to the Coast to make the film version of his own show. And the following year there was the film Holiday Inn for Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a musical which celebrated each holiday of the year with a different Berlin song.
When World War II exploded on the American scene, Berlin was fifty-three years old. Far too old to be drafted again, he promptly reversed the process. He drafted the entire U.S. Army.
Within a brief space of weeks, in the spring of 1942, Berlin, with his astonishing sense of producing the perfectly right attraction for the perfectly right audience at the perfectly right time, had devised the idea of a new soldier show, an updated Yip, Yip, Yaphank. Its purpose would be to boost morale, both on the home front and in Army camps and hospitals. Profits from ticket sales (eventually they would total a staggering $10,000,000) would accrue to Army Emergency Relief, a service charity.
His idea was enthusiastically backed by Major General Irving Phillipson of the 2nd Service Command, on Governor’s Island, and endorsed by General George Marshall. With the Commanding General of the Army as his quondam executive producer, and the entire resources of the Pentagon to draw upon, there was only one thing left for Berlin to do. Just as he had done a quarter-century before, he moved out to old Yaphank—now Upton. He brought to the camp some clean linen, music paper, and his battered upright piano, and started writing a show at top speed.
For once the much maligned Army classification system did its job. From all over the country it produced some three hundred servicemen. GIs now, they had formerly been actors, dancers, singers, stagehands, electricians, set designers, musicians, arrangers, box-office men, even press agents. In the detachment were such talents as Burl Ives, Gary Merrill, Henry Jones, Anthony Ross, dance director Robert Sidney, comics Julie Oshins and Hank Henry and James MacColl. Working on the directorial side were Ezra Stone, the former “Henry Aldrich” of radio, and Joshua Logan.
As anybody will corroborate who was fortunate enough to secure an opening-night ticket to the Broadway Theatre on July 4, 1942, or to any performance thereafter, This Is the Army was a blockbuster of a GI show. It had comedy, a fine score, and an abundance of that indefinable ingredient called showmanship, Berlin-style.
Chauvinist, in retrospect perhaps oversimplistic, and certainly drenched in sentiment, This Is the Army remains a supreme expression of superb musical-comedy agitprop. Consider its ingredients. A brisk theme song, “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones.” Solid comedy, “The Army’s Made a Man Out of Me” and a burlesque, “Ladies of the Chorus.” Two lilting ballads, “I’m Getting Tired So I Can Sleep” and—after a fond take-off on that service club on 44th Street—“I Lost My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen.” A topical song about the Russian winter, and a great dance number about black GIs. Fraternal salutes to other branches of the service, “American Eagles” and “How About a Cheer for the Navy?” Then, splashed across the wide stage, a military minstrel show, topped off by Berlin’s famous old standard “Mandy.”
But it was near eleven P.M., in the next-to-closing slot, that Berlin personally provided his own show-stopper. The curtains parted to reveal a cadre of middle-aged men, somewhat gray but still expert at close-order drill—members of the original cast of Yip, Yip, Yaphank. When they had finished their routine, then came roll call. “Berlin?” bellowed the drill sergeant. No answer.
“Ber-lin!”
“Here!” replied a piping voice, and the spotlight picked up the interior of a GI pup tent. There, seated meekly on his cot, unhappily blinking in his 1918 OD’s, was ex-doughboy Berlin, re-creating his performance of 1918.
AS he rose and came downstage, audiences greeted him with rolling breakers of applause that drowned out the first few words of the verse of his famous old song, and on into two choruses of “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” The resultant ovation sounded like Niagara Falls.
A master stroke of showmanship, a rare compound of nostalgia, patriotism, and superb schmaltz. Certainly it worked. Who else has been so successful in learning to play the keys of his country’s emotions? “I don’t want to write a nation’s laws,” goes the old truism. “Just let me write its songs.”
By the summer of 1943 the film version of the show was completed out in California, the first musical film ever to star a future senator from California, George Murphy, as well as the state’s future governor, Ronald Reagan.
But when the picture reached the movie houses in 1943, Berlin and his soldier troupe weren’t around to count the huge grosses. They had long since departed for other theatres overseas. For the next year and a half the TITA unit was to entertain GIs and sailors and marines in every fighting front.
“After I staged This Is the Army,” said director Joshua Logan, “I went off to Officers Candidate School and Intelligence School. I went into the Paratroops, and then I went overseas with an outfit called the 50th Troop Carrier Wing, and we were stationed way up north in a little town in England. I went down to London for the weekend, and I ran into Berlin. He said, ‘Are you here? Great! I want you to direct a new thing we’re putting into the overseas touring version of the show.’ You see, everywhere he went with his show, he kept writing material for various areas—England, Italy, North Africa, the Pacific. Now he had some sort of a new sketch about the WACs—pretty raw, but perfect for the troops. It hadn’t yet been put into the show.
“I told him that I couldn’t leave my outfit. My general would never let me go; he had a group of men he’d trained, and he wouldn’t let anybody out for anything—it would throw the whole unit out of kilter. Berlin nodded and said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, Josh, I’ll get you, I’ll get you.’
“So Berlin called General Dwight Eisenhower. And Eisenhower, believe it or not, spoke to General Hap Arnold, who commanded the Air Force! They both requested me, and it went down through channels until it got to my general. When the request came down to him, he took a look at it, and then he said, ‘Nope.’
“That didn’t stop Berlin. He went to the Navy. I don’t exactly know who, but the top admiral, I’m sure, and that went down through channels again until it got to my general, and again my general said, ‘Nope.’ I knew all about this; I’d heard.
“Finally, Berlin picked up the telephone and put in a call to my general, direct. My general picked up the phone and the voice said, ‘General, this is Irving Berlin.’
“The general was so excited, he practically dropped the telephone. Berlin got right to the point. He said, ‘General, could I have Logan?’
“And my general said, ‘Yes, sir!’”
And then the war was over.
General Motors, U.S. Steel, Du Pont … all the major monoliths of American industry rapidly converted to peacetime. Berlin puts his 1918 uniform back into mothballs, this time (as one of his martial songs so hopefully put it) for the last time, came back to Broadway and Lindy’s and home, reinstalled his upright in his office, and looked around for something new to do.
She—for the next project was to be about a sharp-eyed female— showed up as the result of a set of ironic circumstances. The lady who was in on Annie Get Your Gun from its earliest moment of conception is Dorothy Fields, a lyricist of the first rank, and co-author, with her late brother Herbert, of the show’s libretto.
“During the war,” she remembers, “my late husband did volunteer work down at Penn Station, for Travelers’ Aid, from midnight to seven A.M. And one of the ladies told him one night about a kid who’d just come in, a young soldier. Very drunk, he’d been to Coney Island and had kewpie dolls and lamps and every piece of junk you could possibly win. How come? Across his chest he had a row of sharpshooter’s medals.
“And as if out of the sky, from Heaven, comes this idea. Because my brother and I had a commitment to write another show for Mike Todd. Annie Oakley—the sharpshooter! With Ethel Merman to play her! SO the next day we went to see Mike, to try the idea out on him. And he said, ‘Merman? That old—! She’ll never work again!’
“We asked him if he’d do it anyway, and he said he wouldn’t touch it. So Herbert said to me, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to somebody else.’ Now, there happened to be a meeting at ASCAP after out meeting with Todd, and the first person I saw when I came in was Oscar Hammerstein. He and Dick Rodgers were producing shows then as well as writing them. I said, ‘Ockie, what do you think of Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley?’ He said, ‘We’ll do it.’ That’s all! And then he said, ‘Talk to Dick after the meeting.’ I talked to Dick, and Dick said the same thing—‘We’ll do it.’
“Then they both said, ‘But can you get up to see Ethel?’ She’d just gone to the hospital to have a child, by Caesarean, and she was feeling awful. I had a hell of a time getting into the hospital, but I did, and I went over to her bed and I leaned down and said, ‘Merm, what would you think of yourself as Annie Oakley?’
“She looked up from her hospital bed, and blinked, and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ It was as simple as that.
“We wrote the book right away; writing the book was a dream. It’s the one show out of all the shows I’ve done that went so beautifully. Only one thing in the second act—a scene which took place in the old Brevoort Hotel—we later rewrote so many times that it got to be an inside joke with all of us. Whenever somebody said to somebody else, ‘What are you going to do tonight?’ the answer was, ‘Rewrite the Brevoort!’
“Dick and Oscar had gotten in touch with Jerome Kern in Hollywood, and he’d agreed to write the music. I would have done the lyrics. Jerry came to New York. And then he dropped dead—on a street. Unknown. That was the worst week of my life. The worst week of everybody’s life. Horrible….
“After the funeral, we were all sitting at a restaurant, and we started discussing whom we could get who could possibly replace somebody as gifted as Kern. And Dick finally said, ‘Well, I know somebody, but it means that Dorothy can’t do the lyrics.’ I said, ‘I have enough to do with the book. I don’t care, who is it?’ And he said, ‘Irving.’ Well, we all thought that was fabulous. We went back to their offices and we called Berlin, and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I’d want to do a show that isn’t “Irving Berlin’s whatsoever.”’
“So Herbert and I said, ‘Irving, sorry, but this is our idea, our play, and it can’t be “Irving Berlin’s Annie Oakley.”’ He said, ‘Let me think about it over the weekend. And if I decide that I want to relinquish the billing that I’ve always had, then we’ll talk about it.’ He wouldn’t read the first act we’d written—he wouldn’t let that influence him. Monday he called up and said, ‘Yes, I’d like to take a look at it.’ He read the first act, and read the outline of the second act. And do you know that in the twelve days after he agreed to do the show, he wrote five songs? One of them being “There’s No Business Like Show Business’!”
“After I became involved in the show,” said Joshua Logan, “I’d see Berlin every other day. Sometimes while he wrote the score he’d go away to Atlantic City or up to his farm in the Catskills, to work on his lyrics or a second chorus, or to write a new song.
“One day he played us ‘Show Business,’ and, naturally, we all thought it was simply marvelous. We figured that Buffalo Bill, our leading male character, would sing it, and then Merman, as Annie, would reprise it.
“Berlin was very proud of it. You know, when Irving sings a song in that tiny voice—there’s a famous crack somebody once made: ‘You have to hug him to hear him.’16 But when he sings right into your face, he’s reading you, studying you every second for your reactions.
“A couple of days later Berlin came in and he sang us a new song we’d been waiting for, ‘Who Do You Love, I Hope?’ It was for the two young juveniles in the show. We all raved about it. Then Berlin said, ‘Oh, by the way, I have the second chorus of ‘No Business Like Show Business.’ And he sang it, and we said. ‘Well, that takes care of that, too.’ That about wrapped things up, and we were on our way.
“Berlin asked me if I’d drop around to his office that afternoon. He was going to play the score for Hugh Martin, and he wanted me around because he said I organized things and ‘excited them.’ He didn’t have to ask me. I could be around Berlin for the rest of my life. I love to see him work. To me, he genuinely represents the excitement of show business.
“Hugh Martin is a pretty respectable composer in his own right—‘The Trolley Song’ and ‘The Boy Next Door,’ among others that he did with Ralph Blane—and Martin was very excited by what Berlin played him. Berlin finished the score, but he left out ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’
“I said ‘Irving, what’s the matter? You left out the finale!’
“He shook his head and said, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t like the way you all reacted this morning. It didn’t register.’
“I protested, ‘But we were all so excited to hear your new song. We all reacted that way because we’d already heard “Show Business” and this was its second chorus.’
“He went on shaking his head. ‘Yes, but it’s a great second chorus, and if you didn’t really like it, I’m certain I don’t want it in the show.’
“It wasn’t petulance. He meant it. I was astounded. I asked him what he’d done with the lead sheet, and he shrugged and said he’d put it away in his files somewhere, and I said, ‘Irving! Get it out of those files and sing it for Hugh!’ He argued with me, but I kept on insisting, until finally he gave in and went out to his secretary and asked her to dig it out of the files, and do you believe this—they couldn’t find it?
“They searched and they hunted, arguing back and forth all the while, rummaging through his whole office. Eventually, thank heaven, they came up with his original lead sheet. There wasn’t even a copy. Can you imagine—for a good ten or fifteen minutes there, ‘Show Business,’ that show-stopper, that standard, an absolute classic of popular music, was missing!
“I remember during that preparatory period we’d have meetings where we’d all of us check in and see how we were getting along. I was beginning to wonder why we didn’t have two songs for Annie and Frank, our two leading characters. They sang ‘They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonderful’ in the first act, which was a beautiful song for Merman and Ray Middleton, but in the second act there really was no song that they sang together.
“It was about two or three days before we were actually going into rehearsal. We were all up at Oscar Hammerstein’s house on 63rd Street. Berlin was way over on the other side of the room, Oscar and I were on this side, and there were also Lucinda Ballard, our costume designer, Jo Mielziner, our set designer, Helen Tamiris, our choreographer, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, everybody. I said to Oscar in a very low voice, ‘Oscar, I’m worried we haven’t got enough songs, we need another one for Ethel and Ray.’ And he said, just as softly, ‘Well, where would it be?’ ‘I don’t know, but I think it should be on Governor’s Island, just before the shooting contest in the second act.’ He said, ‘Listen, Josh, don’t bother Irving with that now. Don’t bring it up. It’ll worry him, and he won’t be able to finish his work; so you keep quiet about it—we’ll bring it up when the time is right.’
“And just then Berlin, who had suddenly appeared behind Oscar’s shoulder, leaned over the two of us and asked, ‘Another song?’
“How he knew it, I do not know. Maybe he simply smelled it in the air.
“He said, ‘Just a minute, please, everybody quiet. A discussion has just come up about a new song. They think there’s got to be one for Annie and Frank. Let’s have a conference right now. If I’m going to write a song, I have to know what kind of song.’
“So there was some discussion—everybody pitched in. Finally Berlin said, ‘The only thing that I can possibly think is that if it’s before a shooting contest, it has to be some sort of a challenge song. Okay, challenge song. Right?’
“At this point we were all exhausted, and we started to leave. My wife Nedda and I left Oscar’s house and we took a cab. Let’s see, we were up on 63rd Street, and at this time we were living down at the Lombardy, that’s on 56th Street, near Park. As I was unlocking our door at the Lombardy, I heard the telephone ring, and I ran inside to get the phone.
“And Berlin, on the other end, said ‘Hello, Josh—this is Irving. What do you think of this?’ And then he sang the whole damned first chorus of ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’!
“Most amazing thing I ever experienced in my whole life! It couldn’t have been more than, at most, fifteen minutes from the time he’d first heard about it to the time he had me on the phone. He’d written the song—the entire first chorus. It was one like that.”
Annie Get Your Gun opened on Broadway in 1946 and was a smash hit. Everything worked; the book meshed brilliantly with Berlin’s songs. At one point in the first act he performed a musical feat still unduplicated by other composers. Frank, the hero, sings “The Girl That I Marry,” which explains her preference in potential brides. Annie answers, without so much as a scene between the two songs, “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun.” Two hit songs, back to back. And in addition to the previously celebrated “Show Business” finale and his challenge song, “Anything You Can Do,” Berlin provided his cast with “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” “I Got Lost in His Arms,” the Merman-Middleton duet “They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonderful,” a lively song called “I’ve Got the Sun in the Morning,” and the masculine chorus “My Defenses Are Down.” All hits, all out of one score. It’s a record that still stands. When, in 1966, Annie was given a triumphant revival at the New York State Theatre, with Miss Merman again in the lead, Berlin went back to his upright and somewhat gratuitously tossed off still another song for the show, a bit of icing for the cake—a duet called “An Old Fashioned Wedding.”
Berlin filled his next years with a steady parade of entertainments—original musical comedies for Broadway and large-scale film musicals.
After the films Blue Skies and Easter Parade, he came back to Broadway with a libretto written by the late Robert E. Sherwood, one which dealt with erecting the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Miss Liberty held her torch aloft for most of one season, but it was one of the very few times when American history plus Berlin haven’t equaled success.
A year later he returned to the lists with another reliable formula— satire on the current scene—and this time it worked. Call Me Madam, with a book by Lindsay and Crouse, featured Ethel Merman as a character loosely drawn from Perle Mesta, the famous Washington, D.C. hostess— in Berlin’s words, “The Hostess with the Mostes’ on the Ball.”
In 1953 Darryl Zanuck produced a successful film version of Call Me Madam, with Merman re-creating Mrs. Sally Adams in Technicolor. A year later Berlin conceived two more large-scale entertainments. There was White Christmas, at Paramount, in which Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye sang and danced through a full menu of Berlin standards—including “Mandy,” produced, for the first time, as an all-white minstrel show. Back at Fox, with Zanuck, there was There’s No Business Like Show Business, with Ethel Merman and the late Marilyn Monroe. That lady’s version of a new Berlin song, “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It,” induced such high temperatures that it melted the Canadian snowscape: north of the border, censors excised it from the film.
Even though that film contained a choice assortment of Berlin standards, dating back to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and ranging forward through “Lazy” and “Heat Wave” and his old Depression-era ditty “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” the story was definitely not Berlin’s own biography set to music.
Berlin remains the only major American composer whose career was never adapted by the Hollywood studios into an omnibus musical. Abel Green offers an interesting footnote about Berlin’s reluctance to be portrayed by another star. “I think,” he says, “if Irving ever had a hero, it was Jerome Kern. Do you remember when Hollywood was making all those musical biographies of composers? Cary Grant played Cole Porter, and Robert Alda was George Gershwin, and so on. I used to review them all for Variety. Metro had just finished making Till the Clouds Roll By, which was supposed to be the life of Jerry Kern. I mentioned to Irving that they wee going to screen the picture for me. ‘That’s one I’d like to see,’ he said. So we went up to the Metro office, and when the picture was finished, Irving shook his head. ‘Jerry would revolve in his grave,’ was all he said.”
One more Broadway musical score was to be pounded out on the ancient upright “Buick.” In 1962 the late Leland Hayward produced Mr. President, with another satiric book by Lindsay and Crouse. If the music and lyrics weren’t exactly as overpowering a parade of knockout hits as Annie’s, they were still first-drawer Berlin. His song “Don’t Be Afraid of Romance” floated melodically through the contemporary world of rock-and-roll dissonance to find popularity with record-buyers who still cherish melody. That show and the triumphant revival of Annie in 1966 are the latest full-scale Berlin works to have brightened the Broadway scene.
During the mid-’60s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced an Arthur Freed musical project, to be based upon some twenty-odd Berlin “evergreens,” and to be called Say It with Music. In the lush postwar years such a project would have had exhibitors all over the country rubbing their hands together in greedy anticipation. But the economics of 1968, Hollywood-style, were light-years removed from the old damn-the-cost era. Opulence, nostalgia, spectacle—and Julie Andrews, a reigning star. It might have worked. “But there were three complete changes in the Metro administration while the script was being written,” recalls George Axelrod, who wrote the last draft. “And by the time the project was ready to be shot, the studio was practically broke. Too bad; it was a good idea. We’d taken all the problems attendant on making such a big film musical and turned them into the story itself.”
Perhaps some enterprising producer will devise a less costly way of recreating the best of Berlin for contemporary film audiences. But until that happens, all those Berlin classics, on records, tapes, and sheet music, whistled and hummed and sung and danced to for most of the twentieth century, will no doubt survive.
In 1955, half a century after Berlin began writing, Variety, the bible of show business, celebrated its first fifty years, and to make that event official, the weekly published a thick Golden Anniversary issue. Inside, on a double-page spread, an advertisement from the Irving Berlin Music Corporation made a jovial comment on the occasion. On a double-page spread appeared the number 50. Imbedded in each numeral were a vast number of Berlin titles, with no comment save the titles themselves. Fifty years’ worth of his history….
The words of his friend Jerome Kern, in a letter to Woollcott back in 1925, say it all. “I once delivered myself of a nifty,” wrote Kern. “It was at a dinner in London, and I was asked what, in my opinion, were the chief characteristics of the American nation. I replied that the average United States citizen was perfectly epitomized in Irving Berlin’s music. He doesn’t attempt to stuff the public’s ears with pseudo-original ultra-modernism, but he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time, and in turn, gives these impressions back to the world—simplified, clarified, glorified. In short, what I really want to say, my dear Woollcott, is that Irving Berlin has no place in American music, HE IS AMERICAN MUSIC.”
And what about Mr. Berlin in 1972?
He is something of a recluse. He spends a great deal of his time at the Berlin farm in the Catskills, or in his Beekman Place home in New York City. He has a small circle of very close friends with whom he keeps in touch by phone. On the occasion of his eighty-second birthday, when one of his friends inquired about his state of mind, he said, “You know, from the neck up, I could do another Broadway show. From the neck down, I’m not so sure.”
How does he fill his hours? He has developed another talent: he paints. His friends are regular recipients of Berlin oils, which are naïve in style, often humorous, and completely charming.
“There’s a current story about Irving that I think is darling,” said Robert Russell Bennett. “You know, Irving has a little granddaughter who’s in school, and she had to write a paper. She wrote ‘An Afternoon with My Grandfather.’ The teacher asked her, ‘Who is your grandfather?’ And she, drawing herself up to her full height, which isn’t much, said, ‘Irving Berlin is my grandfather.’
“And he said, ‘Irving Berlin? What does he do?’
“And Irving’s granddaughter said, ‘He paints!’”