4 DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY: IRVING BERLIN

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds – with God’s help I catch some.

Jean Rhys

Meter, melody, and everything else that relates to the construction of a song are secondary. All that is necessary is to have something to say and to say it as quickly as possible.

Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin is the first in line. Top of the bill and front of the queue. His name will crop up in almost every chapter of this book because he wrote hit songs for more than half a century. And that still allowed for a long, and somewhat tragic, retirement – but we’ll get to that.

In the beginning, Israel Beilin had nothing. The Siberian village where he was born in 1888 was razed to the ground by Cossacks, and his family fled to New York’s Lower East Side when he was five years old. Israel Baline, as he had been rechristened at Ellis Island, became a waiter; then, once he started writing novelty songs in his spare time, he became a singing waiter. When he got an office, the first thing he did was to put a picture of Stephen Foster on the wall – the forefather of all pop music, the songwriter who had died in poverty in the mid-nineteenth century because the business of show business wouldn’t be invented for another half-century. Nothing else on the walls. This was modernity: immigration and integration, suffragettes and skyscrapers just outside the door, a telephone on his desk, an automobile to take him home. It was 1908.

By 1911 Berlin^I had already had more than two hundred songs published, which had earned him a very tidy £100,000 in royalties. 1911 was also the year he came up with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. He was waiting for a train to Palm Beach, Florida, and had twenty minutes or so to kill before he left his office; the song was finished before he picked up his tan leather suitcase and locked the door. Berlin was twenty-three years old, and even if he had written nothing else, he could have lived quite comfortably for the rest of his life. ‘Do I believe in inspiration?’ he wrote years later. ‘In having things hit you from nowhere? Big things you’ve never dreamed of? Occasionally – yes. I have never given Irving Berlin any credit for “Alexander”.’ It exploded, the hit of the year, everywhere. It’s possibly the first song that springs to mind if anyone brings up ragtime, though, in truth, it’s closer to a Sousa march. It’s ersatz ragtime, with no time for rule books, but it absolutely accords with the spirit that those rule books were meant to deliver.

Berlin went from writing lyrics on napkins and slopping soup onto people’s laps to being tagged a revolutionary almost overnight. He hadn’t found his own sound before, but he did with ‘Alexander’. Some said it wasn’t ragtime at all, that it lacked the classic syncopation, and they were quite right. What Berlin did was to dip in and out of ragtime norms, throw in some vaudeville, have fun with his songwriting and create a definite New York sound. These were ragtime songs, rather than ragtime itself; this difference would go on to provide fertile ground for academics and sociologists ever after, but no one outside of purists in St Louis and Sedalia gave two hoots at the time.

What Berlin had created was a hybrid pop song. It had a great hook and a memorable title, and it was easy to sing. It also melded a slight melancholy, which Berlin reckoned he had learned from ‘Slavonic and Semitic folk tunes’, with the vogueish ragtime style, which is what gave it a subtle urban edge (he later wrote an essay called ‘Song and Sorrow Are Playmates’). It became so ubiquitous a hit that it lent itself to multiple soundalikes and follow-ups, not least from Berlin himself: 1914’s ‘He’s a Rag Picker’ was based on the charge that he had stolen the tune for ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ from Scott Joplin. ‘Naturalness’, he found, came to him as long as he followed his own basic lyrical rule: ‘Easy to sing, easy to say, easy to remember and applicable to everyday events.’ More than seven decades later, Bill Drummond would write The Manual on how to make a number-one record, but the first edition was Berlin’s. And as Drummond would with ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, a UK number one in 1988, Berlin added already familiar musical quotes to ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, with a bugle call and a smidgen of Stephen Foster’s ‘Swanee River’. He wrote songs in the way a good cook can work with whatever is hanging around in the fridge. No one had done this before.

Why was ‘Alexander’ so big a deal? It was the first major hit to emphasise the chorus, which was twice as long as it was on most songs, and Berlin dispensed with the second verse entirely. He was more interested in the sound and feel of the lyric than the narrative. The first verse was simply there to build up anticipation for the singalong chorus – ‘Come on, you know it!’ Music historian Alec Wilder reckons it to be the first popular song in which the verse and chorus are in different keys – C and F respectively. Berlin, writing in 1913, had little doubt about why it worked: ‘The whole art of a good ragtime song lies in giving it a rhythm that is snappy, and in making it so simple that the artiste can sing it, a baby can sing it, anybody and everybody can sing it. Its appeal is to the masses, not the classes.’

Sat in his office, though, he constantly worried it would all suddenly end. He had no formal training; he had never learned how to read and write music. He would look at the picture of Stephen Foster on the wall and think about the number of deathless standards he’d written. Maybe the most important song Berlin ever wrote was ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It’ in 1912. It was as big as ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and it pushed forward, utilising America’s new-found dance-craze bawdiness. Tea dances in cafés and restaurants now lasted all afternoon, and tea wasn’t the only beverage on offer. Couples grasped each other as they did the turkey trot and the bunny hug. F. Scott Fitzgerald would recall how the dance craze of 1912 ‘brought the nice girl into the café, thus beginning a profound revolution in American life’. This seemed to open the songwriting floodgates for the freshly confident Berlin, but there was another reason why his output became even more prolific.

In 1913 he married, but his wife Dorothy died of a fever as soon as they returned from their honeymoon in Cuba. They had been together for barely five months. Berlin decided to throw himself deeper into his work, which resulted in his first ballad, the troubled and highly personal ‘When I Lost You’. He also branched out into publishing; other songwriters would send material to Irving Berlin Inc., and if he liked it, they would become part of the family. He toured Britain, billed as the ‘King of Ragtime’, which enabled him to call himself an international star on his return. And at this point he launched his first Broadway musical, Watch Your Step. It seemed he had ridden out the tragedy and darkness in his life, that he had it all planned out.

What Berlin was repressing was his grief. It’s rumoured that he stayed celibate for a full decade after Dorothy’s death. The year of the Charleston, 1923, was soundtracked by ‘What’ll I Do’; the following year by ‘All Alone’. Maudlin ballads were hardly what Mr Ragtime was known for, but both were huge hits.^II It was widely known that Berlin, a Russian Jew from the Lower East Side, was now dating Ellin Mackay, an author with Algonquin Round Table friends and the daughter of the man who ran the Postal Telegraph. Ellin’s dad did not approve, and Berlin poured his distress into these ballads. His mood had hardly improved by 1925, when his heartache led to a pair of waltzes, ‘Remember’ (a hit for Ruth Etting) and ‘Always’. An underwhelmed Algonquin circle playwright, George S. Kaufman, laughed that the latter’s opening line of ‘I’ll be loving you, always’ should have been ‘I’ll be loving you, Thursday’. When Irving and Ellin finally married in 1926, he wrote ‘At Peace with the World’. This run of hit songs is one of the first, if not the very first, to qualify as autobiographical pop, something that wouldn’t become commonplace until the 1960s.

Irving and Ellin’s first date, on 24 February 1924, had been at a Paul Whiteman concert at the Aeolian Hall which aimed to raise jazz to the level of classical music. His medley of Berlin songs, unfortunately, was dreary and entirely eclipsed by a new George Gershwin piece called ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. We’ll hear more about the Aeolian Hall and ‘Rhapsody’ later, but it was clear to Berlin that he would have to up his game; it was equally obvious to him that he had found a muse, one who would take his songwriting to a whole new level.

Ellin was fifteen years his junior, and an heiress. As her father had refused to let them marry, they had had to elope. It was a Jazz Age fairy tale, and the press loved it – a wealthy, literary Catholic girl and a Jewish immigrant who had started out as a singing waiter. In 1925 Ellin became one of the very first writers for The New Yorker, a weekly magazine for the smart, young and sexy, writing a piece called ‘Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains’. Class and social distinctions tumbled down; it was all super-modern.

The unlikeliest thing about Berlin’s huge success is that he never believed he was a genuine talent. He thought he’d just got lucky, and that if he ever learned about musical theory or chord sequences, or how to write down quavers and crotchets, his run of luck would end – he’d be revealed as a fraud, as if his whole life was an unending version of Sparky’s Magic Piano.

Whenever it looked like he might be flagging, another hit would push him back to the summit. In 1926 he’d managed to insert a song into a Rodgers and Hart stage musical called Betsy, when the show’s star, Belle Baker, complained to him that none of the songs struck her as show-stoppers. He went round to her apartment with half an idea – a song called ‘Blue Skies’ that he was writing for his baby daughter Mary Ellin – and had the whole thing finished before Belle had made a pot of coffee. Berlin excitedly called the show’s producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who told him it was Rodgers and Hart’s show, and there were contracts and moral issues to take into account, no matter how much Ms Baker loved the song. Baker then told Ziegfeld she wouldn’t go on unless she sang it. Ziegfeld rolled his eyes and relented, just as long as Rodgers and Hart had no idea who the extra song was written by.

On the opening night Betsy seemed to drag. Belle Baker did her best but could feel she was losing the crowd, until, just as the show was about to stall completely, she sang ‘Blue Skies’. The crowd went bananas, calling Baker for encore after encore. Rodgers and Hart sat in the audience, confused; then a spotlight picked out Berlin, sat in the front row, lustily singing the chorus, and the decibels grew further still. Lorenz Hart headed to the bar.

Time frames melt into each other when you talk about Irving Berlin. More than a quarter century after ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, he wrote the best-selling record of all time, with sales figures that – in the digital era – are unlikely ever to be surpassed. In December 1937 work began on the film of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Berlin was in Hollywood, away from his family for Christmas, and unsurprisingly feeling homesick. Rather than wallow, he decided to write a song about his circumstances. Originally, ‘White Christmas’ had a verse about palm trees and swimming pools: Berlin imagined it being sung by elegant west coast types, sipping cocktails and reminiscing about the Christmases of their childhood.

Berlin would often get out a sheet of paper, write a new song title at the top, then work on it for days, weeks, sometimes years. He called these ‘square songs’. Other times he’d stay up, work through the night and have a ready-made classic by breakfast. ‘White Christmas’ was one of these ‘round songs’. When Bing Crosby was handed the sheet music, he gave it a look, took his pipe from his mouth and smiled, ‘You don’t have to worry about this one, Irving.’

The melody of ‘White Christmas’ is simultaneously cosy and melancholy, and almost entirely downward. Just the odd line climbs incrementally up and then down (‘just like the ones I used to know’), as if trying to conjure the shape of a Christmas tree out of thin air. With Crosby’s warm blanket of a vocal, and a performance designed for film rather than built for the stage, it’s an incredibly intimate song. Yet it’s all about Christmases past, with the singer wishing everyone else future white Christmases. Lurking throughout is the melancholy of times long gone, of Berlin’s heritage, and the knowledge that Christmas can be the loneliest time of the year.

It’s typical of Berlin’s work rate and astute commerciality that while he fretted over ‘White Christmas’, knowing its power and hoping Crosby and its parent movie Holiday Inn would do it justice, he was at the same time writing ‘square songs’ that were all for the war effort and unlikely to endure any longer than an open packet of crisps. There was the fierce ‘When That Man Is Dead and Gone’, which likened Hitler to Satan (and was sung in Britain by precocious child star Petula Clark), while ‘Arms for the Love of America’ was written especially for the US Army’s Ordnance and Ammunition Department; another song, patriotic and brave enough to take on the most unromantic of subjects, was called ‘I Paid My Income Tax Today’.

Throughout his life Berlin worried that the music would suddenly elude him, that he’d just wake up one morning and there would be nothing. It caused him sleepless nights. He went to the doctor about his insomnia and said that he had even resorted to counting sheep. The unsympathetic doctor told him he should try counting his blessings instead, and another hit was born. 1954 saw two movies based entirely on nothing more than a three-minute Irving Berlin song: There’s No Business Like Show Business and White Christmas. The latter was an easy-going retread of Holiday Inn, but the soundtrack included Berlin’s last great song, ‘Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep)’. In the film it was sung as a duet between Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby, but contracts prevented Clooney from appearing on the single. Instead, Bing sings it alone, with great sleepiness, backed by an ominous low-key arrangement by J. J. Lilley. String lines jump octaves with no warning and counter Bing’s beautifully somnambulant delivery with an edge that threatens to drag the song down throughout. The effect is unnerving and truly beautiful. If any one song reflected the state of Berlin’s mind, it was ‘Count Your Blessings’.

His other hit of 1954, ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, reprised ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, as well as reviving ‘Heat Wave’, first made famous by Ethel Waters in 1933 and now performed, in glorious Cinemascope, by Marilyn Monroe. Even as his legend was being amplified for the umpteenth time, Berlin was riddled with self-doubt. He took a rest week during filming, and when asked if he was feeling better, laughed, ‘I’ve just eaten the biggest lunch… never felt better.’ Later, though, he admitted to depression. During the filming of White Christmas, Bing Crosby had gone to his house to hear the new songs. Berlin was a bag of nerves, and Crosby, sensing his discomfort, asked, ‘Do you like them, Irving? Well then, they’re good enough for me.’

In 1955 Berlin wrote very little, save for the ironic ‘Anybody Can Write’; in 1956 there was nothing at all. He took up painting, and wasn’t much cop, which at least inspired a song called ‘(You Can’t Lose the Blues with) Colours’. He wrote songs for his children, then for his grandchildren, but not for the world outside. ‘I got to a point I didn’t want to leave my room when daylight came,’ he remembered. He would live this way for decades.

An unseemly number of the twentieth century’s great songwriters would be hit by misfortune, illness and depression, but Berlin – the first and the greatest – seemed to be haunted by his own jukebox. One of his earliest songs was ‘I’ll See You in C-U-B-A’; his first wife would die after contracting typhoid fever there. He wrote ‘My Little Feller’ for Al Jolson’s second talkie, but also for his son Irving Junior, born in December 1928, who died three weeks later on Christmas Day. After this tragedy, every Christmas Eve the Berlins would tell their daughters that they needed to pop out for some last-minute Christmas preparations, when they would lay flowers on the grave of baby Irving. Song and sorrow were playmates.

For Berlin, then, ‘White Christmas’ had an entirely different meaning to the one it had for the rest of the world, for whom it became their favourite secular carol. Once his daughters left home, he never celebrated Christmas again. But by then much of the calendar, social or seasonal, had a Berlin song to match – ‘Easter Parade’, ‘Tell Her in the Springtime’, ‘Anna Liza’s Wedding Day’, ‘Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon’, ‘Five O’Clock Tea’, ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’, ‘Our Day of Independence’, ‘Happy Holiday’, ‘Snow’, ‘Let’s Start the New Year Right’ – and in times of peril his adopted homeland would sing his ‘God Bless America’. His songs became folk songs, in the air, everywhere; they had flown past his window, and he had been smart enough to catch them.

When asked to consider Berlin’s position in the hierarchy of American songwriters, Jerome Kern said that ‘Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.’

I. His final name change had come in around 1908, when someone misspelled ‘Baline’ as ‘Berlin’ on some sheet music.
II. ‘What’ll I Do’ became the theme to the British TV series Birds of a Feather as late as 1989. ‘All Alone’ became the title track of a 1964 Frank Sinatra album, which also included ‘What’ll I Do’.