| Subject: Irving Berlin, Nation's Songwriter |
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Sep. 22, 1989
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Date Posted: Saturday, September 22, 2012, 10:56:14am
Irving Berlin, the Russian-born minstrel whose songs like ''Cheek to Cheek'' and ''White Christmas'' became part of the fabric of American life, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan, just a few miles from the Lower East Side tenement he lived in when he wrote the first of his 1,500 songs. He was 101 years old.
A son-in-law, Alton E. Peters, said Mr. Berlin died in his sleep at his town house on Beekman Place and that the funeral would be private.
Irving Berlin set the tone and the tempo for the tunes America played and sang and danced to for much of the 20th century. By the time he was 30 he was a legend, and he went on to write the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films. An Outpouring of Song
The musical giant who never learned to read or write music composed his first major hit, ''Alexander's Ragtime Band,'' in 1911. ''With one song, the career of Irving Berlin and American music were intertwined forever,'' said Isaac Stern at Mr. Berlin's 100th-birthday celebration in May 1988, adding, ''American music was born at his piano.'' The last Berlin song to be noted by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers was ''An Old-Fashioned Wedding,'' the show-stopper he wrote for a 1966 revival of ''Annie Get Your Gun.''
In the intervening 55 years, Mr. Berlin's outpouring of songs included ''Always,'' ''Remember,'' ''Blue Skies,'' ''Puttin' On the Ritz,'' ''A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,'' ''What'll I Do?'' ''How Deep Is the Ocean,'' ''Easter Parade,'' ''God Bless America,'' ''Heat Wave,'' ''White Christmas,'' ''Cheek to Cheek,'' ''Let's Face the Music and Dance,'' ''Change Partners,'' ''It Only Happens When I Dance With You,'' ''I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,'' ''This Is the Army, Mr. Jones,'' ''Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,'' ''I Got Lost in His Arms,'' ''The Girl That I Marry'' and ''There's No Business Like Show Business.''
He often said there are only six tunes in the world. But from those six tunes he fashioned, according to his catalogue, 1,500 songs - and nobody knows how many more he may have stored somewhere. When someone admired one of his melodies, Mr. Berlin was quick to say: ''I like it, too. I've used it lots of times.'' A Classic Story
Not only did he compose the melodies; he also wrote the lyrics. And businessman that he was, he established the Irving Berlin Music Corporation in 1919 to publish his works and retain control over all the copyrights, which he guarded fiercely. His was a classic rags-to-riches story that he never forgot could have happened only in America.
His ''Blue Skies'' reached the top of the pop charts when it was written in 1927 - no surprise for an established songwriter. What is unusual is that the song was adopted some 50 years later by the popular country singer Willie Nelson and reached the charts again as part of an album released in 1978.
According to Ascap records, 25 Berlin songs reached the top of the charts. His songs, with their timeless quality, were picked up again and again by top recording artists like Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney and Diana Ross and became hits all over again. ''White Christmas'' remains one of the most-performed standards in the entire Ascap repertory. A Granter of Holidays
The songwriter Sammy Cahn once said of Mr. Berlin's prodigious output: ''If a man, in a lifetime of 50 years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing 60 that are immediately identifiable. Somebody once said you couldn't have a holiday without his permission.''
''White Christmas'' and ''Easter Parade'' were two Berlin songs that became holiday anthems. When he noticed that he might have slighted Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, St. Patrick's Day, New Year's Eve and Washington's Birthday he added ''Something to Be Thankful For,'' ''Say It With Firecrackers,'' ''A Little Bit of Irish,'' ''Let's Start the New Year Right'' and ''I Can't Tell a Lie.'' And in case he had missed anything, he composed ''Happy Holiday.''
''Irving Berlin has no place in American music,'' Jerome Kern once said. ''He is American music. Emotionally, 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 and glorified.''
The composer Douglas Moore said in 1962: ''It's a rare gift which sets Irving Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters. It is a gift which qualifies him, along with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, as a great American minstrel. He has caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about and what we believe.'' Only One Key
Irving Berlin was a slender, dark-haired man with a quick smile and lively eyes topped by wide, prominent eyebrows. Throughout his long life in the world of music he never learned to play in any key but F sharp, but he could tap out tune after tune on the keys of a piano, leaving it to arrangers to write the harmony and to transcribe his melodies. His songs were by turn romantic and tragic, feisty and sentimental, homespun and sophisticated.
His music evoked the mournful tunes of Russia, the land of his birth (''A Russian Lullaby''), and the rhythms of American rag (''Alexander's Ragtime Band,'' ''I Love a Piano''), as well as one that seemed to combine the two, ''Yiddle on Your Fiddle Play Some Ragtime'' (1909). The romance of the ballad was heard in his ''Always'' and ''Remember,'' the romance of the dance in ''Cheek to Cheek'' and ''Let's Face the Music and Dance.''
Mr. Berlin captured the rhythms of a young nation with songs that marked the country's wars and its prosperity and helped it to dance through the Depression. He was so prolific and so popular that by 1924 he was already the subject of a biography. Alexander Woollcott wrote in ''The Story of Irving Berlin'' that the songwriter was a ''creative ignoramus,'' a kind of unschooled genius.
''I really can't read music,'' Mr. Berlin once said. ''Oh, I can pick out the melody of a song with one finger, but I can't read the harmony. I feel like an awful dope that I know so little about the mechanics of my trade.'' To overcome his inability to play in any key but F sharp, he used a specially built piano that had a hand clutch to change keys. He called it his ''Buick'' and for years he took it with him on trips to Europe. It is now in the Smithsonian Institution. Son of a Cantor
The man who came to be known as Irving Berlin was named Israel Baline when he was born near the Siberian border in the Russian village of Tyumen on May 11, 1888, one of eight children of Moses and Leah Lipkin Baline. His father was a cantor. A pogrom in 1893 persuaded Moses Baline to bring his family to New York, and they settled on Cherry Street on the Lower East Side. Israel was 8 years old when his father died, and the boy took to the streets to help support his family. This marked the end of his formal schooling, which totaled less than two years.
Izzy, as he came to be called, became a newspaper boy, hawking The Evening Journal. On his first day on the job, according to Woollcott, the boy stopped to look at a ship about to put out for China. So entranced was he that he failed to notice a swinging crane, and he was knocked into the river. When he was fished out, after going down for the third time, he was still holding in his clenched fist the five pennies that constituted his first day's receipts, his contribution to the family budget.
Young Izzy found his first steady job on the Bowery, looking after Blind Sol, a singing beggar. He led him through the saloons, looked after his receipts and sang some sentimental ballads himself in his childish treble. His ambition was to earn enough money to buy a rocking chair for his mother. After-Hours Tunesmith
He was soon on his own, singing for tips at bars off the Bowery, plugging songs at Tony Pastor's Music Hall in Union Square and finally, in 1906 when he was 18, working as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. When the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and pick out tunes.
Within a year, he published his first song, ''Marie From Sunny Italy'' (1907). He wrote the lyrics; the music was composed by Nick Nicholson, a friend who also worked at the Pelham Cafe. Because of a printer's error, the name of the lyricist on the cover of the sheet music appeared as ''I. Berlin.'' He kept the name. In the early days he was known as ''a man of few words,'' so meager was his grasp of the language. But he made his shortcoming a virtue, writing lyrics in the American vernacular that were uncomplicated, simple and direct: ''I'll be loving you always . . . Not for just an hour/Not for just a day/Not for just a year/But always,'' and ''How much do I love you?/I'll tell you no lie/How deep is the ocean?/How high is the sky?'' and ''You're not sick, you're just in love.''
''My ambition is to reach the heart of the average American,'' Mr. Berlin once said, ''Not the highbrow nor the lowbrow but that vast intermediate crew which is the real soul of the country. The highbrow is likely to be superficial, overtrained, supersensitive. The lowbrow is warped, subnormal. My public is the real people.'' Even Sorrow Was Inspiration
Mr. Berlin even created songs out of his own sadness. In 1912, he married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of the songwriter Ray Goetz. She died six months later of typhoid fever contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. The song he wrote to express his grief, ''When I Lost You,'' was his first ballad. It was an immediate popular hit and sold more than a million copies.
His first complete score was written in 1914 for ''Watch Your Step,'' a revue that included ''Play a Simple Melody.'' In 1916, he collaborated with Victor Herbert on the score of ''The Century Girl.'' Increasingly aware of his own technical limitations, he asked Mr. Herbert whether he should study composition. ''You have a natural gift for words and music,'' Mr. Herbert told him. ''Learning theory might help you a little, but it could cramp your style.'' Mr. Berlin took his advice. Mr. Herbert was a moving force behind the creation of Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In 1914, Mr. Berlin joined with him to become one of the charter members of the organization that has protected the royalties of composers and writers ever since.
Mr. Berlin was drafted in 1917 and stationed at Camp Upton, in Yaphank, L.I., where he was commissioned to write an all-soldier revue. The show, ''Yip, Yip, Yaphank,'' is best remembered for Mr. Berlin's own rendition of ''Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,'' a song he was to repeat in his World War II revue ''This Is the Army'' and the movie that was made from it. The first show eventually earned $150,000 for a camp service center. All the proceeds from the second -some $15 million - were contributed to the Army Emergency Relief Fund. Royalties earned later by the songs from the show - including ''This Is the Army, Mr. Jones'' - were added to the God Bless America Fund, which has supported the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts of New York since 1940. Partner of the Shuberts
Mr. Berlin returned to Tin Pan Alley after the war and in 1921 created a partnership with Sam H. Harris to build the Music Box Theater. He maintained an interest in the theater throughout his life, and even in his last years was known to call the Shubert Organization, his partner, to check on the receipts. In its early years, the theater was a showcase for revues by Mr. Berlin. As theater owner, producer and composer, he looked after every detail of his shows, from the costumes and sets to the casting and musical arrangements.
Then in the 1920's, in a story more romantic than his own ballads, Mr. Berlin fell in love with a young heiress. His courtship of Ellin Mackay was followed in every possible detail by the newspapers, which found good copy in the romance of an immigrant from the Lower East Side and the daughter of Clarence Hungerford Mackay, the socially prominent head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company.
The couple met in 1925, and Mr. Mackay opposed the match from the start. He hustled his daughter off to Europe and Mr. Berlin wooed her over the airwaves with his songs ''Remember'' and ''Always.'' When she returned to New York they were married in a civil ceremony at the Municipal Building.
Mr. Mackay threatened to disown his daughter. ''I don't want your daughter for her money,'' Mr. Berlin told Mr. Mackay, according to breathless reports in the tabloids. ''If you see fit to disinherit her, I'll probably have to make her a wedding present of a couple of million dollars.'' In fact, Mr. Berlin did more. He gave her ''Always'' -the song still often chosen for the first dance at weddings - and several other songs for which the royalties are still coming in. For some years Mr. Mackay was not on speaking terms with the Berlins, but during the Depression, it was Mr. Berlin who bailed out his father-in-law when he suffered business reverses.
By all accounts, the Berlin marriage remained a love affair. An inseparable couple until Ellin Berlin died in July 1988 at the age of 85, they had four children: Irving, who died in infancy; Mary Ellin Barrett and Elizabeth Irving Peters of New York, and Linda Louise Emmet, who lives in Paris. Mr. Berlin is also survived by nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Songs for the Marx Brothers
In the mid-1920's, Mr. Berlin composed the songs for ''The Cocoanuts'' - written by George S. Kaufman for the Marx Brothers. He wrote for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1911, 1919, 1920, and for the Follies of 1927 composed ''Blue Skies.''
Mr. Berlin returned to Broadway in 1932 to collaborate with Moss Hart on ''Face the Music,'' a production that included ''Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee.'' He worked with Hart again in 1933 to create ''As Thousands Cheer,'' which starred Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb. ''Heat Wave'' and ''Easter Parade'' were two of the songs that made that show a box-office triumph.
During the Depression, when Americans turned to the movie houses to escape their troubles, Mr. Berlin was responsible for the scores of some of the most delightful screen musicals of the day, including three that starred Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire - ''Top Hat,'' ''Follow the Fleet'' and ''Carefree.'' ''Cheek to Cheek,'' which he wrote for Mr. Astaire in ''Top Hat,'' won an Academy Award. Mr. Berlin also wrote the music for ''On the Avenue,'' ''Second Fiddle'' and the film called ''Alexander's Ragtime Band.'' Unofficial National Anthem
In 1938, when Kate Smith asked Mr. Berlin to write a patriotic song for her, he reached into his files for a tune he had written 20 years before for ''Yip, Yip, Yaphank'' and had dropped from the show. He wrote new lyrics and from the moment Kate Smith sang it on the radio, ''God Bless America'' became the unofficial national anthem of the United States. In 1940, Mr. Berlin assigned the copyright to the God Bless America Fund. In recognition of the song, Mr. Berlin was given a special Congressional gold medal in 1954 and an official proclamation of appreciation from President Eisenhower.
''White Christmas,'' the song that became a modern Christmas carol, was written for Bing Crosby in the 1942 movie ''Holiday Inn.'' It won Mr. Berlin a second Academy Award for best song, sold more than 50 million records and 4 million copies of sheet music, earned over $1 million in royalties and is one of the most frequently played songs ever written.
After receiving mixed reviews for the 1941 film ''Louisiana Purchase,'' Mr. Berlin returned to Camp Upton to prepare the book, music and lyrics for ''This Is the Army.'' In appreciation of his work, Gen. George C. Marshall conferred on him the Army's Medal of Merit.
After the war Mr. Berlin, who was happiest working in the theater, wrote ''Annie Get Your Gun'' for Ethel Merman. The exuberant musical about Annie Oakley (book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields) opened in 1946. It ran for 1,147 performances and included such songs as ''They Say It's Wonderful,'' ''The Girl That I Marry, ''Doin' What Comes Natur'lly,'' ''You Can't Get a Man With a Gun'' and ''Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better.'' Another Show for Merman
Critics were disappointed in Mr. Berlin's next show, ''Miss Liberty'' (1949). But he enjoyed another triumph when he wrote ''Call Me Madam'' in 1950 for Miss Merman, who starred as ''The Hostess With the Mostes' on the Ball.'' Her role as Ambassador to a country called Lichtenburg was a spoof of President Truman's appointment of the Washington hostess Perle Mesta as Ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1949.
For a while, ''Call Me Madam'' seemed to have been Mr. Berlin's farewell show, but he failed miserably at retirement. He took his family to their estate in the Catskills and tried painting, but got bored. In 1962, at the age of 74, Mr. Berlin was back on Broadway with ''Mr. President.'' He wrote the score, Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay did the book, and Joshua Logan directed. Despite a cool reception from the critics, the show ran for eight months on an advance sale of nearly $3 million.
As he grew older, Mr. Berlin became more and more reclusive, eventually refusing even to see friends. The telephone became his only link to the world outside Beekman Place.
Although he came to feel that too much fuss was made of his accumulated years, he gave his blessing to the 100th-birthday celebration concert held for the benefit of Carnegie Hall and Ascap in May 1988. After all the singing and the dancing and the celebrating were over, Morton Gould, the president of Ascap, said, in effect, that it would never be over.
''Irving Berlin's music will last forever,'' he said. ''Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.''
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