IRVING Berlin, who has died at the age of 101, had a long successful career of over 50 years spanning both world wars. His almost 3,000 songs, 30 Broadway shows and 17 Hollywood musicals amounted to a unique testament to a talent for creating tunes and lyrics that millions of people in several generations could identify with. His fellow-composers acknowledged it too. Jerome Kern, asked about Berlin╒s place in American music, replied ╥Irving Berlin is American music╙ and Cole Porter put him in one of his own songs in Anything Goes: ╥You╒re the top, you╒re a Waldorf salad; You╒re the top, you╒re a Berlin ballad.╙
He always liked to measure his success by the money he made and he could have had no disappointment there, well into his nineties. But for himself, he called Gershwin the top and confessed more than once to a lingering regret that he never fulfilled his more ambitious artistic dreams, such as composing a real jazz opera. He thought jazz was the twentieth century╒s only real contribution to music and he wanted to have a leading part in it.
╥But I╒ve not done badly,╙ he decided towards the end of his life ╥for a poor immigrant boy who can╒t read music.╙ He did his composing on a one-key piano (F sharp) with a lever under the keyboard to manipulate a fuller range. Asked what effect a more sophisticated musical education would have had on his talent, Berlin replied ╥Ruin it.╙
His life was as much a classical American success story from rags to riches as any that he romanticised in his shows and films. Born in Siberia, his real name was Israel Baline. After trouble with local Cossacks his father Moses emigrated with other Russian Jews to America, taking his wife and eight children. Little Izzy was only four when they settled in New York╒s Lower East Side in three crowded rooms with no windows. He sang in a local synagogue with his father, whom he credited in later life with being his musical inspiration.
His father died when he was eight, and at once he gave up school and went on the streets selling newspapers and singing the songs he picked up outside the bars and restaurants. At 16 he became a singing waiter in a beer hall in Chinatown where he discovered he could pick out his own tunes on an old upright piano. At first he wrote lyrics for other people╒s music, and his first song, Marie from Sunny Italy, was printed in error under the name I Berlin. He felt his own name was too biblical for a songwriter so he kept this name, expanding the I into Irving after the famous British actor. Long after, an invitation arrived to meet Sir Winston Churchill. It was intended for Sir Isaiah Berlin.
His first really original song, Alexander╒s Ragtime Band, was hard to sell, but when Al Jolson and other singers adopted it, sales of the sheet music jumped to over a million copies in three weeks. Then hit followed hit ╤ Everybody's Doin╒ It, Ragtime Violin, and so on ╤ until Berlin was called the ╥Hit-maker╙.
He was at the peak of his success, making $100,000 annually in royalties, when he married young Dorothy Goetz in 1912, but five months after their honeymoon in Cuba she died of typhoid. Berlin gave up his career and disappeared to Europe, but his grief continued to block him until his wife╒s brother urged him to write about it. The result was When I Lost You, which George M Cohen said was the prettiest song he had ever heard. In his later life Berlin claimed it was the only time he put his personal life directly into a song. A second career then began.
His second marriage to Ellin Mackay was opposed head-on by
her millionaire father, Clarence Mackay, head of the American Post and Telegraph Company. They were all reconciled only after the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out both the Mackay and Berlin fortunes. ╥I had taken it easy and gone soft,╙ Berlin said, ╥and I wasn╒t too certain I could get going again.╙ At first his songs and shows flopped in the Depression. He felt the ╥age of the automobile╙ had changed the rhythm of life and he wanted to write songs that matched this new action. Syncopation, he said, allowed for the right broken harmonies.
He went to Hollywood and found what he was looking for in the songs for Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and suddenly he was on top again. In 1939, with the world on the brink of another war, he paid his tribute of schmaltz to his adopted country with God Bless America and refused to accept any royalties. He wrote White Christmas for a Bing Crosby film and it became the Yuletide runner-up to Silent Night. Not that composition came to him easily. Walter Scharf once said that seeing Berlin working on White Christmas was like watching a woman in labour.
At 53, he decided to do another wartime musical, 25 years after his first one. He went back to Fort Yaphank and found the soldiers this time were more grim and serious and cynical about blatant flagwaving. This Is The Army responded to this mood and became a hit both in the US and overseas. After the war, his biggest successes were the musicals Annie Get Your Gun, and Call Me Madam ╤ his flow of tunes seemed as spontaneous in his sixties as in his twenties. He summed up his lifetime of songs this way: ╥White Christmas made the most money but God Bless America is the closest to me emotionally.╙
Irving Berlin, born Temum, Siberia, May 11, 1888; died New York,
