America's Master Songwriter

By Michael Walsh

Irving Berlin knew what made his music so timelessly popular. "A good song," he once said, "embodies the feelings of the mob, and a songwriter is not much more than a mirror which reflects those feelings. I write a song to please the public -- and if the public doesn't like it in New Haven, I change it!"

The public liked it. When Berlin died last week at 101, he was the nation's most beloved songwriter, a Russian Jewish immigrant born Israel Baline, who rose from Cherry Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side to pride of place on Tin Pan Alley. Berlin's song is ended. But each time someone gazes up at blue skies, or wonders how deep is the ocean, or says it with music, his melodies linger on.

In comparison with his great contemporaries, Berlin wrote simple songs. Not for him the intricate rhythms and trick accents of a George Gershwin, although the strangely sinister Puttin' on the Ritz twists and turns back on itself like a stutter-stepping snake. Nor did Berlin, who wrote his own words, generally show Cole Porter's kind of cleverness, although he could put some English on a homely sentiment in a song like Lazy (1924): "I wanna peep through the deep/ Tangled wildwood,/ Counting sheep/ 'Til I sleep/ Like a child would./ With a great big valise full of books to read where it's peaceful/ While I'm killing time being lazy."

Berlin's musical signature was the sheer inevitability of his songs, the way they seemed to have always been around, like folk songs. Surely White Christmas is an authentic carol, not a number composed for the 1942 movie Holiday Inn. God Bless America must have been sung first by Washington's troops at Valley Forge, not by Kate Smith in 1938. And didn't Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning emerge from a pioneer encampment and not from a 1918 army musical called Yip, Yip, Yaphank?

Well, no. All three were products of a deceptively sophisticated professional who grew up with the country, reflecting America's experiences in his music. When the Baline family fled the Russian pogroms in 1892 for the tenements of New York, young Israel was four. The Statue of Liberty was only a couple of years older. His father Moses, a cantor, died when the boy was eight, so he hit the streets in search of work. Izzy sang for pennies anywhere he could find listeners, finally landing a job as a singing waiter in a raffish Chinatown bistro; it was there that he wrote his first song, Marie from Sunny Italy, in partnership with the cafe's pianist. When the song was published in 1907, a printer's error had given him a new name: I. Berlin.

"Once you start singing," Berlin said in later years, "you start thinking of writing your own songs. It's as simple as that." Although he could not read or write music (he never did learn), he could pick out a melody on the piano in the key of F sharp. In 1909 Berlin, now calling himself Irving because it sounded tonier, landed a $25-a-week job with a Tin Pan Alley publisher. Two years later, he picked his way into American musical history with Alexander's Ragtime Band. More a march than a rag, it made Berlin famous, erroneously, as the "ragtime king"; what it really made him was king of the pop song.

The hit parade had begun. When his wife Dorothy Goetz died in 1912, Berlin poured out his grief in his first real ballad, When I Lost You. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 brought forth A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody; 1924 saw both the tenderly brooding What'll I Do? and the valse triste All Alone. His courtship of heiress Ellin Mackay, granddaughter of an owner of the Comstock Lode, was breathlessly followed in the press, and their secret marriage in 1926, over her father's vigorous objections, made headlines. It also made standards like Always.

For a short time, Berlin felt himself mined out. But an invitation from Moss Hart to collaborate on Face the Music in 1932 opened a rich new vein of melody. Depression America fought off the gathering gloom with the cheery bounce of Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee. For the first-act finale of As Thousands Cheer (1933), he dusted off an old clinker called Smile and Show Your Dimple, put a new bonnet on it and called it Easter Parade. Two years later, it was on to Hollywood, where Berlin wrote many of the tunes that sent % Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flying into celluloid legend. Back on Broadway in 1946, he achieved his greatest success with Annie Get Your Gun, which gave showfolk their brassy anthem, There's No Business Like Show Business.

A sparrow of a man who always had trouble sleeping and could never sit still, Berlin worked at a furious pace. During a production conference for Annie Get Your Gun, it was decided that the show needed another song, so the composer rushed home. Six minutes later, the show's director got a phone call. "Listen to this," said Berlin, who launched into the first verse of Anything You Can Do. He had written it in the taxi.

"It must be hell being Irving Berlin," a music publisher once lamented. "The poor guy's his own toughest competition." Few could match his output: more than 800 published songs and almost as many unpublished. Nor could they equal his business acumen. Fiercely protective of the copyrights to his songs, he helped establish the principle that every performance of a composer's work deserved a royalty. At the end, the boy from Cherry Street was worth millions.

His last show was Mr. President (1962), a failure. But he continued to pick out tunes just the same. "The question is," he would ask rhetorically, "are you going to be a crabby old man or are you going to write another song?" He watched his parade of birthdays go by quietly, embarrassed by the fuss made by the world at large. Though fans gathered outside his Manhattan town house for a 100th birthday serenade, he was unimpressed with his longevity. "Age," he observed, "is no mark of merit unless you do something constructive with it." What he did was indisputable.