Irving Berlin (1888–1989)

Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidore Baline in 1888, in Mohilev, Eastern Russia. He was one of eight children; the family was poor. His father, Moses, was a shochet—he slaughtered chickens according to prescribed Jewish religious laws—and a cantor in the synagogue, while his mother Leah looked after the children and took in piecework. In 1893, the Baline family, like so many other Russian Jewish families at this time, fled the anti-Jewish pogroms, and settled on New York’s Lower East Side. The boy received virtually no formal education, either academic or musical, and by the age of eight he was out on the streets of Lower Manhattan, working as an errand boy, delivering newspapers, and doing whatever he could to help support his family. When Israel was 13, his father died, and the boy left home rather than be a financial burden to his mother. He inherited his father’s modest singing talent, and sang for pennies on the sidewalks. He found casual engagements from time to time as a chorus boy, and it was while he was working as a singing waiter in Chinatown in 1907 that he earned his first songwriting credit for the words to “Marie from Sunny Italy.” That year, he changed his name to Irving Berlin.

By 1909 he had regular employment as a staff lyricist on Tin Pan Alley—a nickname given originally to an actual street in Manhattan (West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue) where many popular music publishers had their offices. He caught the ear of the American public with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911. It was the first of a prolific stream of pop songs, show tunes, and movie scores which continued virtually unabated for the next 51 years. His first complete musical was Watch Your Step, which featured the hit song, “A Simple Melody.” More musicals and hit songs followed quickly: Stop! Look! Listen! included “The Girl on the Magazine Cover” and “I Love a Piano.” Yip, Yip, Yaphank, a patriotic musical revue performed in 1918 by soldiers, contained the memorable and witty “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning!” Berlin once said that “a patriotic song is an emotion and you must not embarrass an audience with it, or they will hate your guts.” Berlin again wrote patriotic songs and anthems at the outbreak of World War II, and the creator of “This Is the Army, Mister Jones” and “God Bless America” clearly had an unerring instinct for tickling the funny bones and touching the hearts of a nation at war.

Irving Berlin wrote or made significant contributions to more than 20 Broadway shows, including Face the Music (1932), As Thousands Cheer (1933), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Call Me Madam (1950). His final musical, Mr. President, was staged in 1962.

Berlin’s long and distinguished career as a song writer for the movies began with the earliest talkies. He contributed “Blue Skies” to the 1927 Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer, and wrote the music and lyrics for the Marx Brothers’ musical comedy The Cocoanuts (1929). In the 1930s, as the Depression hit Broadway, Berlin relocated to Hollywood. Among the most well-loved of all Berlin’s movie musicals was the string of musicals produced between 1935 and 1939, which starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and included Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Carefree (1938). Astaire’s nonchalance, debonair good humor, and almost weightless tenor voice were beautifully suited to Berlin’s witty lyrics and deceptively simple melodies, and these lighthearted movies were hugely popular in an America that was still suffering economically and was falling increasingly under the shadow of impending war.

For those critics who compare Berlin unfavorably as a lyricist with Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart, it is worth examining the song “Top Hat,” as it is presented in the film. Astaire stands on a stage, dapper in top hat, white tie, and tails, in front of a line of dancers in the same attire. He carries a slender walking stick with which he strikes poses and gestures as he dances and sings, boasting to the audience about the splendid evening he has in store. We understand that although he will be rubbing shoulders with high society, he is not among its members—while the director, Mark Sandrich, underlines the joke by suggesting that the line of men behind Astaire are. They are slightly snooty behind his back as he tells us: “I’m going out my dear, to breath an atmosphere that simply reeks with class / And I trust that you’ll forgive my dust when I step on the gas.” The mock gentility of “I trust” jars comically with the rest of the line, and that single phrase, “reeks of class,” conveys perfectly that Astaire himself is an interloper, a parvenu, someone who doesn’t really belong in high society. It also indicates Berlin’s complete mastery of tone, and the subtlety of his verbal effects. “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?,” and “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket” share the same lightness of lyrical touch.

In all, Irving Berlin wrote the complete scores for 18 films and contributed songs to, and inspired, many more, among them Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946), Easter Parade (1948), Annie Get Your Gun (1950), White Christmas (1954), and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954).

Like Fred Astaire in the classic sequence in Top Hat, Irving Berlin knew how it felt to be treated like an interloper in American high society. In 1926, he married Ellin Mackay, the daughter of Clarence Mackay, president of the Postal Telegraph Company and a leading Catholic layman. Berlin had been married before, in 1912, but his wife had died of typhoid contracted on their honeymoon in Cuba. Because of Berlin’s previous marriage, Jewish identity, and profession, which Mackay regarded as disreputable, Mackay opposed the marriage and never accepted Berlin into his family. Despite this hostility, the marriage was deeply happy and lasted until Ellin’s death in 1988. They had three daughters.

Berlin supported many charities and devoted a good deal of money and time to worthwhile foundations and organizations. He was always deeply conscious of his heritage, and did a great deal to advance American Jewish causes. In 1944 he was honored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for “advancing the aims of the conference to eliminate religious and racial conflict.” Five years later, he was honored by the New York YMHA as one of “12 outstanding Americans of the Jewish faith.” In 1955, President Eisenhower presented him with a gold medal in recognition of his services in composing many patriotic songs for the country. Berlin assigned the copyright and accompanying royalties for “God Bless America” to the God Bless America Fund, which has raised millions of dollars for the Boy Scouts of America® and the Girl Scouts® of the USA.

Always a rather private man, Irving Berlin became reclusive and somewhat petulant in his later years. In 1957, he was outraged when he heard Elvis Presley’s rock and roll recording of “White Christmas,” and instructed his staff to call radio stations all over the country, urging them not to play it. In the late Sixties, he stopped writing songs altogether, rebuffed interviewers, and refused research requests from authors. Increasingly, he relied on the telephone to maintain contact with the world, and would talk to friends for hours each day as he became more and more remote from life in the later twentieth century.

Irving Berlin died on September 22, 1989, at the age of 101, leaving a catalogue of over 1,500 songs. His contribution to American music and culture was immense. As his fellow songwriter Jerome Kern observed, “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.”