TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100289/10028900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.1 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 84

America's Master Songwriter

Irving Berlin: 1888-1989


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.