TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100289/10028900.049

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 6KB | 109 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.