Berlin, Irving, 1888-1989

Irving Berlin (1888-1989), a writer and composer of popular songs, wrote "I Like Ike", which was used by Eisenhower's staff during the 1952 presidential campaign. Eisenhower presented Berlin with a special gold medal from the U.S. Congress in 1955 in recognition of his patriotic and popular songs.

Irving Berlin (born Israel Beilin; Yiddish: ישראל ביילין‎;[1] May 11, 1888[2] – September 22, 1989) was a Russian American composer and lyricist, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in history. His music forms a great part of the Great American Songbook. Born in Imperial Russia (in the area that is now Belarus), Berlin arrived in the United States at the age of five. He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", in 1907, receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights,[3] and had his first major international hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", in 1911. He also was an owner of the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. For much of his career Berlin could not read sheet music, and was such a limited piano player that he could only play in the key of F-sharp; he used his custom piano equipped with a transposing lever when he needed to play in keys other than F-sharp.[4]

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as Berlin's native Russia, which also "flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania". Over the years he was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his stated aim being to "reach the heart of the average American," whom he saw as the "real soul of the country".[5] In doing so, said Walter Cronkite, at Berlin's 100th birthday tribute, he "helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives".[6]

He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which made him famous before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 20 original Broadway shows and 15 original Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards.[1] Many songs became popular themes and anthems, including "Alexander's Ragtime Band", "Easter Parade", "Puttin' on the Ritz", "Cheek to Cheek", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)", and "There's No Business Like Show Business". His Broadway musical and 1943 film This Is the Army,[7] with Ronald Reagan, had Kate Smith singing Berlin's "God Bless America" which was first performed in 1938.[8]

Berlin's songs have reached the top of the charts 25 times and have been extensively re-recorded by numerous singers including The Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Tiny Tim, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Cher, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan, Ruth Etting, Fanny Brice, Marilyn Miller, Rudy Vallée, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Jerry Garcia, Taco, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Buble, Lady Gaga, and Christina Aguilera.

Berlin died in 1989 at the age of 101. Composer Douglas Moore sets Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters, and includes him instead with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, as a "great American minstrel"—someone who has "caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe."[5] Composer George Gershwin called him "the greatest songwriter that has ever lived",[9]: 117  and composer Jerome Kern concluded that "Irving Berlin has no place in American music—he is American music."[10]

Berlin was born Israel Beilin[11] on May 11, 1888, in the Russian Empire.[12] Although his family came from the shtetl of Tolochin (today in Belarus), documents say that he was born in Tyumen, Siberia.[12] He was one of eight children of Moses (1848–1901) and Lena Lipkin Beilin (1850–1922). His father, a cantor in a synagogue, uprooted the family to America, as did many other Jewish families in the late 19th century.

On September 14, 1893,[13] the family arrived at Ellis Island in New York City. The family left the old continent from Antwerp aboard the SS Rijnland from the Red Star Line. When they arrived, Israel was put in a pen with his brother and five sisters until immigration officials declared them fit to be allowed into the city.[14]

After their arrival, the name "Beilin" was changed to "Baline".

Having left school around the age of thirteen,[12] Berlin had few survival skills and realized that formal employment was out of the question. His only ability was acquired from his father's vocation as a singer, and he joined with several other youngsters who went to saloons on the Bowery and sang to customers. Itinerant young singers like them were common on the Lower East Side. Berlin would sing a few of the popular ballads he heard on the street, hoping people would pitch him a few pennies. From these seamy surroundings, he became streetwise, with real and lasting education. Music was his only source of income and he picked up the language and culture of the ghetto lifestyle.[19]

Berlin learned what kind of songs appealed to audiences, writes Bergreen: "well-known tunes expressing simple sentiments were the most reliable."[15]: 17  He soon began plugging songs at Tony Pastor's Music Hall in Union Square and in 1906, when he was 18, got a job as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. Besides serving drinks, he sang made-up "blue" parodies of hit songs to the delight of customers.

Biographer Charles Hamm writes that in Berlin's free time after hours, he taught himself to play the piano.[20] Never having lessons, after the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and begin improvising tunes.[5] He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", written in collaboration with the Pelham's resident pianist Mike Nicholson,[12] in 1907, receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights.[3] A spelling error on the sheet music to the published song included the spelling of his name as "I. Berlin".[21]

Berlin continued writing and playing music at Pelham Cafe and developing an early style. He liked the words to other people's songs but sometimes the rhythms were "kind of boggy," and he might change them. One night he delivered some hits composed by his friend, George M. Cohan, another kid who was getting known on Broadway with his own songs. When Berlin ended with Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy," notes Whitcomb, "everybody in the joint applauded the feisty little fellow."

Berlin rose as a songwriter in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway. In 1911, Emma Carus introduced his first world-famous hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", followed by a performance from Berlin himself at the Friars' Frolic of 1911.[1] He became an instant celebrity, and the featured performer later that year at Oscar Hammerstein's vaudeville house, where he introduced dozens of other songs. The New York Telegraph described how two hundred of his street friends came to see "their boy" on stage: "All the little writer could do was to finger the buttons on his coat while tears ran down his cheeks—in a vaudeville house!"[20]: ix 

In February 1912, after a brief whirlwind courtship, he married 20-year-old Dorothy Goetz of Buffalo, New York, the sister of one of Berlin's collaborators, E. Ray Goetz. During their honeymoon in Havana, she contracted typhoid fever, and doctors were unable to treat her illness when she returned to New York. She died July 17 of that year. Left with writer's block for months after Goetz's death, he eventually wrote his first ballad, "When I Lost You," to express his grief.


With wife Ellin, c. 1920s
Years later in the 1920s, he fell in love with a young heiress, Ellin Mackay, a daughter of Clarence Mackay, the socially prominent head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, and an author in her own right.[56] Because Berlin was Jewish and she was a Catholic of Irish descent, their life was followed in every possible detail by the press, which found the romance of an immigrant from the Lower East Side and a young heiress a good story.[5]

They met in 1924, and her father opposed the match from the start. He went so far as to send her off to Europe to find other suitors and forget Berlin. However, Berlin wooed her with letters and song over the airwaves such as "Remember" and "All Alone," and she wrote him daily.[57] Biographer Philip Furia writes that newspapers rumored they were engaged before she returned from Europe, and some Broadway shows even performed skits of the "lovelorn songwriter". After her return, she and Berlin were besieged by the press, which followed them everywhere. Variety reported that her father vowed that their marriage "would only happen 'over my dead body.'"[53] As a result, they decided to elope and were married in a simple civil ceremony at the Municipal Building away from media attention.

The wedding news made the front-page of The New York Times. The marriage took her father by surprise, and he was stunned upon reading about it. The bride's mother, however, who was at the time divorced from Mackay, wanted her daughter to follow the dictates of her own heart. Berlin had gone to her mother's home before the wedding and had obtained her blessing.[58][57]

There followed reports that the bride's father disowned his daughter because of the marriage. In response, Berlin gave the rights to "Always", a song still played at weddings, to her as a wedding present.[12] Ellin was thereby guaranteed a steady income regardless of what might happen with the marriage. For years, Mackay refused to speak to the Berlins, but they reconciled after the Berlins lost their first son, Irving Berlin Jr., on Christmas Day in 1928, less than one month after he was born.[12]

Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until she died in July 1988 at the age of 85. They had four children during their 63 years of marriage: Mary Ellin Barrett in 1926; Irving Berlin, Jr., who died in infancy in 1928; Linda Louise Emmet in 1932; Elizabeth Irving Peters in 1936.[5]

Berlin died in his sleep at his 17 Beekman Place town house in Manhattan on September 22, 1989, of heart attack and natural causes at the age of 101. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.[5]

On the evening following the announcement of his death, the marquee lights of Broadway playhouses were dimmed before curtain time in his memory. President George H. W. Bush said Berlin was "a legendary man whose words and music will help define the history of our nation". Just minutes before the President's statement was released, he joined a crowd of thousands to sing Berlin's "God Bless America" at a luncheon in Boston. Former President Ronald Reagan, who costarred in Berlin's 1943 musical This Is the Army, said, "Nancy and I are deeply saddened by the death of a wonderfully talented man whose musical genius delighted and stirred millions and will live on forever."[65]

Morton Gould, the composer and conductor who was president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), of which Berlin was a founder, said, "What to me is fascinating about this unique genius is that he touched so many people in so many age groups over so many years. He sounded our deepest feelings—happiness, sadness, celebration, loneliness." Ginger Rogers, who danced to Berlin tunes with Fred Astaire, told The Associated Press upon hearing of his death that working with Berlin had been "like heaven".[65][b]