So, Here's to You, Irving Berlin!

By Michael Walsh

Well, yip, yip, yaphank, and let's all wish a happy 100th birthday to Irving Berlin. This week everybody's doin' it -- celebrating the boy born Israel Baline in Russia a century ago, who came to the U.S., reached for the moon and found that there's no business like show business. God bless America: Berlin's songs are his life.

Isn't this a lovely day? Jerome Kern once summed up Berlin's place in & American popular music by observing: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music." Way back when, George M. Cohan spotted the appeal of the man who had "named himself after an English actor and a German city." Berlin, said the Yankee doodle dandy, "writes a song with a good lyric, a lyric that rhymes, good music, music you don't have to dress up to listen to. He is uptown, but he is there with the old downtown hard sell."

So say it with music. Has there ever been a songwriter like Berlin? Play a simple melody, he wrote, and he has: about 1,500 songs, show tunes and standards, ragtime and ballads, slow wistful waltzes and brisk up-tempo two- steps, reveries and reveilles. I love a piano, he sang, and have man and instrument ever been more symbiotic, the one giving voice to the other?

Holed up in his Manhattan mansion, a recluse for decades, Berlin is still writing songs and, some say, whole shows. Call me up some rainy afternoon: the Garbo of composers, Berlin is glimpsed only infrequently on one of his constitutionals, out for an old-fashioned walk under blue skies. But he's still handy with the telephone, dialing old friends and serenading them in a raspy voice, chewing the fat or just doin' what comes natur'lly. Let me sing, and I'm happy.

How does he do it? Berlin never learned to read music, employing assistants to notate his tunes and help harmonize them. "I'm a little like a poet who can write verses that people like, but who can't parse the sentences in his poems," he once said. Well, he isn't worried: any high school kid can parse. He always knew exactly what he was doing. In 1920, when he was still talking to the press, Berlin offered nine rules for composing a song. Write it for the average voice, for either sex to sing. The title should be strong, the lyrics euphonious. It should have "heart interest" and be "original in idea, words and music." Keep it simple. And absolutely no amateurs need apply: "The songwriter must look upon his work as a business, that is, to make a success of it, he must work and work and then WORK." Always.

This is the life. Hard work has made Berlin a multimillionaire, but just how many multi or millions he has, nobody knows, and he's not telling. (His first, and last, authorized biography, written by Alexander Woollcott, was published in 1925.) Berlin may have lost the knack for writing hits -- his last show, Mr. President, was a 1962 flop -- but the old downtown hard sell has never deserted him. He guards his copyrights with a care that borders on niggardliness, even though he's outlived some of them (notably Alexander's Ragtime Band), and he is fiercely, even pettily, protective of all his music. It all belongs to me.

In February, his lawyer served a cease-and-desist order on a New York City nightclub that was putting on a whole show of his music, even though it was a tribute to him. When Manhattan's 92nd Street Y added a fourth performance of each program in its "Lyrics and Lyricists" series -- this season devoted entirely to Berlin -- the composer balked at the extra performance and forced the Y to cancel it. Better luck next time, but say it isn't so.

Some of his protectiveness might stem from his origins in the hardscrabble Lower East Side, where he sang for pennies on street corners and in saloons until he landed a job as a singing waiter. His media shyness may stem from the days when his efforts to marry his wife of 62 years, Heiress Ellin Mackay, were the stuff of a yellow journalist's dreams. Her father objected; the headlines screamed. I've got my love to keep me warm: Berlin and the girl he married secretly in 1926 have raised three daughters and today live comfortably in their home on swank Beekman Place. No slumming on Park Avenue for them.

Berlin's songs are as much part of American culture as any folk song. They seem to have been with us always, defining the spirit of a nation in an artless melody, or an unexpected harmonic twist. Berlin's cares have been ours, his sentiments shared, his moods universal. When his first wife, Dorothy Goetz, died of typhoid after their honeymoon in Cuba, Berlin poured his heart into a song, venting his grief in When I Lost You. A stint in the Army during World War I inspired the serviceman's lament, Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning. And what would the holidays be without White Christmas, or springtime on Fifth Avenue without an Easter Parade?

Berlin is sitting out the Wednesday-night birthday bash in his honor at Carnegie Hall, but some friends will be there singing his songs: Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Billy Eckstine and even members of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, to whom Berlin assigned royalties of God Bless America, the country's unofficial national anthem. He has always associated with the best. Think of Fred Astaire, resplendent in Top Hat, White Tie and Tails, or the brassy Ethel Merman, hitting the mark in Annie Get Your Gun and ; belting out There's No Business Like Show Business.

So, here's to you Irving Berlin; at 100, you keep coming back like a song. For you, a pretty girl is like a melody; for us, your melodies are like a pretty girl -- irresistible. On May 11, you'll be home, probably painting or picking out a new tune on the piano. But you can't brush us off: we'll be singing. Maybe we don't have to dress up, but just this once we can be forgiven for puttin' on the ritz; they say it's wonderful. So let's break out the top hat and white tie. Let's face the music and dance.