Izzy's Legacy

By Gerald Clarke

AS THOUSANDS CHEER: THE LIFE OF IRVING BERLIN

by Laurence Bergreen

Viking; 658 pages; $24.95

"Irving Berlin has no place in American music," Jerome Kern once said. "He is American music." That was in 1924, when Berlin was only 36 and no one had yet heard -- hard as it now is to imagine -- such hits as White Christmas, Easter Parade, There's No Business Like Show Business and that spirited rival to the national anthem, God Bless America. Less than a year after Berlin's death at the astonishing age of 101, Kern's appraisal is still accurate.

When they came to the U.S. from Russia in 1893, Israel Baline's family spoke only Yiddish. Little Izzy soon realized that if he was to prosper, he would have to learn the ways of his adopted country. Manhattan's Lower East Side turned out to be a good school of the American idiom: Berlin literally sang for his supper in saloons that charged a nickel for a glass of beer and 10 cents for hard liquor.

Tired of singing other people's songs, he started composing his own. Never able to write music, he sang or pounded out his tunes on a piano, and a faithful secretary would notate them on paper. For his lyrics he needed no help at all, and his style was characterized by an elegant simplicity. Working from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., Berlin would sometimes turn out five songs a night, an output so astounding that friends charged, only half jokingly, that he had help from some anonymous tunesmith. His first hit was that all-time rouser Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911). Then during the teens and '20s, he followed with a song for every mood, from the pensive Always and What'll I Do? to the comical theme song of the World War I doughboy, Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.

These deceptively simple tunes and lyrics brought him riches, but if Laurence Bergreen's unauthorized biography is to be believed, they did not bring him anything approximating happiness. "Irving, you look as if you slept well last night," a friend once remarked to the famous insomniac. "Yes," Berlin glumly replied, "but I dreamed that I didn't." Berlin refused to cooperate with any biographer, and his family claims that Bergreen's book is studded with inaccuracies. It is, in many places, unsympathetic and even hostile to its subject. But Berlin's admirers can always turn to his more upbeat autobiography: the songs the world has sung for most of this century and doubtless will still be singing in the one that follows.