For most of the 20th century, everybody has paid court to the genius of Irving Berlin, the most perennially popular songwriter in American history. But nobody has ever been able to get an emotional or intellectual handle on him, partially because he was a recessive personality in a business of flamboyant egomaniacs.
There was a biography a few years ago, by Laurence Bergreen, but it was of the glass-was-half-empty school, and obviously written from too far outside Berlin's time and emotional makeup to make more than a cursory attempt at connection.So Mary Ellin Barrett's "Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir" (Simon and Schuster, $23) is more than just an exquisitely written book; it fills a gaping hole in show business history.
"Well," laughs Barrett via phone from New York, "I am the daughter of two writers, and I've been writing since I got out of college."
Barrett's story is of a careful, loving, "marvelous" father with a slightly doleful center and a tenuous grip on optimism deriving from his Russian melancholy. Berlin had the immigrant's passion for his adopted country, but he also had the fear of it all vanishing tomorrow and being slammed back into poverty's wall.
And, as a matter of fact, it happened. Berlin lost his entire fortune, about $5 million, in the stock market crash of 1929. Since he had married a wealthy woman whose trust had been conservatively invested, she was able to help out, much to Berlin's displeasure.
This was a crucial period for Berlin, for the loss of his fortune coincided - and may have triggered - one of the composer's periodic dry spells. The loss of the money wasn't the worst of it, either. On Christmas Day 1929, Irving Berlin Jr. died at the age of 1 month of what seems to have been sudden infant death syndrome.
"I think all those were elements in the depression. Also the fact that he had just hit 40. Nobody talked of a mid-life crisis in those days, but he'd been on the go since he was 19 or earlier. And he was slowing down in the sense that he didn't write as much as he had. In this period he called `a dry spell,' there were huge songs - `Puttin' on the Ritz,' `Let Me Sing' and `I'm Happy' - but he felt he wasn't writing as well as he used to.
"And the first batch of movies he did were only so-so; there were contributing factors to a loss of confidence."
The Berlin his daughter writes about was the domestic Berlin, the man happy in the center of his family and friends. "My father needed that quiet center; he was a very uxorious man. Before he acquired a wife, he would disappear when he had to supply a score, usually to Atlantic City or Palm Beach. In the Woollcott (biography), there's a story about him needing to supply a score for the third Music Box revue. He was in Atlantic City with an arranger for a month, holed up, and nobody knew. He needed privacy and quiet to work.
"His study was on the top floor of his apartment, away from everyone. He liked seeing people, he liked entertaining, but he didn't like to plan ahead. He liked to go to the theater with my mother and see people at the Stork Club afterwards, but not necessarily to plan it."
Not the least valuable aspects of Barrett's memoir are the portraits she paints of Berlin's intimates, who were sometimes famous - Fred Astaire - and sometimes immensely powerful men without a public profile - Joe Schenck, president of 20th Century Fox and Barrett's godfather. As far as Barrett was concerned, they were all just family friends without any special portfolio.
"It was Joe that introduced me to the sound stages of Fox," she said. "To me, growing up, he was just a nice guy, a pal, who took an interest in my schoolwork. He was the one that could tell my father he was wrong, and my father would listen and take it."
Barrett's book is definitive in at least one area, the story of the 36-year-old Jewish songwriter's courtship and marriage to the Catholic, 21-year-old Ellin Mackay, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy silver magnates. Clarence Mackay, Ellin's father, adamantly opposed the marriage, and, aside from the matter of Berlin's religion, which was in and of itself calculated to irritate the garden variety anti-Semitism of The 400, there was the question of Berlin's suitability. He was, after all, nothing but a songwriter.
All in all, it was a prime piece of hypocrisy, for Clarence Mackay's mistress was the opera star Anna Case.
In spite of dire predictions, it seems to have been that rarity, a genuinely good marriage of mutual devotion that lasted 61 years.
Although Barrett's characterization of her father is almost completely positive, her mother emerges as a considerably spikier personality.
"I loved both of them a lot. In some ways, my father was an easier personality because he was less volatile. He was very steady, and my mother had an Irish temper. My relationship with my mother was much more tempestuous than with my father. With him, it was even-keeled.
"She made life terrifically fun, but she could get after you in a way that was not always agreeable. She was more judgmental, and you could not always tell how she would react. He had less automatically fixed opinions."
So what kind of man was Irving Berlin? His daughter tells a lovely story about the period when Berlin's genius had once again kicked in - "Top Hat" and after. He was writing the songs for "Follow the Fleet," including "Let's Face the Music and Dance," the favorite song of many Berlin fans.
As it happened, Mary Ellin was learning the piano at the same time and they would compete for access. "Can't you see I'm practicing?" she would snap, and he would quietly walk away, as she writes, "with no sense of his priority or my temerity."
Berlin had considerable integrity. Barrett tells a story about the original production of "As Thousands Cheer," when the cast, including Clifton Webb, Marilyn Miller and Helen Broderick, refused to take their bows with Ethel Waters because she was black. Berlin replied simply that he respected their feelings, and since they felt so strongly about it, it would probably be better if there were no bows at all. After due consideration by the offended actors, Waters took her bows with the rest of the cast.
Barrett mostly draws a discreet curtain over the last 20 or so years of her father's life, not because he was incapacitated, but because both he and his wife withdrew into themselves, even to the point of avoiding contact with their children and grandchildren.
He continued to work, writing lyrics as recently as two years before he died. Barrett says at least four of the late songs are quite good and worthy of performance.
As for his emotional difficulties, his daughter says that "he had very severe depressions. Some people don't take getting old very well, and he was very focused on his work and family. Well, family changes, the kids grow up and move out. You get old and your friends die. You slow down, you don't like it and it's hard.
"In my father's case, when you go from being as creative, active and engaged as he was, to being out of the whirl. . . . One of his problems was that he didn't take a lot of pleasure in honors, he didn't like to get up and talk about the old days. It was not the old shows, it was the next show, and after a while there was no next show."
Berlin took the shift in popular tastes very hard; his last show, 1962's "Mr. President," was a famous failure, and there was no way a man in his mid-70s could compete with rock 'n' roll. Berlin was not so presumptuous as to imagine that, in an inherently transient a business like entertainment, obsolescence would strike everybody but him, but that didn't make the inevitable any easier to deal with.
"He did realize it intellectually. He talked to his friend Bob Kimball about needing `to make way for the next generation. The public didn't seem to be buying my wares; maybe it's time to close up shop.' "
"But intellectually is one thing. Inside, he kept writing songs till he was 100. It never stopped. He kept dictating stuff over the phone."