The Story of The Russian Immigrant Who Created America’s Most Beloved Music—Irving Berlin

And we continue with our American stories. 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. Here to tell the story of Irving Berlin is best-selling author Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography As Thousands Cheer the Life of Irving Berlin. Let’s take a listen.

People had wanted to write some sort of biography for a long time, and when I began, I thought he was dead. Most people thought he was dead. Now, as it turns out, he lives about a quarter of a mile from where I live now on Beekman Place, in the same neighborhood, almost in Manhattan. But he’d been a wreck clues for so long, for decades, you know. It was like Greta Garbo: “I want to be alone.” It was like that. And he was not only a shut-in. He didn’t communicate with people, and when he did, he was very, very cranky, and he really only talked to his doctor and his accountant. And by then his wife was deceased, and I think his daughter stayed away. It’s sad because, you know, this was a great songwriter, a cultural hero, really an example of industriousness. But he suffered from mental illness, paranoiaus vinility—whatever you want to call it. I don’t know how you would define it. And it became pronounced when he was about 60 years old, after the failure of Broadway show Missed Liberty. So it extended for almost 40 years for zero. I mean, it’s incredible. So I was curious what happened to Irving Berlin. How could this greatest of all American songwriters back in sensus? Apparently, you know, very charming, sensitive, bright person had become so reclusive. Also, I started hearing people explain, “Oh, yes, didn’t you realize he was an opium addict? Didn’t you realize this?” In the absence of information, these rumors crept in. They weren’t true. The truth was both more everyday, which was his chronic depression, and there was just false. You know, there were people who were envy as of him or spite. You know, I was thinking, when Paul McCartney, at one point, vanished from public view for a while and everybody thought he was dead, and then it turned out he was and he was just taking a breather, you know. It was kind of like that. So I was intrigued by what had happened and how this person who was an untrained, self-taught musician became—as Alexandra Wilcint said—”he is American music.” So how did that happen? So that was what I was curious about.

Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.
Oh, you can’t.
Yes, I can.
Oh, you can’t.
Yes, I can.
Oh, you can’t.
Yes, I can.
Yes, I can.
Anything you can be.
I can be greater, sooner or later.
I’m greater than you.
No, you’re not.
Yes, I am. No, you’re not. Yes, I am. No, you’re not. Yes, I am. Yes, I am.
I can chewed up cartridges, way a single cartridge.
I can get a sparrow with a bow and arrow.
I can live on bread and cheese.
And only on that.
I’m soaking a rat.
Any O you can reach, I can go higher.
I can sing anything higher than you.
Oh, you can’t.
Yes, I can.
Oh, you can.
Yes, I can.
Oh, you can. Yes, I can’t.
Oh, you can. I can.

There were a lot of documents going back to his immigration as a child to New York. His father, a kind of sad story as a cantor in Russia, fleeing the depression there with his family, coming here, unable to find work, becoming a butcher. You know, the very, very difficult lives of immigrants—Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish—who were trying to make their way in the United States. But it was a tough struggle. It was not a pretty picture, and there were no obvious paths to success. The one that Berlin started to take was as a street musician, and he lived on the street, so he really came from a very, very—as, now, they would now say—disadvantaged background. So how did he manage to overcome it? A lot of it was his incredible work ethic. He was absolutely indomitable. He was also honest. I did not hear stories about Irving Berlin cheating people, or gambling, or being a womanizer, or drug addict, or all the other things that seemed to go along with some of this mythology. He was, in some ways, kind of a solitary genius, although after a while he became associated with many, many celebrities because of what he did. And the most intriguing part to me was, how did he write his music if he was not a trained musician and he didn’t go to any music school in Russia? He didn’t go to anything like that here. Not only that, he played his pieces on especially prepared piano. People thought it was unique to Irving Berlin, but it wasn’t. And he played only the black keys. So part of it was because if he put his fingers on the keyboard, deal, they stuck up, they were right there. Not only that, but to change keys, he wasn’t able to do that in that very difficult to learn, especially for somebody like me. Fingering way. It was a transposing piano. It was an invention that many self-taught or uneducated Tin Pan Alley composers used. So there was a bar underneath it. You changed it and the piano changed key, so that simplified things. There are some video demonstrations in the early fifties on TV where he showed how he did it.

Tell me, Irv. Yeah, this is the funniest-looking thing.
I thought, this is a piano, donting that it isn’t a piano dot piano. This is the French pianol I ever own. It’s what we call a transposing keyboard on the outworks. Yeah, well, you see, I only play.
That shop in the black, oh, the black keys.
That’s right. Now, with this movable, play some cleeriod.
He wasn’t the only one. People kept saying, you see, only one who had this special, unique prepared piano. But that’s not true. There are a bunch of others, because Berlin wasn’t the only unchained songwriter trying to make his way. There were others. He was part of a group of, you know, these were immigrants from Eastern Europe. They were preceded by Irish immigrants, George M. Cohan, and other songwriters who were more or less following the same path. They were also fighting intense oppression or discrimination and making their way. Berlin had both advantages and disadvantages. Eastern European Jews from his background were considered sort of beyond the pale, and so that made it difficult. On the other hand, he really had his finger on the pulse of the city and, through some genius or intuition, the American psyche. Now, how he did that, I don’t really know, but keep in mind, he wrote “God Bless America.”

Ah, bless America, that I love.
Stand beside.
And guide.
Through the night with a light from the book, from the Mountains to the Prey to the olds wide with thee. God Bless, Americal, My Home.

Sweet, and many other songs, like “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas.”
Ah angreaving love of word.
Christmas, just like the LODs? Are you still all?
How did he do this? This is magic, and I think part of it was genius and part of it was strategy. He was aware as a composer that songs geared to holidays were very popular. They were occasional.

And you’ve been listening to Lawrence Bergreen tell the story of Irving Berlin and how he came to America—well, to escape religious persecution. Jews had been suffering in Russia for pogroms, they were called at the time. And then, well, life wasn’t easy for his father here. The opportunities didn’t present themselves readily or easily. But to the son, to Irving, well, he started on the streets as a self-taught street musician, and from there his talent and, more importantly, his work ethos, his work ethic would prevail. When we come back, more of the remarkable story, the absolutely American story of Irving Berlin here on our American Story. And we continue with our American stories and the life of Irving Berlin, as told by best-selling author Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography As Thousands Cheer the Life of Irving Berlin. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Of course, “White Christmas,” which he wrote in about 1942 on this piano, has become the best-selling song, the most popular song of all time. You know, it was originally popularized by Bing Crosby, but then countless times there was a movie White Christmas, and the way it took off was phenomenal. And most people think it’s a folk tune that, in a way, is a compliment, because Berlin knew how to make songs sound as if they were already there. They weren’t complicated, they weren’t tricky. He seemed to find a tune, her inspiration, that was just there and write it down. Oh, actually, he didn’t write it down because he could not write music. He had a musical secretary to it who I got to know named Helmi Cressa, and I spent a lot of time talking with Helmy about what was it like to write with Irving Berlin. So Berlin would tap it out on his prepared piano, sometimes sing it, and his voice that you can hear in some songs in some movies, especially This Is the Army.

I’ve been a soldier quite a while, and I would like to state: the life is simply wonderful. The army food is great. I sleep with 97 others in the wooden hut. I love them all, they all love me. It’s very lovely. But, oh, how I hate to get up in the mall morning. Oh, how I’d love to remain in bed, for the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugle call: “You’ve gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up this morning.” Someday I’m going to murder the bugler. Someday they’re going to find him dead. I lam putatis revellie and step upon it heavily and spend the rest of my life in bed.

Let’s put it this way. It didn’t have much of a range. It had a great deal of spirit. But, you know, he was not a sophisticated singer with a big, booming, operatic voice—quite the opposite. So, you know, it’s just incredible in the face of all these disadvantages. How did he manage to do this 1,500 times, however many songs are attributed to him? It’s really, really extraordinary. So, I mean, Helmy told me the story. Berlin was an insomniac, so he would often call up Helmy in the middle of the night and say, “Helmy, Helmy!” You know, he’s very, always very excited. You know, “write this down, write this down,” and then he would start singing a song or plunking it out on his prepared piano. And then Helmy, who was his musical secretary, would write it down, you know, and play it back for him. They went back over and over and over for hours on end, night after night, to get a song right. It wasn’t just, you know, one time, “Oh, here’s a song, write down, got it good.” No, it wasn’t like that. They were incredibly painstaking and refining it, and he would have Helmy repeat it. “Does it sound better this way? Does it sound better that way?” A slight change in the rhythm, a slight change in something else about it, until he was satisfied with it. When that stage was done, it was given to somebody else to orchestrate, because often these songs were played for a movie or on Broadway shows, you know, with an orchestra or a quartet or something else. So it was a multi-step process. Also, what was remarkable was, unlike most songwriters—although there are exceptions—he wrote the words and the music. There are a few others who did that, Cole Porter and some others. But Berlin. It was almost always words and music by Irving Berlin. This was also remarkable because, keep in mind, English was his second language. Now, of course, he had a very acute ear for language, and his choice of words and syllables was just perfect—the intervals—and it always sounds so natural, unless he wants to be tricky or play games or something, but it sounds so natural. He became thought of, or considered, you know, a quintessentially, despite all his varied roots, as the quintessentially American songwriter, beginning with his first hit, 1911, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Band, “Come On in Here, Come On in Here.”
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Come On in Here, Come On in Here. It’s the best band.”
In the man, and they can play a bugle call like.
“You never heard you call, so natural, let’s want to go to law.”
“That’s just the best band.”
“What a—oh, honey Lamb—come on along.”
“Come on alone?”
And again, people thought this was a folk tune, but Irving Berlin wrote it. He was drawing on an American tradition of an Alexander song—that’s a genre mainly among African American musicians—and he thought that would just make for a peppy tune. And this one caught on, and we now think of it as, you know, a highly representative song from that era. Most people heard these songs through live music, and recorded music was slow in coming. Eventually, it would spread, of course, on the radio and television and movies, but at this point it was basically live music in restaurants and in shows and things like that. So the performers were very important, and their ability to send the song, to make that note carry all the way to the back of the auditorium or the bar or whatever, you know, above a noisy crowd, was really important. The best example of that was Ethel Merman, who I had actually seen performed. She was in some of his later shows. She could practically shattered glance, practically, you know, with her voice. It was so powerful. So, you know, Berlin wanted to hear his lyrics, so he would often stand in the back of the theater to see if the voice would carry, and if somebody had a beautiful voice but it was kind of soft, you know, that didn’t work. He also did a lot of revues as well, which he enjoyed doing, and he was extremely enterprising. He had set up his own music publishing company, Irving Berlin Music, which gave him a great deal of control, and eventually he built with some partners and owned the Music Box Theater on Broadway. This is now would be called vertical integration. I’ve been in shows at the Music Box Theater, and it’s still there. It’s a beautiful theater. Eventually, he became one of the founders of ASCAP to protect music. I mean, it was a very important thing that he did because it had been no way to collect royalties at that point, especially as a recording industry. You know, now it’s more important than ever because it’s so many different ways of doing it. So, you know, he really was a pioneer in so many ways. Of course, it’s the songs that, you know, have seeped into our collective consciousness that are so wonderful, and you wonder, oh, yes, where did that come from? Give Riy Gards a going away? Irving Berlin, so many others. Not all of them are equally famous, but, you know, many, many of them are household words that people say, “Oh, I didn’t realize Irving Berlin wrote that.”

Song: If you’re blue, you don’t know where to go? You, why don’t you go where Harlem’s pet at the risk? And go down, Tom, on the bezy? Am I Brown from down the levee? All it’s ten Aughton on a risk? Not very Ginary Lou balgo every birdy evening with Hurt Welboa. Robbie, albout, come with me? And will the band there to Boulie and seven bend there last two bits at the risk.

And you’ve been listening to best-selling author Lawrence Bergreen share the story of Irving Berlin, his biography As Thousands Cheer the Life of Irving Berlin. Well, you can get it at Amazon or the usual suspects. And we learned that Berlin’s talent was that he knew how to make songs that sounded like they were already there. And then on the business side, owning his own publishing, forming ASCAP, which would create royalty collections. The business side of the business was a part of his genius, too. When we come back, more of the story of Irving Berlin here on our American Story. And we continue with the story of Irving Berlin and telling that story as best-selling author Lawrence Bergreen. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

He just had an incredible catalog. He also, despite the fact that he was a generally withdrawn person and at times kind of cranky, was a wonderful collaborator. And when he made friends with somebody—whether it was Alexander Wilcint, the critic, or Cole Porter, or many other singers and performers—he stayed friends. And he was a great musical partner. And he just had this phenomenal drive to keep working. You know, nothing stopped him. During the war, he wrote a show, a revue, that was meant as a morale booster called This Is the Army. And he had been in the Army in World War I, and he had written one famous song and he got out of it: “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” because he was an insomniac, and he really did hate to get up in the morning. I mean, really, anyway, this was now one war later, in World War II, he revived that song and wrote a bunch of others. And not only decided to have a really patriotic motivation, used this show to raise money to donate to the war effort, but to travel with it. So he put on a uniform, and he traveled with them around the world performing. It was dangerous. This was, you know, they were on a warship. They were not going on luxu