White Christmas: The Story of a Song

White Christmas: The Story of a Song Jody Rosen Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote. Irving Berlin, 1942A biography of the single most important record in the history of popular musicA vividly written narrative about the world's best-loved popular song, White Christmas provides both the story behind the making of Irving Berlin's most memorable tune and a rich cultural history of the America that embraced it.When Irving Berlin first conceived the song "White Christmas", he envisioned it as "a throwaway" – a satirical novelty number for a vaudeville-style stage review. By the time Bing Crosby introduced the song to the world in the winter of 1942, it was a yuletide ballad that would become the world's all-time top-selling and most frequently recorded song. Berlin, the Russian-Jewish immigrant who became America's greatest pop troubadour, had written his magnum opus – what one commentator has called a "holiday Moby-Dick" – a timeless song that resonates with some of the deepest strains in American culture: yearning for an idealised New England past, belief in the magic of the "merry and bright" Christmas season, longing for the sanctuaries of home and hearth. Today the song endures not just as an icon of the national Christmas celebration but as the artistic and commercial peak of the golden age of popular song arising from the Jewish-American assimilation, and a symbol of the values and strivings of the World War II generation.‘White Christmas’ is both a period page-turner, tracing the story of the song's making amid the vibrant world of mid-century Broadway and Hollywood, and a chronicle of the song's legacy through today, when Berlin's masterpiece endures as a secular hymn. Copyright (#ulink_ae5e7822-7591-5007-9ee0-7a3f3d421bc8) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) This paperback edition published in 2003 First published in Great Britain in 2002 Copyright © Jody Rosen 2002 The right of Jody Rosen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9781841156323 Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780008245917 Version: 2017–02-17 Permissions Acknowledgments “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Copyright © 1911 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “An Old-Fashioned Tune Is Always New,” copyright © 1939 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” copyright © 1941, 1942 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “God Bless America,” copyright © 1938, 1939 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed 1965, 1966 by Irving Berlin. Copyright assigned to the Trustees of the God Bless America Fund. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “I’ve Written Another Song,” copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “It’s in Three Acts Instead of the Usual Two,” copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” copyright © 1928, 1929 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Let’s All Be Americans Now,” copyright © 1917 by Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co. Copyright renewed and assigned to Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” copyright © 1935, 1936 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Marie from Sunny Italy” by Irving Berlin. Copyright © 1907 Jos. W. Stern & Company. Copyright renewed and assigned to Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “No Strings (I’m Fancy Free),” copyright © 1935 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Of All the Tin Pan Alley Greats,” copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” copyright © 1918 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. Copyright assigned to the Trustees of the God Bless America Fund. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Old Men,” copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Old Songs,” copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Santa Claus—A Syncopated Christmas Song,” copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” copyright © 1935 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “What Is a War Song?” copyright © 2001 by the Trustees of the God Bless America Fund. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “When This Crazy World Is Sane Again,” copyright © 1941 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. “White Christmas,” copyright © 1940, 1942 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Dedication (#ulink_b0bb69d3-4ea5-53ed-b2d5-92a59df12d19) To my parents I’m dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones I used to know, Where the treetops glisten And children listen To hear sleigh bells in the snow. I’m dreaming of a white Christmas With ev’ry Christmas card I write: “May your days be merry and bright And may all your Christmases be white.” Contents Cover (#u74ba0d13-0a86-5ef1-b65a-2b984422ad37) Title Page (#u98186bd4-8859-5a6d-a943-3203acca404e) Copyright (#ulink_a410771e-84ac-56b7-88d0-91c9678435cd) Dedication (#ulink_5bac681d-17a5-5cc5-8063-c431cd3f7890) 1. (#ulink_591489f1-7b75-5bf1-be90-25a24904519f) Introduction: The Hit of Hits (#ulink_591489f1-7b75-5bf1-be90-25a24904519f) 2. (#ulink_0f0de688-2a3d-51bb-81eb-2ebe138bede6) The Best Song Anybody Ever Wrote (#ulink_0f0de688-2a3d-51bb-81eb-2ebe138bede6) 3. (#ulink_990d4f9e-fa48-5984-95e2-2a399ad428ce) Beverly Hills, L.A. (#ulink_990d4f9e-fa48-5984-95e2-2a399ad428ce) 4. (#ulink_c72d659f-9ba7-5aa3-a48d-c3a65341f5ba) No Strings (#ulink_c72d659f-9ba7-5aa3-a48d-c3a65341f5ba) 5. (#litres_trial_promo) Good Jewish Music (#litres_trial_promo) 6. (#litres_trial_promo) The Voice of Christmas (#litres_trial_promo) 7. (#litres_trial_promo) A War Tonic (#litres_trial_promo) 8. (#litres_trial_promo) Let It Snow (#litres_trial_promo) 9. (#litres_trial_promo) Old Songs (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 (#ulink_cc7ab00c-8484-521f-8612-542480efc1f4) Introduction: The Hit of Hits (#ulink_cc7ab00c-8484-521f-8612-542480efc1f4) God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin … “White Christmas.” —PHILIP ROTH, Operation Shylock They say a hanging man hears gorgeous music. Too bad that I, like my father, unlike my musical mother, am tone-deaf. All the same, I hope that the tune I am about to hear is not Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” … Goodbye, cruel world! —KURT VONNEGUT, Mother Night IRVING BERLIN was born in the nineteenth century and nearly outlived the twentieth. During the last several of his 101 years, Berlin faced a peculiar indignity: watching the copyrights expire on his earliest published songs. His ownership of those songs had been as tightfisted as the law would permit; he frostily refused permission to reprint his lyrics even to friends working on fawning tributes. Now the songs were leaving him: in 1982, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” his first published number, written when Irving Berlin was still Izzy Baline, a nineteen-year-old singing waiter in a Chinatown saloon; in 1984, “My Wife’s Gone to the Country (Hurrah! Hurrah!),” his first hit; in 1986, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” his career-making smash, whose clarion opening line—“Come on and hear”—announced not just the arrival of a national troubadour but a young country’s liberation from Victorianism and swaggering emergence into the century it would claim as its own. The old man may have grieved the loss of his songs to the public domain, but much of his catalog had made that journey years before, migrating from Tin Pan Alley straight into national lore. He was born in Siberia, yet seemed to have a direct channel to the American imagination, yanking song after song out of the collective unconscious and returning them to his adopted country as beguiling reflections of its hopes, myths, and passing fancies. He strove to write, he said, “in the simplest way … as simple as writing a telegram.” In so doing, he filled the American Songbook with pop standards that sound as inevitable as folk songs; his songs are definitively twentieth-century things—“a Berlin ballad” appears in Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” alongside a Waldorf salad and Mickey Mouse—yet they strike us as timeless, anonymous. We recognize George Gershwin’s musical signature in the bluesy grandeur of “Summertime” and “The Man I Love”; the droll, debonair voice of “Too Darn Hot” and “Miss Otis Regrets” is unmistakably Porter’s own. But in Berlin’s most celebrated songs—“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “How Deep Is the Ocean?” “Easter Parade,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “God Bless America,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—Berlin is invisible. It was not an insult when Alec Wilder, in his landmark study of American popular song, declared himself at a loss to describe stylistic common denominators in the songwriter’s vast output. Berlin’s most famous song, by far the most valuable copyright in his (or anyone else’s) catalog, is “White Christmas.” But as I discovered in writing this book, it may be the Berlin hit least associated with him. Everyone I spoke to about “White Christmas” knew the song; everyone had Bing Crosby’s dulcet, definitive recording lodged in his mind’s ear. Yet few knew who composed it. This wasn’t true just of my contemporaries, who like me had grown up with hip-hop and rock ’n’ roll and whose only exposure to Irving Berlin may have been Taco’s synth-pop travesty of “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” I met avowed Berlin fans who not only were unaware that the man had written the tune, but could hardly comprehend that it had been written at all. They assumed “White Christmas” was as old as the hills, its creator as ancient and unknown as the composer of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” But “White Christmas” is a pop song: you could call it the pop song. Berlin liked to brag that the number “was a publishing business in itself,” a rare instance of the songwriter—no slouch at trumpeting his successes—selling himself short. “White Christmas” is the biggest pop tune of all time, the top-selling and most frequently recorded song: the hit of hits. It is a quintessentially American song that the world has embraced; among the untold hundreds of “White Christmas” recordings are versions in Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Swahili, and, in a knowing nod to its creator’s pedigree, Yiddish. Sales of “White Christmas” records have topped 125 million copies. Bing Crosby’s original version on Decca Records remains a music industry landmark. For over fifty years it stood as the best-selling record in history. Introduced in the 1942 film Holiday Inn (it won the Academy Award for Best Song), Crosby’s “White Christmas” held first place on the Hit Parade countdown for a record ten consecutive weeks; it would reenter the survey every December for the next twenty years (excepting 1953), spending thirty-eight weeks in the top spot and an unprecedented eighty-six weeks on the chart. All told, Crosby’s “White Christmas” has sold over 31 million copies; it was unseated from its place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the all-time top single only by Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute, “Candle in the Wind ’97.” (Crosby’s record reentered the British charts for two weeks the next year—forty-five years after its initial release.) Popular culture is infatuated with novelty, and pop music is particularly unsentimental, ruthlessly turning today’s superstar into tomorrow’s one-hit wonder, forever seeking refreshment in new styles, new sounds, the next big thing. Once a year, though, the Christmas season brings songs from several centuries back to jostle for airtime with the latest hits. “White Christmas” is a newcomer to the Christmas canon—the composer of “Joy to the World!” beat Berlin to the punch by at least two hundred years—but in the decades since its appearance, it has become the most performed of all seasonal songs: the world’s favorite Christmas carol. To this day, it continues to generate tens of thousands of annual record and sheet music sales. The Muzak versions that fill the nation’s malls each December should alone be enough to pile-drive “White Christmas” into the consciousness of unnumbered future generations of shoppers. Although Crosby’s remains the signature version, singers won’t leave “White Christmas” alone: every year brings new versions by performers that run the musical gamut, from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to the German heavy metal band Helloween. The list of “White Christmas” performers includes many of the most famous names in twentieth-century popular music: Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Jackson Five, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Al Green, U2. Berlin’s melody has been reimagined as a stuttering punk anthem; as Wagnerian Sturm und Drang with a chorus of thousands wailing in the background; as a loping country ballad; as a string of quicksilver bop improvisations; as a thudding house track—a carol for an Ibiza Christmas. Otis Redding wrung new pathos from the old song, recasting it as a Memphis soul ballad; Michael Bolton did a laughable Otis Redding imitation and recorded what may be the most overwrought “White Christmas” of them all (and consider the competition). Is there another song that Kenny G, Peggy Lee, Mantovani, Odetta, Loretta Lynn, the Flaming Lips, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and the Backstreet Boys have in common? What other tune links Destiny’s Child, The Three Tenors, and Alvin and the Chipmunks; Perry Como, Garth Brooks, and Stiff Little Fingers; the Reverend James Cleveland, Doris Day, and Kiss? But the song’s power transcends its sales figures and commercial ubiquity. With “White Christmas,” Berlin created an anthem that spoke eloquently to its historical moment, offering a comforting Christmastime vision to a nation frightened and bewildered by the Second World War. But it also resonated with some of the deepest strains in American culture: yearning for an idealized New England past, belief in the ecumenical magic of the “merry and bright” Christmas season, pining for the sanctuaries of home and hearth. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’s landscapes and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The song’s images of sleigh rides and falling snow and eager children capture the mythic essence of the American Christmas. “White Christmas” seems to have always existed, lurking, as one Berlin biographer has written, “just beneath the surface of national consciousness.” Indeed, in writing “White Christmas,” Berlin lit on a universal ideal: the longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea, seems to have originated with Berlin’s song. It can safely be said that London bookmakers didn’t offer odds on the possibility of a white Christmas prior to “White Christmas.” From the beginning, the song has been a blank slate on which Americans have projected their varied views on race, religion, national identity, and other heady matters. In Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, “White Christmas” is an emblem of “Jewish genius,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, a wearisome reminder of the Second World War. In the early 1940s, at the height of its popularity, “White Christmas” was a huge hit among both white and black audiences. In the decades since, African-Americans have viewed Berlin’s anthem with increasing ambivalence, detecting in Crosby’s placid “white-bread” crooning a coded message excluding blacks from the national Christmas celebration. The song became a hit in the winter of 1942, when it was embraced by homesick American GIs as a symbol of the country to which they longed to return and the values they were fighting to defend. It was the war’s unlikely anthem: a “Why We Fight” song in which the fight was never mentioned. Some thirty years later “White Christmas” returned to play a role in a more troubled American war: the U.S. military used it as the secret signal instructing American soldiers to evacuate Saigon. One of the most poignant “White Christmas” battles was waged by Berlin himself, when the songwriter launched a fierce (and fruitless) campaign to ban Elvis Presley’s recording of the tune. Today, Berlin’s rage at the rock ’n’ roll “desecration” of his song looks like nothing less than a lament over the sunset of an entire pop culture era: the period, roughly bounded by the two World Wars, that the songwriter had stood astride and whose passing plunged him into a depression that dogged the final forty years of his life. We remember that interwar era as the Golden Age of American Song—the charmed period when Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Porter, Harold Arlen, and other titans of Broadway and Hollywood turned the pop song, once regarded as the crudest kind of mass entertainment, into a definitive national art form. In the twenty-first century, the song standards remain indelible; consecrated in the recordings of Sinatra and Fitzgerald and Armstrong and Billie Holiday, launching pads for the improvisations of successive generations of jazz greats—they are the bedrock of American pop. Their lush melodies and lyrical bon mots conjure a fairy-tale world of urbanity and romance, generating nostalgia even in those of us born decades after their heyday. They are supreme products of what historian Ann Douglas has called America’s postcolonial phase; listening to song standards—from “Tea for Two” to “I Get a Kick Out of You” to “Oyer the Rainbow”—we hear the optimism of the American empire at its giddy early height. I grew up in a very different musical age, with ears conditioned by the urgency of rock and soul and hip-hop, and the song standards always struck me as exotic. In part, this book was inspired by my curiosity about the music—where it came from, why it blazed and disappeared. Historians hallow song standards as one of the United States’ great gifts to world culture; musicologists parse their structure with the same loving scrutiny they lavish on Schubert lieder. Yet the American Songbook remains misunderstood, distorted by the culture war that erupted when rock ’n’ roll remade American entertainment in the 1960s. In one corner is the they-don’t-write-’em-like-that-anymore crowd, who have mystified the song-standard era beyond reason and recognition. For those of us who love “Cheek to Cheek” and “Star Dust” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “Don’t Believe the Hype” in equal measure, it can be galling to read history as told by champions of classic pop, who cling to the notion that all craft and charm drained from American music the day rock and soul’s barbarians stormed the gates. On the opposite side are rock critics who, steeped in rock’s rebel mythologies and cult of authenticity, have effectively read fifty years of pop—and George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and Bing Crosby—out of musical history. These competing mythologies remove the song standards from their historical context, and the story of “White Christmas”—the era’s commercial zenith, the signature collaboration of its most famous songwriter and singer—brings that context into sharper focus. It was a time before rock ’n’ roll introduced a musical generation gap and put the voices of blacks and Southern whites at the forefront, before Vietnam and the social ruptures of the 1960s, when pop songs seemed to embody cultural consensus—when the American middle class sought charm and reassurance in mass entertainment. Today, our longing for that musical era grades into a larger nostalgia for the mystical heyday of the “Greatest Generation,” that allegedly happier period of stalwart American values and national unity. If any song represents mid-century consensus, it is “White Christmas”: a celebration of the de facto national holiday, introduced by a multimedia father figure in the midst of a World War, when circumstances encouraged an unprecedented uniformity of thought and feeling. Song-standard aficionados might argue that music was simply better in the good old days. But one can’t help suspecting that they are also longing for a simpler time, when pop songs spoke almost exclusively in the voice of the white middle class and hadn’t yet begun to reflect the difficult questions and moral ambiguities of American life. Nevertheless, if the songs of that pre—civil rights, prefeminist period strike us today as blithely ethnocentric, it should be remembered that they were the result of a social struggle in many ways as significant as those that have inflected rock’s history. The pop-song industry was dominated in both its creative and commercial spheres by Jews—many of them, like Berlin, recent immigrants—and the music it gave to the world was the music of assimilation, a distinctly New World concoction: the result of a people’s striving for social acceptance and a piece of the American pie. Much of twentieth-century pop culture is a kind of Yankee Doodle Yiddishkeit: All-Americanism as imagined by Lower East Siders, intoxicated by showbiz and its fast track out of the ghetto. “White Christmas”—a Russian-born cantor’s son’s ode to a Christian American holiday—is a milestone of Jewish acculturation matched perhaps only by another Berlin magnum opus, “God Bless America”: a symbol of the extraordinary way that the Jews who wrote pop songs, sang them on vaudeville stages, invented Broadway, and founded movie studios, turned themselves into Americans—and remade American pop culture in their own image. Familiarity has made “White Christmas” remote: we know the song so well that we barely know it all. Bing Crosby begins singing, and we hum along, or flee the room; in any case, our ears are closed. But listen again: “White Christmas” is an oddity, whose melody meanders chromatically and is filled with unexpected moments, somber near-dissonances. Strangest of all is the song’s underlying sadness, its wistful ache for the bygone, which—in contrast to chirpy seasonal standards like “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”—marks “White Christmas” as the darkest, bluest tune ever to masquerade as a Christmas carol. “White Christmas” isn’t my favorite song; it isn’t even my favorite Irving Berlin song. I prefer “Blue Skies,” with its shades of exultation and melancholy, or the brooding “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Down the years, those songs have kept their streamlined gleam; with its mile-wide sentimental streak, “White Christmas” has come back in recording after recording as kitsch. Berlin, of course, never shied from sentimentality—or anything else that pleased his audience. He journeyed far from his roots on old Tin Pan Alley, the nickname given in 1900 to the clangorous songwriters’ row along West Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan; but where his younger songwriting colleagues styled themselves as artistes, Berlin clung to the Alley’s populist values: the public was the best judge of a song’s worth, a tune-smith was only as good as his latest hit. It was an ethos that sprang from a need for audience acceptance—a trace, perhaps, of Berlin’s roots as Bowery song busker—and above all, from a sense of duty. Berlin was a public songwriter, who pledged allegiance not to his muse but to “the mob.” “A good song embodies the feelings of the mob,” he said. “A songwriter is not much more than a mirror which reflects those feelings.” This philosophy made Berlin the people’s choice and carved a special place for his songs in our national life. (The post—September 11 reemergence of “God Bless America” is just the most recent example of Berlin’s uncanny staying power.) But to his detractors, Berlin’s crowd-pleasing unmasked him as a cornball and a hack; despite the illustriousness of his songbook, he has never been as beloved by tastemakers as some of his harder-edged colleagues. “White Christmas” is the ultimate Berlin tearjerker, and if there are more decorous songs, there are few deeper ones. We cringe at its mawkishness, but our embarrassment should arise from the shock of self-recognition: three-hankie schmaltz is, to a large degree, the American way of song. Berlin’s paean to long-gone white Christmases “just like the ones I used to know” distills a whole tradition: the hopeless lust for yesteryear that runs through a couple of centuries of popular song, from the homesick ballads of Stephen Foster to Victorian parlor-room plaints to the desolate nostalgia of the blues. “White Christmas” is about as good a summary as we have of the contradictions that make pop music fascinating: it is beautiful and grotesque, tacky and transcendent. Revisiting the song’s story, listening for the thousandth time to its maudlin, immemorial strains, we are reminded of a trick in which Berlin and Crosby both specialized: how, time and again, they proved that art and schlock could be one and the same. 2 (#ulink_fe000a0f-ffae-5fae-b01d-cd2910047746) The Best Song Anybody Ever Wrote (#ulink_fe000a0f-ffae-5fae-b01d-cd2910047746) A simple melody will always linger— I mean the kind you pick out with one finger. —IRVING BERLIN, “An Old-Fashioned Tune Is Always New” WHITE CHRISTMAS” enters the written record on January 8, 1940, in the form of forty-eight measures of musical notation, jotted on a sheet of Irving Berlin Music Company manuscript paper, in the distinctive hand of Helmy Kresa, Berlin’s longtime musical secretary. This earliest transcription of the song finds Berlin still wavering about its verse; nine bars in, a rather stolid melodic passage has been crossed out and improved. But tellingly, the sixty-seven familiar notes of the song’s chorus are intact. Nearly three years before Bing Crosby introduced “White Christmas” to the world, Berlin brought this most famous and indelible of his melodies to Kresa as a fully formed creation. Berlin has had many hagiographers. Perhaps the greatest of these was the songwriter himself, whose years in the rakish atmosphere of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood taught him the value of legend-building and tall tales. His varying reminiscences about the creation of “White Christmas” have a back-room-at-Lindy’s feel: it is hard to imagine Berlin telling the song’s “story” without a cloud of cigarette smoke above his head and a slab of pastrami on his plate. He told his friend Miles Kruger, a historian of the Hollywood musical, that the song was composed in Beverly Hills. On his 1954 promotional tour for Paramount Pictures’ White Christmas movie, Berlin unspooled a different version of the story nearly every day. The Los Angeles Mirror reported that Berlin had written “White Christmas” “for a Broadway show called Stars on My Shoulder … on an August afternoon in 1938 in his Beekman Place home in New York”—a home that he hadn’t in fact moved into until 1947. In an “exclusive interview” with The American Weekly, Berlin recalled that he had written the song in 1940, “for a revue.” “When I wrote ‘White Christmas’ in 1941,” he explained at a press junket in Philadelphia, “it was devised really to fit into a situation in the motion picture Holiday Inn.” A more trustworthy recollection was that of Helmy Kresa, who joined Berlin’s staff in the mid-1920s and remained the songwriter’s trusted amanuensis for the better part of the next six decades. According to Kresa, Berlin strode into his publishing firm’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters with the freshly composed Christmas number first thing one Monday morning, a story that agrees with the evidence: January 8, 1940, the date that Kresa noted in the top right-hand corner of that first lead sheet, was a Monday. Berlin’s appearance at that hour would have startled his employees, who were unaccustomed to seeing their boss before one or two in the afternoon. His early arrival, they must have known, could mean only one thing: Berlin, who never learned musical notation, had written a new song that he was anxious to have Kresa fix on the staff. All-night songwriting sessions were the norm for Berlin, a lifelong insomniac whose frenzied work habits were as celebrated as his songs. The newspaper stories that greeted Berlin’s early fame as the hitmaking phenom of the ragtime craze called him a “songwriting machine”—a bit of a back-handed compliment, linking the young star to the crude industry of Tin Pan Alley’s song mills. But there was something machinelike about Berlin: he was astoundingly prolific—at his productive peak he was writing a song a day—and no one who encountered him could help but be struck by the impression of a man in a state of whirring motion. (“He’s a buzz saw,” marveled a reporter who visited Berlin in 1942. “He’s Mr. Energy.”) He composed continually: jotting lyrics on shirt cuffs, on cocktail napkins, on hotel stationery, dreaming up new tunes on overnight train trips, in elevators, at poolsides, in front of the shaving mirror. He wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in the middle of a clamorous vaudeville rehearsal and “Anything You Can Do” in a taxi marooned in Midtown traffic. When Queen Elizabeth congratulated Berlin on “My British Buddy,” his World War II-era ode to Anglo-American camaraderie, he replied: “Thank you, ma’am. I wrote the song in a bathtub.” In 1912, a month after he married for the first time, Berlin told reporters that his new bride had cured him of the “night-to-morning and morning-to-night” songwriting compulsion that had made him “a nervous wreck … all music, all songs, all the hope of song hits.” Five months later, his wife was dead, of typhoid fever; Berlin returned for good to his insomniac regime and became the nation’s pop-song poet laureate—America’s nervous wreck. All told, Berlin wrote thousands of songs and published 812 of them, an amazing 451 of which became hits. An undated lyric fragment in Berlin’s papers at the Library of Congress is the cheery confession of a man who recognized his creative drive as a kind of mania: He wakes her up and cries, “I’ve written another song, You’ve got to listen to it!” She rubs her eyes and answers, “I don’t want to hear it… ” He keeps it up all morning, Until the day is dawning… And then he wakes her up and cries, “I’ve written another song!” She has to listen to it; She simply cannot keep him shut— He’s a nut, he’s a nut, he’s a nut. This song-crazed “nut” is a figure Helmy Kresa would have recognized: throughout his decades of service, he went to bed knowing he might be roused in the wee hours by a phone call heralding the arrival of a new tune. Kresa was hired by Berlin in late 1926 as one of several staff arrangers. By the early 1930s he had become Berlin’s main musical secretary; though he would go on to write a hit song of his own, “That’s My Desire,” and serve several other of Tin Pan Alley’s most celebrated composers—Porter, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer—Kresa was always known as Berlin’s right-hand man and remained in his employ until shortly before the songwriter’s death in 1989. Like Berlin, Kresa was an immigrant—his heavy German accent gave him an air of “longhair” musicianly gravitas—and he shared his boss’s devotion to musical modesty: simple chord progressions, harmonies that were elegant but unornate. He was famously fast, capable of burnishing a rough new Berlin composition into something playable in a hour or two of speedy work. Kresa’s job wasn’t easy. Berlin was a handful; although he disavowed artsy pretension and played to the hilt the earthy role of bootstrapping street kid made good, he had a temperament worthy of a La Scala diva. He was moody—exhilarated one moment, grim and foreboding the next, one minute generous and jocular, the next brooding in stony silence, the next raging about his colleagues’ inadequacies, bungled business deals, perceived slights. When he locked into a songwriting groove, he was irrepressible, dragging strangers to his piano to vet his new tunes, boasting about his successes to anyone within earshot. When the songs dried up, his spirits sank; during his worst slumps, Berlin was stupefied by self-doubt, convinced that he had lost his talent and his career was over. His driving need for public affirmation made things worse: in commercially fallow periods, other composers could take refuge in the satisfactions of the creative process, but Berlin’s sense of self-worth shriveled in the absence of hits. Kresa weathered his boss’s mood swings with varying degrees of tolerance and exasperation; he considered quitting many times over the years and would have done so, he confessed, “if I had not so much admiration for his fantastic genius as a writer of both words and music.” How—and where—Berlin wrote the words and music he brought to Kresa that January morning is unclear. He had spent Christmas and the New Year with his family—his second wife, Ellin, and their three daughters, thirteen-year-old Mary Ellin, seven-year-old Linda, and three-year-old Elizabeth—at his recently purchased country home in Lew Beach, New York, a rambling estate in the Catskills whose pastoral ambience, perhaps not coincidentally, recalls the scene depicted in the chorus of “White Christmas.” The Berlin family returned to their Manhattan town house, a five-story brownstone on East Seventy-eighth Street, just after the New Year; in all likelihood, Berlin remained in the city for the following weekend of January sixth and seventh. Any composing that Berlin did that weekend would have taken place in his third-floor study, whose centerpiece was a curiously homely upright piano. This instrument, which Berlin coyly called his “Buick,” was custom-built: rigged with a key-changing hand-clutch to accommodate the musical limitations of its owner, who, like many Tin Pan Alley old-timers, only ever learned to play “on the black keys,” in the key of F-sharp. Berlin would sit at the piano for up to twelve hours at a time, chain-smoking and wrestling melodies and lyrics into shape. “The melody doesn’t come to you,” Berlin explained. “You sweat it out. Lots of big successes I’ve written only after I’ve become blue in the face.” Berlin’s family grew used to the noises that would drift from behind that study door: flurries of notes, piano noodlings, the odd burst of high-pitched singing—the stammering sound of a song coming to life. This ruckus followed Berlin on the road. Front-desk clerks at hotels where the songwriter stayed had to contend with calls from sleep-deprived guests; Berlin learned to muffle the din by stuffing his piano with towels and bathrobes. We can only guess at the sounds that filled Berlin’s study that January weekend. But by Monday morning, they had ordered themselves into a song. Picture Irving Berlin arriving at his office at 799 Broadway on a chilly January day in 1940. He was fifty-one years old, at almost the exact midpoint of his life. At a time when songwriters were stars on par with Hollywood screen idols, his face—with those intense, dark eyes, ringed with the “overnight bags” of a thousand insomnias—was recognizable to millions. The songwriter stood just five feet six inches, but he cut a rather dashing figure: the olive skin, the slicked, jet-black hair, the smart Savile Row suits. His trademark feature, though, was his nervous energy: the darting gestures whose madcap effect reminded his daughter Mary Ellin of a speeded-up Charlie Chaplin silent film. That morning, there was extra urgency in Berlin’s step. He pushed through the front door of his office and passed his startled secretaries without a word of greeting, looking for Kresa. He found him at his desk. Kresa was accustomed to Berlin’s bluster, but even he was taken aback by the audaciousness with which the songwriter announced his latest creation, a Christmas tune. “I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend,” Berlin said, waving Kresa into his office. “Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.” 3 (#ulink_10bd9baf-30fb-5381-8efd-5cb07f28199c) Beverly Hills, L.A. (#ulink_10bd9baf-30fb-5381-8efd-5cb07f28199c) Christmas has woven a pattern in my life. —IRVING BERLIN A LISTENER WHO has cued his CD player to Mel Torm?’s 1992 recording of “White Christmas” may find himself puzzled by its opening bars. A piano vamps discreetly in the background; Torm? sings in the plush, vibratoless tone that earned him the nickname The Velvet Fog. But there is a strange jazziness to the tune’s saunter through a series of seventh and ninth chords, and the words that Torm? sings are unfamiliar. “The sun is shining,” he begins. “The grass is green.” He continues: The orange and palm trees sway. There’s never been such a day In Beverly Hills, LA. But it’s December the twenty-fourth, And I’m longing to be up north. These may be the most famous “lost” sixteen measures in popular music: the little-known introductory verse of “White Christmas.” After that concluding line—“And I’m longing to be up north”—Berlin’s melody makes a gingerly seven-note descent, landing on a C major chord, and suddenly, over swelling orchestral strains, Torm? is singing the world’s best-known pop song: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas …” In writing the “White Christmas” verse, Berlin was hewing to the Tin Pan Alley convention of preceding thirty-two-bar choruses with sixteen measures of mood-setting introduction. On the Broadway stage, these verses served a similar function to the recitative that precedes an operatic aria; they were often performed conversationally—a casual way of establishing the tempo and dynamics of a song and easing into its refrain. Although some composers excelled in verse-writing—the Gershwin brothers and Cole Porter were specialists in the art—verses were infrequently recorded, and almost none have lodged in public memory. Millions can hum the refrains of “Star Dust” or “My Funny Valentine,” but how many people know their verses? The opening section of “White Christmas” is doubly obscure. In 1989, Berlin wrote a letter to the singer Rosemary Clooney, a star of the 1954 White Christmas movie, who had performed the song’s verse in a recent concert. Berlin thanked Clooney for resuscitating the verse, which, he noted, “is hardly ever used.” But in December of 1942, at the height of the song’s initial conquest of the Hit Parade, Berlin himself had ordered the sixteen bars expunged from its sheet music. The public had fallen for Bing Crosby’s hushed, chorus-only rendering of the song; now Berlin realized that the verse’s jauntier musical atmosphere and images of Beverly Hills shattered the chorus’s wintry spell. That forgotten verse points to the song’s inauspicious origins: “White Christmas” began its life as a curio. In June 1938, Berlin returned to New York after spending the better part of the previous five years in Hollywood working on movie musicals. It had been a triumphant half decade. In 1932, he had emerged from a commercial and creative dry patch with the Broadway smash Face the Music; he followed this with a string of movie hits that not only raised Hollywood’s commercial bar, but whose finest moments—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirling across a moonlit veranda to the strains of “Cheek to Cheek”—took the film musical, that collision of the two quintessentially modern American lively arts, to new heights of whirligig poetry. That March of 1938, Berlin had turned fifty. Hollywood’s New York ex-pat royalty turned out to salute the songwriter’s three decades in show business at a birthday party held in a detail-perfect reconstruction of the Pelham Caf?, the Chinatown watering hole where the teenage Izzy Baline cut his teeth as a singing waiter. For thirty years, his restless quest for new hit-making “angles”—a favorite Berlinism—and attention to the smallest shifts in public fancy had put him on the cutting edge of an ever-changing popular culture. With Watch Your Step (1914), he became the first popular songwriter to mount a Broadway show comprising entirely his own songs; the first time the world heard sound in a motion picture, it heard a Berlin tune: Al Jolson belting out “Blue Skies” in The Jazz Singer. In the 1920s, when a new songwriting vanguard—George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter—replaced Tin Pan Alley’s churn-’em-out ethos with an artier emphasis on careful craft, melodic sophistication, and the lyrical mot juste, Berlin kept creative pace with the upstarts but stayed just as prolific. “You make all the rest of us feel pretty darned ineffective,” Jerome Kern complained in a letter. “We’re hep that none of us is heightened by your genius for producing just the right thing at just the right time.” But in the spring of 1938, Berlin was slumping. Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the big-budget Berlin musical released by Twentieth Century-Fox that May, drew almost entirely from the songwriter’s back catalog. He managed to come up with five new numbers for its follow-up, Carefree, another Astaire-Rogers picture. But the film was lackluster: when it appeared in August, reviewers suggested—presciently, it turned out—that the Astaire-Rogers partnership was running out of gas. Berlin had come home to New York intent on making an invigorating return to the Broadway stage. The project he had in mind was a throwback to Broadway’s pre-talking-pictures era: he wanted to put on a revue, like those he had staged so successfully in the early 1920s at the theater he co-owned, the Music Box on West Forty-fifth Street. Berlin’s notes for The Music Box Revue of 1938 envisioned a woolly vaudeville-style hodgepodge of tunes, skits, and stunts: topical songs touching on newsmakers from Hitler and Mussolini to Joseph Kennedy to the Dionne quintuplets; a racy comedic number called “Found a Pair of Panties”; sketches featuring acrobats, “sidewalk comedians,” jugglers, and trained dogs. By August, Berlin’s plans had moved in a more baroque direction. The show had a new title—The Crystal Ball—and a novel form: it was a three-act-long “revue of to-day, tomorrow and yesterday.” According to Berlin’s notes for the show, the first-act curtain would rise on a “Greek chorus” arrayed behind a proscenium arch, singing a musical explanation of the revue’s unusual structure: It’s in three acts Instead of the usual two, And in each act We’re doing a separate revue: A first act, a second, and a last— The present, the future, and the past. The Crystal Ball was never produced. When a new Berlin show reached the Broadway stage in 1940, it was Louisiana Purchase, the spry political farce loosely based on the life of Huey Long. But among the unfinished songs and jotted notes for Berlin’s unrealized revue are clues about the provenance of his most famous song. Especially intriguing is a list of numbers for The Crystal Ball’s opening act, probably typed by Berlin himself in mid-1938: ACT ONE—“THE PRESENT.” 1939. 1. Opening—Greek Chorus—crystal ball curtain 2. Short sketch with music 3. number in one 4. sketch 5. commercial advertising 6. rhythm number 7. sketch in two 8. White Christmas—finale Start in one going into full stage From this earliest reference to “White Christmas” we learn that the song had existed, in some form, for at least several months prior to Berlin’s breathless arrival at his office on January 8, 1940. Berlin was a fanatical tinkerer whose songs often gestated for months, or even years, undergoing several revisions before taking final shape; for every song that he completed, there were dozens of false starts and half-songs, snatches of song lyrics and piles of hastily scrawled angles that he stored for future use. The songwriter had a term for his collection of scraps and works-in-progress: “the trunk.” Several of his most celebrated creations—“Easter Parade” and “God Bless America” among them—were reworked trunk songs. The Christmas number that Berlin brought to Helmy Kresa that Monday in 1940 may have been completed, as the songwriter boasted, “over the weekend,” but it had almost certainly been kicking around the trunk for some time before that. Also noteworthy is the song’s position in The Crystal Ball’s proposed running order. “White Christmas” may at this stage have been a primitive version of the song that was eventually published—it may have been nothing more than a twinkling “angle” in its creator’s eye—but Berlin obviously had a high opinion of it, deeming it a worthy act-closer. This suggests something about the song’s form: the “White Christmas” that Berlin slated for his revue’s first-act finale was not the homely ballad that Crosby crooned in Holiday Inn. The songwriter was a stickler for variety-show convention, and convention dictated that first acts conclude with a visually spectacular number. Berlin’s note that the number would “start in one going into full stage” indicates how he envisioned “White Christmas” being staged: the song would begin with a lone player onstage singing its verse; the curtain would then shoot up, revealing an elaborate set, and a full chorus would join in for a rousing sing-along finale. It is difficult to imagine the “White Christmas” we know today as showstopper in a revue filled with dog tricks and pratfalls. Yet the song that reached the world in 1942 as a hymn was, in its inventor’s initial conception, something else entirely: wry, parodic, lighthearted—a novelty tune. We glimpse Berlin’s original vision for “White Christmas” in the six lines of its verse. Where the chorus evokes a distant yesteryear (the Christmases “I used to know”), the verse is set in the modern present: on Christmas Eve Day in Los Angeles. There is conversational breeziness in its language (“There’s never been such a day …”). There is, moreover, a distinct social milieu being described: we are in the louche company of Beverly Hills swells, who loll away day after “perfect day” on green grass beneath swaying trees and a beating sun. The “White Christmas” verse is a satire, Berlin’s variation on a classic New York pastime: a potshot fired at Gotham’s ditsy West Coast rival. (We can hear a New Yorker’s voice in the misnomer “Beverly Hills, L.A.”—an error Berlin shrugged off when his wife pointed it out.) The verse paints a picture of palmy paradise that is deflated by the revelation “it’s December the twenty-fourth.” For the song’s narrator, this “perfect day” in Beverly Hills is no fun at all: Christmas is approaching, and what is Christmas without wintry ambience? In the song Bing Crosby sang in Holiday Inn, white Christmas was a vision of snow-christened perfection; in Berlin’s original conception, it was a punch line. The sight-gag staging of the number in the songwriter’s revue would doubtless have driven the joke home. According to biographer Philip Furia, Berlin pictured it being performed by “a group of sophisticates gathered around a Hollywood pool,” pining for a rustic, snowbound Christmas with “cocktails in hand”—a preposterous tableau sure to tickle a New York audience. Berlin apparently so fancied this novel angle—subverting holiday solemnity for humorous effect—that he thought it might be the basis for an entire show. He began making notes for yet another revue, this one built around “fifteen of the important holidays in a year, using each holiday as an item in the revue.” The show, whose working title was Happy Holiday, was explicitly comedic. “In several of the items,” Berlin wrote, “the point of view will be to debunk the holiday spirit.” Once again, Berlin gave his Christmas number pride of place: it would be, he wrote, “the summing up of the entire show.” Behind the satirical scrim of his Hollywood Christmas song, we discern the figure of Irving Berlin, exasperated after a half decade spent on movie lots. Like most of America’s songwriting elite, Berlin was drawn to Hollywood by the boom market in movie musicals that followed the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer. While other members of the Tin Pan Alley diaspora had relocated outright or bought second homes in Los Angeles, Berlin never put down roots, preferring to camp out for months at a time in suites at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire. In 1939, Berlin finally resolved to move to L.A., leaving his New York apartment and renting a home in the Hollywood Hills, only to back out at the last minute, pitching his family into a frenzy of unpacking and house-hunting back in Manhattan. “He just couldn’t bring himself to go through with moving to L.A.,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett would recollect. “He regarded Los Angeles as fake.” As Berlin himself explained to his wife: “There’s no Lindy’s in Los Angeles. No paper at two in the morning. No Broadway. No city.” A poignant moment in Berlin’s California exile may have provided inspiration for “White Christmas.” It was Christmas, 1937, and Berlin was stuck in Hollywood, working on Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Like many graduates of a Lower East Side Orthodox home, Berlin proudly celebrated Christmas. The songwriter’s family life proclaimed his American arrival with all the trappings of post-Jewish haute-bourgeoisie style: a shiksa wife, an uptown address, a Christmas tree in the living room. Though Berlin was steeped in Yiddishkeit, his relationship to institutional Judaism was negligible: here, a Passover seder, there, a stroll down Fifth Avenue to Kol Nidre service at Temple Emmanu-El. The Berlin family Christmas pulled out the stops. It was, Mary Ellin Barrett recalls, “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” with a family dinner at a “gleaming candlelit Christmas table,” “enormous stockings,” and “so many packages, so many toys.” Invariably, these celebrations were punctuated by Berlin’s retelling of a favorite story from his Lower East Side childhood: how he stole away from his pious home to the apartment of his Irish neighbors the O’Haras and gazed in rapture at their Christmas tree, which, to his young eyes, “seemed to tower to Heaven.” The songwriter must have been gratified by the sight of his children at the foot of their tree, which scraped the ceiling of the family’s double-storied library. But for Irving and Ellin Berlin, seasonal merriment was tempered by sorrow. Back on December 1, 1928, Ellin had given birth to a baby boy. Three and a half weeks later, the day after Christmas, an item appeared on page 3 of the New York Times: BERLINS’ INFANT SON DIES OF HEART ATTACK Irving Berlin, Jr., 24-day-old son of the composer of popular songs and of the former Ellin Mackay, died suddenly yesterday morning of a heart attack at the Berlin residence, 9 Sutton Place … The Berlins refused to see reporters yesterday and information was given out through a Miss Rorke, nurse who had attended the child. The death occurred shortly after 5 o’clock in the morning. Miss Rorke was the only person present. Mr. and Mrs. Berlin were called immediately. Three doctors, whose names were not disclosed, were summoned, but nothing could be done, according to the nurse. Irving Berlin, Jr., was their second child, the other being Mary Ellin, 2 years old. Mary Ellin herself only learned that she had had a brother eight years later—the very winter her father was in Hollywood working on Alexander’s Ragtime Band—when she happened upon a newspaper clipping in a desk drawer. The article made sense of something that had troubled the young girl: every Christmas Eve her parents, with long faces and sober attire, left the house and “went somewhere.” Where they went, it turned out, was Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, to lay flowers at Irving Berlin Jr.’s grave. Years later, Ellin Berlin would admit to her daughter, “We both hated Christmas. We only did it for you children.” Though he put up a jolly front, the tragedy of Christmas, 1928, had forever dampened Irving Berlin’s holiday cheer. Christmas, 1937, was only the second that Berlin had spent apart from his family; that Christmas Eve, he would not make the somber pilgrimage to the Bronx. Instead, he had been invited to dinner at the Beverly Hills home of his friend Joseph Schenck, the Twentieth Century-Fox Studios CEO. Schenck was Berlin’s oldest friend—a buddy from his Lower East Side street-urchin days, who claimed to have bought the first sheet music copy of Berlin’s 1907 debut, “Marie from Sunny Italy.” Like Berlin, he was a ruthless perfectionist in his professional affairs; he shared Berlin’s taste for deli food, hours of show-biz shoptalk, and high-stakes card games. When they got together, the Old Neighborhood bonhomie was palpable: Schenck called Berlin “Zolman,” and the pair traded wisecracks in Yiddish. Berlin counted Schenck as one of his few dear friends. “You said one very wise and true thing to me,” Berlin wrote to Schenck in 1956. “‘As we get older, our real friends become fewer.’ Apart from my immediate family, I can count mine on one hand and have a couple of fingers left over. I don’t have to tell you you head the list.” The movie mogul had a surprise in store for Berlin that Christmas Eve. When the songwriter arrived at Schenck’s estate, he was led to its screening room. “I have this Christmas short that I’d like you to take a look at,” Schenck said. Berlin took a seat in the screening room. The lights dimmed; the projector whirred. A title appeared on the screen: “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The title dissolved, and the camera zoomed in on the snowy exterior of a grand French door hung with a holiday wreath. Cut to the interior of a large apartment: two little girls, with their backs turned to the camera, are facing a festively trimmed Christmas tree. The camera pans in, the girls reel around to face it and shout in unison, “Merry Christmas, Daddy!” These aren’t actors; they are Berlin’s elder daughters, Mary Ellin and Linda, wearing Hungarian dresses, their last year’s Christmas presents. The youngest Berlin sibling, nineteenth-month-old Elizabeth, is there too, splayed on the floor in front of the Christmas tree, dwarfed by ribbon-topped packages. Schenck’s “Christmas short,” it turned out, was made especially for Berlin, filmed five months earlier on a Fox soundstage by the Hollywood director Gregory Ratoff. Ellin Berlin had known her husband would be spending Christmas alone and had conspired to create a holiday treat: a three-minute-long cinematic Christmas card. Might “White Christmas” have first stirred on that Christmas Eve in 1937? We can imagine a glum Berlin, waking the next morning to a balmy, sun-strafed Christmas Day. Christmas always put him in a funk; this Christmas he was three thousand miles from his loved ones. Stepping onto the terrace of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite, he would have beheld a scene surreally different from the homey yuletide aura of his family’s film: gently rocking palms, the garish green of perfectly tended lawns, a swimming pool’s cobalt glare. The only snowflakes in Hollywood fell on soundstages. The memory of that California Christmas surely played some part in inspiring the song that surfaced a few months later in his various plans for a stage revue. Berlin had little idea that beneath his Christmas-in-Beverly-Hills lampoon—stirring in the homesick “longing” of the verse’s last line—the Great American Christmas Carol was waiting to emerge. In the meantime, with his struggles to mount a revue bearing no fruit, the songwriter turned his attention to other projects—a new movie, Second Fiddle, and Louisiana Purchase—casting “White Christmas” into that purgatory where so many previous Berlin creations, slaved over and tossed off, lowly and grand, had gone before it: the trunk. 4 (#ulink_0505a243-1f03-565d-9966-eb8eb2dab062) No Strings (#ulink_0505a243-1f03-565d-9966-eb8eb2dab062) Soon We’ll be without the moon, Humming a diff’rent tune … —IRVING BERLIN, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” IT IS A CURIOSITY of the American Songbook that the majority of its songs were composed during the 1930s, yet scarcely any acknowledge the hardships of the Great Depression. American popular music has never been as insulated from American social reality. When E. Y. Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a hit in 1934, it stood out as a novelty among the ballads crooned on the country’s radio shows: a stark portrait of national woe surrounded by Tin Pan Alley’s paper-moon artifice. In an odd way, the pop songs of the 1930s were a social barometer: the fervor with which the public embraced musical escapism was a measure of the hard times. And indeed, twentieth-century pop rarely produced such beguiling fantasy. The new class of songwriters that emerged in the 1920s were quintessential “young moderns,” who brought a self-conscious artistry and cosmopolitan outlook to what was previously regarded as a profession for scalawags, drunks, and other shady characters who hung around the Union Square rialto. Richard Rodgers drew on the romantic composers he had studied in his conservatory training; the rich, bluesy luster of George Gershwin’s compositions reflected tricks he picked up on his “slumming” pilgrimages to Harlem; the lyrics of Ira Gershwin, “Yip” Harburg, and Cole Porter betrayed their bookish taste for Gilbert and Sullivan and the light verse that filled the pages of The Smart Set. By the 1930s, the new songwriters were pouring out a seemingly unending stream of witty and beautiful songs whose quality even the stuffiest highbrows could not dispute. With their sumptuous melodies and lyrics that made taut, witty poetry out of everyday speech, the songs of the thirties were an American apotheosis: popular music at its most stylized and urbane. Earlier popular song had had its artful moments and flashes of ruffian wit, but nothing had approached the sophistication and expressiveness of a song like Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” (1930), with its daring tonal shifts and rich chromaticism. Nor was there precedent for lyrical ingenuity on par with Leo Robin’s “Thanks for the Memory” (1937)—a luminous pile-up of jokes and rhymes: Thanks for the memory Of rainy afternoons, Swingy Harlem tunes, And motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes. Songwriters brought this new sophistication to songs whose focus was radically narrowed. In the first two decades of the century, Tin Pan Alley strove for Morning Edition topicality, taking account of news events, trends, inventions—the whole mad pageant of American social experience. Now, although Tin Pan Alley was still used as a generic term to describe the music industry centered on Broadway and its Hollywood satellite, song publishers had dispersed from West Twenty-eighth Street and abandoned their old-school commitment to pop-music journalism: the new, up-market American popular song was almost exclusively preoccupied with romantic love. The task of the Broadway and Hollywood tunesmith was, in the words of one wag, to say “I love you” in thirty-two bars; from “It Had to Be You” to “All of Me” to “The Way You Look Tonight” to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the American Songbook is for the most part a catalog of variations on a single sturdy theme. The narrow focus of the new songs was, in part, an emblem of their aesthetic modernity, their art-for-art’s-sake emphasis on style above all. What mattered wasn’t so much what the songs said—usually some variation on “Blah, blah, blah, blah love … Tra la la la, tra la la la cottage for two,” as Ira Gershwin put it in his 1931 parody—but how they said it: the shape of a melody, the flair of a well-wrought rhyme or deft turn of phrase. With their thirty-two-bar form and “blah, blah love” content rigidly standardized, Tin Pan Alley’s songs became sleek exercises in sheer style; this was Deco Pop, music for an era whose cult of the streamlined and pristine was expressed in everything from the cut of waistcoats to the facades of skyscrapers. For a nation mired in the bleak realities of the Depression, the escapist appeal of these songs was considerable. Tin Pan Alley enshrined bourgeois love as a blissful sanctuary from history itself; listening to “Love Is Here to Stay” or “The Song Is You” or “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?” it was possible to believe—for the three minutes that the song played, at least—that real-world hardships didn’t matter, for in romance there was a charmed parallel universe: a “world” of two. “Millions of people go by,” Harry Warren wrote in one of the decade’s signature songs. “But they all disappear from view … I only have eyes for you.” Some songs provided a more decadent escape. In the luxuriant melodies and arch, knowing words of hits like “Just One of Those Things” and “I Can’t Get Started,” Americans heard the voice of an alluring character: the bon vivant who sauntered through 1930s popular culture, cocktail shaker in hand, untroubled by the Depression. These “swellegant” songs were most closely associated with younger writers—Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, and especially, Cole Porter—who filled their compositions with drolleries and highbrow references; but it was Berlin’s Top Hat collaboration with Astaire and Rogers that gave the fantasy its most intoxicating form. For the millions of Americans who made Top Hat (1935) the biggest movie musical success to date, the film’s primary delight wasn’t its predictable boy-meets-girl high jinks, but the swank apartments, the evening clothes, Fred Astaire catching the night flight to Venice for a weekend spree—its immersion in, as Berlin wrote in “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “an atmosphere that simply reeks with class.” Perhaps the greatest vicarious thrill of such songs was the feeling of unfeeling. When Top Hat appeared in 1935, per capita personal income was $474 per year, and unemployment still hovered at 20 percent. The long queue at the soup kitchen—that abiding image of Depression-era urban destitution—was still not unknown in New York, Chicago, and other major cities; farmers fled prairie states that had become wind-whipped dust bowls. In this atmosphere, Americans couldn’t help but lust for the extravagant detachment of Berlin’s “No Strings” narrator, who boasts of having “No strings and no connections / No ties to my affections.” In Top Hat, Astaire’s Jerry Travers sings the song while idling in his London Hotel suite; it is a rogue’s ode to the single life, but above all a declaration of decadence: Travers’s sole commitment is to the pursuit of high-toned pleasure. “I’m fancy free,” he sings while spritzing soda water into a highball of bourbon, “And free for anything fancy.” The narrator of Berlin’s “White Christmas” verse—that poor soul marooned in a Beverly Hills paradise—is recognizably a variation on that Astairean type: a blas? society swell. But by 1938, when Berlin was grappling with “White Christmas” and his various plans for a theatrical revue, history was catching up with popular culture’s fancy-free cosmopolitans. While Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms were lifting the nation from the depths of economic crisis, Americans were awakening to a different nightmare. Hitler was menacing Europe, Spain was rent by civil war, the Japanese were bombing Canton. In the shadow of geopolitical strife, the charm of penthouse pop was wearing off. Berlin’s latest Astaire-Rogers vehicle arrived in cinemas that August under a title, Carefree, that felt unseemly—out of sync with a more solemn and engaged national mood. This shift in public taste was underscored by the demise of Broadway and Hollywood’s songwriting elite. On July 11, 1937, thirty-eight-year-old George Gershwin died, suddenly and shockingly, of a brain tumor. That same year, Cole Porter’s legs were crushed in a horrible horseback-riding accident, a calamity from which his career would take years to recover. Lorenz Hart, the era’s darkest and most debonair wit, sank deeper into alcoholism and self-destruction; soon his partner Richard Rodgers would find an earnest new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II, the author of odes to “Ol’ Man River” and to cornstalks “as high as an elephant’s eye.” As the decade wound down, the eminence of Tin Pan Alley itself was under siege: for good-time musical diversion, American youth was increasingly turning to instrumental tunes played by swinging big bands. Berlin foretold the twilight of this pop culture era in perhaps his greatest song of the 1930s, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” from the Astaire-Rogers picture Follow the Fleet (1936). Musically, the song finds Berlin at his stylish finest, its verses stepping ominously through a series of minor-chord changes whose elegance and menace recall the best Kurt Weill. The lyric is even more remarkable, distilling the wishing-the-world-away desperation behind those High Deco 1930s movies and pop songs. Over a brooding C minor vamp, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” begins with an indelible line: “There may be trouble ahead.” Those words had dark resonance in 1936, the year that the Rome-Berlin Axis was proclaimed and Franco launched his revolt against the Spanish Republic—history was closing in on Hollywood’s fairy tales of “moonlight and music / And love and romance.” In Follow the Fleet, the song is staged as an archetypal expression of that fantasy: Astaire sings the song in his usual black-tie resplendence, while snaking Rogers around a gleaming Deco set. But as the melody’s foreboding downward tug suggests, the clock is ticking on this dream; around the corner, he sings, there may be “teardrops to shed.” “Soon,” Astaire sings, “We’ll be … humming a diff’rent tune.” In the autumn of 1938, Berlin composed that tune. He was in London, attending the British premiere of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The film, a cheerful Berlin greatest-hits package, was well received by British audiences and critics. But Berlin could scarcely take satisfaction in such triumphs: Europe was girding for war. For months, tensions had been mounting over Hitler’s claims on Czech Sudetenland; in September 1938, Germany demanded annexation of the territory. On September 29, the day before the Alexander’s Ragtime Band premiere, the Munich Pact was signed, authorizing Germany’s partition of the Sudetenland—a last-ditch attempt to head off war capped by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous forecast of “peace for our time.” Like most Americans, Berlin had followed the news in recent months with growing disquiet; now, in England—separated from a besieged Europe by a mere twenty-one miles of English Channel—the surreal newspaper headlines had a terrifying immediacy. Chamberlain’s assurances offered little solace. On the journey back to New York aboard the ocean liner Normandie, Berlin set to work on a new song. What he had in mind was a “peace song”—an anthem to soothe and reassure a jittery American public. He struggled to come up with the right tune, toying with a song entitled “Thanks, America” and another called “Let’s Talk About Liberty.” He had made several unsuccessful passes at the project before remembering a number he had abandoned more than two decades earlier: a few lines of purple patriotic verse, set to a martial A major melody, conceived in 1917 as a set piece for his World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank. The songwriter dragged out the old tune, changed a couple of lyrics, adjusted a musical phrase. Soon Berlin’s revamped song was complete. The result was a radical about-face from songs like “No Strings,” “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” and the verse of the fledgling “White Christmas.” Earnest where those songs were flippant and icily aloof, filled with pastoral images where those songs evoked big-city refinement, “God Bless America” was an anthem for a changing world. Berlin gave the song to Kate Smith, who specialized in large-lunged bombast and looked like a farmer’s wife. She was the anti-Astaire. Smith introduced “God Bless America” on her national radio broadcast on Armistice Day, November 11, 1938. Within days the song was everywhere: sung in churches, in ballparks, in public schools, at the White House, embraced by millions as an alternative national anthem to Francis Scott Key’s unwieldy “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This idea incensed nativists, who decried the “phony patriotism” of a tune that was, they hastened to point out, written by a “Russian,” and for a time the merits of “God Bless America” became a topic of vehement editorial-page debate. But the song’s critics were soon shouted down (what could be more patriotic, Berlin’s defenders argued, than an immigrant’s paean of praise to his adopted “home sweet home”?); and Berlin dealt the crackpots a killer blow by announcing that every cent of the song’s royalties would be donated to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America. It wasn’t just the specter of world war that prompted the overwhelming response to “God Bless America.” In the 1930s, the perennial American tension between progress and nostalgia was especially acute. The country was on the one hand in thrall to the modernity celebrated in, and embodied by, Tin Pan Alley’s sleek, cosmopolitan songs. The census revealed that America was now an urban nation, and millions of new American city dwellers, ?migr?s from rural America and from overseas, reveled in the excitement of urban life. The increased cultural and political stature of cities, the impact of mass production and consumption, of progressive religious instruction in churches and scientific teaching in public schools, of radio, motion pictures, and other high-tech mass media—all these contributed to an atmosphere of bracing modernity, to the feeling that the nation was speeding headlong into a science-fiction future of limitless possibility and sophistication. But the Depression made plain that technological revolution offered no guarantee of the good life. New urbanites confronted the anomie of city life, discovering that the fruits of modern, big-city individualism came at the expense of connection—the sense of security and stability that in the past had been provided by ancestral and communal ties. Even Tin Pan Alley’s inveterate New Yorkers registered this discontent; song after classic song features noirish, Hopperesque scenes of solitude and urban isolation, lonesome narrators pining for “someone to watch over me,” stupefied by longing “In the roaring traffic’s boom / In the silence of my lonely room.” As the thirties wore on, Americans felt increasing dissatisfaction with urban modernity—a sense that the country’s best essence lay in its preindustrial past. Depictions of small-town simplicity and a utopian yesteryear became staples of popular culture. In WPA murals and Popular Front posters, farmers reaped the plenty of pastures bathed in golden light; small-town Regular Joes, good-hearted and full of American horse sense, strode through Thornton Wilder’s theatrical smash Our Town (1938) and Frank Capra’s films; Norman Rockwell’s sentimental Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations depicted the wholesome procession along Main Street, USA. Commercial advertising was rife with images of nineteenth-century domestic harmony and agrarian life—Currier and Ives enlisted to sell breakfast cereal. Folkish imagery even penetrated such “high art” as the symphonic works of Aaron Copeland and the choreography of Martha Graham. This pastoral nostalgia dovetailed with another popular preoccupation: rifling the back pages of history to discover the Truly American. Certainly, American historical self-consciousness was nothing new. But in the 1930s, with the trauma of the Depression and the menace of Nazism and other foreign ideologies deepening Americans’ need for psychic reassurance, the quest to recover an organic national character became something of a crusade. The search for the “American way of life”—a phrase that, the cultural historian Warren Susman points out, first came into common use in the 1930s, along with such other telltale terms as “the American dream” and “the grass roots”—linked scholarly works like Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study in National Character and Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England with grandiose projects like the Rockefeller-funded restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. The same impulse guided the efforts of so-called folk revivalists to document and preserve the country’s indigenous song traditions. It was during the 1930s that John and Alan Lomax crisscrossed the rural United States, from New England to Appalachia to the Deep South, making thousands of recordings of ballads and blues and field hollers—the “authentic” music of the American folk. Though these songs were absorbed into left-wing movements like the Popular Front, the ideology of the folk revival was as much aesthetic as political: behind its cult of authenticity was disdain for the artifice and schmaltz of Tin Pan Alley pop. The movement’s torchbearer, Woody Guthrie, championed “people’s ballads” as the earthy alternative to the Hit Parade’s “sissy-voiced” crooners. When Guthrie wrote his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land” (original title: “God Blessed America”), in response to Berlin’s anthem, he was replying not just to the tune’s jingoism but to the grandiose production values and bloated emotionalism of Kate Smith’s ubiquitous recording. Guthrie and his fellow acoustic-guitar-wielding folkies stood for grit, homespun verities, unflinching realism; at the bottom of his “This Land Is Your Land” lyric sheet, Guthrie noted: “All you can write is what you see.” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jody-rosen/white-christmas-the-story-of-a-song/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.