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Behind the Berlin Wall : Suspicion and Privacy Obsess Irving Berlin as He Turns 100

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<i> The writer is the author of "James Agee: A Life" (Dutton, 1984) and is currently at work on a biography of Irving Berlin to be published by Viking Penguin. </i>

On May 11, Irving Berlin, the most successful and popular songwriter in American history, will celebrate his 100th birthday. His extreme longevity is but one more aspect of a singular and astonishing career that has taken him from the Russian town where he was born Israel Baline, the sixth and youngest child of a poor cantor, to reclusive splendor on New York’s Upper East Side.

His songs are deeply woven into the fabric of our national life, ranging all the way from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911)--the hit that made him an international celebrity--to “White Christmas” (1942). Altogether, he has published what is estimated to be more than 1,500 songs and written the scores for 16 Broadway shows. And yet he accomplished all this without being able to read or write music. To overcome this handicap, he composed music on a piano specially modified to change keys at the touch of a lever and relied on trained “musical secretaries” to transcribe his compositions. Despite this limitation, rival composer Jerome Kern once remarked: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.”

For the last quarter-century, the nation’s minstrel has lived quietly with his wife of 62 years, Ellin, in an oversized townhouse in Manhattan’s fashionable enclave, Beekman Place. He has three children, all girls, and nine grandchildren. He has long been the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers’ biggest royalty earner--indeed, he was one of the music-licensing organization’s charter members. At the same time, he is so secretive and publicity shy that most people living in his neighborhood are unaware of their world-renowned neighbor. Next to Greta Garbo, Irving Berlin is the most famous recluse in show business.

In the course of several years’ research for a comprehensive but unauthorized biography of this greatest of American songwriters, I have occasionally gotten a look behind the wall of privacy he has erected around himself. It hasn’t been easy. Berlin has been so successful in his quest for privacy that the question I am most often asked in the course of my research is, “When did he die?” (True to form, Berlin declined to talk with The Times for this article.)

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However, various colleagues and friends of Berlin have provided me with a consistent picture of the way Irving Berlin lives today. Nearly everyone has warned me about his pathological sensitivity to public exposure, no matter how slight, and his overriding fear that friends, family and business associates are liable to take advantage of his wealth and fame. Some of his friends refused to talk about him at all, because they are afraid of upsetting and angering him, they said. Others will only talk anonymously, for much the same reason. It is the paradox of Irving Berlin today that he views the world that has heaped honors and riches on him with deep-rooted suspicion.

His desire for privacy stems in part from a determination to protect his private life. Yet his two marriages are the stuff of tabloid headlines. The first was to Dorothy Goetz, the sister of one of his associates, in 1912. They honeymooned in what was then a fashionable spot: Cuba. There Dorothy contracted typhoid fever. She died five months later in their apartment on Riverside Drive. She was just 20 years old. Though Berlin denies his songs are autobiographical, he wrote “When I Lost You” soon after her death. It sold a million copies.

His second (and current) marriage, to Ellin Mackay, attracted worldwide press attention and stirred national controversy. Ellin came from one of the wealthiest and most privileged families in the United States. Determined to escape the confines of her upbringing, Ellin fled to New York, where she wrote for the fledgling New Yorker. One night she went to a fashionable speakeasy with friends and met Berlin. Thereafter, the two conducted a highly public courtship. (His wonderfully romantic and evocative songs “What’ll I Do” and “Always” date from this period.) But her anti-Semitic father bitterly opposed the union. Hoping she would forget that upstart Jewish songwriter from the Lower East Side, he sent her abroad, but when she returned she eloped with Berlin. They were married on Jan. 4, 1926, in a hastily organized civil ceremony, after which they left on a honeymoon trip to Europe.

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The event polarized society and made front-page news across the country. For weeks on end, the popular press speculated on the progress of his marriage and his supposed decision to convert to Catholicism--all of it the sheerest fiction.

Before his second marriage Berlin courted and manipulated the press with the finesse of a Tammany Hall politician. He gave countless interviews and obliged curious reporters with details of his working methods. He even published articles explaining his songwriting techniques and boasted frequently of his never-to-be-realized dream of composing a ragtime opera. He appeared in the papers so often that his photograph, often carefully posed, was as well known as his music. By the time he met Mackay, Berlin had made himself a staple of American life.

After the marriage, Berlin did all he could to keep his personal life from ever again becoming fodder for the press, and during the six decades he has enjoyed with Ellin, he has accomplished this goal. Of their marriage today, an insider said: “He gets very jealous if his wife is close to anyone but him. Sometimes she’ll be talking with one of the maids and he gets angry. Ellin is very bound to Irving. Everything she does is for him. For example, every night at dinner, which is usually served at 5 p.m., she gets dressed up for Irving. One night she said, ‘I really only have to fix the left side of my hair because Irving always sits to the left of me at dinner, and it is the only side he will see.’ ”

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A Loss of Confidence

The other and more significant reason why Berlin has all but disappeared from view during the last 25 years is the profound and seemingly permanent loss of confidence he has suffered. After “Annie Get Your Gun” lit up Broadway in 1946, he tried repeatedly to come up with a score of similar popularity. Keep in mind that “Annie Get Your Gun” yielded more hit songs than any other show in modern Broadway history; Berlin was setting a high standard for himself. None of his subsequent shows met with the same success. “Miss Liberty” (1949) was pretty much of a flop, and “Call Me Madam” (1950) was his final hit.

In 1962, after an absence from the Broadway stage of 12 years, Berlin attempted his comeback with “Mr. President,” a musical exploiting the popularity of the Kennedys. The show racked up $2.5 million in advance sales, a record for its day. Despite these high expectations, the musical, starring Nanette Fabray and Robert Ryan, laid the biggest egg in Berlin’s entire Broadway career. As the headline of Walter Kerr’s review in the New York Herald Tribune read, “BERLIN’S ‘MR. PRESIDENT’--MUCH TALENT, LITTLE CHEER.” Its failure seemed to offer confirmation of the songwriter’s worst fears.

Berlin also looked to Hollywood to restore luster to his career. During the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, numerous MGM screenwriters and producers labored on a musical biography of Berlin’s career titled, “Say It With Music.” It was to be a lavish, big-budget spectacular, filled with stars. (At one time Julie Andrews was to play the lead.) Berlin even wrote a number of new songs to be included along with his old favorites. But the project was bedeviled by a number of problems, including MGM producer Arthur Freed’s death, constant executive shuffling at the studio and, most significantly, the songwriter’s obsession with privacy.

Berlin has always opposed any attempt to portray him on screen as long as he was alive. Nonetheless, such projects have been in the works almost continuously since 1915, when his rags-to-riches life would have been a silent-movie epic. That movie was never made, and several movies for which Berlin wrote the scores, especially “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1938), flirt with the idea of telling the story of the songwriter’s life, but do no more than that. And yet the story of the life of Irving Berlin, with its mixture of music, heartbreak and triumph, remained a natural for the movies.

Finally, in 1958, the British Broadcasting Corp. assembled a large-scale television dramatization of Berlin’s life, said to be the most expensive British television production of its day. However, when Berlin got wind of the production, he had his lawyers write the BBC and insist that Berlin be written out of the script. At the 11th hour, the BBC yielded and aired a non-biographical version. In both cases Berlin got his wish that his life not be portrayed on film, even though it meant canceling his pet project, “Say It With Music,” which eventually joined the ghostly archive of unmade movies about his life.

Berlin’s Inner Circle

After the failure of “Mr. President” and the demise of “Say It With Music,” Berlin’s life has been something of a long, slow, mournful coda, with the exception of 1966, when he introduced a new duet (“An Old-Fashioned Wedding”) for a Lincoln Center revival of “Annie Get Your Gun.”

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Other than that, he has devoted much of his time to developing his skill with oil painting. Unlike a Berlin song, of which there is no typical style, there is a typical Berlin painting style. He covers a palette with heavily applied oil, often in a primary color, and glues it to a canvas. Occasionally the eye of the palette frames a small snapshot of the individual to whom Berlin intends to give the painting. The recipients are usually friends and occasionally a celebrity, such as the late Fred Astaire, for whom Berlin wrote some of his most famous film scores, beginning with “Top Hat” (1935).

In the event of the recipient’s death, it’s not unusual for a representative of Berlin to retrieve the painting. Berlin works so hard at his painting that he considers it more than just a hobby. “I take it too damn seriously,” he once said of his painting. “I want to be good, but I can’t.” He has given serious thought to mounting a show of his work, but protective friends counseled him against the idea.

He continued to compose both songs and, some say, scores for entire shows, but instead of copyrighting the material, he put it in his drawer. “I’ve got an awful lot of unpublished stuff lying around,” he said on the occasion of his 90th birthday, “but at my age, it’s hard to go to auditions and rehearsals and all the rest. Besides, you get frightened. You can stand success, but you’re afraid of failure.”

By then, Berlin was afraid not only to expose his songs in public but to appear in public himself. By way of explanation, he told a friend, “I don’t want people to look at me and say, ‘See how old he looks.’ ” Indeed, he is said sometimes to consider his extreme old age a cruel joke that is being played on him.

Although Berlin has kept himself out of the public eye, he has talked for years with a network of friends on the phone. Most of Berlin’s “phone friends,” themselves a generation or more younger, describe him as having remarkable mental acuity to this day, despite his failing eyesight. “He always says, ‘My health is wonderful from the neck up,’ ” notes one.

The late Harold Arlen, composer of “Stormy Weather” and “Over the Rainbow,” was among Berlin’s closest confidantes. Since both were sons of cantors, they had much in common, and Berlin liberally dispensed career and personal advice to his friend. Arlen, in turn, took up oil painting in emulation of Berlin. The relationship continued until Arlen’s death in 1986. At that time, Berlin reminisced in a statement he wrote, which was read at Arlen’s funeral: “We would talk on the phone for hours. Never about songs. Conversation would start when one of us would ask, ‘How did you sleep last night?’ This would continue until we were both worn out and too tired to sleep.”

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Author Stanley Green, known for his chronicles of the American musical theater, is another member of Berlin’s inner circle. “He likes to reminisce,” said Green of his phone conversations with Berlin. “He can remember events from 70 years ago with great clarity. He told me that W.C. Fields was in ‘Watch Your Step’ (Berlin’s first Broadway show) during an out-of-town tryout in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1914, at the Empire Theater. It’s amazing that he can remember such details. He also recalled that the producer, Charles Dillingham, didn’t want Fields to steal the show from the stars, the famous dancing team of Irene and Vernon Castle, and fired him. ‘And Dillingham was right!’ Berlin said.

“When Fred Astaire died,” Green added, “Berlin called me . He was very upset. He was very close to Fred Astaire and considered him the most professional performer in movies.”

Unestimated Wealth

Berlin no longer frequents the premises of the legendary Irving Berlin Music Co. Though Tin Pan Alley has long since vanished, except in mythology, Berlin’s music publishing company continues to thrive. Today it occupies unassuming quarters in an anonymous skyscraper on New York’s Sixth Avenue and a West Coast office in a Hollywood high-rise. In a field dominated by large conglomerates, it is one of the few independents left. In the Manhattan office, Berlin’s longtime personal secretary, the mercurial Hilda Schneider, energetically discourages fans, journalists and the like from trying to contact her renowned boss.

Still, according to Helmy Kresa, who has been Berlin’s arranger since 1928, the songwriter continues to run the office by phone from his Beekman Place home, even though he hasn’t set foot in the place in more than five years. And he is as feisty as ever. “I talk to him only if he raises hell with me. When he called one day and discovered that I wasn’t there (at the office) because I’d taken an early train home, he told me I have to stay in the office until 3 o’clock (every day). He didn’t want me leaving earlier.”

Yet even the seeming permanence of the music company is being eroded by the gradual expiration of Berlin’s precious copyrights. Under current law, songs written before Jan. 1, 1978 (the bulk of Berlin’s catalogue) are protected for only 75 years. This means that some of the earliest Berlin hits, such as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam,’ ” “When I Lost You,” and “Everybody’s Doing It Now” have entered the public domain, and more will inevitably continue to do so.

Not that Berlin or his legatees will ever want for money. It is extremely difficult to estimate how wealthy Berlin is today, though it is certain he is a millionaire many times over. Even Forbes magazine, which keeps track of the 400 wealthiest (and often most secretive) Americans, has been unable to come up with a reliable estimate. However, it is known that “God Bless America” (1938) has earned more than $700,000 for the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, to whom Berlin assigned the copyright. And “White Christmas,” said to be the most valuable musical copyright of all time, has sold over 6 million copies of sheet music. And these are but two (admittedly enormously popular) songs out of Berlin’s enormous catalogue.

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No Commercials

As valuable as the Berlin catalogue is, the songwriter has long refused to license his tunes for commercials, thus cutting himself from a major source of income. It is admirable, of course, that Berlin would refrain from sullying his songs this way, but he is often protective to the point of absurdity.

For example, Gil Wiest, owner of Michael’s Pub, a popular New York nightclub, was ready to open a tribute to Berlin entitled “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” But the day before the show was to debut in late February, Berlin’s attorney obtained a cease and desist order. Even though Michael’s Pub pays ASCAP royalties, Berlin’s organization maintains that the club cannot devote an entire program to his songs. Said Wiest: “Berlin is the only composer who does this. The others are only too happy to see their material performed. His organization did the same thing to me four or five years ago. They threatened, but the show ran anyway.” This time in response to the court order, Wiest compromised by cutting back the ratio of Berlin songs to 75 percent and changed the title of the program to “Blue Skies.” In its new form, the show runs through the end of this month.

Berlin also makes life difficult for those who wish to broadcast retrospectives of his songs. Several years ago, when the New York-based film company Camera Three began preparing an Irving Berlin tribute for the Public Broadcasting Service, Berlin refused to cooperate. The program went ahead anyway.

The producers of “Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam” were less fortunate. When they set out to acquire music rights for their film, which is scheduled to be shown Easter Sunday on Home Box Office, they received a gratis license from Bruce Springsteen for “Born in the USA.” They then approached Berlin. “We had footage of guys in Vietnam, and they were singing ‘White Christmas.’ It was very moving,” recalled co-producer B. Z. Petroff. “Berlin wouldn’t give us gratis rights, and he wouldn’t consider being paid for it.” The producers finally substituted “Blue Christmas,” made popular by Elvis Presley.

In the same vein, film versions of such classic Berlin stage musicals as “Call Me Madam” (1953, Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor) and “Annie Get Your Gun” (1950, Betty Hutton, Howard Keel) are not easily found either on videocassette or late-night television. Berlin retains the rights to the songs in these shows and has effectively blocked distribution. To view them, one can go to the Motion Picture and Sound Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, as I did recently, where the reels are stored for copyright purposes.

However, other movie musicals that recycled earlier Berlin hits are more readily available. Two of these titles are the 1948 “Easter Parade” (Fred Astaire and Judy Garland) and the 1954 “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (Merman, Dan Dailey, Johnny Ray, Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor and Marilyn Monroe--whose rendition of “Heat Wave” became one of her classic screen moments).

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Berlin’s extreme sensitivity to copyright infringement extends to print as well. It has been traditionally difficult to receive permission to quote a Berlin lyric. It is now often impossible. So sensitive is Berlin to the issue of plagiarism that he took Mad magazine to court when the humor publication satirized the songwriter’s lyrics. Berlin lost his case in 1964 and seemed quite the curmudgeon for getting mad at Mad.

In the early 1970s, he again jousted with a publisher, this time the august Oxford University Press, which was preparing a definitive account of the popular American song written by Alec Wilder, himself a songwriter of some stature. Among all the composers represented in the volume, Berlin alone refused to give permission for his music and lyrics to be quoted, even in this scholarly context. (Among others, Richard Rodgers had given approval, as well as the estates of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, etc.)

The issue was not criticism, because Wilder had nothing but praise for the master songwriter, but rather Berlin’s belief that such a discussion invaded his privacy. He went so far as to call the book’s editor James T. Maher and lambaste him for having the temerity to oversee such a project. Maher said that Berlin spewed obscenities and castigated every aspect of the project, leaving the editor badly shaken. Despite Berlin’s behavior, the book appeared in 1972, filled with effusive praise for him.

At about the same time, he subjected the Songwriters Hall of Fame to similar abuse when the fledgling institution attempted to induct him. Berlin objected to the 11 other songwriters also accorded the honor (including the likes of Duke Ellington) because he felt the New York-based organization was lowering its standards. Again, he resorted to telephone tirades to make his will known.

‘Christmas’ Salute

Just because Irving Berlin has chosen to forsake the world does not mean the world has forgotten him. Hardly a year passes without Berlin receiving a major award, though he is never lured from his home to receive them. For example, during “Liberty Weekend” on Fourth of July in 1986, Berlin was selected to receive a Presidential Medal, but he was the only honoree not to attend a lavish, open-air ceremony in New York Harbor commemorating the Statue of Liberty. David L. Wolper, who produced the television coverage, instead showed a clip of Berlin singing “God Bless America.” Later, Wolper received some criticism concerning the ostentatiousness of the presentation, but he received support from one master showman--Berlin himself. “He telephoned me the next day,” Wolper recalled, “and said, ‘I watched all of it, and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Don’t believe what you read in the press. When I wrote “God Bless America,” they said it was too corny, but it’s still around.’ ”

More recently, Berlin avoided the Kennedy Center honors, televised last Dec. 30; Berlin was the only recipient not to attend. The approach of his 100th birthday in May has, of course, inspired an outpouring of planned tributes, and Berlin has done his best to scotch all but one, a celebration at Carnegie Hall in New York. About this occasion, Berlin has joked to friends: “You know, I might screw up all your plans. I might die before my 100th birthday.”

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Berlin also receives regular tributes of a gentler and more spontaneous sort. Some 20 years ago, John Wallowitch, a Juilliard-trained composer, moved into Berlin’s neighborhood. “I was walking my dog past his home on Christmas Eve,” Wallowitch recalled recently, “and I sang ‘White Christmas’ and burst into tears. It became a ritual with me until 1982.”

The following year, Wallowitch asked a few friends to join him, and they sang a selection of Berlin tunes aloud in 4-degree weather. “I mean it was c-o-o-ld!” the bespectacled Wallowitch says. “A friend suggested I should ring Mr. Berlin’s doorbell. I found myself overcome with fear, but after what seemed an eternity I did, and the house, which is always dark, suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. We sang ‘Always’ and repeated ‘White Christmas.’ Then the front door opened, and a maid said, ‘Mr. Berlin wants to thank you.’ ”

She invited the hardy troupe of serenaders inside, where they were astonished to see Berlin himself. “He was in the kitchen,” Wallowitch recalls, “wearing pajamas, a bathrobe, slippers, and had big bright eyes. He said, ‘I want to thank you. That’s the nicest Christmas present I’ve ever had.’ ” Wallowitch paused, then adds: “This was the greatest moment of my life.”

Berlin proceeded to hug all the men--a strong hug, despite his age--and kissed all the women.

John Wallowitch and his friends are planning to serenade Berlin again at the start of the composer’s second century, one minute after midnight, May 11, 1988.

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