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In the good old days, before the sixties rewrote the standards of popular culture, Irving Berlin was an American institution almost without equal. Born in Mogilyov, Russia, in 1888, he was one of the very few men in show business with the clout to get his name not just above the title but in it. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, audiences flocked to see Irving Berlin’s On the Avenue, Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, and Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.
Irving Berlin was a songwriter for more than 50 years and wrote over 1,500 songs.1 He had his first big hit in 1911 with "Alexander’s Ragtime Band" and was still going strong in 1954, with the mawkish "Counting Your Blessings."2 It’s hard to imagine such an achievement today, given the constant flux in musical tastes, audiences, and technologies.
The very first song ever sung in a motion picture, "Blue Skies," was a Berlin ballad.3 In his lifetime, Berlin supplied the score for 19 films, six of them starring Fred Astaire.4 Astaire got Berlin’s very best scores,5 but Berlin’s other films, starting with The Cocoanuts in 1929 and running through There's No Business Like Show Business in 1955, give a fascinating picture of that frequently horrifying but always intriguing beast, the American Mind.
Irving Berlin was a one-of-a-kind genius. He spoke no English until the age of 12 and received only a rudimentary education. He started out in "show business" as a singing waiter, deciding to write lyrics because lyricists got paid more than singers. He began composing as well because composers got paid more than lyricists.6 He founded a music publishing company so that he wouldn’t have to share his profits with publishers. He built a theater, the Music Box, that is still in business at 239 W. 45th St., so that he wouldn’t have to listen to theater owners. During the twenties, Berlin’s "Music Box Revues" became the most fashionable shows on Broadway.
Berlin was suspicious of technological innovations like records and radio, which he felt wore out songs too quickly. Talking pictures were a particular menace. They were made in faraway Hollywood, not New York, and they were hugely expensive. Berlin couldn’t exercise the sort of control that he enjoyed in the elegant confines of the Music Box. Like the rest of the great Broadway composers of the era, Berlin wrote for Hollywood — the money was too good not to — but always kept his heart in Manhattan. Broadway style — at once informal and polished, democratic and elitist — defined show business for Berlin. Hollywood was just an outlet.
The Cocoanuts, of course, was the Marx Brothers’ first film, shot on Long Island rather than Hollywood. Few people know that Berlin wrote the score for this property, which began life as a Broadway play. Berlin gets a story credit as well, but he couldn’t have worked very hard, because the plot, involving a pair of international jewel thieves who steal a pearl necklace and hide it in a hollow tree,7 must have been used a dozen times a season on Broadway. The four songs he contributed are hardly distinctive, and the real musical highlight is the "I Lost My Shirt/I Found My Shirt" sequence that relies on two famous arias from Carmen, "La Habanera" and "Toreadora." It’s the Marx Brothers, not Irving, who make The Cocoanuts go, but it definitely is a musical, and it’s definitely worth seeing as a musical, a sample of the stylish, irreverent fun that thrived on Broadway during the twenties.
Berlin’s next picture was Mammy (yes, Mammy), written for Al Jolson in 1930, for which Berlin also got story credit. Jolson’s first few musicals were enormous hits, to the extent that he was demanding, and getting, half a million dollars per picture.8 Only antiquarians with very strong stomachs will want to view Mammy. There’s enough in-your-face blackface to sink a battleship, but Jolson, belting out old-fashioned showstoppers like "Let Me Sing and I’m Happy," definitely makes an impression.9
Berlin was severely burned in his next film effort. He came up with the story and wrote five songs for what was shaping up as a major, major motion picture. Reaching for the Moon starred none other than Mr. Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, in his second talking picture, and co-starred Bebe Daniels, with Bing Crosby along to do the singing. Berlin’s story was typical twenties fluff about a dashing Wall Street financier and a madcap aviatrix aboard a luxury liner, made topical by a plot twist involving the 1929 crash.10 But by the time the picture was finished, in late 1930, studio geniuses decided that "musicals were dead" and cut four of the five songs. The only one to survive was "When the Folks High-Up Do the Mean Low-Down." No doubt the suits were stunned when the mutilated film proved DOA at the box office.
After that debacle, Berlin contributed occasional songs to films but did not write another score until Top Hat (1935), which of course proved to be an enormous triumph, as did the next Fred/Ginger/Irving combo, Follow the Fleet (1936). The platinum-on-platinum look, and success, of these films must have been balm to Berlin’s heart.11
Madeleine Carroll
and Dick Powell
in On the Avenue
Berlin next tried his hand at a non-Astaire/Rogers musical, On the Avenue (1937). Although it lacked Fred and Ginger, On the Avenue had almost everything else — great tunes like "Let’s Go Slumming" and "I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm," lavish production numbers, and good performances by Dick Powell,12 Alice Faye,13 and the Ritz Brothers. As comedians, the Ritz Brothers fell midway between the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.14 On the one hand, they weren’t funny; on the other hand, they didn’t poke each other in the eye. But they were excellent comic singers/dancers,15 and they’re featured in the opening number of On the Avenue, "He Ain’t Got Rhythm."
"He Ain’t Got Rhythm" ("So no one’s with him, he’s the loneliest man in town") is a good old-fashioned blast of American anti-intellectualism. The number opens in a girl’s dorm,16 with Alice Faye explaining to the gals that book-learning is just a waste of time. We cut to an observatory, where astronomer Harry Ritz is getting the same lesson.
HARRY RITZ: "I’m a scientist, to my finger tips!"CHORUS: "But ya can’t do nothin’ with your hips!"
The plot of On the Avenue is standard, second-rate screwball comedy (so I’m going to skip it entirely), but the production numbers aren’t bad. In addition to "He Ain’t Got Rhythm," there’s "Let’s Go Slumming," which humorously urges the masses to condescend to their betters ("let’s go slumming, nose-thumbing, on Park Avenue"), a theme that is of course tailor-made for the Ritz Brothers.17 "I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm" features a clever bit with a white-gloved Powell silhouetted against an all-black curtain (clever, but it doesn’t have much to do with winter). The fact that neither Powell nor Faye could dance helps keep On the Avenue from being a great musical.18
NEXT PAGE: Enough triumph and tragedy for two films
NOTES
1. Berlin was unusual in that he wrote both music and lyrics (his only competitor was Cole Porter) and unique in that he couldn’t actually write musical notation. He would sing or play his compositions for a transcriber to take down.
2. Berlin’s last Broadway show, Mr. President (1962), written when he was 74, was a painful flop. As the sixties wore on, Berlin grew hopelessly out of date and became increasingly bitter and withdrawn. Sadly, he lived to be 101.
3. The film, of course, was The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. "Blue Skies" was already a legendary standard. When it premiered on Broadway in 1926, the first-night audience demanded 23 encores. (Berlin, sitting in the front row, joined in the last when Belle Baker, the singer, suffered temporary brain lock and forgot the lyrics.)
4. The six were Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Carefree, Holiday Inn, Blue Skies, and Easter Parade. Top Hat is discussed in this issue. Articles on the rest will appear in future issues, if the Internet lasts that long. I’m omitting discussion of Puttn’ on the Ritz (1931), Annie Get Your Gun (1950), and Call Me Madam (1953) because they’re not available on video, and Second Fiddle (1940) because it stars Sonja Henie (in addition, none of the songs are well known, and all of the critics have been unkind).
5. Berlin said publicly that Astaire was his preferred singer for introducing a song, "because his delivery and diction are so good that he can put over a song like nobody else."
6. He never learned to read or write music, and could play in only one key, f-sharp major. He used a special piano (they were manufactured commercially) that allowed him to shift keys by adjusting a lever.
7. Well, what would you do with it?
8. The first actor to get a million-dollar paycheck was Sean Connery, who received a million in 1971 to resume the James Bond role in Diamonds Are Forever.
9. Jolson, an overwhelming "Mr. Show Business" type, had an ego massive even by Hollywood standards. According to George Burns, when Jolson was in vaudeville, he would turn the water faucets in his dressing room on full force, so he wouldn’t have to listen to the applause for the other acts. "It could be Henderson’s Elephants. He didn’t care."
10. Don’t worry. Doug and Bebe get married anyway.
11. Berlin made over $300,000 on Top Hat alone (as did Astaire), a huge sum at the time.
12. Powell, a baby-faced smoothie who was a very big star in thirties musicals (he could sing and act, but couldn’t dance), reinvented himself for fifties TV as a gritty, grizzled gunslinger in Dick Powell’s Zane Gray Theater.
13. Faye was very popular in thirties musicals. Like Powell, she could sing and act but not dance.
14. The Ritz Brothers were Mel Brooks’s favorite comedians, particularly Harry Ritz, the leader of the three. Neither Mel nor the Ritz Brothers could resist beating a gag to death. Marty Feldman looks exactly like a Ritz Brother, which is undoubtedly why Brooks featured him so much. If there is a heaven, and if Mel Brooks gets there, he will spend eternity making an infinite number of films exactly like On the Avenue.
15. When they could resist beating a gag to death.
16. Thirties musicals often had numbers set in outrageously inauthentic girls’ dorms. This sort of voyeurism didn’t start with Animal House.
17. "Let’s Go Slumming" gets a double run-through, the first time with Alice Faye surprisingly explicit in the guise of a prostitute (she’s leaning against a lamppost with her skirt slit half way up her thigh), and the second with Harry Ritz in drag.
18. Unless you’re Mel Brooks.
