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Nothing gets Hollywood’s attention like millions in profits. In 1938, Twentieth-Century Fox got the idea for a film, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, which would in effect be a Berlin retrospective. They asked Berlin to come up with a story that would cover 25 years, from his first success in 1911 to the present. Berlin’s life actually contained enough triumph and tragedy for two films. He rose from extreme poverty to extreme wealth and fame. His first wife, Dorothy Goetz, died of typhoid fever on their honeymoon. His second wife, Ellin Mackay, was so wealthy that her childhood home, Harbor Hill, required 134 servants to make its 50 rooms habitable.19
Berlin, however, had no interest in sharing his private life with America. The story he gave Fox involved the fictitious adventures of "Alexander," a New Orleans bandleader who rises to fame playing Berlin’s music. Hollywood producers changed the locale from New Orleans to San Francisco (that’s why they get paid the big bucks) but kept most of the rest of Berlin’s story, casting wasp-waisted pretty-boy Tyrone Power as Alexander.20 For some reason, Berlin drops out of the story entirely. We see his name on the sheet music to "Alexander’s Ragtime Band," but the rest of Berlin’s compositions are assigned, explicitly or implicitly, to members of the band.
Irving Berlin with wife Ellen
and daughters, 1954
The completed film, which features 22 of Berlin’s songs and Alice Faye, Don Ameche,21 Jack Haley,22 and Ethel Merman to sing them, is largely a disappointment. The songs are thrown at us so quickly we hardly get to enjoy them. However, there are some wonderful, frustratingly brief bits at the beginning, including a marvelously eccentric trio (Jane Jones, Otto Fries, and Mel Kalish) doing "That Ragtime Violin" and terrific comic singing and dancing from Wally Vernon (solo on "This Is the Life" and partnered by Dixie Dunbar for "Everybody’s Doing It"). Another trio, made up of Faye, Haley, and Chick Chandler, gives a nice performance of "The International Rag".23 Once these early numbers are done, the film makes little effort to present Berlin’s music either energetically or authentically. What we get is a lot of mild-mannered mid-thirties pop.
Ethel Merman does add some heat to the second half of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, when she pounds out three up-tempo swingers in a row, separated by Faye doing two "down" numbers ("You Forgot to Remember" and "All Alone"), but the production numbers never quite get from "good" to "great." The first of the three is "Pack Up Your Sins (and Go to the Devil in Hades)," one of Berlin’s cleverest numbers but with half the excitement left out. Berlin had a remarkable knack for writing "counterpoint melodies" — twin songs that could stand on their own but could also be sung simultaneously. The lyrics for the countermelody for "Pack Up Your Sins" are terrific ("If you’re tired and all out of sorts, Hell is the best of the winter resorts"), but we never get to hear them.24
Merman does a better job with "My Walking Stick," a salute to Fred Astaire that Berlin wrote specifically for Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The accompanying production number, right out of "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails," isn’t bad either. Merman’s also in good form for the third number, "Everybody Step." As she sings, the chorus boys put their top hats down in a line for her to walk on. (The hats are, obviously, reinforced so they don’t collapse when Merman steps on them. The bit would have worked better if Merman had had the nerve to walk on the hats without looking down.)
The finale has Alexander giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, which Berlin did not do, unlike his rivals Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin. Merman’s featured in an elaborate choral version of "Heat Wave," the first of three film versions of this song.25 "Easter Parade" gets its first film airing by a dreadfully smirking Don Ameche,26 followed by Faye doing a reprise of "Alexander’s Ragtime Band."
The Louisiana Purchase (1941) is one of three Berlin musicals available on video that began life on Broadway. The film is something of a curiosity, although its charms are distinctly limited. It’s the only film of this era I’ve ever seen that contains a lot of topical political humor. But whether you get the allusions or not, most of the jokes are pretty lame. The stars are a young Bob Hope (that’s how old the picture is), actress/ballerina Vera Zorina, Victor Moore, and Irene Bordoni.27
The picture begins with an unusual gag: We see a bigshot in his office reading the script of The Louisiana Purchase. He calls in his secretary and starts singing "Take a Letter to Paramount," explaining that the script is a libel on the State of Louisiana.28 To protect itself, the studio must claim that the story is completely fictional. We cut to a chorus of pseudo-Southern babes (the "Louisiana Belles"), who assure us in song that the story we’re about to see is not based on any real persons, living or dead.
Once we get the plot, we discover that the Louisiana Purchasing Company, headed by state representative Bob Hope, is being investigated for illegal business dealings with the federal government by an incorruptible New England senator, played by Moore. Zorina is a poor girl from Austria fleeing the Nazis, hoping to become a citizen.29 "Once I get my papers, I go on relief. Heil Roosevelt!"30 In exchange for assistance in getting her mother out of Austria, Hope persuades Zorina to inveigle Moore into a compromising position, so that he can be blackmailed into abandoning the investigation.
The plot’s quite a serviceable one for a musical comedy, but the film doesn’t do much to bring it off. Moore, best known as Fred Astaire’s sidekick in Swing Time, had a scratchy, croaking voice, which apparently got laughs back in the thirties but which I find ineffably tiresome. He does nothing to convince us that he actually is from New England, the one thing that might have given his character some believability. (As an old-time character actor, it was his job, after all, to play exactly the same character over and over again.)
As a young man, Bob Hope wasn’t much funnier than he was as an old man. Hope was more than competent as a song-and-dance man, but for some reason the film doesn’t ask him to do either. Zorina does quite a bit of ballet,31 which is pleasant enough, but the only real musical energy in the film is provided by shimmying cutie Dona Drake,32 who gives us a swinging version of "The Louisiana Purchase," and an unidentified black chorus, who sing the best song in the picture, "It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow." Half of Berlin’s Broadway score, including the snappy "Sex Marches On," is left unsung.
The Louisiana Purchase really functions more as spectacle than as either a musical or a comedy. The color is extremely good for such an early film, and we are treated to both a fashion show and the Mardi Gras (shown as an all-white affair), both predictably ridiculous.33 The picture does have a few funny lines. When Hope finds out that Moore is still dreaming of a shot at the presidency, he warns him, "If you continue this investigation, you’ll see less of the inside of the White House than Eleanor."34
Berlin’s most remarkable film has to be This Is the Army (1943). In the stage version,35 Berlin did what he had previously done in World War I, create an all-soldier show that would raise money for war-related charities. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, in part through the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, who saw the show three times while it played in New York and encouraged Berlin and the Army to bring it to Washington so that FDR could see it. After its success in Washington, This is the Army went on a national tour and then an international one, visiting both the European and Pacific theaters. From 1942 through 1945, Berlin and his troupe gave hundreds of performances and traveled tens of thousands of miles.
They also made a film, with the help of ringers George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. The film puts a frame around This Is the Army, loosely derived from Berlin’s own life. In This Is the Army, we see Murphy/Berlin putting on his WWI all-soldier revue, Yip! Yip! Yaphank.36 Berlin himself appears to sing the show’s most famous song, "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning."
In the film, Murphy goes overseas and is wounded (which did not happen to Berlin). The years pass. Murphy’s son grows up to be Ronald Reagan, and war clouds loom in Europe. (The two presumably are unrelated.) Murphy/Berlin dusts off an old song he wrote for Yip! Yip! Yaphank but never used, "God Bless America," and gives it to Kate Smith.
Kate Smith, "America’s Songbird," was one of the fattest and most popular singers in the country. (The radio era was the heyday of the fat girl singer.) Smith sang "God Bless America" in a bombastic, "symphonic" arrangement, complete with orchestra, chorus, and crashing cymbals, almost every week on her radio program during the early years of World War II, prior to America’s entrance.37 She sang it because people wanted her to. Americans desperately wanted to avoid both the scourge of fascism and the scourge of war, a form of semi-paralysis that gripped the country until Pearl Harbor.38 "God Bless America," which Smith sings in This Is the Army, expresses the feverish, confused patriotism of that time, the longing to do something, provided that it would not actually result in war.
Once the war does come, of course, we are given an actual presentation of This Is the Army, which is in fact an all-soldier show. Murphy and Reagan remain on the wings. Berlin’s hit song for the show was "This Is the Army," which struck a note of egalitarian austerity:
"This is the Army, Mr. Jones.
We have no private rooms or telephones.
You had your breakfast in bed before,
But you won’t have it there any more."39
Berlin insisted that the cast of This Is the Army be integrated (it was the only integrated unit in the Army) and he wrote a fairly hip song for the black GIs to sing, "What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Is Wearing." At the same time, he also insisted on a minstrel sketch. (For Berlin, minstrels were show business. He couldn’t imagine a show without them.)
One would think that with "God Bless America" and the stage and film versions of This Is the Army, Berlin had made a sufficient contribution to the war effort. However, his greatest contribution of all was "White Christmas," written for the Fred Astaire/Bing Crosby film Holiday Inn.40 When World War II was over, Irving Berlin was a bigger name than ever.
NEXT PAGE: The trials and tribulations of ordinary gals and fellas
NOTES
19. Yes, that’s 134 servants, and, yeah, she was a shiksa. Harbor Hill, a Long Island estate designed at the turn of the 20th century by famed architect Stanford White, cost Mackay’s father $6 million, which was a lot of money for a house back then.
20. Since Power couldn’t sing or dance, he spends most of his time waving a two-foot baton, so you won’t forget about him.
21. Don Ameche was an affable, versatile actor who achieved an odd degree of fame by starring in the film The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), which led to a long-running gag about Don Ameche inventing the telephone. (Groucho used it in Go West, which is not-bad late Marx Brothers.) For awhile, it was also considered funny to refer to the telephone itself as the "Don Ameche."
22. Haley, of course, is best known as the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz.
23. Ragtime was passé by the time Berlin started writing songs, but many of his early songs have a rhythmic, herky-jerky energy that in effect re-creates the excitement of rag. Authentic ragtime was repopularized in the current era by the Robert Redford/Paul Newman monster hit The Sting (1974), whose soundtrack featured Scott Joplin’s "The Entertainer." (However, The Sting confused a lot of people by using ragtime to back a film set in the twenties, at which time traditional rags were seriously "old-time" music.)
24. They’re available on a discontinued Irving Berlin CD from the Smithsonian, in a fantastic double-track performance by Dorothy Loudon. If you’re a fan of counterpoint pop (there must be at least three of us out there), this CD is worth searching for. It also features a double-tracking Dinah Shore, doing a nice job with "Play a Simple Melody" and Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor giving "You’re Just in Love" a serious workout. (When Berlin first played the song for Merman, during rehearsals of the Broadway show Call Me Madam, Merman said, "We’ll never get offstage.")
25. Olga San Juan sang it in Blue Skies and then joined Fred Astaire in a "passionate" tropical dance. "Heat Wave" got its third go-round in 1955 courtesy of Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business.
26. Unsurprisingly, Ameche proves to be no Judy Garland. It’s not clear why he’s smirking. Presumably, he couldn’t help it.
27. Bordoni was a Broadway legend ("you’re the eyes of Irene Bordoni," sang Cole Porter in "You’re the Top"), but born too late to play a leading lady in talking pictures.
28. Under Governor and then Senator Huey Long, Louisiana had garnered a well-earned reputation, not just for corruption but for tyranny as well. Long controlled every government job – federal, state, and local – in the state. "I buy and sell legislators like sacks of potatoes," he bragged. Fortunately for the republic, he was assassinated in 1935. Huey Long’s Louisiana inspired a famous novel by Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men. The 1949 film version won three Oscars – for Best Picture, Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), and Best Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge). Huey Long aside, making fun of the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, pro-Prohibition South was always a safe bet on Broadway.
29. In 1937, Austria united with Germany (the "Anschluss"), resulting, of course, in the nazification of Austria. Jews who did not get out in time were made subject to all of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish laws. This theme must have had great emotional resonance for Berlin and other Jews in New York and also Hollywood. However, to avoid arousing the anti-Semites, Zorina’s character is clearly intended to be non-Jewish. (Her mother, we’re told, is a countess.) In the 1960s, another, more successful musical also drew its plot from the Anschluss – The Sound of Music.
30. During the thirties, New Deal relief programs saved millions from despair, if not outright starvation, although by 1941 these programs were largely unnecessary thanks to the war-time boom. At one point, Ronald Reagan, his brother, and his father were all employed by a federal relief program. This is one of the first things Ronald Reagan ever forgot.
31. She is partnered by Charles Laskey, identified in the credits as "danceur." Trés bon!
32. In a nifty twofer, Drake dubbed Zorina when she sang "I’m Lonely and You’re Lonely" earlier in the film. Drake, apparently a Hispanic, first worked under the name Rita Rio and appeared in a number of musicals in the thirties and forties. Still active in the fifties, she played "Joyce" in the "Dog Who Knew Superman" episode of the George Reeves "Superman" TV series.
33. Production and costume designer Raoul Pene Du Bois more than lives up to his name.
34. The Roosevelts’ marriage was even more dysfunctional than the Clintons’. Eleanor spent almost all of her time on the road, doing good works.
35. The National Archives has an excellent online article about This is the Army at www.nara.gov/publications/prologue/berlin1.html.
36. In 1917, apparently, that was funny. The title makes more sense if you know that Camp Upton, where Berlin did his training, was located near Yaphank, Long Island, about a hundred miles from the Big Apple. Long Island in 1917 was largely farmland except for the occasional 50-room bungalow.
37. Berlin donated all of the royalties for "God Bless America," which were of course enormous, to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
38. It took us almost as long to get into World War II as it took to get out of Vietnam. Americans wanted to win WWII without fighting it; they wanted to leave the Vietnam War without losing it.
39. When Berlin went to Camp Upton in 1917 as a draftee, he sought to bring his valet along to make his bed and shine his boots. His drill sergeant, evidently a bit of a primitive, vetoed the arrangement.
40. Crosby’s 1942 recording of it sold seven million copies, which is a lot. He sang it in three films – Holiday Inn, Blue Skies (1946, another Irving Berlin film, and also co-starring Fred Astaire), and White Christmas.
