| Irving Berlin | |
 Berlin (age 53) in 1941 | |
| Birth: | 11 May 1888 Russian Empire |
| Death: | 22 September 1989 Manhattan, New York, USA |
| Age: | 101 years, 134 days |
| Country: |  RUS USA
|
| Centenarian | |
Irving Berlin (born as Izrail Moisejevitš Beilin; 11 May 1888 – 22 September 1989) was a Russian-American centenarian composer and lyricist, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in history.
Biography[]
Irwing Berlin was born as Israel Beilin on 11 May 1888 in Russian Empire (sources differs between present-day Russia and present-day Belarus). Although his family came from the shtetl of Tolochin (today in Belarus), documents say that he was born in Tyumen, Siberia. On September 14, 1893, the family arrived at Ellis Island in New York City. After their arrival, the name "Beilin" was changed to "Baline". The family left the old continent from Antwerp aboard the SS Rijnland from the Red Star Line. When they arrived, Israel was put in a pen with his brother and five sisters until immigration officials declared them fit to be allowed into the city.
Having left school around the age of thirteen, Berlin had few survival skills and realized that formal employment was out of the question. His only ability was acquired from his father's vocation as a singer, and he joined with several other youngsters who went to saloons on the Bowery and sang to customers. Itinerant young singers like them were common on the Lower East Side. Berlin would sing a few of the popular ballads he heard on the street, hoping people would pitch him a few pennies. From these seamy surroundings, he became streetwise, with real and lasting education. Music was his only source of income and he picked up the language and culture of the ghetto lifestyle. He soon began plugging songs at Tony Pastor's Music Hall in Union Square and in 1906, when he was 18, got a job as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. Besides serving drinks, he sang made-up "blue" parodies of hit songs to the delight of customers.
Biographer Charles Hamm writes that in Berlin's free time after hours, he taught himself to play the piano. Never having lessons, after the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and begin improvising tunes. He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", written in collaboration with the Pelham's resident pianist Mike Nicholson, in 1907, receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights. A spelling error on the sheet music to the published song included the spelling of his name as "I. Berlin".
Berlin continued writing and playing music at Pelham Cafe and developing an early style. He liked the words to other people's songs but sometimes the rhythms were "kind of boggy," and he might change them. One night he delivered some hits composed by his friend, George M. Cohan, another kid who was getting known on Broadway with his own songs. When Berlin ended with Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy," notes Whitcomb, "everybody in the joint applauded the feisty little fellow."
In 1908, when he was 20, Berlin took a new job at a saloon named Jimmy Kelly's in the Union Square neighborhood. There, he was able to collaborate with other young songwriters, such as Edgar Leslie, Ted Snyder, Al Piantadosi, and George A. Whiting. In 1909, the year of the premiere of Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, he got another big break as a staff lyricist with the Ted Snyder Company.
In February 1912, after a brief whirlwind courtship, he married 20-year-old Dorothy Goetz of Buffalo, New York, the sister of one of Berlin's collaborators, E. Ray Goetz. During their honeymoon in Havana, she contracted typhoid fever, and doctors were unable to treat her illness when she returned to New York. She died July 17 of that year. Left with writer's block for months after Goetz's death, he eventually wrote his first ballad, "When I Lost You," to express his grief.
Years later in the 1920s, he fell in love with a young heiress, Ellin Mackay, a daughter of Clarence Mackay, the socially prominent head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, and an author in her own right. Because Berlin was Jewish and she was a Catholic of Irish descent, their life was followed in every possible detail by the press, which found the romance of an immigrant from the Lower East Side and a young heiress a good story.
They met in 1924, and her father opposed the match from the start. He went so far as to send her off to Europe to find other suitors and forget Berlin. However, Berlin wooed her with letters and song over the airwaves such as "Remember" and "All Alone," and she wrote him daily. Biographer Philip Furia writes that newspapers rumored they were engaged before she returned from Europe, and some Broadway shows even performed skits of the "lovelorn songwriter". After her return, she and Berlin were besieged by the press, which followed them everywhere. Variety reported that her father vowed that their marriage "would only happen 'over my dead body.'" As a result, they decided to elope and were married in a simple civil ceremony at the Municipal Building away from media attention.
The wedding news made the front page of The New York Times. The marriage took her father by surprise, and he was stunned upon reading about it. The bride's mother, however, who was at the time divorced from Mackay, wanted her daughter to follow the dictates of her own heart. Berlin had gone to her mother's home before the wedding and had obtained her blessing.
There followed reports that the bride's father disowned his daughter because of the marriage. In response, Berlin gave the rights to "Always", a song still played at weddings, to her as a wedding present. Ellin was thereby guaranteed a steady income regardless of what might happen with the marriage. For years, Mackay refused to speak to the Berlins, but they reconciled after the passing of the Berlins' son, Irving Berlin Jr., on Christmas Day in 1928, less than one month after he was born.
Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until she died in July 1988 at the age of 85. They had four children during their 63 years of marriage: Mary Ellin Barrett in 1926; Irving Berlin, Jr., who died in infancy in 1928; Linda Louise Emmet in 1932; Elizabeth Irving Peters in 1936.
Berlin died in his sleep at his 17 Beekman Place town house in Manhattan on September 22, 1989, of heart attack and natural causes at the age of 101. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.
Gallery[]
References[]
- “Irving Berlin, Nation's Songwriter, Dies” The New York Times, September 23, 1989
- Biography of Irving Berlin
- Irving Berlin Find A Grave