Word: berlin
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...Berlin surely thought himself an outsider as well. There were Jews in the music business when he started, but not as many as there soon would be. During a 1913 Friars Club tribute, Berlin's predecessor and rival George M. Cohan described Berlin as "a Jew boy who named himself after an English actor [Henry Irving] and a German city." One can read as much affection as coarseness into the Irishman's epithet. Vaudeville and pop songs of the period were full of spiked ethnic jokes (Jewish, black, Irish, Italian); they were the hot bubbles from the American melting...
...Berlin was a Jew whose love for America included a love for two gentile women: his wives. First Dorothy Goetz, the sister of songwriter Ray Goetz. Her marriage to Berlin was brief: she died of pneumonia barely five months past her wedding day. The song he wrote to commemorate her, "When I Lost You," became his second #1 hit. (Berlin couldn't help turning grief into greenbacks...
...with her father bitterly opposed to the union. It was the first big showbiz-society merger. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a retrospective piece on the early 20s, noted that at that time "society and the native arts had not yet mingled - Ellin Mackay was not yet married to Irving Berlin." The two wed in 1926 and honeymooned abroad. The Social Register refused to mention the couple's return to New York because "Irving Berlin has no position in Society...
...Anathema to snooty WASPs, Berlin was the anthemist of Christian holy days ("White Christmas," "Easter Parade") and had a lot to do with turning them into secular holidays. The wandering Jew had embraced middle-America in his songs and his life, agreeing that his and Ellin's three daughters should be raised as Protestants. Whatever temptations celebrity and chorines might offer, Berlin was a doting and apparently faithful husband for 62 years; Ellin died in 1988, he a year later. Yet, when their first child Irving Jr., died after only 25 days - on Christmas - some of Ellin's friends supposedly...
...perhaps no figure in show business, gave more money away: to the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Army Emergency Relief Fund and several cabinet agencies. (The royalties to "Always" were a wedding gift to Ellin.) He could be generous to his colleagues as well. On "Annie Get Your Gun" Berlin was to receive 5% of the royalties for his score, to 4% for the libretto by Herbert and Dorothy Fields. Grateful for the clever song cues in the musical's book, he gave the brother-and-sister writing team a half point of his share, so they'd be even...