Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with music. Has there ever been a songwriter like Berlin? Play a simple melody, he wrote, and he has: about 1,500 songs, show tunes and standards, ragtime and ballads, slow wistful waltzes and brisk up-tempo two- steps, reveries and reveilles. I love a piano, he sang, and have man and instrument ever been more symbiotic, the one giving voice to the other...
Holed up in his Manhattan mansion, a recluse for decades, Berlin is still writing songs and, some say, whole shows. Call me up some rainy afternoon: the Garbo of composers, Berlin is glimpsed only infrequently on one of his constitutionals, out for an old-fashioned walk under blue skies. But he's still handy with the telephone, dialing old friends and serenading them in a raspy voice, chewing the fat or just doin' what comes natur'lly. Let me sing, and I'm happy...
...does he do it? Berlin never learned to read music, employing assistants to notate his tunes and help harmonize them. "I'm a little like a poet who can write verses that people like, but who can't parse the sentences in his poems," he once said. Well, he isn't worried: any high school kid can parse. He always knew exactly what he was doing. In 1920, when he was still talking to the press, Berlin offered nine rules for composing a song. Write it for the average voice, for either sex to sing. The title should be strong...
This is the life. Hard work has made Berlin a multimillionaire, but just how many multi or millions he has, nobody knows, and he's not telling. (His first, and last, authorized biography, written by Alexander Woollcott, was published in 1925.) Berlin may have lost the knack for writing hits -- his last show, Mr. President, was a 1962 flop -- but the old downtown hard sell has never deserted him. He guards his copyrights with a care that borders on niggardliness, even though he's outlived some of them (notably Alexander's Ragtime Band), and he is fiercely, even pettily, protective...
...September of that year, an American leasing agent bought the now middle- aged airliner for approximately $6 million and rented it to financially ailing Pan American World Airways for $130,000 a month. Based in Berlin, No. 19921 spent the next four years making short runs to Frankfurt, Munich and other West German cities. Though the plane was sold twice again during that period to other lessors, Pan Am continued to rent it. From 1986 until last September, the 737 made New York's Kennedy airport its home, flying daily routes to such cities as Cleveland and Pittsburgh...