Word: showbiz
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...really. It?s true that, like Brando, Kelly wore T-shirts and, though he came from far west of the Hudson River, spoke in a working class Noo Yawk accent. But he was stuck with that pre-1950 smile, the professional good nature, the go-getting optimism that defined showbiz in the 20th century?s first half. The second half, led by Brando, was serious, surly, studiously indifferent to giving pleasure or generating affection. Kelly was impudent but not arrogant. His real movie siblings are James Cagney - who had the same low center of gravity, the same relentless forward movement...
...inside a whirlwind. But often he just holds it - who needs protection from the elements when you?re in love? "Come on with the rain! I?ve a smile on my face!" At the end he splashes, stomps his feet in the water; ecstasy makes him infantile. And that showbiz grin never seemed so genuine...
...Italian parents), natural melodic gift and lack of formal musical training. Most of the others - Kern, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Larry Hart - were of German Jewish stock from the educated middle-class; Berlin was a Russian Jewish immigrant, raised on the Lower East Side, quickly out of school and into the showbiz fringe as a singing waiter. Their music came from honing a natural talent with years of study; his songwriting gift was a freak of nature. No wonder he fretted that this knack would desert him; its origin was as much a mystery as its longevity...
...second marriage, to socialite-journalist Ellin Mackay (she wrote for a new magazine called The New Yorker), earned more headlines: the Lower East Side Jew marrying the Upper East Side Catholic, 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...
...Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you. No you can't. Yes I can. No you can't. Yes I can. No you can't. Yes I can, yes I can!" Huh?) But the book makes the best case for what showbiz historian Ethan Mordden has described as a "casual timelessness" of Berlin's songs...