| Name | Blue Skies |
|---|---|
| Caption | Promotional movie poster for the film |
| Director | Stuart HeislerMark Sandrich (died) |
| Producer | Sol C. Siegel |
| Writer | Arthur Sheekman (writer)Allan G. Scott (adaptation)Irving Berlin (story} |
| Narrator | Fred Astaire |
| Starring | Fred AstaireBing CrosbyJoan Caulfield |
| Music | Robert Emmett DolanIrving Berlin |
| Cinematography | Charles LangWilliam E. Snyder |
| Editing | LeRoy Stone |
| Distributor | Paramount Pictures |
| Released | October 16, 1946 |
| Runtime | 104 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Blue Skies is a 1946 Hollywood musical Technicolor comedy film, released by Paramount Pictures and starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Joan Caulfield, Olga San Juan and Billy De Wolfe, with music, lyrics and story by Irving Berlin; most of the songs were recycled from earlier works. The film was directed by Stuart Heisler and produced by Sol C. Siegel.
As in Holiday Inn (1942), the film is designed to showcase the songs of Irving Berlin. The plot, which is presented in a series of flashbacks with Astaire as narrator, follows a similar formula of Crosby beating Astaire for the affections of a leading lady. Comedy is principally provided by Billy De Wolfe.
Joan Caulfield was the protege of Mark Sandrich - who directed many of the Astaire-Rogers musicals - and who was originally slated to direct this film. He died of a heart attack during pre-production and Stuart Heisler was drafted in to replace him. Heisler wanted Caulfield replaced, but Crosby - who was having an affair with Caulfield - protected her.
Tap dancer Paul Draper was the initial choice to partner Bing Crosby, however, during the first week of production Draper's speech impediment and his trenchant criticism of Caulfield's dance ability led Crosby to insist on his replacement by Astaire who, then forty-seven, had already decided that this would be his final film and that he would retire, having spent over forty years performing before the public. The film was billed as "Astaire's last picture" and its very strong performance at the box office pleased him greatly, as he had dearly wanted to go out on a high note.
The reasons for Astaire's (temporary) retirement remain a source of debate: his own view that he was "tired and running out of gas", the sudden collapse in 1945 of the market for Swing music which left many of his colleagues in jazz high and dry, a desire to devote time to establishing a chain of dancing schools, and a dissatisfaction with roles, as in this film, where he was relegated to playing second fiddle to the lead. Ironically, it is for his celebrated solo performance of "Puttin' On The Ritz," which featured Astaire leading an entire dance line of Astaires, that this film is most remembered today.
"Puttin' on the Ritz": Although Berlin's 1930 song was originally written for vaudevillian Harry Richman, it has become indelibly associated with Astaire, who also recorded it for Columbia in 1930. In this tap solo with cane, which was widely billed as "Astaire's last dance", the lyrics are updated, replacing racist references to ritzy Harlemites with wealthy whites strutting their stuff up and down Park Avenue. The routine was produced after the rest of the film had been completed, and according to Astaire, it took "five weeks of back-breaking physical work" to prepare. It is constructed in three sections, beginning in a dull book-lined office with a tired-looking Astaire showing his years and dressed in a morning suit. Here Astaire delivers the song while executing a gentle tap and cane solo in mock slow-motion, in an amusing parody of his impending retirement. The song finished, he returns to normal speed and proceeds to dance around the office while executing an ingenious jumping cane routine which relied on a concealed floor trigger mechanism. Thus rejuvenated, Astaire sweeps aside a pair of drab curtains to reveal a chorus of nine Fred Astaires - achieved by filming two separate versions of Astaire, repeating them four times and interleaving them. The final section is a greatly speeded up repeat of the tune which accompanies a complex routine for Astaire and chorus. In "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" from Top Hat (1935), Astaire proceeded to machine-gun his chorus dancers with his cane. This time, Astaire joins his chorus in adopting a confrontational, at times almost menacing posture towards his audience. In 1957, on the brink of yet another temporary retirement, Astaire wittily refers back to this routine in the self-parodying "The Ritz, Roll And Rock" number from Silk Stockings.
The other Berlin songs which featured only as background music in the film are, in order of use: "Tell Me Little Gypsy" (1920), "Nobody Knows" (1920), "Mandy " (1918), "I Wonder" (1919), "Some Sunny Day" (1922), "When You Walked Out Someone Else Walked In" (1923), "Because I Love You" (1926), "Homesick" (1922), "How Many Times" (1926), "The Song Is Ended" (1927), "Lazy" (1924), "Always" (1925) and "I Can't Remember" (1933).
John Mueller: Astaire Dancing - The Musical Films of Fred Astaire, Knopf 1985, ISBN 0-394-51654-0
Larry Billman: Fred Astaire - A Bio-bibliography, Greenwood Press 1997, ISBN 0-313-29010-5
Category:1946 films Category:Paramount films Category:Films directed by Stuart Heisler Category:American films Category:English-language films Category:1940s musical films
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Bing Crosby |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Harry Lillis Crosby |
| Born | May 03, 1903Tacoma, Washington, U.S. |
| Origin | Spokane, Washington, U.S. |
| Died | October 14, 1977Madrid, Spain |
| Instrument | Vocals |
| Voice type | Baritone/Bass-baritone |
| Genre | Traditional pop, Jazz, vocal |
| Name | Crosby, Bing |
| Alternative names | Crosby, Harry Lillis |
| Short description | Singer, actor |
| Date of birth | May 03, 1903 |
| Place of birth | Tacoma, Washington, United States |
| Date of death | October 14, 1977 |
| Place of death | Madrid, Spain |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Fred Astaire |
|---|---|
| Caption | in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) |
| Birth name | Frederick Austerlitz |
| Birth date | May 10, 1899 |
| Birth place | Omaha, Nebraska,United States |
| Death date | June 22, 1987 |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California,United States |
| Occupation | Actor, dancer, singer, choreographer |
| Years active | 1917–1981 |
| Spouse | Phyllis Livingston Potter (1933–1954) Robyn Smith(1980–1987) |
After the close of Funny Face, the Astaires went to Hollywood for a screen test (now lost) at Paramount Pictures, but were not considered suitable for films.
They split in 1932 when Adele married her first husband, Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish, a son of the Duke of Devonshire. Fred Astaire went on to achieve success on his own on Broadway and in London with Gay Divorce, while considering offers from Hollywood. The end of the partnership was traumatic for Astaire, but stimulated him to expand his range. Free of the brother-sister constraints of the former pairing and with a new partner (Claire Luce), he created a romantic partnered dance to Cole Porter's "Night and Day", which had been written for Gay Divorce. Luce stated that she had to encourage him to take a more romantic approach: "Come on, Fred, I'm not your sister, you know." The success of the stage play was credited to this number, and when recreated in the film version of the play The Gay Divorcee (1934), it ushered in a new era in filmed dance. Astaire later insisted that the report had actually read: "Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances". However, this did not affect RKO's plans for Astaire, first lending him for a few days to MGM in 1933 for his Hollywood debut, where he appeared as himself dancing with Joan Crawford in the successful musical film Dancing Lady.
On his return to RKO Pictures, he got fifth billing alongside Ginger Rogers in the 1933 Dolores del Río vehicle Flying Down to Rio. In a review, Variety magazine attributed its massive success to Astaire's presence: "The main point of Flying Down to Rio is the screen promise of Fred Astaire ... He's assuredly a bet after this one, for he's distinctly likable on the screen, the mike is kind to his voice and as a dancer he remains in a class by himself. The latter observation will be no news to the profession, which has long admitted that Astaire starts dancing where the others stop hoofing."
Having already been linked to his sister Adele on stage, Astaire was initially very reluctant to become part of another dance team. He wrote his agent, "I don't mind making another picture with her, but as for this team idea it's out! I've just managed to live down one partnership and I don't want to be bothered with any more." He was persuaded by the obvious public appeal of the Astaire-Rogers pairing. The partnership, and the choreography of Astaire and Hermes Pan, helped make dancing an important element of the Hollywood film musical. Astaire and Rogers made ten films together, including The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), and Carefree (1938). Six out of the nine Astaire-Rogers musicals became the biggest moneymakers for RKO; all of the films brought a certain prestige and artistry that all studios coveted at the time. Their partnership elevated them both to stardom; as Katharine Hepburn reportedly said, "He gives her class and she gives him sex." First, he insisted that the (almost stationary) camera film a dance routine in a single shot, if possible, while holding the dancers in full view at all times. Astaire famously quipped: "Either the camera will dance, or I will." Astaire maintained this policy from The Gay Divorcee (1934) onwards (until overruled by Francis Ford Coppola, who directed Finian's Rainbow (1968), Astaire's last film musical). Hannah Hyam consider Rogers to have been Astaire's greatest dance partner, while recognizing that some of his later partners displayed superior technical dance skills, a view shared
Astaire was still unwilling to have his career tied exclusively to any partnership, however. He negotiated with RKO to strike out on his own with A Damsel in Distress in 1937 with an inexperienced, non-dancing Joan Fontaine, unsuccessfully as it turned out. He returned to make two more films with Rogers, Carefree (1938) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). While both films earned respectable gross incomes, they both lost money due to increased production costs and Astaire left RKO. Rogers remained and went on to become the studio's hottest property in the early forties. They were reunited in 1949 at MGM for their final outing, The Barkleys of Broadway.
He made two pictures with Rita Hayworth, the daughter of his former vaudeville dance idols, the Cansinos: the first You'll Never Get Rich (1941) catapulted Hayworth to stardom and provided Astaire with his first opportunity to integrate Latin-American dance idioms into his style, taking advantage of Hayworth's professional Latin dance pedigree. His second film with Hayworth, You Were Never Lovelier (1942) was equally successful, and featured a duet to Kern's "I'm Old Fashioned" which became the centerpiece of Jerome Robbins's 1983 New York City Ballet tribute to Astaire. He next appeared opposite the seventeen-year-old Joan Leslie in the wartime drama The Sky's the Limit (1943) where he introduced Arlen and Mercer's "One for My Baby" while dancing on a bar counter in a dark and troubled routine. This film which was choreographed by Astaire alone and achieved modest box office success, represented an important departure for Astaire from his usual charming happy-go-lucky screen persona and confused contemporary critics.
His next partner, Lucille Bremer, was featured in two lavish vehicles, both directed by Vincente Minnelli: the fantasy Yolanda and the Thief which featured an avant-garde surrealistic ballet, and the musical revue Ziegfeld Follies (1946) which featured a memorable teaming of Astaire with Gene Kelly to "The Babbit and the Bromide", a Gershwin song Astaire had introduced with his sister Adele back in 1927. While Follies was a hit, Yolanda bombed at the box office and Astaire, ever insecure and believing his career was beginning to falter surprised his audiences by announcing his retirement during the production of Blue Skies (1946), nominating "Puttin' on the Ritz" as his farewell dance.
After announcing his retirement in 1946, Astaire concentrated on his horse-racing interests and went on to found the Fred Astaire Dance Studios in 1947 — which he subsequently sold in 1966.
During 1952 Astaire recorded The Astaire Story, a four volume album with a quintet led by Oscar Peterson. The album provided a musical overview of Astaire's career, and was produced by Norman Granz. The Astaire Story later won the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999, a special Grammy award to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance." Astaire further observes:
Working out the steps is a very complicated process — something like writing music. You have to think of some step that flows into the next one, and the whole dance must have an integrated pattern. If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement. It should build to a climax and stop!"
With very few exceptions, Astaire created his routines in collaboration with other choreographers, primarily Hermes Pan. They would often start with a blank slate:
"For maybe a couple of days we wouldn't get anywhere — just stand in front of the mirror and fool around ... Then suddenly I'd get an idea or one of them would get an idea ... So then we'd get started ... You might get practically the whole idea of the routine done that day, but then you'd work on it, edit it, scramble it, and so forth. It might take sometimes as long as two, three weeks to get something going."
Frequently, a dance sequence was built around two or three principal ideas, sometimes inspired by his own steps or by the music itself, suggesting a particular mood or action. Many of his dances were built around a "gimmick", such as dancing on the walls in "Royal Wedding," or dancing with his shadows in Swing Time, that he or his collaborator had thought up earlier and saved for the right situation. They would spend weeks creating all the dance sequences in a secluded rehearsal space before filming would begin, working with a rehearsal pianist (often the composer Hal Borne) who in turn would communicate modifications to the musical orchestrators.
His perfectionism was legendary; however, his relentless insistence on rehearsals and retakes was a burden to some. When time approached for the shooting of a number, Astaire would rehearse for another two weeks, and record the singing and music. With all the preparation completed, the actual shooting would go quickly, conserving costs. Astaire agonized during the entire process, frequently asking colleagues for acceptance for his work, as Vincente Minnelli stated, "He lacks confidence to the most enormous degree of all the people in the world. He will not even go to see his rushes ... He always thinks he is no good." As Astaire himself observed, "I've never yet got anything 100% right. Still it's never as bad as I think it is."
Although he viewed himself as an entertainer first and foremost, his consummate artistry won him the admiration of such twentieth century dance legends as Gene Kelly, George Balanchine, the Nicholas Brothers, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, Bob Fosse, Gregory Hines, Rudolf Nureyev, Michael Jackson and Bill Robinson. Balanchine compared him to Bach, describing him as "", while for Baryshnikov he was "".
Astaire was a songwriter of note himself, with "I'm Building Up to an Awful Letdown" (written with lyricist Johnny Mercer) reaching number four in the Hit Parade of 1936. He recorded his own "It's Just Like Taking Candy from a Baby" with Benny Goodman in 1940, and nurtured a lifelong ambition to be a successful popular song composer.
Built in 1905, the Gottlieb Storz Mansion in Astaire's hometown of Omaha includes the "Adele and Fred Astaire Ballroom" on the top floor, which is the only memorial to their Omaha roots.
Astaire is referenced in the 2003 animated feature, The Triplets of Belleville, in which he is eaten by his shoes after a fast-paced dance act.
Always immaculately turned out, Astaire remained something of a male fashion icon even into his later years, eschewing his trademark top hat, white tie and tails (which he never really cared for) in favor of a breezy casual style of tailored sports jackets, colored shirts, cravats and slacks — the latter usually held up by the idiosyncratic use of an old tie in place of a belt.
Astaire married for the first time in 1933, to the 25-year-old Phyllis Potter (née Phyllis Livingston Baker, 1908–1954), a Boston-born New York socialite and former wife of Eliphalet Nott Potter III (1906–1981), after pursuing her ardently for roughly two years. Phyllis's death from lung cancer, at the age of 46, ended 21 years of a blissful marriage and left Astaire devastated. Astaire attempted to drop out of the film Daddy Long Legs (1955), offering to pay the production costs to date, but was persuaded to stay.
In addition to Phyllis Potter's son, Eliphalet IV, known as Peter, the Astaires had two children. Fred, Jr. (born 1936) appeared with his father in the movie Midas Run, but became a charter pilot and rancher instead of an actor. Ava Astaire McKenzie (born 1942) remains actively involved in promoting her late father's heritage.
His friend David Niven described him as "a pixie — timid, always warm-hearted, with a penchant for schoolboy jokes." Astaire was a lifelong golf and Thoroughbred horse racing enthusiast. In 1946 his horse Triplicate won the prestigious Hollywood Gold Cup and San Juan Capistrano Handicap. He remained physically active well into his eighties. At age seventy-eight, he broke his left wrist while riding his grandson's skateboard.
He remarried in 1980 to Robyn Smith, a jockey almost 45 years his junior. Smith was a jockey for Alfred G. Vanderbilt II.
Astaire died from pneumonia on June 22, 1987. He was interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. One last request of his was to thank his fans for their years of support.
Astaire has never been portrayed on film. He always refused permission for such portrayals, saying, "However much they offer me — and offers come in all the time — I shall not sell." Astaire's will included a clause requesting that no such portrayal ever take place; he commented, "It is there because I have no particular desire to have my life misinterpreted, which it would be."
Category:1899 births Category:1987 deaths Category:American Episcopalians Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:American ballroom dancers Category:20th-century actors Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:American crooners Category:American choreographers Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:American actors of German descent Category:American people of Jewish descent Category:American film actors Category:American tap dancers Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor Category:Best Musical or Comedy Actor Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe (film) winners Category:California Republicans Category:Cecil B. DeMille Award Golden Globe winners Category:Deaths from pneumonia Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:People from Omaha, Nebraska Category:Burials at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame inductees Category:Actors from Omaha, Nebraska Category:RCA Victor artists Category:MGM Records artists Category:Vaudeville performers Category:American racehorse owners and breeders Category:Infectious disease deaths in California Category:Film choreographers
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Irving Berlin |
|---|---|
| Background | non_performing_personnel |
| Birth name | Israel Isidore Baline (Beilin) |
| Born | May 11, 1888 Tyumen, Russian Empire |
| Died | September 22, 1989New York City, New York, United States |
| Genre | Broadway musicals, revues, show tunes |
| Occupation | Songwriter, composer, lyricist |
| Years active | 1907–1971 |
| Spouse | Dorothy Goetz (1912)Ellin Mackay (1926 – death) |
His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous. The song sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as Russia, which also "flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania." Over the years he was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his aim being to "reach the heart of the average American" whom he saw as the "real soul of the country."
He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which made him "a legend" before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards. Many songs became popular themes and anthems, including "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "This is the Army, Mr. Jones", and "There's No Business Like Show Business". His Broadway musical and 1942 film, This is the Army, with Ronald Reagan, had Kate Smith singing Berlin's "God Bless America" which was first performed in 1938. Smith still performed the song on her 1960 CBS television series, The Kate Smith Show. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Celine Dion recorded it as a tribute, making it #1 on the charts.Berlin's songs have reached the top of the charts 25 times and have been re-recorded countless times by singers including Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Rita Reys, Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, Al Jolson, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Doris Day and Ella Fitzgerald. Composer Douglas Moore sets Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters, and includes him instead with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, as a "great American minstrel" – someone who has "caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe." Composer George Gershwin called him "the greatest songwriter that has ever lived", and composer Jerome Kern concluded that "Irving Berlin has no place in American music - he is American music."
Whitcomb also describes further the turning point in Berlin's early life:
But, suddenly one day, the Cossacks rampaged in on a pogrom... they simply burned it to the ground. Israel and his family watched from a distant road. Israel was wrapped in a warm feather quilt. Then they made a hasty exit. Knowing that they were breaking the law by leaving without a passport ( Russia at that time was the only country requiring passports), the Balines smuggled themselves creepingly from town to town, from satellite to satellite, from sea to shining sea, until finally they reached their star: the Statue of Liberty.
Settling in New York City
They eventually settled on Cherry Street, a "cold-water basement flat with no windows," on the Lower East Side. His father, unable to find comparable work as a cantor in New York, took a job at a Kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons on the side, and struggled to support his family. He died a few years later when Irving was eight years old. With only two years of schooling, he found it necessary to take to the streets to help support his family.Music historian Philip Furia writes that when eight-year-old "Izzy" quit school to sell newspapers in the Bowery, he no doubt would "hear the hits of the day drift through the doors of saloons and restaurants" that lined the streets of New York. He found that if he sang some of the songs while selling papers, people would toss him coins in appreciation, which gave him a vision of things to come. One night to his mother, he "confessed his life's ambition—to become a singing waiter in a saloon." Bergreen writes that it was at this point that he left home to become a "foot soldier in the city's ragged army of immigrants." Berlin entered a lifestyle along the Bowery where an entire subindustry of lodging houses had sprung up to shelter the thousands of homeless boys choking the Lower East Side streets. "They were not settlement houses or charitable institutions; rather, they were Dickensian in their meanness, filth, and insensitivity to ordinary human beings."
Early jobs
With few survival skills and little education, he realized that formal employment was out of the question. His only ability was acquired from his father's vocation: singing. He joined with a few other youngsters and went to saloons on the Bowery to sing to customers. These itinerant young singers were common on the Lower East Side. He would sing a few of the popular ballads he heard on the street, hoping that customers would "pitch a few pennies in his direction." As Bergreen notes, "it was in these seamy surroundings that the runaway boy received his real and lasting education." Music became his sole source of income and he emerged culturally from the ghetto lifestyle, learning the "language of the street."To survive he began to recognize the kind of songs that appealed to audiences: "well-known tunes expressing simple sentiments were the most reliable." He began plugging songs at Tony Pastor's Music Hall in Union Square and finally, in 1906 when he was 18, working 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. Berlin biographer Charles Hamm writes that "in his free time he taught himself to play the piano." His first attempt at songwriting was "Marie From Sunny Italy," written in collaboration with the Pelham's resident pianist, Mike Nicholson, and at the same time he began using the name Irving Berlin, being easier for others to remember. (Berlin never learned to play in more than one key and used a custom-made 1940 Weser Brothers piano with a transposing lever to change keys.)
Nobel prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling, living up the coast during that period, "was shocked and intrigued by the screeching squalor he found in the dirty gray tenement canyons of immigrant New York," writes Whitcomb. "He thought it worse than the notorious slums of Bombay. But he was impressed and moved by the Jews, noting the little immigrant boys saluting the Stars and Stripes." Kipling wrote, "For these immigrant Jews are a race that survives and thrives against all odds and flags."
Recognition as songwriter
Max Winslow, a staff member at music publisher Harry Von Tilzer Company, noticed Berlin's singing on many occasions and became so taken with his talent that he tried to get him a job with his firm. Von Tilzer described an episode in his autobiography:
Max Winslow came to me and said, "I have discovered a great kid, I would like to see you write some songs with." Max raved about him so much that I said, "Who is he?" He said a boy down on the east side by the name of Irving Berlin... I said, "Max, How can I write with him, you know I have got the best lyric writers in the country?" But Max would not stop boosting Berlin to me, and I want to say right here that Berlin can attribute a great deal of his success to Max Winslow."In 1908, at the age of 20, Berlin took a new job at a saloon 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, and in 1909, the year of the premiere of Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, he got his big break as a staff lyricist with the Ted Snyder Company.
Songwriting career
Before 1920
"Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911)
From this early position, Hamm writes, his "meteoric rise as a songwriter" in Tin Pan Alley and then on Broadway, began with his first world-famous hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band," in 1911. As a result of his instant notoriety, he was the feature performer later that year at Oscar Hammerstein's vaudeville house, where he introduced dozens of other songs to the audience. The New York Telegraph wrote a story about the event, reporting that a "delegation of two hundred of his friends from the pent and huddled East Side appeared... to see 'their boy.'" The news story added that "all the little writer could do was to finger the buttons on his coat while tears ran down his cheeks--in a vaudeville house!"Richard Corliss, wrote about the song in a Time magazine profile of Berlin in 2001: :"Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911). It was a march, not a rag, and its savviest musicality comprised quotes from a bugle call and "Swanee River". But the tune, which revived the ragtime fervor that Scott Joplin had stoked a decade earlier, made Berlin a songwriting star. On its first release and subsequent releases, the song was consistently near the top of the charts: Bessie Smith, in 1927, and Louis Armstrong, in 1937; # 1 by Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell; Al Jolson, in 1947. Johnny Mercer in 1945, and Nellie Lutcher in 1948. Add Ray Charles's big-band version in 1959, and "Alexander" had a dozen hit versions in a bit under a half century. Composer George Gershwin, foreseeing its influence, said, "The first real American musical work is 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' Berlin had shown us the way; it was now easier to attain our ideal."
Sparking a national dance craze
Berlin was "flabbergasted" by the sudden international popularity of the song, and began to ask himself "Why? Why?" Berlin later wrote,And I got an answer. The melody... started the heels and shoulders of all America and a good section of Europe to rocking. The lyric, silly though it was, was fundamentally right.;"Watch Your Step" Furia writes that the international success of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" gave ragtime "new life and sparked a national dance craze." Two dancers who expressed that craze were Irene and Vernon Castle. In 1914, Berlin wrote a ragtime revue, "Watch Your Step," which starred the couple and showcased their talents on stage. That musical revue became Berlin's first complete score and Furia notes that "its songs radiated musical and lyrical sophistication." Berlin's ragtime songs, he adds, had "quickly come to signify modernism, and Berlin caught the cultural struggle between Victorian gentility and the purveyors of liberation, indulgence, and leisure with songs such as "Play a Simple Melody." That particular song, according to Furia, also became the first of his famous "double" songs in which two different melodies and lyrics are counterpointed against one another.
Variety called it "The First Syncopated Musical," where the "sets and the girls were gorgeous." But most of the success or otherwise of the show was riding on the Berlin name, according to Whitcomb. He notes that Variety... marked the show as a "terrific hit" from opening night alone:
Irving Berlin stands out like the Times building does in the Square. That youthful marvel of syncopated melody is proving things in 'Watch Your Step', firstly that he is not alone a rag composer, and that he is one of the greatest lyric writers America has ever produced.... Besides rags Berlin wrote a polka that was very pretty, and he intermingled ballads with trots, which, including the grand opera medley, gives 'Watch Your Step' all the kind of music there is.Whitcomb also points out the irony that Russia, the country Berlin's family was forced to leave, flung itself into "the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania":
... like a display of medieval religious frenzy; some seemed to be doing a dance of death. Lady Diana Manners, at a London ball reviving the Age of Chivalry, was escorted by Prince Felix Yusupov. This young man, a recent Oxford undergraduate, had an impeccable Russian noble lineage: a descendant of Frederick of Prussia, he was heir to the largest estate in Russia, he would be richer than the Tsar. He was exquisite and heavily bejewelled, but Lady Diana was irritated by his 'wriggling around the ballroom like a demented worm, screaming for 'more ragtime and more champagne'.Lady Diana Manners was apparently not alone in her dislike of ragtime. A newspaper clipping found in Berlin's scrapbook included an article titled, "Calls Ragtime Insanity Sign":
"Alexander's Ragtime Band" is a public menace.... The authority for these statements is Dr. Ludwig Gruener of Berlin, a German [doctor] who has devoted twenty years' study to the criminally insane.... He says, 'Hysteria is the form of insanity that an abnormal love for ragtime seems to produce. It is as much a mental disease as acute mania—it has the same symptoms. When there is nothing done to check this form it produces idiocy'. He also stated that 90 percent of the inmates of the American asylums he has visited are abnormally fond of ragtime., star of The Jazz Singer, circa 1927]] Berlin also created songs out of his own sadness. In 1912, he married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of songwriter E. Ray Goetz. She died six months later of typhoid fever contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. The song he wrote to express his grief, "When I Lost You," was his first ballad. It was an immediate popular hit and sold more than a million copies. In 1916, he collaborated with Victor Herbert on the score of "The Century Girl."
He began to realize that the slang of ragtime would be an "inappropriate idiom for serious romantic expression," and over the next few years would begin to adapt his style by writing more love songs. In 1915 he wrote the hit, "I Love a Piano," which was an erotic, but comical, ragtime love song (Read lyrics).
By 1918 he had written hundreds of songs, mostly topical, which enjoyed brief popularity. Many of the songs were for the new dances then appearing, such as the "grizzly bear," "chicken walk," or fox trot. After a Hawaiian dance craze began, he wrote "That Hula-Hula," and then did a string of southern songs, such as "When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam." During this period he was creating a few new songs every week, including numerous rags and songs aimed at the various immigrant cultures arriving from Europe. Furia tells of a train trip Berlin was on where he decided to entertain the fellow passengers. Later on they asked him how he knew so many hit songs, and Berlin would modestly reply, "I wrote them."
One of the key songs that Berlin wrote in his transition from ragtime to lyrical ballads was "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody," which was considered one of Berlin's "first big guns," according to historian Alec Wilder. The song was written for Ziegfeld's Follies of 1919 and became the musical's leading song. Its popularity was so great that it became the theme for all of Ziegfeld's revues, and later the theme song in the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld (Watch). Wilder puts it "on a level with Jerome Kern's "pure melodies," and in comparison with Berlin's earlier music, finds it "extraordinary that such a development in style and sophistication should have taken place in a single year."
World War I
On 1 April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson declared that America would enter World War I, and, as Whitcomb writes:
;"Yip Yip Yaphank" In 1917 Berlin was drafted into the army, and the news of his induction became headline news: "Army Takes Berlin!" one paper read. However, the army only wanted Berlin, now aged 30, to do what he knew best: to write songs of patriotism. Hence, while stationed at Camp Upton in New York, he composed an all-soldier musical revue titled "Yip Yip Yaphank", written to be patriotic tribute to the United States Army. By the following summer the show was taken to Broadway where it also included a number of hits, including "Mandy" and "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which he performed himself. The shows earned $150,000 for a camp service center. One song he wrote for the show but decided not use, he would introduce twenty years later: "God Bless America."
According to Whitcomb, "at the grand finale, General Bell made a thank-you speech from his box, while Sergeant Berlin, on stage, declined to utter a word. Then, under orders from the War Department, Sergeant Berlin led the entire 300-person cast off the stage, marching them down the theater's aisles, singing 'We're on Our Way to France,' all to tumultuous applause. The cast carried off their little producer like he was victor ludorum." Berlin's mother, having seen her son perform for the first (and last) time in her life, was shocked. The soldier-actors continued out into the downtown street and up the plank to the waiting troop carrier. "Tin Pan Alley had joined hands with real life," writes Whitcomb.Watch
1920 to 1940
Berlin returned to Tin Pan Alley after the war and in 1921 created a partnership with Sam Harris to build the Music Box Theater. He maintained an interest in the theater throughout his life, and even in his last years was known to call the Shubert Organization, his partner, to check on the receipts. In its early years, the theater was a showcase for revues by Berlin. As theater owner, producer and composer, he looked after every detail of his shows, from the costumes and sets to the casting and musical arrangements.;"What'll I Do?" (1924) This ballad of love and longing was a #1 hit for Paul Whiteman and had five other top-12 renditions in 1924. Twenty-four years later, the song went to #22 for Nat Cole and #23 for Frank Sinatra.
;"Always" (1925) Written when he fell in love with Ellin Mackay, who later became his wife. The song became #1 twice (for Vincent Lopez and George Olsen) in its first incarnation. There were four more hit versions in 1944-45. In 1959 Sammy Turner took the song to #2 on the R&B; chart. It became Patsy Cline's postmortem anthem and hit #18 on the country chart in 1980, 17 years after her death, and a tribute musical called "Patsy Cline ... Always," played a two-year Nashville run that ended in 1995.
;"Blue Skies" (1926) Written after his first daughter's birth as a song just for her. In it he distilled his feelings about being married and a father for the first time: "Blue days, all of them gone; nothing but blue skies, from now on." #1 for Ben Selvin with five other hits in 1927 besides being the first song performed by Al Jolson in the first feature sound film, "The Jazz Singer," that same year. In 1946 it returned to the top 10 on the charts with Count Basie and Benny Goodman. In 1978, Willie Nelson made the song a #1 country hit—52 years after it was written.
;"Marie" (1929) This waltz-time hit went to #2 with Rudy Vallee and in 1937 reached #1 with Tommy Dorsey. It was again on the charts at #13 in 1953 for The Four Tunes and at #15 for the Bachelors in 1965–36 years after its first appearance.
;"Puttin' on the Ritz" (1930) An instant standard with one of Berlin's most "intricately syncopated choruses," this song is associated with Fred Astaire, who danced to it in the 1946 film "Blue Skies." It was first sung by Harry Richman in 1930 and became a #1 hit, and in 1939 Clark Gable sang it in the movie "Idiot's Delight." It was also featured in the movie Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks and a #4 hit for the techno artist Taco in 1983.
;"Say It Isn't So" (1932) Rudy Vallee performed it on his radio show, and the song was a #1 hit for George Olsen and awarded top-10 positions with versions by Connee Boswell and Ozzie Nelson's band. In 1963 Aretha Franklin produced a single of the song in 1963–31 years later. Furia notes that when Rudy Vallee first introduced the song on his radio show, the "song not only became an overnight hit, it saved Vallee's marriage: The Vallees had planned to get a divorce, but after Vallee sang Berlin's romantic lyrics on the air, "both he and his wife dissolved in tears" and decided to stay together.
;"I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" (1937) Performed by Dick Powell in the 1937 film "On the Avenue." Later it had four top-12 versions, including by Billie Holiday and Les Brown, who took it to #1.
"God Bless America" (1938)
memorial dedication, September 11, 2008]] Written by Berlin twenty years earlier, he filed it away until 1938, when Kate Smith's manager asked Berlin if he had a patriotic song Smith might sing to mark the 20th anniversary of Armistice Day. It was "a simple plea for divine protection in a dark time — a plangent anthem in just 40 words," writes Corliss. It quickly became the second National Anthem after America entered World War II and over the decades has earned millions for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, to whom Berlin assigned all royalties.Describing the mood at the time and the significance of the song, Corliss wrote in Time magazine that December:
In times of crisis, the nation loses its short-term cultural memory—puts aside idiot movie comics, suicidal rock lyrics, must-see reality TV and the pursuit of the moral triviality that is Gary Condit—and, like a senior citizen finding solace in the distant past, rekindles that old feeling. In pop culture, at least for a while, many Americans traded in cool pop culture for warm, sarcasm for sentiment, alienation for community. In the blink of a national tragedy, we went from jaded to nice, just like that.The popularity of the song, when it was first introduced in 1938, was also related to its release near the end of the Depression, which had gone on for nine years. As a result, one writer concludes that the song's introduction at that time "enshrines a strain of official patriotism intertwined with a religious faith that runs deep in the American psyche. Patriotic razzle-dazzle, sophisticated melancholy and humble sentiments: Berlin songs span the emotional terrain of America with a thoroughness that others may have equaled but none have surpassed."
But his most notable and valuable contribution to the war effort was a stage show he wrote called "This is the Army". It was taken to Broadway and then on to Washington, D.C. (where President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended). It was eventually shown at military bases throughout the world, including London, North Africa, Italy, Middle East, and Pacific countries, sometimes in close proximity to battle zones. Berlin wrote nearly three dozen songs for the show which contained a cast of 300 men. He supervised the production and traveled with it, always singing "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning". The show kept him away from his family for three and a half years, during which time he took neither salary nor expenses, and turned over all profits to the Army Emergency Relief Fund. The play was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1943, directed by Michael Curtiz, costarring Joan Leslie and Ronald Reagan, who was then an army lieutenant. Kate Smith also sang "God Bless America" in the film with a backdrop showing families anxious over the coming war. The show became a hit movie and a morale-boosting road show that toured the battlefronts of Europe. The shows and movie combined raised more than $10 million for the Army, and in recognition of his contributions to troop morale, Berlin was awarded the Medal of Merit by President Harry S. Truman. His daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, who was 15 when she was at the opening-night performance of "This is the Army" on Broadway, remembered that when her father, who normally shunned the spotlight, appeared in the second act in soldier's garb to sing "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," he was greeted with a standing ovation that lasted 10 minutes. She adds that he was in his mid-50's at the time, and later declared those years with the show were the "most thrilling time of his life." McCorkle writes that the score "meant more to me than ever, now that I knew that he wrote it after a grueling world tour and years of separation from his wife and daughters."
Historian and composer Alec Wilder noted the difference between this score and Berlin's much earlier works:
To hear... that "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) was the hit of Vienna and probably every large city of Europe by late 1912, and then to realize that the writer of this song, forty years later, wrote the nearly perfect score of Annie Get Your Gun, comes as a profound shock.Apparently the "creative spurt" in which Berlin turned out several songs for the score in a single weekend was an anomaly. According to this daughter, he usually "sweated blood" to write his songs. Annie Get Your Gun is considered to be Berlin's best musical theatre score not only because of the number of hits it contains, but because its songs successfully combine character and plot development. The song "There's No Business Like Show Business" became "Ethel Merman's trademark."
Final shows
Berlin's next show, Miss Liberty (1949), was disappointing, but Call Me Madam in 1950, starring Ethel Merman as Sally Adams, a Washington, D.C. socialite, loosely based the famous Washington hostess Perle Mesta, fared better, giving him his second greatest success. After a failed attempt at retirement, in 1962, at the age of 74, he returned to Broadway with Mr. President. Although it ran for eight months, (with the premiere attended by Democratic President John F. Kennedy,) it did not become a successful show. But as Richard Corliss points out, it did at least prove that Berlin was still the "uncomplicated lover of the country that had adopted and enriched him . . . [and] his feelings were most directly expressed" by the lyrics to the song, "This Is a Great Country:":Hats off to America, The home of the free and the brave — If this is flag waving, Flag waving, Do you know of a better flag to wave?
Berlin subsequently retired from songwriting and spent his remaining years in New York City.
Movie scores
1920s - 1950s
(1948)]] In 1922, Madame Butterfly was his first composing film debut. In 1927, his song "Blue Skies", was featured in the first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. Later, movies like Top Hat (1935) became the first of a series of distinctive film musicals by Berlin starring performers like Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, and Alice Faye. They usually had light romantic plots and a seemingly endless string of his new and old songs. Similar films included On the Avenue (1937), Gold Diggers in Paris (1938), Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946), and Easter Parade (1948), with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.
"White Christmas" (1942)
The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced "White Christmas", one of the most recorded songs in history. First sung in the film by Bing Crosby, it sold over 30 million records and stayed #1 on the pop and R&B; charts for 10 weeks. Crosby's single was the best-selling single in any music category for more than fifty years. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that "the song also evokes a primal nostalgia—a pure childlike longing for roots, home and childhood—that goes way beyond the greeting imagery."Richard Corliss also notes that the song was even more significant having been released soon after America entered World War II: [it] "connected with... GIs in their first winter away from home. To them it voiced the ache of separation and the wistfulness they felt for the girl back home, for the innocence of youth...." Poet Carl Sandburg said, "Way down under this latest hit of his, Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace."
"White Christmas" won Berlin the Academy Award for Best Music in an Original Song, one of seven Oscar nominations he received during his career. In subsequent years, it was re-recorded and became a top-10 seller for numerous artists: Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Ernest Tubb, The Ravens, and The Drifters. It would also be the last time a Berlin song went to #1 upon its release.
Talking about Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", composer–lyricist Garrison Hintz stated that although songwriting can be a complicated process, its final result should sound simplistic. Considering the fact that "White Christmas" has only eight sentences in the entire song, lyrically Mr. Berlin achieved all that was necessary to eventually sell over 100 million copies and capture the hearts of the American public at the same time.
Not always certain about his own writing abilities, he once asked a songwriter friend, Mr. Herbert, whether he should study composition. "You have a natural gift for words and music," Mr. Herbert told him. "Learning theory might help you a little, but it could cramp your style." Berlin took his advice. Herbert later became a moving force behind the creation of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In 1914, Berlin joined him as a charter member of the organization that has protected the royalties of composers and writers ever since.
Years later, he was asked whether he ever studied lyrical writing:
I never have, because if I don't know them I do not have to observe any rules and can do as I like, which is much better for me than if I allowed myself to be governed by the rules of versification. In following my own method I can make my jingles fit my music or vice versa with no qualms as to their correctness. Usually I compose my tunes and then fit words to them, though sometimes it's the other way about.
In later years he would emphasize his conviction, saying that "it's the lyric that makes a song a hit, although the tune, of course, is what makes it last."
According to music historian Alec Wilder, it was well known that Berlin, unable to write his own music, paid a professional musician to harmonize and write his music, but always did so under his close supervision. He notes that "though Berlin may seldom have played acceptable harmony, he nevertheless, by some mastery of his inner ear, senses it, in fact writes many of his melodies with this natural, intuitive harmonic sense at work in his head, but not in his hands."
As a result, Wilder concludes that many admirers of the music of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter were unlikely to consider Berlin's work in the same category. But he feels that was due primarily to "forgetfulness and confusion," making them inclined to minimize his talent. He writes:
They forget "Soft Lights and Sweet Music,' 'Supper Time,' and 'Cheek to Cheek' because they are confused by his also having written 'What'll I Do?' and 'Always.' The solid, straightforward pop songs of Berlin are minor masterpieces of economy, clarity, and memorability. But they give little hint of the much more sophisticated aspects of his talent as it is revealed in his theater and film music.
Wilder tries to describe the source of Berlin's gift for songwriting: "In his lyrics as in his melodies, Berlin reveals a constant awareness of the world around him: the pulse of the times, the society in which his is functioning. There is nothing of the hothouse about his work, urban though it may be."
Whatever idealism some of his songs revealed, the core of his work has been eminently practical: his has been truly a body of work... his approach to songwriting is that of a craftsman rather than a composer.... I have been searching assiduously for stylistic characteristics in Berlin, but I can't find any. I find great songs, good songs, average songs, and commercial songs. But I find no clue to a single, or even duple, point of view in the music.
Berlin did state a stylistic goal early in his career: to write a "syncopated operetta." He said, "If I were assigned the task of writing an American opera I should not follow the style of the masters, whose melodies can never be surpassed. Instead I would write a syncopated opera, which, if it failed, would at least possess the merit of novelty. That is what I really want to do eventually - write a syncopated operetta." Two decades later, composer George Gershwin wrote, "I have learned many things from Irving Berlin, but the most precious lesson has been that ragtime—or jazz, as its more developed state was later called—was the only musical idiom in existence that could aptly express America."
Many musicians and music historians have attempted to define the qualities about Berlin's songs that made them unique. Gershwin once tried:
His music has that vitality - both rhythmic and melodic - which never seems to lose any of its exuberant freshness; it has that rich, colorful melodic flow which is ever the wonder of all those of who, too, compose songs; his ideas are endless.During the early 1940s, Berlin became an enthusiastic reader of works by the 18th century English poet, Alexander Pope. He had a genuine "enthusiasm for Pope's lean, compact heroic couplets." He felt that Pope would have made a "brilliant lyric writer."
In 2000, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim reflected on the greatest songs in the American Songbook, noting "What distinguishes Berlin is the brilliance of his lyrics. 'You Can't Get a Man With a Gun' -- that's as good a comic song as has ever been written by anybody. You look at the jokes and how quickly they're told, and it still has a plot to it. It's sophisticated and very underrated."
They met in 1925, 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 Mr. Berlin. However, Berlin wooed her over the airwaves with his songs, "Remember" and "Always." His biographer, Philip Furia, writes that "even before Ellin returned from Europe, newspapers rumored they were engaged, and Broadway shows featured skits of the lovelorn songwriter...." During the week after her return, both she and Berlin were "besieged by reporters, sometimes fifty at a time." Variety reported that her father had vowed 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.
A front-page story in the New York Times about the wedding stated, "Although Broadway for months had expected the one-time newsboy and Bowery singer of songs to wed the prominent young society girl... the marriage took Clarence H. Mackay, father of the bride, completely by surprise. He was reported to have been stunned when he learned from a third person of the Municipal Building ceremony." However, the bride's mother, who was divorced from Mr. Mackay, was apparently not of the same mind according to the story: "in fact, some quarters pictured her as desirous of seeing her daughter follow the dictates of her own heart. It was reported that the couple motored to the home of Mrs. Blake [her mother], early in the evening and obtained her blessing."
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: Irving, who died in infancy; Mary Ellin Barrett and Elizabeth Irving Peters of New York, and Linda Louise Emmett, who lived in Paris.
Lifestyle
In 1916, in the earlier phase of Berlin's career, producer and composer George M. Cohan, during a toast to the young Berlin at a Friar's Club dinner in his honor, described Berlin:
The thing I like about Irvie is that although he has moved up-town and made lots of money, it hasn't turned his head. He hasn't forgotten his friends, he doesn't wear funny clothes, and you will find his watch and his handkerchief in his pockets, where they belong.Berlin's daughter later wrote in her memoir that "she found her father a loving, if workaholic, family man who was 'basically an upbeat person, with down periods,' until his last decades, when he retreated from public life...." She adds that her parents liked to celebrate every single holiday with their children. "They seemed to understand the importance, particularly in childhood, of the special day, the same every year, the special stories, foods, and decorations and that special sense of well-being that accompanies a holiday." Although he did comment to his daughter about her mother's lavish Christmas spending, "I gave up trying to get your mother to economize. It was easier just to make more money."
Death
, the Bronx, New York City]] Berlin died in his sleep on September 22, 1989, in New York City at the age of 101 and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. He was survived by three daughters: Mary Ellin Barrett and Elizabeth Irving Peters of New York, and Linda Louise Emmet, who lives in Paris. He is also survived by nine grandchildren.On the evening following the announcement of his death, the marquee lights of Broadway playhouses were dimmed before curtain time in his memory. President George H. W. Bush said Mr. Berlin was "a legendary man whose words and music will help define the history of our nation." Just minutes before the President's statement was released, he joined a crowd of thousands to sing Berlin's "God Bless America" at a luncheon in Boston. Former President Ronald Reagan, who costarred in Berlin's 1943 musical This Is the Army, said, "Nancy and I are deeply saddened by the death of a wonderfully talented man whose musical genius delighted and stirred millions and will live on forever."
Morton Gould, the composer and conductor who is president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), of which Mr. Berlin was a founder, said, "What to me is fascinating about this unique genius is that he touched so many people in so many age groups over so many years. He sounded our deepest feelings - happiness, sadness, celebration, loneliness." Ginger Rogers, who danced to Berlin tunes with Fred Astaire, told The Associated Press upon hearing of his death that working with Mr. Berlin had been "like heaven." During his career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs and was a legend by the time he turned 30. He went on to write the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated for Academy Awards on eight occasions. Music historian Susannah McCorkle writes that "in scope, quantity, and quality his work was amazing." Others, such as Broadway musician Anne Phillips, says simply that "the man is an American institution." According to McCorkle, of the top five songwriters in America, only Berlin and Cole Porter wrote both their words and music. According to music historian Gary Giddins, "No other songwriter has written as many anthems.... No one else has written as many pop songs, period... [H]is gift for economy, directness, and slang, presents Berlin as an obsessive, often despairing commentator on the passing scene." Biographer David Leopold adds that "We all know his songs... they are all part of who we are."
At his 100th-birthday celebration in May 1988, violinist Isaac Stern said, "The career of Irving Berlin and American music were intertwined forever—American music was born at his piano," while songwriter Sammy Cahn pointed out: "If a man, in a lifetime of 50 years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing 60 that are immediately identifiable... [Y]ou couldn't have a holiday without his permission." Composer Douglas Moore added:
It's a rare gift which sets Irving Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters. It is a gift which qualifies him, along with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, as a great American minstrel. He has caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe.ASCAP's records show that 25 of Berlin's songs reached the top of the charts and were re-recorded by dozens of famous singers over the years, such as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) also tried to describe the importance of Berlin's compositions:
I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.... His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert. But apart from his genuine talent for song-writing, Irving Berlin has had a greater influence upon American music than any other one man. It was Irving Berlin who was the very first to have created a real, inherent American music.... Irving Berlin was the first to free the American song from the nauseating sentimentality which had previously characterized it, and by introducing and perfecting ragtime he had actually given us the first germ of an American musical idiom; he had sowed the first seeds of an American music.
Awards and celebrations
Received the Army's Medal of Merit on Oct. 2, 1945 from General George C. Marshall, at the direction of President Harry S. Truman, in appreciation for writing the music and lyrics to "This Is the Army." Won a Tony Award in 1951 for Best Score for the musical, Call Me Madam. Received a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1954 from President Dwight D. Eisenhower for contributing the song, "God Bless America." Berlin had also written three songs for his candidacy, including "I Like Ike." Won a Special Tony Award (New York City) in 1963 for his contributions to the American musical. Awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1968. Was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. Was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 by President Gerald Ford Won a Lawrence Langner Tony Award (New York City) in 1978 for his distinguished life in the American theater. Awarded (in absentia,) a Medal of Liberty during centennial celebrations for the Statue of Liberty in 1986. His 100th-birthday celebration concert for the benefit of Carnegie Hall and ASCAP on May 11, 1988. Awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Musical scores
The following list includes scores mostly produced by Berlin. Although some of the plays using his songs were later adapted to films, the list will not include the film unless he was the primary composer.
Stage
"Watch Your Step" (1914) "Stop! Look! Listen!" (1915) "The Century Girl" (1916) "Yip! Yip! Yaphank" (1918) "Ziegfeld Follies" (1919) "Music Box Revue" (1921) "Music Box Revue" (1922) "Music Box Revue" (1923) "Music Box Revue" (1924) "The Cocoanuts" (1925) "Face the Music" (1932) "As Thousands Cheer" (1933) "Louisiana Purchase" (1940) "This Is the Army" (1942) "Annie Get Your Gun" (1946) "Miss Liberty" (1949) "Call Me Madam" (1950) "Mr. President" (1962)
Film scores
Puttin' on the Ritz (1929) The Cocoanuts (1929) Top Hat (1935) Follow the Fleet (1936) On the Avenue (1937) Carefree (1938) Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) Second Fiddle (1939)
Holiday Inn (1942) This Is the Army (1943) Easter Parade (1948) Annie Get Your Gun (1950) Call Me Madam (1953) There's No Business Like Show Business (1954) White Christmas (1954)
Song lists
Footnotes
References
Berry, David Carson (2001). “Gambling with Chromaticism? Extra-Diatonic Melodic Expression in the Songs of Irving Berlin,” Theory and Practice 26, 21-85. Berry, David Carson (1999). “Dynamic Introductions: The Affective Role of Melodic Ascent and Other Linear Devices in Selected Song Verses of Irving Berlin,” Intégral 13, 1-62.
External links
Papers of Irving Berlin, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library Irving Berlin Music Company PBS page on Irving Berlin, part of their Great Performances series If Irving Berlin could not read or write music, how did he compose? (from The Straight Dope) Liner notes for The Vintage Irving Berlin, New World Records NW 238 Irving Berlin collection of non-commercial sound recordings, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts The Judy Room "Easter Parade" section Remarkable Sergeants: Ten Vignettes of Noteworthy NCOs Elder, Daniel K. U.S. Army Soldier Show Irving Berlin | 5th Avenue Theatre Tony Awards Songwriters Hall of Fame - Irving Berlin
Audios
"Irving Berlin In Hollywood (Film Score Anthology)" Song clips "Irving Berlin Always" Song clips "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook" Song clips "Irving Berlin: A Hundred Years" Song clips "The Melody Lingers On: 25 Songs Of Irving Berlin" Song clips "Annie Get Your Gun" (film) score samples "Annie Get Your Gun (Broadway play) song samples "How Deep is the Ocean" - Frank Sinatra "What'll I Do?" - Harry Nilsson
Videos
"Ordway Center Spotlight on Irving Berlin" Presentation by James Rocco, V.P. Performing Arts, 8 min. Kaye Ballard Tribute] 8 min. 1982 Oscars Tribute part 2 videos 7 min. "God Bless America" - sung by Kate Smith; sung by Celine Dion; with Irving Berlin "Always" Frank Sinatra at Irving Berlin's 100th birthday celebration "Easter Parade" movie trailer "Annie Get Your Gun" "Anything You Can Do"; "Col. Buffalo Bill" "Alexander's Ragtime Band" movie trailer "Follow the Fleet", Fred Astaire on piano "A Cheer for the Navy"; Finale scene from "This is the Army" "Let's Face The Music And Dance" with Nat King Cole; version by Diana Krall "Blue Skies" Willie Nelson; Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer" 1927 "Top Hat" movie trailer "Cheek to Cheek" with Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers "There's No Business Like Show Business" movie trailer (1954); Song clip "Shakin' the Blues Away" with - Doris Day "White Christmas" movie trailer - "White Christmas" Broadway promo "Play a Simple Melody" by Greater Boston Intergenerational Chorus "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" with Dick Powell & Alice Faye; version with Frank Sinatra "A Couple of Swells" with Judy Garland & Fred Astaire "Always" with Frank Sinatra slide show "Russian Lullaby" (written 1927) with Jacques Gauthe & jazz group "Puttin' on the Ritz" with Fred Astaire; piano solo with Jim Hession Category:1888 births Category:1989 deaths Category:American buskers Category:American centenarians Category:American film score composers Category:American musical theatre composers Category:American pianists Category:Songwriters from New York Category:Best Song Academy Award winning songwriters Category:Congressional Gold Medal recipients Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Imperial Russian immigrants to the United States Category:Jewish American composers and songwriters Category:Musicians from New York City Category:People from Mogilev Category:Presidential Medal for Merit recipients Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Ragtime composers Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (The Bronx) Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Vaudeville performers Category:Jewish composers and songwriters Category:American songwriters Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States
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| Caption | September 1941 McCall's Magazine cover image of Joan Caulfield |
|---|---|
| Birthname | Beatrice Joan Caulfield |
| Birth date | June 01, 1922 |
| Birth place | West Orange, New Jersey, USA |
| Death date | |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California, USA |
| Yearsactive | 1946-1987 |
| Spouse | Dr. Robert Peterson (1960-1966) (divorced) sonFrank Ross (1950-1960) (divorced) son |
Joan Caulfield (June 1, 1922 - June 18, 1991) was an American actress and former fashion model. After being discovered by Broadway producers, she began a stage career in 1943 that eventually lead to signing as an actress with Paramount Pictures.
In 1950, she married the film producer Frank Ross, with whom she had a son Caulfield Kevin Ross. She and Ross were divorced in 1960. She later married Robert Peterson, a dentist, with whom she had her second son John Caulfield Peterson. Her second marriage ended in divorce as well. At the time of her death, she had one grandchild. She died within 24 hours of actress Jean Arthur, the first wife of her husband Frank Ross, Jr. Arthur had been married to Ross in 1932, and they divorced in 1949.
Category:1922 births Category:1991 deaths Category:American film actors Category:American female models Category:American television actors Category:Columbia University alumni Category:People from West Orange, New Jersey Category:Cancer deaths in California
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After the war ended, she joined Benjamin Britten's newly formed English Opera Group. Her first important opera role was Lucretia in the 1946 Glyndebourne production of Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. The following year she created the role of Nancy in his Albert Herring, also at Glyndebourne, and in 1948 she sang Polly in Britten's version of The Beggar's Opera.
Her first husband was the record producer Walter Legge, whom she married in 1941. The couple had one daughter, born in 1942, but divorced in 1948. In 1949, Evans married the producer and librettist Eric Crozier, who became a co-founder of the Aldeburgh Festival with Britten and Peter Pears. Evans taught singing at the Britten-Pears School in Snape Maltings after her retirement and was made an OBE in 1991. She died in Aldeburgh at the age of 85.
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Today, the "magnitude of his contribution to popular music is still hotly debated", and because he appeared on the opera stage only twice, many critics feel that he needed to have had more "operatic quality time" in major theatres before he could be considered a star of that art form. According to opera historian Clyde McCants, "Of all the Hollywood singers who performed operatic music . . . the one who made the greatest impact was Mario Lanza."
]] His budding operatic career was interrupted by World War II, when he was assigned to Special Services in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He appeared in the wartime shows On the Beam and Winged Victory. He also appeared in the film version of the latter (albeit as an unrecognizable member of the chorus).
Lanza resumed his singing career with a concert in Atlantic City with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in September 1945 under the baton of Peter Herman Adler, who subsequently became a mentor to him. The following month, Lanza replaced tenor Jan Peerce on the live CBS radio program Great Moments in Music, on which he made six appearances over a period of four months, singing extracts from various operas and other works.
He then studied with noted teacher Enrico Rosati for fifteen months, acquiring a solid vocal technique that enabled him, in his own words, "to sing for hours without becoming tired." His friend and colleague bass-baritone George London later recalled that, prior to working with Rosati, Lanza's voice "was unschooled, but of incredible beauty, with ringing, fearless high notes. [...] Rosati taught him to sing more lyrically, with less pressure, to good advantage."
His studies with Rosati completed, Lanza embarked on an 86-concert tour of the United States, Canada and Mexico between July 1947 and May 1948 with George London and soprano Frances Yeend. Reviewing his second appearance at Chicago's Grant Park in July 1947 in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the respected music critic Claudia Cassidy praised Lanza's "superbly natural tenor" and observed that "though a multitude of fine points evade him, he possesses the things almost impossible to learn. He knows the accent that makes a lyric line reach its audience, and he knows why opera is music drama."
In April 1948, Lanza sang two performances as Pinkerton in Puccini's Madama Butterfly for the New Orleans Opera Association. The conductor was Walter Herbert, the stage director was Armando Agnini. Writing in the St. Louis News, critic Laurence Odel observed that, "Mario Lanza performed his duties as Lieut. Pinkerton with considerable verve and dash. Rarely have we seen a more superbly romantic leading tenor. His exceptionally beautiful voice helps immeasurably." Following the success of these performances, Lanza was invited to return to New Orleans in 1949 as Alfredo in Verdi's La traviata. However, as biographer Armando Cesari observes, by 1949 Lanza "was already deeply engulfed in the Hollywood machinery and consequently never learned the role [of Alfredo]."
Depressed by his dismissal, and with his self-confidence severely undermined, Lanza became a virtual recluse for more than a year, frequently seeking refuge in alcoholic binges. During this period, Lanza also came very close to bankruptcy as a result of poor investment decisions by his former manager, and his lavish spending habits left him owing about $250,000 in back taxes to the IRS.
In September 1958, he made a number of operatic recordings at the Rome Opera House for the soundtrack of what would turn out to be his final film, For the First Time. Here he came into contact with the Artistic Director of the Rome Opera, Riccardo Vitale, who offered him the role of Canio in Pagliacci in the theater's 1960/61 season. Lanza also received offers from the management of the La Scala and San Carlo opera houses. However, his health continued to decline, with the tenor suffering from a variety of ailments, including phlebitis and acute high blood pressure. His old habits of overeating and crash dieting, coupled with binge drinking, compounded his problems.
, the only full professional opera Lanza ever appeared in]] Lanza's widow, Betty, moved back to Hollywood with their four children, but died five months later at the age of 37. Biographer Armando Cesari writes that the apparent cause of death, according to the coroner, was "asphyxiation resulting from a respiratory ailment for which she had been receiving medication". In 1991, Marc, the younger of their two sons, died of a heart attack at the age of 37; six years later, Colleen, their elder daughter, was killed at the age of 48 when she was struck by two passing vehicles on a highway. Damon Lanza, the couple's eldest son, died in August 2008 of a heart attack at the age of 55.
In 1994, tenor José Carreras paid tribute to Lanza in a worldwide concert tour, saying of him, "If I'm an opera singer, it's thanks to Mario Lanza." Carreras' colleague Plácido Domingo echoed these comments in a 2009 CBS interview when he stated, "Lanza's passion and the way his voice sounds are what made me sing opera. I actually owe my love for opera thanks to a kid from Philadelphia."
Miljenko Jergovic mentions Lanza in his Dvori od oraha (The Mansion in Walnut) novel of 2003 as a part of story about Luka Sikiric.
Mario Lanza Boulevard is a roadway in the Eastwick section of Lanza's native Philadelphia, close to Philadelphia International Airport and ending on the grounds of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge.
Category:1921 births Category:1959 deaths Category:American male singers Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:American musicians of Italian descent Category:American opera singers Category:American people of Sicilian descent Category:Burials at Holy Cross Cemetery Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Deaths from pulmonary embolism Category:Musicians from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Category:Opera crossover singers Category:People from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:United States Army Air Forces soldiers
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| Name | Irving Kaufman |
|---|---|
| Order3 | Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York |
| Term start3 | October 21, 1949 |
| Term end3 | September 22, 1961 |
| Nominator3 | Harry S. Truman |
| Order2 | Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit |
| Term start2 | 1961 |
| Term end2 | 1987 |
| Nominator2 | John F. Kennedy |
| Order | Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit |
| Term start | 1973 |
| Term end | 1980 |
| Birth place | Brooklyn, New York |
| Death date | (aged 81) |
| Profession | Jurist |
| Religion | Judaism |
Kaufman had been known to lament what he regarded as the distortion of judicial opinion and finding, as it passed through the filter of the media: "The judge is forced for the most part to reach his audience through the medium of the press whose reporting of judicial decisions is all too often inaccurate and superficial."
Category:1910 births Category:1992 deaths Category:Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Category:United States district court judges appointed by Harry S. Truman Category:Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Category:United States court of appeals judges appointed by John F. Kennedy Category:Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Category:Fordham University School of Law alumni Category:American Jews
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Selvin started his professional life at age 15 as a fiddle player in New York City night clubs. A "husky" lad, he looked older than he was and as such was permitted into such establishments.
A mere six years later, as leader of his own dance band, the "Novelty Orchestra," Selvin released the biggest-selling popular song in the first quarter-century of recorded music. That single, Dardanella, eventually went on to sell more than 5 million copies and an additional 2 million pieces of sheet music.
According to The Guinness Book of World Records, Selvin recorded more musical sides (on 78-rpm discs) than any other person. One reason for this prolific output is that he recorded for dozens of different labels during this high-growth time in the industry, using a different name (or slightly different name) for each label. Selvin's output has been estimated at 13,000 to 20,000 song titles.
During the Columbia era, he recorded under many different names (for Columbia, OKeh, Odeon, Parlophone, Harmony, Diva, Velvet Tone & Clarion) including
Many of the these records during the Columbia era are highly collected and treasured examples of either jazz related pop, or sophisticated, smoothly arranged dance music.
Also, there had been incorrect reports that Ben Selvin's Band played under the name "Perley Stevens and his Orchestra", when in fact, Perley Stevens on occasion played with Ben Selvin's Band and many others, including Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey Orchestras and Paul Whiteman's Band.
Was musical director of Majestic Records beginning in 1947.
Was a Vice-President and A&R; Director (artists and repertoire) at Columbia Records in charge of the recordings of Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark in the late '40s and early '50s.
Was an A&R; Director at RCA Victor in charge of the company's popular Camden Label and served as the Musical Director for a recording in 1954 by John Serry, Sr..
Became, post-retirement, a consultant to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company), helping them during the transition from vinyl recordings to recordings on tape.
(references: "American Dance Bands on Record and Film 1915-1942" by Richard J. Johnson & Bernard H. Shirley; Rustbooks 2010 and the earlier "American Dance Discography" by Brian Rust: Arlington House, 1975)
Category:1898 births Category:1980 deaths Category:American bandleaders Category:Vocalion Records artists
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