The Jews in America Trilogy (147 page)

At the age of fourteen, and for no particular reason, Izzy Baline ran away from home. He was apparently not very much missed, because he did not run far—only a few blocks away, to the Bowery. The Bowery, in those days, did not have the skid-row aura it emanates today. In fact, it was almost glamorous. It was the Broadway of the Lower East Side, crammed with bars, restaurants, and nightclubs that offered vaudeville-style entertainment. It was an era when “slumming” was a popular diversion for uptowners, when debutantes and their escorts dressed in their shabbiest clothes and came down to the Bowery for a taste of how the other half lived, and for the thrill of rubbing shoulders with gamblers, gangsters, and other East Side lowlifes. From the slummers and from their regular neighborhood customers, the bars of the Bowery did a thriving business. Izzy Baline decided he could earn a living as a “busker” in the Bowery bars.

Buskers were free-lance entertainers who cruised from bar to bar, singing songs, or dancing, or performing comedy routines, then passing the hat for pennies among the customers. On a good night, a busker could earn as much as a dollar, which, in a neighborhood where a steak pie cost a nickel and a room in a boardinghouse cost a quarter a night, was enough to provide him with food and shelter and even a bit of pin money. For a while, Baline worked as a kind of Seeing Eye dog for a blind busker known as Blind Sol. He led Blind Sol
on his singing rounds of the bars, sometimes joining him in a duet, and was paid with a share of Blind Sol's take. For a brief period, too, he sang—for five dollars a week—with an itinerant vaudeville troupe that billed itself as
THREE—KEATONS—THREE.
There was Ma Keaton, who played the saxophone. Pa Keaton did a comedy routine, and their baby, Buster Keaton, was a comic prop who got laughs by being tossed back and forth across the stage by his parents.

In terms of his later career, however, Izzy Baline's most important employment occurred when he was hired as a singing waiter in a bar called the Pelham Café on Pell Street, in the heart of Chinatown. The Pelham Café had a perfectly dreadful reputation. To begin with, Chinatown, full of “sinister Oriental types,” opium dens, and tong wars, was considered one of the most dangerous areas in the city, where police were always breaking up dope rings and trying to solve the periodic clueless throat-slittings. At the center of all this unlovely activity stood the Pelham Café, which was known far and wide not by its official name but by the even unlovelier sobriquet of Nigger Mike's. Nigger Mike's was said to be the favored hangout of all the most notorious criminals and the most flamboyant and popular prostitutes. In Nigger Mike's back room, it was said, illegal gambling, opium smoking, and Lord knew what else went on. It was the unsavory reputation of Nigger Mike's, and of its alleged “back room” (which, in fact, did not exist), that had made it one of the most sought-after slumming places in town. Naturally, “Nigger Mike” Salter, who ran the place, did nothing to discourage his establishment's expanding ill repute. And Mike Salter, meanwhile, was not a black at all, but a Russian Jew whose swarthy complexion had earned him the nickname—one he didn't mind at all. If anything, it enhanced his saloon's shady image, which was its chief drawing card.

The songs that Izzy Baline sang while working as a singing waiter at Nigger Mike's were a pastiche. Like Helena Rubinstein, he was proving himself to be a masterful adapter. Some were simply the popular songs of the day—“Dear Old Girl,” “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider,” and “Sweet Adeline.” But then, for variety, he sometimes added new and slightly off-color lyrics to well-known favorites, and he also offered a few tunes that he had simply composed in his head. At Nigger Mike's there was a battered upright piano, and in his off hours, he
laboriously picked out these new songs on the keyboard, though, unable to read or write music, he had no idea how to transcribe his tunes to make musical manuscripts. In fact, he never really did master the piano. Years later, after Irving Berlin had become one of the most popular composers in America, it was something of a shock to strangers to discover that he could play in only one key—F sharp—and had never learned to read music, or to transcribe it.

It was while singing at Nigger Mike's, meanwhile, that Izzy Baline had his first brush with fame. Prince Louis of Battenberg was visiting New York and, it seemed, the notoriety of Nigger Mike's saloon had traveled as far as Europe. One of the sights the prince wanted to see in the city was the famous Chinatown café. Nigger Mike himself was not at all sure how to deal with such an illustrious customer, and when the prince and his party arrived he announced that drinks would be on the house. When the prince was ready to leave, he thanked his host, and then offered a tip to his singing waiter. Baline, thinking that he too must appear as hospitable as his boss, politely refused the tip. A reporter named Herbert Bayard Swope—later to become the editor of the New York
World
—who was covering Prince Louis's visit, decided that here was an amusing story: an immigrant Jewish waiter who would refuse a tip from a visiting German prince. Thus the name of Izzy Baline found itself in the papers the following morning.

This bit of extra publicity for his establishment, however, did nothing to endear Izzy Baline to Nigger Mike, who, when he was drunk, had a terrible temper. Some nights later, when Baline's job was to watch the cash register, he nodded off over the half-opened drawer. Nigger Mike found him that way, and summarily fired him.

But he had no trouble finding another job, and he was presently doing his song and parody routines at another bar, called Jimmy Kelly's, on Union Square. In appearance, it was not much different from Nigger Mike's, but it was at a slightly better address and attracted a slightly higher-class clientele. It was here, with a pianist friend named Nick Nicholson, who knew someone who could put notes on music paper, that Izzy Baline wrote a song called “Marie from Sunny Italy,” which the two decided was good enough to try to get published. They took their composition to the music publisher Joseph Stern,
who promptly accepted it. The song became mildly popular in the music halls of 1907. The lyric writer's revenue from it was thirty-seven cents, and when the sheet music first appeared it bore the legend “Words by I. Berlin.”

Just how Baline became transformed into Berlin would always be something of a mystery, even to the composer himself. It may have been the careless publisher's error. Or it may have been Baline's own fault, since, as he would admit, in the Yiddish-accented speech of the Lower East Side his name came out sounding like “Berlin.” Later, when the modest “I. Berlin” became Irving Berlin, it was Berlin's own doing. He decided that both Isidore and Israel, his Hebrew name, sounded “too foreign.” Irving sounded “more American.” In any case, Joseph Stern capitalized on the new name, touting Berlin's first song as “about an Italian girl, written by a Russian boy, named after a German city.”

Two more not very distinguished songs followed “Marie”—“Queenie, My Own,” written with an itinerant pianist at Jimmy Kelly's, and “The Best of Friends Must Part,” which Berlin wrote alone. But it was with a humorous bit of verse called “Dorando” that Irving Berlin came—almost accidentally—uptown to Tin Pan Alley, as the neighborhood around West Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway was known, where the big-time music publishers had their offices. “Dorando” had been commissioned—for ten dollars—by a song-and-dance man at Kelly's who wanted to do a comic routine, in an Italian accent, about an Italian marathon runner named Dorando, who had just lost to an American Indian named Longboat. Berlin's verse was about an Italian barber who had wagered his life's savings on Dorando and, of course, had lost. But the song-and-dance man defaulted on the deal and refused to pay for the routine, whereupon Berlin took his words uptown to the offices of the then legendary publisher Ted Snyder.

For some reason, he was admitted immediately into the great man's office, though he did not even have an appointment, and recited his verse. “Well,” Snyder said, after hearing it, “I suppose you've got a tune to this.” In fact, Berlin did not, but he quickly lied, and said, “Yes.” Snyder then waved him down the hall to his music-arranger's office, with instructions that Berlin was to sing his tune for the arranger. Somehow, between
Snyder's office and the arranger's, Berlin managed to compose some notes in his head to go with the words, and a full-scale song was born.

For the next three years, most of Irving Berlin's output was in collaboration with Snyder or one of his stable of composers. Although some forty-five new Berlin songs appeared during this period, none is particularly memorable today, even though many—such as “Yiddisha Eyes”—were popular music hall favorites of the day. For his work with the Snyder office, Berlin was paid a comfortable—for 1910—salary of twenty-five dollars a week, plus a royalty on sheet-music sales of each new title. But it was not until 1911, when he began writing his own music and lyrics without resorting to collaborators, that he began to come into his own. His first big hit that year was “Alexander's Ragtime Band,” a song that would remain popular for years and that seemed to provide a glorious overture to the Jazz Age that was to follow. He was only twenty-three.

Irving Berlin songs began to appear that are still sung in college dormitories, nightclubs, beer halls, and on concert stages all over the country—“I Want to Go Back to Michigan,” “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “He's a Rag Picker,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”—now mandatory background music for every Miss America Pageant—and on and on. Which came first, the lyric or the tune? It could happen either way. The genesis of “I Want to Go Back to Michigan” was simply that Berlin had been playing around, in his head, with the couplet “Oh, how I wish again/That I was in Michigan.” It was a place, incidentally, that he had never visited when he wrote the song in 1917.

Music theorists and historians have tired to parse and analyze the music of Irving Berlin, searching for forms and early influences that might have shaped his talent. This is not an easy chore because, in addition to his prodigious output, the variety of Berlin's modes and moods is remarkable. He wrote simple love songs (“What'll I Do”), and he wrote ragtime romps (“Everybody's Doin' It”). He wrote sentimental ballads (“I Lost My Heart at the Stagedoor Canteen”) and patriotic marches (“This Is the Army, Mr. Jones”). He wrote sad songs, funny songs, high-stepping jazz songs, and romantic waltzes. Theorists have claimed to hear strains of other cultures in Berlin's
music—echoes of Negro spirituals, for instance, which is interesting, since Berlin had almost no familiarity with the genre. Others have sensed a relationship between Berlin's music and old Yiddish folk songs, Hasidic chants, and even ancient Sephardic liturgical music from the synagogues of fourteenth-century Spain—all unlikely sources of his inspirations.

Perhaps, again, the best way to see Irving Berlin's music is as pastiche—a piecing together of this and that, of everything that went into the experience of the American melting pot. Many of his songs had Jewish themes, but he also wrote songs with Italian themes, French themes, German themes, Irish themes, Spanish themes, and blackface and American Indian themes. One could not label as a “Jewish” composer the man who celebrated America's principal Christian holidays with “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” and who celebrated America itself with “God Bless America,” a hymn so popular that it has become virtually a second national anthem—to the point where many Americans believe it
is
the national anthem. Just as America itself has become, if not a melting pot exactly, a tossed salad of ethnic influences and traditions, so is the collective oeuvre of Irving Berlin a tossed salad. And so deeply entrenched in the American idiom are his songs that they don't translate well into foreign tongues. Even in England, audiences have had difficulty understanding Berlin's songs—“What'll I Do,” for instance, puzzled the British, who wondered at the meaning of the word “whattle.” As for Berlin's style, “American” is the best adjective for it. His contemporary and chief competitor in the songwriting field, George Gershwin, called him “America's Franz Schubert,” but that falls somewhat wide of the mark. Harold Arlen once said that Berlin's songs “sound as though they were born that way—God Almighty!—not written!” And asked to define Irving Berlin's place in American music, Jerome Kern replied, “Irving Berlin has
no
place in American music. He
is
American music.” And the wonder of it all is that he was born in Russia.

When he left Ted Snyder's firm to form his own Irving Berlin, Inc., he was not only making a move that would make him a very rich man; he was also moving into the mainstream of the American free-enterprise system, and fulfilling every American's dream of becoming his own boss.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1920s, new Russian-Jewish names and faces were emerging by the score in the American entertainment business—singers, actors, comics, composers, lyricists, and dancers. Their names are legion—Theda Bara (Theodosia Goodman), Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky), Fanny Brice (Fanny Borach), Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss), Al Jolson (Asa Yoelson), Sophie Tucker (Sonia Kalish), George Burns (Nathan Bimbaum), Eddie Cantor (Isidor Iskowitch), and Libby Holman (Catherine Holzman) are only the beginning of a long, imposing list of folk who turned their talents, in one form or another, to the performing arts. Why this headlong rush of Eastern European Jews into show business? It is a little difficult to explain.

To begin with—considering the craving of most Jewish immigrants for solid American “respectability,” for the Grand Concourse via City College—was the fact that show business was considered in no way a respectable American calling. Performers and other theater folk occupied a position on the status ladder just a short step above prostitutes and pimps. Furthermore, if the entertainment business was looked on as a low calling by most self-respecting Americans it was regarded as an even lower calling by most right-thinking and pious Jews. Rabbis inveighed against the theater as a form of idol worship, and the Hebrew phrase
moshav letzim
, meaning “the seat of the scornful,” was often used in Russia as a synonym for the theater, while the first Psalm warned, “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.” The word
letz
, or “scorner,” was often used to describe an actor.