Читать книгу White Christmas: The Story of a Song - Jody Rosen - Страница 10
ОглавлениеChristmas has woven a pattern in my life.
—IRVING BERLIN
A LISTENER WHO has cued his CD player to Mel Tormé’s 1992 recording of “White Christmas” may find himself puzzled by its opening bars. A piano vamps discreetly in the background; Tormé sings in the plush, vibratoless tone that earned him the nickname The Velvet Fog. But there is a strange jazziness to the tune’s saunter through a series of seventh and ninth chords, and the words that Tormé sings are unfamiliar. “The sun is shining,” he begins. “The grass is green.” He continues:
The orange and palm trees sway.
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA.
But it’s December the twenty-fourth,
And I’m longing to be up north.
These may be the most famous “lost” sixteen measures in popular music: the little-known introductory verse of “White Christmas.” After that concluding line—“And I’m longing to be up north”—Berlin’s melody makes a gingerly seven-note descent, landing on a C major chord, and suddenly, over swelling orchestral strains, Tormé is singing the world’s best-known pop song: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas …”
In writing the “White Christmas” verse, Berlin was hewing to the Tin Pan Alley convention of preceding thirty-two-bar choruses with sixteen measures of mood-setting introduction. On the Broadway stage, these verses served a similar function to the recitative that precedes an operatic aria; they were often performed conversationally—a casual way of establishing the tempo and dynamics of a song and easing into its refrain. Although some composers excelled in verse-writing—the Gershwin brothers and Cole Porter were specialists in the art—verses were infrequently recorded, and almost none have lodged in public memory. Millions can hum the refrains of “Star Dust” or “My Funny Valentine,” but how many people know their verses?
The opening section of “White Christmas” is doubly obscure. In 1989, Berlin wrote a letter to the singer Rosemary Clooney, a star of the 1954 White Christmas movie, who had performed the song’s verse in a recent concert. Berlin thanked Clooney for resuscitating the verse, which, he noted, “is hardly ever used.” But in December of 1942, at the height of the song’s initial conquest of the Hit Parade, Berlin himself had ordered the sixteen bars expunged from its sheet music. The public had fallen for Bing Crosby’s hushed, chorus-only rendering of the song; now Berlin realized that the verse’s jauntier musical atmosphere and images of Beverly Hills shattered the chorus’s wintry spell.
That forgotten verse points to the song’s inauspicious origins: “White Christmas” began its life as a curio. In June 1938, Berlin returned to New York after spending the better part of the previous five years in Hollywood working on movie musicals. It had been a triumphant half decade. In 1932, he had emerged from a commercial and creative dry patch with the Broadway smash Face the Music; he followed this with a string of movie hits that not only raised Hollywood’s commercial bar, but whose finest moments—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirling across a moonlit veranda to the strains of “Cheek to Cheek”—took the film musical, that collision of the two quintessentially modern American lively arts, to new heights of whirligig poetry.
That March of 1938, Berlin had turned fifty. Hollywood’s New York ex-pat royalty turned out to salute the songwriter’s three decades in show business at a birthday party held in a detail-perfect reconstruction of the Pelham Café, the Chinatown watering hole where the teenage Izzy Baline cut his teeth as a singing waiter. For thirty years, his restless quest for new hit-making “angles”—a favorite Berlinism—and attention to the smallest shifts in public fancy had put him on the cutting edge of an ever-changing popular culture. With Watch Your Step (1914), he became the first popular songwriter to mount a Broadway show comprising entirely his own songs; the first time the world heard sound in a motion picture, it heard a Berlin tune: Al Jolson belting out “Blue Skies” in The Jazz Singer. In the 1920s, when a new songwriting vanguard—George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter—replaced Tin Pan Alley’s churn-’em-out ethos with an artier emphasis on careful craft, melodic sophistication, and the lyrical mot juste, Berlin kept creative pace with the upstarts but stayed just as prolific. “You make all the rest of us feel pretty darned ineffective,” Jerome Kern complained in a letter. “We’re hep that none of us is heightened by your genius for producing just the right thing at just the right time.”
But in the spring of 1938, Berlin was slumping. Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the big-budget Berlin musical released by Twentieth Century-Fox that May, drew almost entirely from the songwriter’s back catalog. He managed to come up with five new numbers for its follow-up, Carefree, another Astaire-Rogers picture. But the film was lackluster: when it appeared in August, reviewers suggested—presciently, it turned out—that the Astaire-Rogers partnership was running out of gas.
Berlin had come home to New York intent on making an invigorating return to the Broadway stage. The project he had in mind was a throwback to Broadway’s pre-talking-pictures era: he wanted to put on a revue, like those he had staged so successfully in the early 1920s at the theater he co-owned, the Music Box on West Forty-fifth Street. Berlin’s notes for The Music Box Revue of 1938 envisioned a woolly vaudeville-style hodgepodge of tunes, skits, and stunts: topical songs touching on newsmakers from Hitler and Mussolini to Joseph Kennedy to the Dionne quintuplets; a racy comedic number called “Found a Pair of Panties”; sketches featuring acrobats, “sidewalk comedians,” jugglers, and trained dogs.
By August, Berlin’s plans had moved in a more baroque direction. The show had a new title—The Crystal Ball—and a novel form: it was a three-act-long “revue of to-day, tomorrow and yesterday.” According to Berlin’s notes for the show, the first-act curtain would rise on a “Greek chorus” arrayed behind a proscenium arch, singing a musical explanation of the revue’s unusual structure:
It’s in three acts
Instead of the usual two,
And in each act
We’re doing a separate revue:
A first act, a second, and a last—
The present, the future, and the past.
The Crystal Ball was never produced. When a new Berlin show reached the Broadway stage in 1940, it was Louisiana Purchase, the spry political farce loosely based on the life of Huey Long. But among the unfinished songs and jotted notes for Berlin’s unrealized revue are clues about the provenance of his most famous song. Especially intriguing is a list of numbers for The Crystal Ball’s opening act, probably typed by Berlin himself in mid-1938:
ACT ONE—“THE PRESENT.” 1939.
1. Opening—Greek Chorus—crystal ball curtain
2. Short sketch with music
3. number in one
4. sketch
5. commercial advertising
6. rhythm number
7. sketch in two
8. White Christmas—finale
Start in one going into full stage
From this earliest reference to “White Christmas” we learn that the song had existed, in some form, for at least several months prior to Berlin’s breathless arrival at his office on January 8, 1940. Berlin was a fanatical tinkerer whose songs often gestated for months, or even years, undergoing several revisions before taking final shape; for every song that he completed, there were dozens of false starts and half-songs, snatches of song lyrics and piles of hastily scrawled angles that he stored for future use. The songwriter had a term for his collection of scraps and works-in-progress: “the trunk.” Several of his most celebrated creations—“Easter Parade” and “God Bless America” among them—were reworked trunk songs. The Christmas number that Berlin brought to Helmy Kresa that Monday in 1940 may have been completed, as the songwriter boasted, “over the weekend,” but it had almost certainly been kicking around the trunk for some time before that.
Also noteworthy is the song’s position in The Crystal Ball’s proposed running order. “White Christmas” may at this stage have been a primitive version of the song that was eventually published—it may have been nothing more than a twinkling “angle” in its creator’s eye—but Berlin obviously had a high opinion of it, deeming it a worthy act-closer.
This suggests something about the song’s form: the “White Christmas” that Berlin slated for his revue’s first-act finale was not the homely ballad that Crosby crooned in Holiday Inn. The songwriter was a stickler for variety-show convention, and convention dictated that first acts conclude with a visually spectacular number. Berlin’s note that the number would “start in one going into full stage” indicates how he envisioned “White Christmas” being staged: the song would begin with a lone player onstage singing its verse; the curtain would then shoot up, revealing an elaborate set, and a full chorus would join in for a rousing sing-along finale.
It is difficult to imagine the “White Christmas” we know today as showstopper in a revue filled with dog tricks and pratfalls. Yet the song that reached the world in 1942 as a hymn was, in its inventor’s initial conception, something else entirely: wry, parodic, lighthearted—a novelty tune.
We glimpse Berlin’s original vision for “White Christmas” in the six lines of its verse. Where the chorus evokes a distant yesteryear (the Christmases “I used to know”), the verse is set in the modern present: on Christmas Eve Day in Los Angeles. There is conversational breeziness in its language (“There’s never been such a day …”). There is, moreover, a distinct social milieu being described: we are in the louche company of Beverly Hills swells, who loll away day after “perfect day” on green grass beneath swaying trees and a beating sun.
The “White Christmas” verse is a satire, Berlin’s variation on a classic New York pastime: a potshot fired at Gotham’s ditsy West Coast rival. (We can hear a New Yorker’s voice in the misnomer “Beverly Hills, L.A.”—an error Berlin shrugged off when his wife pointed it out.) The verse paints a picture of palmy paradise that is deflated by the revelation “it’s December the twenty-fourth.” For the song’s narrator, this “perfect day” in Beverly Hills is no fun at all: Christmas is approaching, and what is Christmas without wintry ambience?
In the song Bing Crosby sang in Holiday Inn, white Christmas was a vision of snow-christened perfection; in Berlin’s original conception, it was a punch line. The sight-gag staging of the number in the songwriter’s revue would doubtless have driven the joke home. According to biographer Philip Furia, Berlin pictured it being performed by “a group of sophisticates gathered around a Hollywood pool,” pining for a rustic, snowbound Christmas with “cocktails in hand”—a preposterous tableau sure to tickle a New York audience.
Berlin apparently so fancied this novel angle—subverting holiday solemnity for humorous effect—that he thought it might be the basis for an entire show. He began making notes for yet another revue, this one built around “fifteen of the important holidays in a year, using each holiday as an item in the revue.” The show, whose working title was Happy Holiday, was explicitly comedic. “In several of the items,” Berlin wrote, “the point of view will be to debunk the holiday spirit.” Once again, Berlin gave his Christmas number pride of place: it would be, he wrote, “the summing up of the entire show.”
Behind the satirical scrim of his Hollywood Christmas song, we discern the figure of Irving Berlin, exasperated after a half decade spent on movie lots. Like most of America’s songwriting elite, Berlin was drawn to Hollywood by the boom market in movie musicals that followed the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer. While other members of the Tin Pan Alley diaspora had relocated outright or bought second homes in Los Angeles, Berlin never put down roots, preferring to camp out for months at a time in suites at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire. In 1939, Berlin finally resolved to move to L.A., leaving his New York apartment and renting a home in the Hollywood Hills, only to back out at the last minute, pitching his family into a frenzy of unpacking and house-hunting back in Manhattan. “He just couldn’t bring himself to go through with moving to L.A.,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett would recollect. “He regarded Los Angeles as fake.” As Berlin himself explained to his wife: “There’s no Lindy’s in Los Angeles. No paper at two in the morning. No Broadway. No city.”
A poignant moment in Berlin’s California exile may have provided inspiration for “White Christmas.” It was Christmas, 1937, and Berlin was stuck in Hollywood, working on Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Like many graduates of a Lower East Side Orthodox home, Berlin proudly celebrated Christmas. The songwriter’s family life proclaimed his American arrival with all the trappings of post-Jewish haute-bourgeoisie style: a shiksa wife, an uptown address, a Christmas tree in the living room. Though Berlin was steeped in Yiddishkeit, his relationship to institutional Judaism was negligible: here, a Passover seder, there, a stroll down Fifth Avenue to Kol Nidre service at Temple Emmanu-El.
The Berlin family Christmas pulled out the stops. It was, Mary Ellin Barrett recalls, “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” with a family dinner at a “gleaming candlelit Christmas table,” “enormous stockings,” and “so many packages, so many toys.” Invariably, these celebrations were punctuated by Berlin’s retelling of a favorite story from his Lower East Side childhood: how he stole away from his pious home to the apartment of his Irish neighbors the O’Haras and gazed in rapture at their Christmas tree, which, to his young eyes, “seemed to tower to Heaven.” The songwriter must have been gratified by the sight of his children at the foot of their tree, which scraped the ceiling of the family’s double-storied library.
But for Irving and Ellin Berlin, seasonal merriment was tempered by sorrow. Back on December 1, 1928, Ellin had given birth to a baby boy. Three and a half weeks later, the day after Christmas, an item appeared on page 3 of the New York Times:
BERLINS’ INFANT SON DIES OF HEART ATTACK
Irving Berlin, Jr., 24-day-old son of the composer of popular songs and of the former Ellin Mackay, died suddenly yesterday morning of a heart attack at the Berlin residence, 9 Sutton Place …
The Berlins refused to see reporters yesterday and information was given out through a Miss Rorke, nurse who had attended the child. The death occurred shortly after 5 o’clock in the morning. Miss Rorke was the only person present. Mr. and Mrs. Berlin were called immediately. Three doctors, whose names were not disclosed, were summoned, but nothing could be done, according to the nurse.
Irving Berlin, Jr., was their second child, the other being Mary Ellin, 2 years old.
Mary Ellin herself only learned that she had had a brother eight years later—the very winter her father was in Hollywood working on Alexander’s Ragtime Band—when she happened upon a newspaper clipping in a desk drawer. The article made sense of something that had troubled the young girl: every Christmas Eve her parents, with long faces and sober attire, left the house and “went somewhere.” Where they went, it turned out, was Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, to lay flowers at Irving Berlin Jr.’s grave. Years later, Ellin Berlin would admit to her daughter, “We both hated Christmas. We only did it for you children.” Though he put up a jolly front, the tragedy of Christmas, 1928, had forever dampened Irving Berlin’s holiday cheer.
Christmas, 1937, was only the second that Berlin had spent apart from his family; that Christmas Eve, he would not make the somber pilgrimage to the Bronx. Instead, he had been invited to dinner at the Beverly Hills home of his friend Joseph Schenck, the Twentieth Century-Fox Studios CEO. Schenck was Berlin’s oldest friend—a buddy from his Lower East Side street-urchin days, who claimed to have bought the first sheet music copy of Berlin’s 1907 debut, “Marie from Sunny Italy.” Like Berlin, he was a ruthless perfectionist in his professional affairs; he shared Berlin’s taste for deli food, hours of show-biz shoptalk, and high-stakes card games. When they got together, the Old Neighborhood bonhomie was palpable: Schenck called Berlin “Zolman,” and the pair traded wisecracks in Yiddish. Berlin counted Schenck as one of his few dear friends. “You said one very wise and true thing to me,” Berlin wrote to Schenck in 1956. “‘As we get older, our real friends become fewer.’ Apart from my immediate family, I can count mine on one hand and have a couple of fingers left over. I don’t have to tell you you head the list.”
The movie mogul had a surprise in store for Berlin that Christmas Eve. When the songwriter arrived at Schenck’s estate, he was led to its screening room. “I have this Christmas short that I’d like you to take a look at,” Schenck said.
Berlin took a seat in the screening room. The lights dimmed; the projector whirred. A title appeared on the screen: “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The title dissolved, and the camera zoomed in on the snowy exterior of a grand French door hung with a holiday wreath. Cut to the interior of a large apartment: two little girls, with their backs turned to the camera, are facing a festively trimmed Christmas tree. The camera pans in, the girls reel around to face it and shout in unison, “Merry Christmas, Daddy!” These aren’t actors; they are Berlin’s elder daughters, Mary Ellin and Linda, wearing Hungarian dresses, their last year’s Christmas presents. The youngest Berlin sibling, nineteenth-month-old Elizabeth, is there too, splayed on the floor in front of the Christmas tree, dwarfed by ribbon-topped packages.
Schenck’s “Christmas short,” it turned out, was made especially for Berlin, filmed five months earlier on a Fox soundstage by the Hollywood director Gregory Ratoff. Ellin Berlin had known her husband would be spending Christmas alone and had conspired to create a holiday treat: a three-minute-long cinematic Christmas card.
Might “White Christmas” have first stirred on that Christmas Eve in 1937? We can imagine a glum Berlin, waking the next morning to a balmy, sun-strafed Christmas Day. Christmas always put him in a funk; this Christmas he was three thousand miles from his loved ones. Stepping onto the terrace of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite, he would have beheld a scene surreally different from the homey yuletide aura of his family’s film: gently rocking palms, the garish green of perfectly tended lawns, a swimming pool’s cobalt glare. The only snowflakes in Hollywood fell on soundstages.
The memory of that California Christmas surely played some part in inspiring the song that surfaced a few months later in his various plans for a stage revue. Berlin had little idea that beneath his Christmas-in-Beverly-Hills lampoon—stirring in the homesick “longing” of the verse’s last line—the Great American Christmas Carol was waiting to emerge.
In the meantime, with his struggles to mount a revue bearing no fruit, the songwriter turned his attention to other projects—a new movie, Second Fiddle, and Louisiana Purchase—casting “White Christmas” into that purgatory where so many previous Berlin creations, slaved over and tossed off, lowly and grand, had gone before it: the trunk.
