one or two in the afternoon. His early arrival, they must have known, could mean only one thing: Berlin, who never learned musical notation, had written a new song that he was anxious to have Kresa fix on the staff.
All-night songwriting sessions were the norm for Berlin, a lifelong insomniac whose frenzied work habits were as celebrated as his songs. The newspaper stories that greeted Berlin’s early fame as the hitmaking phenom of the ragtime craze called him a “songwriting machine”—a bit of a back-handed compliment, linking the young star to the crude industry of Tin Pan Alley’s song mills. But there was something machinelike about Berlin: he was astoundingly prolific—at his productive peak he was writing a song a day—and no one who encountered him could help but be struck by the impression of a man in a state of whirring motion. (“He’s a buzz saw,” marveled a reporter who visited Berlin in 1942. “He’s Mr. Energy.”) He composed continually: jotting lyrics on shirt cuffs, on cocktail napkins, on hotel stationery, dreaming up new tunes on overnight train trips, in elevators, at poolsides, in front of the shaving mirror. He wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in the middle of a clamorous vaudeville rehearsal and “Anything You Can Do” in a taxi marooned in Midtown traffic. When Queen Elizabeth congratulated Berlin on “My British Buddy,” his World War II-era ode to Anglo-American camaraderie, he replied: “Thank you, ma’am. I wrote the song in a bathtub.” In 1912, a month after he married for the first time, Berlin told reporters that his new bride had cured him of the “night-to-morning and morning-to-night” songwriting compulsion that had made him “a nervous wreck … all music, all songs, all the hope of song hits.” Five months later, his wife was dead, of typhoid fever; Berlin returned for good to his insomniac regime and became the nation’s pop-song poet laureate—America’s nervous wreck. All told, Berlin wrote thousands of songs and published 812 of them, an amazing 451 of which became hits. An undated lyric fragment in Berlin’s papers at the Library of Congress is the cheery confession of a man who recognized his creative drive as a kind of mania:
He wakes her up and cries,
“I’ve written another song,
You’ve got to listen to it!”
She rubs her eyes and answers,
“I don’t want to hear it… ”
He keeps it up all morning,
Until the day is dawning…
And then he wakes her up and cries,
“I’ve written another song!”
She has to listen to it;
She simply cannot keep him shut—
He’s a nut, he’s a nut, he’s a nut.
This song-crazed “nut” is a figure Helmy Kresa would have recognized: throughout his decades of service, he went to bed knowing he might be roused in the wee hours by a phone call heralding the arrival of a new tune. Kresa was hired by Berlin in late 1926 as one of several staff arrangers. By the early 1930s he had become Berlin’s main musical secretary; though he would go on to write a hit song of his own, “That’s My Desire,” and serve several other of Tin Pan Alley’s most celebrated composers—Porter, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer—Kresa was always known as Berlin’s right-hand man and remained in his employ until shortly before the songwriter’s death in 1989. Like Berlin, Kresa was an immigrant—his heavy German accent gave him an air of “longhair” musicianly gravitas—and he shared his boss’s devotion to musical modesty: simple chord progressions, harmonies that were elegant but unornate. He was famously fast, capable of burnishing a rough new Berlin composition into something playable in a hour or two of speedy work.
Kresa’s job wasn’t easy. Berlin was a handful; although he disavowed artsy pretension and played to the hilt the earthy role of bootstrapping street kid made good, he had a temperament worthy of a La Scala diva. He was moody—exhilarated one moment, grim and foreboding the next, one minute generous and jocular, the next brooding in stony silence, the next raging about his colleagues’ inadequacies, bungled business deals, perceived slights. When he locked into a songwriting groove, he was irrepressible, dragging strangers to his piano to vet his new tunes, boasting about his successes to anyone within earshot. When the songs dried up, his spirits sank; during his worst slumps, Berlin was stupefied by self-doubt, convinced that he had lost his talent and his career was over. His driving need for public affirmation made things worse: in commercially fallow periods, other composers could take refuge in the satisfactions of the creative process, but Berlin’s sense of self-worth shriveled in the absence of hits. Kresa weathered his boss’s mood swings with varying degrees of tolerance and exasperation; he considered quitting many times over the years and would have done so, he confessed, “if I had not so much admiration for his fantastic genius as a writer of both words and music.”
How—and where—Berlin wrote the words and music he brought to Kresa that January morning is unclear. He had spent Christmas and the New Year with his family—his second wife, Ellin, and their three daughters, thirteen-year-old Mary Ellin, seven-year-old Linda, and three-year-old Elizabeth—at his recently purchased country home in Lew Beach, New York, a rambling estate in the Catskills whose pastoral ambience, perhaps not coincidentally, recalls the scene depicted in the chorus of “White Christmas.” The Berlin family returned to their Manhattan town house, a five-story brownstone on East Seventy-eighth Street, just after the New Year; in all likelihood, Berlin remained in the city for the following weekend of January sixth and seventh.
Any composing that Berlin did that weekend would have taken place in his third-floor study, whose centerpiece was a curiously homely upright piano. This instrument, which Berlin coyly called his “Buick,” was custom-built: rigged with a key-changing hand-clutch to accommodate the musical limitations of its owner, who, like many Tin Pan Alley old-timers, only ever learned to play “on the black keys,” in the key of F-sharp. Berlin would sit at the piano for up to twelve hours at a time, chain-smoking and wrestling melodies and lyrics into shape. “The melody doesn’t come to you,” Berlin explained. “You sweat it out. Lots of big successes I’ve written only after I’ve become blue in the face.”
Berlin’s family grew used to the noises that would drift from behind that study door: flurries of notes, piano noodlings, the odd burst of high-pitched singing—the stammering sound of a song coming to life. This ruckus followed Berlin on the road. Front-desk clerks at hotels where the songwriter stayed had to contend with calls from sleep-deprived guests; Berlin learned to muffle the din by stuffing his piano with towels and bathrobes. We can only guess at the sounds that filled Berlin’s study that January weekend. But by Monday morning, they had ordered themselves into a song.
Picture Irving Berlin arriving at his office at 799 Broadway on a chilly January day in 1940. He was fifty-one years old, at almost the exact midpoint of his life. At a time when songwriters were stars on par with Hollywood screen idols, his face—with those intense, dark eyes, ringed with the “overnight bags” of a thousand insomnias—was recognizable to millions. The songwriter stood just five feet six inches, but he cut a rather dashing figure: the olive skin, the slicked, jet-black hair, the smart Savile Row suits. His trademark feature, though, was his nervous energy: the darting gestures whose madcap effect reminded his daughter Mary Ellin of a speeded-up Charlie Chaplin silent film.
That morning, there was extra urgency in Berlin’s step. He pushed through the front door of his office and passed his startled secretaries without a word of greeting, looking for Kresa. He found him at his desk. Kresa was accustomed to Berlin’s bluster, but even he was taken aback by the audaciousness with which the songwriter announced his latest creation,
