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
