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.
Soon
We’ll be without the moon,
Humming a diff’rent tune …
—IRVING BERLIN,
“Let’s Face the Music and Dance”
IT IS A CURIOSITY of the American Songbook that the majority of its songs were composed during the 1930s, yet scarcely any acknowledge the hardships of the Great Depression. American popular music has never been as insulated from American social reality. When E. Y. Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a hit in 1934, it stood out as a novelty among the ballads crooned on the country’s radio shows: a stark portrait of national woe surrounded by Tin Pan Alley’s paper-moon artifice.
In an odd way, the pop songs of the 1930s were a social barometer: the fervor with which the public embraced musical escapism was a measure of the hard times. And indeed, twentieth-century pop rarely produced such beguiling fantasy. The new class of songwriters that emerged in the 1920s were quintessential “young moderns,” who brought a self-conscious artistry and cosmopolitan outlook to what was previously regarded as a profession for scalawags, drunks, and other shady characters who hung around the Union Square rialto. Richard Rodgers drew on the romantic composers he had studied in his conservatory training; the rich, bluesy luster of George Gershwin’s compositions reflected tricks he picked up on his “slumming” pilgrimages to Harlem; the lyrics of Ira Gershwin, “Yip” Harburg, and Cole Porter betrayed their bookish taste for Gilbert and Sullivan and the light verse that filled the pages of The Smart Set.
By the 1930s, the new songwriters were pouring out a seemingly unending stream of witty and beautiful songs whose quality even the stuffiest highbrows could not dispute. With their sumptuous melodies and lyrics that made taut, witty poetry out of everyday speech, the songs of the thirties were an American apotheosis: popular music at its most stylized and urbane. Earlier popular song had had its artful moments and flashes of ruffian wit, but nothing had approached the sophistication and expressiveness of a song like Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” (1930), with its daring tonal shifts and rich chromaticism. Nor was there precedent for lyrical ingenuity on par with Leo Robin’s “Thanks for the Memory” (1937)—a luminous pile-up of jokes and rhymes:
Thanks for the memory
Of rainy afternoons,
Swingy Harlem tunes,
And motor trips and burning lips and
burning toast and prunes.
Songwriters brought this new sophistication to songs whose focus was radically narrowed. In the first two decades of the century, Tin Pan Alley strove for Morning Edition topicality, taking account of news events, trends, inventions—the whole mad pageant of American social experience. Now, although Tin Pan Alley was still used as a generic term to describe the music industry centered on Broadway and its Hollywood satellite, song publishers had dispersed from West Twenty-eighth Street and abandoned their old-school commitment to pop-music journalism: the new, up-market American popular song was almost exclusively preoccupied with romantic love. The task of the Broadway and Hollywood tunesmith was, in the words of one wag, to say “I love you” in thirty-two bars; from “It Had to Be You” to “All of Me” to “The Way You Look Tonight” to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the American
