The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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.

  To be sure, there was the tradition of the Yiddish theater to be considered. At the same time, while the Yiddish theater was enjoyed as spectacle, those connected with its performances were held in low esteem, and though Yiddish theater was transported to the Lower East Side, it can in no way account for the enormous outpouring of show-business talent that emerged from Jewish immigrants in the United States. In Russia, there had also been the tradition of the badchen, or street jester, juggler, or fiddle player—but the badchen was also a figure of scorn and ridicule, little better than a beggar, an organ-grinder with his monkey, a blind man with his cup. And yet, as a singing waiter, Irving Berlin had been an American badchen, just as Eddie Cantor—singing and telling jokes and doing imitations at weddings and bar mitzvahs—had thereby launched himself as a comedian.

  Still, this does not satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of American Jews in show business. One can, of course, assume that part of the explanation was the fact that, once the Jews were freed from the shackles of poverty and discrimination, great wells of talent that had been forced into hiding in the old country became uncapped in the new, and that with this came a longing for more than respectability—for achievement, recognition, and fame; the name in lights on Broadway, the cheers and applause of an audience. But sheer ambition does not invariably lead to fame, nor is it necessarily an accompaniment to theatrical talent.

  It is true, however, that by the 1920s much of the business end of show business was in Jewish hands. Many of the legendary producers and impresarios on Broadway, such as Billy Rose (William Rosenberg) and Florenz Ziegfeld, were Jewish. So were many of the theatrical agents. The theaters themselves, meanwhile, were in the hands of the formidable brothers Shubert—Sam, Lee, and Jacob—the sons of an immigrant Syracuse peddler, who by the 1920s were to Broadway showplaces what the Rockefellers were to Standard Oil. All this helped Jewish performers find employment without fear of anti-Semitism, and among the careers launched by Flo Ziegfeld were those of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Fanny Brice. Then there was the fact that, by 1920, much of the Prohibition liquor trade was in Jewish hands, and a good number of the speakeasies and nightclubs where would-be stars could do their turns were also Jewish-owned. But still, where did so much talent come from? How to account for the wonderful songs—that seemed not to be written, but simply to “happen”—from the musically untutored Irving Berlin?

  Much of the answer may lie in the streets of the Lower East Side themselves, where a bit of theatrical talent—or a plucky stab at it—could be a means of survival. More than gumption and street wisdom were required of a Jewish child to make it through the average day of taunting and bullying, and an ability to improvise was often helpful. If a Jewish youth were slightly built and not particularly athletic (like Irving Berlin), a potential tormentor could often be as diverted by a soft-shoe shuffle, a bit of clever mimicry, a comedy routine, or a song as by the use of fists. Once diverted by the young performer, the tormentor found himself disarmed and going along with the joke. The explosion of talent that erupted from the Lower East Side in the 1920s very likely grew out of the art of self-defense.

  Having found that he could hold an audience, the young performer discovered that he could sell his ability for pennies in the street, or in the shabby saloons along the Bowery, or in the speakeasies of Brooklyn and Harlem. From there, the next step might be an engagement at one of the increasingly lavish resort hotels, such as Grossinger’s and the Concord in the Borscht Belt of the Catskills. Here, vacationing Jewish families demanded entertainment of all varieties when not sunning themselves in lawn chairs, eating sumptuous meals, and admiring mountain scenery. Here, Meyer Lansky would establish several pleasant, and illegal, gambling parlors, and here budding comics, singers, and actors would hone their techniques and develop new routines. At one of these hotels, a young comedian named David Daniel Kominski, the son of a Russian-born Brooklyn tailor, later to be known as Danny Kaye, was hired to do zany acts in the lobby on rainy days to prevent guests from checking out. These Jewish performers, furthermore, were playing for Jewish audiences and were delighting them with a kind of Jewish self-parody that a generation later might have raised eyebrows. Fanny Brice, for example, did her acts in a heavy Yiddish accent—full of “oys!” and “Oy vehs!”—which she actually had to teach herself, since hers had not been a Yiddish-speaking family. Danny Kaye’s comedy relied heavily on mocking Russian-Jewish mannerisms and shibboleths and speech patterns—a takeoff on a newly rich Jewish businessman with an unpronounceable name was a particular favorite—and the Marx Brothers had a routine called “Misfit Sam the Tailor.” Sophie Tucker, meanwhile, could always bring the house down by closing her act with a rendition of “My Yiddishe Mama.” It was at the Catskill resorts that producers and agents were scouting for fresh talent, and, for the performer, the next step might be the vaudeville circuit, or Broadway, or Hollywood.

  In Hollywood, however, the situation for the Jewish performer was somewhat different from what it was in the Catskills or even in New York. Though the motion picture business—led by men like Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the brothers Warner—had become a heavily Jewish industry, its national audience was not. Jewish jokes and Jewish themes might be popular in the Borscht Belt or even on Broadway, but Hollywood, with its eye ever on the largest possible box-office receipts, made carefully de-Semitized films for the Christian majority. During the 1920s and even into the 1930s, it was unlikely that a Jewish actor would be cast as a romantic lead unless, like John Garfield (Julius Garfinkle), he happened not to “look Jewish.” Part of this had to do with Hollywood’s preoccupation, during this period, with turning out Westerns, and it was assumed that a Jewish face or physique would appear incongruous dressed in a cowboy outfit. But there was also genuine business fear that Christian audiences would not react kindly to Jewish stars. Theda Bara’s Jewishness was a closely guarded secret, as was the fact that Douglas Fairbanks’s mother had been Jewish. There was a great deal of elaborate name-changing, in the course of which Irving Lahrheim became Bert Lahr, Emmanuel Goldberg became Edward G. Robinson, Pauline Levee became Paulette Goddard, and so on. One of the most ingenious of these changes was made when an actor named Lee Jacob became Lee J. Cobb. The euphemism used in studio casting offices was “Mediterranean type,” and if an actor was branded a Mediterranean type he usually found good roles in the movies hard to come by. Both Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable had, in the early stages of their careers, difficulty getting parts because they “looked Mediterranean,” though neither was Jewish.

  The one area of films where an actor could get away with being Jewish, or looking Jewish, or where one could pretend to be Jewish even if one was not—where it was even an advantage to be Jewish—was comedy, and so it is no coincidence that some of the greatest comedians in the world—Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers—have been Jews nourished to p
rominence by Hollywood. For years, it was assumed that the greatest movie comedian of them all, Charlie Chaplin, was Jewish. He had to be, because he was so funny. He went to his grave, however, heatedly denying the rumors.

  But it is an interesting comment on the timidity and insecurity of Hollywood’s Jewish moguls who, by the 1920s, had become the most powerful purveyors of mass culture in America—a comment, perhaps, on their own ethnic embarrassment or even downright shame—that the only way a Jew could be a Jew on the screen was to play a tramp, a clown, a grifter, or a nebbish.

  And yet, it had to be admitted, playing the nebbish had helped many a bright young Jew make it through the Lower East Side, out of it, and onto a theater marquee.

  9

  HIGH ROLLERS

  One of Sam Goldwyn’s gifts as a filmmaker was his genius at generating publicity. Though he personally oversaw every detail of the movies he produced—from the writing and editing to the actresses’ hairstyles and makeup—the part of his job he relished most was getting his name, his studio’s name, his stars’ names, and his pictures’ names in the papers. One of the great social events of the Prohibition era was the wedding, in 1927, of one of Goldwyn’s stars, Vilma Banky, and Rod La Rocque, an actor under contract to Cecil B. DeMille. The affair was almost entirely staged—and was completely paid for—by Goldwyn. He had discovered Miss Banky on a trip to Budapest, and after getting her to trim down by some twenty pounds and having her teeth capped, Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood to make her a star. (It mattered not, in those days of silents, that she spoke not a word of English.) In the process, Goldwyn had created the myth that she was a “Hungarian countess”—though in fact he had met her getting off a streetcar.