Irving Berlin Quotes

Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.

Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.

The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad—that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?

Talent is only a starting point.

You're not sick you're just in love.

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.

Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it.

I long to be out in the sun with no work to be done.

You cannot make your shimmy shake on tea

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

It's a lovely day today So whatever you've got to do You've got a lovely day to do it in, that's true And I hope whatever you've got to do Is something that can be done by two For I'd really like to stay It's a lovely day today And whatever you've got to do I'd be so happy to be doing it with you But if you've got something that must be done And it can only be done by one There is nothing more to say Except it's a lovely day for saying It's a lovely day!

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.

Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.

How far would I travel To be where you are? How far is the journey From here to a star?

Meter, melody, and everything else that relates to the construction of a song are secondary. All that is necessary is to have something to say and to say it as quickly as possible. Irving Berlin

There is no show business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and [in 1950] he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.

The train surges forward. I start singing an old Irving Berlin song Mom used to play on the piano: “How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?…And if I ever lost you, how much would I cry? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?

The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, but this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.

I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. “People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock.

(Hitler had a constitutional duty to consider each appeal for clemency and sign the execution warrant.) In bygone times the condemned criminal had had the traditional right to see the Kaiser's signature on the warrant before being led to the scaffold. In Hitler's era, the usages were less picturesque. A telephone call went from Schaub to Lammers in Berlin: ‘The Führer has turned down the appeal for clemency’ – this sufficed to rubber-stamp a facsimile of the Führer's signature on the execution warrant. On one occasion the file laid before Hitler stated simply that the Berlin Chancellery would ‘take the necessary steps’ if they had heard no decision from him by ten P.M. that night. Human life was becoming cheaper in the new Germany. When it was at its cheapest, at the time of Stalingrad, Walther Hewel was to explain to an OKW staff officer, ‘If you want to understand the way the Führer's mind works, you must look upon the human race as being just a swarm of ants.’ However,

Lillian was determined that her next role would be Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and assumed she only needed to find the right actor to play opposite her as Reverend Dimmesdale. Mayer informed her there was a much larger issue at stake; The Scarlet Letter was on the Hays office “blacklist” of books that could not be filmed. The very idea of a blacklist was ridiculous to Lillian and she took up the matter directly with Will Hays. While he would occasionally publicly chastise the studios, Hays never forgot that the full name of his office was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and worked to smooth the path any and every way he could. He told Lillian that the major source of objection was “the Protestant Church, especially the Methodists,” and directed her to the heads of several church and women’s organizations where she forcefully presented her case. Even with Hays’s assistance, no other actress had the personal and professional reputation pure enough to garner the response she received: the ban would be lifted if she was “personally responsible” for the film. Lillian turned her attention to finding the consummate Dimmesdale and Mayer suggested she watch Lars Hanson in The Saga of Gosta Berling. The studio boss had seen Mauritz Stiller’s film in Berlin the previous December and he immediately put the director and the film’s three stars, Hanson, Mona Martenson, and Greta Gustafsson, all under contract. Lillian agreed Hanson was “perfect” and was enthusiastic when Thalberg suggested the experienced Swede Victor Seastrom (Sjöström) direct, for she believed he had “Mr. Griffith’s sensitivity to atmosphere.” And so the ban was lifted from The Scarlet Letter, Lars Hanson was coming from Sweden, Victor Seastrom was assigned to direct, and now it was Irving Thalberg’s problem. He had no script. Lillian would later say that Irving “told me that Frances Marion and I could adapt it,” but it was hardly that simple.

It was on Sullivan’s 1932 series that listeners first heard the voices of Jack Benny, Jack Pearl, Irving Berlin, Florenz Ziegfeld, and George M. Cohan. Sullivan’s radio fame was enhanced by his newspaper column, “Little Old New York,” in the New York Daily News. His Toast of the Town (CBS, June 20, 1948–June 6, 1971) was the biggest variety hour of early television.

She won an amateur night at Keeney’s Theater in Brooklyn, singing When You Know You’re Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can’t Forget. Her prize was $10, and she gathered $23 in coins from the floor of the stage. She worked for George M. Cohan but was fired when Cohan learned that she couldn’t dance. After singing with a road show, she appeared in New York musical revues. A struggling young songwriter, Irving Berlin, gave her a musical piece called Sadie Salome and suggested she sing it in Yiddish dialect at the Columbia Burlesque House, where she was working. In the audience that night was Florenz Ziegfeld, whose Follies were at the pinnacle of Broadway entertainment.

On April 23, therefore, he signed a secret decree confirming Göring as his deputy in Berlin, while Hess continued to manage the Party in his absence. On May 2, 1938, Hitler wrote out a private testament and handed it in a sealed envelope to Dr Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery – a rare documentary glimpse of Hitler as a human being, putting his affairs in order, arranging his own funeral and disposing of his personal effects to his family and private staff. The

Telephone calls began coming from private citizens reporting fresh outbreaks of fire and the looting of Jewish businesses all over Munich. Hitler angrily sent for SS General Friedrich Karl von Eberstein, the city's police chief, and told him to restore order at once. He telephoned Goebbels and furiously demanded: ‘What's the game?’ He sent out Schaub and other members of his staff to stop the looting and arson. He ordered special protection for the famous antique dealers, Bernheimer's. At 2:56 A.M. a telex was issued by Rudolf Hess's staff as deputy of the Führer – and was repeated to all gauleiters as Party Ordinance No. 174 – forbidding all such demonstrations: ‘On express orders issued at the highest level of all there is to be no arson or the like, whatever, under any circumstances, against Jewish businesses.’ The Gestapo followed suit – thus at 3:45 A.M. the Berlin Gestapo repeated this prohibition.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

Groucho asked me once to play for him one of the first Irving Berlin songs. And he said to me, “You know, I sang this song for Irving Berlin. When I finished, Irving said to me, ‘Groucho, if you ever have a strong urge to do this song again, call me, and I will give you ten dollars not to do it.

To the disinterested outside visitor, the Lower East Side in the early 1900s would have appeared utterly chaotic, and nothing been foreseen to come out of it except disaster—or, at the very least, some sort of violent social upheaval or revolution. And yet that is not what happened at all. Instead, out of it came artists, writers, lawyers, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, like Irving Berlin, Jacob Javits, Samuel Goldwyn, David Sarnoff,

Working late one night in 1940, poolside at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Irving Berlin, Munn Lodge 190, New York City, told his secretary, "I just wrote the best song I've ever written — heck, I just wrote the best song anybody's ever written!"  Brother Berlin was right on the mark.  He had just finished composing "White Christmas."  Having sold 50 million copies - and counting - it is the best selling single of all time.

In idealizing or romanticizing America, a Jewish songwriter would inevitably change it. Irving Berlin suppressed his own Jewish identity, but he also did something much more dramatic and extraordinary. In a memorable riff in Operation Shylock (1993), Philip Roth dubs Berlin “the greatest Diasporist of all” and writes, “The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, but this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” The passage is hilarious, the tone that of a tummler, but the argument couldn’t be more serious. “Is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”21 Though the passage is unequivocal in its endorsement of Berlin’s “means of defusing the enmity of centuries,” note that Roth himself, whom Jewish critics used to lecture for showing disrespect to the fathers and the faith, could not sound more Jewish in this passage and in Operation Shylock as a glorious whole. The

What were they playing? All agree that the band featured light, cheerful music—ragtime, waltzes, and the comic songs that were then so popular in the London music halls. Survivors specifically recalled Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and a pretty English melody called “In the Shadows,” the big London hit of 1911. Colonel Gracie couldn’t remember the name of any tune, but he was sure the beat was lively to the end. Nevertheless, the Carpathia had no sooner reached New York than the story spread that the band went down playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The idea was so appealing that it instantly became part of the Titanic saga—as imperishable as the enduring love of the Strauses and the courage of the engineers who kept the lights burning to the final plunge. Yet doubts persist. In the first place, the whole point of the band playing was to keep the passengers’ spirits up, and light music seems best suited to that. As Colonel Gracie observed, “If ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ was one of the selections, I assuredly would have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death, and more likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding….

In other words, Berlin conceived shows as events more than as works. As a result, Berlin’s shows do not exactly represent the most enduring oeuvre in the American theater: only Annie Get Your Gun, the show that least obviously addresses its time, has enjoyed an unbroken string of productions that stretches from its premiere to the present. Yet by engaging with the here-and-now, with no apparent thought of posterity but mainly of the “mob” before him, Berlin distilled and packaged musical comedy conventions that resonated in the theater deep into the twentieth century even as they held to comedy’s ancient ideals. Above all—and this I think manifests the engine that drives all of his work—Berlin seems to have understood and embraced the idea that American musical theater is always, inescapably, about itself. He probably would have scorned the term metatheater, but the boot fits. All of his stage shows and films are in some way about theater, about putting on a show, about performing in public, and about the place that tested his mettle and nourished his craft: New York City. This is the case even in shows that are not chiefly set in New York. Annie Get Your Gun may be widely considered one of the “Western” musicals of the Oklahoma! age, but it is above all a show about “show business,” and it all takes place east of (or near to) the Mississippi River and ends up in New York, with plenty of swinging tunes that resonate more with postwar Manhattan than with Annie Oakley’s earlier America in Darke County,

End-man–style banter with an authoritative interlocutor remained fundamental to Berlin’s theater, even when the more obvious trappings of minstrelsy are absent. It resurfaces, for example, in Groucho Marx’s put-ons of Margaret Dumont (in The Cocoanuts) and the brash, benighted challenges that Ethel Merman’s homespun characters present to show business professionals (in Annie Get Your Gun) and to foreign dignitaries (in Call Me Madam).

the young medium of film became Berlin’s means of preserving an old theatrical form that he knew was dying out.

for Berlin, a minstrel scene was not just a good way to begin a movie but also a way to dramatize the origins and foundations of American show business.

he believed that minstrelsy’s conventions, its structure, and its vitality gave it access to the common denominator in an American audience.

Opera enjoyed a place in Berlin’s theatrical vocabulary partly because of its long presence in minstrel parody, but also because Berlin loved opera and wished to write one, one that would be widely construed as a distinctively American contribution to the genre.

All of his musicals through the mid-1930s include at least one extended, multisectional musical sequence featuring two or more characters in dialogue and action.

he started writing counterpoint songs for the theater in the same period that he publicly claimed his desire to compose an opera, because in opera two or more characters regularly express conflicting feelings simultaneously, as in the famous quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto, which Berlin parodied in his first musical comedy, Watch Your Step.

Minstrelsy and opera, then, form the twin currents that charge the three genres in which he channeled his theatrical energy: vaudeville, revue, and musical comedy.

The main racial drama of the Berlin Olympics, at the time and in its retelling, was, of course, the victory of Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter and long jumper who won four gold medals and beat the best of the Germans in unequivocal style.1 However, there were also quiet victories for the Jewish athletes who braved the games. Jewish Hungarians alone won six gold medals, including Ibolya Csák in the high jump, two members of the water-polo team, Karoly Karpati in freestyle wrestling, and the fencers Ilona Schacherer-Elek and Endre Kabos. There were also medals for two Austrian Jews, Ellen Preis and Robert Fein, as well as the American and Canadian basketball players, Samuel Balter and Irving Maretzky.

Blue skies Smiling at me Nothing but blue skies Do I see Bluebirds Singing a song Nothing but bluebirds All day long Never saw the sun shining so bright Never saw things going so right Noticing the days hurrying by When you're in love, my how they fly Blue days All of them gone Nothing but blue skies From now on I never saw the sun shining so bright Never saw things going oh-so right Noticing the days hurrying by When you're in love, my how they fly Blue days All of them gone Nothing but blue skies From now on Songwriter: Irving Berlin