Show Business: So, Here's to You, Irving Berlin!

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Well, yip, yip, yaphank, and let's all wish a happy 100th birthday to Irving Berlin. This week everybody's doin' it -- celebrating the boy born Israel Baline in Russia a century ago, who came to the U.S., reached for the moon and found that there's no business like show business. God bless America: Berlin's songs are his life.

Isn't this a lovely day? Jerome Kern once summed up Berlin's place in & American popular music by observing: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music." Way back when, George M. Cohan spotted the appeal of the man who had "named himself after an English actor and a German city." Berlin, said the Yankee doodle dandy, "writes a song with a good lyric, a lyric that rhymes, good music, music you don't have to dress up to listen to. He is uptown, but he is there with the old downtown hard sell."

So say it with music. Has there ever been a songwriter like Berlin? Play a simple melody, he wrote, and he has: about 1,500 songs, show tunes and standards, ragtime and ballads, slow wistful waltzes and brisk up-tempo two- steps, reveries and reveilles. I love a piano, he sang, and have man and instrument ever been more symbiotic, the one giving voice to the other?

Holed up in his Manhattan mansion, a recluse for decades, Berlin is still writing songs and, some say, whole shows. Call me up some rainy afternoon: the Garbo of composers, Berlin is glimpsed only infrequently on one of his constitutionals, out for an old-fashioned walk under blue skies. But he's still handy with the telephone, dialing old friends and serenading them in a raspy voice, chewing the fat or just doin' what comes natur'lly. Let me sing, and I'm happy.

How does he do it? Berlin never learned to read music, employing assistants to notate his tunes and help harmonize them. "I'm a little like a poet who can write verses that people like, but who can't parse the sentences in his poems," he once said. Well, he isn't worried: any high school kid can parse. He always knew exactly what he was doing. In 1920, when he was still talking to the press, Berlin offered nine rules for composing a song. Write it for the average voice, for either sex to sing. The title should be strong, the lyrics euphonious. It should have "heart interest" and be "original in idea, words and music." Keep it simple. And absolutely no amateurs need apply: "The songwriter must look upon his work as a business, that is, to make a success of it, he must work and work and then WORK." Always.

This is the life. Hard work has made Berlin a multimillionaire, but just how many multi or millions he has, nobody knows, and he's not telling. (His first, and last, authorized biography, written by Alexander Woollcott, was published in 1925.) Berlin may have lost the knack for writing hits -- his last show, Mr. President, was a 1962 flop -- but the old downtown hard sell has never deserted him. He guards his copyrights with a care that borders on niggardliness, even though he's outlived some of them (notably Alexander's Ragtime Band), and he is fiercely, even pettily, protective of all his music. It all belongs to me.