Mr. and Mrs. Irving Berlin

flashback

Vanity Fair, June 1930

Acentury ago this month Izzy Baline was bom in Temun, Siberia. At age four, the cantor's son and his family fled the Cossacks to the illustrious Lower East Side; at fourteen, Izzy was peddling songs at Bowery gin joints; and by twentyfour, Berlin (the name change was a printer's error) had made $100,000 in royalties. Slumming on Park Avenue came with the successes of "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "God Bless America," and "White Christmas" (the biggest seller of all time). Here he's Cheek to Cheek with his second wife, author Ellin Mackay (they had eloped when her tycoon father forbade the match), just after they crashed in the Crash. Happily, "Easter Parade" soon had them Puttin' on the Ritz again. Berlin never learned to read music, but pounded out his three thousand songs in F sharp on the black keys (balancing cigarettes on the white ones) on an old upright he carted around the world and called his Buick. He skipped out on ASCAP's inaugural dinner in 1914, but it's throwing him an all-star Carnegie Hall birthday bash anyhow.