ditsy West Coast rival. (We can hear a New Yorker’s voice in the misnomer “Beverly Hills, L.A.”—an error Berlin shrugged off when his wife pointed it out.) The verse paints a picture of palmy paradise that is deflated by the revelation “it’s December the twenty-fourth.” For the song’s narrator, this “perfect day” in Beverly Hills is no fun at all: Christmas is approaching, and what is Christmas without wintry ambience?
In the song Bing Crosby sang in Holiday Inn, white Christmas was a vision of snow-christened perfection; in Berlin’s original conception, it was a punch line. The sight-gag staging of the number in the songwriter’s revue would doubtless have driven the joke home. According to biographer Philip Furia, Berlin pictured it being performed by “a group of sophisticates gathered around a Hollywood pool,” pining for a rustic, snowbound Christmas with “cocktails in hand”—a preposterous tableau sure to tickle a New York audience.
Berlin apparently so fancied this novel angle—subverting holiday solemnity for humorous effect—that he thought it might be the basis for an entire show. He began making notes for yet another revue, this one built around “fifteen of the important holidays in a year, using each holiday as an item in the revue.” The show, whose working title was Happy Holiday, was explicitly comedic. “In several of the items,” Berlin wrote, “the point of view will be to debunk the holiday spirit.” Once again, Berlin gave his Christmas number pride of place: it would be, he wrote, “the summing up of the entire show.”
Behind the satirical scrim of his Hollywood Christmas song, we discern the figure of Irving Berlin, exasperated after a half decade spent on movie lots. Like most of America’s songwriting elite, Berlin was drawn to Hollywood by the boom market in movie musicals that followed the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer. While other members of the Tin Pan Alley diaspora had relocated outright or bought second homes in Los Angeles, Berlin never put down roots, preferring to camp out for months at a time in suites at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire. In 1939, Berlin finally resolved to move to L.A., leaving his New York apartment and renting a home in the Hollywood Hills, only to back out at the last minute, pitching his family into a frenzy of unpacking and house-hunting back in Manhattan. “He just couldn’t bring himself to go through with moving to L.A.,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett would recollect. “He regarded Los Angeles as fake.” As Berlin himself explained to his wife: “There’s no Lindy’s in Los Angeles. No paper at two in the morning. No Broadway. No city.”
A poignant moment in Berlin’s California exile may have provided inspiration for “White Christmas.” It was Christmas, 1937, and Berlin was stuck in Hollywood, working on Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Like many graduates of a Lower East Side Orthodox home, Berlin proudly celebrated Christmas. The songwriter’s family life proclaimed his American arrival with all the trappings of post-Jewish haute-bourgeoisie style: a shiksa wife, an uptown address, a Christmas tree in the living room. Though Berlin was steeped in Yiddishkeit, his relationship to institutional Judaism was negligible: here, a Passover seder, there, a stroll down Fifth Avenue to Kol Nidre service at Temple Emmanu-El.
The Berlin family Christmas pulled out the stops. It was, Mary Ellin Barrett recalls, “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” with a family dinner at a “gleaming candlelit Christmas table,” “enormous stockings,” and “so many packages, so many toys.” Invariably, these celebrations were punctuated by Berlin’s retelling of a favorite story from his Lower East Side childhood: how he stole away from his pious home to the apartment of his Irish neighbors the O’Haras and gazed in rapture at their Christmas tree, which, to his young eyes, “seemed to tower to Heaven.” The songwriter must have been gratified by the sight of his children at the foot of their tree, which scraped the ceiling of the family’s double-storied library.
But for Irving and Ellin Berlin, seasonal merriment was tempered by sorrow. Back on December 1, 1928, Ellin had given birth to a baby boy. Three and a half weeks later, the day after Christmas, an item appeared on page 3 of the New York Times:
BERLINS’ INFANT SON DIES OF HEART ATTACK
Irving Berlin, Jr., 24-day-old son of the composer of popular songs and of the former Ellin Mackay, died suddenly yesterday morning of a heart attack at the Berlin residence, 9 Sutton Place …
The Berlins refused to see reporters yesterday and information was given out through a Miss Rorke, nurse who had attended the child. The death occurred shortly after 5 o’clock in the morning. Miss Rorke was the only person present. Mr. and Mrs. Berlin were called immediately. Three doctors, whose names were not disclosed, were summoned, but nothing could be done, according to the nurse.
Irving Berlin, Jr., was their second child, the other being Mary Ellin, 2 years old.
Mary Ellin herself only learned that she had had a brother eight years later—the very winter her father was in Hollywood working on Alexander’s Ragtime Band—when she happened upon a newspaper clipping in a desk drawer. 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