LONGEVITY IN BODY AND SONG FOR IRVING BERLIN

Monday will be the 99th birthday of the composer of “That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune,� “How Do You Do It, Mabel, on Twenty Dollars a Week?,� “Ragtime Mocking Bird,� “Keep Away From a Fellow Who Owns an Automobile,� and something like a thousand other popular songs.

Irving Berlin’s other songs, of course, are a bit better known. Like Berlin himself, who is quietly entering his centennial year, his songs have an extraordinary longevity. They are, in fact, a one-man anthology of the national musical memory, from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band� to “Blue Skies,� “Always,� “Easter Parade,� “White Christmas,� “Change Partners,� “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody� and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.�

He wrote “God Bless America� for “Yip Yip Yaphank,� the GI show he did during World War I. Persuaded that there were enough patriotic anthems around, he put the song in a trunk for 20 years. In 1938, with the rumblings of war everywhere, he thought the time was ripe for a patriotic song again, and gave it to Kate Smith to introduce on her radio show. Berlin assigned the royalties to the Girl Scouts, for whom “God Bless America� has been almost as lucrative as cookies.

While he worked with collaborators now and again, the great bulk of Berlin’s songs--music and lyrics--are all his own. No one has come close to the sheer volume of tunes that have become standards, part of the bathtub and shower-stall repertoire of singing citizens the world around.

Surprisingly little has been written about him. While he energetically plugged his songs and his shows (in which, up through “This Is the Army,� he often appeared), he has been reluctant to talk about how he does what he does. In later years he has been increasingly reclusive, keeping to his family, painting industriously.

Max Wilk, gathering material for his invaluable book on popular composers, “They’re Playing Our Song� (revised edition, New York Zoetrope, 1986), caught Berlin for a brief telephone conversation in 1972. Berlin couldn’t believe anyone would be interested in songwriters.

“There’s a whole new public out there,� Berlin said, “and they don’t even know people like me are still around. Don’t you read the papers? We’re antiques! Museum pieces! Today it’s all kids!�

Wilk persisted, in quest of a Berlin philosophy. Wilk quoted another composer, who said that he wrote to please himself first, and that if he was lucky, the public liked the song, too.

“He told you that, did he?� Berlin said, laughing. “All right, I’ll tell you what I think about that. I write a song to please the public-- and if the public doesn’t like it in New Haven, I change it. “

In 1972, as a symbolic gesture that his songwriting days were over, Berlin gave the Smithsonian his famous trick piano. He was a self-taught pianist, couldn’t run a scale or an arpeggio and could compose only on the black keys, in the key of F-sharp. His trick piano had a sliding keyboard, so that if he wanted to try a song in a key other than F-sharp, he reset the keyboard and the new key emerged, but now on the black keys.

Most of his songs became and have stayed popular because they are accessible, easy to sing and remember. Berlin could also do wonderfully intricate things, such as the interlocking, back-to-back melodies “You’re Just in Love� and “I Hear Singing and There’s No One There� that he wrote for Ethel Merman and Russell Nype in “Call Me Madam.�

Lyric-writing is a comprehensible gift. It’s an extremely demanding form of economical poetry, and not many people have done it supremely well. Still, it relates to other kinds of writing. But pulling an apparently inexhaustible flow of original, beautiful melodies out of the air, or out of the battered black keys of a small upright, approaches the miraculous.

The composing was not always effortless. Max Wilk tells a fine story of Berlin’s all-night effort to finish a song for Belle Baker, who was about to open in “Betsy,� a Ziegfeld musical with a score by Rodgers and Hart. Baker needed a show-stopper and asked if Berlin had one handy.

Berlin had a fragment, the first eight bars of something he called “Blue Skies.� He went to see Baker and her husband, Maurice Abrahams, and sat at the piano, trying to find the middle eight bars, the bridge, that he needed to complete the song. It was 6 in the morning before he had it, and the matching lyric (“Never saw the sun shining so bright, never saw things goin’ so right�). It was a thunderous hit, although the show wasn’t, and Baker’s son, the writer Herbert Baker, said later that Rodgers and Hart didn’t speak to his mother for years.

“Watch that middle eight,� said another composer, Noel Coward; they make the song. “The best exponent of that is Berlin, Irving. That chap is the grandest of the middle-eight boys.�

He is that, and more. Born in Siberia, May 11, 1888, one of 10 children of a cantor who somehow got his family to New York in flight from the pogroms, Berlin ran away from home at 14 to ease the financial burden on the family. He worked his way up from street singer to song plugger, to composer, publisher and producer. He is one of that early immigrant generation who proved the American dream, and in Irving Berlin’s case proved the dream by setting it to music.