Groucho, Berlin, and Me

The first and only time I met Groucho Marx was in April 1974, backstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. It was Oscar night, and Groucho was clutching his honorary statuette. He was wearing a tam-o’-shanter with a little birdie on top and, at age eighty-three, looking a little uncertain about what he was doing there. I was twenty-two, wearing a rented brown tuxedo and feeling more than a little uncertain about what I was doing there.

I was backstage at the Oscars that night because, rather unbelievably, I was in possession of a press pass to be there. I was a recent college graduate and soon-to-be art school dropout with little idea of where I was going in life, and my younger brother, a Harvard sophomore with major chutzpah, had decided it would be fun for the two of us to go to Hollywood and write about the Academy Awards. Fine. But how we then managed to talk Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, a serious, big-time magazine, into giving an assignment to two unexperienced nobodies was something of an exercise in the surreal.

We’d sent Lapham a lively proposal letter, boasting of accomplishments both real and imagined. Fact: My brother was writing for The Harvard Crimson. Fiction: I had supposedly started a literary magazine called Blast. Fact with hazy overtones: My brother was friends with Christopher Lawford, son of the used-to-be movie star and Rat Pack outcast Peter Lawford. Christopher, our letter said, could introduce us to people in the movies. We would, we said, cast a fresh eye on Hollywood. That, at least, was solidly true: We were nothing if not fresh.

So there I was, backstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, asking Groucho Marx to show me his watch. Standing in the scrum surrounding him, I’d spied a caricature of Richard Nixon on the watch face and piped up: “What does it say under Nixon?” With a kind of leer, Groucho turned the timepiece so I could see the caption: “I Am Not a Crook.” On that April night, Nixon had four months left in office.

My brother and I did write a piece about the 1974 Oscars, which did not wind up in Harper’s or anywhere else. Too much chutzpah, too little experience.

Six months later, in another unimaginable turn of events involving a fair amount of chutzpah, I found myself employed at The New Yorker, typing manuscripts for Pauline Kael and John McPhee. During lunchtimes I used to wander down to a shop on the ground floor called The Record Hunter. It was a real old-fashioned record store, with a couple of listening booths and the store’s own line of LPs of early recorded music—Enrico Caruso and John Philip Sousa and the like. One of the albums was titled “Irving Berlin, 1909–1939.” This interested me.

Back in the days before Turner Classic Movies, Channel 9 in New York used to show old movies sometimes, and one of the pictures it showed now and then was the Marx Brothers’ first film, a musical called The Cocoanuts, shot at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens in 1929. This was just after the advent of talking pictures, and The Cocoanuts was a creaky affair: The story took place in Florida, during the land boom of the 1920s, and you could practically see the painted palm tree backdrops sway in the breeze when the actors walked by. But the Marx Brothers were young and sassy (Groucho: “Three years ago I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now I’ve got a nickel in my pocket.”), and the half-dozen songs that made up the movie’s score, though as lightweight as the scenery, were sassy and funny too. When I looked at the track list on the Berlin album at The Record Hunter, I saw that the tunes from The Cocoanuts were on there. It turned out that Berlin had written them. I bought the record. I soon found something that fascinated me just as much as the songs from the movie: the album’s first track, a 1909 recording of a twenty-one-year-old Irving Berlin singing his own composition, “Oh, How That German Could Love.”

Berlin’s performance was deliciously impish—its verve and wit shone out of the deep past like a beacon. When, many years later, Yale University Press approached me to write a volume in its Jewish Lives series, it was pretty easy to choose a subject.

Berlin started out, soon after he left home at age fourteen, as a singing waiter in tough bars on the Bowery. His special skill was improvising dirty lyrics to the popular tunes of the day. The hard-drinking customers loved it. Soon he began writing songs himself, and soon he was getting paid to do it, even though he couldn’t read or write music. Working at a music publisher on Tin Pan Alley, he would stand next to a piano and hum or sing the tune he had in his head, and one of the firm’s pianists would play the chords and write them down. Berlin would write the lyrics himself—he was very good at clever lyrics.

But he wasn’t a jokester. He was quiet, serious, and incredibly hardworking. Over the course of his long career, he wrote something like 1,400 songs—though he liked to say he wrote more bad songs than anybody.

And yes, he also wrote “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade”—two numbers that Philip Roth, or at least some version of Roth in the hall of mirrors that is Operation Shylock, had a lot to say about:

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. . . . He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. . . . 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!

Well, whichever Roth is talking, I don’t exactly agree. Did writing “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas” make Irving Berlin a schlockmeister? OK, “Easter Parade,” maybe. But he also wrote many, many great songs: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” “What’ll I Do.” “How Deep Is the Ocean.” “God Bless America.” He even wrote “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” You’d think Roth would’ve at least appreciated that.

Can low art also be high art? Say what you will about Berlin, he had a unique ability to get you where you lived, to stimulate the tear ducts or gooseflesh. That brings me back to Groucho. Once, a journalist asked him about the political significance of another early Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup. “What significance?” Groucho said. “We were just four Jews trying to get a laugh.”