Mary Ellin Barrett

Michael Kantor: Tell me about, did your father ever talk about being poor as a child?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Yes, but he didn’t make a big deal of it. I would ask him as a little kid, what was it like being poor, Daddy? And he would say, poor? What is poor? It was what I knew. I always had enough to eat, and I was never cold, only too hot in the summer, and so I slipped out on the fire escape. But he just… Told about it and about some of his escapades as a little boy, that was his childhood.

Michael Kantor: Your father was very straightforward about being poor and what have you, but how did you feel about the Lower East Side?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, it was where he came from. It was the part of the city that had taken him in as an immigrant. And I suppose he must have felt that living there under various hardships and challenges gave him a kind of grit. I mean, it helped form his character and his determination. And then, of course, all the sounds of the Lower East Side went into his songs when he started writing them. I mean, first the sound of the synagogue. His father was a cantor. His father taught him to sing. He would have sung in temple on the high holidays. So that music, that melancholy, minor chromatic music was in, went in the year. Then there’d be the organ grinders playing Italian opera. And there’d be ragtime and minstrel music. So all of this fed into those ears, which were extremely sharp. And that was all part of the Lower East Side.

Michael Kantor: Great. Where did he actually, where did your father learn to sing?

Mary Ellin Barrett: To sing from his father, his father who was a cantor. And his father taught him to sing and he would say as a little boy he did not like school or shul, but he liked to sing. He was a dreamer in class.

Michael Kantor: And how did he use the fact that he knew how to sing as a way of making money?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, his first real job was as a busker, which is standing on street corners and selling songs, singing a new song for a few pennies, showing off the songs, and as a song plugger. Then he got a job as a singing waiter in Mike Salter’s famous Chinatown Cafe. That was a big job in those days for a boy who had come from. Very poor circumstances.

Michael Kantor: Well, why did he leave home? How, rather, when did he leave home and why?

Mary Ellin Barrett: I think he left home after his father died. He was 13 years old, 12 or 13 years. And it was time for him to make money, to bring in some money to his mother and the sisters that were still at home were also working. And he wasn’t very good at the kind of jobs he could get as a 12 or a 13 year old. He wasn’t a big, strong, muscular fellow who could. Do a job on the docks or that kind of thing, and he was not of the temperament to work in a sweatshop or as a tailor. So I think he felt inadequate in the kind of jobs that his siblings had gotten themselves. And so he bolded. He went, what is the expression, he went on the lam and he got these jobs that seemed to suit him better. These singing jobs.

Michael Kantor: Wasn’t easy, though. I mean, clearly, leaving home at 13, I mean it must have been a tough, tough experience.

Mary Ellin Barrett: It was a tough experience, but you know, I think it was a very… Texture that he came from, though his mother was a most loving caregiver. She was obviously the rock of the family. Yes, and you know, talking about that to his children, he wouldn’t make light of it, but he didn’t dwell on it. He said, that’s what I felt I had to do. And pretty soon he checked in with his mother. I don’t think he kept her in cruel suspense for too long because he was very, very fond of her.

Michael Kantor: How did he learn to compose music?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Again, the ear, he learned to play the piano. When he was a singing waiter, the first thing he did was lyrics, not music. He wrote. He sang songs as a singing waiter. And then he also wrote parody lyrics of some of the songs of the day. Fairly racy, I would say, were those parody lyrics. I can’t quote you on. But that was how he got the feel of writing lyrics. And then the story is well known that one day, the owner of the cafe said to my father and a fellow waiter, say, the boys down the street, they’ve written a song that’s been published. Why can’t you boys write a song? And so my father… Wrote the lyrics to a song called Marie from sunny Italy, which was not the first song to bring him to prominence. I think it sold, made 33 cents, but there he was, I Berlin. And then it went on from there. Then he wrote Durando. He brought a lyric into a publishing house. And Durando was about an Italian marathon runner who lost the race. The publisher said, oh, yeah, this is a great lyric, very funny. Do you have a tune to go with it? Well, my father didn’t, but he said, well, do you have piano? And so he went into the piano, and in an hour or so, he had a tune, to go the lyrics. So that was the first published song with words and music by I. Berlin. I think by then it was Irving Berlin.

Michael Kantor: Why did he change, why did your father change his name?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, I think he felt that his, the name he had, Israel Baleen, didn’t sound American enough. And in those days, everybody wanted to sound American. And so, there was, I believe, on the first piece of music, Marie from sunny Italy, it was a printer’s error. I, Berlin, instead of Balee, Balein, B-A-L-I-N-E, was hard for people to pronounce. And he let it go. And he thought, that’s… That’s a good name for an American songwriter. That’s what I’m going to be. And then the Irving came either in the second or the third song.

Michael Kantor: Now what about, you know, how did he, if he sat down at the piano, how did he make the music?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Okay, he learned to play the piano in a saloon. He learned to the black note key, that is the key of F sharp. Now, people sometimes make the mistake of saying, oh, Irving Berlin only played black notes, that’s not it. He only played in this key, which he said fell easily in the hand, and it was the saloon player’s key. So the key of F sharp has five black notes and two white notes. And that was the key in which he composed all his life. And when it became necessary for him to be able to play a song in another key than F sharp, he got his famous piano that he called his Buick with the transposing keyboard. So he could continue to play the notes of F-sharp, but you pull a lever and you could hear it in D or E-flat or any other key that was desired.

Michael Kantor: Now, why would someone call their piano a Buick?

Mary Ellin Barrett: I don’t know, I just have heard that, that’s what he called it.

Michael Kantor: I heard it was because he traveled so much, you know? Well, he did.

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, he did. He had at least three of these pianos, three to five of these piano, and so there was one in his office, and when I was a child there was one at home, and then there were one or two that traveled that went to California or Bermuda or Palm Spring or wherever he was going to work. One of his pianos went across the waters and back, across the Atlantic Ocean when he Morse Hart decided they were going to a sequel to A Thousand’s Cheer, More Cheers, and they got the boat to Naples and then they turned around and came back and the piano was on that. That sequel never happened.

Michael Kantor: Again, what did this piano do?

Mary Ellin Barrett: What did it do?

Michael Kantor: I’m just waiting on a bus coming by.

Mary Ellin Barrett: Okay, upright piano, looks like any normal upright piano except you notice a little tiny pointer on the keyboard and underneath there’s a lever. So my father is sitting at this piano playing in the only key he plays in, the key of F sharp, but a singer wants to sing it in E flat. So he pulls the lever, the keyboard moves, and what comes out… Is E flat, but he’s still playing the F sharp key notes.

Michael Kantor: What did you think as a young man? What was your father’s dream? What was his goal? Before he became, before Alexander’s ragtime band, before…

Mary Ellin Barrett: I think probably his first goal was to be a singing waiter, to sing, to sing songs. But as you know, if you’ve ever heard a recording, he had a very true voice. He sang the note on the note, but it was a frail voice. I mean it wasn’t a big, belting-out voice. But I think so probably first he would have wanted to make his living as a singer. Then when he discovered he could write lyrics, he would be a lyricist. Then when he discovered that he could write tunes… He was very successful, almost immediately. So he would be a songwriter. I mean, before Alexander’s Ragtime Band, by 1910, he was already talked about very young, Tin Pan Alley songwriter, so the pre-Alexander’s Rag Time Band, there’s Sadie Salome, Come Home, Call Me Up, One Rainy Afternoon. I mean there are songs that were hits. But it was Alexander’s Ragtime Band that catapulted him from being an up and coming young songwriter to a world famous songwriter. I mean that song went around the world.

Michael Kantor: What’s this story about when he first went to London?

Mary Ellin Barrett: That is a well-known story. He was in a taxi cab, which had picked him up and was dropping him off someplace. And the taxi cab driver was whistling Alexander’s Ragtime Band. And so when my father got out of the cab, he gave the taxi driver a very large tip. The taxi driver said, I wonder who that is. I didn’t expect from such a young man, such a young American, this kind of tip. I had no idea about that. So he was just thrilled to hear his song not being sung by a singer on stage, but by just a common man who was on the street. Not a guffaw sense of humor. He was witty. He was quizzical. And he looked on the world with humor. Now he also had the Russian Velshmirtz, well that’s not the Russian word, but I mean he had a great deal of passion and he could see the dark side of life. But yeah, he had a twinkle and of course this feeds itself into the songs. He started out, when he was doing lyrics, doing funny songs. And if you know the lyric for Sadie, it’s along. Very funny and some of those early ethnic songs are extremely. Broad ways and subtle ways. But, you know, you don’t need me to quote you lyrics. But I, that I couldn’t do. I mean, he, but the lyric for you be surprised. It’s very funny, you now. Don’t, yeah. And what do you think?

Speaker 3 Broadway meant to him.

Mary Ellin Barrett: Okay, he began, before his first Broadway show, Watch Your Step, he contributed songs to reviews, to Ezekiel Follies or one of those other catch-all shows that used different songs by different songwriters. His first Broadway Show, which was a milestone in his life, a milestone on Broadway, was Watch Your Stepp, 1914. It was the first ragtime. Musical, the first musical to incorporate, really incorporate the beat of popular music. So it had ragtime, it had foxtrots, it has a tango, there was dancing in the title. It was written for the castles, Vernon and Irene Castle, and it was as much a dancing as a singing show. And it even ragged grand opera. There was a wonderful sequence called the opera burlesque in which Verdi is saying, please don’t rag my song. No, please, don’t rag my aria, please. And so it, and it had, it was a fresh, fresh spirit in that show. I mean, it a young man’s show on a young Broadway. I mean a young broadway in terms of what the musical theater was going to be. And it was enormously popular, critically well received. It was something my father talked about always as his first show. The hit song was Play a Simple Melody, which was his first double number, great song with the old-fashioned melody and the vying against the play me some rag syncopation.

Michael Kantor: Was your father, like, characterizing in terms of speed and quickness?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Oh, he was quick as a whip. I mean he was a dynamo in terms of energy and when I say he wasn’t big and muscular, but he was strong. I means he learned to swim in the East River and if you swim against the East river current and get to the other side, you know you’re going to be a good swimmer for the rest of your life. And maybe you could use that as an image for the way he pushed himself along in life. He had tremendous drive, tremendous non-stop energy. He was, as a child, I used to sometimes think he was like Quicksilver. I mean, now you’d see him, now, you didn’t. But when you were with him, it was a very intense experience. I mean he, because he focused, because he not only had energy, but he had concentration. So if you talked, he listened.

Michael Kantor: What was it like if he was working on a show, a Broadway show, for instance?

Mary Ellin Barrett: If he was working on a Broadway show, the first knowledge in the family would have been the sounds from behind the closed study door, the sounds of the piano. And these sounds were rather like the piano tuner sounds. I mean, they were disconnected notes and chords and chromatic passages and thumping. And you’d think, how could this ever be a song? And then little by little the sounds came together. And there was a finished song. So I actually probably heard some of the songs for a thousandth cheer in this rudimentary form coming from behind the library door. That was what scored my childhood.

Michael Kantor: Let’s step back a little to your parents meeting each other. Describe what your mother first said to your father. They were at a dinner party, correct? Any other music.

Mary Ellin Barrett: The night my parents met at a dinner party, my mother, Ms. Mackie, turned to my father, Mr. Berlin, and said, Oh, Mr. Berlin, I do so like your song, what shall I do? And my father looked at her and smiled and told her the correct title, which was, What Will I Do? And so she wouldn’t be embarrassed, said, of course, where Grammer was concerned. He could always use a little help, though in fact… The song was grammatically perfect and that was the beginning. You know, the spark was struck.

Michael Kantor: Now take this back, I mean you mentioned he becomes a singing waiter, he becomes a lyric writer, he moves out of just that to being a publisher and an owner, doesn’t he?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Yes, he joined the firm of Snyder and Waterston. It became Snyder, Waterston, and Berlin. So he knew very early on that he wanted to be part of publishing his own songs. And at some point in the teens, he split from that firm and formed Irving Berlin, Inc., his own music company. And forever after. He wrote the songs, words and music, and published them. So he had real control of how they were used.

Michael Kantor: And then didn’t he also become, didn’t build a theater?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Yes, after the First World War, he and Sam Harris, the great Broadway producer, built themselves a theater to house his new reviews. And my father gave it the name, wonderful name, of the music box. Everybody said it was Harris and Berlin’s Folly. It cost a fortune to build. It is a beautiful theater which has actually just been renovated. It was a landmark theater, and there it was to house these new reviews, the music box reviews, which were a new kind of review for the jazz age. I mean, we’re now in the 1920s, and it was like a Siegfeld Follies made smart and fast and very beautiful still, but on a small scale. And it set a new musical theater language, those shows. The first Music Box Review made the theme song for the Music Box reviews, which was Say It With Music. That also had Everybody Step and a couple of other songs that lasted long after the shows were finished. And the reviews were spectacular. The public adored these shows. So then the next year there was the second music box review. And then the third Music Box review, I believe it was the third that introduced Grace Moore, who then became a Metropolitan Opera star. But my father found Grace Moore in Paris singing and invited her to be the prima donna of the Music Box. A Thousandth Cheer was one of the great shows of the 1930s. I mean, it’s a legendary show. And when I tell people that I saw it, you know, they say, you saw A Thousanth Cheer? I say, yes, I was a little girl. It was a review based on the front page of the newspaper. Every skit, every song was taken off the newspaper and that had never, it seems like a simple idea, but it had never been thought of before. My father and Moss Hart thought it up. And my father, I think, already had Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller signed up and he wanted a different kind of voice and a different type of singer. Total contrast to Meryl Miller. Had heard there was someone singing up at the Cotton Club. I think possibly Harold Arlen told him, who was singing Stormy Weather at the cotton club. And that was the young Ethel Waters. And my father heard her and asked her if she would do him the honor of being in his show. And she said yes. And I believe it was her first Broadway show. And she was spectacular. Even as a little girl, I knew she was wonderful. I mean, she is the one that I remember. From that show. She sang Heatwave, and I fully understood that song. She sang Harlem on My Mind. I don’t suppose that I knew about Josephine Baker. Song, the beat of the song, suppertime must have gone over a child’s head, but of course I’ve heard it many times since and that was one of my father’s extraordinary songs. It was an extraordinary moment, as you know, in that show.

Michael Kantor: Tell me, what does it say about your father that in a review with stars like Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller, he would insist that Ethel Waters be allowed to perform?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, I don’t think anybody had anything to say about Ethel Waters performing in the show. But what actually happened was when the show went out of town to Philadelphia. Miss Miller and Mr. Webb and Helen Brodrick refused to take a curtain call with Ethel waters, They being white and she being black. And my father, when he heard this, said, fine. There need be no curtain calls at all then. So the next night, Mr. Webb and Miss Miller and Miss Broderick took their call with Ethel Waters, who might have given them pause in terms of who’s going to steal that show.

Michael Kantor: Great. I mean, your father was remarkable as far as the very few segregated all-black shows. And then there’s all-white shows. And then, there’s your father. Did you ever think about that in terms of maybe his upbringing? Or what was it that you thought gave him that courage and that freedom?

Mary Ellin Barrett: I think that what he looked for was talent, and he was colorblind as far as that was concerned. So he knew who he wanted to sing certain songs in the show, and Ethel Waters was it. And, you know, This Is the Army was the only… Desegregated division in the U.S. Army, or I should say the only integrated division in the US Army.

Michael Kantor: So, place this if you would, long button, on the opening night of This is the Army.

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, I have never had such an experience. It was July 4, 1942, the first July 4 of the war, Broadway theater, packed crowds in the street outside, packed lobby full of the usual first-nighters, but also a lot of big brass, generals, because this was wartime, people up from Washington. I’d never been to a first night before. I was 15 years old, so this was a pretty thrilling first night to have. And I can remember the excitement in this audience just before it ever started. And then the curtain opens, and there are 300 young men in uniform on bleachers delivering the opening chorus. And it builds from there soldiers, these wonderful soldiers singing new Irving Berlin songs. Doing funny skits, being marvelous. And already in the intermission, the buzz in the theater was extraordinary. This was Irving Berlin’s best show yet. And about the amount of money it was making for Army Relief that had already been sold for hundreds of thousands to the movies, more money for Army relief. And then towards the end of the second act, my father himself. Came out on stage to sing what we in the family knew always was his theme song, Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning, which he had written for Yip Yip Yap Hank, his soldier show of the First World War. There he was in his World War I uniform, small, dark man with these huge dark eyes, opening his mouth to begin to sing. And at that moment. The theater exploded, and there was a roar, cheers, applause, everybody on their feet standing for my father. So you can imagine what this must have been like. And it went on for 10 or 12 minutes. He would open his mouth, close it, open, and finally he was allowed to begin his song. And there he sang with that. True, frail voice, a little nervous at first, and then beginning to pick up and tapping, you know, beating his hat against his leg for the rhythm, really delivering it. And when he finished, whole other round of applause and cheers, and I remember my feelings. I had never seen anything like this before. In our family. Things had been always in a compartment, there was our private life. Daddy, and then there was the public serving Berlin. That night these things came together and I saw something in that theater which was more than the fame of my father. But it was love, real love from that audience. Love for this man, for what he had given people, not just for This is the Army, though that was enough, but for everything he’d done as a songwriter, as a showman, as an American for this country. And it was very profound, very profound experience. And people, not just his daughter, but other people who were there that night, remember this. And then he said afterwards, oh, you know, that wasn’t just for me, that was for the whole show, which was true also because it was wonderful. Already in the intermission, there was this enormous excitement, the first act intermission for the show, everyone saying it’s Berlin’s best yet, and for the amount of money that was being made for Army Relief and the fact that it had already been sold to the movie. So, huge excitement. And then, towards the end of the second act, my father himself came on stage.

Michael Kantor: The show started on Broadway, but then where did it go, and what did it mean to the people who saw it?

Mary Ellin Barrett: It went first, it played Broadway all summer. Then it went on tour and it toured the United States. First to Washington, then all over the country. I remember we had Christmas that year in Detroit because that’s where this is the Army was playing. Then after that, they went to Hollywood to do the movie. And at some point during that period, my father had, a lot of correspondence with the War Department, and it was finally agreed that he could take the show to Great Britain. So in the fall, they went to London, and then they toured the British Isles. And General Eisenhower came to see the show in London, and he was so impressed that who were touring the globe, entertaining the troops. These audiences in the South Pacific, there could be as many as 2,000 or 20,000, I’m not good on figures, out there, sometimes in the pouring rain, they’d be in the middle of the jungle with just a stage set up and do the show.

Michael Kantor: Which do you think made, which was more important to him, playing to a Broadway audience or playing for the guys on the front?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Look, I wouldn’t ever want to say that playing for Broadway audience wasn’t important for him. But obviously, playing for the guys on the fronts, the various fronts, was a powerful experience for him, he was very, very proud of what he’d done. Jerome Kern was his mentor when he was a young songwriter. And Jerome Curran is the one who said, when asked, what place does Irving Berlin have in American music, Jerome Currain answered, Irving Berlín has no place in American Music. He is American Music, so they were very close. And I remember that my mother came with this terrible news in the fall of 1945 that Jerome Currn had died very suddenly. On the streets of New York or in the hospital of a stroke. And Jerome Kern was in New York to begin writing the music for a new show the Fields had written for Ethel Merman about Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter. So there’s mourning in our house because Jerome Kern has died. And then the next thing is Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein not writing the show but producing it. Say, who can we get to replace Jerry Kern? And they said, there’s just one person. He’s back. He’s from overseas, Irving Berlin. But of course, my father writes words and music. And Dorothy Fields was going to write the lyrics. Jerome Kern was going write the music. Dorothy Field agreed that if they could get Irving Berlin, she would bow out of doing the lyrics.” So they approached my father, and he said, first of all, he wasn’t sure if he could do that kind of show, a historical piece with music following a historical story. He wasn’t if he can write what he called Hillbilly music. And there’s a funny line. I don’t know what somebody else will tell you from Oscar Hammerstein, what Oscar said to him. So my father read the script, he liked the script. And he said he’d try a couple of songs. And he came back after a weekend with at least two songs. And the first was doing what comes naturally, and so much for Hillbilly. And they say it’s wonderful. And then in short order, I mean very short order. That whole score was written maybe in a couple of months, one song after the other. And I’m not going to list them because everybody knows them.

Michael Kantor: He sort of went, what was his modus operandi? He’d go to like Atlantic City or something.

Mary Ellin Barrett: He would go, if he wanted to really concentrate, I mean, he worked at home. And then he often did lyric writing in his office. But if he’d wanted to get something done without any interruption, he would go off to Atlantic City if we were in New York. That was where he wrote a lot of shows. And he wrote lot of Annie Get Your Gun in Atlantic City. He would take with him his arranger, Helmi Cressa. And he and my father would hole up in a suite. And my father, if it was a good time of year, would go down to the beach for a bit and then back to the hotel suite, and that’s where he wrote the Music Box reviews.

Michael Kantor: How do you think your father and Richard Rogers were different? And what do you thing working with Rogers as the producer and Hammerstein? What did he want to show them?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, my father and Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein were theater establishment. I mean, Oscar Hammerstine came from a long line of theater people. They were from a different world. They started out life from a difference world. Richard Rogers went to Columbia from my father, who starred out on the Lower East Side. So they they represented different parts of the American stream. Also, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein were the kings of Broadway. I mean, Richard Rodgers and. Lorenz Hart had written a succession of marvelous musicals in the 30s and early 40s. Now there was Rodgers and Hammerstein with a whole new kind of musical, which was not a kind of musical my father had ever explored. So I think there was an element of I’m back, I’ve been away from Broadway since 1941. I’ve got to show people I’m still around. That was an explanation given to me by Jay Blackton who was the orchestrator and conductor for Annie Get Your Gun. I said where did all those songs come from? I mean one after the other like, you know, never amiss like Annie with her gun. And he said that he felt that my father had this surge of energy back from the world And also. He wanted to let everybody know he was still there.

Michael Kantor: Any get your gun has any sort of political feminist metaphor built in.

Mary Ellin Barrett: I think that Annie Get Your Gun, Annie from the start, there is no feminist problem. Annie realized she wanted Frank Butler. You could ask why she wanted frank butler, but she did. He was attractive, she was in love with him. And she recognized the male vanity and she knew that people play games for love. They’ve always done it, they still do it. And so, she lost the match to save Frank’s pride. And it never seemed to me that this was anti-feminist, because Annie was the smart one. She had outsmarted.

Michael Kantor: What about the idea that, you know, in the post-war world where there’s women who’ve been in jobs and men coming back, do you think that figured in at all in terms of your father, or was it just us?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Now that’s an interesting, actually I had not thought, I’m sorry I didn’t. That is a very interesting thought. I don’t think so. I don, because he didn’t write that book. The Fields wrote the book. They’re the ones who, he had a pretty much finished book when he began writing those songs. So Annie throwing the match to Frank was part of the story. He wrote anything you can do. Jumbo, I went to for my ninth birthday party in the company of all my barely classmates. And my mother wasn’t feeling well, so my father with one assistant took us and the hilarity in our box. I mean, I remember Jum Bo, Jimmy Durante and the most beautiful girl in the world. It was a wonderful show and the elephants. But in our box, it was total hilarity. My father was not a disciplinarian like my mother. And we got all the things that she would have forbidden, the toy whips and the cotton candy and the lemonade, which we blew out of straws at each other. And finally, my father said, you know, enough, enough. And I said, can we go backstage? And he said, no, not today.

Michael Kantor: Put it in terms of, you know, an assimilation story or…

Mary Ellin Barrett: Okay. My father was a Russian Jew, an immigrant from the Lower East Side who rose to become Irving Berlin. My mother, Ms. Mackey, was the child of an old New York mother. Her mother’s family went back to before the revolution. They were genteel, aristocratic, intellectual New Yorkers. Her great grandfather was a president of Columbia University. Aunt was a novelist, it’s that kind of family. Her father was Clarence Mackey, the son of John William Mackey who discovered the Comstock Load, was the richest man west of the Hudson River I believe, founded Postal Telegraph and was an immigrant like my father. John Mackey had come from Dublin, poor boy on the docks of New York and then he went out west to be a miner. By the time my mother came along, Clarence Mackey was a businessman, a pillar of New York and Long Island society, a patron of the arts on the board of the opera, on the Board of the Philharmonic. And my mother was brought up a New York young lady. She went, you know, educated, the best possible boarding schools exposed to every possible advantage.

Michael Kantor: So while Broadway was still… Broadway.

Mary Ellin Barrett: Broadway was a whole other world. But in 1920s New York, Broadway and society mingled. New York was a smaller place than it is now, or maybe not. And so my mother and father met at a dinner party because the hostess was a friend of my father’s and a friend my mother’s father who liked to have young people at her dinner table. And that’s how they met. But also. My mother’s, Alice Stewart Miller, my grandmother’s cousin, was a member of the Algonquin set, as was my father. So he had already met a member of my mother’s family before he ever met her.

Michael Kantor: They couldn’t have been more different, could they?

Mary Ellin Barrett: In background, they couldn’t have been more different. In actual. Personality and their attitude towards life was quite similar they had very similar sense of humor physically they were opposites well we know what opposites do they attract

Michael Kantor: Great. Tell me, when the press caught on to their courtship, what happened?

Mary Ellin Barrett: The press was awful, and I have been a member of the press in my life, but it was awful. They, the press printed anything they could get their hands on, whether it was true or not true, because my grandfather disapproved of my mother’s romance with my father. My father was 15 years older. He was Broadway. He was from a completely different background, so, and the newspapers loved that. So they’d make up stories if they didn’t, the headlines. And they hounded my parents when they finally eloped. It was headlines in every newspaper in the country and in Europe. And my parents never had a moment of peace until they got on the boat to sail to Europe. And then there it was again, meeting them in London and in Paris. And all kinds of wretched things, really. Now my father was eager to be interviewed on his work. The press was a great friend to him in terms of his career. So I want that to be said if I’m going to say the other. But they were wretched about this. It was the first major kind of press love-in. I guess the press, I mean, it compared with the way the press was about when Rudolph Valentino died. You know, it was one of those stories of the 1920s. And people remembered it years later. Someone would come up to me and say, oh, yes, I remember about your mother and father.

Speaker 3 Do you remember any of those headlines? What kind of things, when you say wretched things?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, I wouldn’t remember, I would just hear about it. I heard from my mother mostly. My father just didn’t say anything. No. Sometimes he’d say, oh, the press, but no. But my mother said how awful the press had been. And I thought, my mother was a very emotional lady. And I though, and she liked to tell a story. So I thought she was probably exaggerating when I began to work on my book, and I looked up. Those old newspaper stories, I saw that my mother had told the truth. And they really were terrible. They were even waiting. When my parents came back from Europe, they’d been away nine months, and my mother was heavily pregnant with me, and they decided to come into Canada rather than New York to escape the press, but the press found out and went up there, and when my mother saw them, she began screaming. And one of the reporters said, let’s back off. That woman’s gonna lose her baby. And they did.

Michael Kantor: Your father wrote a song for your mother as a present at this stage, didn’t he?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Yes, he wrote always. And that was her song. And he not only wrote it for her, he gave it to her. It was his wedding present to her, and it was a rather splendid wedding present. Because until White Christmas came along, it was the biggest seller in my father’s entire catalog. I can’t give you figures, but it made her a tidy amount every year.

Michael Kantor: What do you like about that song?

Mary Ellin Barrett: The feeling of that song, the way it’s expressed, and the way what seems like a very simple melody fools you, changes key at just the right place. So it’s not quite, like a lot of my father’s songs, it’s as simple as you think it is. And I think that the last lines are really beautiful.

Michael Kantor: What about when you came along? What happened in terms of dedicating songs?

Mary Ellin Barrett: When I came along, my father began to write Blue Skies. And he called it my song. And he finished Blue Skys, if it was all in the month of December 1926. And he finish Blue Skyes because Bell Baker, who had sung many of his songs over the past 15 years, needed a song for a show. And did he have anything? And he said, well, I have something. He said that I haven’t finished. But uh… Maybe this would work and he’d finish it overnight. So it became my song and Bill Baker’s song.

Michael Kantor: Do you remember the first time or very early when you heard the word Broadway? What did it, that’s our title, what did it mean to you?

Mary Ellin Barrett: It was a place that my father belonged to, beyond the peripheries of my childhood world. It was a place of glamor and excitement. It was a place I went to to go to the theater. But I remember when Broadway and my father really sank in was when he took me to see A Thousand’s Cheer. And there I was sitting next to him, one song after the other. And I’m not sure that I really understood about my father and that he’d written all those songs up there. But I understood better when he put me backstage. And he was surrounded by the people who… Been playing in the show, and there were children, because the finale of the first act was Easter Parade. And all the children were around my father. Children, some of them not any older than I was, saying, hello, Mr. Berlin. Hello, Mr Berlin. And he’d say hello, whatever their names are. And I saw that he was backstage in his habitat. Then he took me in to meet his stars. That this was his other world. That I had no place in, and yet I was there because I was his child. And he really summed up that world in show business, the song, which went way beyond Broadway to all show business.

Michael Kantor: How do you think there’s no business like show business, sums up the world of Broadway?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, I’m not going to quote the lyrics because I’ll get them wrong, but every verse of that song, every chorus, tells you something about what show people live for and go through. How high it can get and how low it can and how you pick yourself up and start again and that show, that song obviously expressed a lot of what my father felt but he loved Broadway. He loved the theater, not just his own work on Broadway but he went to every Broadway show and he would, you know, he could walk into a theater without a ticket and if there was a ticket he could have it or he’d stand. And one of the things he would do if you went out for an evening with him, sometimes he’d take you in just to see one number in a show that he wanted to catch again. And then he’d go out and do something else. He loved his own theater, he loved other people’s theaters. And it was part of his life that… A meaning for him, and that’s where he started.

Michael Kantor: What do you think America meant to your father?

Mary Ellin Barrett: America was the country that took him in. A refugee as an immigrant and gave him the chance to become who he became. He loved this country, he was enormously grateful to this country and he said thank you to this country with God Bless America and also with the two Army shows with Yip Yip Ya and this is the Army. That was his thanks to America. He loved this country very much.

Michael Kantor: Tell me a little bit, we didn’t talk about Yippee-A-Bah-Pank. What prompted that show at that time?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, my father was drafted and he was down at Camp Upton and there are various stories. Now, one he told was that his friend, Joe Skank, the Hollywood producer said, called up General Bell and said, you have no business having Irving Berlin down there. He’s too frail, he’s too old. What are you doing? And that maybe it was Joe Skink who put the idea into General Bell’s head that perhaps he could use them to do a show. There’s also the strong possibility that my father himself made the suggestion because he figured it was a way of getting out of Reveille. Because if he was working on a show, then he could do his usual work habits and not get up at five in the morning. Those are stories. At any rate, he did the show. He wrote it. He wrote the songs. He played in it. He not only sang, oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, but poor little me, I’m a KP.

Michael Kantor: How does that go?

Mary Ellin Barrett: Poor little me, I’m a KP, and the last word goes, keeping the world safe for democracy. I scrubbed the dishes and whatever, keeping the word safe for the democracy. And it played on Broadway, I am not sure how long.

Michael Kantor: At a certain deep level, he was impenetrable. Tell us more about what he was like as a child. What was he like during his creative phases? What was it like as man?

Mary Ellin Barrett: When he was in a creative phase, he’d tune out. You would be having a conversation with him. Let’s say we were out on a fishing boat and he’d been talking to the fisherman and with me and then he’d stop and you could hear this whistling or humming under his breath and then you’d know that he was working on a song. It wasn’t because you were boring him. It was because an idea had come into his head and then everything else was dropped. So when he was working, he was working, but when he wasn’t working, though he would have these lapses, he was very much there. He was very present. We had a million things to say to each other. I mean, I talked a lot. And he talked and we would have exchanges about any what I was doing in school, about my friends. He was very interested about what we thought on a world matter or what the latest, when I was a teenager, what the latest songs were, the latest dances. He always wanted to know what we were doing on the dance floor and he really liked young people. And this was true not just of me, but as I say, and my sisters, but of our friends. He was great, enormous amount of fun to be with. He was very charming. He was a very, very charming man. With a twinkle, and he was funny, and when he wasn’t all slicked up and dapper and ready to go out, his hair would climb up to the ceiling, he had this wild, curly hair, and he looked a little like Charlie Chaplin sometimes, you know, he’d be funny. And people will ask me, do I feel that I really knew him? Well, you know, at a deep level, I’m not sure… That you can say you know anyone. I think that there were depths to him. He was a person in layers. And my mother said once to me that the really interesting thing, one of the many things about being married to him, was that you never ran out of things that you were going to learn about him. That he wasn’t one of those people who gave himself away in the first year or the first decade. There was always something more to know.

Michael Kantor: What about, you know, Sound of Music is, in 1960, how did you feel, you now, in terms of your conversations, about this sort of revolution in American culture when rock came in and the Broadway musical was just.

Mary Ellin Barrett: Well, there were still great Broadway musicals being written in the 50s and 60s. The way, he probably talked to my children, his grandchildren, more about what was their music than he did to me. I remember that he liked The Beatles. We talked about The Beatles, he thought they were really good songwriters. And that makes sense because The Beatles still wrote in a musical language. That related to the musical language he wrote in. I don’t think he much liked rock and roll. And I think he felt that to some extent with the big rock revolution it had made his kind of music maybe a little obsolete. But of course that’s not true. And we all know what has happened to the classic American standard and to the American musical.