[Dixielandjazz] Irving Berlin's house

[Robert Ringwald]

Blue Skies: Berlin's Beekman
by Michael Riedel
New York Post, October 12, 2011
If you care about American popular music, you must make a pilgrimage to Beekman Place:
17 Beekman Place, to be exact. There stands a five-story, neo-Georgian brick town
house from the 1930s. Today it belongs to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but from
1946 until his death in 1989, it was the home of Irving Berlin.
His songs -- "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Blue Skies," "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up
in the Morning," "Cheek to Cheek," "White Christmas" -- caught and in many cases
defined the shifting moods of American life from 1910 until the '60s, when rock 'n'
roll upended Berlin's musical style. As Jerome Kern famously said, "Irving Berlin
has no place in American music. He is American music."
The composer, born Izzy Baline in Russia, has rarely gone out of fashion. Friday,
the New York Pops kicks off its new season at Carnegie Hall with a Berlin salute,
"From Rags to Ritzes."
And his home is the subject of a charming book, "The Luxembourg House on Beekman
Place," which contains an essay by Pamela Hanlon on the composer's life at 17 Beekman
Place.
Not long ago, Berlin's daughter, Linda Emmet, was in town (she lives in Paris), and
I asked her to take me on a tour of the home she grew up in.
Berlin was a very rich man by the time he bought the mansion. He had just sold the
movie rights for "Annie Get Your Gun" for the princely sum of $650,000, writes Laurence
Bergreen in his Berlin biography "As Thousands Cheer." Once a poor Jewish immigrant
on the Lower East Side, he used to swim the East River as a boy. Now, as one of the
richest men in show business, he wanted to be by the river again, only this time
in style.
On the first floor is a spacious but comfortable sitting room where Berlin and his
beloved wife, Ellin Mackay, an heiress, would entertain close friends. Emmet remembers
parties attended by Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle Hart, playwrights Russel Crouse,
Howard Lindsay and Robert Sherwood, and Berlin's favorite singer, Rosemary Clooney.
When they weren't throwing a party, Berlin and his wife would meet every afternoon
in the room for a pre-dinner cocktail.
After dinner, when everyone else went to bed, Berlin went to work.
"His office was at the top of the house so nobody would hear or disturb him," Emmet
says. The office was lined with rare books and manuscripts -- first editions of Voltaire
and Hugo, a nine-volume biography of Napoleon and original letters from Shelley.
An upright piano stood in the corner. It was on this that Berlin composed his last
hit show, 1950's "Call Me Madam." Ironically, it's about Perle Mesta, the first US
envoy to... Luxembourg.
"We did not know that when we bought the house," says Francois Knaff, the consul
general. "It was a happy coincidence."
At the back of the house on the second floor is a small kitchen, where Berlin would
make himself a late-night snack of scrambled eggs.
There was a first-class wine cellar in the basement. It's off limits to visitors,
though Emmet still refers to it as "our cellar."
Berlin's last years at Beekman Place weren't his happiest. "My father suffered from
depression," says Emmet. "It became worse as he grew older. And as his health failed,
he didn't want people to see him."
In his 90s, Berlin almost never left the town house. But every Christmas Eve, a group
of carolers would stand outside his front door and sing "White Christmas." One night
the maid invited them in, and they found Berlin, in his pajamas, pouring out cups
of hot chocolate.
"I want to thank you," he said. "That's the nicest Christmas present I've ever had."
Berlin died in his tiny bedroom at the top of 17 Beekman Place. He was 101.
Today the room is a nondescript office that is, technically, Luxembourg territory.
But lingering there a few minutes after everyone else had started down the stairs,
I heard the sound of America.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

I hate all this terrorist business. 
I used to love the days when you could look at an unattended bag on a train or bus and think to yourself
"I'm going to take that."