White Christmas: The Story of a Song. Jody Rosen

but how many people know their verses?

      The opening section of “White Christmas” is doubly obscure. In 1989, Berlin wrote a letter to the singer Rosemary Clooney, a star of the 1954 White Christmas movie, who had performed the song’s verse in a recent concert. Berlin thanked Clooney for resuscitating the verse, which, he noted, “is hardly ever used.” But in December of 1942, at the height of the song’s initial conquest of the Hit Parade, Berlin himself had ordered the sixteen bars expunged from its sheet music. The public had fallen for Bing Crosby’s hushed, chorus-only rendering of the song; now Berlin realized that the verse’s jauntier musical atmosphere and images of Beverly Hills shattered the chorus’s wintry spell.

      That forgotten verse points to the song’s inauspicious origins: “White Christmas” began its life as a curio. In June 1938, Berlin returned to New York after spending the better part of the previous five years in Hollywood working on movie musicals. It had been a triumphant half decade. In 1932, he had emerged from a commercial and creative dry patch with the Broadway smash Face the Music; he followed this with a string of movie hits that not only raised Hollywood’s commercial bar, but whose finest moments—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirling across a moonlit veranda to the strains of “Cheek to Cheek”—took the film musical, that collision of the two quintessentially modern American lively arts, to new heights of whirligig poetry.

      That March of 1938, Berlin had turned fifty. Hollywood’s New York ex-pat royalty turned out to salute the songwriter’s three decades in show business at a birthday party held in a detail-perfect reconstruction of the Pelham Café, the Chinatown watering hole where the teenage Izzy Baline cut his teeth as a singing waiter. For thirty years, his restless quest for new hit-making “angles”—a favorite Berlinism—and attention to the smallest shifts in public fancy had put him on the cutting edge of an ever-changing popular culture. With Watch Your Step (1914), he became the first popular songwriter to mount a Broadway show comprising entirely his own songs; the first time the world heard sound in a motion picture, it heard a Berlin tune: Al Jolson belting out “Blue Skies” in The Jazz Singer. In the 1920s, when a new songwriting vanguard—George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter—replaced Tin Pan Alley’s churn-’em-out ethos with an artier emphasis on careful craft, melodic sophistication, and the lyrical mot juste, Berlin kept creative pace with the upstarts but stayed just as prolific. “You make all the rest of us feel pretty darned ineffective,” Jerome Kern complained in a letter. “We’re hep that none of us is heightened by your genius for producing just the right thing at just the right time.”

      But in the spring of 1938, Berlin was slumping. Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the big-budget Berlin musical released by Twentieth Century-Fox that May, drew almost entirely from the songwriter’s back catalog. He managed to come up with five new numbers for its follow-up, Carefree, another Astaire-Rogers picture. But the film was lackluster: when it appeared in August, reviewers suggested—presciently, it turned out—that the Astaire-Rogers partnership was running out of gas.

      Berlin had come home to New York intent on making an invigorating return to the Broadway stage. The project he had in mind was a throwback to Broadway’s pre-talking-pictures era: he wanted to put on a revue, like those he had staged so successfully in the early 1920s at the theater he co-owned, the Music Box on West Forty-fifth Street. Berlin’s notes for The Music Box Revue of 1938 envisioned a woolly vaudeville-style hodgepodge of tunes, skits, and stunts: topical songs touching on newsmakers from Hitler and Mussolini to Joseph Kennedy to the Dionne quintuplets; a racy comedic number called “Found a Pair of Panties”; sketches featuring acrobats, “sidewalk comedians,” jugglers, and trained dogs.

      By August, Berlin’s plans had moved in a more baroque direction. The show had a new title—The Crystal Ball—and a novel form: it was a three-act-long “revue of to-day, tomorrow and yesterday.” According to Berlin’s notes for the show, the first-act curtain would rise on a “Greek chorus” arrayed behind a proscenium arch, singing a musical explanation of the revue’s unusual structure:

       It’s in three acts

       Instead of the usual two,

       And in each act

       We’re doing a separate revue:

      A first act, a second, and a last—

       The present, the future, and the past.

      The Crystal Ball was never produced. When a new Berlin show reached the Broadway stage in 1940, it was Louisiana Purchase, the spry political farce loosely based on the life of Huey Long. But among the unfinished songs and jotted notes for Berlin’s unrealized revue are clues about the provenance of his most famous song. Especially intriguing is a list of numbers for The Crystal Ball’s opening act, probably typed by Berlin himself in mid-1938:

      ACT ONE—“THE PRESENT.” 1939.

       1. Opening—Greek Chorus—crystal ball curtain

       2. Short sketch with music

       3. number in one

       4. sketch

       5. commercial advertising

       6. rhythm number

       7. sketch in two

       8. White Christmas—finale

      Start in one going into full stage

      From this earliest reference to “White Christmas” we learn that the song had existed, in some form, for at least several months prior to Berlin’s breathless arrival at his office on January 8, 1940. Berlin was a fanatical tinkerer whose songs often gestated for months, or even years, undergoing several revisions before taking final shape; for every song that he completed, there were dozens of false starts and half-songs, snatches of song lyrics and piles of hastily scrawled angles that he stored for future use. The songwriter had a term for his collection of scraps and works-in-progress: “the trunk.” Several of his most celebrated creations—“Easter Parade” and “God Bless America” among them—were reworked trunk songs. The Christmas number that Berlin brought to Helmy Kresa that Monday in 1940 may have been completed, as the songwriter boasted, “over the weekend,” but it had almost certainly been kicking around the trunk for some time before that.

      Also noteworthy is the song’s position in The Crystal Ball’s proposed running order. “White Christmas” may at this stage have been a primitive version of the song that was eventually published—it may have been nothing more than a twinkling “angle” in its creator’s eye—but Berlin obviously had a high opinion of it, deeming it a worthy act-closer.

      This suggests something about the song’s form: the “White Christmas” that Berlin slated for his revue’s first-act finale was not the homely ballad that Crosby crooned in Holiday Inn. The songwriter was a stickler for variety-show convention, and convention dictated that first acts conclude with a visually spectacular number. Berlin’s note that the number would “start in one going into full stage” indicates how he envisioned “White Christmas” being staged: the song would begin with a lone player onstage singing its verse; the curtain would then shoot up, revealing an elaborate set, and a full chorus would join in for a rousing sing-along finale.

      It is difficult to imagine the “White Christmas” we know today as showstopper in a revue filled with dog tricks and pratfalls. Yet the song that reached the world in 1942 as a hymn was, in its inventor’s initial conception, something else entirely: wry, parodic, lighthearted—a novelty tune.

      We glimpse Berlin’s original vision for “White Christmas” in the six lines of its verse. Where the chorus evokes a distant yesteryear (the Christmases “I used to know”), the verse is set in the modern present: on Christmas Eve Day in Los Angeles. There is conversational breeziness in its language (“There’s never been such a day …”). There is, moreover, a distinct social milieu being described: we are in the louche company of Beverly Hills swells, who loll away day after “perfect day” on green grass beneath