White Christmas: The Story of a Song. Jody Rosen

his various plans for a stage revue. Berlin had little idea that beneath his Christmas-in-Beverly-Hills lampoon—stirring in the homesick “longing” of the verse’s last line—the Great American Christmas Carol was waiting to emerge.

      In the meantime, with his struggles to mount a revue bearing no fruit, the songwriter turned his attention to other projects—a new movie, Second Fiddle, and Louisiana Purchase—casting “White Christmas” into that purgatory where so many previous Berlin creations, slaved over and tossed off, lowly and grand, had gone before it: the trunk.

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       No Strings

       Soon

       We’ll be without the moon,

       Humming a diff’rent tune …

      —IRVING BERLIN,

      “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”

      IT IS A CURIOSITY of the American Songbook that the majority of its songs were composed during the 1930s, yet scarcely any acknowledge the hardships of the Great Depression. American popular music has never been as insulated from American social reality. When E. Y. Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a hit in 1934, it stood out as a novelty among the ballads crooned on the country’s radio shows: a stark portrait of national woe surrounded by Tin Pan Alley’s paper-moon artifice.

      In an odd way, the pop songs of the 1930s were a social barometer: the fervor with which the public embraced musical escapism was a measure of the hard times. And indeed, twentieth-century pop rarely produced such beguiling fantasy. The new class of songwriters that emerged in the 1920s were quintessential “young moderns,” who brought a self-conscious artistry and cosmopolitan outlook to what was previously regarded as a profession for scalawags, drunks, and other shady characters who hung around the Union Square rialto. Richard Rodgers drew on the romantic composers he had studied in his conservatory training; the rich, bluesy luster of George Gershwin’s compositions reflected tricks he picked up on his “slumming” pilgrimages to Harlem; the lyrics of Ira Gershwin, “Yip” Harburg, and Cole Porter betrayed their bookish taste for Gilbert and Sullivan and the light verse that filled the pages of The Smart Set.

      By the 1930s, the new songwriters were pouring out a seemingly unending stream of witty and beautiful songs whose quality even the stuffiest highbrows could not dispute. With their sumptuous melodies and lyrics that made taut, witty poetry out of everyday speech, the songs of the thirties were an American apotheosis: popular music at its most stylized and urbane. Earlier popular song had had its artful moments and flashes of ruffian wit, but nothing had approached the sophistication and expressiveness of a song like Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” (1930), with its daring tonal shifts and rich chromaticism. Nor was there precedent for lyrical ingenuity on par with Leo Robin’s “Thanks for the Memory” (1937)—a luminous pile-up of jokes and rhymes:

       Thanks for the memory

       Of rainy afternoons,

       Swingy Harlem tunes,

       And motor trips and burning lips and

       burning toast and prunes.

      Songwriters brought this new sophistication to songs whose focus was radically narrowed. In the first two decades of the century, Tin Pan Alley strove for Morning Edition topicality, taking account of news events, trends, inventions—the whole mad pageant of American social experience. Now, although Tin Pan Alley was still used as a generic term to describe the music industry centered on Broadway and its Hollywood satellite, song publishers had dispersed from West Twenty-eighth Street and abandoned their old-school commitment to pop-music journalism: the new, up-market American popular song was almost exclusively preoccupied with romantic love. The task of the Broadway and Hollywood tunesmith was, in the words of one wag, to say “I love you” in thirty-two bars; from “It Had to Be You” to “All of Me” to “The Way You Look Tonight” to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the American Songbook is for the most part a catalog of variations on a single sturdy theme.

      The narrow focus of the new songs was, in part, an emblem of their aesthetic modernity, their art-for-art’s-sake emphasis on style above all. What mattered wasn’t so much what the songs said—usually some variation on “Blah, blah, blah, blah love … Tra la la la, tra la la la cottage for two,” as Ira Gershwin put it in his 1931 parody—but how they said it: the shape of a melody, the flair of a well-wrought rhyme or deft turn of phrase. With their thirty-two-bar form and “blah, blah love” content rigidly standardized, Tin Pan Alley’s songs became sleek exercises in sheer style; this was Deco Pop, music for an era whose cult of the streamlined and pristine was expressed in everything from the cut of waistcoats to the facades of skyscrapers.

      For a nation mired in the bleak realities of the Depression, the escapist appeal of these songs was considerable. Tin Pan Alley enshrined bourgeois love as a blissful sanctuary from history itself; listening to “Love Is Here to Stay” or “The Song Is You” or “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?” it was possible to believe—for the three minutes that the song played, at least—that real-world hardships didn’t matter, for in romance there was a charmed parallel universe: a “world” of two. “Millions of people go by,” Harry Warren wrote in one of the decade’s signature songs. “But they all disappear from view … I only have eyes for you.”

      Some songs provided a more decadent escape. In the luxuriant melodies and arch, knowing words of hits like “Just One of Those Things” and “I Can’t Get Started,” Americans heard the voice of an alluring character: the bon vivant who sauntered through 1930s popular culture, cocktail shaker in hand, untroubled by the Depression. These “swellegant” songs were most closely associated with younger writers—Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, and especially, Cole Porter—who filled their compositions with drolleries and highbrow references; but it was Berlin’s Top Hat collaboration with Astaire and Rogers that gave the fantasy its most intoxicating form. For the millions of Americans who made Top Hat (1935) the biggest movie musical success to date, the film’s primary delight wasn’t its predictable boy-meets-girl high jinks, but the swank apartments, the evening clothes, Fred Astaire catching the night flight to Venice for a weekend spree—its immersion in, as Berlin wrote in “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “an atmosphere that simply reeks with class.”

      Perhaps the greatest vicarious thrill of such songs was the feeling of unfeeling. When Top Hat appeared in 1935, per capita personal income was $474 per year, and unemployment still hovered at 20 percent. The long queue at the soup kitchen—that abiding image of Depression-era urban destitution—was still not unknown in New York, Chicago, and other major cities; farmers fled prairie states that had become wind-whipped dust bowls. In this atmosphere, Americans couldn’t help but lust for the extravagant detachment of Berlin’s “No Strings” narrator, who boasts of having “No strings and no connections / No ties to my affections.” In Top Hat, Astaire’s Jerry Travers sings the song while idling in his London Hotel suite; it is a rogue’s ode to the single life, but above all a declaration of decadence: Travers’s sole commitment is to the pursuit of high-toned pleasure. “I’m fancy free,” he sings while spritzing soda water into a highball of bourbon, “And free for anything fancy.”

      The narrator of Berlin’s “White Christmas” verse—that poor soul marooned in a Beverly Hills paradise—is recognizably a variation on that Astairean type: a blasé society swell. But by 1938, when Berlin was grappling with “White Christmas” and his various plans for a theatrical revue, history was catching up with popular culture’s fancy-free cosmopolitans. While Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms were lifting the nation from the depths of economic crisis, Americans were awakening to a different nightmare. Hitler was menacing Europe, Spain was rent by civil war, the Japanese were bombing Canton. In the shadow of geopolitical strife,