Irving Berlin turns 100 - 6 May 1988

I wonder what they’d be doing in Tyumen, Kyrgyzstan, next Wednesday. I can’t guarantee the pronunciation and I am also pretty hazy about the place, about Tyumen that is.

Kyrgyzstan I am a little more definite about, though I have never run into anybody who has been there, except the man I have in mind, who was born in Tyumen a hundred years ago, next Wednesday.

It would be nice to hear, though I think it very unlikely, that the streets of the village will be flapping with bunting and the natives will be dancing around hand in hand, and singing, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and catching their breath from time to time, to chant, "Viva!" or, more probably, "Long live Israel Berlin". Whose name, by a printing mistake on a piece of sheet music, got changed to I Berlin, and then, because practically every other Russian immigrant boy to this country whose first name began with an I turned into Irving, Irving Berlin.

That's the man, a little frail they say, as you might expect to be. Frail and wiry, a friend describes him, but with all the marbles. It really blows the mind my mind to begin to calculate the odds against the son of a rabbi, in a mountainous Moslem settlement on the border of China, turning within one generation into the pied piper, the troubador, of American popular music.

The odds against his ever getting away from the shadow of the 20,000-foot peaks of Kyrgyzstan even, into European Russia, seem formidable enough. Looking back on his boyhood Berlin could fairly say that he was born in the middle ages and in the pre-civilised middle ages. Kyrgyzstan now, of course, the Soviet socialist republic, didn’t even belong to Russia until 1876, 12 years before the boy was born.

Before that, telling its history in the simplest terms makes you sound like a film writer mocking up a script for something called 1000BC. For centuries the Kyrgyz were a tribe of nomads of Mongol extraction, who about, it's thought, the 16th Century migrated into the alpine border country we are talking about, and, came under the rule of – wait for it – the Khanate of Kokand a relic of Tamerlane’s empire.

In 1876, the Russians moved in, 12 years later, Israel Berlin arrived. He was one of eight children of a rabbi, who in 1893, when the boy was five, saw his home burn down. By whom is a matter of never-settled debate. At any rate, in this remote Mongol Moslem country, Jews were certainly a minority, and as elsewhere, looked on as a threat to the true faith.

Rabbi Berlin it is ruled, took off in a hurry, like many more persecuted legions, for New York city, where the family lived for several years in great poverty. The father died when young Berlin was eight, and he was thrown – as a journalist at the time wrote – into the welter of New York, selling newspapers for a while, trying out as a singing waiter in the seedier saloons of Chinatown and the Bowery and rescuing coins tossed into the sawdust at his feet.

In New York then, before the immigrant flood that bought in a spate of musical talent, anti-Semitism was rife enough, even in the lower reaches of show business, to persuade Berlin to adopt for a time an Irish name, Cooney. For a year or two, he plugged songs from music-hall balconies, he worked as a floor sweeper and general handyman of something called Nigger Mike's Place.

At some point, he had access to a piano in his squalid boarding house and began to pick out tunes – on the black keys only. He wrote and sold, for a pittance, to a song publisher all sorts of dialect songs – one way for Jews to blur their social stigma was to kid it, along with the fancied characteristics of other immigrant strains. He wrote comic Italian songs, Irish songs, Jewish songs, Marie from sunny Italy, Sadie Salome, Goodbye Becky Cohen.

He was just 23 when he picked up the incoming craze for ragtime, and thumpingly made it is his own with two songs that rattled around America, and Europe. Alexander’s Ragtime Band and, Everybody's Doing It. From Chinatown, Berlin’s biographer put it, he dropped on to Broadway as abruptly as if he had come by parachute. He was twenty three, and it’s safe to say that for the past 77 years, poverty is something he would not forget, but never again, endure.

I couldn’t help reflecting this week on one of the ironies of his awesome longevity – of course, there will always be freakish exceptions to any well-established scientific rule which is what makes researchers, I have noticed, often rather nervous types always looking over their shoulders for the glaring case that contradicts their best generalisations – I am thinking of Irving Berlin as a physical type. And here again, the odds against his living to be 100 must be incalculable. He was small, a slip of a young man, thin to the point of transparency, the sort of man that, in my boyhood in grimy Manchester was described with a hand over your mouth, as a candidate for consumption.

On the long trek from the Chinese border to the Bowery, the refugee family made many precarious stops in ghettos across Europe and came in here in the stew of steerage, then into the foulest slums of New York. Little food and that not of the sort of build up a bonnie boy, from his early teens on, he slept among smells and rodents, 16-hour days sweeping, washing up, stowing garbage, then at night, typing away in his reedy little voice in dives reeking of smoke and liquor.

The annual medical check-up is something very few Americans had ever heard of in those days, and today, Berlin’s kind still haven’t. But I am sure that, if he’d ever gone to a doctor, to look him over, the prognosis would have been dim.

This thought, came into my mind the other evening – I didn’t let it out – when I was talking with the doctor about the current dogmas on diet. We have gone into another period of general anxiety about cholesterol. These periods have been waxing and waning since the early 1960s.

By this time it’s hard to find a friend – an American friend – who can’t tell you, right off, his cholesterol count. A very good friend of mine on the west coast, has something in the stratosphere of 425 and his doctor keeps telling him "You are a walking time bomb".

Yet this friend, after feeling low and queasy through a succession of diets soaked in polyunsaturated fats, has decided to back to his own diet, which is to eat what he feels like and which, in theory, should have killed him a year ago. Of all the pieces I have come across in the past year or so – and must be hundreds – I have not seen one, not one, study that weighed the effects of anxiety about cholesterol on the general state of health.

How about the cholesterol count itself? But there was a cool and reassuring piece from a London doctor, of much experience and some distinction, a man in his late '70s. He looked over the present raft of prohibitions – the meats and dairy products and sauces and liquids you ought not to use – and set the list against the diseases they are supposed to cause, most of all, heart attacks.

He then looked at the mortality rates, male and female of the species, now, although the only true gauge of advancement in human preservation is the expectation of life at birth. He went over British and American reports on the age at which the great majority of people die. And then, for purposes of comparison, he went back to magazines, both medical and lay, of the late 1920s and early '30s.

He noted the different concerns about diet, the quite different diets prescribed, and the different diseases the doctors threatened you with, if you didn’t pay attention. Finally, he looked over the age at which 50, 60 years ago, most Britons and Americans died – I hasten to say yes, I know it's higher, not much for the male, strikingly higher by four or five years, for the female. Still our doctor decided that there was not too much in it, not enough to justify our saying that the radically different diets of today would prolong your life dramatically, over the '20s and '30s.

What it comes down to, he decided, was we don’t really know what makes this person die early and that one die late. And London doctor's last wry word was, "You have a choice – the difference between then and now is you are likely to die of a different set of diseases and at about the same time." This, for some time, will be my last word on the subject which comes up in conversation here rather more than often than the Persian Gulf, Yasser Arafat, or the presidential elections.

As for the secret, if there is one, of longevity, even the most learned medicos when stumped still take refuge in the shaking of the head and the pronouncing of the phrase, "It’s the genes". Irving Berlin’s parents, by the way, did not live overlong; his grandparents, I don’t know.

But when any public person gets into their 80s, he or she is, as sure as an Oscar winner, to be tapped by some newspaper seeking the secret of their success. Roosevelt’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, a small Texan, built like a bullet, was interviewed on his 98th birthday. "The secret," he said, "was bourbon and water." On his 99th birthday, he was interviewed again. The secret? Laying off bourbon and water.

Field Marshal Montgomery remained 100% fit because, he said, he didn’t smoke or drink. To which Mr Churchill responded, "I smoke and I drink and I am, too, 100% fit." The last word, the snippet of philosophy which should banish sleepless nights of worrying about diet, health, long life, belongs, I think, to Mark Twain. "Well," he said, "after all, nobody gets out alive."

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