December 25, 2007
Merry and bright
A Belarusian Jew named "Israel" might not seem the most likely person to write the great American Christmas carol. But Israel Isidore Baline, the greatest songwriter of the dying days of Tin Pan Alley, had a brainwave one winter day at a spa in Phoenix, and wrote the best-selling song of the first hundred years of recorded music. Baline, working under his adopted name of Irving Berlin, excised the somewhat sardonic framing narrative of the song, about a California millionaire wishing for the snowy Christmases of his youth, and things took off from there. Fred Astaire, to whom he presented the song, liked it, but it ended up sung by Bing Crosby in the Crosby/Astaire film Holiday Inn. Although the hotel chain took its name from the movie, "White Christmas" was Holiday Inn's true legacy.
The movie is less known today than it might be, perhaps because of Crosby's blackface-and-dialect number in celebration of Lincoln's birthday in the February sequence, perhaps because it wasn't terribly good, and perhaps because the song's unexpected success — millions of singles sold, an Academy Award for Berlin — prompted Paramount to release a musical starring Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney. White Christmas was the top-grossing film of 1954 and focused on war buddies putting on a heckuva Christmas show in Vermont, leaving out all the extraneous Independence-Day-and-Thanksgiving-type songs. ("Abraham" makes an appearance, as an instrumental only.)
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