OH! HOW
HE HATED TO GET UP IN THE MORNING
Few soldiers have matched Sergeant Irving Berlin's
resourcefulness in beating reveille
by Laurence Bergreen
When the United States entered the Great War in April
1917,the hottest young songwriter in the land was Irving
Berlin. Ever since his "Alexander's Ragtime
Band" had swept the country six years before and
made his name a household word. Berlin had consolidated
his position with one hit after another. "When I
lost you". "Everybody's Din it" "When
That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves For Alabam".
"Snookey Ookums". "I Love a
Piano"-these are just a few of the hundreds of songs
written by then. Remarkably, Berlin wrote both the lyrics
and music even though he had no formal music training: He
required the services of a trained "musical
secretary", a transcriber, to write down his tunes.
Nonetheless, he managed to earn $100,000 a year in
royalties.
Remarkably, too, the man who would come to be
considered the nation's songwriter was not yet an
American citizen. Born in Russia in 1888, the son of a
cantor, he had come to the new world with his family in
1893 and grown up amid the throngs of New York's Lower
Eastside. His real name was Israel Baline; He had adopted
the somewhat grander "Irving Berlin" when he
launched his song writing career. Responding to a general
upsurge and patriotism, he completed the process of
becoming a citizen on February 6, 1918, when he took the
Oath of Allegiance. One unforeseen consequence was that
Berlin became eligible for the draft. About to turn
thirty, he seemed an unlikely prospect. He supposed the
army would bypass him on account of his celebrity alone.
Still, he wanted to lend his talents to the war effort,
by writing patriotic songs, entertaining-whatever was
required of him. He was also hoping that one of his war
songs would be a hit. He tried a few numbers, which all
fizzled, and before he could make his mark, he
experienced what his friend Alexander Woollcott, the
esteemed drama critic, termed a "painful
shock": He found himself drafted into the army.
He was assigned that spring to Camp Upton in Yaphank,
Long Island, and became a member of the 20th Infantry,
152nd Depot Brigade. To an urban dweller like Berlin.
Yaphank 100 miles from New York City, seemed a hopelessly
remote and desolate place. Dirt roads meandered through
flat, featureless potato fields, and the local
inhabitants, mostly farmers and their families wanted
nothing to do with the tumult of the city.
The only excitement Berlin found was at Camp Upton
itself. Which functioned primarily as a staging area for
soldiers bound for France. Most of the induces, like
Berlin, were draftees from New York, often immigrants
with little desire to return to Europe and challenge the
Hun. They were young men with lives to lead, careers to
establish and they found it distasteful to be thrown
together in barracks, forced to get up at dawn and spend
the day on KP duty or marching across a dusty parade
ground in close-order drill.
"I found out quickly I wasn't much of a
soldier," Berlin later reflected. " There were
a lot of things about army life I didn't like, and the
thing I didn't like most of all was reveille. I hated it.
I hated it so much that I used to lie awake nights
thinking about how much I hated it."
Indeed, everything about army life went against his
instincts. Patriotic or not, Berlin was indignant. He'd
been a law-abiding citizen who more than earned his keep
and even employed others, who depended on him for their
livelihood. But he'd been taken out of his thriving
music-publishing business and plunked down in the middle
of nowhere and assigned to peel potatoes, wash dishes,
and carry out a lot of other rather demeaning tasks. His
soldiers pay-only $30 a month- hardly compensated for the
indignity of army life.
What did his dreary routine have to do with fighting a
war? An utterly private man, he was now forced to share
crowded sleeping quarters with dozens of other men, a
situation he hadn't encountered since his days in Lower
East Side flophouses. Nor did the strenuous physical
drills and his status as a humble private suit his taste.
He used occasional weekend passes to return to his
apartment in New York, which now seemed more luxurious
than ever to him, and to eat food prepared by his own
cook exclusively for him, but the brief return to
civilian life only made life at Camp Upton more difficult
to bear.
A few times he tried to cut corners and assert his
status In one instance his valet, who was visiting, made
up his bunk and polished his army-issue items while
Berlin was on the field, enduring drill. "I really
wasn't fitted to be a soldier," he soon concluded.
" I was a song writer. I knew entertainment."
Harry Ruby (originally Rubenstein). Who was then a
pianist working at Berlin's songwriting firm of Waterson,
Berlin and Snyder, but was soon to join him at Camp
Upton, vividly remembered the worst problem his
celebrated boss experienced: Berlin gets into the army at
Upton, and now he's getting up with all the other
soldiers, five A.M.! Irving had never gone to bed before
two, three in the morning. He would work until two,
three, and then sleep, and get up around ten. All of a
sudden, he's getting up with the birds at five, and he's
going out of his mind! This is not for him, believe me.
As much as Berlin detested barracks life, leaving the
comforts of home turned out to be one of the best things
that could happen to him, for it gave him an entirely new
range of experiences on which to draw for his
songwriting. He sincerely "Wanted to be a good
soldier," he recalled. "Every morning when the
bugle blew, I'd jump right out of bed, just as if I liked
getting up early. The other soldiers thought I was a
little too eager about it, and they hated me."
Berlin decided to incorporate his hatred of the
military mentality, of bugles, and most of all, of
getting up at the crack of dawn, in a song, and this time
he struck a nerve. He discovered that soldiers
everywhere, including the one who slept in the bed next
to his, Private Howard Friend, felt precisely as he did
about reveille. In contrast to the run-of-the-mill
popular song extolling the grandeur of war, Berlin's
plaintive "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the
Morning," with its threat to "Murder the
Bugler," bordered on the mutinous.
The song first made the rounds at Camp Upton, where it
gave expression to every soldier's self-deprecatory,
antiheroic sentiments. It was then packaged commercially
by Waterson, Berlin & Synder. The sheet music was
inscribed: Dedicated to my friend "Private
Howard Friend" who occupies the cot next to mine and
feels as I do about the "bugler."
The dedication emphasized the song's familiarity and
at the same time advertised that Berlin, too, was doing
his part for Uncle Sam. He wanted it understood that he
was no longer participating in the Tin Pan Alley
hypocrisy of sitting around a piano in an office high
above Broadway, plunking out a tune that cynically
encouraged others to go to war. There remained only the
task of finding a performer of the first magnitude
willing to take the song to the paying customers, the
civilians. (Eddie Cantor would do it.)
The soldier-songwriters song of the Great War
contained no reference to combat, President Wilson,
freedom, peace, or even patriotism. Focusing exclusively
on homely details, it was folksy without being a folk
song, and was undeniably autobiographical, deriving
directly from Berlin's observations and street-smart
humor. Its tone of comic grousing appealed not only to
the soldier's of Camp Upton, who lived it, but to the
country at large. The timing was right, for the song's
mutinous humor wouldn't have been well received in the
grim early days of the war. As a result, Berlin finally
had his first hit war song. It eventually sold a million
and a half copies.
"There's a song called The Star Spangled banner
which is pretty big song hit too," Berlin said
later, "but my answer to the question in the opening
line of the national anthem is a loud 'No!' I can't see
anything by the dawn's early light. My song about hating
to get up in the mo-o-o-rning was a protest written from
the heart out, absolutely without the slightest thought
that it would ever earn a cent."
Here at last was the song in which he finally cast off
for good the fetters of ragtime that had bound him to so
many ephemeral revues. "Oh! How I hate to Get Up in
the Morning," unlike many of his earlier songs,
wasn't reminiscent of black music, or Jewish, or Italian;
it was in an "American" vernacular"
simple, straightforward, masculine. Though he would
continue to employ devices he'd learned from ethnic
songs, such as syncopation, he would write no more of
them. He now belonged to a category by himself.
While "Oh! How I hate to Get Up in the
Morning" was catching on, most of the soldiers who
had come to Camp Upton with Berlin departed for France,
as expected, but Private Berlin stayed behind, earning
promotion to the rank of sergeant; it seemed a special
destiny lay in store for him. Major General J. Franklin
Bell, the camp's commanding officer, ordered Berlin to
his office and explained: "We want a new community
house - a place where friends and relatives of you men
can be made a little more comfortable when they come to
visit. It could cost a lot-perhaps thirty-five thousand
dollars-and we thought perhaps you could put on a little
show to make money."
T comply, Berlin initially prevailed on his vaudeville
friends to assuage their guilty consciences and make
morale-boosting visits to Camp Upton, but he began to
feel "this was running a little thin." Around
the same time he remembered "the navy did a show
called boom boom. I read about it in Variety and I
thought: Hmm, this is my chance. So I went to a Colonel
Martin, I think it was, who was on the staff of the
commanding officer,…and I asked him. "Why can't
we do a show here at Upton?"
So ran the official version. The unofficial version,
according to Harry Ruby, was that Berlin continually
pestered the commanding officer an opportunity to stage a
vaudeville show. It would occupy the camp's other show
business draftees-and more important, would provide a way
for Berlin to avoid getting up at reveille.
After General Bell agreed to Berlin's proposal. The
songwriter went on to say "Here's the thing General.
I write at night. Sometimes I work all night when I get
an idea. And I couldn't do that if I had to get up in the
morning at five, you understand."
"You don't have to get up at five," replied
the general. "You just forget about all that. You
write this show."
If the cost of sleeping late was writing a show
gratis, Berlin was prepared to proceed. Indeed, realizing
whatever personnel he required would come free, he
contemplated a lavish, Ziegfeld-style revue, conceived on
a scale that the impresario would have approved.
Furthermore, he wanted to stage it not on the base, as
just another talent show, but on Broadway, as a
full-blown theatrical event.
In May the Navy had taken over the huge Century
Theatre on Central Park West for 16 performances of a
show noted mainly for its female impersonators. Berlin
naturally wanted Century for his own revue, in which he
planned to teach the Navy a trick or two about
entertaining civilians. The only modest aspect of
production was to be the length of its run: 8
performances.
To fill a theater of the Century's outsized
proportions. Sergeant Berlin requested a crew of 300,
evenly divided between performers, and stagehands. When
the extent of his demand became known, General Bell
quickly established a supervisory board consisting of
three officers- Major J. John Brandreth, Capt. James G.
Benkard, and Lieutenant Basil Broadhurst- to oversee the
ambitious project.
As he began his nocturnal labors on the score. Berlin
sent for Harry Ruby, who moved into the same barracks and
became the songwriter's musical secretary. Ruby marveled
at Berlin's ferocious work habits:
He'd come up to me in the morning… and he'd say,
"Harry, got a pencil and some music paper?" and
I'd say sure, and he'd say, "Take this down,"
and sing me a melody… I'd ask him, "when the
hell did you write that?" and he'd say, "Oh, I
was up all night. Do you like it?" And I'd say it
was great, and I'd play it back for him to hear what he
dictated- and he'd listen, and he'd say, "You got
one chord wrong in there." And he'd be right- he
couldn't play the chord, but he could hear it all right!
Berlin dictated a rich assortment of songs that cast
military experiences in human, even homely terms: "I
can always find a little sunshine in the Y.M.C.A"
"Kitchen police," and "dream on, Little
Soldier Boy." In keeping with the shows Vaudeville
format, he even devised, despite the unlikely
circumstances, a romantic show stopper, " Mandy,''
which would serve as the center piece of a minstrel
section.
After writing down the melodies and devising
appropriate harmonies, Ruby turned the songs over to an
arranger, who further elaborated them into orchestral
parts. In all respects Berlin's modus operandi was the
same as it was for a conventional Broadway revue.
Finally, Berlin composed one unashamedly patriotic
anthem. He called it " God Bless America," but
even as he dictated it to Ruby, Berlin became insecure
about it. "There were so many patriotic songs coming
out everywhere at the time," Ruby recalled. "
Every song writer was pouring them out." As he wrote
down the melody, he said to Berlin, "Geez, another
one?"
Deciding that Ruby was right, that the song was too
solemn to ring true for the acerbic doughboys, Berlin cut
it from the score and placed it in his trunk. "Just
a little sticky" was the way he described the song.
"I couldn't visualize soldiers marching to it. So I
laid it aside and tried other things."
After holding auditions, Berlin started rehearsals in
June for Yip-Yip-Yaphank, as he called his show. New York
newspapers carried ads for seats priced from fifty cents
to two dollars.
In July, Yip-Yip Yaphank opened for a tryout at Camp
Upton's little Liberty Theatre, and Berlin endowed the
occasion with all the publicity he could muster. He
discovered that with the might of the United States Armed
Forces behind him, he was able to command respect (and
attendance) for his work as never before. A private train
hired for the day transported seventy celebrities from
New York to see the show, including vaudeville stars Al
Johnson, Fanny Brice, and Will Rogers, as well as the
female chorus of a Broadway revue entitled Midnight
Frolics.
The run-through, a scaled-down version of the revue
planned for the Century, served its purpose, which was to
win the approval of its military backers, especially
General Bell, and the Yip-Yip-Yaphank Company proceeded
to take over the Century Theatre.
It was now August, and the city sweltered in
relentless heat and humidity, but the 300 soldiers from
Camp Upton yielded nothing to the weather. They
bivouacked at the Seventy-first Regiment Armory, at Park
Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, and each day they
marched uptown to the Century in military formation,
rehearsed under the direction of Sergeant Berlin, and
then marched back downtown to the armory, where they
remained under military discipline. Meanwhile, playbills
appeared al over town, proclaiming, "UNLE SAM
PRESENTS… a military mess cooked up by the boys at
Camp Upton."
Opening night, August 19th, found every seat in the
old theater occupied. Outside, on Central Park West,
soldiers equipped with rifles were stationed every few
paces, while others guarded the entrances. The show of
force might have seemed threatening had not each sentry
been under orders to smile at the crowds. Once again,
Vaudeville stars turned out in force; In addition to the
familiar faces of Brice and Jolson, celebrity watchers
noted the presence of George M. Cohan and the dancer
Irene Castle. Entirely ignored by the crowd but a far
greater importance to Sergeant Berlin was the bulky,
stooped figure of one other theatergoer-his mother, Lena
Baline.
Within, a call of "Atten -shun!" brought the
excited murmurs of the audience to a sudden halt, and
every head including those of the girls selling programs,
snapped forward. The crowd rose in unison, stood more or
less at attention, and waited as General Bell passed
among them on the way to his box. And the show began.
Berlin had framed his revue with minstrel acts, but in
his version the traditional minstrel line wore khaki and
only the men on either end were in blackface. Acting as
an interlocutor, a Capt. McAllister informed the soldiers
that they now face a seasoned enemy, perched just over
the foot light, an enemy they must bomb with jokes and
vanquish with songs.
The first song struck an attitude of comic irreverence
that would be maintained throughout the evening:
"You Can't Stay Up On Bevo." "Bevo"
was non alcoholic wartime, beer, and Anheuser-Busch, the
brewers, actually paid Sergeant Berlin $10,000 to deride
the stuff; Berlin promptly donated the
"contribution" to war relief.
But there was more than songs; since the revue
intended to depict life at Camp Upton and showcase the
talents of its inhabitants, there ensued procession of
acrobats, jugglers, and dancers. There was even a boxing
demonstration featuring Benny Leonard, lightweight
champion of the world. Recognizing how much theater was
inherent in army life, Berlin cannily included military
drills. Set to his syncopated music, they became
transformed into choreography as as the soldiers marched in
ever more complex formations.
In addition to these displays of talent, the revue
included much silliness, as the soldiers became hairy-
chested chorus girls parodying the lavish spectacles
Ziegfeld had staged in the same theatre. Individual
soldiers tried to imitate leading ladies of the moment,
such as Ann Pennington and Marylin Miller.
In response to all the organized lunacy, the audience,
according to theartre magazine, became a carefree mob
that whistled, shouted, and cheered every number, and
joined in the chorus after the first encore. The
enthusiasm and vigor of the boys on the stage and the
stimulus of the songs swept everyone irresistibly into
the spirit of the evening. It was more like the last
inning of the World Series ball game than anything else.
Although he had orchestrated all these activities from
behind the scenes, Berlin refrained from appearing on
stage until late in the show. And he gauged well the
effect of delayed entry, for by the time he did appear it
was nearly 11pm. And the anticipation of the audience,
which had been waiting several hours for a chance to see
him, reached its highest pitch.
His solo was a reflection of his own self-contained,
even isolated personality and offered a dramatic contrast
to the foregoing excitement the lights dimmed, and a Camp
Upton-style tent appeared onstage. There were calls for
" Sergeant Berlin," but he failed to
materialize. Eventually two other soldiers dragged him
out of the tent, asleep on his feet.
" Of course there was a welcome that rocked the
theater." Wrote Theatre magazine critics, "but
to his credit as a good actor, there he stood, while his
friends waited for a nod of recognition, staring dreamily
ahead, and buttoning up his coat. Then he sang, in his
peculiar, plaintive little voice, the chorus that goes :
Oh! How I hate to get up in the morning."
This endearingly mournful underplaying enthralled the
audience, and in the process Berlin established a stage
persona for himself: that of the feisty little common man
buffeted by events over which he has no control but
managing, through a sense of humor and innate toughness,
to survive in an often insane world.
Irving's slight build made the persona credible, and
so did his Lower East Side accent. There was nothing
slick about his thin, high voice; he could easily have
been just another soldier, except that his timing was
flawless and his lament hilarious. Someday, he sang, he
was going to murder the bugler. Except that in his mouth,
the words came out sounding more like he'd "moidah
dah buglah"- pure Cherry Street tough talk.
Berlin furthered his comical exploration of the
serviceman's unhappy lot in his last scene, where he sang
of how he was making the world safe for democracy with a
mop and a pail. Said one observer: "Every soldier in
the audience who was doing his bit by peeling weeds from
the parade ground howled joyfully in response."
Not everyone laughed, however. When two soldiers began
to bully Berlin as part of the skit, his mother, from her
vantage point in the audience, became concerned. Why were
these men pushing here lzzy around? And why was the
audience laughing? And most of all what were they saying?
English remained a foreign tongue to her.
Throughout the evening, only one song fell flat, and
it was , as Berlin had feared, the sentimental number
"I Can Always Find a Little Sunshine in the
Y.M.C.A." Invoking, motherhood and the dubious
pleasure of writing home, the ballard drew boos and
catcalls.
But, the finale, a minstrel scene called
"Darktown Wedding, " quickly restored the
audience to good humor. Intended as a grotesque, comic
parody of a typical Ziegfeld "tribute" to the
American girl, the scene contained a song that later
became a Berlin standard: "Mandy."
And what did the impish Berlin do with this tender
song about a young suitor who wanted a minister handy so
he could marry his Mandy? He staged it as a drag number
with a hairy-chested blackface male chorus decked out in
ribbons and curls. The spectacle was tasteless, it was
racist, but it was also funny. In the midst of the
reverly Mandy herself appeared onstage. She was played by
an actual woman, not a drag queen, and the actress really
was black. Her unexpected appearance, according to an
unsigned Theatre magazine interview, " fairly
stopped the proceedings with a pair of eyes that would he
worth a million dollars in the movies if they were topped
with Pickford curls instead of Topsy pigtails."
After exploring the limits of theatrical absurdity,
the company shed their blackface and costumes and rallied
for the finale. The entire Camp Upton company-227
soldiers; fortified with police reservists-crowded onto
the stage wearing full battle gear. A song Berlin had
hurriedly as a replacement for the "sticky"
"God Bless America"- "We're On Our Way to
France"- began. The soldiers suddenly streamed from
the stage, down ramps and through the aisles of the
Century, rifles on their shoulders, and continued out
doors, as if they were actually on there way to France
and possibly their death.
After this stunning conclusion, General Bell rose in
his box to address the audience. He thanked them all for
their generosity, exclaimed that the proceeds would be
used to make a community house at Camp Upton, and then
added: " I have heard that Berlin is among the
foremost song writers of the world and now I believe
it."
He gestured to Sergent Berlin, indicating that he
should speak. Applause for Berlin began. It had taken
upwards of 300 soldiers to pull this revue off, but it
was Berlin that had shaped the entire production-written
the lyrics composed the music, and staged the scenes.
Though he had been on stage a matter of minutes, everyone
knew he was the evening's mastermind. His reticence only
inspired the audience to cheer more lustily.
The roar of approval continued for a full ten minutes
while the song writer groped for words. Spontaneity did
not come easily to a man as disciplined as he, but he had
to overcome his inhabitance and respond; his commanding
officer's wishes had the force of an order. The cast came
to his rescue by hoisting him onto their shoulders and
parading him around the stage.
Without quite intending to, and even now only dimly
aware of the moment's larger implications, Berlin had
outstripped the conventional measurements of Broadway
success and become, to the audience and the soldiers, a
symbol of camaraderie, fun, and catchy tunes. Moreover,
this night had promoted this little man to the status of
an archetypal figure: the Minstrel, of Camp Upton, of the
Great War, and the extension, of the country.
Better than any other show-business figure, he had
managed to capture the war in song- not the hideous
blunders, needless deaths, and general horror, which
would become widely acknowledged once the war had ended,
but the gaped-tooth, good- natured, aw-shucks spirit of
the nation awakening from the long and perilous slumber
of isolationism to its eminence as a world power. Wrote
one entranced cub reporter Marion Spritzer: It may well
be that no mortal theatre was ever so beautiful as the
Century that hot night in August of 1918, and its even
more that no mortal show could have ever been quite so
transcendentally wonderful, so altogether out of this
world.
After the show Berlin celebrated the occasion as only
Berlin would: He slipped out of the crowd and took his
mother home to the Bronx. Once there, she confessed, in
Yiddish, her relief that he had been released. Her son
pressed her for an explanation. Released?
"Yes," she answered, "by all the gangsters
that got hold of you and your carried you on their
shoulders."
Though designed as a limited-run benefit talent show,
Yip-Yip-Yaphank received the press coverage and publicity
of a Broadway hit. In the morning, New York's newspapers
headlined the shows success.
To hear Irving Berlin sing "I hate to get up in
the morning" alone is worth a trip to Manhattan.
There is more truth than poetry in the song and it came
home strong to the boys under 45 in the audience last
night, many of whom may be "Cussing" the bugler
themselves, inside of a few short months.
Contributions poured in. Even E.F.Albee, the powerful
vaudeville manager who rarely went to the theatre
himself, took sixteen friends and enjoyed himself so much
that he donated $1000. Buying a seat for Yip-Yip-Yaphank
at the highest possible price quickly became a patriotic
duty. The revue's run was extended for another week and
then a full month, well into September; since another
show had been booked into the Century, Yip-Yip-Yaphank
moved to the Lexington Ave. Opera House, where the
ovations continued and the donations piled up. Expected
to earn $35,000, the show eventually collected $80,000.
The Camp Upton contingent's Cinderella existence on
Broadway came to a dramatic conclusion. On closing night,
when the soldiers marched down the aisles singing
"We're on Our Way to France" at the end of the
performance, they continued marching to the street. It
looked as it was all a part of the usual show, but then
the production crew started to follow the actors down the
aisles, led by Sergeant Berlin. Gradually some of the
audience noticed that they were actually going to war.
There was considerable crying and fainting and
cheering-a jumble of emotions that coalesced into cheers
that rang in the ears of the departing soldiers as they
proceeded in formation to a troop carrier. They boarded
it without delay and sailed within the week from France.
Berlin, however, stayed behind. At the end of the
show's run, he returned to Camp Upton. Although he would
fail to see any action, he had already had himself a very
nice war. He had reaped vast goodwill and priceless
personal publicity from Yip-Yip-Yaphank-the kind that
could not be bought on Tin Alley at any price.
When the war ended in November, the need for Camp
Upton's community house-the the original reason
Yip-Yip-Yaphank had come into existence-suddenly
evaporated. The structure was never built, and Berlin,
who returned to civilian life in 1919, never did find out
what became of cash he'd raised for Uncle Sam.
Laurence Bergreen is a
journalist and biographer. This article is adapted from
his book As Thousands cheer: The life of Irving
Berlin.