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- BIOGRAPHY
Daughter of Clarence Hungerford Mackay and Katherine Alexander Duer, Ellin Travers Mackay was born 22 March 1903 in Brooklyn. Ellin was a devout Irish-American Catholic and as a writer she was published in _The New Yorker._
In a civil ceremony, 4 January 1927 in New York, she married Irving Berlin. It was against the wishes of his family and her father disinherited her. Finances were not a problem, however, Berlin assigned her the rights to his song _Always_ which yielded her a huge and steady income. They were both snubbed by society and Ellin was immediately disinvited from the wedding of her friend Consuelo Vanderbilt. Ellin and Irving Berlin had four children, who were raised as Protestants.
Irving Berlin, born 11 May 1888 in Russia as Israel Isidore Beilin, was the son of Moses Beilin and Lena Jarchin. The family migrated to the United States in 1893. Following the death of his father in 1896, Irving found himself having to work to survive. Selling newspapers and busking and later on working as a singing waiter at Pelham's Cafe in Chinatown. He was asked by the proprietor to write an original song for the cafe to rival a tavern which had their own song published. The result was _Marie from Sunny Italy_, this earned him thirty-seven cents but also gave him his name: Israel Beilin was misprinted as 'I. Berlin' on the sheet music.
It was _Alexander's Ragtime Band,_ which in 1911 launched his career. In 1912 he married Dorothy Goetz but she contracted pneumonia and typhoid fever on their honeymoon to Cuba and died five months later. Her death inspired Berlin's song _When I lost you,_ which became on of his earliest hits. A year before Dorothy's death, Irving Berlin, E. Ray Goetz (Dorothy's brother) and Ted Snyder co-wrote a song called _There's a Girl in Havanna._
During World War One, in 1917, he was drafted into the United States Army and staged a musical revue, as a patriotic tribute to the United States. He had written _God Bless America_ for it, but decided not to use it. When it was released it was so popular that during the 1930s it was even considered for the National Anthem, but was rejected by the press in part because it came from a Jewish composer.
Berlin's 1926 hit song _Blue Skies_ became another American classic. He was responsible for many Hollywood film scores including _Top Hat_ (1935) and _Holiday Inn_ (1942, which included _White Christmas,_ one of the most-recorded tunes in American history. For Broadway he was responsible for the music for the stage musical _Annie Get Your Gun_ (1946), produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The main song for this musical was _There's No Business Like Show Business._
In spite of his musical career, Berlin never learned how to play a piano or read music beyond a rudimentary level. In his last years he became a virtual recluse and did not attend the 100th birthday party held in his honour. He did attend the centennial celebrations for the Statue of Liberty in 1986.
His wife died July 1988 in New York and he died of a heart attack also in New York City at the age of a hundred-and-one and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
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