On Independence Day, Here's to My Friend Irving

Happy Birthday, America. And Happy Birthday, Irving.

Who's Irving?

By way of explanation, I'm a big fan of Turner Classic Movies. At my house, that channel has been a godsend during the turmoil of the pandemic and our buzzsaw politics, an escape hatch to more entertaining times in the past. On this Fourth of July, they're running some of their patriotic perennials - "John Paul Jones," "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "1776," among others. It's a good thing.

But I also watch TCM because these old films often are an intriguing sociological look back at how Americans used to live and think. A few weeks ago they ran the first movie in which cowboy crooner Roy Rogers had the starring role (apparently, the studio was in a contract dispute with Gene Autry; Roy was their ace in the hole.)

The movie came out in 1938, titled "Under Western Stars," and believe it or not, it's all about Rogers getting elected to Congress so he can help fight the Dust Bowl's vicious drought by breaking the monopoly of corporate bad guys who control the water supply. Pretty subversive stuff. There's plenty of New Deal politics and tumbleweed populism - a full year before "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" was released -- and ole Roy's not above some deception and a couple of dirty tricks to win the day on Capitol Hill.

If I was trying to take a break from our reality, I might have picked the wrong movie.

So then I checked out "Rhapsody in Blue," a 1945 Hollywood biography of the great George Gershwin that, except for his terrific music, is a real stinker. I'd never seen it from beginning to end and now I know why. But it did serve as a reminder of one of the most eccentric people I got to know shortly after I moved to New York, an elderly lyricist named Irving Caesar. He collaborated with Gershwin on some of his earliest hits - you can see his name flash by in the movie's credits.

As we celebrate independence, Gershwin and Caesar's lives are testaments to one of the brighter aspects of the United States, one that comes under steady fire from the bigoted right - taking the needy and oppressed into our country from nations poorer and more repressive than our own and showing them a possible way forward.

Each man was the son of Jewish immigrants; Caesar's father from Romania, Gershwin's parents from czarist Russia. Gershwin dropped out of school at 15 to become a song plugger, selling sheet music to customers eager to hear the latest tunes; Caesar grew up in the same neighborhood as the Marx Brothers and hung out at the Grand Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a place where tenement kids could be safe and learn sports and arts and crafts. It's still doing that good work today.

Like many young Jewish men in New York in those days, Irving learned stenography and other secretarial skills that could give a fellow a leg up. He became secretary to Henry Ford's Peace Ship project, a misbegotten voyage to Europe in 1915 intended to end World War I. Despite my questions, Irving would never tell me how he managed to deal with the notoriously anti-Semitic Ford.

But Caesar's true calling was putting words to music, and he came to his profession at a moment when the American musical theater was booming, becoming one of the country's greatest gifts to the world. He and George Gershwin collaborated on some of Gershwin's earliest work, including "Swanee," the duo's first commercial success.

Eventually, the two went their separate ways and Caesar went on to write the lyrics to "Tea for Two," "I Want to Be Happy," "Just a Gigolo" - which in different decades provided hits for both Louis Prima and David Lee Roth - as well as songs for Shirley Temple and a series of songbooks for children, including music promoting international peace and racial tolerance.

Irving Caesar and I first met at New York's Friars Club in 1975, at a luncheon where he was presenting a journalism award he had created named after Don Hollenbeck, a TV newsman hounded to suicide by the right-wing zealots who ran McCarthyism's blacklist. Someone told Irving I had worked on public television's coverage of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. He shook my hand and told me I should be very proud. Aware of who he was, I said I'd be proud to have written "Tea for Two." So began a friendship.

For years, from time to time we would meet for lunch at Gallaghers Steakhouse on West 52nd Street in Manhattan. He had his own table there and would arrive, white-haired and bespectacled, bow tied, his coat lapels flecked with ash and goodness knows what else. The pattern was always the same. We'd order, and then before, during and after the meal, cigar in hand waving like a baton, he would regale me with stories and sing his songs acapella at the top of his lungs. Usually the same stories and the same songs. The volume at which he performed only startled the tourists; the waiters and restaurant regulars were used to it.

Afterwards, we would retire to his offices in the nearby Brill Building, known worldwide as the home of famous songsmiths Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Ellie Greenwich and a thousand others. We'd sit among dusty piles of sheet music and ancient files of correspondence. When he couldn't find something he wanted me to see, he would shout to his assistant - "my boy" -- to find it. Irving was in his eighties at the time; his "boy" was around 78.

I still have vinyl records and sheet music proudly presented to me by this voluble Broadway character. Irving died in 1996, 101 years old. And he was born on the Fourth of July.

At least he said he was.