Mrs Linda Emmet was in Dublin recently and expressed surprise that our reporter who spoke to her had actually heard of her father, who was none other than Irving Berlin. She was with her husband, Edouard, and a whole passel of Emmets who are related in one way or another to Robert, and they were here for a Gathering of Emmets to celebrate the legacy of the patriot and his brother, Thomas. Mr Edouard Emmet is a great-great-grandson of Thomas, but Mrs Emmet has just as direct a family connection with Ireland, for her mother, Ellin Mackay Berlin, who died in 1988, was of strong Irish stock, too.
Ellin's grandfather, John William Mackay, was born in Dublin in 1831. Just ahead of the Famine, he emigrated from poverty to America and found work as an apprentice shipbuilder in New York. But, like so many young men of the time, he was wooed by siren voices from the west that spoke of gold and he went on to San Francisco. There, hearing of the riches being lifted from the earth in the Nevada Territory, he turned around and walked the 200 miles across the Sierra from California, bent on making his fortune.
The story goes that, as he approached Virginia City, he took his last half-dollar from his pocket and threw it into the sagebrush, so that he could "enter the town like a gentleman". Gentlemen did not carry money in their pockets.
Destitute widow
He took up a shovel and toiled for a time as a labourer in the mines of the Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859 by Peter O'Riley and Patrick McLaughlin. Then in 1871, with three others, he put his earnings into a group of unpromising small silver mines called the Consolidated Virginia claim. The investment cost them $100,000. Four years later, the quartet's stock was worth $160 million, the equivalent of $3 billion at today's values.
John William married a destitute widow, Louise Bryant, in Virginia City and eventually moved to New York where, in 1883, he set up the Commercial Cable Company. (Samuel Morse had developed the "magnetic telegraph" in the 1840s, and its wires had rapidly spread their web across the country.) This put him head to head with Western Union, a monopoly controlled by the cut-throat Jay Gould. Gould tried to squeeze Mackay out, but he held his ground, faced Gould down, to the astonished admiration of Wall Street, and prospered apace. He was nominated twice for the US Senate, but twice this modest Irishman declined. When he died in 1902, his business manager said: "I don't suppose he knew within 20 millions what he was worth."
John's son Clarence married a society girl called Katherine Alexander Duer, and they established themselves on a large estate on Long Island called "Harbor Hill" and had three children. As a young woman Ellin, the youngest, manifested some talent as a writer, and her short stories and articles were published regularly in the New Yorker.
Russian immigrant
Irving Berlin's first contact with things Irish was probably when, as an immigrant boy called Izzy Baline from Tamun in Russia, he sold the Irish Echo on the streets of the Lower East Side of New York and later worked as a singing waiter in Jimmy Kelly's. But by the time he met Ellin Mackay, the New Yorker writer, he was already a successful songsmith, with his own theatre, the Music Box. His first wife, Dorothy Goetz, sister of the songwriter and producer Ray Goetz, had died tragically from typhoid fever picked up while on honeymoon in Cuba.
Ellin was educated, sophisticated and elegant, everything Berlin was not (he never lost his accent), and he fell heavily. Ellin returned his affections, and wrote in the New Yorker: "Modern girls are conscious of their own identity, and they marry whom they choose, satisfied to satisfy themselves. They are not so keenly aware, as were their parents, of the vast difference between a brilliant match and a mesalliance." But Clarence was having none of it. No good Catholic daughter of his was going to marry a Jew in "the show business" from an impoverished family. He packed Ellin off to Europe to get it out of her system.
While she was away, a desolated Irving Berlin wrote All Alone, and What'll I Do (If You Are Far Away)? and Always and Remember. Composer Jimmy McHugh and lyricist Al Dubin threw in their 10 cents' worth to boost the romance with the fetchingly, if tiringly, titled When A Kid Who Came From The East Side Found A Sweet Society Rose.
Secret marriage
Ellin remembered. She came back from Europe, and she and Berlin were married secretly in January 1926. Irving penned At Peace With The World. Clarence disinherited his determined daughter, but he later relented and bestowed his blessing. Indeed, having been long divorced from his first wife, he himself married a singer from "the show business" called Anna Case. He also lost much of his fortune on the stock market, eventually leaving his songwriting son-in-law wealthier than he was.
Ellin, in a nice touch, having been raised a Catholic and having married a Jew, brought up their three daughters as Protestants. Irving Berlin survived her by just a year and died, aged 101, at his home in Beekman Place, a couple of miles, but a whole world, distant from the streets of the Lower East Side.