Within the East River, close to Mary Ellin’s penthouse dwelling, her father had as soon as, at 8 years outdated, practically drowned; when rescued, he was discovered nonetheless clutching the pennies he had earned that day promoting newspapers.
He usually appeared a “shaky, unsure man,” Ms. Barrett wrote — drumming his fingers, molding the within of dinner rolls into compact balls, smoking too many cigarettes, chewing an excessive amount of gum, leaping when the phone rang, fiddling along with his piano.
But out got here hit after hit after hit; between his 20s and his 60s, he wrote about 1,500 songs.
Ms. Barrett got here to see her father’s drive because the product of hysteria and toughness that lingered from a ghetto childhood. He was “the road fighter,” she wrote, “not noisy and brawling however quiet, dogged,” by no means shaking the sense that he acted “along with his again in opposition to the wall, writing, composing, negotiating his approach out of a nook.”
Mary Ellin Berlin, who was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Manhattan, grew up in a distinct universe. Her girlhood recollections included dinner events with the Astaires, the Goldwyns, the Capras and Somerset Maugham, who as soon as lay on the ground, balanced a glass of water on his brow and stood up with out spilling a drop.
Although she typically needed to chase her father for consideration and felt alienated by the celebrity of her dad and mom — her mom, Ellin Mackay, was an heiress and a well-liked novelist — Mary Ellin felt much less resentment than enchantment along with her luck. When she relentlessly invited folks to the household’s theater home seats for her father’s 1946 Broadway megahit, “Annie Get Your Gun,” one aggravated buddy advised her to knock it off.
