Exactly 100 years ago, on Jan. 4, 1926, legendary American Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin married Ellin Mackay, a Roman Catholic heiress, in a civil ceremony in Manhattan’s City Hall. What some considered a misalliance of prominent figures from different worlds was the subject of much comment, as much for their class differences as their religious ones. This is the story of how Irving met Ellin, of the difficulties they faced at the start of what proved a happy, 62-year marriage, and of how Irving’s fellow Jews felt about the union.

For more than a century, interfaith marriage has functioned as a kind of Rorschach test within American Jewish life, alternately framed as an existential threat, a sociological inevitability or, more recently, a potential avenue for renewal. Only last month, for example, the Conservative movement formally apologized for decades of discouraging intermarriage and committed itself to a new approach centered on engagement. This is worlds apart from the prevalent attitude in the second half of the 20th century, when intermarriage skyrocketed and communal leaders warned that it was hastening assimilation, eroding a fragile minority culture and causing a crisis.

Such voices were also heard in the 1920s, but in Irving and Ellin’s day the attitude of most Jews was a good deal more benign. A robust Yiddish and Jewish press — including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — closely followed the couple’s romance, and pulpit rabbis discussed it in their sermons, but there was no consensus on whether the celebrity intermarriage was a “menace” to the Jews or, indeed, a sign of their growing acceptance.

The couple’s courtship began on a May evening in 1925 at the home of Frances Wellman, the socially prominent wife of a New York district attorney. Frances had invited her good friend Ellin to dinner. The 21-year-old Ellin, presented to society four years earlier, had recently begun writing for The New Yorker as a voice of the younger, privileged set.

A publicity photo of Irving Berlin taken by his early music publishing company, 1906. (Life magazine images via Wikipedia)

A theater aficionado, Frances was also close enough to 38-year-old Irving Berlin that she felt comfortable calling him to fill in when a dinner guest cancelled at the last minute. That was what happened on the Saturday night that Irving was introduced to Ellin in a meeting that was entirely unplanned.

Irving’s rags-to-riches story was already well-known. Journalist Alexander Woolcott had just published a biography of him and like most everyone, Ellin had enjoyed his songs. Born Israel Baline in a shtetl in Belarus, he had arrived in America in 1893 at age five. His father, a cantor, worked as a meat cutter and a Hebrew tutor in New York; his mother was a midwife. Young Izzy left school to earn a living when his father died in 1901. He began by selling newspapers, but the musical ability he had inherited opened other doors. He found work as a singing waiter in Chinatown, and later at Jimmy Kelly’s Greenwich Village nightclub, the “Montmartre of New York.”

By 1907 he was already writing music. He was erroneously identified on the sheet music of his first published song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” as “I. Berlin” and the spelling stuck; he also began going by “Irving” rather than “Izzy.” His first megahit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which sold over a million copies, came in 1911 and catapulted him to fame. Drafted into the army in 1917, he wrote a patriotic musical, “Yip Yip Yaphank,” and produced it with an all-soldier cast. His blockbuster hit, “God Bless America,” was composed for that show, but not released until years later. By the 1920s, he was internationally famous and quite wealthy, with assets estimated at a million dollars (about $25 million in today’s currency).

Lean and wiry at five feet six, Berlin had briefly been married before. He had wed Dorothy Goetz, a 20-year-old Catholic girl, in a civil ceremony in 1912. During their honeymoon, however, Dorothy had contracted typhoid fever and she died just five months after the wedding. After her tragic death, he composed a plaintive waltz called “When I Lost You” to express his grief. From time to time since then, Irving’s name had been linked with those of other women, but in 1925 he was unattached. He liked to quip that if he were engaged to anyone, it was to Sam Harris, his partner at New York’s Music Box Theatre.

Ellin, for her part, was a bit more attached. She had been seen with Leopold Stokowski, the eminent conductor, and wooed by a Scottish aristocrat, Capt. Ian Campbell, heir to the Dukedom of Argyll. She had even accepted an expensive bauble from the latter, but no engagement had ever been announced.

Nonetheless, the attraction that Saturday night in 1925 was strong and mutual, and the evening did not end with dessert. After dinner, Irving invited Ellin to hear the band at Jimmy Kelly’s. The evening marked the beginning of a passionate romance.

Dancing with the Prince of Wales

To say Ellin Mackay came from money would be a colossal understatement. Her grandfather, John William Mackay, was one of the 20 richest people in the world at his death in 1902. Born into poverty in a Dublin slum, John had arrived in New York in 1840 and answered the call of the California Gold Rush. But it was silver rather than gold that accounted for his vast wealth. He and three other miners had struck it rich in the silver mines of the Comstock Lode.

Ellin Mackay’s insider chronicle of Manhattan nightlife, published in The New Yorker in 1925, became a sensation. (The New Yorker)

John used some of his fortune to form the Commercial Cable Company, which broke financier Jay Gould’s monopoly on transatlantic telegraphy, and the Postal Telegraph Company, which operated networks in the U.S. His wealth rivaled that of Gould and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt II. But his money could not buy him and his wife Louise social acceptance when they moved back east in 1878. As a nouveau riche Irish Catholic, John was snubbed by New York society.

Upon his death, his son Clarence, known as Clarie, inherited some $45 million ($1.7 billion today) and became president of both enterprises. He would eventually extend the telegraph and cable service to three quarters of the circumference of the earth. In 1898 he wed Katherine “Kitty” Duer, a Protestant and a member of the New York “smart set” whose family was listed among the “Four Hundred”; in so doing, he bought himself the social standing that had eluded his parents.

For a wedding gift, John gave the couple a 648-acre estate in Roslyn, Long Island known as Harbor Hill, and Clarie spared no expense in building his new wife a dream house there. He engaged world-famous architect Stanford White to design a 52-room, 80,000-square-foot French chateau at a cost of $6 million ($207 million today) that took two years to complete. Erected on the second highest point on Long Island, it commanded impressive views of the ocean and the sound. The manor boasted a grand entrance hall, a ballroom, a library, a music........

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