Such sweet sorrow
Ranging around the Internet, I found this picture on a free photo site of the songwriter Irving Berlin (1888-1989) and his first wife, Dorothy Goetz, a singer from Buffalo.
I'd heard for years how Irving Berlin's first wife was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery and how he never got over her -- leaving flowers on her grave and even writing songs under the maple tree nearby.
The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra is doing a tribute to Irving Berlin on Saturday night -- Marvin Hamlisch is conducting -- and it seemed like a good opportunity to get the facts straight on the old stories I had heard. So here is the Cliff Notes version: Berlin's wife was the sister of the songwriter E. Ray Goetz -- maybe we will look into him next. She and Irving Berlin went to Cuba on their honeymoon, and that is where Dorothy caught pneumonia and typhoid fever. She died five months later, in 1912, only 20 years old.
Berlin went on to live until 101. He married again -- his second wife was Ellin Mackay, who was heir to a mining fortune. She was Catholic and her family disowned her when she married Berlin because he was Jewish. The Catholic attitude toward religious intermarriage is much more relaxed now, I can say that for certain. Berlin and his second wife seem to have been very happy but it's true, Dorothy always had a place in his heart.
Soon afterward, Berlin wrote a song called "When I Lost You" about losing Dorothy. It became one of his first big successes. Here are the lyrics:
The roses each one
Met with the sun
Sweetheart when I met you
The sunshine had fled
The roses were dead
Sweetheart when I lost you
I lost the sunshine and roses
I lost the heavens of blue
I lost the beautiful rainbow
I lost the morning dew
I lost the angel who gave me
Summer, the whole winter through
I lost the gladness that turned into sadness
When I lost you
The birds ceased their song, right turned to wrong
Sweetheart when I lost you
A day turned to years
The world seemed in tears
Sweetheart when I lost you
I lost the sunshine and roses, I lost the heavens of blue,
I lost the beautiful rainbow, I lost the morning dew.
I lost the angel who gave me summer, the whole winter too.
I lost the gladness that turned into sadness,
When I lost you.
What tender feelings, buried there at Forest Lawn.
-- Mary Kunz Goldman
