He was just three weeks old. When she was a child, Barrett writes, her father would tell the same story each year on Christmas day.
He would explain that when he was a boy, he would sneak out of his Orthodox Jewish household on Christmas Eve. She joined a Manhattan Reform Jewish temple and took the children to Passover seders and Yom Kippur services at this temple. She also informally instructed her children in the basics of Christianity and left a choice of religion, if any, up to them.
Most of the country clubs which formerly welcomed her were now closed to her because she was married to a Jew. Mary Ellin Barrett writes that her parents were both terrified by the rise of the Nazis in the early s and supported those politicians, like Franklin Roosevelt, who tried to steer America on a course of active intervention to stop Germany. Would they have to flee to South America?
Irving Berlin singing God Bless America. Ellin McKay died in July, , age She agreed and their romance began. He compared her beauty to that of a rose. They fell quickly and deeply in love and Berlin proposed marriage some weeks after their meeting. Dorothy said yes, and they were married just a few months later, in February The couple went to Cuba on their honeymoon. But shortly after they arrived, an outbreak of typhoid broke out.
They quickly returned home, where Dorothy became very ill. This membership led indirectly to his marriage.
Louise Antoinette Hungerford was born in New York City but came out West as a child with her parents, who were searching for a way out of their own poverty. At sixteen she married a doctor and the future looked promising until he succumbed to alcoholism and drug abuse and died at a young age. Louise politely declined their offer on the grounds that she could not accept charity and that, although she had a young daughter, she was determined to somehow manage on her own.
John felt he could not let a beautiful woman with that kind of character get away. Father Manogue, a personal friend of both. Louise moved into a much more comfortable existence than she had ever known. John proved to be extremely generous with his newfound wealth and treated his little stepdaughter as if she were his own, eventually legally adopting her. They lived quietly and happily in San Francisco, with John gradually becoming more of a corporate miner, although he still often supervised his mining operations personally.
He also expanded into banking. When the big silver was struck, their lives changed forever. They were soon one of the richest families in America. John became the Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg of his day. He turned to philanthropy, founding a Catholic orphanage in Virginia City and the Opera House in San Francisco, among many other works.
Louise wanted to return to her native New York City and enter society, but their ethnicity and religion — moreso than their nouveau riche status — stood in their way. Louise could be reluctantly accepted as a Catholic since she was of French and English descent, but social status for the wife of an Irish Catholic was out of the question.
Oh Irish, of course. They then rented a second house in London and became friends with the upper echelons of English society. John would leave his family in Paris or London and commute across the Atlantic to take care of his now-expanding business empire. Despite his wealth and success, John never lost his grit or moral compass. John hired detectives to find the source of the rumor and when he located the cad, an unsuccessful businessman, in one of the banks of which Mackay was a director, he confronted him.
He then challenged him to a fistfight, which the hapless slanderer wisely declined from his position on the floor. The Mackays sued the tabloid, won a large financial settlement, and donated it all to charity.
In a later unfortunate incident, a failed miner unreasonably blamed John for his bad luck and shot him. The bullet went into his chest and out his back, but John survived. John William, Jr. However, tragedy stuck when young John was killed in a horse racing accident. It is the only one built with electricity and a heating system so that the priests who prayed for John, Jr. Army Emergency Relief Fund. These special keyboards changed the key, allowing him to play the same notes but produce different sounds.
Berlin also paid music secretaries who notated and transcribed his music. Her father, a financier named Clarence Mackay, disapproved of Berlin because he was Jewish. One biographer noted that though Irving was Jewish and Ellin was Catholic, their three daughters were raised Protestant, "largely because Ellin was in favor of religious tolerance. He died the following year at age
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