Wilfrid Sheed's Musical House of Cards

One of the great aspects of America's popular songs is that everyone has the right to hum them, whether they are by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, or Harold Arlen. This truly democratic music belongs to us all, and any listener can enjoy its tunes. Hence the veteran journalist Wilfrid Sheed has every right to publish "The House That George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty" (Random House, 339 pages, $29.95).

Mr. Sheed, born in 1930, now divides his time between homes in the exclusive Southampton village of North Haven — where in January, a 55-acre waterfront estate was priced at $80 million, the highest priced residential property in New York State history — and the Old Town section of Key West, Florida. He's the scion of a distinguished British family of Catholic writers — his parents Francis Sheed and Mary Ward founded the publishing house Sheed&Ward, which printed such distinguished Catholic authors as Dorothy Day, Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton, and Paul Claudel.

After graduating from Oxford in the early 1950s, Mr. Sheed eventually settled in America, where he published a handful of long-out-of-print novels, nonfiction books on sports and other subjects, and endless articles for Esquire, the New Yorker, and other top-paying magazines. A dozen years ago, Mr. Sheed published "In Love with Daylight," a memoir about surviving polio, a period of depression that followed alcohol and pill dependency, and oral cancer. Only two years ago, Mr. Sheed's misfortunes were in the headlines again, when a home-care aide allegedly swindled him out of tens of thousands of dollars.

The title of "The House That George Built" refers to a "safe house," Mr. Sheed explains, adding that the RKO movie studio was the "closest thing to a safe house for Broadway writers in Hollywood." Mr. Sheed's own safe house was compromised not only by his domestic helper, but by the terrorist attacks on "9/11 that lives in infamy," after which "nobody's words or tunes rang the bell more resonantly or accurately than good old ‘God Bless America.'" To favor the stolid, exclusionist, and hokey "God Bless America" in any book on the artistry of American popular song is a warning signal. "The House That George Built" is not, as is claimed on its cover, a "history of the Golden Age of American popular music" — it's a highly personal collection of musings about songs, some of them quite peculiar indeed.

The fact is that Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriters were often Jewish and sometimes gay. Mr. Sheed, for all the polish of his prose, is clueless and flummoxed about Jews and gays. He refers to Harold Arlen's father as an "active cantor" — as opposed to those passive cantors one hears from. On a page about Irving Berlin's "Always," the question is posed: "Can you transfer the whole schlamozzel to somebody else and still keep it a love song?" Mr. Sheed is confusing the Cockney slang term "shemozzle" or "schmozzle," which means "muddle" or "confusion" with the Yiddish word "schlimazel," or unlucky person.

Gays enjoy even less comprehension than Jews, due to bizarre observations such as "To this day, many people have trouble swallowing love songs from gays." Huh? Mr. Sheed declares that Cole Porter was an "off-the-wall, over-the-top gay man," and likens Porter's excessively discreet recent biographer, William McBrien, to Kenneth Starr for even broaching the subject of the songwriter's sexuality. Mr. Sheed describes Porter's "suspiciously typical gay childhood, with an overpowering mother force-feeding her son the arts, and a shadowy, withdrawn father." And he scorns the elder Porter for "still freakishly craving sex" after years of invalidism.

"The House That George Built" is chock-full of such tone-deaf observations, such as praise for the unbearable Maurice Chevalier's appearances in 1930s Hollywood films as a "one-on-one entertainer, a confider of songs, perfect for the movies." Chevalier was only a great entertainer in French, and Woody Allen once aptly proposed his English-language records as suitable for military torture. Harry Warren's "That's Amore," which Dean Martin himself loathed for its kitschy lyrics such as "When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool, that's amore," is called the "best, most characteristic piece of work in Dino's career." In an appendix, the book honors less-than-stellar songs like 1920s "Barney Google (With the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)" while decrying Sammy Fain's moving "I'll Be Seeing You" — unforgettably recorded by Ray Charles — as "schmaltzy … everything but major."

Writing about Berlin's old age, Mr. Sheed comments, "How much can you or he ask of an eighty-year-old man, anyway?" Coming from a 77-year-old author, this question rings with special significance. At the coda of a hugely successful journalistic and publishing career, "The House That George Built" is poignantly jittery and shell-shocked, a statement by a writer trying to insulate himself with comforting old-time tunes after realizing that no "safe house" exists in his adopted country any longer, if it ever really did.

Mr. Ivry last wrote in these pages about Birgit Nilsson.