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Get yourself set for the biggest news you’ve ever heard since the advent of the audible screen….
— advertisement, Variety (1929) 1
The first screenwriter assigned to the project had little sympathy with Whiteman’s ideas. 2 When their discussions collapsed, the film was rescheduled for the fall and the band planned to head for the Coast in May. Now there were four months to fill, but Whiteman’s plate never remained empty for long. A couple of unexpected opportunities had come his way shortly before the New Year. Florenz Ziegfeld celebrated the first anniversary of his production of Show Boat by launching two new shows in December: an Eddie Cantor musical, Whoopee, on December 4, at the New Amsterdam Theatre, and a completely revised version of his after-hours nightclub revue, Midnight Frolic, three weeks later on the New Amsterdam Roof. Whoopee was a smash, but George Olsen, its featured bandleader and the conductor slated for Midnight Frolic, battled with Ziegfeld, who accused him of reserving his best arrangements for leading lady Ethel Shutta, Olsen’s wife. After Olsen quit or was fired, Ziegfeld hired Whiteman for both shows at a salary rumored to be the highest ever offered a bandleader. 3
On December 29 Whiteman moved his operation into Whoopee with much fanfare and not a little calamity. When Paul gave the downbeat for a dance sketch, the band segued into one piece while lead trumpeter Charlie Margulis started another. Certain that everyone else was wrong, the crocked Margulis figured he could fix things by playing extra loud. Musicians recounted Whiteman sputtering, “Get me a pistol. Somebody kill the son of a bitch. I’ll tear him apart with my hands!” 4 For the finale, the stage rolled over the pit, scaring the hell out of Whiteman, who had not been warned of this innovation in stagecraft. He ran out and, realizing his mistake, could not get back in. Cantor went on a tear, parodying Paul with a drumstick for a baton. The delighted audience assumed it was all planned.
After the curtain, the band and numerous luminaries took the elevator to the Midnight Frolic on the lavish roof, fashioned by Austrian theatrical designer Joseph Urban with pastel colors and lights, glass balconies, and a “pearl” curtain that was actually made of transparent medical capsules painted silver. The roof boasted a chic kitchen with matching prices. Ziegfeld stars, including Fanny Brice and Helen Morgan, stopped by to sing one or two numbers, but the Frolic was Whiteman’s show. He was more at home in a nightclub than in a pit trying to tailor his music to actors.
During this time, the Rhythm Boys were playing their week at the Palace. They finished the engagement the same night Whiteman entered the cast of Whoopee, and two days later they were back on tour, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They were not scheduled for Whoopee, although Bing was whisked into the studio to record a fast, impeccably articulated version of the Eddie Cantor showstopper “Makin’ Whoopee.” By mid-January Whiteman was also on the road, playing weeks in Cincinnati and Detroit, where he hired Andy Secrest, an able if uninspired trumpet player who could handle the jazz solos when Bix was ailing. Returning to Manhattan for the February 5 commencement of his Old Gold show, Paul resumed double duties at the New Amsterdam for nearly three months. When in town the Rhythm Boys occasionally appeared in the roof shows and even in Whoopee, performing an interpolated song. More often they were sent on area tours, returning Tuesdays to take their places on the Old Gold broadcasts.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, to mark his son’s twenty-first birthday, Carl Laemmle Sr. appointed Carl Laemmle Jr. general manager of Universal and dropped the much publicized and hugely expensive Whiteman film in his lap. Junior immediately replaced Wesley Ruggles with Hungarian director Paul Fejos (whose succes d’estime of 1928, The Last Moment, details the last days of a suicide) and assigned the script to Edward T. Lowe (whose thin vita later included Poverty Row Charlie Chans and Bulldog Drummonds). Both men were dispatched to New York, and one can scarcely imagine what Paul made of them. Fejos proposed a history of the orchestra with actors playing the musicians. Under no circumstance was Whiteman going to make a movie about his band without his band; he could not believe anyone would suggest such a thing. Universal obliviously informed the trades that an eight-week shooting schedule would begin June 1 so that Paul could return home for the August racing season at Saratoga. But the start-up was delayed again when Fejos and Lowe limped back to Hollywood. They were accompanied by Ferde Grofe, whom Whiteman asked to orchestrate the score; at least he could get started.
Concurrently, something entirely unexpected happened to popular music: it got younger. The new sound was favored almost exclusively by women, and the object of their passion was not Bing but rather Hubert Prior Vallee, a singer, saxophonist, and bandleader who renamed himself Rudy in honor of his idol, saxophone virtuoso Rudy Wiedoeft. As a Yale undergraduate who spent six years earning a philosophy degree, Vallee led a sticky-sweet band called the Yale Collegians. He believed he possessed rare insight regarding his generation’s musical tastes, which he construed as a desire for rah-rah Ivy League songs, adapted European ballads, and mildly risque novelties about stupid or easy girls. Briefly the public validated his judgment. In 1928 he brought his band, renamed the Connecticut Yankees, into New York’s Heigh-Ho Club, achieving widespread recognition as WABC aired his sets. When he opened at Keith’s 81st Street in February 1929, success became spectacle as mounted police cordoned off an area to accommodate hundreds of fans, many of them teenagers.
Vallee’s trademark appurtenance was a small megaphone, his greeting a jaunty “Heigh-ho, everybody,” his sound a dry, nasal baritone that detractors (they were legion) derisively characterized as “crooning.” By March Vallee had three simultaneous hit records. By June he was starring in a hit film, The Vagabond Lover, which was advertised, “Men hate him — women love him.” By 1930 he had published the first of three unintentionally hilarious autobiographies, fabled for their pettiness and vaunted modesty. (“I apparently have always been like the great surgeon who is too busy performing his superb and skillful operations to take any bows for what he does so easily and naturally.”) 5 By 1931, after watching Crosby perform, Vallee, whose theme song was “My Time Is Your Time,” proved sufficiently astute to observe to friends, “My time is short.” Yet Vallee’s startling popularity helps explain Bing’s strangely uneven recordings in the months before he left for California. They suggest a bout of indecision, as if Bing had lost his compass and was no longer certain what kind of singer he wanted to be.
Bing was now twenty-five and prized by the musicians he admired as well as numerous fans. With Whiteman granting him the freedom to freelance for Columbia sessions, he was in demand to provide “vocal refrains” for studio orchestras. Before the Vallee hysteria set in, Bing was on a roll. He demonstrated confidence at a date by a Sam Lanin outfit, inflecting Spencer Williams’s “Susianna” with a felt ebullience, cannily shading the lyrics with his measured breathing. On the British evergreen “If I Had You,” he embellishes the melody and stresses the vowels, often with a slight turn or mordent. The next day he was on hand for the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, a recording unit copiloted by Jimmy and Tommy, the battling brothers from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, two of the most sought-after freelancers in New York. Glenn Miller arranged the material, and for the first time Bing’s chorus was backed by the ingenious guitarist Eddie Lang. On “The Spell of the Blues,” Bing bends notes for bluesy effect and, despite one Jolsonesque ringer, is clearly his own man. He is no less assured on Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” encouragingly supported by Lang. Best of all is “My Kinda Love,” a flimsy song that he projects stirringly without a trace of the frangible crooning style.
Several days after Vallee’s theatrical breakthrough, however, Bing recorded with Whiteman and for the first time appeared discombobulated. He sang two waltzes — including his second Berlin tune, “Coquette” — in a key too high for him and in a style that might be described as a poised croon, deft but diffident. The second tune, “My Angeline,” was deemed unreleasable; a week later Bing gave Whiteman an acceptable version, but even then his top notes were soft. Bing was clearly in a state, and we can only speculate about what threw him. Perhaps he would have been more himself if Challis, not William Grant Still, had arranged “Coquette.” Perhaps he withered under the glare of the despotic anti-jazz producer Eddie King. Perhaps he simply had a bad day. Most likely, Vallee had gotten to him in a way drink never did, as witness the far more significant follow-up session.
On March 14, encouraged by the Vallee phenomenon, Columbia offered Bing his first date under his own name. He was backed by three Whiteman musicians (violinist Matty Malneck, pianist Roy Bargy, guitarist Snoozer Quinn). All his experience during the four years since the Musicaladers should have been consolidated in this hour, yet the records are unaccountably lifeless. Spurred by the vitality he achieved on “My Kinda Love” with the Dorseys, Bing chose to rerecord it, but this time he overloaded the song with self-conscious vocal techniques; for the first time, he was thrown off-kilter by a doubled-up tempo change. On the wholly undistinguished song “Till We Meet,” he sounds not unlike singers he was in the process of demolishing.
By contrast, he was in splendid form a few weeks later, in April, for arguably the best of the Rhythm Boys sessions. “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together,” by Harry Barris and Billy Moll (“I Want a Little Girl”), recounts an ornithological covenant while advancing the merrily subversive subtext of miscegenation, a theme previously explored in 1924, when Eva Taylor, accompanied by Louis Armstrong, recorded “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.” Bing begins the number with his hand cymbal and sings his solo parts with aplomb, using mordents and a midrange croon, but without the corn of “My Kinda Love.” Later passages suggest a rapping modernism, and the unison harmonization shows the trio at its best. In case anyone doubted the soloist’s identity, “Louise” begins with a phone call for Bing (“I wonder who could be calling when I’m recording,” he grouses. “Louise? That’s different.”) The phone found its way into their live act. On some nights the routine had Hollywood on the line, calling for Bing to make pictures. And why not? After all, Hollywood had called Rudy Vallee.
Returning to the studio with Whiteman, Bing appeared perplexed once again, casting about for style. He did as well as could be expected on the ineffable Jolson tearjearker “Little Pal,” tossing in a tearful mordent and somehow managing to sound rational. The potentially vital “Reaching for Someone,” a Challis arrangement recorded on Bing’s twenty-sixth birthday, is marred by his misguided attempt to vocally mimic Tram’s saxophone glissandi at the turnbacks, a tasteless conceit in an otherwise fine performance and one he never repeated. Bing, Tram, and Bix all enliven “Oh, Miss Hannah,” a southern song (“the moon am shining bright”). Bing stresses the word roses with a mordent employed not for sentiment but to underscore rhythmic pulse, and swells the final cadence. Yet at the same session he is indifferently orotund on Gus Edwards’s “Orange Blossom Time.”
Unlike Armstrong, who was born practically fully formed, Bing flirted with styles before settling into one unremittingly his own, one that would prove applicable to every kind of song. His natural reserve led him toward an economy of expression, but the times encouraged his inclination toward grandiloquence. To a certain degree his dilemma was created by his obligation to fulfill Whiteman’s requirements. When he was afforded good material, Bing could make the whole band shine. But Paul’s more bombastic pieces demanded a stolid projection. The miracle of Bing’s tenure with the band is how consistently he held himself apart from its pomposity. Like Bix, Bing seems to open a window and let in fresh air almost every time he stands up to solo. Only in the spring and summer of 1929, Vallee’s brief time in the sun, did Bing blink. He was the one, after all, who should have been moving into the limelight, not that mewling throwback to the kind of dullards he and Louis Armstrong were consigning to oblivion.
Bing’s musical confusion did not detract from his appetite for good times, leading to one professional and personal lapse that almost ended in disaster. Whiteman’s orchestra played a two-week engagement at the Pavillon Royal on Long Island’s Merrick Road. On Sunday, May 12, Bing, Al, Harry, and Mischa Russell, a violinist in the band, entertained some Ziegfeld Follies girls at the apartment of a wealthy friend. Late in the afternoon their host proposed a sailboat cruise on Long Island Sound. As they launched onto the water, Bing leaned against the rail, hoisted a glass of champagne, and began a song just as the boat hit a wave. He was tossed overboard. Wind drove the boat 300 yards before the skipper could come about. Bing’s expertise as a swimmer saved him. He was treading water and laughing when they fished him out — reason enough to return to New York and resume the festivities.
At 2:00 A.M. the Whiteman foursome and the Ziegfeld girls repaired to the apartment of one of the chorines. They slept late and missed the bus Whiteman had chartered to take his musicians to Long Island. When they realized that there was no way they could make the gig in time, they knew they were in serious trouble and had no recourse but to apologize profusely. Whiteman threatened to fire them. The boys had never seen him angrier. Yet he calmed down when they promised to reform. Asked years later whether Bing had been hard to handle, Paul replied, “No, he was never hard to handle. But sometimes he was hard to find.” 6
On May 24, hours before the Whiteman caravan headed west, Bing made his second date as a leader. Backed by three musicians, this time including Lang on guitar, he covered Vallee’s adaptation of a German song, “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,” humming, whistling, and finishing with jazzy adornments. But then he lost his moorings on “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be?,” missing a note and veering out of tune on a scat break. Even his usually flawless time failed him. Bing needed a break from New York.
The Whiteman—Old Gold Special chugged out of Pennsylvania Station on May 24, a privately chartered train of eight coaches, two for baggage alone, another for Paul’s Duesenberg. The party of fifty included thirty-five musicians, managers, a crew of audio experts, staff arranger William Grant Still, the vice president of P. Lorrillard (Old Gold footed the bills), and reporters, most notably Variety’s Abel Green, who filed regular dispatches along the way as, over the course of twelve days, the band performed — in addition to weekly broadcasts — free concerts in sixteen cities, from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City. It was a public-relations bonanza, the showbiz story of the year. When they did not have a hall, the band performed on the train’s extended observation platform, and no one complained when local radio stations set up microphones. Indeed, the sponsor was overjoyed to have the whole country tracking the bandleader’s journey to California. “This is a nite club, all stag, on wheels,” Green reported, “except that the club is going all hours, day and night.” 7 In Nebraska the band entertained 4,500 at Omaha’s City Auditorium in the afternoon and 1,500 at the Lincoln train station at night. In Denver Whiteman participated in a much photographed reunion with his parents. Throughout the trip black porters (“Ethiops” in the parlance of Variety) greeted him as king and treated him accordingly.
Shortly before the band left New York, the premier violin-guitar team of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang signed on as members of the troupe (previously they had been contracted for individual recordings), and they provided much of the journey’s intramural entertainment, not all of it musical. Along with banjoist Mike Pingitore and violinist Wilbur Hall, they formed a string quartet to serenade the king at dinner. Venuti was a dedicated practical joker. Heading through Utah and finding Bix in a dead sleep, he gathered sand buckets (used to extinguish fires) from passenger cars and heaped the sand on Bix’s lap, the adjoining seat, and the floor. When Bix came to and blanched, Venuti reassured him that they had safely emerged from the worst sandstorm in years. Bix protested, “Why didn’t someone wake me up? I could have suffocated.” 8
Lang and Venuti were two prodigiously talented Italians from Philadelphia. After Bix, they were arguably the most influential white jazz musicians of the 1920s, serving as a sort of template for the famed European jazz ensemble of the 1930s, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which featured guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelly. They blended their instruments in virtuoso ten-string exercises that combined classicism and swing in astonishing breakneck exhibitions, but they were also capable of poignant lyricism. Inseparable in their school years, they remained personally and musically close and had no need for arrangements; once they agreed on a key, they could improvise all evening. Yet as individuals they could not have been more different. Venuti, a physically imposing man with a growly voice and temperament, was a resolute gambler and joker, said to be the only man to nettle the placid King of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers. (When they shared a stage bill in the 1940s, Joe struck up a conversation with Roy as he awaited a cue astride his palomino, Trigger; while they conversed, Venuti triggered the horse with his violin bow, producing an immoderate erection that convulsed the audience.) Joe was a loner who worked when he felt like it, an eccentric and natural comedian — just the type of personality Bing relished.
Lang was his polar opposite: quiet, thoughtful, responsible, a ruminative Catholic. Bing came to regard him as a counterpart. Eddie was one of the few people in Bing’s life to get beyond the role of a jester or playmate and become a genuine confidant. He was Bing’s most intimate friend, almost certainly the closest he would ever have. Until Lang’s tragic death in 1933, they traveled together, making wonderful music on records and in films. Eddie’s wife, Kitty, whom he met in 1920, when she was touring in a Ziegfeld Follies road company and he was playing banjo with a band in Philadelphia, described him as a “shy boy with black, curly hair and grey-green eyes. He could barely say hello, but he had the sweetest smile I ever saw.” 9 They eloped in 1926, enduring rough times until the good jobs began coming Eddie’s way. He introduced Kitty to Bing in a nightclub: “Eddie and I were with Jimmy Dorsey and his wife Janey. Bing came over to our table and sat down for a few minutes. He was a happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, a perfect gentleman at all times, though he had had a few drinks. Eddie told me afterwards that he believed this guy Bing would go places as he had everything going for him once he settled down to business.” 10
“Well we are wending our way westward and having a truly marvelous time of it,” Bing wrote home to his mother. After detailing the itinerary, he penitently reassured Kate: “If nothing else our return to Whiteman has been fruitful because of this trip. Not only are we having a great time but my name is being prominently featured in the newspapers and in the broadcasts and considerable invaluable publicity thus redounds to me. What awaits us on the Coast is as yet problematical and whether we get much of a break in the picture or not I can’t tell now. However, I intend to bear down heavily and really try to accomplish something worth while.” 11 He told her that they figured to be in Los Angeles on June 20 and that she could write him in care of Everett, who had recently married the former Naomi Tillinghast and settled in what Bing later described to Kate as a “cute home.” 12
The band pulled into Los Angeles at 3:00 P.M. on June 6 for a covert huddle with Universal officials, then continued to San Francisco to play a week of vaudeville at the Pantages Theater. The official arrival in Los Angeles, preceding yet another week of vaudeville, was accompanied by the usual ballyhoo at Central Station: speech by the mayor, key to the city, all the contract players Universal could muster as a welcoming committee, plus a crowd of 500 fans. This was White-man’s first visit to California in three years — he had been away since the time he recruited Bing and Al. Carl Laemmle brought the musicians to the lot to show off a clubhouse he had built for them, called Whiteman Lodge, complete with rehearsal room, fireplace, billiard tables, library, lockers, and showers. Transportation problems were solved when a Ford dealer offered each of Whiteman’s men a Model A roadster, almost at cost, the payments to be deducted from their salaries over the course of their stay. Whiteman ordered thirty-five. Bing chose a convertible. As a promotional gimmick, each roadster sported a prominent spare tire with the potato-head caricature, which became a carrot for highway patrolmen who learned that if they followed one long enough, they would get to issue a summons or two.
During an impromptu interview, Whiteman made the ominous remark “I haven’t seen the script yet, but I can tell you one thing. Jazz is losing out to the slower rhythms. You might print that and quote me!” 13 If his statement was intended as grievance, he himself was partly to blame, having decided to hire a team of conventional writers like Mabel Wayne (who wrote Whiteman’s hit “In a Little Spanish Town”) and L. Wolfe Gilbert (who wrote the Jolson classic “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee”), when he might have had his pick of the sophisticated songwriting talents lighting up Broadway. He also chose to leave Challis at home in favor of Grofe and Still. Whiteman’s concert violinist, Kurt Dieterle, thought he made that decision because Challis was too painstaking and slow for the Hollywood mill. Challis, however, was not nearly as slow as scriptwriter Ed Lowe. When Whiteman checked in with the front office on June 24, he was flabbergasted to learn that there was no script. Furthermore, Grofe complained that time and again he was asked to score a tune and after finishing the job was told the tune had been scrapped.
Aside from radio broadcasts, the band had nothing to do except golf, party, drink, and drive around, all on the Universal dole. Mischa Russell was arrested for drunk driving and held by a peculiarly liberal turnkey; when some of his friends visited the lockup, they were informed that Russell and his jailer had gone to the movies but that they were welcome to wait if they liked. Comedy turned to tragedy six weeks into their stay when several musicians took off in a fleet of cars for a gig in Santa Barbara. Venuti broke from his lane to pass a slowpoke and crashed into an oncoming vehicle. His wrist was badly mangled; for a while it was feared he would never play again. His passenger, Mario Perry, an accordionist and one of Whiteman’s earliest associates, died en route to the hospital. The two women in the other car, though unharmed, filed suit against Venuti and Whiteman. Hollywood had become a nightmare.
Bing stayed out of trouble. “Universal gave the boys two hundred dollars a week, each boy,” Kurt Dieterle recalled, “and we also had the Old Gold broadcasts — that was another fifty dollars. The first three months they were rewriting the story, five of us who were golfers — Chet Hazlett, Roy Bargy, Bing and Al Rinker, and myself — went and joined Lakeside. Hazlett bought a regular membership and the rest of us bought associate memberships for five hundred dollars. We didn’t do a lick of work as far as the orchestra. The five of us went to Lakeside in the morning, played a round of golf, each with our own caddy. After lunch we would play another eighteen holes.” 14 Bing, Dieterle, and Mischa Russell rented a house for the summer on Fairfax Avenue and hired a cook. They visited Universal only on payday. Bing recalled Whiteman’s saying, “Well, thanks a lot for managing to get over here for your checks — thanks a lot.” 15
In those days, the membership of Lakeside Golf Club was dominated by the film industry, and Bing became friendly with several actors, including Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers, Oliver Hardy, and Johnny Weissmuller. But his entree into Hollywood really began to take wing after the Rhythm Boys, alone among the Whiteman musicians, sought a steady job. “We are trying to line up some extra work while here but the rehearsals and radio just about make it impossible,” Bing wrote Kate, overstating their labors:
However, we plan an opening at the Montmartre cafe in Hollywood for a short time to see how it works out. This will help to tide us over during our enforced idleness. Picture work is, of course, possible for the trio, but we are prevented from doing any of this until the Universal picture is completed, and even in that it is quite probable that we’ll be left on the cutting room floor. In the meantime I am going to make some screen tests for MGM, as has been suggested to me quite often since my arrival here, and, who knows, something may come of them? 16
The Rhythm Boys were a hit at the Montmartre Cafe, but nothing came of Bing’s MGM tests or of subsequent tests at Fox, where casting director Jim Ryan complimented Bing’s singing and asked him to read lines for chief of production Winfield Sheehan. Bing recalled Sheehan’s saying, “Very good, but the ears are wingy.” Bing told the tale on TV in 1971: “I thought he said, ‘The years are winging,’ and I said, no, I’m twenty-whatever-I-was-then. He said, ‘No, the ears are winging, there’s no way we can photograph you, it would be a lot of big problems.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid that there just isn’t a place for you in pictures.’ I went on my way and the years went by and I finally belonged to the same church he did, Blessed Sacrament out in Beverly Hills. He used to sit in the third row, so when I went to communion, I’d come back and as I passed him I’d go [he mimed flapping his ears].” 17 Bing never forgot the slights of those days and polished the particulars like old silver. To Jim Ryan he attributed the crack “A camera pointed straight at you would make you look like a taxi with both doors open.” 18
Though he continued to make the studio rounds, Bing did not seem especially ambitious to those who worked with him. A member of Whiteman’s radio cast, Dorothea Ponce of the Ponce Sisters, who occasionally sang with Bing, remembered: “He didn’t seem star material at the time. He was simply a part of the weekly program with the Rhythm Boys. I never thought of him going out on his own and leaving them.” 19 Bing rarely showed his hand. Sometimes he appeared not to know what cards he was holding. Rudy Vallee told of Bing’s diffidence one evening in Baltimore, when he shared a bill with the trio:
Above the chatter of the diners the Rhythm Boys might just as well have stayed in bed; no one was paying the slightest attention to them. But suddenly a hush fell upon this crowd of Baltimore’s elite. One of the Rhythm Boys was singing a song called “Montmartre Rose,” and even though he lacked any amplification or means of channeling his sound waves to us, his voice commanded instant silence [and] when he finished the crowd applauded wildly and cried for more. As though he were oblivious to their shouts and applause, almost as though he were hard of hearing, he threaded his way back through the tables and passed by our sax section, not more than a foot and a half from me. I was struck by the lack of expression on his face, which was a mask of complete indifference. Bing Crosby was a hit and didn’t even know it! 20
Bing undoubtedly did know it, but he was not inclined to let on, then or ever. Although he sang solo on Whiteman’s broadcasts as often as he sang with the trio, neither he nor his partners acknowledged the inevitable split that had to come. Whiteman attempted to stifle his ambitions, threatening to fire him if he continued to seek screen tests. Yet pressure from Everett and established agents was building for him to go out on his own. They all wanted a piece of him.
The young Hollywood crowd was captivated by Bing’s casually handsome composure. After the Second World War, an observer suggested that if a celestial visitor arrived at a cocktail party seeking an earthling leader and was directed to a group in which Bing was chatting with Winston Churchill and Douglas MacArthur, it would probably assume Crosby was the guy in charge. Even in 1929, when he was scrambling after a new career and shying from responsibility, peering at his future through the mist of rotgut whiskey and generally preferring a life on the fairway, Bing imparted a near regal nonchalance. His innate propriety deflected the kind of vanity that curdles into narcissism. The distinct warmth that defined his singing and later his acting made him seem cool yet approachable. A young contract player named Sylvia Picker observed, “Truthfully, there wasn’t a girl in town who wasn’t nuts about Bing Crosby.” 21 His working-class man’s-man insouciance was found no less fascinating by men. He had none of the brilliantined conceit and manicured irony rife in Hollywood. He came across as an extraordinary ordinary guy.
The Rhythm Boys worked the entire month of July at Eddie Brandstatter’s Montmartre Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard. They were billed as Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys and touted as the “Musical Sensation of Los Angeles,” “America’s Foremost Entertainers,” 22 and, in a stretch even by Tinseltown’s standards, “Direct from Ziegfeld’s Roof in Their First Appearance Outside of New York.” 23 The second-story cafe was a blocklong room with banquet tables (packed for fashionable luncheons), a small dance floor ringed with tables, and a bandstand. It was the hot spot of the moment, and fans routinely crowded under the ornate marquee to see who entered: a mix of celebrities and coddled would-be stars of the new all-talking picture business. The Los Angeles Evening Express trumpeted Brandstatter’s coup in luring the trio away from New York (“at great expense”), 24 and the club boasted increasing receipts as young Hollywood turned out every night to be in on something new and adventurous.
Bill Hearst and his college friends from San Francisco were regulars, as was another acquaintance from vaudeville days, Phil Harris, who had just returned from a long tour of Australia and was playing drums and coleading a band. “The Montmartre was the place, that and the Cocoanut Grove,” said Harris. “And that’s the first time I heard him do a ballad, ‘I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,’ and he knocked the roof in with it. When Bing finished, I mean, I never heard anything like it, you could hear a pin drop.” 25 The crowd demanded an encore, and the boys reprised their flagwaver, “Mississippi Mud.” The trio was invited to countless parties, including one in Catalina at which Bing and Al ended up squiring Lita Grey Chaplin, recently divorced from Charlie Chaplin, and her friend, starlet Catherine Dale Owen. One thing led to another, and the Rhythm Boys were soon engaged for a week in a vaudeville package at the Orpheum, billed second (“syncopated song, melody, comedy you will talk about for months”) to Lita, “California’s own crooning beauty.” 26 They played two shows daily at the Orpheum, then rushed to make their evening sets at the Montmartre.
Among the starlets and hopefuls who crowded the Montmartre was a young couple, each recently signed to Fox. He was Frank Albertson, the busy character actor who would be remembered as Sam Wainright in It’s a Wonderful Life and the lecherous millionaire robbed by Janet Leigh in Psycho. At that time, he was a fleshy-faced second lead and a friend of Bing’s, eager to introduce him to his beautiful seventeen-year-old date. She was Dixie Lee, an introverted but temperamental southern-born actress and singer who dyed her dark hair platinum blond and was fully expected to make the transition from starlet to star. Frank and Dixie had worked together in two films, in the star-studded chorus of Happy Days and as the second leads in The Big Party (both released in 1930). Before she arrived in Hollywood, Dixie had won a singing contest in Chicago that eventually led to a job understudying Peggy Bernier in Good News. Known as Dixie Carroll in those days, she had heard about Bing from her roommates, Bernier and Holly Hall, both of whom complained about his habit of last-minute cancellations. “I just wanted to meet this character once and tell him off,” Dixie said in 1946. When Bing did call her in Chicago, wanting to meet her, Dixie asked one of her roommates to handle him: “You tell that guy I’m not in the habit of going places to meet anybody — especially him.” 27 Yet at the Montmartre, seeing and hearing him for the first time, she coyly asked Frank to introduce her to him by her real name, Billie Wyatt. Dixie and Bing struck no sparks that night, but Bing was flattered when she returned to hear him sing, especially when he found out she was the well-known Fox starlet Dixie Lee.
In late August, nearly three months after his arrival in Hollywood, Universal presented Whiteman with a script. He read it with disbelief. To his utter bewilderment, the studio intended to make him a leading man in a conventional love story. Hollywood’s incomprehensible, always unsuccessful attempts to make romantic figures of rotund or oddball music personalities would eventually sink the cinematic aspirations of performers ranging from Kate Smith to Liberace to Pavarotti; it is to Whiteman’s credit that he was appalled rather than tempted by Universal’s blandishments. Paul prepared to leave California as soon as possible. He would return when the studio could assure him that it had a reasonable story idea. If Whiteman was mad, the Laemmles were livid: they had already spent $350,000 and had nothing to show for it. After broadcasting on August 27, Whiteman’s troupe boarded the train for New York and an emergency job Jimmy Gillespie had lined up at the Pavillon Royal. They had a stowaway in Hoagy Carmichael, who had come west on his own without the prospect of work and without finding any; he shared a berth with Bing.
In fact, Whiteman made off with much more than Hoagy. At a party in New York a year earlier, he had met Margaret Livingston, who played the vamp in the bulrushes in F. W. Murnau’s masterwork, Sunrise, a movie Whiteman adored and screened repeatedly. Though married to his second wife, Paul devoted much of his California sojourn — when not in attendance at the dozens of parties thrown in his honor by such film luminaries as Marion Davies, Richard Barthelmess, and Ronald Colman — to his courtship of Livingston, who was filming on the Universal lot. In 1931, after he complied with her ultimatum to diet, they married; they remained a devoted couple until his death in 1967.
He did no less well on the musical front, as Bing and Al finally found a way to favor their benefactress, Mildred Bailey. Paul made it clear he wasn’t hiring anybody, including Hoagy, but Bing and Al knew that if they could get Whiteman to hear Mildred, he’d fall under her spell. Millie became friendly with several guys in the band that summer. She took them horseback riding in the Hollywood Hills, cooked up a storm, and served her home brew, which created quite a sensation, as decent beer was hard to find. Bing and Al encouraged her to throw a party for the band and its leader. Whiteman, a prodigious beer drinker, happily accepted the invitation. As Bing recalled, “Paul didn’t know it at the time, but he was a goner when he walked into the house.” 28
Hoagy, Roy Bargy, and pianist-arranger Lennie Hayton took turns at Millie’s Steinway. Rinker describes what happened next: “Finally, Bing turned to Mildred and said, ‘Hey, Millie, why don’t you sing a song?’ No one had ever heard her sing but they all joined in, ‘Yeah, c’mon, Millie, let’s have a song.’At first, Mildred acted reluctant, but I knew it wouldn’t last long.” 29 She asked Al to accompany her on “(What Can I Say, Dear) After I Say I’m Sorry,” and “she sang the hell out of the song.” After a brief silence everyone started to cheer, and Whiteman, who had been in the kitchen, asked who was singing. Bing barked, “That was Millie, Al’s sister.” Whiteman joked, “Don’t tell me that there’s one in the family who can sing!” He then walked over, kissed her, and asked for an encore. “All her past experience singing in speakeasies and night spots came out as she sang. Her small, pure voice gave the songs feeling and meaning, and you knew you were hearing a singer who was very special,” Al wrote. 30 That night Paul hired her to sing the popular lament “Moanin’ Low” on Tuesday’s Old Gold show. Weeks later she was on the train to New York, a contract in her purse — the first “girl singer” to tour with an orchestra. A year later she was the highest-salaried performer on Whiteman’s payroll.
* * *
On the previous occasion when Whiteman played the Pavillon Royal, Bing had fallen into the Long Island Sound and almost lost his job, if not his life. This time he had a dire experience of another sort. Bing and his brothers told the story so often that it became family lore, the details mutating in the telling. Apparently the evening began when Kitty Lang rounded up some Ziegfeld girls for a party and Bing found his companion less than stimulating. In their 1937 fictionalized biography, Ted and Larry Crosby say he left the table and walked to the bandstand to hear a new song, “Singin’ in the Rain,” and returned to find his date “pouting.” The gerund has the ring of discernment, because Bing could not abide pouting and found emotional neediness as unpleasant as emotional dishonesty.
He left for another speakeasy, where a Valentino wannabe — padded shoulders, greased hair parted in the middle — recognized him and bought him a drink. Bing joined the stranger’s party, embarking on a forty-eight-hour brandy binge. He came to in a strange hotel room and stumbled into the bathroom seconds before the front door was blasted open by machine-gun fire and his companions were sprayed by bullets, all wounded but none killed. Bing stayed in the bathroom “for what seemed hours,” 31 until a cop opened the door and asked him who he was, eliciting an innocent-bystander routine that Bing claimed surpassed anything he did in the movies. The next day he learned he had spent two days in the hideout of Machine Gun Jack McGurn, the dapper Capone killer who had taken part months earlier in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and had slit the throat of singer (later, thanks to McGurn, comedian) Joe E. Lewis.
However mortified Bing may have been by his behavior — and if the McGurn story was embellished, his predilection for a binge was not — he continued to make professional strides. During the band’s weeks in New York, before Universal summoned them back to resume (or begin) work on King of Jazz, Whiteman and Columbia refused to record the Rhythm Boys because they had failed to develop any new material. Barris was not included in any sessions at all. But Bing was still in demand for studio work.
He had finally exorcised the demon Vallee and was now intent on insulating himself from the word crooner, a term that due chiefly to Vallee was almost always used disparagingly, often implying deviance. Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell denounced crooning as a force for evil and invited parishioners to share his “sensation of revolting disgust at a man whining a degenerate song, which is unworthy of any American man.” 32 Pundits followed suit. The Springfield Union, enraged to the point of grammatical chaos, reviled crooning as a “gratuitous insult to that intelligent person which rightfully expects a better return for its expensive investment in radio equipment.” 33
What, we may ask, were such laughable denunciations really about? Is the subtext nothing more than fear of homosexuality, and if so, why all the indignation over Vallee and not the Nick Lucases, Gene Austins, and Jack Fultons who preceded him? We may agree, from a musical point of view, that Vallee and company were “whining,” but the diatribes, with their emphases on manliness and words like degenerate augur Hitler’s excuses for banning Weimar artists. In truth, Vallee was a big, convenient target. The real prey was the entire sexual undercurrent manifest in the Jazz Age, particularly its music, which along with Prohibition lured women into saloons and crossed racial boundaries. A youth music almost by definition implies rebellion, family tension, the potential for anarchy.
Bing’s singing was nothing if not virile. He would cause a far greater furor than Vallee, but the Cardinal O’Connells of the world could never tag him with imputations of effeteness. After Bing achieved his breakthrough, the word crooner would usually be used descriptively or with admiration. In September Bing recorded for the first time in four months, since the high-strung “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be?,” and gave free rein to his natural tones. His heartiness uplifts Grofe’s arrangement of “Waiting at the End of the Road,” an Irving Berlin song memorably introduced in King Vidor’s black musical film, Hallelujah. This was the pre-Vallee Bing, restored and confident. His effortless swing was the flash point for the session, which proved to be Bix’s last with Whiteman.
Bix, drinking excessively, was coming apart at the seams and ruined several takes. A few days later Paul put him on a train for his family home in Davenport, Iowa, hoping he would cure himself. Paul kept him on salary for months, until it became clear he would not be coming back to the band. Bix returned to New York, though, and freelanced on several sessions — playing a memorably affecting solo on his last as a leader, “I’ll Be a Friend (With Pleasure).” He died in August 1931 at twenty-eight. “Every once in a while he’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and make me change beds with him,” recalled Bing, 34 who refused to concede that Bix was an alcoholic, maybe because, like himself, he could go without liquor for days at a time. But Bing was kidding himself, more than twenty years after the fact, when he wrote of a man who often started his day with four ounces of gin, “In the end, it was his lack of sleep and his physical exhaustion which broke his health and killed him.” 35
Bing’s third session under his own name, in late September, was little better than the first two and suffered from pompous, non-jazz accompaniment. Columbia probably wanted to disabuse him of his inclination to scat or embellish. On the movie tango “Gay Love” (written by Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare for The Delightful Rogue), he emotes with a purple bravado that prefigures his hit recording of “Temptation,” the movie tango composed for him a few years later, sobbing the high notes and employing a robust attack no one could misconstrue as crooning. 36 No less operatic is his work with Whiteman on two Vincent Youmans songs, “Great Day” and “Without a Song.” On the former he staunchly sings the verse before disappearing into a trebly choir. “Without a Song,” however, taken at a peppy tempo that displeased its composer, is a Crosby coup of the sort that encourages one to speculate on how inspiring it must have been to, say, Frank Sinatra, who was fourteen when the Youmans numbers were released on a hugely popular platter. Bing’s phrasing, breathing, vibrato, and projection are superbly coordinated, and he pins the high note free and clear, demonstrating hardly a trace of his or anyone else’s mannerisms. His vocal is the more remarkable for crowning an otherwise dreary arrangement.
Bing is more in his element and again in marvelous voice with Whiteman on Lennie Hayton’s pert arrangement of “If I Had a Talking Picture of You,” backed by Lang and Venuti. The chemistry between Bing and Eddie is fully realized on “After You’ve Gone,” a delightfully cool William Grant Still arrangement with voicings that blend rather than separate the strings and the winds, as well as a climax that includes an Andy Secrest solo in the style of Bix and a Joe Venuti solo in a style all his own, complete with sparkling break. Directly after the session Whiteman returned to Hollywood, with the band following a day or so later. This time there was no hoopla, no dispatches from the front, no broadcasts, just a quick jaunt to get the damn movie made.
* * *
On October 22, 1929, a few days before the Whiteman band regrouped in Hollywood, Charles Mitchell, chairman of National City Bank, responded to the sense of dread enveloping Wall Street with consoling words: “I know of nothing fundamentally wrong with the stock market or with the underlying credit structure.” 37 On October 23 Paramount and Warners called off their negotiations for a merger that might have completely altered Hollywood history — not a moment too soon. Twenty-four hours later, Black Thursday, the market imploded as nearly 13 million shares were traded at a loss of $6 billion. The band arrived in Los Angeles a day later; like most Americans, the musicians were undistracted by the crash. Few of them were in the market, and no one believed that the panic on Wall Street would be anything more than a brief inconvenience. In days that followed, experts reassured the country that the market had stabilized. But on Tuesday, as Paul resumed broadcasting, the bottom fell out; nearly 16.5 million shares were traded at a loss of three times the money circulating in the entire nation. Hollywood digested Black Tuesday with Variety’s famous headline: WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.
Few Americans were worried even at that stage, certainly not members of the Whiteman band, several of whom had secured raises just before the trip. No one saw the big bad wolf of the Depression slavering at the door. Nor could anyone have imagined that, by a Hollywood-style contradiction, the nation’s financial ruin would have an even more salubrious impact on the fortunes of show business than Prohibition. True, the movie business would never again enjoy the figures of 1929, when 23,000 theaters were visited by an average of 95 million people a week. By 1936 the number of screens would be shaved by a third and would not rise beyond 20,000 until the 1980s. The number of weekly filmgoers would also decline permanently, slashed by radio and television and the Internet to a late-nineties average of 22 million. Still, never was escapist entertainment needed more than during the Depression. Hollywood rose to the occasion.
As the wolf settled in for a lengthy stay, entertainment provided solace and balm. But reduced prices and varied giveaways were not enough to lure people into trading hard-earned pennies for filmed vaudeville. They wanted magic and romance and novelty; stories with happy endings and a chastened wolf. Whiteman’s King of Jazz would turn out to be a mammoth casualty of that demand — a sad irony, because Universal’s was the most magical revue of an era in which every studio felt obliged to release an oversize, vaudeville-style parade of talent. Had King of Jazz been finished on time, it almost certainly would have been a smash hit. Instead, because of the delays that plagued the production, the first film revue announced was the last to be released; it would appear just as the excitement surrounding “audible variety” ended.
When Universal signed Whiteman, it had no major stars, an inconvenience the studio hoped to disguise with Whiteman’s status and a supercolossal production. Junior Laemmle decided that the solution to his script problems was a variety show. His writer, Edward Lowe, could stay on to provide continuity between the numbers, but Laemmle sought a top theatrical showman to replace his director, Paul Fejos. Whiteman lobbied for John Murray Anderson, a former dancer with whom he had worked at the Paramount Theater in 1928 and whose lush and innovative direction of The Greenwich Village Follies (1919-24) thrilled Broadway. He was hired at $50,000, half Whiteman’s salary, but an extraordinary sum considering his total lack of movie experience. Anderson, the nucleus of a formidable crew, brought in set and costume designer Herman Rosse, who won King of Jazz’s only Academy Award (he later worked on set decor for Frankenstein), and choreographer Russell Markert, who went on to create the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Junior asked Anderson to meet with Fejos and cameraman Hal Mohr to discuss the use of a twenty-eight-ton crane and boom camera built for the just released musical Broadway. He then fired Fejos but retained Mohr — an innovator in color photography — and two other cameramen, color expert Ray Rennahan and special-effects wizard Jerry Ash. Anderson insisted that Universal shoot the entire picture in the two-strip process (red-orange and blue-green) developed by Technicolor.
Never before had a Hollywood studio bestowed upon a first-time director as much money and control as Universal yielded to John Murray Anderson; nor would any studio follow suit until RKO imported Orson Welles from New York a decade later. Whatever he desired, he received — dozens of extras in flamboyant and costly foreign costumes, a 500-foot bridal veil, the first-ever Technicolor cartoon, film rights (estimated at $50,000) to “Rhapsody in Blue.” He did accept a few constraints. The nightclub act of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante held out for too much money, and negotiations with Rodgers and Hart fell through. But he was able to reassign the score to the team that had written his recent Broadway flop, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac: Jack Yellen and Milt Ager, old-school songsmiths whose many hits included “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He kept only two of Mabel Wayne’s tunes, including the waltz “It Happened in Monterey.”
Anderson also recruited sixteen chorus girls and two sister acts: the Sisters G, a Yiddish vocal and dance team from Europe, and the Brox (originally Brock) Sisters, a close-harmony trio who got their start by auditioning for Irving Berlin on the telephone from their home in Edmonton, Canada. They became regulars in Berlin’s Music Box Revues, including one in 1924 staged by Anderson. The Brox Sisters were already in Hollywood; along with Cliff Edwards, they introduced “Singin’ in the Rain” in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Bing became smitten with the pretty married one, Bobbe.
Junior, preoccupied with his production of All Quiet on the Western Front, not only allowed Anderson three months to rehearse and shoot the picture but permitted him to improvise sequences as he advanced, shooting acres of film. A script was transcribed after the fact. Rehearsals began November 6, but as of December 11 Universal had yet to nail down a final cast. An ad in Variety boasted “the biggest news you’ve ever heard since the advent of the audible screen… a luxury of song, dance, music, and joy.” 38 The promised lineup of performers included Joseph Schildkraut, Mary Nolan, Ken Maynard, and Hoot Gibson, none of whom appeared in the finished film. The shooting was fraught with problems. The Technicolor lighting was so severe that it peeled the varnish off the violins (a Warners technician measured the heat on a closed Technicolor soundstage at 140 degrees). It was impossible to move the crane, erect sets, or film dancers while recording music, a problem Whiteman solved with a prophetic fiat: “Let’s prerecord it.” 39
Most early recording engineers in the movies were moonlighting radio technicians, who considered prerecording an affront to their craft. They played out the old debate between live (radio) and canned (records) entertainment, a debate that peaked in 1946, when Bing produced the first transcribed network radio show. The soundmen argued that the public had accepted direct recording in earlier films and pointed to disastrous attempts at dubbing in Fejos’s Broadway. Although a few musicals had been prerecorded in part — most notably, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” in MGM’s The Broadway Melody a year earlier — live recording remained the standard procedure until 1932, when Paramount prerecorded Love Me Tonight and Warners followed suit with 42nd Street. Whiteman, though, was adamant and he prevailed. That decision not only expedited the filming but produced clean musical tracks. The cast mimed to records as carpenters hammered the sets, just like in the recently departed days of silent movies.
No incident in this period is more emblematic of Bing’s ambivalence about stardom and success than his arrest that November for drunk driving. As maddening as the seemingly endless production of King of Jazz was, the picture held tremendous promise for Bing. His screen tests and auditions had led nowhere, but Whiteman offered him a prominent role in what everyone expected to be one of the most important pictures of the coming season. In addition to numbers with the Rhythm Boys, he would be featured as soloist in a lavish episode built around the key song in the Yellen-Ager score, “Song of the Dawn.” He scuttled his chance.
The trouble began with a tiff during the rehearsal of “A Bench in the Park,” a Brox Sisters number for which the Rhythm Boys provided harmony. As recalled by Bobbe Van Heusen, nee Brox, Bing arrived on the soundstage cheerful and slightly flush with drink. Bobbe had argued with him about his drinking before. This time she got mad. “I was told to sit on his lap during the number and I refused. I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “It was really silly, like kid stuff, you know. But I wouldn’t do it. So he went out and got drunk and he practically drove through the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. And of course he was arrested, and came to rehearsals with two detectives for the rest of the picture.” 40
Despite several versions of the tale and the disappearance of Bing’s arrest record, no one disputes the basic facts. After the rehearsal and argument with Bobbe, Bing walked to Whiteman Lodge, where an elaborate studio-catered party was in progress, celebrating the end of the first week’s filming. The musicians played, Bing sang, and shortly after midnight, a woman asked him to drive her to her hotel. As they approached the Roosevelt, Bing made a left turn into an oncoming car with such force that he and his passenger were knocked over the windshield and onto the pavement. He was fine, but the woman was bloody and unconscious. Bing carried her into the Roosevelt lobby, where the house doctor assured him that she was all right. Just then a policeman collared him and the other driver — who in Bing’s account was more inebriated than he was — and took them to Lincoln Heights jail.
Kurt Dieterle, the violinist Bing roomed with, observed, “Well, Bing is a boy that does what he wants when he wants to do it. This night I went out for a date after I had my dinner, and the woman cooking for us said, ‘How about Mr. Crosby?” I said, ‘Just leave it on the stove, he’ll be back later, I’m sure.’ I went out and came home. He wasn’t home yet, must have been after twelve, one o’clock. I was in bed when the phone rings, and who was it? Bing. I said, ‘Where in the hell are you?’ He said, ‘I’m in jail.’ Said he got into a confrontation. ‘It’s cold here, bring me a couple blankets.’That was the end of our apartment with Bing. I gave it up and moved in with Roy Bargy and his family.” 41
The next morning Jimmy Gillespie arranged bail and a trial was set for the following week. Bing agreed to plead guilty and pay the fine, but at the hearing he could not resist riling the judge. He arrived in court directly from the golf course, wearing green plus fours, an orange sweater, and check socks. The judge, noting the H.B.D. (had been drinking) complaint, asked if he was familiar with the Eighteenth Amendment. Bing’s reply ran along the lines of “Only remotely” (according to his brothers’ account) 42 or “Yes, but nobody pays much attention to it” (according to his own). 43He was sentenced to sixty days.
Unable to contact his friends, Bing stewed in his cell for a day, until his brother Everett discovered he had not come home. Bing was stung by the severity of the sentence, and Whiteman was irate. The combined pleas of Ev, Whiteman, and Laemmle succeeded in getting him transferred to a Hollywood jail with a liberal visitation policy. After a great deal more pleading, Bing’s new jailers agreed to a scheme that allowed him to work at the studio under police escort and return to his cell after the day’s shooting. But it took two weeks to make that deal, and Whiteman could not or would not postpone “Song of the Dawn.” He gave the number to John Boles, a thirty-five-year-old former World War I spy and stage actor who had made the transition from silent to talking films with his chesty operatic voice and conventional Hollywood good looks: dark hair, trim mustache, square jaw, gleaming eyes. As the closest thing to a movie star in the cast, billed second to Whiteman, Boles was an obvious choice for the number, an ersatz aria with the martial optimism expected of at least one song in every Hollywood revue.
Bing steamed, complaining repeatedly to Everett that Paul should have waited for him. Whiteman, sick of waiting, argued that he could not afford to postpone a major production number, though at this stage he undoubtedly felt little compunction in lowering the boom on Bing. Whiteman barely acknowledged him when he returned to the set. Bing’s continuing obsession with the accident and its aftermath is evident in his repeated assertion — until the day he died, decades after there was any reason to airbrush the story — of his innocence and relative sobriety. He may indeed have been the victim of a bad driver and a zealous cop. But it was his brazen court performance that ruined his chance and required him to explain to Kate why he would not be featured as promised.
In one of his memoir’s oddest passages, Bing considers what might have happened had he performed “Song of the Dawn” in King of Jazz. Observing with a trace of resentment that it “certainly helped” Boles, he concludes that it all worked out for the best, because the number might have short-circuited his career. “He had a bigger voice and a better delivery for that kind of song than I had,” Bing wrote. “My crooning style wouldn’t have been very good for such a number, which was supposed to be delivered a la breve like the ‘Vagabond Song.’ I might have flopped with the song. I might have been cut out of the picture. I might never have been given another crack at a song in any picture.” 44
Bing had a gift for mocking his own powers: note the humble reference to his “crooning style.” But any doubts he or anyone else may have entertained about his ability to sell “Song of the Dawn” had been put to rest right after the film wrapped, when he recorded it with Whiteman. Bing never sounded more determined to prove how stentorian he could be; yet even belting that operatic rubbish, he lightens an overwrought arrangement with a touch of impudent swing. Still, he had self-inflicted a professional wound, and his indignation and guilt would not let it heal. Bing suffered several disappointments during the next year. Sometimes he feared he would never get another shot at Hollywood, while Boles, who had made many films, continued to make many more. However facetious Bing meant to be in his 1953 memoir, his desperation back in 1930 was real, and it survived in his fixation on a song and a movie that are no better remembered than John Boles.
On New Year’s Eve the picture’s production was threatened again by a car accident, in which violinist Mischa Russell suffered four broken vertebrae and trombonist Boyce Cullen a broken arm, though this time the other driver accepted full blame. A week later, in an attempt to quell rumors of catastrophe, Paul, Grofe, Anderson, Rosse, Markert, and featured vocalist Jeanette Loff took a seasonal-greetings ad in Variety, announcing their joy in completing King of Jazz. When that failed to squelch the gossip, Junior Laemmle arranged for reporters to visit the set to watch him shake hands with Whiteman.
Bing’s jail sentence was ultimately reduced by a third, and he was released before the New Year. Bobbe Brox never did agree to sit on Bing’s lap for “A Bench in the Park,” which was consequently staged with the Rhythm Boys chirping behind the bench. “He had to come to the rehearsal with those detectives and he looked so terrible. He didn’t like it very well,” Bobbe recalled, laughing. “But he was so charming, so very charming. I loved Bing and we were good friends for a long, long time. He was lots of fun — great sense of humor, fun to be with. But he did something a lot of boys do at that age. They do not know how to hold their liquor. That was the only thing about Bing that I didn’t like. Of course, he grew up, thank goodness, and never did that anymore and we remained friends.” 45
In her last years Bobbe claimed that she and Bing might have married but for his drinking. Apparently she had forgotten that a year earlier she had married William Perlberg, who booked the sisters and had helped secure the Montmartre engagement for the Rhythm Boys. Perlberg later became a film producer and worked closely with Bing. After she ended their long marriage (some thirty-five years), Bobbe married another Crosby associate, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen. Bing sent them a telegram in 1969 that, in Bobbe’s recollection, read: “I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to see my two oldest friends married — to each other.” 46
The film finally wrapped on March 11, 1930, and by then the Whiteman band had resumed its theatrical jobs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, reaping tremendous gates. (Variety reported that when the band went into “Rhapsody in Blue,” a woman advised her girlfriend, “That’s the Old Gold theme song.”) 47 During the weeks leading up to the film’s April 20 premiere in Hollywood and May 2 premiere in New York, Whiteman ceaselessly plugged the cast and songs on radio and recorded the main tunes for Columbia. Universal announced that Anderson would be retained to direct a second film with Whiteman. Everyone was hopeful.
They were whistling in the dark. At $1.5 million, King of Jazz cost more than four times the average musical. Translated into today’s dollars, the budget was as high as a modern special-effects action extravaganza (about $75 million) — this in a year when movie tickets averaged thirty-five cents. The industry began to realize that the vogue for filmed vaudeville was over shortly before King of Jazz debuted, when Paramount Pictures released Paramount on Parade (a revue packed with real stars) and saw business fall sharply in the first weeks. Universal’s hopes sank precipitously. King of Jazz opened well at the Los Angeles Criterion. Variety projected first-week receipts of $18,000. But business tapered off so badly by the third day that the theater took in only $13,000. Variety ran an unusually vicious review, attacking Anderson (“who knew nothing about picture direction and didn’t seem to know any more either at the finish of the film”) 48 and accurately predicting a two-week life span. Most critics, however, were dazzled and supportive.
As Bing feared, Boles was singled out (typically: “John Boles throttles all competition in the singing cinema”) 49 while the Rhythm Boys were mentioned only in passing. The picture did well in Philadelphia, fair in San Francisco, and died in Indianapolis. Yet Universal believed the public could be swayed, and pulled out all the stops for the New York debut at the Roxy, presenting the film in tandem with a stage show that starred Whiteman and George Gershwin. 50 Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times wrote, “There is no sequence that isn’t worth witnessing and no performance that is not capable in this fast paced picture.” 51 But for once, there was too much Whiteman. The public, surprisingly, favored All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone’s scalding World War I film, which saved Universal’s hash and won Junior Laemmle an Academy Award for best picture. Junior would not be picking up options on Whiteman or Anderson (indeed, he threatened to sue Paul over food and telegram expenses). Nor would he make any more musicals for a while, though he approved nine foreign versions of King of Jazz, including a German edition emceed by Joseph Schildkraut, with two additional numbers by the Sisters G, and a Hungarian one with Bela Lugosi. 52 Junior would find his forte in monsters and vampires, initiating the great Universal horror cycle of the 1930s. But the Depression defeated him, and when his splendid 1936 film of Show Boat stumbled at the box office, he left pictures for good at age twenty-eight.
Universal took a million-dollar bath and did not begin to recoup until the picture was reissued in 1933, on the coattails of 42nd Street. (Bing, by then a major star, was embarrassed to find himself top-billed.) Yet as the New York Times and other papers noted, King of Jazz was a singular film, and it endures as Anderson’s triumph. Its ingenious visual effects bely his novice status and proved highly influential. It remains a Rosetta stone of early American pop, incarnating a multicultural display intended for a white middlebrow audience. The picture begins with Bing’s voice, singing through the credits (“Music hath charms, though it’s classy or jazz”), and ends with “The Melting Pot of Music,” an extravaganza featuring leggy Spanish dancers, men in jodphurs, and concertina, bagpipe, and balalaika players (but no Africans), all ultimately dissolving into the image of Maestro Whiteman taking a bow. We are told at the outset that “jazz was born in the African jungle to the beat of the voodoo drums,” but the only black person in the film is a smiling six-year-old girl cradled in White-man’s lap for a laugh.
King of Jazz exists in a bubble of racial and mercantile timidity. All references to blacks are aged in minstrel conventions, among them a snippet of “Old Black Joe” and dancer Jacques Cartier decked out as an African chieftain, dancing in silhouette on a gigantic drum. Yet the Cartier number underscores the film’s tremendous impact: the silhouette trick was used by Fred Astaire in his tribute to Bill Robinson in Swing Time; the drum dance was developed by Robinson himself in Stormy Weather. Many of Anderson’s ideas were imitated in later pictures, from the miniature musicians climbing out of a valise (Bride of Frankenstein) to cardboard skyscrapers (42nd Street) to concentric tuba and trombone orbits (the two-reeler Jammin’ the Blues). Visual abstractions for “Rhapsody in Blue” are abundant with tropes later elaborated by Busby Berkeley: pianist Roy Bargy morphing into five pianists, aerial shots, giant dislocated heads, kaleidoscopes.
Musically, the film is dreary except for “Rhapsody” and the few examples of jazz, which consist of Lang and Venuti playing “The Wild Dog” and the numbers involving Bing. Despite the hullabaloo over “Song of the Dawn” (Boles, in a bolero outfit, looks and sounds as dated as the rouged and lipsticked tenors in other scenes), Bing is handsomely represented and in excellent form. He swings the song behind the opening titles as well as a spiritual lip-synched by a Walter Lantz cartoon character, interpolates a bu-bu-bu-boo in top hat behind the Brox Sisters; and jives two numbers with the Rhythm Boys. Whether he is on- or offscreen, his voice is buoyant and bright, agelessly rhythmic. The Rhythm Boys sequence is the best evidence we have of how enchanting they were at their peak and how natural Bing was in front of a camera from the start. Al Rinker is tall and handsome, standing with his hand in his pocket. Harry Barris is so chipper, he can’t sit still. Yet on “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together,” only Bing adds deft physical touches, waving his hand, inclining his head. For “Happy Feet,” Al and Harry play two pianos and Bing stands in the middle. As Harry pretends to execute a dance step, Bing gives the camera a wide-eyed look that momentarily breaches the fourth wall. Bing’s light marcelled hair is receding and his rouge is a bit thick, but he is utterly relaxed. With his double takes and mock solemnity, he is our contemporary, winking across time.
The Rhythm Boys continued with the band when Whiteman left California to play Canada. Incredibly, Paul was barred from entering the country at Vancouver: orchestra leaders, he learned, were “entertainers” and “as such could play from theater stages, but not at dances.” 53 After days of wrangling, the tour detoured for a week to Seattle and Portland before finally heading home to New York. But a contretemps that week permanently poisoned the waters between Paul and Bing. In his memoir Bing explains that a bootlegger dunned him for money he claimed was due for a quart of “day-old pop-skull”; 54 when Bing contested the debt, the bootlegger demanded money from Whiteman, who complied over Bing’s objection and then deducted the amount from Bing’s salary. That led to an argument, Bing wrote, that ended when Whiteman told him, “When we get to Seattle, we’ll part friends and that’ll be the end of it.” 55 Years later, however, Bing related a different version of events to his second wife, Kathryn: Whiteman had confronted him in front of the band and accused him of stealing his liquor. “I was outraged by that and quit,” he told her. 56
In any case, neither Bing nor his partners quit in Seattle. They traveled with the band back to New York and made the break shortly after arriving. They had several reasons beyond Bing’s pique, chiefly a desire to return to California. A couple of days after his jail sentence was commuted, Bing had encountered Dixie Lee again at a party, and they had continued to see each other almost every night. Now, in New York, he was inconsolable without her. One evening he telephoned her from his room at the Belvedere and fell asleep without breaking the connection. His roommate, Frank Trumbauer, found him in the morning cradling the phone. The cost was $130.75, paid by Tram, who saved the bill as a souvenir. Barris, too, had become infatuated with a singer, Loyce Whiteman (no relation to Paul), who demonstrated sheet music in a Glendale shop. Al didn’t have a steady girl, but he was no less determined than the others to stay off the road. After three years and four months, the trio decided to break with Whiteman and return to Los Angeles.
On April 30, the morning after an Old Gold broadcast, Bing told Whiteman of their intentions. Paul agreed to abrogate their contract but asked them to keep it quiet so as not to interfere with his imminent premiere at the Roxy. “It was time to go out on our own and also the right time for Paul to let us go,” recalled Al. “His band payroll was very high and his contract with Columbia was soon to end. On our part, the Rhythm Boys had not followed through on our own recordings and we didn’t seem to have the incentive to pursue our recording career. It was a friendly parting and we wished each other good luck.” 57
For Bing, the “pop-skull” incident may have added to a grudge he was already carrying. In February — a month before King of Jazz wrapped, but after Bing’s work on it was done — Paramount rushed into production a Nancy Carroll musical called Honey but could not settle on a leading man. They needed an appealing young actor who could sing. Studio chief B. P. Schulberg asked songwriter Sam Coslow for a recommendation. Coslow had known Bing in New York and now heard rumors that he was ready to leave the band. He drove to Loew’s State, where Whiteman was working, and found Bing heartbroken about losing “Song of the Dawn” and eager for a real movie part. “He was confident he could get by with it,” Coslow recalled in his autobiography. All Bing wanted was the same $200 Whiteman paid him, a standing contract (“After all, I have a steady job with this outfit”), and guaranteed parts for Al and Harry. Coslow relayed the good news, and Schulberg sent two talent scouts to Loew’s State to audition Bing. “For about 24 hours, he was under consideration,” Coslow wrote. “But the following day they auditioned a young actor named Stanley Smith. He couldn’t sing very well, but somehow he got the part — don’t ask me why.” 58 Stanley Smith was one of the ineffectual tenors in King of Jazz.
Bing thought Whiteman had nixed the deal. That seems unlikely. Weeks earlier Whiteman had allowed him to participate in MGM’s The March of Time, a blockbuster that threatened to dwarf all the other movie revues. Bing was retained for two scenes and billed as “Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman Soloist.” The March of Time was a strange mixture of stage veterans (Weber and Fields, Fay Templeton), newcomers (Skin Young, Benny Rubin), and extravagant production numbers. Bing sang “Poor Little G String,” backed by an all-girl orchestra and the Albertina Rasch Ballet, but was little more than a prop in his second scene, made up as an old man with wig and mustache listening to a boy violinist. Just as the picture neared completion, the King of Jazz fiasco sobered MGM’s accountants. Rather than pour more cash into a sure loser, MGM not only shut down its “giant screen carnival” but destroyed most of the film stock. The more expensive numbers were recycled into later pictures, 59 but all that remains of Bing’s labors is an eight-by-ten glossy.
In later years Bing’s tributes to Whiteman were reserved, if sincere: “I’m impressed by how kind he was. When I was younger and more hot-headed, I used to think he should line my pockets with more gold. But I confess he owes me nothing. It’s the other way around.” 60 They had little more to do with each other beyond a few radio appearances. Whiteman had his own troubles. Old Gold dropped his show, and his record sales evaporated. After he opened at the Roxy, he fired ten musicians and shaved the salaries of the survivors by 15 percent. Bing’s timing had not failed him. The musicians Whiteman let go were his jazzmen — among them Lang, Venuti, Hayton, and Challis. For three years, beginning when he hired his Walla Walla boys, Paul had intelligently felt his way into jazz. Now he returned to his old formula (though he later recruited such jazzmen as Jack Teagarden and Red Norvo).
Challis thought the band began to slide downhill in 1929 and blamed radio, which consumed arrangements as fast as jokes. The luxury of taking one’s time to perfect a piece was sacrificed to the demand for quantity. Worse, radio counted blandness as an asset, desirable to sponsors and song-pluggers. Challis briefly freelanced for Henderson and Ellington, until he could no longer ignore the hated medium and signed on for three years with Kate Smith. 61 By the early days of the Swing Era, he was considered old hat and was soon forgotten; not until the mid-1970s was he rediscovered by jazz fans. As for Whiteman, his celebrity and energy kept him afloat for years, but he never recovered his reign. He abandoned jazz just as it was about to enjoy a sweeping triumph in America’s mainstream. An embittered, cynical public demanded a new and honest music that spoke directly to its dreams and fears. Few in 1930 could have imagined that the scepter would fall to a twenty-seven-year-old Rhythm Boy.