Part Two
Bing’s voice has a mellow quality that only Bing’s got. It’s like gold being poured out of a cup.
— Louis Armstrong, Time (1955) 1
14
The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States.
— Artie Shaw (1992) 2
The two weeks preceding the broadcast were busy ones for Bing, who had not been back to New York in fifteen months. A few days after his arrival, he was booked by Jack Kapp for a three-hour session that proved momentous on two counts. Bing worked for the first time with Victor Young, the conductor and composer soon to emerge as one of Hollywood’s finest musical directors and someone with whom he developed a particularly close and lasting rapport. 3 And he was paired with three important songs that he forged into all-time standards: “Star Dust” (Bing was the first to record Mitchell Parish’s lyric to Hoagy Carmichael’s magical, Bixlike melody, verse and chorus), “Dancing in the Dark” (from The Band Wagon), and the less sturdy but much revived “I Apologize.” They represent Bing in his ardent, pleading mode, technically assured but studied, as though he were mining to the fullest a commercially viable approach.
He spent several days auditioning theme songs for his radio show. The title of the leading candidate, fashioned for him by composer Fred Ahlert and lyricist Roy Turk, underwent two revisions: first, it was transposed from “When the Gold of the Day Meets the Blue of the Night” to “When the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)”; then the word when was replaced with the more intriguing where. The other leading candidate was “Love Came Into My Heart,” written by nineteen-year-old Burton Lane and Harold Adamson for Earl Carroll’s Vanities of 1931. Bing learned about it from music publisher Jack Robbins, who asked Burton to play it for the singer. “Bing came up to [Robbins’s] offices,” Burton recalled, “and I played the song and he liked the way I played it and he asked me to accompany him when he auditioned the song for the studio. He was not auditioning himself — he was auditioning two songs, mine and ‘Where the Blue of the Night,’ which was a much better song. So we were ushered into a room at CBS, the two of us, and apparently we could be heard by people in another office who would make the decision. The other song was chosen and it was perfect, a lovely song.” 4
Harry Barris’s daughter, Marti, said “it broke his heart” 5 that Bing did not choose “I Surrender, Dear” as his theme, but strong financial and musical reasons justified his preference. A successful theme song, mandatory in the 1930s (every top band and radio star had one), might identify an entertainer for decades, accruing mechanical royalties with each performance. Ahlert and Turk cut Bing in on the copyright, allegedly because he worked with Turk on the song’s verse, ensuring him a significant income over the years. Although Bing was accused of making a deal with Ahlert and Turk, which the team denied, his consideration of the Burton Lane tune and his reputation among songwriters indicates that this was not the usual case of quid pro quo authorship. 6
Bing was in a position to demand cut-ins on dozens of songs (as Jolson did before him and Presley after), but he appears to have been scrupulous about taking credit only on those to which he made a contribution; he shares the copyright on twenty-three (including seven he never recorded), almost all collaborations with friends, chiefly Barris, Young, and Johnny Burke, and only two of any commercial significance — his theme song and Victor Young’s enduring melody “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” 7 Bing went on to write several parodies that he recorded privately and pressed on a handful of discs for friends, but he had no illusions about his songwriting talent. Late in his life he wrote, “I really think I’d trade anything I’ve ever done if I could have written just one hit song.” 8
Financial considerations aside, Bing’s choice was eminently musical. “Where the Blue of the Night” is an ideal signature tune because the main eight-bar phrase can be played in just about any tempo, lending itself to compression and dramatization. The lyric is relatively neutral (unlike, for example, the dejected avowal “I Surrender, Dear”), and although the melody resembles Gilbert and Sullivan’s quintessentially British “Tit-Willow,” it has the unmistakable appeal of an Irish lullaby. Wistful and nostalgic, the song boasts a rousing release suited to Bing’s range and attack, and works equally well in either three-four (it was conceived as a waltz) or four-four time. Bing recorded it in November, backed by Bennie Krueger’s band and Eddie Lang’s splendid guitar, an exceptional, well-tempered performance, devoid of vanity and honeyed with understated emotion. The song became so closely associated with him that few recorded it except in homage. Yet Bing remained undecided about his theme when the show premiered, a week after the tryout with Lane. By then, some thought he was beginning to look undecided about singing at all.
August 31, 1931, was a cool, dry Monday in the twilight of Prohibition, just before the bleakest years of the Depression. The two frontpage stories could not have been more reflective of the times: a Brooklyn gunfight (residue of a gang war between Dutch Schultz and Mad Dog Coll) had taken the life of a teenage girl, and President Hoover was pledging to fight the payment of bonus reparations to World War I veterans. (When some 15,000 veterans encamped in Washington the following summer, he allowed federal troops to burn them out.) Prosperity was nowhere near the corner, but the New Deal was, and Bing, though a moderate Republican by disposition, was about to emerge as its crooning oracle. The ascendancy of Everyman Bing began on network radio with a strange and fitful birth.
Bing’s Monday evening 11:00 P.M. debut was much publicized. The Sunday New York Times “Listening-In” column featured a large photograph of Bing and a capsule rendition of Paley’s shipboard discovery. 9 Yet when listeners tuned it at the appointed time, they heard CBS staff announcer Louis Dean tell the radio audience that the scheduled program would not be heard. Instead, Fred Rich and the Columbians — a compact edition of the CBS Studio Orchestra — would perform. Listeners expecting to hear Bing on Tuesday night heard another announcer declaim a second postponement; Fletcher Henderson’s band filled in.
Finally, on Wednesday evening, September 2, an ebullient third announcer, Harry Von Zell, ended the mystery: “Here is the moment you have been waiting for, the delayed appearance of that sensational baritone, Bing Crosby, whose singing has made him the favorite of California through the mediums of the motion picture, the vaudeville stage, and the radio.” Von Zell explained that the singer had recovered from a severe case of laryngitis and could now “bring you his inimitable song interpretations.” 10
Insiders drew the obvious conclusion: drunk again, another opportunity almost blown. Bing noted in his memoir that he was variously thought to have suffered a hangover, laryngitis, stage fright, nodes on his vocal cords, and blacklist troubles. His own explanation was that he had exhausted his voice singing at four or five clubs and parties a night while making the rounds: “The pipes just gave out, and I couldn’t produce hardly a sound. Just hoarse. Tired.” 11 A Paley biographer claims that the CBS head was at home during Bing’s delayed premiere and was so angered by Bing’s unstable performance that he phoned the studio and ordered Crosby pulled off the air; feeling “giddy” with power, 12 he then assigned a twenty-four-hour guard to keep Bing sober. According to a biographer of Bing, the singer was on a three-day binge. 13 Both stories are demonstrably untrue. Paley was in the studio for Bing’s debut, which was transcribed (the first and last songs Bing sang that night have been released on records), and Crosby showed up for daily rehearsals. There is no reason to doubt his own account. Bing was a public drinker who never attempted to hide or disavow his conduct; no one saw him drunk on those evenings, while many saw him at work or at rest during the afternoons, among them agent Cork O’Keefe, who told a background reporter in 1946 that Bing had lost his voice and “mooned about the hotel for three days, heartbroken.” 14
Moreover, his condition was diagnosed by Simon Ruskin, an ear, nose, and throat specialist whose patients included members of the Metropolitan Opera, Gertrude Lawrence, Mary Martin, and other entertainers. On Wednesday Everett Crosby summoned Ruskin to the station twenty minutes before Bing went on the air. In 1949 the doctor told a field reporter for Time that that evening Bing had a head cold and postnasal drip, which infected his vocal cords. He said that Bing griped, “It’s no use, let me go back to California,” to which Ruskin, referring to his pricey ministrations, retorted, “Don’t be silly, Bing, you’re working for me now.” 15 Ruskin thought the infection caused Bing’s voice to drop, making it huskier and more attractive to the radio audience.
Bing wasn’t incensed at the drinking stories (here is a man who, in the blush of his success in 1931, told journalist Joseph Mitchell of his “trail of broken bottles”), 16 but he was offended by rumors that he had had an attack of nerves, rumors that undermined his reputation for imperturbable confidence. “I don’t think I have ever had stage fright or what we in the trade call ‘flop sweat’ in my life.” 17 On that score, witnesses take issue. Agnes Law, the CBS librarian, brought material to the studio and found him “pacing the floor too petrified to open his mouth to sing.” 18 The show’s recording engineer, Edgar Sisson, said that during the rehearsals Bing appeared nervous and grumbled about the microphone, which lay flat on the stand rather than hanging from a boom as was customary at recording sessions. Bing spent much of his rehearsal time trying to get comfortable with the setup. The engineers respected his concern and admired his understanding of the technology — especially when a few weeks into the program, he arrived with a copy of his new record, “Sweet and Lovely,” and declared, “This is what I want to sound like.” 19
Gary Stevens, a precocious fifteen-year-old gofer in the publicity department, idolized Bing and made certain to be present on the Monday he was originally scheduled to air. The show emanated from the twenty-second floor of Paley’s newly acquired building at 485 Madison Avenue. “When I finally got a glimpse of him, he was shorter than I envisioned and he had sparse hair, brownish blond, and was fairly thin. He wore an outlandish outfit, kind of a pink coat and blue-green slacks and an ill-colored shirt. And he was very, very nervous. Late that afternoon, after a three-hour rehearsal where they did the eight or nine songs to be used for the week, he left, and sometime after five there was a big huddle and when they came out, the word was he wasn’t going on.” 20 Among those in the huddle were Ralph Wonders, the head of CBS’s artists bureau; bandleader Fred Rich; and Paley himself, who left after the decision was announced.
Bing’s apprehensiveness was made evident by his request that Victor Young conduct his first show. He had already made certain that Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti were on hand. Bing had no complaints about Rich, who resumed his duties the next week and for the rest of the series. But on that first night he wanted a conductor who understood him, and Young was available as of Wednesday to supervise rehearsal and broadcast. Premiering on Tuesday was never a consideration. Artie Shaw, a member of the CBS Studio Orchestra, recalled Bing affecting an attitude of indifference at rehearsal, but believed otherwise: “He wanted it badly. You don’t get that by accident. Bing was never a matinee idol. He developed a screen personality that worked because it was based on who he wanted to be — casual, relaxed. But it was a tense sort of relaxing because you knew he was working at it. Bing wasn’t Bing any more than Bogart was Bogart.” 21
Yet on the third day the tension apparently disappeared. “No nerves,” Gary Stevens insisted. “Very relaxed. He was in the same outfit I saw him in Monday afternoon, pink jacket and open shirt, greenish or aquamarine slacks, and he was very casual. He loved being around musicians. When I got there, about ten minutes before he went on, he was in animated conversation with a few musicians before they took their places and were ready to go on the air.” 22 Paley was in and out of the control room all evening, and Stevens was instructed to alert radio editors at the dailies and prepare any information they needed.
At eleven Harry Von Zell intoned, “Fifteen minutes with Bing Crosby” while the orchestra — with Tommy Dorsey soloing — played Victor Young’s “Too Late” in the background. Bing sang “Just One More Chance,” “I Found a Million Dollar Baby,” and “I’m Through with Love,” resting his voice during an instrumental. He was not at his best. He sounded almost too tense to whistle, though CBS reportedly asked him not to on behalf of Morton Downey, its resident whistling singer. 23 Instead, he exchanged halting la-di-das with Joe Venuti’s violin and first came alive near the finish of “Just One More Chance,” ringing forth on the phrase “all the while.” His wobbly mordents were overstated (almost as baldly as in Dixie’s “I Apologize” parody), but by the closing “I’m Through with Love,” he was warmed up, beaming on the release. Inspired by Venuti’s obbligato, he attacked the final eight bars with brio.
Stevens thought he was “sensational. It knocked me out — I knew something new had happened. We had a crooning, nasal, tenor society — Downey, Vallee — and this had a refreshing macho quality. Bing moved with the band. He was the first ballad singer who had rhythm with him.” 24Artie Shaw concurred: “There are virtuoso performers who have not found an identity. That thumbprint is missing. With Bing you knew right away who he was. And you knew that he knew. He really is the first American jazz singer in the white world. Bing was an enormous influence. You couldn’t avoid him. He had a good beat. He was a jazz singer, he knew what jazz was, and could sing a lyric, say the words, and make you hear the notes. Bing could swing. When he sang, the tune swung, whatever it was.” 25 After the show wrapped, Stevens found himself in an elevator with Paley and Ralph Wonders. As they descended to the lobby, Wonders broke the silence and asked Paley what he thought. Looking at his shoes, Paley quietly replied, “I hope he’s got it.” 26
By the end of the week, affiliates were calling to inquire about Bing and to report on the excitement in their communities. Fans phoned or sent letters and wires. Requests for interviews poured in from the press. Several out-of-town editors asked to meet Bing and watch the show (there was no studio audience). The country was suddenly mad for singers: Paley immediately added the Boswell Sisters to his team, which already included the immensely popular Downey and Kate Smith. NBC could not believe it. With two networks (the Red and the Blue), NBC thought of itself as the invincible ruler of the air. Suddenly Paley was crooning his baby into position as a real competitor. NBC had fired Russ Columbo on August 21; but after Bing signed with CBS, NBC’s vice president John Royal rehired him for a nightly show that directly followed Crosby’s. He advised the press, “Both artists are the same style singers,” instigating a “battle of the baritones” that prefigured the Crosby and Sinatra duels of the 1940s. 27
Despite the superficial resemblance, Columbo was the obverse of Crosby. He was a crooner merely, a ballad singer who initially favored a tenor range and could barely handle an up-tempo number, let alone swing. If Bing represented a synthesis of jazz and pop, Columbo was a limited stylist who held his notes a tad too long. Yet Russ echoes throughout Bing’s developing years like a night wind, pursuing him in every medium — the first of many celebrated singers to consciously imitate Bing, affirming and codifying his influence. 28
Staff announcer Ken Roberts was an avid admirer of Bing. Only twenty-one, he had listened to him in the Whiteman years and was thrilled to be assigned to Bing’s show. He began with the second broadcast and remained until a sponsor took charge and demanded a more inflated voice. He recalled that Victor Young was brought in “strictly for Bing” because he was a friend and “knew his style,” which included placing Eddie Lang right behind Bing, “giving him the rhythm,” and Joe Venuti at Bing’s side, providing obbligato. 29 Sixty years later Roberts, one of radio’s ubiquitous announcers for decades, reminisced about Crosby’s first weeks on network radio:
It was a wonderful time, but I must say that as much as I loved him, I didn’t know him. He was a very private person, at least in the studio. He would come in and do his job. He was not temperamental at all, easy to work with, but as soon as he was finished it was good-bye. At first the only conversation we had was “Good evening, Bing, how are you?” “Hello, Kenneth, how are you?” That changed after a few weeks on the air. I was walking up Madison Avenue, a few blocks from CBS, and I saw Bing standing in front of a bookshop, looking in the window. I stopped alongside and said, “Hi, Bing, how are you?” He said, “Oh, hello, Kenneth, how are you? You read that book yet?” He pointed to some esoteric book — it could have been Schopenhauer. And I said, “No, I haven’t,” and he said, “Well, you should.” And from then on it was very warm between us, until he got a sponsor.
He used to wear porkpie hats in some crazy shade of green. He was cute — a nice fella. His style was so marvelous, so effortless and beautiful and knowledgeable. The show would begin with the theme, “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” and then I would say, “Welcome to another fifteen minutes with Bing Crosby and tonight Bing starts his show with…,” and he’d sing his song. The show was an immediate success. Tremendous. He was a real star. The song-pluggers were around all the time — radio was their bread and butter. But with Bing it was no longer the song that sold the records, it was the artist. 30
Roberts’s observation underscores the great paradox about Crosby: he was a man whom the audience thought it knew almost as well as a member of the family but who was, in fact, known to very few. Cool and efficient in his private manner, he was, in Roberts’s words, “exceptionally intimate when he sang. He never bellowed. He never sang out as he did when he was with Whiteman, as on ‘High Water.’ Once he got his show he learned what a microphone was. We liked his easiness, the intelligence behind his interpretation of the lyrics. Everything he did depended upon intelligence and he certainly had that.” 31
Bing was now shaking up the entertainment world. In March 1931 CBS had seventy-seven affiliates. Three months after Bing’s debut, it had ninety. The November issue of Radio Log and Lore categorized the new radio voices (Columbo was “King of Crooners”), describing Bing as “recording artist and entertainer extraordinary.” At the close of his first week on the air, two of the top five sheet-music hits — “Just One More Chance” and “I Found a Million Dollar Baby” — were songs he had sung on his first broadcast. His success was contagious. Four days after he premiered, Kate Smith found a sponsor, raising her salary sixfold. A few weeks later Jesse Crawford interpolated Bing’s record of “Just One More Chance” in his performances at the Paramount; that raised eyebrows because Crawford was contracted to NBC. Seven weeks into Bing’s broadcast, Variety noted that Rudy Vallee impersonators had given way to something new: “Radio circles and song pluggers who have just returned from road tours report that they heard at least one or more Crosby-Columbo imitators locally in every city they visited.” 32 Variety’s tabulation of October record sales showed Bing with three of the five top sellers in New York (no. one, “I Apologize”; no. two, “Sweet and Lovely”; and no. five, “Goodnight Sweetheart”) and Los Angeles (no. one, “Dancing in the Dark”; no. two, “I Apologize”; and no. four, “Sweet and Lovely”). 33 The Groaner from Tacoma, as Tommy Dorsey tagged him at a rehearsal, 34 was now, in Duke Ellington’s words, “the biggest thing, ever.” 35
Bing’s sustaining program lasted as long as it did — two months — because Ralph Wonders, encouraged by Everett, told prospective sponsors they would have to pony up $3,000 a week, which was considered exorbitant for an artist who had yet to prove himself more than a fad. (Actually, as noted, Kate Smith received that amount, a far greater raise for her than it would have been for Bing, who was already paid half that by Paley.) Before long, however, a contract was negotiated with Certified Cremo, a cigar-making subsidiary of American Tobacco, ruled by the notoriously despotic George Washington Hill. For four months Bing was infelicitously known as the Cremo Singer. Carl Fenton conducted the orchestra, which included few (if any) regular jazz players except Lang and Venuti, and David Ross announced — the ideal choice for a ludicrously pretentious company, known for its bizarre obsession with clean tobacco. Ross rolled his rs and contrived fancy pronunciations in reading copy that might have reduced a lesser man to giggling:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! The manufacturers of Certified Cremo present for your listening pleasure Bing Crosby, the Cremo Singer. While you are listening, light up a Cremo and discover real smoking enjoyment. Your eyes can’t tell you whether a cigar is clean or whether it is made by unsanitary methods. Smoke Certified Cremo and know that your cigar is clean. Cremo, made in the famous perfecto shape that is the mark of fine cigar quality, is the only cigar in the world finished under glass. Fifty-six health officials endorse Cremo’s crusade for cleanliness. And now, Bing Crosby, singing… 36
Ross, who pronounced singer “sing-ah” and might have served as inspiration for Groucho Marx’s “thank yow” sketch in A Night at the Of Opera, was the typical radio announcer of the era and, in fact, had just received the annual gold medal in the field, which titillated Cremo’s sense of status. Younger announcers like Ken Roberts and Harry Von Zell were trying to humanize the medium but faced an uphill battle. Ross had the sort of delivery that Bing — who ultimately did more than anyone to popularize a chummy radio style — routinely parodied, once he was allowed to speak. His early sponsors would not permit Bing to utter a word on air. Ironically, this constraint worked to his advantage, as the contrast between the naturalness of his singing and the announcers’ pomposity intensified the sense of intimacy he cultivated.
The most important result of the Cremo series was that it established Bing as a prime-time performer from coast to coast. The sustainer had originally been aired at 11:00, in part so that it was heard at 7:00 out West (California had not yet accepted daylight saving, so there was a four-hour difference in 1931), where CBS hoped Bing might put a dent in Amos ‘n’Andy. That hopeless cause was teased in Sing, Bing, Sing, the Sennett short that Crosby made the following year. Bing’s character, a radio singer, signals his plans to elope over the air; then that night, the girl’s father intercepts and taunts Bing with the line “Thought I’d be listening to Amos ‘n’Andy, didn’t you?” CBS attempted to increase Bing’s New York following by adding an early show to his schedule on Tuesdays at 8:45. His success in that time slot motivated the network to broadcast him exclusively at 7:00 P.M., causing much consternation among West Coast fans who were working or did not otherwise have access to radios at three in the afternoon. With Cremo writing the checks, however, the issue was solved: Bing made two nightly broadcasts Monday through Saturday, at 7:00 for the East and 11:00 for the West.
For all his notoriety and success, Bing was not breaking any ratings records. But three days after he debuted for Cremo, he began setting the first of many career records that would never be broken. On November 6 he embarked on a ten-week stint at the Paramount Theater (the stage where he and Al Rinker had bombed) for what turned out to be the longest streak by any entertainer in the theater’s history. Midway through the initial engagement, Paramount renewed his contract for another ten weeks — four more at its Broadway theater and six at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn. When he closed in Brooklyn, Bing returned to the Broadway theater as the vocal star in a George Jessel revue for an additional three weeks. In total, he commanded Paramount’s two New York stages for five months without a break. During most of that time, Bing’s daily grind consisted of four stage shows — at $2,500 a week — and two fifteen-minute daily broadcasts, plus various charity shows, guest appearances, recording dates, and concerts.
Inevitably, Bing’s vocal problem — the huskiness — returned. Paramount, concerned about its contracts, sent him to the same specialist who had treated him before the CBS debut. This time, Dr. Ruskin found him “happy-go-lucky” 37 and assured Bing that his only problem was a minor node, a hard blister, on one of his vocal cords; because of it, a slight cold might generate congestion and swelling. Ruskin told him he could have it surgically removed but advised against it. An operation could have an unforeseen effect on his voice, while the harmless node contributed to an appealing timbre. Over the next few years, an echoey and pleasing throatiness served as Bing’s signature sound. (It could also render him downright hoarse, as on the record “Snuggled on Your Shoulder.”) He suggested that Bing rest his voice, allowing it to heal on its own. Bing compromised; he curtailed its use when he was not working. For years fans debated whether Bing secretly had surgery, so completely did the huskiness disappear in the mid-1930s, but he evidently did not. In 1933, when Paramount Pictures signed Bing to a contract, his voice was insured for $100,000 by Lloyd’s of London, which insisted on a proviso: Dr. Ruskin had to stipulate that he would not operate, as the node was an essential component of Bing’s “vocal charm.”
On opening night of the Paramount engagement, Lillian Roth, Gus Edwards, and the dancer Armida made stage appearances to wish him well. As was customary, Paramount stage shows changed weekly, along with the movie — he opened opposite Ruth Chatterton in Once a Lady — and supporting stars. Bing’s duties required him to emcee as well as sing and act in sketches, all good preparation for the movies and the kind of radio shows he would pioneer in a couple of years. He began to draw on his inveterate fascination with the sauruses. Though prohibited from speaking on the air, onstage he could be quite “gabby,” as he put it. 38 Blending verbal gimmicks (“alliteration and other fancy devices”) 39 with jaunty phrases and current slang, he produced a distinctive speech pattern all his own. “I can only go so far with big words,” Bing explained, “then I have to return to the vernacular to finish what I have to say.” 40
Because Bing was a radio persona, Paramount management decided to actually introduce him as a disembodied voice — or something close to it. During his first number he was displayed as a dark blue silhouette. Billboard complained that all one could see of him as he sang “Just One More Chance” were his white flannels. Where was the logic in that, the reviewer wondered, especially as Bing “registered heavily” in his second number, “As Time Goes By,” bathed in white light and seated on an ascending pipe organ played by Helen Crawford (Jesse’s wife). 41 In a more bizarre setup, Bing had to swing over the first few rows in a seat welded to a crane. The theater was dark except for a spotlight on his face. Once, the controlling mechanism got stuck during a performance, and Bing was forced to crawl along the crane’s shaft — amid gales of laughter — until he could safely drop to the stage.
Microphones were stationed everywhere, two in the open and the rest hidden, so that Bing could perform freely in just about any position. Diversity was key. In one show he sang “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” as a lead-in to a dance by the scantily clad Vanessi, who rumbaed; then he serenaded ballerina Harriet Hoctor with “I Surrender, Dear” as she danced on her toes and leaped over hurdles in a simulated steeplechase. A mike was hidden in each of the hurdles, and Bing walked from post to post, singing one phrase at each, until finishing the song.
Variety praised his professionalism: unlike most singers, “he saw an audience before he saw the inside of a radio studio.” 42 But business was not much better than average the first week. The theater manager, Jack Mclnerny, remembered Bing occasionally having an attack of nerves and bracing himself with a drink — though nothing like in the Rhythm Boys days, he added. Mclnerny recalled him as “very pleasant, talked to the stagehands, joked with everybody, easygoing, but a little nervous before a show.” 43 He relaxed when the Mills Brothers, one of the most ingenious and melodious of close-harmony groups, appeared for three delightful weeks. Bing never felt more at home than when surrounded by good musicians, and though he performed only one number onstage with the brothers, between shows they repaired to the steps out back and jammed.
In October Bing and the Mills Brothers participated in a two-sided record, Gems from George White’s Scandals, sharing the platter with Victor Young’s orchestra, the Boswell Sisters, soloist Tommy Dorsey, and radio tenor Frank Munn, whose contribution includes the unspeakable “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” The highlight of the session was “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” for which Young asked Bing, the Boswells, and the Mills Brothers to devise different interpretations that he could juxtapose into a single arrangement. Engineer Edgar Sisson recalled that “Bing rehearsed one-tenth the time the others did” and amused everyone present by spontaneously altering the line “You can’t take your dough when you go-go-go” to “You can’t take that good dough when you go” because, Bing explained, go-go-go “seemed awkward.” 44
Yet the arrangement permitted no interaction between Bing and the Mills Brothers; after sharing three weeks with them at the theater, Bing was determined to rectify that. On December 16 he arranged — accidentally on purpose — to record with them. Taking a busman’s holiday, Bing wandered into the studio to watch the brothers rehearse with one of Bennie Krueger’s units. After a while he asked to get in on a number. They ran down a routine on “Dinah,” a jump tune chiefly associated with Ethel Waters. Bing began fooling around, scatting. He asked the engineers to record a take simply as a test. Everyone liked it so much, a second take was made. Kapp was probably not present, for no actual recording was scheduled, but when he heard it he knew he had a jewel. He released the second take of “Dinah” on a disc with Bing’s earnest version of Victor Young’s “Can’t We Talk It Over,” recorded days later at the Paramount Theater, sedately accompanied by Helen Crawford’s Wurlitzer. In the first days of 1932, “Dinah” was the hottest record in the country, the second top-ranking hit for the Mills Brothers and the fourth (under his own name) for Bing. It endures as an irresistible pop classic.
“Dinah” is emphatically a record of the early thirties; Bing slightly overdoes the parallel mordents and scats with a two-beat stiffness. Yet his phrasing is sure and inventive, and he swings buoyantly, especially when riffing with the brothers. The entire performance is dazzling fun, flowing with energy and good cheer. Bing was most expressive in his lower midrange, as here, sculpting every note while breezing over the rhythm. After the Millses sing a unison double-time chorus, Donald Mills scats a two-bar platform from which Bing leaps into a sixteen-bar improvisation. The Armstrong influence is evident in his ensuing riffs (especially on the long-unissued and more larkish “test” version), yet he is utterly himself. Donald, not yet seventeen at the time, recalled, “Crosby and us were great friends. We enjoyed one another. He was a wonderful person. When we made ‘Dinah’ or ‘Shine’ [two months later], we didn’t rehearse. We just said, ‘Well, we’ll do this, you do that,’ and we recorded. No arrangement.” 45
Over time, business at the Paramount improved. Reviewers noted Bing’s equanimity — he did not appear to mind having to sing while obscured by a bevy of dancing girls — as well as his “quiet line of clowning” and his innovative decision to plant his main microphone in the orchestra pit, several feet in front of him, so that he stood bare before the audience, like Al Jolson. The front office (Paramount Publix) booked Russ Columbo into the Brooklyn theater during part of Bing’s Broadway run to exploit the battle of the baritones. But it tilted its booking powers toward Bing, whose shows were more elaborate and included several of the most talented and popular performers of the era, notably Kate Smith, Eleanor Powell, Lillian Roth, Cab Calloway, the Boswell Sisters, and Burns and Allen. Paramount increased his salary to $4,000 when it extended his contract (it did not renew Columbo’s), a tribute as much to his personal stability as to his drawing power.
Which is not to say he didn’t slip up a few times. Frieda Kapp, Jack’s widow, recalled the Paramount run as the period when Jack began pressuring Bing to dispense with the trademarks that had given him cachet ever since the Whiteman years. Jack summed them up as the “bu-bu-bu-boos,” by which he also meant scat singing and jazz. Kapp was determined to establish Bing as the first entertainer who was all things to all people, and as his instincts usually proved sound, Bing grew to depend on them. But it was not always easy, and one of their discussions apparently sent Bing on a bender. “That was the beginning of Bing’s success, taking away the bu-bu-bu-boos at the Paramount Theater,” as Frieda remembered it. “I remember very well that [Jack] took the bu-bu-bu-boo away from him and he did not appear that night at the Paramount. They found him drunk somewhere. After that, of course, he went back and became a great success.” 46
His sporadic unsteadiness was also apparent on the air. “A couple of times during the early weeks, I remember him fumbling on the radio,” said Burton Lane. “I never saw him drinking, but if he blew a lyric,there would be talk on the street, you know, around the music publishers.” 47 Artie Shaw remembered a broadcast when Bing “was so drunk he was staggering. He wouldn’t stay near the mike, somebody had to hold him there.” 48 In Shaw’s opinion, the problem was Dixie. The scuttlebutt had it that she had come to New York to keep him off the sauce but was drinking too much herself.
Shortly before Bing took off for New York, Dixie Lee embarked on a nightclub engagement in Los Angeles at the Embassy club. She arrived in New York after completing the gig, and friends said they seemed happy together. “Bing and Dixie were living at the Essex House, which was very new, and Mildred and I were married and staying with Joe and Sally Venuti, nearby on Fifty-fifth Street,” Red Norvo recalled. “And so we gave parties at Joe’s apartment, the six of us, and they were wonderful.” 49 Bing and Dixie bought a white terrier and named it Cremo. “Dixie came to the studio once or twice,” Ken Roberts remembered, “and she was like a little waif. I heard after that she drank a lot. I don’t know. Bing had a reputation for drinking, but I never saw him drunk. When he was working he was very serious.” 50 Yet a turnabout was taking place. At Dixie’s urging, Bing had straightened out, but in trying to keep up with him and in warding off loneliness when he worked late, she now turned increasingly to alcohol.
Meanwhile, Everett ran rampant, pulling strings, making deals. “Everett was running Bing’s life at that time,” or so it seemed to Gary Stevens. “He was all business, looking out for Bing’s welfare on a very strict, cold basis.” 51 He was not greatly liked or respected. Ken Roberts thought that “he just kind of latched on to this brilliant young brother.” 52 Everett was known as a tippler and a chaser. Members of the Paramount stage crew 53 described an incident that occurred when Everett followed Bing onstage as he was about to climb onto the seat of the crane that suspended him over the audience. During their hurried conversation, before the curtain rose, Everett noticed they were standing near a trapdoor that opened on the girls’ dressing area. Somehow he managed to fall through the trap as the crane took Bing on his ride. The orchestra had to play extra loud to cover the shrieking from down below.
In the all-time classic Everett story, however, he plays a bit part. “There was a shoeshine boy near CBS at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood,” Artie Shaw recalled, “and he was working on one man, when the man he just finished gave him a dime tip, which was a normal tip back then, and walked away. So the shoeshine boy says, ‘Thanks, Mr. Crosby,’ and the new customer says, ‘Was that Bing Crosby?’And the kid says, ‘No, that’s the wrong Crosby.’ Everett was known as the wrong Crosby for the rest of his life.” 54
Yet for all his rough edges, Everett proved an effective deal-maker as the Crosby phenomenon billowed. Young Gary Stevens helped the process along by convincing CBS’s three vocal stars — Kate Smith, Morton Downey, and Bing — to pose for a picture he placed in the New York World-Telegram; it was quickly picked up by the Associated Press. Bing refused to wear his hairpiece for the picture, the last time that would happen in a publicity shot.
In January Mack Sennett asked Bing to complete a biographical card for his public-relations office. Everett filled it out, creating bits of the Crosby myth that persisted from one press release to another, from one screen-idol magazine to the next. He got little right beyond eyes (blue), hair (light), pastimes (golf and swordfishing), and current address (the Essex House). But he did create Bing’s official birth date of May 2, 1904. Though he shaved only a year from Bing’s real age, Everett thought he was being canny; he figured Bing had to be thirty-one or thirty-two and that he was doing him a favor keeping him in his twenties in what promised to be his breakthrough year in movies. He declined to fill in height and weight, identified his first Sennett film as One More Chance (it was I Surrender Dear), and traced his nickname to his childhood affection for popguns. Unable to resist adding a little more color, he appended a few Whiteman tales and the comment: “claims his watch has been in every pawnshop across country” 55
Everett could afford to make the pawnshop crack, because those days were behind Bing. With Dixie on furlough from Fox, she made the rounds with him. They enjoyed their relative prosperity, his increased renown, New York, and each other. Bing focused intently on singing and rarely turned down an opportunity to work. He sang so often, it’s a wonder his node didn’t cause greater affliction. On a Saturday evening in February, toward the end of the Paramount engagement, Bing moonlighted at New Jersey’s Newark Armory at a Radio Artists Ball, where a dollar ticket rewarded fans with Crosby, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Nick Lucas (“Tip Toe Through the Tulips with Me”), and Bennie Krueger’s orchestra. Five evenings later he hightailed it from his last show at the Paramount to the Columbia studio where Duke Ellington was setting up. Between midnight and one, they recorded two Ellington arrangements of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Although they admired and liked each other (Duke created his concerto version of “Frankie and Johnny” for Bing’s radio show in 1941; the last recording Bing made in the United States was for a memorial tribute to Duke in 1977), this was the only time Bing formally recorded as a soloist with Ellington and one of the few times he recorded the blues. 56 A pity on both counts, for the result is a gem — or, more precisely, two gems.
The second (B) take was initially released and remains the best known of the two, beginning with a slap-tongue introduction by baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and proceeding with glowing choruses by trumpeter Cootie Williams and trombonist Joe Nanton. After a short piano transition, Bing sings two twelve-bar choruses, backed by a covey of clarinetist Barney Bigard, Carney, and guitarist Fred Guy, whose dynamic strumming suggests a banjo. Bing continues with the two sixteen-bar refrains (Ellington dispenses with the tango rhythm of the original), backed at first by Nanton and then by the previously noted trio. He coolly improvises phrases with such authority that when he forgets the lyric, he is able to unhesitatingly fake — in true blues tradition — a closing refrain. At which point the tempo is doubled as the great alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges wails a chorus, setting up a stirring passage by Bing, one of the finest examples of scat singing in that era. He concludes at half tempo with the beautifully modulated line “And I love my baby [critic J. T. H. Mize astutely singled out the “slow and deliberate tilt on baby”] 57 till the day I die.”
That closing phrase probably clinched the choice of take B, but the verdict was actually settled on a question of gender; in Bing’s first try, the St. Louis woman pulled “that gal around,” instead of the man she was supposed to be pulling. The A take has rewards of its own, beginning with an orchestral introduction and a ferocious Cootie Williams solo that establishes a far earthier mood, peaking with one of Bing’s headiest jazz moments on record. Before Hodges completes his double-time chorus, Bing — Louislike — leaps in and commands the saxophonist’s last four bars as a scat runway for his own elated chorus. In neither version does Bing make an effort to mimic expressive blues techniques. He enjoyed, as did Ellington, the contrast between his level tones and the band’s idiosyncratic timbres. The record was reviewed later that year in Britain’s Gramophone:“After the ballad performances to which Bing has been devoting most of his time lately the brilliance of his rhythmic style will be surprising, even to those who remember the days when, with Harry Barris and Al Rinker [he] created quite a sensation as a hot singer.” 58
Bing played it both ways, hot and cool, all season. If the material was uninspired, as it often was, he managed to wring something personal from it anyway, for example, “Starlight,” a poised though raspy-voiced reading of an undistinguished ballad that shows how comfortable he had become as a stylist, no longer trying so hard to turn or sigh a note. Jack Kapp’s persistence in getting him to simplify his attack paid off without diminishing Bing’s gift for drama. He gives full measure to the bygone lament “My Woman,” transforming an awkward song into a charmer with mild echoes of jazz and tango. 59 Eddie Lang was invariably at his side, a kind of jazz conscience. In arranging “Paradise,” Victor Young allowed Bing and Lang to waltz the last sixteen bars largely on their own, and on “You’re Still in My Heart,” he had Lang double-time the second chorus.
The most popular Crosby recording that month was a stunning reunion with the Mills Brothers on “Shine.” A minstrel song fashioned for a revue in 1909 by two black songwriters (Ford Dabney and the influential lyricist-publisher Cecil Mack), “Shine” did not achieve success until the 1920s, by which time its self-pity and ethnic cliches (“Just because my hair is curly / Just because my teeth are pearly”) were more likely to invite parody than outrage. In 1931 Louis Armstrong had made the song an exuberant virtuoso showcase, practically transforming the epithet “Shine” into a badge of honor. In their 1932 version, the Mills Brothers politely phrase the outmoded lyric. Then Bing jumps in, imbuing every word with swing, rhythmically and sonorously overwhelming the trite caricature. When the Millses reprise the chorus, Bing interpolates spoken responses that suggest a benign carny barker (“man’s got curly hair!” “also got pearly teeth!”) and adds an Armstrongian “ohhh, keep on smiling.” Bing’s scat solo on “Shine” was his most inventive to date, surpassing “Dinah” in its rhythmic variety and assurance.
He fared less successfully on Victor Young’s “Lawd, You Made the Night Too Long,” an incongruously heavy-handed record with Don Redman’s elegant orchestra and the Boswell Sisters, with whom he does not interact. Sadly, that was the last time he appeared on record with the Boswells, though they worked together on radio numerous times. It was also the last time he recorded in New York before embarking — that very afternoon (April 13) — on the tour that brought him back to Hollywood.
Bing’s departure from New York had been hastened in part by Cremo’s surprise decision, in February, not to renew his radio contract. George Washington Hill saw no need to explain why. According to one observer, the clean-cigar company was shocked to discover, after four months, that women who faithfully listened to Bing did not smoke cigars. Another traced the rupture to one of Hill’s advertising boasts, “There is no spit in Cremo.” Bing’s show had become notorious for its distasteful commercials, shudderingly recited by announcer David Ross (“Spit,” he would begin, “is a horrid word”), concerning the dreadful effects of saliva. 60 The story went that one of Hill’s lieutenants manufactured a private run of hand-rolled (and tongue-sealed) cigars and distributed them with the Cremo label. Hill was allegedly mortified to realize that those Cremos did undoubtedly contain spit and withdrew all sponsorship for the product.
Bing and Everett were not overly worried at first. CBS had every intention of keeping Bing on the air until a new sponsor could be found. Yet the network forbade him from including Dixie in the show, perhaps fearing that a wifely presence would undermine his potency as a heartthrob balladeer. Bing was sufficiently concerned about his future in radio to accept the injunction, which hammered home the career reversals that had taken place in the seventeen months since they were married. Cremo’s retreat was not untimely. Bing had failed to give his voice the prescribed rest, so Dr. Ruskin sent him to another specialist, Chevalier Jackson, who apparently frightened him into a brief repose. As Bing related to biographer Charles Thompson, Jackson warned him that surgery might turn him into “a boy soprano” and advised, “If you rest and don’t even answer the phone — don’t talk, don’t do anything — [the nodes will] recede.” 61 Bing took ten days off before resuming broadcasts, again with Fred Rich’s band, but only three times a week. Cremo’s layoff also made it easier for him to return to California to shoot the two remaining shorts on his Sennett contract. While Bing continued working the Paramount, Everett was less preoccupied with finding him a new sponsor than with lining up a feature film to make the trip worthwhile.
Meanwhile, Bing’s standing in show business reached a new plateau. During the week of his last Cremo appearance (February 27), Bing was honored with a midnight dinner at the Friars Club — “a particularly funny night,” according to the club’s chronicler, Joey Adams, and the first time the industry paid him tribute. 62 The speakers included Jack Benny, George Burns, Irving Berlin, Rudy Vallee, William Paley, George Jessel, Walter Donaldson, and Damon Runyon. At the end of the evening, George M. Cohan presented Bing with a lifetime membership card made of gold. In March the public joined in a roast of the whole crooning triad, stimulated by a song, “Crosby, Columbo and Vallee” (“Who do husbands hate their wives to listen to? / Crosby, Columbo and Vallee!”). Vallee sued to have his picture removed from the sheet music but could do nothing when Merrie Melodies lampooned him and Bing in a cartoon of the same name.
(Over the next decade Bing would be caricatured visually, vocally, or both in numerous animations, not always kindly. In depicting him as a cad, the parodies echoed the plots of the Sennett shorts in which he abducts women from their suitors. In a May 1936 cartoon, Let It Be Me, Mr. Bingo is a spats-wearing cock of the walk, who croons for PBC [the Poultry Broadcasting Company] and seduces and abandons an innocent hen in favor of a curvaceous French capon. The hen’s dumb-cluck boyfriend avenges her by smashing a radio and punching Mr. Bingo before marrying the hen. They have five chicks, one of whom chirps bu-bu-bu-boo. Merrie Melodies quickly followed it with Bingo Crosbyana, this time prompting a suit in which Bing’s attorney, John O’Melveny, argued that the title character was depicted as a “vainglorious coward.” The complaint had no motive beyond harassment. Warners cartoonists gave Bing a wide berth for a couple of years, during which his representatives developed a better sense of humor. Bing was back on the drawing board by 1938, albeit less derisively.)
A blanket skewering of radio itself provided Bing with his opportunity to return to Hollywood in style. The talk of Broadway in early 1932 was William Ford Manley’s play Wild Waves, which satirically traced the rise of a broadcast star. One of its producers, D. A. Doran, was affiliated with the story department at Paramount Pictures and persuaded the studio to purchase the film rights. By February Paramount let it be known it was considering Bing for the lead role. A New York Daily News columnist cheered, “Should be Bing’s meat!” 63 Paramount negotiated with Sennett and Everett to obtain Bing’s participation and signed him to a one-picture deal — a deal that would have Bing working his way west in just about every Paramount-Publix theater en route.
* * *
As his star rose during the first six months of 1932, Bing began to extricate himself from a surfeit of agents. Early in the year, Ev was taking 10 percent of his income while Marchetti was taking another 20 percent. Bing was obliged to the lawyer for getting him out of the mess at the Grove and vetting his CBS contract, but he now rankled at paying him a fifth of his earnings when they were on opposite coasts and Marchetti no longer did much, if anything, for him. Having organized Bing Crosby, Ltd., with himself, Bing, and Barris as equal partners, Marchetti demanded $100,000 for his third. Bing wired another Los Angeles attorney, John O’Melveny, to handle the situation. O’Melveny represented Sue Carol and once helped Dixie with her Fox contract; he had seen Bing at the Grove and was later introduced to him by Sue at a party she gave for Bing and Dixie when they were married. His negotiations with Marchetti resulted in the astonishingly low settlement of $15,000 and established O’Melveny as a permanent member of the Crosby organization, representing Bing in all legal matters for the rest of their lives.
Edward Small presented more of a problem. Bing had stopped paying him his 10 percent, claiming that Small verbally released him from their 1930 contract on the condition that Bing settle with him upon his return to Los Angeles. Small denied ever relieving Bing of his obligations. When the Paramount deal was rumored, he sued for $20,000, based on his estimate of Bing’s two-year earnings as $200,000 (“I wish that were true,” Bing told a reporter); 64 when the movie deal was confirmed, he enlarged his demand by an additional $85,000. Newspaper accounts feigned surprise that such sums could be earned from crooning, and Bing bristled at having his finances publicized. After one of his Paramount salary checks was attached by the sheriff, Bing settled out of court.
Bing needed a publicist. His brother Ted (third-oldest of the siblings, after Larry and Everett) had made a game try in December 1931 from his home in Spokane, pitching Bing’s story to Time. Ted received a smug response from a member of the editorial department with the improbable name Eleanor Hard: “I am afraid the Bing Crosby suggestion won’t be suitable for FORTUNE. Thanks for your suggestion, however.” 65 Fortune”? He wrote back that he had meant Time, which recently ran a story on Alice Joy, “The Dream Singer,” a vaudevillian who did a daily fifteen-minute show. “The incidents in her rise to fame are not nearly so startling as those to be found in a history of Bing’s,” he argued: “[Bing] heads the list of radio singers — he is in his third month at the New York Paramount — his motion picture ‘shorts’ are breaking records — his records are best sellers — and his latest success is in song writing.” 66 Though Ted harbored aspirations as a manager and writer, he was disinclined to leave Washington. Brother Larry, on the other hand, was raring to go, and Bing gave him the job of redefining his reputation as one of professionalism and sobriety. The FDR era was about to commence. Within a year Prohibition would be repealed. There was no reason to drink anymore — except maybe the Depression.
Doreen Wilde (above) appeared with dancer Bobby Thompson in the same vaudeville show (Syncopation Ideas) that introduced Crosby and Rinker to California audiences, 1925. Alison McMahan Collection
On January 1, 1926, the Spokane Chronicle reported on Al and Bing’s first variety tour. Bing Crosby Collection, FoleyCenter, Gonzaga University
The Rhythm Boys at play: Al Rinker at the piano, Harry Barris on the ground, Bing with cymbal and baton. Mickey Kapp Collection
Paul Whiteman’s photograph helped sell the sheet music for the Rhythm Boys’ biggest hit, “Mississippi Mud,” 1927. Gary Giddins Collection
“Am I too suave or sveldt… Brush by Fuller.” Bing, mustachioed and natty, had this picture taken in New York and inscribed it to his brother Ted. Howard Crosby Collection
Gus Arnheim led the famous orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove. Elsie Perry Collection
A publicity photo of Bing and Eddie Lang, the highest-paid sideman in the country before his untimely death.
Gary Giddins Collection
Six scenes from the short subjects Bing made for Mack Sennett. In Dream House, he gets black housepaint on his face, leading a black casting director to hire him as a black actor; in Billboard Girl, the swishy brother of Bing’s paramour pretends to be her and Bing can’t tell the difference. Note that he almost always wore a hat to avoid the dreaded “scalp doily.” Jon Pro tas
Larry Crosby was brought on board to handle Bing’s publicity and collaborated with brother Ted on a fictionalized biography. Bing Crosby Collection, Foley Center, Gonzaga University
Jack Kapp revolutionized the recording industry and chose many of Bing’s songs between 1931 and 1949. Elsie Perry Collection
Three Crosby brothers, top to bottom: bandleader Bob, Bing, and manager Everett (“the wrong Crosby”).
Ron Bosley Collection
The October 1934 issue of RadioStars celebrated the crooner who helped place radios in millions of homes. Gary Giddins Collection
Bing’s ambivalence about tobacco sponsorship was evident in a 1944 print campaign in which he allowed himself to be quoted only on the matter of friendship.
Eric Anderson Collection
In the weeks before his 1931 network radio debut, Bing auditioned a couple of songs as his theme before settling on “Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)”-a perfect choice. Gary Giddins Collection
When Rudy Vallee first heard Bing, he observed, “My time is short.” Bing thumbs through Radio Mirror with Rudy on the cover, 1933. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences