17

UNDER WESTERN SKIES

I’d like to be able to sing like the crooners. The reason is a crooner gets his quota of sentimentality with half his natural voice. That’s a great saving. I don’t like to work.

— Bing Crosby, Time (1934) ¹

Paramount was determined to keep Bing in harness. Two months after wrapping College Humor, he began shooting Too Much Harmony, enjoying little rest in the interim beyond a week in May spent with Dixie at Palm Springs. On returning to Hollywood, he agreed to shoot six shorts and, within days, accompanied director Arvid E. Gillstrom to Yosemite Park to make two, Please and Just an Echo. ² In the first, Bing once again plays Bing. Driving his car, he comes upon a fair maiden with a flat tire and an overbearing clownish suitor. As it happens, she teaches singing and Bing — looking younger and more attractive than in College Humor — asks for lessons. After dispatching her beau, Elmer Smoot (Vernon Dent doing a malevolent Oliver Hardy), in a vocal contest, Bing drives into the sunset with her, pecking her on the lips and nodding his head to seal his accomplishment.

In Just an Echo Bing proves he can stay on a horse, as a forest ranger who orders campers to douse their cigarettes. One miscreant is his captain’s daughter, with whom he, once again, rides into the sunset. Bing disliked Just an Echo — he thought it poorly edited — and it disappeared, apparently for good. When College Humor exceeded box-office expectations, the studio realized Bing was too important for two-reelers and abruptly canceled the four remaining shorts.

Instead, he participated in another Hollywood on Parade promotional short, exchanging compliments with Mary Pickford, Para-mount’s first major star and the queen of Hollywood royalty. She retired that year, at forty, but returned in 1935 to introduce Bing in the MGM Technicolor two-reeler Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove, a film terminally dated except for Bing’s complacent, almost alien intelligence and his measured rendering of “With Every Breath I Take.” That same unassuming flair is evident in the Paramount reel, as he, every inch the film star, genially accepts Pickford’s praise. Eight years earlier he had grudgingly roused himself from sleep to accompany Al Rinker to California. Now he felt flush, confident of his success — and he wanted his parents at hand. Kate and Harry, in their early sixties, were ready to enjoy easier times. After twenty years in the small brown house near Gonzaga, they left Spokane for a new life. For a while they lived with Bing, who wrote his brother Ted about selling the house: “I don’t imagine the folks will ever return there, except for a visit. This climate is less rigorous and accordingly better for them.” ³ Months later he bought them a place of their own in Toluca Lake, at nearby 4366 Ponca Avenue. Harry Crosby readily took to Hollywood: “He’d sit down on a bus and introduce himself,” Bing marveled. “’Harry Crosby Sr., I’ve got a few clippings,’ and he’d show my clippings.” ⁴ Mother Crosby discovered the ponies.

In June Bing reunited with bandleader Jimmy Grier, Gus Arnheim’s former arranger at the Grove, for three recording sessions, followed by a fourth in August. Bing’s pleasure in working with Grier cannot in itself explain the magnetic extravagance of his singing on those dates. Perhaps he was expressing his delight in his success or his happiness with Dixie or anticipation of their first child or solid roots indicated by their new home or all of the above or something else entirely. But never before had Bing performed with so much nervy adrenaline; his voice seemed to burst with vitality. Neither Brunswick nor Columbia, the label that eventually acquired ownership of the records, ever thought to collect the Grier sessions for an album, yet they are all of a piece: exuberant readings of mostly second-rate songs, exemplifying the jazz creed, Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

The first order of business was to record the tunes from his films. Much of the material was grim, expressing the mood if not the substance of the Depression in narratives of lost, doomed, or betrayed love. Bing’s stout delivery, cradled in richly detailed arrangements, is at once heroic and haunted. He told an interviewer that same year, “I won’t sing sappy songs. A crooner gets enough criticism. There’s no reason to invite more barbs by singing mush.” ⁵ None of the fourteen titles recorded that summer is mushy. “Learn to Croon” may be replete with la-di-das, but the attack is bolder than any singing of the day short of opera. Yet so unaffected is Bing, he creates the illusion that anyone could sing as well. Even his flawless intonation and splendid timbre have an unschooled, artless quality — the sound of a passionate American rearing back and singing full bore. “Moonstruck,” also from the film, begins with a moon/June cliché and never gets much better, but it is emboldened by the assertiveness of Bing’s delivery. “Down the Old Ox Road,” inverting the usual order of tempo adjustments, begins swinging and then slows down.

Better was to come. “I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House,” an odd Yiddische minor-key melody by Lew Brown, has had no life beyond Bing’s original recording, yet he embraces the sad plight of the narrative with such sympathetic brilliance — aided by Ellingtonian muted brasses to underscore the rhythm — that he enhances it with an intensity due an art song. Victor Young’s undistinguished “My Love” begins with a surprising allusion to John McCormack; Bing enters unexpectedly high before settling into a more comfortable midrange. With his forceful conception and execution, he turns a minor song into a satisfying experience, soaring into the clouds at the end of the release. “Blue Prelude,” trumpeter Joe Bishop’s mesmerizing melody (it was briefly Woody Herman’s theme in 1940), was outfitted with a Gordon Jenkins lyric and an Ellingtonian arrangement, plus strong rhythm-section work and a fitting clarinet solo by James Briggs. Bing’s dynamics are most impressive in his rattling last eight bars, but his overall attention to detail confers a structural design virtually unheard-of on a pop record.

The most successful of the Grier records and a huge national hit for Bing was “Shadow Waltz,” from Gold Diggers of 1933. Most of Al Dubin’s lines end in the maladroit phrase “to you”:

In the shadows, let me come and sing to you.

Let me dream a song that I can bring to you.

Take me in your arms and let me cling to you.

Bing takes the vowels in stride, building an overall arc for the performance that complements Harry Warren’s loping melody. In some of his inflections (song/bring), one can hear the nascent style of Dean Martin, another young singer — fifteen at the time — who learned his trade by imitating Crosby. After the first chorus, Bing attacks the verse a beat early, for dramatic emphasis. “There’s a Cabin in the Pines” was one of several cabin songs (in the cotton, on the hilltop, in the sky), but Bing puts aside its rustic innocence in favor of jazzy cadences and subtle backbeat phrasing. His mastery of time is no less marked in his rubato treatment of the verse of “I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song.”

Bing’s immaculate bell-like projection deepens “The Day You Came Along,” from Too Much Harmony, as does his canny breath control, as he punctuates the turnback after the first eight bars with a wordless exclamation; he turns an unimportant, repetitive song into a rousing anthem, building to a climactically rhythmic finish. His alchemy is perhaps most luminous on the cryptically dark “Black Moonlight,” from the same film. The arrangement begins with pizzicato strings answered by growly brasses and descending saxophones and advances with rhythmic change-ups and vivid voicings. Emotional yet stoic, Bing displays all he knows about breathing and enunciation and dynamics to articulate its mood and import. These performances refuted the critics who disparaged his allegedly anemic crooning, and demolished singers who could do no more than croon.

Shortly after the June sessions, Gary Evan Crosby was born at Cedars of Lebanon on June 27, 1933, weighing seven pounds six ounces and named after Gary Cooper and Dixie’s dad. Richard Arlen had bet Bing $100 that the baby would be a girl and that his newborn son, Richard Jr., would marry her. Instead, the infants were christened together and feted at a baby-dunking party at the Crosby home. Weeks before, Kitty Lang had arrived to live with the Crosbys; they never spoke of Eddie’s death and funeral, three months earlier. She helped Dixie shop for layettes and other items she would need in the hospital and stayed with her through the delivery. She then ran into the waiting room to tell Bing. “He was so happy. It was good to see him smile again. He said, ‘This calls for a celebration.’ Did we go to Chasen’s? Not exactly. We went to Sid’s Ice Cream Parlor for a banana split.” ⁶ Gary Cooper, delighted by his namesake, brought over a crib with Gary carved on it. Bing tried to match him with Kitty, who admired him on the screen, but she shyly demurred. Bing told her, “Now that I have a son, I want him to be proud of me. I’m really going to settle down.” ⁷

For the next few years, he doted on Gary, taking him everywhere, not least the racetrack and swimming. Gary was said to be exceptionally bright; Bing claimed that he could sing in tune when he was a year old. Gary would watch his father sing, and cause much hilarity by moving his lips and mimicking his movements. But he was a difficult, colicky infant, and Dixie was intimidated by the hospital nurse. Kitty thought the nurse, who insisted that Gary was having temper tantrums, less than sympathetic. When she convinced Dixie to hire an “old-fashioned nurse,” the colic disappeared. Kitty showed Dixie how to bathe and feed her baby; “although she was scared to death, she managed quite well.” ⁸ At one point Dixie fell and broke her elbow, fueling rumors that she was drinking. Bing rushed home from Catalina Island to take her to the hospital. When Gary was four months old, the Paramount publicity department issued a four-page press release, quoting Bing as hoping his son would be an actor and singer “a million times better than I am” — though he was not going to push him into the profession. “Whatever he wants to do, we’ll smooth the road as far as it is possible to do so.” ⁹

All he demanded, Bing purportedly said, was that Gary, unlike himself, finish college. He also stipulated that his son be a regular kid, no different from any other. He would be raised like a “typical American boy.” ¹⁰ But not entirely typical. In July, responding to threats in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Bing sought a bodyguard to protect his wife and child. He offered the job to Marty Collins, the fighter who had come to his aid at Eddie’s funeral. Collins remained on the payroll for three years, after which Bing helped him open his own bar.

The energy of the Grier recordings and the joy of fatherhood did not hold for Too Much Harmony — a rote backstage musical with a lack luster performance by Bing. The picture was directed by former vaudevillian and Chaplin protégé Edward Sutherland and was written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who idolized Bing and mimicked him at parties. Again, Bing’s role was an afterthought, this time in a project originally intended for the other two stars. In 1929 Jack Oakie and Skeets Gallagher had enjoyed popular triumphs with two films, Close Harmony and Fast Company; the latter is an adaptation, by Mankiewicz, of Ring Lardner’s Elmer the Great and remained Oakie’s perennial favorite among his own pictures. Too Much Harmony was devised as a reunion for Oakie and Gallagher but was shelved until producer William LeBaron got the idea to move them into the background of a romance built around Bing.

Mankiewicz’s story, for which he received a larger screen credit than Sutherland, concerns Broadway headliner Eddie Bronson (Bing), who is torn between the nice girl who adores him (Judith Allen) and the faithless, gold-digging bitch who uses him (Lilyan Tashman). The outcome, unlike that of The Big Broadcast, holds no surprises. The film begins with Bing singing the final measures of “Learn to Croon” at a Chicago theater, establishing continuity with College Humor not only for Bing but for Coslow and Johnston, who wrote the score. (They learned they had the job from Everett at Gary’s christening party.) They wrote worthy songs, notably a hit sequel to “Please” called “Thanks.” Yet two superior numbers, “Black Moonlight” and “The Day You Came Along,” were maddeningly assigned to Judith Allen and Kitty Kelly, who could neither sing nor synchronize their lips. Allen’s song was dubbed by a singer whose streetwise head inflections, a cross between Dixie Lee and Ethel Merman, are a far remove from her highborn speaking voice. Kelly appears as the salty paramour of a producer, Max Merlin, played by a language-mangling Jewish comedian, Harry Green; in an instance of kitsch imitating life, her number was created for her because she was the paramour of producer William LeBaron.

Another cast member with connections was Mrs. Evelyn Offield Oakie, Jack’s mother on- and offscreen, a feisty lady who left a trail of anecdotes. She once convinced a Bank of Hollywood teller to give her all of Jack’s money the day before the bank folded. On the set she regaled the actors with tales as they sat around her on canvas chairs emblazoned with their names. When her chair tipped over, Bing helped her up, asking, “Are you all right, Mrs. Offield?” “Bing,” she said, “I noticed that my name wasn’t on the chair and it kind of upset me.” ¹¹ Bing admired Oakie, a master of double takes and sheepish grins, and insisted that he did not mind his rampant scene stealing, his “twisting you around so that his face was in the camera while you talked to the backdrop.” He reasoned: “Sooner or later there would be a spot in the picture in which I’d sing a song and Jack would be in the trunk.” ¹²

One of Bing’s best scenes is in the baggage car of a train, when he sings, all too briefly, “Boo Boo Boo,” another attempt to cash in on his trademark; the tune rouses him more than the cast or script. Yet the most elaborate number belongs to Kitty Kelly. “Black Moonlight” is an outlandish indulgence in which, through a trick of lighting, streetwalkers and dancers decked out in Harlem drag change from black to white and back, while Kitty’s lips move in blissful disregard of the words she is supposed to be miming. The jokes were older than the actors telling them. At one point Oakie and Gallagher exchange a breakneck string of vaudeville jokes, including the one — “How can I keep my horse from frothing at the mouth?” — that got the Rhythm Boys banned in Toledo.

Bing was not happy about his billing, especially on the pre-release posters. Paramount was giving him star treatment despite his opposition. The company argued that his name was the movie’s biggest asset and ought to be played to the hilt; in any case, the press materials were printed and it was too expensive to redo them. But Bing was intractable. He insisted they place his name on the same title card as Oakie, Gallagher, and other principals, and the studio complied, creating new credits, ads, lobby cards, and press packets.

Completed after five weeks, in mid-August, the film was distributed in September. Reviews were mixed. The New York Times found many “quite lively” scenes but cautioned admirers of “Mr. Crosby’s peculiar ballads” that they might be “disappointed by his attempts to register admiration and affection.” ¹³ Variety approved his ability in “the trouping department.” ¹⁴ The ludicrous Hearst columnist Louella Parsons was delighted with Kitty Kelly and her voice and thought the whole picture “swell,” except for Judith Allen. ¹⁵ She counted herself, along with her son, as converted Bing fans — small wonder, as Mr. Hearst was set to produce Bing’s next picture.

The majority of local reviewers held their collective nose, but adverse reviews notwithstanding, the public flocked to the box office. Too Much Harmony was a smash in every region. Several theaters extended their bookings, a rare occurrence in 1933. In Pittsburgh it was the first major draw in months; in Cincinnati it successfully competed with the road-show megahit Dinner at Eight; in Indianapolis, despite major competition and a dearth of ads, it beat everything else on the street; in New York it broke the Paramount Theater’s house average and raked in $60,000 in one week — “like the old predepresh days,” Variety crooned. ¹⁶ Receipts from Europe were just as dazzling. In two weeks Too Much Harmony did more business at London’s Plaza Theatre than any movie since the advent of sound. ¹⁷

The picture that clinched Bing’s place in the coveted circle of top-ten box-office attractions, as calculated in an annual poll of exhibitors conducted by Quigley Publications, was not made at Paramount. It came from MGM, at the behest of Marion Davies and her powerful lover, William Randolph Hearst. The irony was much appreciated on the Paramount lot: in attempting to boost Davies’s flagging popularity, Hearst borrowed two of Paramount’s leading men (first Bing in Going Hollywood, then Gary Cooper in Operator 13). In Hollywood’s pecking order, this was akin to Rolls-Royce renting upholstery from General Motors. The decision to borrow Bing was initiated by MGM lyricist and former coproducer of the Morrissey revues, Arthur Freed. With his partner, Nacio Herb Brown, Freed had written a fervent new song, “Temptation,” that he believed only Bing could put over. Davies was charmed by Bing. But the jealous Hearst fretted about his reputation as a womanizing hell-raiser (he surely recalled the Berkeley frat party that got his son Bill and Bing into trouble) and had to be persuaded. College Humor’s box-office receipts helped. He was undoubtedly comforted by the success of Too Much Harmony, which broke during the filming of Going Hollywood.

Paramount agreed to the loan-out, reasoning that a little MGM stardust could not hurt the value of its property; besides, Hearst always paid his way. Everett, who closed Bing’s deal, put to good use the rumors about Davies’s leisurely way of working. He negotiated a payment of $2,000 a week above and beyond a lump sum. This produced a windfall as the picture, slated to shoot between August 30 and October 13, wrapped several weeks late, netting Bing $75,000 and leading Time to describe him as “probably the world’s best paid male singer.” ¹⁸ Bing relished Going Hollywood for the partying and the clique of top-notch talent.

It had all begun when Cosmopolitan, the production company Hearst created for Marion Davies, bought a treatment called Paid to Laugh, by Frances Marion, a prolific scenarist of the silent era who also directed a few Davies films. A synopsis was given to playwright and novelist Donald Ogden Stewart, then at the beginning of a stellar career as a screenwriter — Holiday, Love Affair, The Philadelphia Story — that was curtailed twenty years later by the blacklist. He completed his final draft in August, by which time six songs were written by Brown and Freed, the team that put the MGM musical on the map in 1929 with The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and The Broadway Melody. Supervising the musical score and fashioning some of the most refined movie arrangements of the era was Lennie Hayton, who became a mainstay of the Freed unit in 1942. Davies, at thirty-six, was six years older than Bing and looked it; she required a premier cinematographer and found one in George Folsey, who shot The Big Broadcast among numerous other black-and-white films and would also become a Freed unit regular, setting Technicolor standards in pictures like Meet Me in St. Louis and Ziegfeld Follies. Walter Wanger, soon to be a major force in Hollywood, was chosen to produce.

Last on board was director Raoul Walsh, a legend at forty-six, though his best work lay ahead of him (The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde, White Heat). He accepted the picture because he was eager to work with its two stars. Walsh had known and admired Bing as far back as the Cocoanut Grove (“he had come a long way with talent and a big future sticking out all over him”), ¹⁹ and he wanted to meet Marion, by then a reluctant actress, often maligned as Hearst’s Galatea by those who had never seen the superb comedienne’s work. Born to an Irish Catholic family that prospered in the Garment Center, Raoul grew up in a posh Manhattan town house bustling with servants and visited by the celebrities of a fading era, among them Edwin Booth, Diamond Jim Brady, Buffalo Bill, and John L. Sullivan. Yet, like Bing, he had a yen for the wild side, which he exercised swimming in the East River and frequenting Bowery saloons and bordellos.

Walsh was fifteen when his mother died and an uncle took him to Cuba. He made his way to Mexico, where a job driving cattle led to parts in western movies and an apprenticeship with D. W Griffith, who cast him as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation. He developed into an instinctive and stylish filmmaker, renowned for dynamic action scenes; an early triumph was The Thief of Bagdad, with Douglas Fairbanks. Though Walsh directed few musicals during his long career, he loved the sentimental ditties of old New York, and several of his most hard-bitten pictures are cued to those songs. Wearing an imposing eye patch, the result of an automobile mishap, he was not averse to drinking and brawling. He was popular with actors, though he could be acerbic on the set, grumbling his pet phrase “otra vez” — Spanish for “another time” or “not now” or “let’s get the hell out of here,” depending on his inflection.

Stu Erwin was again recruited as a rich, nebbish producer. Walsh filled out the cast with Fifi D’Orsay as the bad girl competing for Bing’s attention, comic Patsy Kelly as Marion’s pal, and sour Ned Sparks as a film director. Hearst summoned them all to San Simeon, his 350,000-acre estate, commanding thirty miles of shoreline. Bing reluctantly boarded a plane with the director and the songwriters. They were ensconced at the castle for the week, rehearsing and socializing with, among others, Winston Churchill, who puffed on a cigar and generally ignored them. One night at dinner, Marion, who was born and bred in Brooklyn, asked Walsh if as a boy he had ever visited Rockaway Beach. When he assured her he had, she named him Rockaway Raoul, which Bing amended to Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.

Except for exteriors filmed at Walsh’s Encino ranch, the film was made on the MGM lot, where Marion had a bungalow fit for the mistress of the world’s wealthiest press lord: fourteen rooms. The powers at MGM were tiring of Hearst, especially his tirades about Norma Shearer, executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, and the roles he thought Marion and not Shearer should have been given, like Marie Antoinette and Elizabeth Barrett. For her part, Marion was tired of the whole routine. Hearst pushed her into unsuitable parts and rammed her down the throats of his tabloid readers, and she went along to please him. Yet she had long ago proved herself a sparkling comic actress with a trenchant gift for mimicry, especially in such movies produced by Thalberg and directed by King Vidor as Show People, remembered for her hilarious spoofs of Mae Murray and Gloria Swanson. Neither she nor Hearst thought filmmaking should crimp a good party, however, and they let Wanger worry about the hopeless task of keeping the train on track. The costs eventually exceeded $900,000, making Going Hollywood Marion’s most expensive movie, and consequently a money-losing hit.

The aspect of talking pictures that most bothered Marion was having to learn dialogue. Taking literally the idea that one could memorize something one slept on, she kept her script under her pillow. “But that didn’t work,” she admitted. “When I got on the set, I didn’t know one line of it.” Nor was she inclined to walk the block and a half from her bungalow to the set before eleven. She refused the assistant director’s pleas, with the excuse that she was studying her lines. “Bing got mad at me every once in a while, but W.R. never did. He used to coax us not to work.” ²⁰ Bing would arrive at nine, make up, and wait two hours for Marion, who was accompanied by a five-piece band that serenaded her between shots. They would listen to pop tunes for half an hour, at which time Walsh would tear himself away from such pursuits as driving golf balls into a canvas net or playing cards or conducting the band, to discuss the first scene. Then they repaired to lunch, a two-hour production in Marion’s bungalow, described by Bing as Lucullan: Rhine wines, foie gras, chicken in aspic, Bombay duck. Now they needed to make up again, after which they paused for another musical interlude, and finally prepared to shoot around five. “Flushed with the success of our first scene,” Bing noted, ²¹ they were ready to tackle another, but either the crew punched out or Hearst stepped in to avoid overtime. Alone, Marion did her close-ups. “That was kind of smart of me, anyway,” she said. ²²

Soon a competition in pranks evolved, as Raoul encouraged Bing to trick Marion into acting scenes when the cameras were not rolling and the mikes were off. Once, Marion, who was terrified of horses, looked out from her bungalow and saw Bing and Raoul on white steeds, determined to ride into her living room; she locked the door in the nick of time. The day they shot “We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines,” Bing and Marion had imbibed an excess of Rhine wine. The scene required them to stroll through a field of eight-foot cellophane daisies that waved from side to side like pendulums. Bing and Marion, waving a bit themselves, found the swaying reeds so nauseating that they could barely stand. Marion cried out for Bing to hang on to her, and they made a pact not to look at the daisies. In the completed film, they walk through the scene with Bing singing to the sky and Marion gazing raptly at the side of his face.

They became good friends. “He was very cute and very sweet, and he was crazy about his wife Dixie,” Marion said. He talked about Dixie constantly, phoning between shots, until Marion suggested he pretend that she was Dixie to rev up their love scenes. “Oh, no,” he told her, “you’re not nearly as pretty.” “I understand that,” she said, “but just close your eyes.” Marion named Bing and Cooper as her favorite leading men, for the same reason: “Gary would give the star the benefit of the scene. Only a real man does that, and Bing did that, too. Other actors don’t.” ²³ Bing described Marion as generous, charming, funny, with a “heart as big as Santa Monica.” ²⁴ Both of them enjoyed the irascible Walsh. At a wrap party at San Simeon, Bing announced that he and Arthur Freed had written a song about Walsh, set to the melody of “The Bowery.” He performed it, complete with spoken interlude in which he mimicked Walsh’s voice and manner:

Rollicking Rockaway Raoul

When clad on the beach in a towel,

He’s terrific, colossal, stupendous, and grand.

He’s the lay of the land, of the land.

Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery,

He never goes there anymore.

A good pal and true,

That old Kerry blue,

Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.

[Spoken] Hello, Greenwood! Greenwood! Get me a bottle of that Royal George. What? No Royal George? Oh, Newman, is it too late to replace Greenwood? And where’s my Bull Durham, goddamnit, where’s my Bull Durham? No Bull Durham? Nuts! I tell you what we’ll do, Bing, we’ll go over to Davies’ bungalow. Maybe she’ll pop out with a drink. Okay, let’s go. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s Waange-er, Wanger. Turn ‘em over quick! Wanger’s here. Bing, otra vez.

Rollicking Rockaway Raoul,

He thinks highbrow operas are foul,

But bimbos and sailors and chippies and such,

He gives them that old Rao-oul Walsh touch.

“Otra vez,” “otra vez,”

We’ll never hear that anymore.

And now that we’re through,

MGM can go screw,

Says Rollicking Rockaway Raoul. ²⁵

As Bing’s best attempt at lyric writing to date, it reveals a more penetrating talent for satiric observation than for love songs, and he wrote several more in later years. This one was recorded on the spot (after giggling through the opening lines, he sings it with characteristic esprit) and found its way to the underground circuit of Crosby collectors. According to Walsh, MGM moguls were so incensed by the song’s last line and the implication that Walsh and associates fiddled while studio chief Louis B. Mayer burned (even if Hearst, and not MGM, footed the bill), they barred Bing and Walsh from the lot for life and would have fired Freed but for an ironclad contract. ²⁶ Except for a B-film by Walsh — who enjoyed a dazzling twenty years at Warners — and Bing’s appearance in the Cocoanut Grove two-reeler, both in 1935, neither man worked at MGM until after Mayer was deposed, in 1951.

Going Hollywood was forgotten for decades, until excerpts appeared in the 1974 compilation That’s Entertainment!, reviving interest in a fascinating film. By then the Bing persona had become so upright, at least in memory, that one chronicler of film musicals described “Temptation” as “a drunken paean to lust and self-loathing [and] the last thing one associates with Crosby.” ²⁷ That may be true today, but it wasn’t in 1933. In two of his first four movies, Bing played a man with a drinking problem; in one he attempts suicide, and in all four he lusts and is lusted after, usually by two women. Going Hollywood was the formula as before, but with intriguing twists.

Marion’s Sylvia is a French teacher at an impossibly stuffy girls’ school where the rest of the faculty is spinsterish, butch, or old. Transported by the voice of Bill Williams (Bing) on her contraband radio, she quits her job and pursues him — despite his consistent rejections — to his hotel bedroom, train stateroom, and movie set, calmly disparaging his hot-tempered fiancée and leading lady, Lili (D’Orsay). Sylvia is a female version of the Sennett Bing, who invariably runs off with the affianced. Here, he is passive and vulnerable, while Sylvia dogs his tracks, refusing to be thwarted. The comical sparring for power between Erwin’s producer and Sparks’s director parallels the catfights between Sylvia and Lili. Sparks riotously mimics Walsh, grousing and grumbling, contemptuously walking off whenever the producer arrives on the set. At one point he snarls at his stars: “Off to Rockaway Beach for the both of ya, if you don’t get this right.”

Davies is fun to watch, in part because she is so clearly uninvolved with the proceedings, sleepwalking through scenes and almost falling over during a dance routine that unflatteringly reveals her pudgy legs — she looks at her feet like Ruby Keeler and waves her arms to keep upright. One remarkable shot is an almost gratuitous example of what George Folsey’s glamour photography could achieve for an aging ingenue. Sylvia lies in bed at school, listening to Bill on the radio, and the camera gazes at her face for an astonishing ninety-plus seconds, with only two brief cutaways. In a soundstage scene, she appears in blackface as an extra — Bill doesn’t recognize her — yet charmingly reveals herself with a beautifully unadorned smile. Bill reaches past her to a black boy and rubs his cheek; “I’s real, Massa Williams,” the kid says. Erwin, who also fails to recognize her, tells her she’s changed quite a bit. “It’s the climate,” Sylvia deadpans. But it is more than climate; it’s going Hollywood, which means she walks onto a set with no thespian experience and is chosen — after Lili conveniently throws a fit — to play the lead in the picture. Ever the mimic, Marion/Sylvia does a mean Fifi/Lili.

Though it was Marion’s production, with Bing taking second billing for the first and last time until he accepted character parts in the 1960s, Bing dominates the film, greatly assisted by a terrific score. Inexplicably, he never recorded the title song, but when he sings it in a production number set in Grand Central, reenacting his own recent decision to leave New York, he is at his indomitable, swinging best. “Beautiful Girl” allows him to reveal his increasing ability to handle varied bits of business, singing as he walks around his hotel room, followed by Sterling Holloway and a microphone. He glides through a six-minute production number and romances Marion with “After Sundown,” pouting like a teenager when she declines to sleep with him that evening. She changes her mind, however, only to find him in Lili’s room. The Hays Office found that acceptable but vainly lobbied MGM to change the title: “no Hollywood title should be used which would tend to undo the efforts made to disabuse the public mind of the unfavorable impression of Hollywood which formerly obtained.” ²⁸

Sylvia does not find it acceptable, and when she gives him the cold shoulder, Bill does what Bing might have done in years past. He goes on a bender in Mexican bordellos, precipitating the best scene in the picture. An unshaven derelict, Bill stares into a shot glass, reeling between hallucinations of the dark and evil temptress Lili and the good and golden Sylvia. “It was all very Russian Art Theater,” Bing later explained. ²⁹ He sings “Temptation” at his purple best, imbuing a melodramatic yet weirdly seductive style of pop with stentorian, heartbursting, operatic gusto — part Jolson on his knees, part McCormack in his cups, and all youthful bravado. Keep your head down, his mother might have said, but go for broke in song.

The initial response to Going Hollywood was positive. Needless to say, Hearst papers could not contain themselves. Louella had an attack of literary vapors trying to do justice to its immortal glory: the picture “stands supreme as a perfect example of good entertainment with a heroine beautiful enough to make every other girl wish she could be a Marion Davies.” Lest anyone think she was prejudiced, she added, “She is so lovely that a murmur of admiration went through the theater, both in the scenes where she wears regulation street dress and again in the beautiful costumes in the motion picture scenes.” ³⁰ The New York Times critic thought it “sprightly and jocular.” ³¹ Time grudgingly conceded that it surpassed previous attempts at movies featuring radio singers, but could not resist disparaging Bing as a reformed Vallée imitator. ³² Time ran a letter weeks later from Jackson Leichter, one of Paul Whiteman’s radio writers, who corrected several errors, including the Vallée crack, and closed with a prediction: “Crosby’s popularity will grow. He has brains, a growing wisdom, a recently acquired balance. He’s good for America.” ³³

* * *

Variety gauged Going Hollywood as “an emphatic moneymaker,” but despite strong openings, it failed to become the runaway hit that would have earned back its investment. MGM soon buried it. The trade paper was on firmer ground when it declared Bing “the present day disc best seller.” ³⁴Other record companies attempted to lure him away from Brunswick and Jack Kapp, who paid him $400 a disc plus royalties. Victor offered him five times that. Kapp parried with a history lesson, comparing Brunswick’s steadfast buildup with the wobbly loyalties of Victor and Columbia, which Bing had learned about firsthand during his time with Whiteman.

Bing did not need the lecture. He liked and trusted Kapp, who had an ace in the hole. Jack himself was fed up with Brunswick, which rejected his bid to head the company, and determined to start a label of his own, with Bing’s contract as collateral. If anyone could defy the majors in the middle of the Depression, Kapp was the man, and Bing would be in on the ground floor; indeed, he would be the ground floor. While Jack considered his options, he continued to advance Bing’s transformation from crooner to all-American troubadour.

A week after the Victor offer was rejected, Jack recorded Bing with a plush Lennie Hayton studio ensemble. He devoted half the session to slightly accelerated versions of songs from Going Hollywood, “Beautiful Girl” and “After Sundown.” With two additional songs, he routed Bing on a new trail. “The Last Round-Up” was the year’s most improbable hit, introduced at the New York Paramount by Irish tenor Joe Morrison, who was heard with George Olsen’s band. Written by an erstwhile cowboy, Billy Hill (whose “There’s a Cabin in the Pines” had fizzled for Bing), it was a sensation in spite of the incongruity of song, singer, and band; Olsen’s Columbia record, with Morrison singing the refrain, dominated sales charts for two months. Victor and Brunswick raced in with bestselling versions by bandleaders Don Bestor and Victor Young. But Kapp, convinced there was far more to round up, simultaneously released another two versions, by Guy Lombardo (Brunswick 6662) and Bing (Brunswick 6663). Lombardo’s sold almost as well as Olsen’s (they accounted for two of the year’s ten bestselling discs). But Bing’s version, nestling directly under Lombardo’s, had the more lasting impact. His melancholy moonlit cry sold the tune with the authenticity of a true western balladeer. When he sang it at the Los Angeles Paramount, the audience leaped to its feet and cheered, as if for a patriotic song. Afterward, Gene Autry took up the song, and Paramount slapped the title on a Randolph Scott western.

“Crosby was one of the main fellas in those days and if he sang a song and it was a halfway decent song, it became a hit,” Roy Rogers recalled. “And what we would do, we’d take those big top hit songs and build a story around them and use them to name our pictures.” ³⁵ Rogers himself would not become known as King of the Cowboys for nearly a decade, but he realized even then that Bing’s way with western songs made them more appealing than did the gruff country singers of the early 1930s. Many other cowboy and country singers agreed, and over the next few years Bing’s influence turned up unmistakably in the work of several western balladeers who admired his timbre, enunciation, and feeling.

Bing, in turn, recorded dozens of western songs. Three years after “The Last Round-Up,” Paramount devised a horse opera for him, Rhythm on the Range, introducing the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that brought Roy Rogers to Hollywood. In years to come, when Roy went out on his own, Bing covered several of his hits, notably “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Cool Water.” An ironic intersection in their careers took place in 1944, when Roy premiered “Don’t Fence Me In,” by the least likely of cowboys, Cole Porter, in Hollywood Canteen, and Bing (with the Andrews Sisters) scored the hit, selling millions. “The Last Round-Up” echoed in western circles as late as 1947, when Autry made a movie with that title, underscoring his homage by including a rendition of an intervening Crosby hit, “An Apple for the Teacher.”

Yet the most resonant of Bing’s cowboy records, by far, was made at the same session as “The Last Round-Up,” although it did not initially sell as well. Bing’s version of “Home on the Range” turned a little-known saddle song into the most renowned western anthem of all time. In November 1933, when his record was issued, the origin of “Home on the Range” was obscure and widely debated. Folklorist John Lomax, who said he learned it from a black saloonkeeper in Texas, published it in 1910, in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. In 1925 a sheet-music arrangement found modest popularity; two years later Vernon Dalhart, the operatic tenor turned hillbilly singer, recorded it for Brunswick. California’s radio cowboys picked it up from him, and in 1930 the movies’ first crooning western star, Ken Maynard, recorded a version. Not until Bing sang it, however, was the song embraced as a national hymn, so popular as to generate a farcical plagiarism suit that had the unintended benefit of spurring an inquiry into the song’s history. It was traced to a poem, “Western Home,” written in the 1870s (without the chorus or the phrase “home on the range”) by Dr. Brewster Higley, whose neighbor, Dan Kelley, set it to music.

Bing’s stirring performance transforms a nostalgic lament into an ode to pioneering, a dream of shared history, a vaguely religious affirmation of fortitude in the face of peril. He made it a Depression song that ignores the Depression, expressing longing, awe, and grace. Bing’s subtle embellishments enhance the melody, and his projection and control are unfailingly dramatic, particularly during the soaring eight-bar release. His record offered a transcendent secularity, a well from which all Americans could drink. More prosaically, it anticipated the golden age of gentle-voiced singing cowboys and the Irish sentiment of the John Ford westerns that followed on their heels. FDR acknowledged “Home on the Range” as his favorite song. John Dillinger escaped jail with a wooden gun and drove off singing “The Last Round-Up.”

Bing recorded “Home on the Range” twice in the late 1930s, neither version as compelling as the one from 1933, but the performance about which he was most likely to regale friends occurred on August 16, 1935, when Bing and Dixie visited Saratoga for the races. They attended a dinner for the turf riders. “I didn’t, uh, skip any drinks that were passed around,” he recalled. ³⁶ Afterward, they went to the Arrowhead nightclub, where Guy Lombardo’s band was broadcasting:

And it came over the NBC network that Will Rogers had just been killed up in Alaska with Wiley Post, and they were putting together a memorial program — picking people from all over who could do things in tribute to Will Rogers, and they wanted me to sing “Home on the Range.” I was going to have to do it in about ten minutes, and I was a little shaky, from the sauce and from the realization that it was a solemn occasion, and it was a song he dearly loved, and they thought it should be used, and I couldn’t remember the words. The time was drawing closer and closer and I kept asking if anybody knew the words. I knew the first line, of course, “Give me a home,” and all of a sudden I’m on the radio. And that was the first time that I really had flop sweat, my palms were wet, my brow was damp, and they were playing the introduction, and there I was. Obviously, I had sobered up a little by that time, and I sang the first line, thinking, “What the hell is the second line.” And it came, and then, “What’s the third line,” and it came. And it kept coming, kept coming, until I was finished. And I was really finished then. I went home and lay down. ³⁷