18

MORE THAN A CROONER

Bing Crosby — he’s a different kind of ladies’ man, because he appeals to men! That’s the truth! Have you ever heard of the Malden, Massachusetts Bing Crosby Club? There’s not a sixteen-year-old microphone-struck girl in it; no sir! That Bing Crosby Club up in the New England state is composed of men all over twenty years of age and every one an athlete.

— Robert Trout, Wilkins Coffee Time (1933) ¹

Shortly after going cowboy, Bing inaugurated a CBS radio series for Woodbury (“for the skin you love to touch”), a manufacturer of women’s soap based in Cincinnati. The show represented a significant leap in his transition from radio crooner to radio star. Instead of two fifteen-minute recitals a week, the Chesterfield schedule, Woodbury gave him a thirty-minute program once a week, with an announcer, supporting players, and guests. Above all, radio could now boast: Crosby speaks! This came as no surprise to the millions who had seen him do that very thing live and onscreen. Nor was it a revelation to fans who had heard him plug his films in radio promotions. But on his own shows he had never been permitted to talk directly to his radio following.

At first, his new freedom counted for little. The funny, relaxed, quick-thinking, verbally dexterous Bing was nowhere to be found. He stiffly intoned pro forma introductions like “I have the pleasure of singing tonight the feature song from Ben Bernie’s new picture, Shoot the Works.” Bing had conjured up a personality in pictures. Now he had to find a complementary one for the air.

Easier said than done. Radio comedians invented personality trademarks that were consistently harped on, whether or not they were true to life — Jack Benny’s cheapness, Eddie Cantor’s pep, Ed Wynn’s zaniness, Gracie Allen’s dizziness, Will Rogers’s horse sense, Joe Penner’s idiocy. But Woodbury had hired Crosby as a romantic figure who would appeal to its female customers. Turning him into a jokester was never an option, and Bing didn’t give his producer and writer, Burt McMurtrie, much to work with: singer, film star, nice guy. What’s more, he was uneasy without a script. The stubborn confidence Bing displayed in devising his film persona was less in evidence when it came to radio, though he knew what he would not do. He refused to accommodate a studio audience or replace his theme song with a Woodbury jingle; when an advertising agent from New York indelicately criticized his work, he threatened to walk. His contract called for thirteen shows at $1,750 per broadcast. By the second season he commanded $6,000, keeping nearly half and paying for the orchestra and arrangements with the rest, thereby securing control over the show’s contents.

McMurtrie had produced Paul Whiteman’s Old Gold shows and hailed from Spokane. He understood Bing’s style and potential as well as anyone but could do little more than suggest the rudiments of a radio identity for him. On the first show, Bing sang “Thanks,” “Tomorrow,” and “The Last Round-Up”; bantered with announcer Ken Niles about cosmetics; and introduced Lennie Hayton’s instrumentals and a vocal by a teenage singer, Mary Lou Raymond. Billboard liked the show, relieved that “he neither whistled nor dabbled in his famous impromptu obbligatos.” ²

A livelier atmosphere started taking hold in December, after Bing prevailed upon Woodbury to sign the Mills Brothers as weekly regulars, singing their own numbers and — significantly — backing his. Though little noted or remembered, their hiring represented a landmark for racial integration in radio and music, preceding by two years Benny Goodman’s road tour with Teddy Wilson and by three Jack Benny’s signing of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. When the Mills Brothers were unavailable, Bing sustained the broadcast’s high spirits with the Boswell Sisters, whom he famously introduced as “three girls with but a single thought: harmony. And what harmony.”

Hayton, basking in the attention of the movie studios, did not renew his Woodbury contract after the first season. His replacements included Gus Arnheim, Jimmy Grier, and ultimately Géorgie Stoll, who conducted the orchestra on more than half of Bing’s seventy-two Woodbury shows, from mid-1934 through the end of 1935. ³ Like Bing, Stoll was an Armstrong fanatic, but little of that emerged in his arrangements, which, judging from the three surviving episodes, were rather stuffy and unswinging. Other regulars on the show included the singers Kay Thompson, Irene Taylor, the Three Rhythm Kings, and the Williams Sisters — Laura, Alice, and Ethelyn. Alice went on to work with the Music Maids, a popular addition to Kraft Music Hall during Bing’s tenure.

The show was an instant ratings success. The New York World-Telegram observed that of the radio singers who had won so much acclaim only two years earlier, Bing alone maintained “the same level of popularity,” adding that he might easily have sustained the Woodbury ratings through the summer had he not “put his foot down” and insisted upon a vacation. ⁴ The same paper conducted a national radio poll, publishing the results in February 1934. Bing won Best Popular Male Singer and the Boswells, Best Harmony Team. With the Boswells or the Mills Brothers at his side, Bing didn’t need much in the way of guests, and he had few good ones — mostly dull comics and stillborn starlets. Radio had yet to become acceptable to Hollywood’s supernovas, many of whom would later snub television for the same reason: it was free and common. But in plugging his concurrent movies, Bing scored appearances by his leading ladies, notably Carole Lombard, Kitty Carlisle, Miriam Hopkins, and Joan Bennett, prefiguring the movie colony’s delayed appreciation of radio as a publicity bonanza.

Bing’s years of undergraduate oratory had taught him that great speakers don’t pontificate to the great unwashed. They make contact with their fellows. That was Bing’s natural way, enabling him to speak as intimately via the microphone as he sang. Orotund announcers were on their way out — they were silly at best, snobbish at worst. Bing occasionally reached for their affectations (his Woodbury performance of “Just a-Wearyin’ for You” is painfully genteel), but he got over the temptation quickly, poking fun at the highfalutin by italicizing a rolled r or inserting a ten-dollar word in his plainspoken repartee.

Bing was not the only radio personality who tailored his style to speak to individuals at home rather than to a massive congregation. Nor was he the only one to understand that the public responded to a well-spoken man as long as he refrained from talking down to them. Bing may have learned a trick or two from President Roosevelt, that master of aristocratic candor, whose “fireside chats” debuted seven months before the Woodbury show. ⁵ With 60 million people tuned in to his first Sunday-evening broadcast, March 12, 1933, FDR spoke warmly and directly, without patronizing folksiness or condescension: “My friends, I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” ⁶ He said it was safe to put money in the bank, and people did. His secretary of labor (and the nation’s first female cabinet member), Frances Perkins, recalled, “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” ⁷ Roosevelt’s inauguration won Outstanding Broadcast in the New York World-Telegram poll.

Roosevelt had begun using radio when he was governor of New York. He was more practiced than Bing in projecting personality through speech. Yet he applied basically the same techniques of directness and enunciation that Bing had mastered in selling his musical style. On one occasion FDR seemed to acknowledge Bing’s influence. According to Eddie Cantor, during a March of Dimes broadcast from Warm Springs, Georgia, the president tested the microphone by “crooning in a cracked baritone, ‘When [sic] the blue of the night… bub-bub-bub-boo!’” ⁸ The wonder of it is that so few, beyond Bing and Roosevelt, recognized radio’s unique power to convey rapport and empathy.

Still, compared with what he later achieved on radio, Bing sounded hesitant on the Woodbury show, though his artless, neighborly way struck a chord. Listeners who once tuned in to hear the crooner now discovered a friend. Bing, logically, began to infuse the show with elements of his personal life. After he attended the Rose Bowl game between Stanford and Columbia in 1934, he talked about it over the air. After Dixie gave birth to twins during his summer break, he employed them in a song cue: “Speaking as the father of twins, I might say, in fact I will say, that it is a double pleasure to be back on this program again. As a result thereof ‘I’m humming, I’m whistling, I’m singing.’” The dialogue was often fairly stilted, but it was appealingly modest, even adorable, and usually revealed his singular personality:

Niles: Say, have you learned much about [the twins]?

Bing: No. It’s a new racket for me. But what would you like to know?

Niles: Well, tell me something about them, anything.

Bing: Well, twins usually look alike, having been born more or less under the same conditions and having no preference in the matter.

Niles: There you go, Bing!

Bing: Sure, and if they resemble their mother, they have what might be called a flying start in life.

Niles: What if they resemble their father?

Bing: Well, in that case, they should be held right side up and patted lightly on their respective backs.

Niles was invariably upbeat, nudging the audience about Bing’s linguistic playfulness. Bing was more earnest, taking his time, peppering convoluted phrases with slang, and averting banality with little more than a slightly reticent, vernacular charm.

It was too vernacular for Woodbury. On the surface, the company seemed content with its spokesman. Before Bing took his summer break, the sponsor celebrated his success with a giveaway:

Niles: We think you’ll agree the Woodburys have done two very important things this year. They’ve brought Bing Crosby back to this radio audience, with whom he is such a favorite. And they’ve created a ten-cent size of Woodbury’s facial soap in order that new millions may enjoy the blessings of this scientific beauty aid at a price never heard of before. Tonight Woodbury’s makes you an extraordinary offer. In exchange for ten cents, one dime, Woodbury’s will send you an attractive gift, the Woodbury loveliness kit [and] an autographed photograph of Bing Crosby…. Please send a dime, not stamps. ⁹

Yet despite solid ratings, the marriage between sponsor and spokesman was rocky. Woodbury argued that Bing’s cool delivery did not confer enough dignity on its products. That impression solidified after Variety conducted a street-corner poll on sponsor recognition: fewer than one-fourth of those queried knew who paid Bing’s bills. For his part, Bing had a hard time with Woodbury’s idea of dignity, as expressed in commercials that managed to insult the very women it hoped to reach. One sketch began with Ken Niles confiding to Bing that he was in love with a woman he had never seen. When Bing tells him he is “full of that boulevard gin,” Niles explains that she wears a mask. Two songs later Niles reveals that she removed the mask and was so homely that he pretended not to know her. “Sure glad you didn’t get stuck with her,” Bing commiserates, to which Niles responds: “The poor thing, Bing, and you know, there are hundreds just like her, who if they only knew about Woodbury’s facial soap might easily capture such a prize as Bing or, ah, me.”

What really rankled Woodbury was Bing’s effectual control of the series. By May 1935 the company made clear its intention to challenge him. The first showdown took place after Bing announced on the air that his friend, actor Andy Devine, would be a guest the following week. The sponsor told Bing that Devine could not appear because his voice, a comically strained gargle caused by a childhood accident, was unsuitable for the air. Next week Bing arrived at the station with Devine and calmly refused to go on unless Andy accompanied him. Minutes before airtime Woodbury backed off and inadvertently launched Devine’s long career as a radio entertainer.

Bing refused to relinquish authority in choosing songs or guests, and the company refused to renew his contract, which was up June 11, 1935. Yet even with the end in sight, the clashes continued; at one point Bing would have walked (John Boles, of all people, was hired as an emergency substitute) had not CBS convinced him to complete his obligation. After Woodbury, Bing would not be at liberty for long. NBC became interested in him late that summer when Bing appeared alongside the Dorsey Brothers as guests of Kraft Music Hall’s ratings-challenged host, Paul Whiteman. By December Bing would be Kraft’s new host, commencing an eleven-year run that not only redefined the variety show — it reinvented the image of Bing Crosby.

One reason professional strife never got the better of Bing is that he always had so many fish to fry. Pursuing work and play with equal diligence, he consigned virtually every minute of his day to a schedule — to the dismay of his family, which was not always accorded prime time. While Woodbury was pulling its hair, Bing shot one picture after another: four features and one short subject between January 29, 1934, and January 19, 1935. After he completed Too Much Harmony, Bing owed Paramount one picture on his original contract. Chagrined by the difference in quality between MGM’s Going Hollywood and its own Crosby vehicles, the studio resolved to make it a first-rate production. Paramount could ill afford to lose him and had recently endured a reminder of his finicky independence.

Paramount’s stars had been assigned small parts in a film of Alice in Wonderland, in which they were disguised by makeup intended to approximate John Tenniel’s illustrations. While the other contract players signed on, Bing (through Everett) opened negotiations. Although he could not see the point of appearing under a mound of makeup, he agreed to participate on two conditions: a week’s salary and permission to do another picture for an outside studio. Paramount agreed to the first and balked at the second. Furious at Bing’s intransigence, the studio offered his part to Russ Columbo before settling on Cary Grant. It also signed Lanny Ross, a tenor who became popular on the Show Boat radio hour, promising a big buildup and casting him in College Rhythm (opposite Jack Oakie as a football star). As insurance against Crosby, Ross was marginally more viable than, say, John Boles, and the executives knew it.

They also knew that Bing had been damn shrewd to avoid Alice in Wonderland, a miserable flop, and that although Everett served as his cover, Bing made the decisions. As Bob Crosby once noted, “A lot of people thought Everett was a financial wizard, but he wasn’t. He would maybe get a call from someone that would want Bing to make a picture, and he’d go to Bing and say, Do you want to do it or don’t you want to do it? And Bing would say yes or no or I want more money or I’d like to read the script, whatever.” ¹⁰ While Lewis Carroll took Paramount to the cleaners, Bing prepared for the adaptation of another British classic, by Carroll’s young Scottish contemporary, James M. Barrie.

The Admirable Crichton, a comedy about class divisions and the perfect butler, had been Hollywoodized as a silent film, Male and Female, and was now decked out as a musical, ominously titled Cruiseto Nowhere. Enigmatically renamed We’re Not Dressing, the result was frothy and absurd but vastly entertaining, the class war having been reduced to a more dependable formula of boy meets girl, annoys girl, wins girl, rejects girl, and walks into sunset with girl. In this instance, the girl is a rich and haughty brat, played by Carole Lombard, and the boy a lowly sailor (who wants to be an architect, so it’s all right) employed on her yacht. The yacht sinks and, mirabile dictu, all the stars drift to the same spot on an apparently deserted island, where the sailor’s skills create a turnabout, placing him in charge. An elaborate joke involving Lombard’s panties (an example of pre-Code raffishness) uncovers the presence elsewhere on the island of a pair of natural scientists. Before the castaways learn they are not alone, however, the sailor (Bing) has brought Lombard down a peg, and they are chastely reconciled.

The making of We’re Not Dressing, including three weeks of shooting on Catalina Island, was a happy experience for everyone, especially Bing and Lombard, who became fast friends (although she was then engaged to his rival Russ Columbo). ¹¹ It was an important picture for her, the first to suggest the screwball flair for comedy she unleashed in Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, and other films before her much lamented death in a plane crash. She had not been the studio’s first choice. Miriam Hopkins demurred because she thought the script trivialized Barrie, and Paramount unsuccessfully asked MGM for the loan of Karen Morley or Mae Clarke (Charles Butterworth and W. C. Fields were also sought, presumably for the role played by Leon Errol). Two years earlier Lombard had turned down the Leila Hyams part in The Big Broadcast, which might well have salvaged Carole’s faltering career. She leaped at the offer of a second shot in a Crosby picture.

Carole, bemused by Bing’s cool tact, played off it between takes in a series of practical jokes. Bing enjoyed her dedicated swearing — “colorful epithets” he described as “good, clean, and lusty. Her swearwords weren’t obscene. They were gusty and eloquent. They resounded, they bounced. They had honest zing!” ¹² With amazement, he described her dash to the ocean after inadvertently dousing herself with wintergreen: “She appeared practically unclothed,” he wrote, the adverb added as a gentlemanly euphemism. ¹³ She occasionally enlivened the set by flashing him. While breakfasting at Catalina’s St. Catherine Hotel, where elderly regulars stared disapprovingly at the movie clan, she “came slinking in” and loudly cried, “Bing! Did I leave my douche bag in your room last night?” ¹⁴ For two days she sent Bing a one-word telegram every fifteen minutes or so: the word was NOW. “The fact that she could make us think of her as being a good guy rather than a sexy mamma is one of those unbelievable manifestations impossible to explain,” Bing wrote. “She was the least prudish person I’ve ever known.”

Carole had one weak point, however; she could not stand to have her face touched, and one scene called for Bing to slap her. At her request, he refrained during rehearsal, but when the scene was filmed, she responded violently. Howard Hawks liked to take credit for creating Lombard as a comic actress by encouraging her to kick John Barrymore in the balls in Twentieth Century. According to Bing, she required no coaching; she kicked, punched, bit, screamed, tore off his toupee, and finally “wept hysterically.” ¹⁵ Bing recalled that he refused to do a second take and that some of the tantrum was actually used, but it wasn’t. In the film, she returns his slap with a kiss.

Bing also had trouble with Bruno, the ship’s pet bear, whom the sailor is obliged to soothe with a lullaby, “Good Night Lovely Little Lady.” One scene in which he narrowly averted disaster did get into the film. While brushing the bear’s fur, Bing sings “She Reminds Me of You.” Bruno suddenly tries to get away. Bing grins but continues lip-synching while manfully holding on.

Norman Taurog directed We’re Not Dressing with brisk confidence, sprinkling story points amid musical numbers, not allowing a dull moment to intrude in its seventy-four minutes, thanks to a splendid cast — Burns and Allen (never better), Ethel Merman, Leon Errol, Ray Milland — and no less than six songs expertly rendered by Bing as the radiant, funny Lombard gazes at him, alternately happy and dismissive, but mostly happy, especially during his swing chorus on “May I?” The film’s luminous look was created by photographer Charles Lang. Like many great stars, Bing developed a keen interest in cinematography, realizing that its masters influenced not only a film’s veneer but the actors’ glamour. More than half of his fifty-four features (excluding those in which he makes cameo or one-song appearances) were shot by just four of Hollywood’s most accomplished cameramen: Lang, Karl Struss, Lionel Lindon, and George Barnes. Lang worked on six Crosby pictures, and his contribution here is evident in the sharp black-and-white contrasts, plush shots of Catalina, and unmistakable aura surrounding the principals.

Though cheeky and adult, We’re Not Dressing lacks the sophistication of the year’s best comedies, It Happened One Night and The Thin Man, but remains a standout among the musicals of 1934. Dames and The Merry Widow, though more assured, restate the tried-and-true formulas of Busby Berkeley and Ernst Lubitsch. By contrast, We’re Not Dressing and The Gay Divorcee (the first film in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers assume lead roles) augur the musicals to come, for they are built around virtuoso American performers, not the stock juveniles, backstage wannabes, and Continental rascals of the past. Ballyhooed by Paramount for featuring more Crosby songs than any of its predecessors, We’re Not Dressing proved that Bing could enchant audiences through three-minute vocal close-ups and offered his most informal and amusing performance to date.

He was immeasurably aided by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel’s energetic score, which exploits his gifts for jazz and lullabies. Bing had known the team in New York — they entertained at his Friars Club send-off — and loved the way Gordon, an ebullient man and lively singer, demonstrated his new songs. For their first Paramount picture they wrote “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?,” which became an outstanding Crosby recording at the close of 1933 — boldly expressive and stoked with understated rhythm. We’re Not Dressing was their second film, and no less than five of its songs became Crosby hits: “May I?,” “Once in a Blue Moon,” “She Reminds Me of You,” “Good Night Lovely Little Lady,” and “Love Thy Neighbor.” Inevitably, Gordon and Revel were hired for his next film, which went into production in April, the same month We’re Not Dressing opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the usual lively crowds.

Most critics found it breezy fun and generously lauded Bing (the New York World-Telegram called him “an excellent comedian”), while Time reliably snorted: “Interspersed liberally with shots of Crooner Crosby’s blank, adenoidal face, We’re Not Dressing is fair entertainment, easy-going, incredible and sanitary.” If the movie was all those things, it was clearly because of and not in spite of Bing — not least the sanitary part. Bing looks desolate during his big love scene, which lacks the anticipated kiss. Lombard supplies heat in her revealing gowns, as does an exasperated Bing, when he drags her off and chains her to a tree. “I suppose a fate worse than death awaits me,” she says. “How do you know it’s worse than death?” he replies. “You’ve never been dead, have you?” ¹⁶ Bing’s acting had improved, though he was still given to moonfaced pouts. A breakthrough would occur late in the year with Here Is My Heart. But first came the gender-reversal comedy, She Loves Me Not.

Miriam Hopkins did not know Bing would be her costar when she accepted the role of Curley Flagg, a nightclub hoofer who witnesses a murder and hides out in a Princeton dorm, disguised as a boy. The role of college student Paul Lawton was first offered to Gary Cooper, who refused it because he feared Hopkins would steal the picture, her forte. A busier, twitchier actress never lived, though she could be highly effective in dramatic roles. She Loves Me Not, however, was farce with a pedigree, first as a novel (by Edward Hope), then as a Howard Lindsay stage hit, which was packing the Forty-sixth Street Theater as the film went into production and did not close until four months after the movie’s release. All the play’s political satire was deleted, but Paramount retained a few barbs about salacious movie producers and arrogant press flacks. Gordon and Revel wrote three songs, but Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin contributed the picture’s immensely popular ballad, “Love in Bloom.” One Paramount executive demanded that their song be pulled, citing it as too sophisticated for the general public.

Hopkins’s scene-stealing shenanigans were legendary, ¹⁷ but her confidence was shaken when she saw that the picture would now be perceived as a Bing Crosby vehicle. The imperturbable Bing, fast becoming renowned for his letter-perfect first takes, knew how to handle her, as she explained to interviewer John Kobal:

And do you know another doll was Bing Crosby. Oh my God! We did She Loves Me Not. Now I thought I was a dramatic actress, you see, and I want to rehearse everything first. I was on his radio show all the time, and I said, “Bing can’t we rehearse this show?” He ran through it once and we went out and sat in his car and had a cigarette. And I said, “Can’t we do it again?” And he said: “Sweetie, no! We’d get stale. Let’s just do it, you know, we’ve got the line. I’ll say something and [you] ad-lib back and forth with me.” Well, there was one scene in She Loves. I said: “Bing, I’d like to rehearse this with you.” He says…, “Now, you know very well, you’ve been in the theater and New York, and I’m just a guy who dropped a load of pumpkins.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘dropped a load of pumpkins?’” And that was the famous line, “I’m just a guy who dropped a load of pumpkins,” you know. Oh, but so darling! ¹⁸

Kitty Carlisle, who played the university president’s daughter and Paul’s true love, considered Hopkins surprisingly nice, “the most generous of colleagues, offering to rehearse before each scene.” ¹⁹ Carlisle had appeared in only one other film, Murder at the Vanities, but — trained in opera and theater — she tended to look upon Hollywood from an aristocratic perch, condescending and ambitious. Yet she was startled by Bing’s singing. “I was a serious singer, I had studied seriously, and I was impressed by his technique, his effortlessness, the fact that his voice was so much bigger and more available for, really, operatic roles than you saw in the movies. To me there was Bing Crosby and then everybody else.” She also marveled at his unaffectedness: “He certainly didn’t pamper himself. He’d come in chewing gum and eating chocolate and then just begin to sing and it was melting.” They had little in common and nothing to talk about, she with her “European social training” and he “a man’s man who got along very well with the crew.” She could recall only one personal moment off the set, when Bing showed her “a very pretty, rather modest diamond necklace. He said, Did I like it, did I think [Dixie] would like it? I said I think she’d adore it.” ²⁰

Bing was enthusiastic about the film, but the overall pressure was beginning to tell. Bing confided to Ted his need for a break:

I am three weeks along into She Loves Me Not a collegiate comedy with a couple songs, from the play now current in New York. It has a terrific script, great dialogue, and grand situation. I don’t see how it can fail to be a great laugh picture, and fine for me.

Dad had some teeth out the other day and was a little out of line for a bit, but is okay now. I have been so busy I haven’t seen much of mother or anyone else for that matter, but at last reports she was in good health and spirits. Everett is, of course, living the life of Riley, and his family are well.

I finish the picture in another week, the radio May 26th, and following this plan on resting for possibly a couple months. Feeling a little tired, and further income in May & June will put me in a very disagreeable income tax bracket. So I might as well rest as give it back to Uncle Sam. I am trying to pick up a ranch near San Diego, not too elaborate, and if successful, you can come down and start me off rite on some intensive gentleman farming. ²¹

Elliott Nugent, a successful stage actor, director, and playwright, directed She Loves Me Not with little flair, from a script by producer Benjamin Glazer. The film has dated badly, in part because Hopkins, in her determination to be funny, goes so far over the top that no one can reign her in, certainly not Bing or Eddie Nugent, who plays Paul’s housemate, Buzz (the role that made Burgess Meredith a Broadway star). The most persuasive bits poke fun at Hollywood: Buzz’s father (George Barbier) is a producer who intends to capitalize on Curley’s notoriety by putting her in a picture (replacing one Yvonne Lamour, a name that was considered satirical until Dorothy Lamour came to town). He promises his backers that her clothes will be ripped off in every scene, while she remains a virginal victim of circumstance. ²²

She Loves Me Not is of interest for the way it cuts against the grain of the era’s other transvestite movies, in which women invariably play men as serious and sexually repressed. Hopkins’s Curley Flagg is initially hesitant about entering the dorm. But as soon as she loses her hair to Paul’s scissors and trades in her clothes for Buzz’s pajamas, she becomes sexually ravenous, while the boys act like affronted fops. Paul stammers and turns schoolmarmish: “Now you listen to me, Curley Flagg, I got no more interest in you than I have in the United States Senate.” But the joke is muffled, because Curley is very girly — mascara will do that. Only a murderous goon is, briefly, confused by her wiles; he figures she’s gay.

Bing, who turned thirty-one during filming, is an absurdly seasoned undergraduate. He offers a few comical double takes (notably a Stan Laurel turn at the end), but his vest buttons do not close. “He was very good in movies except that he didn’t look right,” Kitty Carlisle remembered. “He had a behind the size of a barn. There’s a shot in She Loves Me Not where he turns and walks — I mean, it was like a ship leaving shore. But Bing could make fun of anything about himself. He was not at all pompous.” ²³ A mystery to several leading ladies who felt neglected by him off the set, Bing — as he once said of his association with Bob Hope — preferred to save it all for the camera, a practice that clearly pays off in his duets with Kitty. However aloof he may have acted between takes, he genuinely lights up as he sings to her “Straight from the Shoulder” and “Love in Bloom,” at the thirty-minute mark. Kitty, too, registers delight when they sing together. One reason the duets are so convincing is that Nugent shot them live, an unusual and risky decision. “Why we did it live I’ll never know,” Kitty said. “I never asked questions. I got onto the set at nine and there was a little orchestra and we recorded. I was so nervous I thought I’d jump out of my skin. We did it two or three times and that was the end of it.” ²⁴ Watching footage of Carlisle and Bing, Para-mount’s pint-size studio chief Emanuel Cohen must have imagined he was brewing his own version of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He signed Kitty to Bing’s next film.

“Love in Bloom” handed Bing another megahit, topping sales charts for nearly four months — six weeks in the number one slot. That year the Academy Awards initiated a best song category, and “Love in Bloom” was nominated. It lost to “The Continental” (from The Gay Divorcee) but paved the way for a Crosby statistic that is not likely to be broken. Between 1934 and 1960 he introduced more songs that were nominated for Academy Awards (fourteen) and more that won (four) than any other performer; Astaire and Sinatra tie for second place with eight nominations each. Bing thought “Love in Bloom” “a good melody, easy to remember, a lovely song.” ²⁵ Kitty expected it to become her theme. Neither was pleased by what happened to it. As Jack Benny told the story, he and his wife, Mary, went to a supper club one night, and the bandleader asked him to sit in. When Benny stepped up and borrowed a violin, he noticed an arrangement of “Love in Bloom” on a music stand and played it with predictably amusing results. A columnist wrote about his impromptu performance, and the next time the Bennys went to a club, the band serenaded them with “Love in Bloom” as a joke. “So I decided to adopt it as my theme song,” Benny explained. ²⁶ Overnight the melody became a Pavlovian laugh-getter; no matter who played or sang it, audiences howled. “I always took umbrage at that,” Bing said. ²⁷ Kitty felt she had been robbed. ²⁸

Few moviegoers noticed at the time, but Bing’s looks changed after She Loves Me Not: his ears were finally liberated. During one scene, midway through filming, the hot lighting repeatedly loosened the spirit gum. According to Frank Westmore, “this happened no less than ten times,” whereupon “Bing furiously refused to allow the errant ear to be stuck back.” ²⁹ Bing recalled, “They said you’ve got to put them back, we’ve got half the picture with your ears in — you put ‘em out, you’ll look like a taxi with both doors open and you’ll never match the other scenes. So I said, all right, I’ll put ‘em back for the rest of this picture. We had a couple weeks to go, and then the next picture, that was the end of it.” ³⁰ Wally Westmore involved himself in the battle, convincing Manny Cohen that Bing’s ears did not affect his voice.

Audiences paid little attention to his ears, but thanks to Lang’s astute camera work, they did begin to notice a unique and endearing physical aspect of his speech: the fluttering cheeks and popping lips when he pronounced w or b words. A phrase like “Well, what is it?” suggested a goldfish recycling oxygen, a tic that kept mimics busy for years.

She Loves Me Not outgrossed all of Bing’s previous pictures. This time most critics were disarmed, and not just the Louellas. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic noted a plug in the film for Chase National (which had Paramount by the throat) but praised it for its honest professionalism. “Bing Crosby sings pleasantly and even acts a bit,” he wrote. ³¹ Time considered it “creditable,” reserving praise for Hopkins (“squeaks and wriggles pleasantly”) and the new songs while remaining mum on the singers. ³² An especially perceptive analysis of the Crosby phenomenon appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. After noting Bing’s obvious appeal to women, the writer continued:

Perhaps it is his uncompromising masculinity and obvious inability to overplay anything that make him so innocuous to his own sex. Unlike most of the other radio names, he never seems to be trying to be charming. The toothy smile, the Sunday School superintendent’s unction [play] no part in the Crosby technique. He borrows something from the old deadpan school of slapstick comedy and something from the insouciant ogle of the professional masher to produce an effect of being congenitally at home and sure of himself anywhere — not working hard in the least, just taking it as it comes. ³³

The better the public came to know Bing, the better it liked him; the more it learned, the more it wanted to learn. Paramount, having signed him to another three-picture deal, put its publicity department into overdrive to maximize the attraction of his personality. Of the several full-page ads it purchased in Variety, one took a conspicuously novel tack: a caricature of a man pushing a stroller and the boldfaced headline SHE LOVES ME NOT IS BING CROSBY’S GREATEST TRIUMPH SINCE THE TWINS!

While Bing was shooting films, flogging soap for Woodbury, and recording, Dixie was on every bit as tight a schedule. She learned about her second pregnancy a few months after she gave birth to Gary. Kitty Lang, who helped nurse her as well as the infant, had briefly left for New York to settle Eddie’s affairs, promising she’d be back before Dixie delivered. She returned to find Dixie suffering from chronic back pain. An X ray revealed twins. Despite her distress, Dixie was pleased when tiny Monogram Pictures called and asked her to star opposite Robert Armstrong in a quickie production they promised to complete in less than two weeks. She asked Kitty to be her stand-in so they could continue to spend afternoons together. Kitty’s own life had just taken an upward turn. Dixie’s friend, Alice Ross, now working as her secretary, located a small home for Kitty in Toluca. With help from friends (Richard Arlen’s brother-in-law was the contractor), Kitty rebuilt it to suit herself, a niece, and two dogs. When one of the dogs took ill, she took it to the local veterinarian, Dr. William Sexton. She became Kitty Sexton.

Knowing that Dixie was pregnant, the film crew showed her every consideration. Kitty was paid handsomely — $200, nearly three times the going rate for two weeks of extra work — and the shoot presented no problems. But the songs unnerved Dixie, who feared everyone would compare her with Bing; she steeled herself with a few drinks before making the prerecordings. The film, Manhattan Love Song, was of no consequence, and Dixie looks pallid. Shortly after it was completed, in her fourth month, she experienced contractions and her cautious doctor ordered her to bed, forbade parties and alcohol, and limited her time with Gary to visits in her bedroom, where she remained for the next four months. Bing made up for it by being “a doting father,” Kitty remembered. “As a result, Gary did become a little spoiled.” ³⁴

The twins were born six weeks premature, weighing less than four pounds each, on July 13, 1934. Their arrival was treated as a major news story. When Bing allowed them to be photographed with Gary for the press the following September, the Los Angeles Times ran the picture on its front page, right-hand column above the fold. As the babies lay in the incubator, Kitty visited the ward with Bing and asked him about their names. He said, “Well, I’ll name the largest one Dennis Michael, after my family, as he looks more Irish, and Dixie can name the other.” ³⁵ Dixie chose Phillip Lang, Phillip from the Greek “lover of horses,” and Lang after Eddie. When Ted’s wife, Hazel, had delivered twin girls a few months before, Ted wrote Bing, “You have to have three of a kind to beat a pair of queens.” Bing now wired his brother, “A pair of kings arrived today.” ³⁶

With only thirteen months separating Gary and the twins, two nurses were added to the household. Gary, resenting the interlopers, began acting out to claim the attention of his parents. The fraternal rivalry would remain a constant in the boys’ lives, generating countless fistfights and feuds and ultimately resulting in a break between Gary and Phillip. As her strength returned, Dixie grew bored. The nurses took over her chores with the babies while she took up tennis, revealing a genuine talent for the game until a kidney infection forced her to give it up. That, Kitty thought, “started Dixie drinking more than usual, particularly as it meant she was sitting home again.” ³⁷

In the weeks between the completion of She Loves Me Not and the birth of the twins, Bing bought a sixty-five-acre property in Rancho Santa Fe, twenty-five miles north of San Diego, five miles from Del Mar. The large adobe ranch house, with exterior walls two feet thick and a white wraparound porch supported by beams and posts, was built a hundred years before, and Bing hired architect Lillian J. Rice to restore the cultivated simplicity of the nineteenth-century Spanish style. At the same time, he modernized it, adding a new wing, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. Dixie decorated with sturdy wooden furniture, brass adornments, gingham and chintz, keeping it spare to protect valuables from the three infants, whose maple cribs were aligned in one room, with a rocking chair separating Gary’s from those of the twins.

Except for one historic recording session (Decca’s first) on August 8, Bing was free until late in the month, when filming on Here Is My Heart began. He and Dixie spent much of that time at the ranch, where her health improved as they entertained friends. Publicity photographs of Bing and Dixie, looking trim, youthful, even enchanted, on the tennis court or by the pool glisten with romance. Bing invested in his first racehorses and kept riding mounts at the ranch. He even labored with the work crew on the construction site for days, returning to Hollywood with callused hands. That did not fit the image of the self-made prince and his devoted princess, so publicity photographs focused on Bing in his yachting cap and Dixie — incandescently blond — in a bathing suit, the loving pair incarnating a fantasy as appealing as any movie.

Back at Toluca, the old routine ensued. Bing returned to work while Dixie sat disconsolately at home. Her own career was little more than a memory, despite the just-released Manhattan Love Song, of which Variety reported: “Film shows the potential value of Dixie Lee and Helen Flint, both of whom can go places if properly handled, especially Miss Flint.” ³⁸ Dixie enjoyed Bing’s triumphs but envied them a little, too. She wilted when obliged to meet the press, always as an appendage to Bing, never as an accomplished entertainer in her own right. A few drinks helped her face his clamorous public. Kitty suggested to Bing that Dixie needed a mink coat and other accessories suitable to her station as a star’s wife. “You’re right,” he told her. “I never thought of it.” ³⁹ The next day the two women went on a spree and bought everything Dixie wanted. At other times Dixie was loath to spend money at all.

With Larry Crosby acting as her agent, Dixie was signed to star in a Paramount film, Love in Bloom. She of course had no say concerning the title, which exploited Bing’s song (though it was not performed in the picture) and underscored her connection to the singer. But she was adamant that Paramount not promote her as Mrs. Bing Crosby. Paramount hardly promoted her at all. Dixie had the central role but was billed fourth, after Burns and Allen and Joe Morrison, the tenor who introduced “The Last Round-Up” — a strange choice for a leading man at Bing’s studio until one remembers that the Crosby-style baritones who overwhelmed the business a few years later were not yet on the scene. Morrison proved no more tempting to moviegoers than Lanny Ross and left the business within a year. So did Dixie. And yet Love in Bloom, though negligible, contains her best work. She brought pathos to the shamelessly clichéd role of a street-smart trouper from the dregs of show business, and her sole musical number — Morrison did most of the singing — is the picture’s undoubted highlight.

Most of the figures involved in the production had worked with Bing, including producer Benjamin Glazer, director Elliott Nugent, and songwriter Mack Gordon, who composed the unmemorable songs without his partner, Harry Revel, though Revel received screen credit anyway. But Dixie, never one to visit her husband’s sets, did not know the crew, and the crew did not know her. They were all embarrassed by their first meeting.

Dixie had dyed her hair a golden red, and on the first day of shooting, Kitty was sent to wardrobe to find a matching wig and a dress so that she could serve as her friend’s stand-in during lighting tests. The wardrobe mistress fitted her with a wig that might have suited Harpo Marx and a tight sheath dress. As Wally Westmore worked on Dixie in her dressing room, Kitty, feeling like a stuffed sausage, waited on the set. When the assistant stage manager called for cast and crew, she draped a full-length mink over her shoulders, put on dark glasses, picked up a script and Dixie’s purse (which Dixie had asked her to safekeep), and joined the others. Cameraman Leo Tover (College Humor), mistaking Kitty for the star, panicked. He had been told Dixie was pretty, he mumbled to his assistants. While Kitty baked under the lights, Tover circled his team for a pep talk, imploring them, for Bing’s sake, to make Dixie look good. Minutes later Larry brought in Dixie, groomed to gleaming perfection in a pleated dress. Tover ordered Kitty to work in street clothes.

Love in Bloom effectively marked the end of Dixie’s career. She was twenty-three, though she looked older and warier. Variety said she played her part “excellently,” ⁴⁰ but only Larry thought it would boost her standing. Convinced that the experience “built up her confidence,” ⁴¹ he convinced Jesse Lasky to give her the lead in his doomed 1935 Fox production Redheads on Parade, in which the twins — not yet nine months old — make their debut and Dixie plays opposite the recurring John Boles. Larry wrote Ted it was “sure fire to make her a star — the only gal in it. She made some great records for Decca, & is singing and acting swell as I told her she does better without liquid stimulant — more natural.” ⁴² But the picture bombed. Aside from a few radio spots (notably a star turn on Al Jolson’s Shell Chateau) and two records with Bing, Dixie enjoyed no more professional hurrahs. The stage jitters that had always plagued her increased to the point where she declined to appear in public. Yet, as the wife of one of the most adored men in America, her name was known to everyone.

Another career ended, tragically, on September 2, 1934, when Russ Columbo died in a bizarre shooting accident, at twenty-six. Though no longer a major rival, he had continued to shadow Bing, aiming for a career in movies. Appearing in the tawdry Broadway Through a Keyhole (based on Ruby Keeler’s affair with a mobster when she was young), he did well enough to land a contract with Universal. But Latin lovers were out of season, and his Wake Up and Dream was a disaster; that it provided him with his first hit in two years, “When You’re in Love,” could be largely attributed to the controversy surrounding his death.

Russ had been killed while visiting a friend, Hollywood photographer Lansing Brown, who showed him a set of antique dueling pistols, not realizing that one pistol held a live charge. When it went off accidentally, the bullet ricocheted off a mahogany desk and through Columbo’s eye. A new Columbo legend sprang to life as Carole Lombard, who called Russ “the great love of my life,” ⁴³ and other friends conspired to keep Russ’s ailing mother from learning of his death; they regularly sent her checks and letters purportedly mailed by her son from various European cities where he claimed to be in great demand. The charade continued until Mrs. Columbo’s passing, two years after Lombard lost her own life. At the funeral, Carole had sobbed uncontrollably, comforted by Bing, who served as a pallbearer. Five years later she married Clark Gable. In January 1942, while returning from a midwestern tour to promote U.S. bonds, Carole Lombard died in a plane crash, at thirty-three.

Larry’s disappointment with Dixie’s retreat from show business was matched by his general frustration with the entertainment world and his brothers. He wrote to Ted: “Bing too heavy — testy & hard to handle. May quit anytime. Ev a big shot, etc. The future — very indefinite. All depends. This is a tough racket! Nothing done in a business way! Merit is the last thing that counts.” ⁴⁴ Yet at that very moment, Bing’s film acting was rising to a new level. While Dixie vainly went through the paces of her comeback, Bing completed the picture that would at last convert his detractors and secure his position as a captivating comic actor — Here Is My Heart. Improbably, the plot hinges on antique dueling pistols.

Adapted from Alfred Savoir’s play The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (filmed in 1926), the picture reunited Bing with director Frank Tuttle and inaugurated his long collaboration with his favorite cameraman in the prewar period, Karl Struss. Having served up “Love in Bloom,” Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger helped Bing to three more brass rings with their new score: the perennial jazz standard “Love Is Just Around the Corner” (written by Robin with Lewis Gensler), the bygone “With Every Breath I Take,” and the classic ballad “June in January,” which dominated sales charts for nearly two months.

As casting began, Paramount sounded out the idea of promoting Bing and Kitty Carlisle as a new romantic team by asking exhibitors for their opinions. The results convinced Manny Cohen he was on the right track. The pair’s costars included some of the finest character actors in the business: Roland Young, Alison Skipworth, Akim Tamiroff, and William Frawley (a longtime Crosby pal), as well as the mysterious Marian Mansfield, a fetching and enthusiastic young woman whose only other appearance in pictures was a minor role in Dixie’s Love in Bloom.

Once again Carlisle was touched by Bing’s professionalism and modesty. “He was always right, Johnny-on-the-spot. We had Alison Skipworth and Roland Young and Reginald Owen, three first-class stage stars, much older than we were, and we were doing a scene with them, and he turned to me and he said, ‘What the hell are we doing starring in this movie with those folks?’ He could not get over the fact that they were the supporting cast.” ⁴⁵ According to Tuttle, the script was written by Harlan Thompson (who shares screen credit with Edwin Justus Mayer) with an assist from playwright Vincent Lawrence, who was hired to write an extended love scene between a waiter (Bing) and an impossibly lofty White Russian princess (Kitty). “They played it to the hilt,” Tuttle wrote. He believed that Bing had “developed into a first-rate comedian” and was especially tickled by an episode in which Bing serves the Russians while wearing a fake mustache that falls into their soup: “He played this broad scene with the telling seriousness of an accomplished farceur.” ⁴⁶

The story concerns a radio singer named J. Paul Jones, who, having made his first million, sets out to do all the things he dreamed of doing as a boy, including fishing dead center in the Atlantic Ocean, singing “Yankee Doodle” to the Sphinx, presenting dueling pistols owned by John Paul Jones (no relation) to the Naval Academy, and marrying a princess. He already has one of the pistols and learns that the second is owned by Princess Alexandra, in Monte Carlo. Money and class drive the plot. To get access to the princess, he pretends to be a waiter, secretly purchasing the hotel to further his ruse. When he discovers that the high-living Russians are penniless, he surreptitiously stuffs their purses with cash. As in We’re Not Dressing, he brings the highborn down to his own exemplary plane. “You can’t offend royalty,” his hotel manager cautions. “No, you probably can’t,” Bing says, “but let’s make an effort anyhow.” He ultimately lands his princess and converts her family to capitalism, offering one relative an honest day’s work as a hotel doorman.

The Ruritanian romance between commoner and royalty was old hat long before 1934, but Bing gives it a new twist, playing the commoner as an Everyman American of such good and honest disposition that Old World values crumble before him. His performance is utterly relaxed and infectious. He more than holds his own with those eminent stage actors, taking quiet command of every scene, confidently inserting Bingisms: a pet phrase (“keep it shady”) or a cowboy inflection or an Oliver Hardy chin waggle. Bing’s love of the old comedians is particularly apparent in a scene in which he adopts the mustache and squint made famous by Jimmy Finlayson, a ubiquitous actor in the classic shorts of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.

Tuttle, who propels the film at a clip, is no less sure of the material. A sequence in which several servants squeeze Bing into his waiter uniform is worthy of Lubitsch, and a strangely disconnected passage in which Bing stalks a man down a corridor is his homage to silent comedy. No little credit must go to Karl Struss, who won the first Academy Award for cinematography, for Sunrise. Bing finally looks handsome, every vestige of callowness gone. Struss shadows Bing’s features to make them appear chiseled and strong, while his eyes are limpidly romantic. In one diverting scene, the camera is all but stationary as Bing governs and sustains the action on his own: he is in his room, listening to his own record of “June in January,” whistling a duet, reading a paper, changing from a robe to a dinner jacket, singing along. When his recorded self finishes with a head tone, he kibitzes, “Well, you made it.”

Paramount knew it had something special and issued several publicity shots, most featuring Tuttle, including one with Kitty and Bing hanging on to the director’s tall shoulders. As usual, Bing did not allow himself to be billed alone or above the title; in the ads Carlisle’s name is the same size as his. But billing, publicity, and good reviews did not help her case at Paramount, which deemed her neither beautiful nor charming enough to go the distance. “There was something in Photoplay that I was sort of the young star of the year. And I got notices,” she recalled. “I really thought I was on my way. That’s why I was so surprised when they paid me off and sent me home.” ⁴⁷

The reviews focused on the leading man. “Bing Crosby is something more than a crooner; he is a comedian with a perfect sense of timing,” declared the New York Daily News. ⁴⁸ The venture was praised by Variety as “an excellent example of musical comedy picture making,” especially Bing’s duet with his own recording. ⁴⁹ Even Time, which months earlier had found the Crosby face blank and adenoidal, capitulated: “To cinemaddicts who share the Princess’ feeling about crooners, Here Is My Heart will reveal that Bing Crosby is not only an accomplished singer but a talented comedian.” ⁵⁰ Marquis Busby expressed the consensus in the Los Angeles Examiner: “As I see it, Clark Gable, Fredric March, and Gary Cooper had better take a good look at the writing on the wall. They’d better hurry and take some singing lessons. Now all the studios are looking for another Bing Crosby.” ⁵¹

Yet Here Is My Heart was for many years a forgotten film, out of circulation since the 1930s. Paramount’s copies rusted, and the picture was presumed lost, though Bing’s version of the commoner had a lingering afterlife. Billy Wilder reworked it in his script for Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, in which a Soviet snob succumbs to the American way, and in his self-directed The Emperor Waltz (1948), starring Bing as a phonograph salesman who brings to heel an Austrian countess. Then in July 1977, three months before his death, Bing invited film preservationist and Crosby collector Bob DeFlores to his home to screen for him some rare short films Bing had not seen since they were made. At the end of the day, he offered DeFlores anything he wanted from his nearly complete vault collection, including a pristine duplicate of the original print of Here Is My Heart. The picture’s long neglect is puzzling because it is central to Bing’s canon, both for the quality of his performance and for launching his new image as an all-American character: a plucky, eternally boyish, self-made millionaire with a common touch and uncommon voice.

Midway through shooting Here Is My Heart, Tuttle threw a party for Bing and Dixie to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, a lavish Beverly Hills affair climaxing with a midnight swim.’ It had been a blessed year — the twins, the ranch, a career of limitless horizon. On Christmas Day, shortly after the film debuted in New York, Bing celebrated the reopening of the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, a bedroom community northeast of Los Angeles. It was a momentous occasion. The original Santa Anita was built in 1907 and failed quickly; but the new one, constructed at a site several miles from the first, brought racing back to the San Gabriel Valley for the first time in twenty-five years. Bing invested $10,000 to secure box seats. Hardly a day passed that he did not visit his investment.

On Christmas night he sang “Silent Night” on the radio, initiating a tradition that continued for forty-three years and associated him as closely with Christmas as anyone since Charles Dickens, if not Santa Claus. When the 1934 Quigley poll was tabulated, Bing was seventh among the top-ten box-office attractions, the first and — until 1936, when Gary Cooper scored — only Paramount male to make the list. One other Paramount player, Mae West, also ranked, for the last time, in a field dominated by stars at Fox (Will Rogers, Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple) and MGM (Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressler, Norma Shearer). For Bing, who became a fixture in the poll, placing in fourteen of the next twenty years, the victory signaled a new beginning. He was about to take charge of Kraft Music Hall and, with Jack Kapp, revolutionize the record business.