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I remember somebody once said that Bing would have made a great Hamlet. I don’t know what Bing had to say about that. Oh, my gosh, he would have been scared to death taking on Hamlet. But there was a feeling from people that there was something much deeper about Bing.
— Anthony Quinn (1989) 1
The New York Sun polled several personalities in 1938 for lists of their ten favorite films. Bing’s roster is individual, knowing, and surprisingly impolitic given his own predictable roles in the most capital-oriented (“After all,” says Sammy Glick, “our pictures are shipped out in cans. We’re in the canning business”) of the arts. 2
1. The Crowd
2. The Birth of a Nation
3. The Informer
4. Vivacious Lady
5. Any silent Chaplin film
6. Ditto
7. Ditto
8. A Farewell to Arms
9. The Big Parade
10. Lloyd Hamilton comedy
The list is striking in that seven of his selections are silent: Griffith’s landmark The Birth of a Nation; King Vidor’s two dramatic pinnacles, The Crowd and The Big Parade; and four comedies, three by Chaplin. Bing’s lifelong love of silent comedy is apparent throughout his work, and his devotion to Chaplin in particular comes through on numerous occasions when he strikes a bowlegged pose or executes a pigeon-toed walk or some sleight of hand with a prop. The three talkies include his only ballot for a Paramount picture, Frank Borzage’s pre-Code A Farewell to Arms, with Gary Cooper; The Informer, John Ford’s celebrated treatment of a besotted traitor during the Irish Rebellion; and a new film, Vivacious Lady, George Stevens’s comedy of the classes in which nightclub singer Ginger Rogers marries botanist James Stewart.
Bing’s new film at the time his list appeared was Sing You Sinners, a determined effort to move beyond the standard Crosby persona movies that had grown increasingly similar. When William LeBaron took over as Paramount’s chief of production (replacing the ill-suited Ernst Lubitsch), Adolph Zukor warned him he would have difficulty finding stories for Bing. From the beginning the studio had a firm notion of what a Crosby story entailed. Joseph Mankiewicz recalled Emanuel Cohen halting production on Too Much Harmony in 1933, explaining to him, “You have made one terrible mistake. You have Crosby falling in love with the girl. The public will never accept that. You must make the girl fall in love with him!” 3 A year later Charles Samuels, hired to doctor a few scripts, was instructed, “Don’t forget that Crosby’s love scenes are not like those of any other male star. He never makes love to the girl. She has to make love to him. Love and romance always have to sneak up on Bing when he isn’t looking.” 4
Though Pennies from Heaven fits the template to a T, Bing was nevertheless aiming for greater variety when he and Manny Cohen produced it. 5 “I felt I had to play a different type of character, a real person,” he told a reporter. “All this singing for no reason at all couldn’t go on. So I went into business for myself.” 6 Thirty years later he looked back on his 1930s films as a blur: “So much of what I did seems to run together…. A lot of those pictures were, dare I say, very similar.” 7 His list of favorites show how well aware he was of the gap between Cinema and the general run of Hollywood product, particularly his own.
Returning to Paramount after Pennies from Heaven, in 1936, he worked for the fourth time with Frank Tuttle and for the fifth with Karl Struss, producing the blockbuster Waikiki Wedding — the third-highest-grossing picture of 1937. The project was chosen after two others fell through: It Happened in Paradise, a summer-camp musical, would have reunited him with Ida Lupino; 8 the more intriguing Follow the Sun would have reunited him with Burns and Allen and Norman Taurog (Paramount announced it as “made to the measure of that Crosby smash, We’re Not Dressing”)while drawing directly on his ancestry in telling the story of a sea captain who ships from the Pacific Northwest to the Orient to start a nightclub. 9 The switch to a Hawaiian setting may have been swayed by an important recording session that summer.
To Jack Kapp, Hawaiian songs meant a standard category of music, like cowboy or Christmas songs. They represented another string for the Crosby bow, and Kapp was eager to record them. The Crosbys were planning to vacation in Hawaii in August, and Jack told him it would be a nice gesture to telegraph their arrival with a couple of appropriate tunes, “Song of the Islands” and “Aloha Oe.” He hired the perfect accompanist, Dick McIntyre and His Harmony Hawaiians, a quartet with steel and acoustic guitars, ukelele, and bass. Five days after the record date, Paramount announced Waikiki Wedding as Bing’s next picture, though the decision had not yet been finalized; 10 weeks later the studio reversed itself with an announcement that It Happened in Paradise was back on schedule. Yet in the end, Paramount, like Decca, succumbed to the appeal of placing a lei around Bing’s neck.
If the years 1936 to 1940 were bumpy ones in Bing’s movie career, with equal rations of highs and lows, they represented an important crossroads for his music. Once again his voice and attack were evolving. His newly modulated style was, as Rose Bampton discerned, more accomplished. He sang with greater economy, a more reflective approach to lyrics; he employed longer notes and balanced his expressive middle tones with polished plums from the high and low reaches of his range. The 1933 Jimmy Grier records had captured Bing climbing peaks; now, tempered yet emotionally resolute, he was willing to survey the valleys. The voice was still round and robust, but he did not push it as hard. The nodes and attendant hoarseness had miraculously vanished, and the hollow ring that crept into his voice in the mid-1940s was not yet evident. Whether romping with his brother’s jazz band or sighing of trade-wind breezes, Bing in the mid-thirties was the most quietly assured male pop singer alive.
For Bing, Hawaiian songs occupied a middle ground between cowboy songs and pop ballads, and he pursued all three idioms with unusually moody expressiveness. On Ray Noble’s lovely “The Touch of Your Lips,” his musing eloquence is befitting and expected. On the two comically theatrical numbers from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (“I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”), his interpretations are unexpectedly rueful. The most impressive of his new cowboy songs (including “We’ll Rest at the End of the Trail,” “A Roundup Lullaby,” “Empty Saddles” ) was “Twilight on the Trail,” a lament introduced that year by Fuzzy Knight in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and sung by Bing as though it were an old western hymn. That’s how it may have sounded to President Roosevelt, who declared it his favorite song after “Home on the Range”; Mrs. Roosevelt requested Bing’s record for the Roosevelt Library.
Hawaiian songs combined affecting melodies and the down-home spirituality Bing found in western ballads. The glissandi of the steel guitar (guitars were always magic for him) complemented his vocal glides; the dilatory tempos exercised his handsome stalwart timbre. Yet Bing’s affinity for South Seas idylls seemed clouded at the first session. The larghissimo tempo triggered a vague trembling and self-conscious use of mordents. Kapp immediately scheduled a follow-up, this time recording “South Sea Island Magic” and “Hawaiian Paradise,” and the improvement is unmistakable; the mordents are natural and the high notes weighted by a robustness and subtly swinging pulse. “South Sea Island Magic,” the more accomplished performance, sold decently in the period before “Pennies from Heaven” took over, dominating sales for the rest of the year. With “Hawaiian Paradise,” Bing waved across the Pacific to its composer, Harry Owens, the bandleader who had auditioned him and Al Rinker at Cafe Lafayette in 1926. A professional since the age of fourteen, Owens had seemed so much more experienced back then, but he was only a year older than Bing. Now he led the band at Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where Bing and Dixie would spend their first evening on the island.
On Sunday, August 30, 1936, two weeks after he returned to the studio with Dixie to record their duets, they boarded the SS Lurline for a five-week vacation. When the ship docked at Oahu on September 3, photographers captured Bing at breakfast and, as one reporter wrote, “shuffl[ing] his way through a jam of shrill flappers who ogled at the nonchalant swing of his 178-lb. body, the fluttering of his pale blue eyes.” 11 The Crosbys had arranged to stay at a private home at Kaalawai with Lindsay Howard and his wife and other friends.
Like everyone else on the island, Owens was excited about their arrival and wondered whether Bing would remember him. His doubts were allayed that evening, when Bing strode to the bandstand and said, “Hi, Harry, is this tryout night?” 12 He asked the name of the tune the band had just played.
A couple of years earlier, Owens had written a ballad to commemorate the birth of his daughter, Leilani. When he told Bing the song was called “Sweet Leilani,” Bing made a joke about not being able to pronounce it, but during the course of the evening he requested the unpronounceable title another five or six times. The following morning Bing phoned Harry to tell him he wanted the song for his next picture and asked whether he could ride over on a motorbike he had just rented. Harry was overwhelmed but ambivalent. The song was so personal to him and his family that he was disinclined to commercialize it. He asked Bing to listen to his other songs, including “Dancing Under the Stars,” “Palace in Paradise,” and “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha,” all of which Bing eventually recorded. Undeterred, Bing proposed a characteristic solution to Owens’s quandary.
For all his straightforwardness, Bing was in two areas a master of indirection. When it came to the requisite love songs in his movies, he asked Johnny Burke to avoid the phrase I love you in favor of roundabout metaphors (e.g., “You Don’t Have to Know the Language,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Sunday, Monday or Always”). When it came to money, he devised intricate ways to be charitable without the appearance of actually giving away money. These ranged from schemes to allow Gonzaga to participate in a TV show to arranging bit work to making secret bequests. Indeed, his brother Bob resented him for years for refusing to help his band out of a bind early in his career, only to learn years later that the man who did help him was operating under Bing’s instructions. According to Owens, Bing said, “I won’t permit you to commercialize on ‘Sweet Leilani,’” then offered to set up a trust fund that would collect all royalties for the education of Leilani and any future children Harry might have. 13 They made a test recording the next afternoon. Bing asked Harry to hum the tune so he would not miss any notes. “How fast he learned,” Owens noted. “Once through and he knew it perfectly.” 14
The next few weeks were idyllic. Though besieged by fans, he swam, golfed, motorbiked, and tried surfing and motor gliding. He attended a meeting of Kamaaina Beachcombers’ Hui, a sportsmen’s organization dedicated to promoting swimming in the islands, and took a sampan from Honolulu to Kaunakakai, where a crowd paraded him through town to the steps of Molokai market. Deeply moved by the warmth of his reception, he sang “Hawaiian Paradise” and attempted “Na Lei O Hawaii,” though he didn’t know all the words. He stayed overnight on Molokai and hunted deer the next day.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the film was beginning to take shape as producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. hired Don Hartman and Frank Butler to write a script, and Eddie Sutherland (Hornblow’s man on Mississippi) to direct. Paramount renewed Bing’s contract for another two years, though he had nine months remaining on the old one. Only five days earlier Bing had played his part in the negotiations by wiring columnist Sheila Graham that he might retire from the screen with the fulfillment of his present contract; 15 LeBaron thought Bing wholly capable of doing just that. Whether or not Bing was actually in contact with Hornblow, he did not inform him of “Sweet Leilani” until his return to the mainland on October 8, at which time he also displayed an expanded waistline that forced him to accept a stringent liquid diet.
Hornblow, an intelligent and cultured man in private life, was notoriously megalomaniacal on the set. Eddie Sutherland remembered him issuing pointless edicts, like “Crosby’s got to be here at nine.” “Well, Crosby can get there when he feels like it, you know,” Sutherland explained. “What are you going to do, keep him after school? Crosby’s a most generous man. He’ll give you three months to work on a script if you’re not ready, but then he’ll say, ‘I’m not coming in on Saturday, I want to go to the races.’You say, ‘Fine,’ and you shoot around him. But this man would say, ‘He’s got to be here Saturday.’” 16 Hornblow’s response to “Sweet Leilani” was an emphatic no. Bing tried to convince him that the song had proved itself in Hawaii, and showed him a fitting spot for it in the script, to no avail. He let the matter slide — until shooting began.
Robin and Rainger, who wrote the picture’s score, had been very good to Bing in the past with “Please,” “Love in Bloom,” and “June in January,” among others. They were in no position to take umbrage at the insertion of a new song, as Rodgers and Hart did when Bing interposed “Swanee River” in Mississippi. Hornblow, on the other hand, remembered that tiff all too well, though he may have forgotten the positive things that came from Bing’s stubbornness. For Bing, more than a song was at stake; there was the promise to Harry, and his pride in being able to recognize a winning number. After all, his previous attempts to help struggling tunesmiths had been rewarded with Carmichael’s “Moonburn,” Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” and the score to Pennies from Heaven.
By the time the picture went into production in December, Horn-blow had replaced Sutherland with Frank Tuttle, who was particularly enthusiastic about the challenge of creating Waikiki Beach on the Paramount lot, a feat he credited to the “ingenuity of the set designers and constructors, who built an entire Hawaiian village on one of the sound stages with an amazingly realistic sky backing.” 17 Only scenic shots and a chase scene, using doubles, were photographed in Hawaii. While Tuttle busied himself staging the musical numbers, Bing behaved with customary professionalism, pleased to be surrounded by a cast of amusing friends, including Bob Burns, Martha Raye, George Barbier, and Grady Sutton, and an appealing and musical leading lady, Shirley Ross. 18 The filming was almost complete in February, when they came to the sequence where Bing thought “Sweet Leilani” belonged. He brought it up, and Hornblow refused. Bing told him, “When you change your mind, I’ll be back,” and left to play golf. 19 He stayed away for two days, until Hornblow relented. After they shot the scene, Bing cabled Hawaii:
DEAR HARRY, I FILMED SWEET LEILANI SEQUENCE TODAY. COME SATURDAY AM RECORDING SONG FOR DECCA. TRUST FUND DOCUMENTS IN MAIL. THINGS LOOKING UP. BETTER PLAN ON HAVING A DOZEN MORE KEIKIS. ALOHA TO ALL. BING. 20
* * *
Like Rhythm on the Range, Waikiki Wedding is an elaboration of Kraft Music Hall, though more stylish than the earlier film. Tuttle’s imaginative staging and limber camera are evident from the opening scene, a long traveling shot magnificently handled by Struss, showing a wedding ceremony and dwelling on the prettiest girls. He directed the film’s primary song, “Blue Hawaii,” as a duet, in which Bing recites each line of the lyric before Ross blends her voice with his, to avert the cliché of characters who are “letter perfect in the words of a song when they’ve never had a chance to learn them.” 21 Only in Hollywood would a director aim for realism in presenting a song, when not an ounce of realism pertains anywhere else in the picture.
The plot requires Bing, playing a press agent, to romance Ross, the winner of a Miss Pineapple Princess competition, in order to dissuade her from returning to her California home and fiancé before the publicity value of her victory can be fully exploited. While love sneaks up on him, he contrives to keep her busy with a fake adventure involving hostile islanders; in effect, he frames a big con, engaging numerous actors to fool his mark. The device is engaging because through much of the picture the audience is no wiser than Ross, as a preposterous story unfolds, concerning an iconic pearl and a vengeful volcano. We learn shortly before she does that we have been duped by a scheming publicist who has conjured up a script within the script. After the fraud is exposed, Waikiki Wedding turns shamelessly routine: the leading lady must choose between her society fiancé on the mainland and a recumbent Bing on his boat.
In one scene Bing is obliged to knock out a tribal chief, played by Anthony Quinn, who recalled, “We were supposed to fight and I didn’t know much about fighting in pictures. I had fought in the ring, so, I mean, a man is gonna hit me, he hits me. But Bing hit pretty hard. So I went down. I should have ducked. Then he apologized and that made us wonderful friends.” 22 Quinn had been working in pictures for less than a year, mostly as an extra or a hood. Waikiki Wedding was his first substantial part. Because he was half Mexican and sensitive to studio discrimination, Quinn was gratified by Bing’s easy tolerance:
Bing was one of the most amazing people in the world because he had worked with so many minorities, and minorities were having a lot of trouble in those days, my gosh. And Bing understood, he understood what I must have been going through and he was most helpful to me, his whole attitude. I always loved him because of the way he treated [people]. There was a shoeshine man at the entrance to the Paramount gate named Oscar. And Bing was one of his favorites because Bing came in and, I mean, he could talk the talk and he was wonderful at it. And Oscar and he would laugh, but there was nothing about Bing that was patronizing. He had worked with Louis and all the great musicians of the time and was used to being with blacks and Mexicans and all kinds of minorities. So he was actually wonderful to work with and made you at ease, put me at my ease. 23
For all its polish, Waikiki Wedding is a minor period piece, dated by low humor — instead of Rhythm on the Range’s bull, the characters have to contend with Burns’s pet pig — and the change-ups between patter and music. Bing holds the fort as the nominal star, looking youthful and earnest, coming to the fore chiefly in song. The real stars are Struss’s depth-of-field photography and the songs, primarily “Blue Hawaii,” an ideal vehicle for Bing; the first two phrases are confined to a range of four notes near middle C, the third leaps upward an octave, where the song remains until it descends for the second eight bars, and the release is lovely. “In a Little Hula Heaven” (an affable jump tune that Bing recorded swingingly with Jimmy Dorsey) and “Sweet Is the Word for You” are also effective. The one ineptly staged song is “Sweet Leilani,” obscured by the squealing of the pig, which at the initial showing in Honolulu so affronted the patrons and composer that the print was angrily shipped back to Hollywood.
But, as Bing soon wired Owens: HEAR YE, HEAR YE! WAIKIKI WEDDING, AFTER FLOPEROO IN HAWAII, IS SMASH HIT ALL OVER THE USA. ALSO MY DECCA RECORD OF SWEET LEILANI JUST TOPPED ONE MILLION PLATTERS. SO SMILE MAN. 24 The reviews were modestly positive and generally out of touch. Varietyprophesied, “None of the songs here will hit the top performance brackets,” though it thought them deserving of “a minor play on the air.” 25 Time dismissed the “pseudo-Hawaiian” ditties but considered the picture a “mild pleasantry,” singling out for praise the pig, who “steals the show by oinking at suitable moments.” 26 The New York Times found it “friendly, inoffensive, reasonably diverting.” 27 Melody Maker, in England, huffed, “If this is the best that Paramount can do with Crosby, then I seriously suggest that they loan him permanently to Columbia — the firm which made such a success of Pennies from Heaven.” 28
The public loved Waikiki Wedding — Variety declared it socko everywhere, including Europe. In a season when theaters scrambled for patrons, Bing once again filled the coffers, eliciting trade-paper headlines like CLEVELAND PEACEFUL EXCEPT FOR CROSBY’S WHAM $21,500. 29 In three weeks it broke the Los Angeles Paramount’s all-time house record, and then went on to ring up bigger numbers at its New York adjunct (on a bill with the Eddy Duchin band). The picture’s domestic gross exceeded $1.5 million, ranking it third in 1937, after two MGM releases, Maytime and The Good Earth. 30 The one other top-ten entry from Paramount was a Gary Cooper vehicle, The Plainsman. Beyond that, news at the studio was bleak. Two of its matchless legends departed, diminished by the lilliputians in the Hays Office: Paramount canceled Mae West; Marlene Dietrich left in dismay. Ordered to reduce his budget of $30 million by a sixth, William LeBaron informed Zukor and the powers in New York that he preferred to step down and produce independently (an action he postponed until 1941).
When it came to musicals, each film factory claimed a discrete turf and stuck to it. MGM, self-consciously tony in every regard, had its Broadway Melody series, milking the Great White Way for ambience and source material. Warner Bros. sent its mugs and broads frolicking in the Gold Diggers movies, each climaxing with an erotic kaleidoscope of bare limbs. RKO had it both ways with Fred and Ginger, working-class hoofers who looked rich and stayed in the nicest places. Paramount alone made a complete reversal. Hollywood’s most sophisticated establishment in the pre-Code era found its salvation in Big Broadcasts and was now content to advertise itself as the “radio recruitment studio” while boasting of profits from rubbish like Mountain Music, a hee-haw farce with Bob Burns and Martha Raye. Paramount’s one sure attraction, money in the bank, was Crosby. In the long view of Bing’s career, however, the popularity of Waikiki Wedding proved less significant than his handling of its songs.
Bing had not sung for Decca in six months, not since the duets with Dixie shortly before their vacation. In February 1937, accompanied by Lani McIntyre (Dick’s brother) and His Hawaiians, he recorded “Blue Hawaii” and “Sweet Leilani.” The former, beginning with an attention-jolting steel-guitar glissando and superbly executed throughout, was a hit. The song endured for decades as a minor standard, recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley, who made a movie of that name. “Sweet Leilani” did not fare as well in the long run. But it was a phenomenon in its day, commercially one of the most significant, and musically one of the most unusual, releases in the history of American popular music.
What did listeners think, in the spring of 1937, hearing “Sweet Leilani” on the radio? A plush glissando sets the stage for a high Hawaiian tenor — Lani McIntyre — singing a chorus backed by a humming ensemble and a contralto’s obbligato. If forewarned by an announcer that this was the new Crosby record, did people wonder if he had joined the castrati? And if not forewarned, how surprised must they have been when, seventy-seven seconds into a three-minute side, the exotic vocalist is suddenly supplanted by the reassuring virility of Bing’s dulcet baritone? It was a nervy arrangement, to say the least. Yet the switch from Mclntryre to Bing underscored the latter’s homey familiarity in a new and categorical way. It was like wandering through a strange city and suddenly meeting an old friend. Bing’s reading is felt and faultless, from the ascending glide of the title phrase to the comely embellishment on the repeat of “heavenly flower” to the drawn-out closing “dream.”
“Sweet Leilani” dominated sales charts for an astonishing six months, more than a third of that period in the number one spot (it was pushed aside briefly by another Bing Crosby record, “Too Marvelous for Words”). As the best-selling American disc in eight years, since the stock market crash, it was acclaimed as a turning point for the recording industry and a good sign for the national economy. That the record also boosted movie queues gave Hollywood reason to cheer as well.
The song was nominated for an Academy Award, in competition with the evergreens “That Old Feeling” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (a Gershwin song favored to win) and the deciduous “Whispers in the Dark” and “Remember Me?” (by Harry Warren and Al Dubin). The last probably would not have been nominated had it not also generated an enormous and delightfully whimsical Crosby hit, as arranged by John Scott Trotter to combine musty polka rhythms and a Bixian trumpet solo (by Andy Secrest), which Bing echoes in his jazzy finish.
The overwhelming popularity of “Sweet Leilani” vindicated Bing’s faith in it, not only proving once again his interpretive powers but also trumping Hornblow, who never produced another Crosby picture. But the song’s epochal success cannot disguise its essential triteness. The first of Bing’s twenty-one gold discs is à quintessential bauble of the 1930s, a seductively nostalgic record that helped define its era — it helped trigger a craze for anything Polynesian — and yet echoes eerily in ours. The gold record and Oscar nomination were small potatoes compared with this statistic: it sold 54 million units of sheet music. 31
Hawaii had been promoting itself as paradise in the Pacific for half a century, landing squarely on America’s pop-culture map in 1915 when San Francisco’s Pan-Pacific Exhibition introduced hula girls, steel guitars, and ukeleles. That year the mainland was swaying to songs like “On the Beach at Waikiki,” “Song of the Islands,” and “Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?” Bing heard them on the family record player, and the following summer he watched Jolson light up Spokane’s Auditorium with “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula.” A fancy for ukeleles swept the nation in the 1920s. Yet it was not until the mid-1930s, when Hawaii started its own recording industry and began broadcasting shortwave, that kindling was provided for an all-out Hawaiian vogue. Bing lit the match in the spring of 1937.
Within months Hollywood resembled a Hawaiian theme park, as restaurants and nightclubs replaced 1920s jungle decor with bamboo, parrots, and waterfalls; floor shows complete with hula and/or sword dancers; and generic Cantonese cuisine masquerading as luau fixings. If you could not follow the Hollywood big shots to the Hawaiian surf for deductible holidays (they claimed to be scouting locations), you could hobnob at Luana, King’s Tropical Inn, Hula Hut, Club Hawaii, Zamboanga, Seven Seas, and Hawaiian Paradise, among others. It did not last long. With the advent of the conga line, the bamboo was scrapped for gaucho chic and the steadfast pu-pu platter modified to accommodate coconut shrimp. But Hawaii was now regarded less as a distant territory than as a tropical extension of the United States, and by the mid-1940s the issue of statehood (unrealized until 1959) was on the table.
Hawaiian songs, mostly ersatz, were now a staple of American popular music. They answered the need for pure escapism, conjuring a world without breadlines, dust bowls, or the rumble of war while melding with the simple melodicism of country-and-western music —a connection manifested in the frisson of gliding steel guitars. Legend attributes the birth of that instrument to Joseph Kekuku, who got the idea in or about 1909, when he accidentally dropped a comb that slid across the frets of his guitar. Steel guitars were occasionally heard in country-music records in the 1920s, a mellower version of the slide techniques already familiar in the work of such black guitar innovators as gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson and bluesman Charley Patton. After Bob Wills featured Leon McAuliffe on “Steel Guitar Rag” in 1936, they were everywhere in country music, virtually plaiting the two styles as one, as in Roy Acuff’s 1937 “Steel Guitar Chimes,” an adaptation of “Maui Chimes.”
Bing recorded more than forty Hawaiian or Hawaiian-style songs and arrangements, and several of those performances are sublime, notably those from 1939 and 1940, including “My Isle of Golden Dreams,” which he singled out as a personal favorite (“I think I sounded fairly tolerable in that record”), 32 “Aloha Kuu Ipo Aloha” (words by Dick McIntyre, his most frequent Hawaiian accompanist), and a definitive adaptation of “Where the Blue of the Night,” backed by the Paradise Island Trio. One of his most evocative records of 1937 connects Hawaii, country, and jazz in the context of a ballad that might have been written in the days of Carrie Jacobs Bond. Lani McIntyre composed “The One Rose,” but Bing recorded it with a Victor Young ensemble (violins and harp, no guitars), producing a sui generis lament that breaches the generic boundaries. However much he disliked singing the phrase I love you, he could make of it a powerful cri de couer; reprising the line “Each night through love land,” he evinces his flair for embellishment with Armstrongian finesse. In “The One Rose,” Bing achieved the universality Jack Kapp envisioned.
At the March 1938 Academy Awards ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel, which Bing typically declined to attend (Bob Burns emceed, and Bob Hope made his Oscar night debut), Jimmy Grier conducted the nominated songs and confidently predicted the Gershwins would triumph. The trophy, however, went to Harry Owens, who accepted it with a short speech giving full credit to Bing. No one at the time seemed to find it ironic or farcical that Owens was handed the statuette by a gracious Irving Berlin. The relatively unknown Owens was the first songwriter to win as composer and lyricist — a distinction he held until 1943, when the fifty-five-year-old Berlin was at long last honored for the ultimate Crosby megahit, “White Christmas.”
In the months leading up to Oscar night, Bing instigated contracts for Owens at Paramount and Decca; made his dramatic radio debut (opposite Joan Blondell) in an adaptation of She Loves Me Not for CBS’s Lux Radio Theater, receiving rave notices; and completed two new pictures, filmed in the summer and autumn of 1937.
Double or Nothing stuck to the formula, with a recurring Depression twist. This time the four principals are brought together by a millionaire’s will. The deceased has instructed his lawyers to drop twenty-five billfolds around the city containing $100 and the law firm’s address. Every honest soul who returns the money is given $5,000 and the chance to participate in a competition. The first to legitimately double the money within thirty days wins the estate. Naturally, contemptuous heirs are on hand to foil their attempts, and naturally the most insidious of the heirs has an attractive daughter. The people who return the billfolds are played by Bing, Martha Raye, Andy Devine, and William Frawley. The romantic interest is provided by Mary Carlisle, of College Humor, who wore a “pale ice blue dress, perfectly beautiful,” she said, that complemented Bing’s eyes — “blue blue blue blue, they were gorgeous eyes.” 33 The conceit was lost to black-and-white cinematography.
The stars, abetted by several specialty acts, provide an improbable number of diverting scenes in a film woodenly directed by Theodore Reed. This was his second Paramount film in a brief and negligible career, floated for a couple of years by the Henry Aldrich series (Para-mount’s answer to Andy Hardy). Not that Reed got much help from the quartet of credited scenarists, who probably never sat in the same room together. 34 Yet the performers are engaging, as are the songs, including three by Burke and Johnston (the Pennies from Heaven team) and two by Ralph Freed (Harry Barris’s partner on “Little Dutch Mill”) and Burton Lane, who six years before had helped Bing choose his theme song. “Smarty,” the upbeat opening number, was the first of several Lane songs Bing recorded.
Sam Coslow, who helped put Martha Raye on the map with “Mr. Paganini,” wrote another showstopper for her this time around, “It’s On, It’s Off,” her character’s theme song from her days in burlesque. Every time she hears it, she begins to strip. Frank Tuttle once described Maggie as a “combination of Marie Dressler and Fannie Brice. She appeals to the down-to-the-earth fans and the sophisticates.” 35 Even the Hays Office approved, relieved that there was no “undue exposure,” 36 though Australian censors deleted a shot of a padlock on Raye’s dress. The strip number was treated with a uranium-tone azure, the first time since the silent era that Paramount had used tinting. MGM and Fox also experimented with tints in this period, but after The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the rise of Technicolor, the practice was discontinued for good.
In compliance with Bing’s demand not to be advertised as the “sole star,” the studio top-billed him and Raye, a departure from custom, as she was not his romantic interest. 37 The reviewers were generally content, and the picture was a nationwide hit, yielding three top Crosby records: “The Moon Got in My Eyes” (a chart-topper), in which he effortlessly finesses a profusion of awkward oo and long-i diphthongs; “It’s the Natural Thing to Do,” with its singspiel interlude typifying Bing’s KMH personality; and “Smarty,” an insolently buoyant yet amusingly nuanced swinger. All were recorded at his first session with Trotter.
Double or Nothing is studded with personal references and jokes. The marriage of high and low that came to define KMH is evident as Bing swings “Smarty” in a diner while a chef bawls opera. Bing’s love of silent comedy is manifest in a scene in which he sets his straw hat on fire to attract Carlisle’s attention, a scene played at a leisurely tempo. As Mary’s mother, Fay Holden reads Hobo Harry’s Revenge to learn the lingo of lowlifes. Martha Raye interjects “Muddy Water” while belting “Listen My Children, And You Shall Hear.” Mike Pecarovich has a walk-on (as in Waikiki Wedding). Exceedingly strange vaudeville acts are interpolated. Bing’s character’s ambition is to open a nightclub, for which he hires a Singband — an all-girl choir dressed in tight black-satin dresses, scatting melodies conducted by Harry Barris (the first of his many bit parts in Crosby films). When Bing and Raye do their own scat number, Harry joins in for a few measures, closing with a Rhythm Boys hahh!
Of the singers who prerecorded the Singband tracks — gypsies who worked at all the studios — only a few were chosen to actually appear on camera, among them Trudy Erwin: “We sang on risers in this nightclub set, and we were there for days and days — you know how those things go. I was taking a rest on a little cot that was beside the set, and all of a sudden something was hitting me and I looked up and it was Bing throwing spit wads at me. That’s when I first met him.” 38 Within two years Trudy became a fixture on KMH, first as a member of the Music Maids, then as a single. “He was always completely relaxed — you’d never know he was acting. He always seemed the same to me. Singing was the same way, so natural and a wonderful ear.” 39
A private joke between Bing and Carlisle surfaces in dialogue leading into “It’s the Natural Thing to Do.” She asks him, “How’s for a rousing game of backgammon?” Bing ad-libs, “Well, jacks is really my racket, but I’ll pitch in with you.” On College Humor Mary grew accustomed to Bing doing his job and leaving the set to pursue other interests. During Double or Nothing he casually asked if she played backgammon. “He was all gung ho for playing and on the set all the time,” she recalled. “There were several years in between the first picture and the next and he had grown up, shall we say. But he hadn’t changed a bit. He was very nonchalant about everything. He always knew his lines, but it wasn’t like he was playing a part or acting. He was just there and he did it. He was delightful, never upstaged anyone, though he must have known the tricks of the trade — like you step back a bit and get your face in and everyone has to look at you. Bing was not like that. He was very generous and never tried to hog anything. He knew the tricks, but it wasn’t his style.” 40
If he didn’t compete for the camera, he struggled mightily to hold his own against Mary in their backgammon tournament. “It was a rage then,” she said of the game, “and he wanted to learn it. He asked if I had a board and I said yes and he said, ‘Bring it tomorrow.’ We started to play and he said, ‘Let’s see, what’ll we play for?’ I said, ‘Bing, you don’t even know how to play the game, now why would you play for money?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s more fun like that.’ We played through the whole picture and I kept winning and winning and winning. He never went to his dressing room like he used to — it was always, ‘Get the board, come on, let’s play.’ When we finished the picture, he owed me a good bit of money, a fair amount in those days.” 41 Reluctant to pay up, he persuaded her to play double or nothing until he was in the hole for $1,200. He promised to send a check but did not. Instead, he arranged for Mary, who was under contract to the Bing Crosby, Inc., talent agency, to star in Doctor Rhythm, which went into production a few months after Double or Nothing wrapped.
Bing called and he said, “We’re gonna do it together again,” and I said, “Oh, I’m so pleased.” I said, “You know, I bet I know why you want me in the picture.” He said, “Why?” I said, “I bet you’re gonna try and get your money back.” And I want to tell you, we played. And Frank Tuttle was the director and they have pictures of us on the set, you know, with the board between us and playing away, with Frank looking on. And I kept winning and winning, and finally it was about two weeks before the picture finished and he said, “Why don’t we play a really good big game?” And I said, “What do you mean by big?” And he gave me a figure. I said, “Why, Bing you’re out of your mind. I don’t play for that kind of money.” He said, “Whose money are you playing with?” I said, “Oh, yeah. All right.” So we started with this figure and it was an automatic double game. We both threw doubles. Then he was doing well, so he doubled it again. And then I thought I could beat him, so I doubled it again. So it was lot of money. And do you know that he won that game? We never played again. 42
Mary concluded, “He didn’t want to lose. He finally got the money back, he didn’t have to pay me, and he didn’t want to play again.” One consequence of the time Bing and Mary spent together on the set was the rumor of an affair. Carlisle adamantly denied a romance, conceding that “there was so much gossip, it was unbelievable.” She thought it was fueled because she accompanied Bing to Del Mar and to Spokane as part of the KMH troupe when he received his degree, though her mother chaperoned her on those occasions. “I bought a mink coat on one picture and people said, ‘Oh, Bing bought the mink coat,’ which is why I don’t believe anything I read anymore.” Yet the gossip never made the papers. “You have to remember, Louella Parsons was a good friend because I was a good friend of the Hearsts, and I would be up at the beach house, the ranch, San Simeon. So Louella is not going to print anything that isn’t nice about me. And if she heard something, she’d say, ‘Mary, what is this about a coat?’ And I’d say, ‘Don’t you believe it, I’ll show you the check I paid for it,’ you know, and she’d say, ‘Okay, honey,’ and that was it. They controlled everything in the press.” 43
The Hearst Editors’ Radio Poll voted Kraft Music Hall best musical program and Bing the best male vocalist for 1937. He also reappeared on the Quigley box-office poll for the second time, ranking after Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor.
Bing started 1938 by completing Doctor Rhythm, arguably the most peculiar picture he ever made. Though routine enough in plot and variety-show diversions, it was a more personal project than its immediate predecessors. What began as a hip, funny, and stylish filmmaking party for old friends was derailed by accidents, infighting, and a capitulation to the sensibilities of southern exhibitors at the expense of Louis Armstrong. The film survives in a blundered post-release print as a fragmentary curiosity. Doctor Rhythm was Bing’s second independent venture with Manny Cohen’s Major Pictures, only this time there was no bidding for distribution. Paramount would release it under the rubric “Adolph Zukor Presents an Emanuel Cohen Production.”
The comity suggested by the joint billing was entirely cosmetic. Zukor had disdained Cohen for years, ever since he had run the studio and signed Bing, Mae West, and Gary Cooper to personal contracts. He now saw the opportunity for a showdown. That was Zukor’s way. A smiling cobra who bided his time before striking, he had taken control of Paramount twenty years earlier by taking note of the weaknesses of its founder, W. W. Hodkinson, and then using them to turn the board, against him. With Doctor Rhythm, he found a way to rid himself of Cohen, whose name would never appear on another feature film. Executive machinations were of no concern to Bing, however, as he embarked on the venture, surrounding himself with friends and trusted colleagues.
Frank Tuttle was back, working for the first time with cinematographer Charles Lang, who was shooting his fourth Crosby picture. Tuttle credited Lang with breaking him of his penchant for arty foreground compositions that obscured the background action. Herb Polesie hired on as associate producer. John Scott Trotter wrote arrangements for a score supervised by Georgie Stoll. A new team was configured to write songs, as Johnny Burke joined James Monaco, a veteran composer recently signed to the studio. In his glory years Monaco had written such enduring ditties as “Row, Row, Row” for Ziegfeld Follies of 1912, “You Made Me Love You” for Al Jolson, and “Crazy People” for the Boswell Sisters, but his career had been in eclipse for several years. Jo Swerling and Richard Connell wrote the script, freely adapted from O. Henry’s uninspired story “The Badge of Policeman O’Roon.”
As usual, Bing was billed as part of a starring quartet, along with his backgammon adversary Mary Carlisle, fellow horse breeder Andy Devine, and — in a particular coup and the primary motivation for the entire project — Beatrice Lillie. 44 Bing had admired the outlandish Canadian-born comedienne ever since he saw her in Charlot’s Revue in 1926. In the intervening years she had become the darling of the English stage, playing Shaw and Coward, though best known for turns in comic revues that earned her the accolade “the funniest woman on earth.” 45 Yet her humor was hardly heartland material, and after a dismal vehicle in the early days of sound, she had been ignored by the film studios.
Wearing her hair in a mannish bob and trilling double entendres while gesticulating with a long cigarette holder, Bea Lillie combined wordplay, gender confusion, upper-crust parody, and spry physicality for a result that convulsed some and confused others. For her first picture in eight years (and the only suitable opportunity she would ever have in Hollywood), she was promised a major production number in addition to one of her trademark numbers, Rodgers and Hart’s “There’s Rhythm in This Heart of Mine,” and the chance to revive her famous sketch from At Home Abroad, in which she orders “a dozen double damask dinner napkins.” 46 Lillie arrived in Los Angeles in late September, appeared on Kraft Music Hall, and posed for Doctor Rhythm publicity photos with a horse, after which she thanked the photographer and his assistant and then turned to the horse and said, “Thank you, too, you walleyed son of a bitch.” 47
Louis Armstrong was also signed. After Pennies from Heaven he had appeared for Paramount in the Jack Benny comedy Artists & Models and in Manny Cohen’s unsuccessful Mae West film, Every Day’s a Holiday. Now he was back with Bing, purportedly in a more ambitious role, with two musical numbers and dialogue scenes, generating much publicity. Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s manager, told the Chicago Defender (a black paper) that Louis would have “an opportunity to work throughout the picture in many scenes with Bing Crosby,” 48 enabling him to “surpass all of his acting in previous films.” 49 That was in September. By October, when the picture went into production, Louis’s role had been greatly reduced; though he worked two weeks (a glossy still of him and Bing was widely published), he was now limited to one production number, the climactic performance at a benefit for the police department, described with appalling insensitivity in the Paramount press book:
The number opens with what seems to be a symphony orchestra in silhouette. Symphonic music swells from the screen. The number ends, the leader turns, bows and leans wearily against a pillar. Then as the light comes up we see that the musicians aren’t a symphony orchestra at all, but a hot negro dance band, and the leader no Toscanini in black full dress, but a chubby darkie in a dress suit of silver cloth. He stands there dreamily until someone toots an impatient note at him from the rear, then he bestirs himself to reality, sighs, raises his trumpet and goes into “The Trumpet Player’s Lament,” which begins,
“I wish that I could play like José Iturbi,
Instead of tootin’ notes into a derby…”
The disconsolate one is Louis Armstrong. 50
The prevalent treatment of black performers in Hollywood musicals involved isolating their numbers so they could be snipped out when the pictures were distributed in the South. Despite all the publicity attending Armstrong’s participation and the prominence accorded him in billing and press materials, that option became the fallback remedy for Doctor Rhythm — especially after it was understood that Tuttle had shot Louis in front of a racially integrated ensemble. Although MGM presented the mixed Benny Goodman quartet in Hollywood Hotel the year Doctor Rhythm was filmed, Tuttle’s decision may have been viewed by the brass as a provocation; the only promotional stills of the sequence show Louis surrounded by black musicians.
Certainly, Zukor had the southern market on his mind after the brouhaha caused by Louis’s performance in Artists & Models. Atlanta’s The Georgian protested, “Martha Raye, thinly burnt-corked, does a Harlem specialty with a fat Negro trumpeter and a hundred other Negroes. It is coarse to the point of vulgarity. I have no objection to Negroes on the screen. I like them from Bill Robinson down the line. Their stuff is usually good. But I don’t like mixing white folk — and especially a white girl — in their acts.” 51 The managing editor of the Shreveport Journal personally wrote Zukor to warn him that any attempt to depict Negroes and whites “in social equality” was offensive and might generate repercussions. 52
But that issue could wait; there were more pressing backstage problems, ranging from the ludicrous to the lunatic. Bing offered a small part to his recently acquitted golf friend, John Montague, arguing, “I knew he’d win out, he comes back here with clean hands and can start over again.” 53The Hays Office convened a meeting and flaunted its power in barring him from the film. Bing backed off. Then a problem arose with the title. The working title was that of O. Henry’s story, but as the cameras started to roll, something snappier was sought, like Swing Along Ladies or Come Along Lady. One executive proposed Doctor Rhythm, to exploit the “reams of publicity printed about Crosby’s doctorate from Gonzaga University.” 54 Knowing Gonzaga might take umbrage, Larry telegrammed Father Sharp to tell him of the suggestion. As Sharp was out of town, the president, Leo J. Robinson, opened the wire and misread the title as Doctor of Rhythm. He wrote Larry, thanking him for directing the matter to the school’s attention, and asked that the degree “not be referred to in any light manner.” He was primarily irked by a radio burlesque on Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight in which an actor portraying Robinson — “a cheap and undesirable caricature” — asked Bing for a job in the movies. 55
Larry advised Cohen that Bing would not precipitate a clash with Gonzaga, and the studio relented, not knowing that Bing had taken the matter in hand with authoritative diplomacy, writing Father Robinson, “Larry has just shown me your letter of recent date and I am sorry that the undignified reference to the presentation of the degree was made on the Town Hall Tonight radio program. This is the type of thing that they generally do on their show…. I don’t think there will be anything more of this nature, however. At least I hope not, as the ceremony and the honor the degree stands for is much too important to me to be either caricatured or referred to in the spirit of levity on the radio or in the newspapers.” Concerning the title, he pointed out that it was Doctor Rhythm, a “substantial difference” from Doctor of Rhythm, implying no “connection with the ceremony at Gonzaga as the character I play in the picture is a doctor, a general practitioner in New York.” He noted that the title was not finalized and “if we can think of anything better we will make the change.” 56 That would not be necessary.
Bing’s finesse was of no use a couple of weeks later, when Tuttle was directing a scene set in the Central Park Zoo in which Andy Devine’s inebriated character frees the animals, including a cage full of monkeys. A net had been draped over the soundstage, but as the actor opened the latch, a lot of monkeys — 150 according to a newspaper account, 300 according to a Paramount press release, 350 according to Bing’s autobiography — broke out, ripping the net apart and escaping. Four hysterical hours later forty of the monkeys had been seized; the rest toured Los Angeles, many of them swarming through trees in the district of Belmont High School. Cohen offered students a one-dollar bounty per head for every monkey captured. Monkey sightings were reported for weeks.
The studio got better publicity when Bing challenged Bob Hope to a round of golf. Hope was about to film The Big Broadcast of 1938, the picture in which he and Shirley Ross sing “Thanks for the Memory,” so the outing bolstered two pictures. On the first hole only, for the benefit of press photographers, Ross caddied for Bob and Mary Carlisle for Bing. The loser was supposed to work as a stand-in for a day on the winner’s picture. Bing won handily, though no one knows if Bob spent a day baking under the lights on the Doctor Rhythm set. 57
The fun and games turned treacherous by late January 1938, after principal shooting ended, when the film was assessed at $350,000 over its $800,000 budget. Various technical problems were blamed, as well as Cohen’s desire to give greater prominence to Bea Lillie. Zukor charged in, demanding control. Cohen’s only leverage was his possession of the script and cutting print, and he withheld them. Paramount seized the negative, created its own print, and tried unsuccessfully to get Tuttle to supervise the editing. Why Tuttle refused is not clear, as he omits the episode from his unpublished memoir, though he writes at length of what a delightful experience the film was for him and Bing: he describes working with Bea Lillie as “one of the biggest kicks of our careers.” 58 The studio assigned Herb Polesie the impossible task of cutting the film with no more than, as Variety noted, “his own conception of what the playwright had in mind.” 59
Emanuel Cohen was a tiny (under five feet) tin-pot Napoleon who became head of production in Paramount’s darkest days, 1932, making numerous enemies as he bullied artists and displaced such industry stalwarts as B. P. Schulberg and Jesse Lasky. After his own fall some thought he was a model for the eponymous double-crosser in What Makes Sammy Run? by B. P.’s son, Budd, who denied it. Herman Mankiewicz said Cohen’s only virtue was his diminutive size: “You don’t have to see the sonofabitch — unless you look under the desk.” 60 Yet in the early 1930s, when Paramount’s value plummeted and Zukor (unable to repurchase stock he borrowed to acquire a chain of theaters) declared bankruptcy, ham-handed Manny was credited with keeping the studio afloat. He encouraged adult features like A Farewell to Arms and the sex farces of Mae West and Carole Lombard and launched the unexpectedly nimble crooner, Crosby. Now it was over for him. In exchange for a settlement of $400,000, he turned over all materials relating to Doctor Rhythm and relinquished claims to the nine pictures he made for distribution by Paramount, as well as the lease to his studio property. He was said to be planning productions with Gary Cooper and Mae West, but they never materialized.
Tuttle credited Polesie as “a contributor to the success of Doctor Rhythm… as adviser on story construction and picture planning,” but others also had input on the post-production edit. 61 Acting on Zukor’s orders to revise the footage to evenly balance Bing and Bea, LeBaron hired producer George M. Arthur to supervise, committing $150,000 for new scenes pending the response to a sneak preview. How much work was done is not known; but when the completed film was officially previewed several weeks later at the Los Angeles Paramount, it ran eighty minutes and there was no sign of Louis Armstrong. None of the remarkably favorable reviews noted his disappearance — except in black newspapers and England’s Melody Maker, which raised a ruckus, reporting that the cut was made “in spite of Bing Crosby’s urgent request to leave Louis in the film.” 62
Bing told the Pittsburgh Courier, a black paper, that cuts were made to accommodate increased footage of Bea Lillie, affecting his and Andy Devine’s scenes as well as Louis’s. He continued to exert pressure on Paramount, which ultimately agreed to supply a complete print with the Armstrong sequence to theaters requesting it. Only theaters in black communities did so, including the Regal in Chicago, which billed Louis as the star, and the Regent in Brooklyn. Those prints are not believed to have survived, and except for a few stills, the sequence is presumed lost. Late that summer Larry Crosby offered Melody Maker an explanation, denying “racial or professional jealousy” and repeating the need to give more footage to Beatrice Lillie. 63
In truth, the film is so dizzy with specialty numbers, mistaken-identity gambits, and chases that Louis’s number might very well have slowed the proceedings. Besides, his featured number, “The Trumpet Player’s Lament,” which Armstrong recorded for Jack Kapp at the same session that produced two of his masterpieces (“Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and “Jubilee”), was unworthy of him. Trashing jazz and everything he stood for (“I wish that I could play like José Iturbi…”), it was perhaps better off buried. Yet in noting that “Louis appeared in front of a white [actually mixed] band in the film,” Larry leaves the unmistakable impression that Zukor took to heart the warnings of southern exhibitors. 64 Larry concluded, “Bing, who is Louis’ bosom pal, was dissatisfied with the results and has sworn to get Louis a big part in the next Crosby musical.” 65
Alas, that musical was far from “next.” It was postponed eighteen years, until they made High Society at MGM (1956), though there were many collaborations on radio, a movie cameo, and a hit record (“Gone Fishin’”) in the interim. Bing’s feelings for Louis are captured in a story told by Joe Bushkin, the pianist who led the quartet that backed Bing on his tours in the mid-1970s.
This will give you an insight about Bing. We went to the track to see an Australian horse called Turn Unstoned. So I always like to bet, not as a big gambler or anything, at least fifty dollars…. So I see the fifty-dollar window, there’s three people there. I can go right there and get the goddamn ticket and tell Bing, I got you covered. But I thought, that was not a housebroken way to operate with Bing. I was very conscious of Bing’s style and I figured if he said, Put two dollars down, I was going to give him a two-dollar ticket. I had to do that. The goddamn line at the two-dollar window — this was before they had the automatic teller — was huge and I get to the thing, sweating it out, because the horses are on the track. And I order twenty-six two-dollar tickets, fifty dollars for me, two for him. And the guy keeps punching two-dollar tickets on me and the bells rang and people in back of me are really pissed off because they can’t make a bet. It was a scene. So I go back and I told Bing what I bet. He said, What? He really got uptight with me. He said, For chrissake, if you win is it going to change your style of living? I said, No, Bing. He said, But if you lose, think of all the Louis Armstrong albums you could have picked up for that money. 66
Doctor Rhythm made money, but not the usual windfall, although the reviews were generous. Newsweek reported that at one preview, the laughter drowned out “substantial portions of the dialogue” while “members of press, profession and public were heard to proclaim it Bing Crosby’s best picture and many took in much more territory.” 67 Lillie received much of the attention for her parody of a coloratura and her routine involving dinner napkins. The movie’s grosses were helped by the early release of Bing’s recordings of the film’s songs, which received extensive radio play, especially the cheerful “My Heart Is Taking Lessons” and the winsome “On the Sentimental Side.”
A great deal was made of the opening sequence, one of the most surreal in any American film of the period. Screenwriters Swerling and Connell created it as a throwback to the René Clair and silent-movie conceits Tuttle employed in The Big Broadcast. A doctor (Bing), policeman (Devine), Good Humor man (Sterling Holloway), and zookeeper (Rufe Davis) meet at night at the zoo, unfurl a banner proclaiming their fifteenth annual reunion of a relay race they won at P.S. 43, gorge on food and beer, sing the school song, strip down to running suits, and re-create the race around the seal pool. In the morning Bing, boozily blissful, sings “My Heart Is Taking Lessons” to birds in the park and is overheard by Carlisle, who tosses him a coin, while Devine dives into the pool and is bitten on the seat of his pants by a seal. Except for songs and grunts, the opening eight minutes of the picture are completely silent. Paramount boasted that Doctor Rhythm had less dialogue “than any American film in years” and claimed to have “evolved a new method of unfolding a story.” 68
The film becomes all too conventional when the dialogue kicks in, though the plot offers a twist on the usual Crosby formula: Bing loves the girl, but the girl loves a scoundrel, until one of Bing’s ballads, “This Is My Night to Dream,” brings her to her senses. Despite the title, rhythm is kept to a minimum. Yet Bing holds his own with Lillie in the concert parody, “Only a Gypsy Knows,” complete with a patty-cake bit and a mock ballet. 69 “Bing, who is a born athlete, leaped into the air and did a couple of entrechats,” Tuttle wrote. “I believe he was prouder of this accomplishment than of winning an Academy Award for Going My Way.” 70
Sing You Sinners was Claude Binyon’s baby. In the years since College Humor, he and director Wesley Ruggles had developed an enviable track record with a series of edgy screwball comedies that advanced the careers of Paramount players Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, and Carole Lombard, notably The Gilded Lily, The Bride Comes Home, I Met Him in Paris, and True Confessions. As a result, Binyon worked as an equal with Ruggles, an A-list director. The younger brother of Charles Ruggles, Wesley entered the business as an actor, leaving high school to organize a minstrel troupe. Mack Sennett made him a Keystone Kop in 1914, and he soon graduated to editor and director, assisting Chaplin on his last six films for Essanay.
Ruggles and Binyon had been looking for an idea that would suit Bing, their neighbor in Toluca Lake. The writer suggested, “I’d like to do a story about Crosby as I see him at his home and as I’ve watched him at the racetrack.” 71 The director agreed, and Binyon came up with a story about three brothers who hate to sing but have no other way to pay the bills. Like princes in a fairy tale, the eldest is solid, responsible, and hardworking, and the second is a ne’er-do-well dreamer striving for a pot of gold and unwilling to settle for anything less. (The third brother is a boy caught between the two.) Bing was slated for the role of the no-account, who earns desperately needed money and squanders it on a racehorse. William LeBaron, who hoped to find a racetrack story for him, was pleased, as was Bing, who after reading the script remarked, “I guess I can act myself.” 72
The brothers, who live with their mother in the reduced circumstances of a working-class home stomped by the Depression, are Joe, David, and Mike Beebe, and the script was initially called The Unholy Beebes, a title Bing admired, though Paramount figured people would not know how to pronounce it and demanded a change. For a time the brass favored Harmony for Three.
Bing’s siblings were originally to be played by Don Ameche and Mickey Rooney, but Ameche fell out quickly and Fred MacMurray replaced him as David. Rooney remained with the project until shortly before shooting began in April 1938, when he was suddenly pulled by MGM. Ignoring Paramount’s casting department, Ruggles told his assistant director, Arthur Jacobson, “Find me another Mickey Rooney and we’ll start the picture.” 73 It so happened that Jacobson was scheduled to attend a benefit for the Motion Picture Relief Fund at the Biltmore Hotel, emceed by Bob Hope; in addition to movie stars, a few vaudeville acts were recruited to fill out the bill, among them the O’Connor Family, with its sparkling twelve-year-old wunderkind, Donald.
Jacobson made an appointment with O’Connor. “I asked him if he could act. He said, ‘If it’s entertainment, I can do anything. I can sing, I can dance, I can act.’” Asked if he could ride a racehorse, Donald replied, “No, but I’ll learn,” and did. 74 Jacobson asked him to listen to prerecordings by Bing and Fred and harmonize with them. Within days Donald knew the script cold. On Monday morning Jacobson brought him to see Ruggles, who immediately advised Paramount to sign him. O’Connor had been on the stage since he was three days old. He had played every kind of theater and circus. When he met Bing, he felt as though he already knew him:
I would see him on the screen in between shows and, like everybody else, I always thought he was a friend of mine. So when I met Bing, he was extremely nice. Had a wonderful smile. And he never said too much to me on the movie. He was very, very patient with me. I was a very small child at twelve and I was riding this big goddamned racehorse and I was scared to death of this horse. There was one scene down at the track, an exposition scene, where I tell him I’ve been bribed, I’ve got the money and I feel awful, I’m letting the family down. It’s a long scene and Bing is in front leading me on the horse and he’s pumping me and at the same time reassuring me not to be worried. We get right down to the end and I blow my lines. So we turn the horse around, all the way back, and it was a cold day at Santa Anita, and we have to start again with all the crying and everything. I blow the line again. We must have done that forty times. And Bing never complained, not once. I told him, “I’m so sorry, my mind just can’t get this.” He said, “Don’t worry about it, kid, you’ll get it, we have no place to go.” We had a lot of fun on that movie. He treated me like a pal. 75
Bing later said of O’Connor, “He could sing, dance, do comedy, do anything, thoroughly accomplished, thoroughly grounded in every aspect of show business because of his many years in vaudeville.” 76
Sing You Sinners was Bing’s sixteenth picture as a film star and broke the pattern of all he had previously done. Johnny Burke and Jimmy Monaco wrote three songs (a fourth was not used), of which “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” was hugely popular; the interpolated “Small Fry,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, as performed by the Beebe brothers in rustic drag, was also considered a highlight of the film. Yet strictly speaking, the picture is not really a musical, as Bing sings only one solo and all the songs emerge from the plot. For the first and only time (except when he played a priest or, late in life, character roles), Bing does not get the girl and for the first time since The Big Broadcast, he plays a lout, complete with a drunk scene in which he reaches his nadir by making a pass at his brother’s fiancée. “Sometimes I turn into such a heel, I surprise myself,” he broods as Fred MacMurray undresses him and puts him to bed. Bing tells him, “You’re the kind of fella I wanna be.”
For the part of Martha, MacMurray’s sweetheart, Artie Jacobson recommended an inexperienced seventy-five-dollar-a-week starlet named Terry Ray. Ruggles liked her but warned that she would have to be approved by Bing, per his contract. Jacobson brought her to Stage One, where Bing was prerecording, and, as she waited outside, told him about her. Bing said if he and Ruggles selected her, that was good enough for him. “He didn’t want to see her,” Jacobson said. 77 Artie had known Bing for years, mostly from luncheon encounters in the commissary. “I fell in love with the guy,” he said, although they had never worked together. “I can go on all afternoon and tell you about the virtues of Bing Crosby. He was a wonderful guy, but he had to like you. He wasn’t the easiest guy in the world to get to know.” 78 Jacobson told him, “Since you’re being so nice about it, you deserve the pleasure of seeing what will happen in her eyes when you tell her that she’s got the job.” He brought her into the stage and said, “Bing, will you tell this little lady something? Just say these words, ‘You have the job.” Bing deadpanned, “You have the job.” 79 She fainted.
After walk-ons or bits in a dozen pictures (including Rhythm on the Range), Terry Ray suddenly found herself a leading lady, as Ellen Drew. The studio changed her name a couple of times before settling. Bing joked that he was so confused by the name changes, he called her Ellen Terry, after the legendary dame of the nineteenth-century English stage. In a press release issued under his name, he expresses pleasure at not having to labor for her hand: “The only break I get in the picture is that I don’t get the girl — Fred gets her. And believe me that’s a relief. I’ve made enough love scenes in the past five or six years. And I haven’t got a one in Sing You Sinners. Whoopee! What a break!” 80
Artie Jacobson received a break as well. The roving head of the talent department was fired for auditioning female talent in hotel rooms. When a Paramount executive learned from Ruggles how O’Connor and Drew came to be in Sing You Sinners, he gave Jacobson the job.
The shoot was fun for Bing, not least because his costars included some two dozen of his horses; track scenes were filmed on location at the Pomona Fairgrounds and Santa Anita. On May 2 production on the soundstage was halted as a cake was wheeled out to salute Crosby’s thirty-fourth birthday. Ironically, the character he played, Joe Beebe, is identified as being Bing’s real age, thirty-five. As was the case with many of his previous pictures, Sing You Sinners overflows with biographical allusions, the kindest of which poke fun at Bing’s persona, the rest taking him to task with a severity befitting a singing sinner. In the first two shots, Ruggles and Karl Struss establish a neighborhood not unlike the one Bing knew as “the holy land.” As the willful Mother Beebe and her sons march to church and sing “Shall We Gather at the River,” Joe (Bing) irreverently chews gum. At dinner Mother makes it clear that Joe is her pet; since macaroni will make him fat, she cooks his favorite dish, pot roast, which his brothers detest.
Dave is engaged to Martha but uses Joe’s laziness and the family’s insolvency as an excuse to postpone marriage. He resents having to sing in a trio for ten dollars a night, echoing the view of the combative young men who heckled Bing long ago at Lareida’s Dance Pavilion. “I’m a man, doggone it,” MacMurray’s Dave says, “and I want to stay one.” Mike (O’Connor) similarly complains that he’s being turned into a Buster Brown. Bing, more than ever, embodies a version of Harry Crosby, the optimistic dreamer who never quite measures up. Mother Beebe (Elizabeth Patterson) observes, “His father was the same way. He just drifted along without a worry in the world until you boys started coming along.” Bing takes Martha to a roadside dance hall where the bandleader, Harry Barris, persuades him to get up and sing. Barris is as kinetic as ever. Bing is so cool that you can’t believe no one has advised him to go to Hollywood and become a star. He works the room, singing “Don’t Let That Moon Get Away,” dancing with customers, playing drums with cutlery on the bar, executing a nifty before resuming his seat.
The personal references keep on coming. Chagrined after making a fool of himself over Martha, he tells his mother, “I don’t fit in this town, so I’m going somewhere I can do the family some good” — Los Angeles with a hard g. Relocated, he bets two bucks on a horse named Toluca. In a beautifully executed routine with actor Tom Dugan as a tout, Bing captures the madness of gambling and winning as he trades one ticket for another, finally winning a substantial sum. He sends for the family and meets the train wearing plaids and stripes that outstrip even Bing Crosby’s hallucinogenic taste. The family is appalled to learn that he has invested all his money in a horse, Uncle Gus (played by Ligaroti and others). “Whatever you do, don’t worry,” he tells his mother, who is obliged to pay the cab fare. “Yes,” she says, “I’m afraid we all know each other too well.”
The study of a wastrel soon deteriorates into the familiar racetrack picture, but with a strange moral: long shots pay off better than dull jobs. The old-time revivalism of the title is nowhere echoed in the movie, but the combination of feckless optimism and family ties, bound within a veneer of realism, won over press and public. The New York Daily News implored Claude Binyon to devise a sequel, because the Beebes “are the sort of family, like the Joneses and the Hardys, that could continue indefinitely on the screen under Wesley Ruggles’s astute direction.” 81 Time conceded the picture was “tolerable comedy, jigging playfully from farce to melodrama like a kite with no tail,” while lamenting that it was “no preachment for the typically American virtues.” 82
Bing received splendid reviews — not just for his portrayal but for the character of Joe Beebe. Life ran a pictorial on the fight scene, noting, “Crooner Bing Crosby abandons the romantic roles for which his stocky figure makes him unsuited and takes a comfortable, happy-go-lucky part that fits him like a glove…. His Joe Beebe is a model of simple, unpretentious acting.” 83 Calling the picture “the funniest comedy on Broadway, including all the side streets,” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was inspired to offer a groaningly awkward KMH-style Crosby joke: “The only noteworthy difference between reality and Sing You Sinners, at the Paramount, is that in the movies Crosby’s horse wins — an unprecedented thing which may be explained by the fact that Bing must have undoubtedly had a hand in the script.” 84 To which Jimmy Durante might have exasperated, “Everybody wants to get into da act!”
But then, everyone was in the act. The Times reviewer’s inclination to refer to Bing as he might to Stan or Ollie (as opposed to Mr. Cagney, Mr. Astaire, Miss Davis, et al.) implied an uncommon assumption of intimacy with the private identity of a movie star. “But you’ve got to know the character of Bing to appreciate the family comedy of Sing You Sinners,” Crowther adumbrated with a surplus of pronouns: “Bing is the type that’s lovable, but that lies around reading in hammocks, or goes out and drinks too much, and come homes pie-eyed, and that propagates a new scheme for getting rich quick every weekend or so.” 85 The New Republic’s Otis Ferguson agreed: “The main thing was the character of Bing Crosby, who can sing and also be a swell feller.” 86 Life could not distinguish between Bing on- and offscreen, even when it purported to be trying:
To see Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby on the Paramount lot is to set him down as the most modest and easygoing of Hollywood stars. This appearance is deceptive. For though Bing is modest, he is also one of the most enterprising actors in the film city. When his acting chores are over, he loves to hop in his bright red Cadillac, skip down 118 miles to his 120-acre ranch where he breeds and trains a stable of racehorses…. Between times he broadcasts weekly over the radio, turns out popular Decca records, plays the drums for pleasure, acts as adviser to a third brother’s orchestra and raises his family of four boys including Twins Philip [sic] and Denis [sic]. 87
In short, when critics said that Bing plumbed new depths as an actor, they meant he was playing himself more credibly than ever before. His screen persona was not as ingenuous as Cooper’s, or as manly as Gable’s, or spirited as Cagney’s, or funny as Grant’s, but it had a matchless, overriding aplomb, a self-reliance that bordered on impertinence. It had always been there when he sang. Now it was evident when he acted. Bing retained the righteous assurance of silent-era movie clowns, vulnerable and impervious. Like Chaplin, he seemed most alone in a crowd. Small wonder Leo McCarey recognized in him the ideal movie priest. “There was a feeling from people that there was something much deeper about Bing,” Anthony Quinn remembered. 88 And Donald O’Connor mused, “I think you have a tendency to dismiss someone acting so very natural. With the Stanislavsky kind of school, you try to act natural but you’re acting. Bing was one of the finest natural actors who ever lived. To do that is a hell of an acting job. He studied that. The other person who was very close to that was Spencer Tracy, but Spencer was more dramatic than Bing. Bing was softer. Much softer. Came at you through the back door.” 89
Bing’s revocation of Horatio Alger’s school of gumption in Sing You Sinners represented a new turn in his persona. The ethical switch —from Hard Work, Pluck, and Ambition Conquer Adversity to Daydreamer Picks Winning Horse and Saves Family — was a fantasy designed to salve more than Depression worries. Economic burdens were now rivaled by international chaos. In the weeks surrounding the August 1938 Sing You Sinners premiere at Del Mar, Germany and Japan conscripted millions of reserves; Italy expelled its Jews; President Roosevelt pledged that the United States would not support Europe against the Reich; Prime Minister Chamberlain threatened war over Hitler’s attack on Czechoslovakia, only to recant weeks later at Munich. Those stories vied with tales of native anxiety: on September 10, 55,000 hungry people trampled a Republican Party banquet in Pittsburgh; on October 30 Orson Welles staged a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, and hundreds of people abandoned their homes to escape martians. A year later, as Hitler invaded Poland, Dorothy would refuse to surrender on the Yellow Brick Road.
So eager were people to dream a dream of good luck and better times, they seemed “inured to hardship,” as Barbara Bauer observed of the reception to Sing You Sinners and its “dispiriting soup kitchen and bread line atmosphere.” Money or the lack of it, she wrote, was at the center of every scene: “Life has music for the Beebes only because the three brothers must sing for their supper. And there’s something irredeemably pathetic about seeing a ‘small fry’ so heavily burdened by his family’s problems.” 90 Yet public and press roared at the pratfalls of the Beebes, trusting in Bing, whose existence was proof enough that hard times would pass. For a souvenir, one could bring home his ebullient recording of “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” number one in sales for a month and second only to Ella Fitzgerald’s more clamorous fantasy “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (also on Decca), as the year’s best-selling record.
More remarkably, Bing was acknowledged as the second-highest-paid actor at any of the Hollywood studios. 91 Paramount’s Claudette Colbert ranked first, at $426,944, followed by Bing, at $410,000, and freelancer Irene Dunne, at $405,222. They were the only three to top $400,000, though none ranked among the top ten 1938 box-office draws, according to the 1938 Quigley poll. Their incomes implied keen business sense and an autonomy that, in Bing’s case, was fortified by his predominance in all media. His stature differed from the others in another way. While Paramount took great care to find suitable properties for Colbert, a Crosby property was presold by virtue of his presence alone. He was unlikely to find himself in a film he himself would have regarded as a potential classic. He was equally unlikely to find himself in a flop.