24

CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS

He never came on like a star, at least to anybody I ever saw. I’ve seen great singers choke, ‘cause they’re with the best. And whenever you did something like that, if you blew it, he blew it right behind you and blamed it on himself—you know, “Let’s do another take, I fucked that up.” He always sang the harmony part when he worked with somebody, always made it as easy as possible. He was a pleasure to work with.

— Gary Crosby (1991) ¹

On September 17, 1938, as Sing You Sinners rang box-office bells and “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (a duet with Connie Boswell) took turns crowning the hit parade, Bing, Dixie, and five-year-old Gary, along with Larry and his wife, Elaine, and twenty-four pieces of luggage, ascended the ramp of the SS Monarch for a three-week vacation in Bermuda. Bing’s next film, Paris Honeymoon, was already in the can, shot during the summer between the two Westwood Marching and Chowder Club shows. In December he would begin preliminary work on his self-produced East Side of Heaven. Clearly, Bing and Dixie needed some time together. If he spread himself any thinner, nothing would be left but the stuff of caricature: pipe, hat, and golf club.

The trip, which concluded with a pleasant detour to Chicago and a reunion with baby brother Bob and Bob’s new bride, proved a memorable jaunt that raised the family’s spirits. Bing spent his time golfing, fishing, shopping, and shooting home movies with a 16mm camera he had acquired a couple of years earlier. The Crosbys returned with healthy tans and thirteen additional pieces of luggage containing purchases made along the way, including British military-style khaki shorts for each member of the Kraft team. Trotter’s shorts, however, were a shiny blue; an NBC press release quoted Bing kidding him, “There just wasn’t enough of this kind of khaki in Bermuda to make a pair of shorts for you.” ² Bing also brought Trotter a song to orchestrate, “Bermuda Buggy Ride,” though he never recorded it.

Out shopping alone, Bing had bought a bolt of green doeskin cloth to have a suit made for his friend Edmund Lowe. “How’s that for a nice green?” he asked Larry back at the cottage. “That’s swell, Bing,” Larry told him, “but it isn’t green. It’s pink, and a bad pink at that.” ³ Bing returned to the store to exchange it, ordering by name rather than by sight.

The home movies Bing shot in Bermuda suggest nothing in the way of familial strain. In addition to touristy scenic pans, his camera dotes on Gary, golfing and riding in a horse-drawn cart, and captures a beach party and a deep-sea fishing expedition. During the years that Bing made most of his home movies (1936—40), he captured much of the same footage as numberless other dads in the era before camcorders and digitization replaced small movie cameras, tripods, portable screens, splicing Moviolas, noisy projectors that burned holes in the film stock, and social gatherings to display the results. That summer, in 1938, Bing edited years of footage into reels, complete with title cards that usually invoked the South: “Bing Crosby Presents Four Sons of Dixie,” “The Sun Shines Bright on the Old Toluca Home,” “Home on the Range, Where the Dears and Elder Folk Play.” Filmed in Toluca or at Rancho Santa Fe, they display a young happy family indistinguishable from the one the public imagined.

In one sequence (Walt Disney’s Snow White was the rage that year), the three elder boys are elaborately costumed as dwarfs while Sue Carol’s daughter plays Snow White. Elsewhere, Bing can scarcely take the camera off the recently christened Linny, who lies on his stomach or reposes in a swing (the caption: “Swing It!”) while his three brothers hold hands and play, turning somersaults in a sandpit, romping with the white terrier, Cremo, and other Crosby dogs, among them a matronly Saint Bernard that might have modeled for Nana in Peter Pan. A shot of Gary embracing the three-year-old twins is captioned “Gary Holds a Pair of Threes.” Everyone looks sunny and pleased, especially Gary, who accompanies Bing fishing and riding; at four, he handles himself smartly on a pony, trotting toward the camera with no adult in view. The caption reads: “Another Crosby Learns About Horses (we hope).” At five, Gary dives and swims, under the tutelage of a trainer. The boys are surrounded by animals, including a goat and chickens in the backyard, and are as comfortable with them as if they lived on a farm. Dixie is introduced with the card “Momie Has Her Moments of Popularity,” but she does not show up often and when she does, she is seen in the company of servants, nurses, and friends. Her hair is dark now, her smile broad yet shy; she wears dark glasses and gloves and a suit. One reel is called “Dixie Lee Presents Stepping Out” and documents Linny as he walked for the first time, with the caption “First Steps to Freedom from Feminine Autocracy.”

The most frequently photographed friend is Andy Devine, with and without his son, fishing, mugging, comparing his own stomach with the bulk of the huge fish they’ve landed. Richard Arlen and Pat O’Brien and their daughters show up, as well as Edmund Lowe and Henry Fonda, Dixie’s friends (especially Kitty) and parents, and Bing’s: Harry in cap, cardigan, and tie; Kate in sweater and skirt, lifting Gary horizontally off the ground with take-charge brass. But the truly remarkable aspect of these private idylls is the authority of Bing, who is in front of the camera more often than behind it.

Bing’s physical exuberance and style were shortchanged by his Hollywood features. Everything he does in the private reels is carried off with poised expertise. He rides at Santa Anita and Del Mar, with cap and pipe; walks the Alaskan coast among dozens of walruses and sizes up the seals; swims like a seal himself and plays tennis with an energetic grace; looks up from a backgammon game or down at a croquet ball; fishes for marlin; golfs; runs in a relay and hops in a sack race; dances the hula with a dozen or so grass-skirted beauties from Waikiki Wedding. Whatever the activity, he is invariably in his element, and his presence of mind shines through each frame.

Wearing shorts and a rolled-up bandanna to keep the thinning locks from his eyes, he is barechested on the fishing barge and, with his paunchy midriff and fleshy hips, suggests nothing of the torso of Apollo. Yet he is obviously in great physical condition, in perpetual motion, though very cool, with a pipe or a cigar and a twinkle for the camera when it meets his eye. He is surrounded by a crew of professionals. They land dozens of fish — someone is always ready with a club to finish off the largest; the deck and hold are awash in blood. The other amateurs occasionally get help from the pros, but not Bing, who wears a harness and reels in one monster after another as if he had grown up an apprentice to Disko Troop in Captains Courageous. He measures one catch against himself — they are the same height — and kisses another square on the mouth. Waiting for a bite, he holds his rod in one hand and with the other elaborately conducts the crew, unknowing members of his imaginary orchestra. In Chaplin’s Limelight the old comic Calvero says, “That’s all any of us are — amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Only in that sense does Bing convey amateur status.

As hard as Bing worked in the late 1930s, he was not the absentee father he became during the war, when army shows, charity work, and guest appearances kept him traveling around the country. The movies he shot at home and in Bermuda were hardly the labors of an indifferent or dilettante parent; they capture a long, rosy interval before the dam broke. If all happy families are alike, his was an ostensible paradigm. Signs of marital discord were few and confined. Dixie’s drinking was not yet oppressive. If Bing stepped out in this period, his philandering — evident during the war but little noted before — was too incidental and discreet to merit attention. ⁴ After eight years he and Dixie were evidently committed to each other. Two years later Bing would threaten divorce for the first (but not the last) time since Dixie had raised the issue six months after their wedding. In the interim the mortal sin came to roost among Bing’s siblings; four out of six (all but Larry and Kay) risked the wrath of God and Mother Crosby to divorce and remarry.

Everett separated from Naomi in 1936, though not until April 1938 did he sue for divorce, citing her drinking. He won custody of their daughter, Mary Sue, and a year later married light-opera singer Florence George, who was twenty-three; Bing featured her a few times on Kraft Music Hall. ⁵Much later Ted also divorced and remarried. ⁶ Bing’s favorite sister, Mary Rose, divorced and remarried twice. ⁷ The first to mortgage his soul was the youngest, Bob, whose band was playing at Chicago’s Congress Hotel in 1938 when he met June Kuhn, a Sarah Lawrence student on Easter vacation. His first marriage, to Marie Grounitz, had lasted nearly four years, producing a daughter; letters suggest they parted over her involvement with a woman and initially planned to separate, not divorce. ⁸ His marriage to June got off to a terrifying start when she climaxed an argument by stabbing him in the back. Yet to the family’s astonishment, he chose not to revoke the marriage, which lasted fifty-four years, producing three boys and two girls. ⁹

To a proud, resolute Catholic like Kate, these marital changes bore consequences. While Harry figured that Marie had “no one to blame but herself” and left it at that, Kate lamented Bob’s fall from grace. ¹⁰ Indeed, she held that grievance against him and the rest of her apostate children all her life. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, divorce, unlike the “humanly reparable” sin of adultery, warrants damnation. ¹¹ Kate gave her children a preview, taunting those who had fallen and threatening those who had not. Ted’s son, Howard, who never knew his grandmother, recalled, “I talked to Uncle Bob, I talked to Aunt Mary Rose, I talked to Aunt Kay, and I certainly talked to my dad, and they all said they felt no love for their mother at all. They were scared of her. As children, they respected her because she commanded a lot of fear. Now I don’t know how Uncle Bing or Uncle Everett or Uncle Larry felt because I never talked to them about it.” ¹²

Bing and Dixie were in Bermuda when Bob and June married in Spokane, on September 22. Before heading home, they stopped in Chicago to meet the bride and provide Jack Kapp with a chance to record the brothers for the first time. Bob had become a commercial entity in his own right, fronting one of the era’s most distinctive bands, the sole orchestral exponent of a music close to Bing’s heart, Dixieland. “I’m the only guy in the business who made it without talent,” Bob once remarked. ¹³ The musicians in his band would not have disagreed with him. An indifferent baritone who at best sounded like Bing and at worst did not, he became a bandleader through personality, good looks, and a famous name.

* * *

Bob had been picking cucumbers in Washington at twenty-five cents an hour when Bing told Anson Weeks, facetiously perhaps, that he had a younger brother who could sing. Hungry for a touch of Crosby magic, Weeks wired Bob an offer of $100 a week to join his dance band (Weeks’s girl singer was Dale Evans). Dad Crosby handed him the telegram, laughing, saying it had to be a joke, because Bob could not sing. “I know,” Bob told him, “but anything is better than picking cucumbers.” ¹⁴ He took the train to Los Angeles to borrow a tuxedo from Bing, who spent the next ten days preparing him with voice lessons. Bob crooned with Weeks and then with the Dorseys, making little professional headway.

Bob’s big chance came about when established bandleader Ben Pollack began devoting more energy to romancing and building the career of his singer, Doris Robbins, than to his orchestra, which boasted some of the finest musicians in the business. When he announced a long layoff in Los Angeles, the musicians stacked Pollack’s music library on his doorstep one night and drove east, eventually reorganizing in New York under the leadership of Pollack’s erstwhile musical director, Gil Rodin. Rodin was a talented leader behind the scenes, which is where he wanted to stay. The musicians formed a cooperative in 1935 and took their idea for a band to Rockwell-O’Keefe. Benny Goodman had just ushered in a new era at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, and Cork O’Keefe was intrigued by the idea of a collective in which the musicians, the leader, and his office held shares. Who did they have in mind as a leader? Rodin’s men wanted the great trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden, but Paul Whiteman had him bound under a five-year contract. O’Keefe asked them to consider three of his clients. They thought Bob Crosby — young, pleasant, connected — the most promising. The job called for him to stand out front, smile, sing, and make introductions.

He took the opportunity seriously, especially when the Roger & Gallet perfume company offered to sponsor the band on a New York radio show. “This, of course, can either be the makings of the younger brother, or perhaps complete anhilization [sic] of the younger crooner’s career,” Bob wrote Ted. “Am hitting the piano every day, and running scales up and down in an effort to strengthen my voice a little and hope to show some improvement before the big program.” ¹⁵ The first night he appeared with the band, Bob bought a baton. Bassist-composer Bob Haggart recalled, “He knew nothing about leading a band, knew nothing about music. He would beat off all these terrible tempos, and we’d take the baton away from him. [Drummer Ray] Bauduc and I would have to start the tempo the way we knew it was supposed to be.” ¹⁶

But the idea worked like a charm. Fans came to gawk at the new Crosby and stayed to enjoy his cordial demeanor and swinging band, which downplayed his singing in favor of stellar arrangements (by Haggart, Matty Matlock, Deane Kincaide) and solos (by Eddie Miller, Irving Fazola, Yank Lawson, Billy Butterfield, Joe Sullivan). Critic and producer Helen Oakley convinced Rodin to start a band within the band, an octet called the Bob Cats; inevitably, the tag stuck to all of Bob’s musicians. Their swinging variation on the New Orleans style was received as a tonic. Duke Ellington, no less, described Crosby’s Bob Cats as “a truly gut-bucket band with a strong blues influence.” ¹⁷

The jitterbugs were elated, though Bob felt they never accepted him as his own man. “They wanted to see what Bing’s kid brother looked like,” Haggart said, “and that was his cross to bear. His whole life he’s been crying about the girls who would come up and ask, How tall is Bing? A lot of guys didn’t want to work for him, but I felt a debt of gratitude because he mentioned my name, gave me all these plugs. In fact, he mentioned everybody in the band, and no other bandleader did that in those days. He wasn’t much of a singer and he knew it, so he did a lot of talking.” ¹⁸ Haggart, who over the years worked extensively with Bing, believed Bing was as ambivalent about Bob as the men in his band. “You know, he was never really proud of his kid brother,” he observed, tracing the problem to Bob’s inveterate gambling. Shortly before Bing and Dixie left for Bermuda, the orchestra drew crowds at Chicago’s Blackhawk Restaurant, which harbored a bookie joint on the top floor. Bob wagered himself heavily into debt (Haggart thought $8,000), and the hoods running it issued an ultimatum. “The next thing I know, Larry and Everett came out from California to straighten the thing out. And that kept happening. Bing wasn’t too fond of that.” ¹⁹

The ambivalence ran both ways. Publicly Bob often recounted the many things Bing did for him; privately he was known to grumble they were not enough. From Bob’s perspective, Bing had progressed from his baby-sitter to a well-traveled entertainer, with no stops between. Eleven years and thousands of miles separated them. Maybe Bob believed he could close the gap by following in his brother’s footsteps. But in the end, he conceded like many others, “I don’t think I ever really knew Bing. I think Bing got frightened when he made his successful appearance, after he left the Whiteman band, at the Paramount Theater. And when he saw his name on the marquee in great big letters, he really got very frightened. And I think — I fantasize about this — that he built a cellophane bag and sealed himself inside and didn’t let anyone inside because they knew he was shy and that he couldn’t say no. He was an easy touch.” ²⁰

Late in life Bob described him as “a fine man, a fine brother” and recalled how much Bing had done to establish him. ²¹ When Bob hit the big time, Bing presented his orchestra on Kraft Music Hall, introduced it at the Palomar Ballroom, and appeared as a guest on Bob’s radio show. He also helped him out of financial problems and made records with him. Yet more often than not, they kept their distance.

When Bob sought management and publicity advice in 1939, Larry set him up with Barney McDevitt at Rockwell-O’Keefe. But when asked why he and Bing had never sung together, Bob could only answer, “I don’t know. He never asked me. You don’t argue with the Bank of America.” ²²Bob never overcame a sense of hopeless competition. He explained why he agreed to front the big band: “I got sick and tired of everybody telling me, well, you don’t sound as well as your brother Bing does when you sing. I figured, I’m a bandleader now and I got a better band than Bing has, because he never had one. So I topped him there.” ²³ Bob’s most impervious fan, despite his fall from grace, was his mother, who once confided to a startled Rosemary Clooney, “You know, Bob’s the real talent in the family.” ²⁴ His disengagement from Bing and his family was made evident to Rosemary at Bing’s funeral when he walked over to her son, Miguel, and said, “Hi, I’m your uncle Bob.” He had mistaken him for Bing’s fifth son, Harry.

No feeling of competition intrudes, however, on the records Bing and Bob made that fall. The music appears to reflect their overall satisfaction with the reunion. If the incident with the bookies came up, it failed to dispel the warm feelings. Dixie instantly hit it off with June, who at nineteen (Dixie’s age when she married Bing) was bewildered by her new circumstances. Bob was grateful to Dixie, and his affection for her never faltered. “She was a wonderful woman,” he said, describing her as Bing’s salvation. ²⁵

With Dixie and Gary listening in the control room, Bing recorded three numbers with the band. Two were covers of current Victor hits by bandleader Larry Clinton, “My Reverie” and “Old Folks” (Mildred Bailey covered them for Vocalion). Matty Matlock arranged “Old Folks,” a new song by Willard Robison, the master of pastoral ballads, whose folklike melodies and nostalgic images influenced Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. After a deft four-bar intro by clarinet and brasses, Bing enters brightly, in utter control of the narrative lyric, as if the consonant-heavy words and tempo changes presented no difficulties whatsoever. He floats over the rhythm like a kite on a breeze. Bing’s version helped establish the song as an unlikely yet durable jazz standard, with interpretations ranging from Jack Teagarden to Charlie Parker to Miles Davis.

Bob Haggart initially arranged “My Reverie,” Larry Clinton’s adaptation of the Debussy theme, with an eight-bar introduction. “Jack Kapp came in and says, ‘Wait a minute, we’re playing “My Reverie,” not “Clair de lune.”’ And Bing says, ‘Leave it alone, he worked all night on this thing.’ And it was true. So he left it in.” ²⁶ Haggart, though, realized that eight bars at a slow tempo might kill the record, so he cut the intro in half. Bing attacks the number with authority, enlivening the tempo to rid it of any dawdling. His articulation denatures the labored rhymes, even the dreadful couplet “My dreams are as worthless as tin to me / Without you, life will never begin to be.” He sings the h in whirlpool and uses his entire range, plus head tones and mordents — his timing is as natural as a heartbeat. The record was a solid hit.

But the blockbuster of the session was a new song by Mercer and Harry Warren, written for a Dick Powell movie (Hard to Get). “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” is quintessential Bing, a rejoinder to those who thought jazz was something he relegated to his past, the kind of performance that inspired pianist Ralph Sutton to marvel: “He’s right there, right on the button, man. You know — a musician. And so loose. Jesus Christ, it’s unbelievable.” ²⁷

Here he is: swinging with such poise that he lifts the whole band, but with that choirboy voice that speaks right to you even as it suggests a sleepy-eyed nonchalance. This is not a singer to commune self-consciously with his muse or to emote for the hipster musicians. His approach is disarmingly, almost nakedly, artless, yet so artful that he never shows his hand, never shows off his phrasing or his easy way of rushing or retarding a phrase, never does any of the things singers do to show you how hard they are working. He is so smooth, you may not notice the flawless diction of the rhymes startin’ and kindergarten in a phrase that ends with a model mordent on the last word (wild); the impeccably timed cadences of the phrase “I can see the judges’ eyes as they handed you the prize”; and the neat embellishment on the reprise of “judges’ eyes.” Haggart’s excellent arrangement puts the verse in the middle for a change of pace and shows off the ensemble and tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller in an interlude that begins with a hint of “Muskrat Ramble.” The sustained chords at Bing’s return have the effect of suspending the rhythm. A number one hit, “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” was reckoned as one of the top sellers in a year dominated by big bands. Bing won the Down Beat poll as best jazz singer of 1938.

Hits aside, Bing enjoyed a state of musical grace in the late 1930s. Having pared away the most avid of his youthful mannerisms, he now personified a style beyond style. He made singing seem so easy that amateurs imagined they could sound as good as he did, an illusion that flattered Bing. In his own way, he was as much a musical populist as the self-styled people’s singers, like Woody Guthrie, who disparaged Crosby as the commercial tool of a soulless industry. Many of the same people who wanted to be Guthrie around a campfire became Crosby in the shower. Nineteen thirty-eight turned out to be Bing’s busiest year as a recording artist since 1928, when he was at Paul Whiteman’s beck and call. In fifteen sessions he recorded forty-seven songs (as opposed to an average of thirty during the preceding decade), of which twenty-three were important hits, scoring among the year’s bestsellers. As most of his other records were issued on the flip sides of hits, virtually every number made money, an average he sustained in 1939 (again forty-seven songs) and 1940 (sixty songs). In terms of quantity, his most fruitful year was 1947 (seventy-nine songs), but that was a time of spoken-word albums and a rush to stockpile material before the recording ban of 1948. For a ratio of bull’s-eyes to discards, the years 1937 to 1940 were nonpareil.

In addition to Hawaiian songs and tailor-made Johnny Burke lyrics, duets became a major element in Bing’s recording regimen. Even more than Kraft Music Hall, they emphasize his spontaneity and good humor, partly because they concentrate so much interplay in such a brief span, but largely because the interplay is conducted over musical rhythms with people Bing admired and enjoyed. One might argue that of all the manifestations of his art, duets best exemplify the real Bing.

The pop vocal duet is a peculiar art. Though obviously assisted by compatible vocal ranges, it is absolutely dependent on personal empathy. Sinatra, attempting to replicate Bing’s career in his early years, tried to blend with several colleagues and almost always proved too stiff to bring it off, until he and Bing chimed in High Society (1956). Bing, on the other hand, was never more honestly and affably himself than in duets. He employed the format more frequently than anyone else — on records, radio, and television. Near the end of his life, he cited the High Society duet with Sinatra (“Well, Did You Evah?”) as his favorite scene from any of his movies. Among his many other partners were Connie Boswell, Johnny Mercer, Al Jolson, Louis Armstrong, Peggy Lee, Bob Hope, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Jack Teagarden, Louis Jordan, Frances Langford, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Wiley, Gary Crosby, Mary Martin, Mel Tormé, Burl Ives, Donald O’Connor, Mildred Bailey, Perry Como, Trudy Erwin, Danny Kaye, Mitzi Gaynor, Dean Martin, Maurice Chevalier, Patty Andrews (and her sisters), and Rosemary Clooney — a particular favorite, as their vocal ranges and esprit were a perfect match.

The duet gave him a challenge, like golf, with a modified degree of competition. He was as generous to other singers as to fellow actors, and his supreme confidence relaxed and inspired them. The laughter in a Crosby duet is never scripted, while the scripted material often sounds improvised; it is generally impossible to tell just how much was planned. An illuminating example of Bing’s disregard for safety nets and his ability to get another performer to share his derring-do comes from late in his career, when he recorded with Fred Astaire, an inveterate rehearser. Ken Barnes, who produced their 1975 album, recalled that Fred “treated every vocal like a choreographic routine. He would want to know what happened here, did he hear the brass there — he was really very precise. Whereas Bing would just say, ‘Well, the tempo’s good, the key’s fine. I’ll leave it to you fellows.’” ²⁸ The week prior to the recording date, Astaire fretted in London while Bing toured Scotland’s golf courses.

Barnes tried to track him down at various courses but kept missing him until he returned to London, two days before the session. Reaching him at Claridge’s, he explained that Fred required six or seven hours of rehearsal. Bing laughed and said that was impossible: “I’ve got nineteen appointments tomorrow” (Bingspeak for eighteen holes and a drink after the game). Bing asked, “What does he want to rehearse for? Fifteen minutes in front of the piano. How sweet it is. No problem.” Bing finally offered to arrive half an hour early on the morning of the session. When Ken phoned Fred to tell him the plan, there was a long silence before he erupted: “Oh, my God. I should have known. He has always been like this. I’ll tell you what he is, he’s irresponsible!” Ken pointed out that Bing had never let him down and was always delightful in the studio. Fred remonstrated, “Well, we all know the great Crosby can just walk in and turn it on. I can’t do that. I’m not his kind of performer. I’ve got to be prepared.” ²⁹

Fred insisted he had to rehearse with somebody, so he and Barnes went to the home of musical director Pete Moore, where Ken sang Bing’s parts. Fred began feeling more confident, but he was concerned about the confusing lead sheets and asked for one that had only his lines. “Can’t I have a part of my own so I know exactly what I’m doing? Why must I know what Bing’s doing?” Barnes said, “Well, I think you have to. It’s a duet. You guys have to interact.” ³⁰ Another eruption. In Barnes’s recollection, their conversation went like this:

Fred: Interact? That’s another thing. Crosby’s a great ad-libber, I can’t ad-lib at all. He’s going to destroy me. I shouldn’t have done this.

Ken: Fred, I’m sure it’s gonna be fun, it’s gonna be like a party. We’ve got the band there. You’ll like the songs and you’ll like Bing.

Fred: I love Bing, he’s great. But he’s gonna crucify me. He’s a much better ad-libber than I am. And these parts, I don’t know what I’m looking at.

Ken: Well, look, it says Bing, very clearly there, and then Fred, and then both.

Fred: I know how to fix that. ³¹

Whereupon Fred took out two colored pencils and proceeded to underline his own lines in red and Bing’s in blue.

On the morning of the session, Bing arrived to run down the material with Fred, accompanied by Pete Moore on piano. As they sang, Bing looked over Fred’s shoulder at the red and blue lines, then down at his own part, and kept singing. “I could see he was up to something,” Barnes recalled. When they finished, Bing said, “You know, I think it would be much better if I sang these lines and you sang those. It’s better for your personality, Fred.” “Oh my God. Are you sure?” Fred asked. Bing reassured him. So Fred took out the pencils and scratched out the blue and replaced it with red and vice versa. They sang it again. Bing said, “No, I think it was better the way it was before.” Fred said, “I can’t see anything now.” Ken offered a clean copy, but Fred declined, asking, “Now, Bing, are we gonna stay with those lines?” ³²

They proceeded to the studio, where the forty-three-piece orchestra awaited them, and handled the material like the pros they were, completing most numbers in two takes. Fred was so loosened up by the morning’s experience that he parried every Crosby thrust with aplomb, answering each in kind. “It was just beautiful,” Barnes said, “and I can tell you Fred’s ad-libbing on that record was genuine.” Bing made him laugh several times, cracking him up at the finish of “Pick Yourself Up,” with an improvised spiel about teaching him to sing; you can hear the musicians roaring as well. “Ken, what a lovely album,” Fred enthused at the end of the day. Bing invited Fred to dinner and asked him to appear on his next Christmas special, telling him, “We got on so well.” ³³ As to billing on the jacket, A Couple of Song & Dance Men, Fred overruled Barnes’s inclination and insisted that Bing’s name come first.

Bing’s penchant for duets resounded in 1937 and 1938, when he recorded the Gallagher and Shean parody with Johnny Mercer and several numbers with Connie Boswell. “He loved Johnny Mercer,” Rosemary Clooney recalled, “got along with him brilliantly. He liked Johnny’s patterns of speech.” Clooney explained a technique Bing used for duets, adapted from his radio work: dummy lines at rehearsal to mask the real lines. “For example, we did ‘You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,’ and on the verse, I say, ‘You breakfast with Bardot,’ and he says, ‘Oh, my, she’s something,’ so I know he has a line there. But when we get down to the final take, he says, ‘You know, somebody ought to knit that girl a hug-me-tight,’ which is a little shrug old ladies used to wear in the South. Well, I started to laugh, you know, because it was just so out of left field — a hug-me-tight for Bardot. He would do a dummy line until you were close to the take and then hit you with the one he had worked out.” ³⁴

One of Bing’s most compatible partners was Connie Boswell, who embarked on a successful twenty-five-year career as a soloist in 1935, after her sisters Martha and Vet married and left show business. Struck by poliomyelitis at three, she performed in a wheelchair rendered invisible by lighting and the drapery of her gowns; she disdained sympathy. After her death in 1976, Bing remembered her as “a dear woman, a brave woman.” ³⁵ Connie (she changed her name to Connee during the war so she would not have to dot the i while signing countless autographs for servicemen) played cello, piano, and saxophone, and her instrumental skills enhanced her rhythmic poise, as did her admiration for Louis and Bing, whose slurs and syncopations suited her sultry timbre. She was a singer’s singer and a favorite of musicians. Ella Fitzgerald acknowledged Connie as her idol, and Harry Belafonte once called her “the most widely imitated singer of all time.” ³⁶ Bob Crosby’s band accompanied her at her first solo engagement and on many of her best Decca records, evading the radar of Kapp, who tried to tone down her jazziness.

Yet it took the compound of her molasses drawl and Bing’s brisk virility to secure her a couple of chart-topping hits, the winningly imaginative “Bob White” and an offhanded sprint through “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The last, backed by a raucous, swinging Victor Young band, was released with an Eddie Cantor speech asking for help to fight infantile paralysis. The performers and Decca donated the disc’s royalties to the cause.

The first Boswell-Crosby encounter, “Basin Street Blues,” was a gift to Connie. She dominates the number while Bing plays straight man, harmonizing or humming obbligato, never singing more than eight consecutive solo bars but blending dreamily with her on the last unison chorus. When Bing sings a trombone-style counterpoint, his deep authority makes her shine. Their comportment suggests a family affair, as they call each other by name and refer to John Scott Trotter, practically extending an invitation to the listener to join them on “the street where all the light and dark folks meet.” Andy Secrest’s fine trumpet solo pays homage to Louis Armstrong, incorporating figures from Louis’s two celebrated recordings of Spencer Williams’s tune. Bing messed up a phrase, “where welcome’s free,” but let it ride, an instance of his credo (expressed to Les Paul at another session) to “let them see I’m human.” ³⁷ Bing and Connie are more equal and ebullient on Johnny Mercer’s “Bob White,” a tantalizing confection packed with puns about birds and singing. ³⁸ This time Connie plays it straight, and Bing turns in one of his most playful performances, indulging the staccato and vibrato called for in the lyric.

Bing’s solo sessions of this period also produced gems, but sometimes you had to pan through a lot of silt to find them. The biggest risk in taming Bing was the threat of a middlebrow blandness, imposed not through songs or arrangements but coming from within Bing himself. As the all-purpose troubadour, he could no longer play the jazzman who subverts corny material with the tact of his own musical impulses, who subordinates the “what you do” to the “how you do it.” Kapp didn’t want that from him, and the Decca schedule, with its relentlessly diverse range of material, made such knowing detachment almost impossible to sustain. Bing had a genius for popularity. His major achievement was to plait the many threads of American music into a central style of universal appeal. But the price was exorbitant. To achieve universality, he had to dilute individuality.

Drawing from the payload Bing had helped strike a few years back with “Swanee River,” Kapp returned to the nineteenth century for two classics, the abolitionist threnody “Darling Nelly Gray,” and the Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” They served Jack’s strategy to establish Bing as the American bard and suited his purposes in other ways: those tunes were known to millions, spoke to a nostalgic longing for the past, and were in the public domain. The songs of Stephen Foster probably never enjoyed greater popularity than in the 1930s, when they were not widely perceived as underscoring racial stereotypes. Deeply ingrained in the American memory, like fairy tales handed down through generations, they, too, were sweet, sentimental, and unprotected by copyright. Kapp revived many of them for his roster, as did producers at other companies, and the songs were recycled in numerous movie scores. His initial selections for Bing were politically astute even by the standards of half a century later.

“Darling Nelly Gray,” written by Benjamin Hanby, a twenty-two-year-old white minister, four years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, similarly dramatizes southern barbarism in the form of a slave’s lament for his lover who had been sold off and sent to the Georgia cotton fields. Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers recorded it for Decca a year before Bing, creating a richly emotional performance, tender and defiant. In Trotter’s arrangement, the combination of soloist and choir is replicated by Bing and Paul Taylor’s Choristers, but the result is studied and detached. The Choristers restore the darkest passage of the lyric (“the white man bound her with his chain”), omitted from the Armstrong version, and Bing sings with much elegance, especially on the verse. But the throaty warmth associated with his nodes has been replaced by a thin echo in his upper midrange, and although he counters it with frequent low-note swoops, he is too remote from the material to engage it meaningfully. In the last section of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” his voice softens to as low and hushed a level as he ever achieved on records, but the effect is nonetheless dated.

Still, those songs were preferable to newer creations like the nondescript “Let Me Whisper I Love You,” with a Trotter arrangement that combines classical borrowings and a habanera beat, or the stupefying “When Mother Nature Sings Her Lullaby,” for which Bing was backed by pipe organ — a throwback to his days at the Paramount Theater and Jesse Crawford, and no more enchanting. Yet the same session that produced “Let Me Whisper I Love You” generated a memorable version of the Edgar Sampson swing anthem “Don’t Be That Way,” three months after Benny Goodman opened his fabled Carnegie Hall concert with it. In place of Benny’s thumping four-four, Trotter’s arrangement bounces not unpleasantly over a two-beat rhythm. Bing, slow and sinuous, glides through the melody, smoothly mining the lyric for nuance: the low way, the drawn-out sky, the mordent on me, the jazzily enhanced “don’t break my heart.” Trotter provides a bona fide swing interlude, with Spike Jones’s splashing cymbals setting up Secrest’s solo, until Bing ends the party with a decisive “Stop it!”

He proved no less masterly on “Summertime,” recorded at his first reunion with Matty Malneck, who had played so prominent a role in establishing Bing with the Paul Whiteman band. Matty’s medium-slow arrangement has enough bounce to animate Bing, who inflects the descriptive, cautionary lyric for meaning, employing those bass-baritone swoops that were influencing numerous young singers in the 1930s. After the ensemble plays a one-bar unison Bixian rip in the interlude, Bing closes with a surprise reprise of the phrase “don’t you cry.”

“A Blues Serenade” also summoned recollections of days gone by, though the song itself was only three years old. It was written by Frank Signorelli, whose Original Memphis Five kept Bing’s circle jumping in Spokane, and Mitchell Parish, who wrote the lyric to “Star Dust.” The first try ended in a Crosby fluff take, which begins with a nice muted trumpet solo by Manny Klein but is otherwise stilted. The botched take might have sufficed if Bing had not veered out of tune on the coda; holding fast to the wrong pitch, he drones, “What the hell happened to me, son of a bitch,” and then tells Malneck, “Let them play the melody.” The blunder snapped him to attention, and the second take is far more persuasive. He floats the dreamy melody, underscoring the consonants in the phrase “one that I could kiss and cling to,” and employs a long rest to syncopate the reprise.

The quintessential Crosby ballad of 1938, however, emerged from the session that produced “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” as well as the less memorable Sing You Sinners songs and a mildly engaging Robin and Rainger cowboy song (“Silver on the Sage”). “Mexicali Rose” was written by bandleader — and later California state senator— Jack Tenny, while working a border town in 1923. The piece languished until the mid-thirties, when Gene Autry sang it on records and in a movie. It was brought to Bing’s attention by Carroll Carroll’s secretary at a KMH rehearsal, when Bing could not come up with a tune. “I heard my mother humming a pretty song,” she told him. ³⁹

Bing sang “Mexicali Rose” for four months on the air before making a record that infused it with the vivid and wistful melancholy he had used to transform so many commonplace and even trite songs (“Home on the Range,” “Black Moonlight”). He made the song resonate as a quasi-western hymn for the last days of the Depression. Autry reclaimed it a year later in a movie of the same name, but in his or anyone else’s hands, it was merely a sentimental love song. Bing’s interpretation produced a frisson, an eerily palpable suggestion of what the times sounded and felt like. We tend to recall 1938 with the images of swing — stomping feet and flying skirts. “Mexicali Rose” renders the flip side, far from the ballrooms, where the night is black, inert, and full of longing. The force of his reading transcends the lyric and its southwestern setting.

John Trotter’s clever arrangement, with its staccato wind instruments marching against a small contingent of strings, is more polka than mariachi — a neat trick either way for a waltz. Aldous Huxley observed that the waltz was originally conceived, in 1770, as a “jovial, bouncing, hoppety little tune” fit for a child’s nursery, “almost completely empty of emotional content,” but that by a century later it had become the very rhythm of eros, “densely saturated with amorous sentiment, languor and voluptuousness.” ⁴⁰ In waltzes such as “The One Rose” and “Mexicali Rose,” strong emotions are retained, but despite the romantic text, eros — now the province of swinging four-four — is supplanted by chilling loneliness, relieved only by the cathartic identification between the listener and singer. Bing admired Trotter’s arrangement and navigates it with confidence, holding back the sentiment like a dam. Bing is in the details: the goldfish puckering on the bs in “big brown eyes”; the tender head tone on hold followed by the barrel-chested me in the phrase “kiss me once again and hold me”; the contrast between the distant hollow timbre on the first syllables of crying and pining, and the satisfying mordent on the suffixes.

Bing’s sides with Bob Crosby followed “Mexicali Rose” onto the hit parade in the closing weeks of the year, but his last hit of 1938 was a return to solemnity that launched a new tradition for the record business and the country. In December Kapp issued Bing’s “Silent Night”: not a new version, but the one he had made in 1935. Before 1938 reissues of any kind were rare and usually came out on bargain-label subsidiaries so as not to compete for consumer dollars with new product; during the past decade Victor, Brunswick, and Columbia combined enjoyed no more than six or seven reissue hits. But with the vast increase in record sales in 1938, reissues became more profitable. RCA re-released old records by Tommy Dorsey and Kay Kyser; Brunswick did the same with early sides by Raymond Scott, Louis Armstrong, and most timely of all, the Boswell Sisters — their 1935 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” rode the coattails of the duet by Bing and Connie. Jack followed the trend when he reissued Decca’s first big hit, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around,” and its first Christmas song, “Silent Night.”

But “Silent Night” was like no other reissue, thanks to its seasonal attachment. Kapp realized that it had the makings of a national observance. Bing’s holiday classic could be brought to market year after year, with dependable results. Over the next few years, the annual release of Christmas songs would become a recording-industry staple and a holiday tradition as steadfast as Christmas trees, fruitcakes, and Dickens. Where once Americans had celebrated with carols, hymns, and the Messiah, they would now grow accustomed to hearing — and buying by the millions — pop-record perennials, first Bing’s “Silent Night” and (as of 1942) “White Christmas,” and then a spate of new songs conceived to exploit the demand, from Nat “King” Cole’s “The Christmas Song” and Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to Harry Simeone’s “The Little Drummer Boy” and Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock,” and on and on.

And what of his concurrent movies? Paris Honeymoon was remembered by its participants for a pun, alas not in the picture, delivered grandiloquently by Bing in reference to his costar, Franciska Gaal. The Budapest-born actress and cabaret star was brought to America by Cecil B. De Mille for The Buccaneer, the first of three Hollywood pictures she made in 1938, after which — her starlight diminished — she returned to Europe. A beautiful, wired Kewpie doll with beseeching Luise Rainer eyes and the pep of Miriam Hopkins on a diet of triple-espressos, she played basically the same role in Paris Honeymoon (which has no honeymoon and only a few minutes of Paris) and MGM’s The Girl Downstairs: an unyielding peasant girl who lands a millionaire. When she wasn’t chewing up scenery and actors, she raged off camera at cast and crew. After one violent tantrum, she stormed off the set. Bing broke the stunned silence: “I’d like to divide Gaal into three parts.” ⁴¹

The picture, rushed to fulfill Bing’s three-picture quota that year, was not without promise. Paramount reassembled the Waikiki Wedding team. Frank Tuttle and Karl Struss shot a Frank Butler and Don Hartman script, and Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger supplied the songs. The studio certainly appeared confident. It issued a publicity release revealing that Bing might rethink the “freak” ⁴² clause in his contract prohibiting it from billing him above the title: “It may be ‘Bing Crosby and Franciska Gaal in Paris Honeymoon,’” the release timorously announced. ⁴³ The studio even attempted to have a print of the film interred, instead of a Crosby record, in a 6,177-year time capsule created by Thornwell Jacobs of Oglethorpe University. ⁴⁴ Paramount assured Jacobs that its latest cellulose film stock would last 100 years but failed to explain what use that would be to a capsule under seal until 8114. (Jacobs chose 6,177 years because that’s how far back from 1938, he said, the Egyptians developed calendars.)

Bing himself knew the picture was a runt, and far from accepting star billing had his name listed, after the title, on the same card as five other actors, of whom Akim Tamiroff, possibly inspired by Gaal, wins honors for over-the-top histrionics that broke up Tuttle and Bing. His big speeches, as the con-man mayor of a Ruritanian country, are filmed in single-camera setups over Bing’s shoulders, with few reaction shots to break his timing. The plot reverses the male fantasy of a few years earlier in favor of a Cinderella variation; instead of an heiress forsaking her kind for a common Joe, the self-made millionaire abandons his wealthy fiancée to anoint a poor serving girl. The trouble is that Bing’s heiress as played by Shirley Ross (his leading lady in Waikiki Wedding) is more appealing than the wacky laundress played by Gaal. By the time Gaal’s Manya tells Bing’s Lucky she loves him (really? he had no idea), Bing plays their scenes as though he were contemplating root canal.

Bing’s Lucky is every bit as superstitious as Fred Astaire’s Lucky in the 1936 classic Swing Time, which is also contrived around a postponed engagement. Strangely, no one remarked on the similarities. The movie begins with an inside joke. Lucky’s butler, Edward Everett Horton (known for his pictures with Astaire, but an old acquaintance of Bing’s from Reaching for the Moon), retrieves a shoe from a horse that trumpet player and memoirist Max Kaminsky would later describe as “a moth-eaten, sway-backed, ancient yellow nag.” ⁴⁵ The horse had been a birthday gift from Joe Venuti, so Bing put it in the picture. Returning with the horseshoe, Horton points out a joke that Bing’s radio audience could appreciate: Lucky wears argyle socks with his dress suit.

Frank Capra rated Bing “in the top ten of all actors” and explained why: “He has a complete faculty of being able to work with props; you give many actors props and they can’t do it, but he can juggle balls and have Bob Hope cracking ad-libs on the side and still say his stuff.” ⁴⁶ Bing’s first song as Lucky, a rich cowboy, is a sterling example. He dons his Stetson and sings “The Funny Old Hills,” casually performing a world of shtick: making and twirling a lariat, chewing, spitting, hopping up and down on a bed, stroking a nonexistent mustache (a favorite bit of mime he repeated in East Side of Heaven, If I Had My Way, and elsewhere). Bing amused the crew with one ad-lib that did stay in the picture. He is supposed to kiss Ross, who wears a veil. Instead of lifting the veil and taking her in his arms, as every other actor would have done, he tells her, “You better lift up that pup tent,” before bestowing his peck. ⁴⁷ Ross and Bing sing a bathtub duet that got past the censors because Bing telephones his part, crooning, “I have eyes to see with,” long-distance, as she soaks.

The mediocre score yielded three substantial hits, arranged by Trotter: the loping “Funny Old Hills,” the exceptionally well-sung “I Have Eyes,” and the patronizing “You’re a Sweet Little Headache.” Bing’s energetic warbling could not, however, salvage “Joobalai,” a fatuous attempt at a peasant folk song that portends the kind of novelties Perry Como made his province in the 1950s. The records did not help the picture, Bing’s least successful to date. When it debuted at the New York Paramount in January 1939, live music won the day. Bob Crosby’s Bob Cats, wrote the New York Daily News reviewer, were “the answer to an alligator’s prayer.” ⁴⁸

East Side of Heaven was an altogether more pleasant experience for Bing and moviegoers. It developed a situation that had first been exploited in Pennies from Heaven: Bing as a surrogate father. After the back-to-back disappointments of Doctor Rhythm and Paris Honeymoon, he needed a pick-me-up movie quick and, having fulfilled his Paramount obligation for the year, was entitled to produce this one himself. His friend David Butler said, “Why don’t you let me do your outside picture?” ⁴⁹ Butler, riding high as the director responsible for the incredibly profitable stardom of six-year-old Shirley Temple, had left Fox and was negotiating a deal with Universal. Bing told him to go for it.

Butler surrounded himself with story men, chiefly the then ailing William Conselman (he died a year later) and James Kern, who had come to Hollywood as a member of the comedy-vocal group the Yacht Club Boys (sort of a musical Ritz Brothers). Out of respect for Conselman, Butler gave him the screenwriting credit on East Side of Heaven but in interviews for the Directors Guild of America’s oral-history program said that he and Kern devised the story. In any case, Universal pounced. To be sure, the studio was desperate and would likely have signed Bing had he wanted to play Ming the Merciless in a Flash Gordon serial. Deanna Durbin was its only moneymaker and, for that matter, only star. Early in the year two erstwhile RKO executives, Nate Blumberg and Cliff Work, were recruited to revive Universal’s fortunes, and by the early 1940s the company would be in the chips with W. C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Maria Montez, and a monster revival. East Side of Heaven was a transitional project, and in order to get Bing back on the lot for the first time since King of Jazz, Universal conceded him a 50 percent profit split in exchange for his services and personal investment of half the final budget.

It was a wise deal for all concerned. With Bing’s money on the line, he was doubly inspired to make an entertaining picture while keeping an eagle eye on the budget. The latter function he delegated to Herb Polesie, who served as his associate producer (the movie credits do not acknowledge a producer, though Polesie shares a card with Butler for original story). A wonderful cast was assembled, with Joan Blondell, Mischa Auer, Irene Hervey, C. Aubrey Smith, Jerome Cowan, and a personality from Bing’s first days in Los Angeles, Jane Jones, the big-boned singer and hostess of the speakeasy where Mildred Bailey worked. The production number with Jones, as the owner of the Frying Pan Cafe, introduced — as singing waitresses — the Music Maids, who simultaneously became regulars on the Kraft Music Hall. For good measure, Matty Malneck and his orchestra and pianist Joe Sullivan were also drafted.

For Universal, the most important member of the supporting cast turned out to be the infant daughter of a milkman, who upon hearing of the studio’s need for a ten-month-old baby dropped four snapshots along with the morning milk on the doorstep of Charles Previn, Universal’s musical director. The pictures were turned over to Butler, who told Life he hired the baby without asking its sex and did not know he had a girl in a boy’s part for two days. ⁵⁰ He later admitted he tested numerous babies and found the milkman’s, Sandra Henville, to be the cutest. “I said, ‘Nobody will know if this is a boy or girl. We’ll call it a boy.’ We put the kid in as Baby Sandy, and the kid was wonderful.” ⁵¹ The studio made another picture with Baby Sandy, then disclosed that she was a girl and made a bunch more — eight in all, and all moneymakers. Only the studio of Maria Montez could have mined silver from a gurgling genderproof infant. When her three-year contract ended, Sandy did a cameo for Republic and retired at age four.

“East Side of Heaven was good fun under the expansive aegis of D. Wingate Butler,” a buoyant Bing wrote Johnny Mercer after completion. “Never engaged in a more pleasant and, I hope, profitable enterprise. The budget was astonishingly low and, if John Public takes to the picture favorably, we’re a cinch to make a meg or two.” ⁵² Butler had known Bing since the Cocoanut Grove. He directed Dixie in Fox Movietone Follies and mistakenly believed that Dixie and Bing met at a party he and his wife gave for a visiting German opera company. “Bing was there, and he sang with all the opera fellows, and we were very friendly,” he recalled. ⁵³ The two men grew closer at Del Mar (“the happiest days of my life”). ⁵⁴ An early investor, Butler led the cheering squad for Ligaroti at the famous match race.

Born in San Francisco in 1894, Butler began in movies as an actor for Thomas Ince in 1913 and earned major parts in numerous pictures for D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, and John Ford before he turned to directing in 1927. An impersonal but prolific and reliable filmmaker, he made lucrative comedies and musicals for every major studio over a thirty-year period before turning to television in the late 1950s (all six seasons of Leave It to Beaver, among dozens of episodes for other programs). The year before his death-in 1979, Butler was awarded an honorary lifetime membership in the Directors Guild of America — the fifth director so honored. A portly, funny, easygoing man with a passion for sports, he was a perfect match for Bing.

As Universal anticipated, the production was pragmatic and efficient. With a script completed early in the new year of 1939, the cameras began to roll on Friday, January 13. Polesie’s first status report was optimistic; they scheduled the picture for thirty-six days, but figured forty more reasonable. A week later he presented a budget — “worked over and reduced in every possible way” ⁵⁵ — of $686,000, noting they had fallen behind two days and would exceed that sum if they fell behind any more. The weekly status reports were written with an inflated sense of drama (“only fair progress during the past week,” “a rather disastrous setback last night”), ⁵⁶ as if to lowball expectations, but the model production averaged fifteen minutes of footage a week, and most of the delays concerned Sandy, who was not permitted to work more than four hours a day. Butler maximized the shoot by switching to a different set when Sandy was whisked away; if he did not have to shoot close-ups, he replaced her with a doll.

Bing sang all the songs, so the prerecordings were a snap, though they were made in a novel way. He was accompanied solely by a pianist playing softly. The orchestra dubbed its part onto his playback recordings, Butler recalled, “because Bing ad-libbed a lot. We had a piano playback that wasn’t very loud, so that the other music would cover it.” ⁵⁷ Butler enjoyed his professionalism: “He was the fastest man that I ever saw in my life with learning a song. He’d get a song, and come over and say to Johnny Burke, ‘Play it.’ Johnny would play it a couple of times. He’d start humming it, and then the third time he’d sing it — he’d know it perfectly.” ⁵⁸ He was no less gratified by Bing’s acting: “He did everything you wanted him to do. I never saw such an actor. He’d do it, and do it very well. The only thing — we always kidded him about wanting to leave his hat on. He never wanted to put that toupee on.” ⁵⁹

Some exteriors were shot day-for-night between dinner and sunrise, to accommodate Bing’s radio obligations, and one street scene with seventy-five extras was ruined by unexpected rainfall followed by winds that “blew all rain clouds away but made recording and photographing impossible.” ⁶⁰ To make up for lost time, they often worked Saturday nights until the small hours. Polesie estimated midway that they would need forty-two days (six more than scheduled), provided the big production number in the Frying Pan Cafe (“Hang Your Heart on a Hickory Limb”) went smoothly, ⁶¹but a week later two more days were lost when Joan Blondell fell ill during makeup and was hospitalized for “a severe cold and throat infection “ ⁶² — not a total loss, because in her absence the rest of the company could rehearse the musical number. Filming finished March 7, after forty-four shooting days and an overrun of $10,000. ⁶³

During the next ten days, the 137½-minute rough cut was edited to eighty-six minutes in time for a successful preview. Even so, a battle with the censors had to be decided. Joseph Breen had warned against shooting certain bits: “This gag of the baby wetting its diapers must be omitted”; “This gag of Danny investigating the baby’s sex must be omitted”; “The following line is suggestive and must be changed or omitted: ‘This is just like spring practice, but wait till the season starts.’” ⁶⁴ When studio chief Cliff Work informed Breen he would go to the New York board to persuade it — “in the friendliest possible manner” ⁶⁵ — to allow the baby to wet its diaper, Breen harrumphed in a letter to Will Hays that Universal disregarded his script warnings and shot offensive scenes, urging him to block the trespass of “what we call, here, toilet gags.” ⁶⁶ In almost every instance Universal prevailed. The picture premiered April 7 in Miami and opened a month later at Radio City Music Hall — Bing’s debut in New York’s landmark movie theater. As Bing anticipated, it made a meg or two, but Paramount was probably more envious of the billing than the profits: “Bing Crosby and Joan Blondell in East Side of Heaven.”

Bing’s usual routine was in no way hindered by the six days per week shooting schedule — a phenomenon no less remarkable for being absolutely typical. Each week he produced an hour program for Kraft Music Hall, requiring his presence at two-hour rehearsals on Wednesdays at 3:30 and seven-and-a-half-hour rehearsals on Thursdays at 11:00, followed at 7:00 by the broadcast, after which he ate at the Universal commissary and worked all night, reporting again on Friday morning. His KMH guests in that month and a half included the usual motley of Hollywood players and concert stars, among them Grete Stuckgold, Spring Byington, Colonel Snoopnagle, Humphrey Bogart, Nigel Bruce, Emanuel Feuermann, Elizabeth Patterson, Gregor Piatigorsky, Wayne Morris, Henry Fonda, Ellen Drew, Rose Bampton, Joan Bennett, Joseph Calleia, Lloyd Nolan, Frances Langford, and William Frawley. Some of his finest singing in the period was heard on radio, including fully realized interpretations of songs he never recorded, for example Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (a new song he offered in two discrete arrangements) and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson’s old ditty “Together.” One major change took place at KMH, when Paul Taylor’s Choristers concluded their contract with the February 9 show. The program report for February 16 notes, “Didn’t seem to miss the choir,” ⁶⁷ but the next week a new choir of five debuted, the Music Maids, KMH fixtures for the next six years.

Two Music Maids had crossed Bing’s path before. Alice Ludes, married to NBC audio engineer Ed Ludes, was one of the Williams Sisters, a trio that performed regularly on Bing’s Woodbury show, and Trudy Erwin (who later married Bing’s audio engineer, Murdo MacKenzie), freelanced in the Double or Nothing Singband. Each of the five members was between seventeen and twenty-three when the group was formed early in 1939 by Erwin and Dottie Mesmer; the others were Denny Wilson and Bobbie Canvin, who soon left to sing with Tommy Dorsey’s band and was replaced by Trudy’s high-school classmate, Pat Hyatt. They won instant acceptance. Though their popularity on the air did not translate into much of a recording career beyond a handful of discs with Bing, they appeared in a few movies and on the soundtracks of a few more. By the time East Side of Heaven circulated, they had been on KMH for several weeks, and many assumed they were put in the film to capitalize on their radio renown. Actually, they were hired for the film — their agent was Larry Crosby — before Bing approved them for the program.

“Larry called us one day and said, would we like to audition for some show on NBC,” Trudy Erwin recalled. “So we did ‘Hawaiian War Chant’ in Studio B at NBC, no accompaniment, nobody onstage, just Larry, ourselves, and the mixer — my husband now, though we didn’t know each other then, of course.” ⁶⁸ Bing listened to their transcriptions, and a week later Larry called and asked whether they would like to be on Kraft Music Hall. They had no idea they were auditioning for Bing. Some nights they were allowed to perform on their own, but mostly they backed Bing and provided half-chorus interludes for his songs. “It was a lot of fun. Once in a while, he would take us to the Brown Derby on Vine. He didn’t eat very much, maybe a salad. In those days, he’d have a big breakfast and no dinner, that’s how he finally took off weight. I never thought he was too heavy, but that’s what he did. Very disciplined, except when he went wild — in his work, I mean. The most fun was the dress rehearsal that just preceded the show by maybe an hour. He would kid around and try to break us up and sing the wrong lyrics and just do all kinds of stuff.” ⁶⁹ Bing, who invented monikers for everyone (Murdo MacKenzie was Heathcliff, Johnny Mercer was Verseable), called the Music Maids the Mice. “I don’t know why he did that,” Trudy said, “maybe because we got in a little circle and talked at rehearsal.” ⁷⁰ Alice Ludes speculated, “Well, the sponsor made cheese.” ⁷¹

The combined radio and movie work failed to sate Bing’s energy. On his first free Sunday, he took Dixie, the Edmund Lowes, and Lin Howard to the races and then to Club 17, where the great stuttering comedian Joe Frisco entertained. The picture’s third weekend coincided with Bing’s third annual pro-am tournament at Rancho Santa Fe. The first in which Bob Hope played, it is now chiefly remembered for the presence of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the 1932 Olympic gold medalist who became a championship golfer in the 1940s. At the 1939 Crosby she was accepted as a competitor by mistake; she remains the only woman to have participated in the tournament. In 1974, when Bing futilely lobbied to permit women pros to play the Crosby on Monterey Peninsula, he recalled how much Babe had added to the event. (Women were allowed to play as of 1977.) The following Sunday he guest-starred on a new CBS series, The Gulf Screen Guild Show, a popular anthology to which Hollywood stars donated services because fees were given to the Motion Picture Relief Fund. A few weeks later Bing and Dixie attended a preview of David Butler’s Kentucky,his last Fox picture and one close to the director’s heart, as it concerned horse breeders. A photograph of the couple entering the theater shows Dixie in a sheath gown and fur jacket, smiling, while Bing, in a light overcoat and fedora, mugs, thumbs at chin and fingers spread to frame his exaggerated grin.

East Side of Heaven is little remembered today, a victim of MCA’s disregard for most of the Universal catalog, which it acquired in 1962. To be sure, the film was a mild amusement in its day and seems no more profound today; the sentimental final shot of Bing and Baby Sandy will make you coo or wince. But it entertains throughout. Butler, who did not consider himself a thinker, knew how to avoid longueurs. The picture also represents a change in Bing’s screen character, a transition that points ahead to the deadpan comedy he perfected in the Road pictures and the maturity that defined his 1940s persona. Photographed by George Robinson (a Universal veteran better known for his work on horror films), East Side of Heaven looks and feels like an early-forties film, with grayer shades and a relaxed tempo, not to mention Bing’s shorter and wavier toupee.

One reason Crosby accepted billing above the title was the prominence of Joan Blondell; he allowed the same exception for Sing You Sinners because of Fred MacMurray’s stature. Blondell was the first major Hollywood actress to play opposite Bing since Miriam Hopkins in 1934. Some of his leading ladies became stars after working with him (Carole Lombard, Joan Bennett, Ida Lupino, Frances Farmer), but the only Crosby cast members during the past five years with box-office clout were MacMurray and W. C. Fields. Joan Blondell had spent her entire childhood in vaudeville and emerged in the 1930s as one of the most popular and reliable performers on the Warners lot. She was equally at home in gangster pictures (usually opposite James Cagney or Warren William) and musicals (usually opposite her husband, Dick Powell). Now, however, she was freelancing. East Side of Heaven was an important role for her, secured by Bing, who had enjoyed working with Joan a year earlier on the Lux Radio Theater.

The movie opens with a private joke. Jimmy Monaco, who wrote the score with Johnny Burke, had gotten married in November and recently returned from his honeymoon. In the first scene Bing is at work at the Postal Union, singing greetings on the phone. One message — to Alice from Kitty — probably refers to Dixie’s friends, but there is no doubt about the next one: to Mr. and Mrs. James Monaco, whom we see in the midst of a violent quarrel, until she slams the phone down. After work Bing walks into a hotel lobby and casually exchanges greetings (he poses à la Hermes and twirls his invisible mustache) with Matty Malneck, who is leading a band no one else pays any attention to. ⁷² Bing had gone to hear Malneck in a Los Angeles club and impulsively offered his band a part in the picture; as there was no nightclub sequence, Butler planted it in the crowded lobby. Bing then strolls to the receptionist, Blondell, and attempts to pick her up, but it’s a game. They are, in fact, engaged; their marriage has been postponed, as so often occurs in Depression movies. Unlike in Sing You Sinners, she is the one who wants to delay until he gets a decent job. Their interplay throughout the film is appealing and funny.

The Production Code is tweaked in the next scene, in which we see Bing and his roommate, Mischa Auer, asleep in a double bed (one of the few scenes in which Bing does not wear a hat); under the Code, married couples were required to sleep in single beds, but single men could cozy up under the same sheets. Asked by Bing to be his best man, Auer responds: “If the best man is the best man, why does the bride marry the groom?” The censors were more concerned about the villain of the piece, a radio gossip named Claudius De Wolfe, played to unctuous perfection by Jerome Cowan. Butler based the character on real-life society wag Lucius Beebe, known for his tag line “Are you happy, honey?” Seeing the phrase in the script, Breen wrote Universal, “There must be of course no ‘pansy’ suggestion about the line, ‘Are you happy, honey?’”

The convoluted plot involves an imperious old millionaire who is trying to take his infant grandson from the wife of his alcoholic son. Meanwhile, Bing takes a job as a singing driver for the Sunbeam Taxi Company, auditioning for the job with the peppiest song in the underrated Monaco-Burke score, “Sing a Song of Sunbeams.” “The cruising troubadour,” as he is known, offers a free ride and song to customers to build up business. The Crosby hero has come a long way in one year from the hard-work-is-for-saps credo of Sing You Sinners, but he continues to exemplify the idea of the common-man singer.

The mother leaves the baby in his cab, allowing Bing a kind of “spring practice” to be the perfect dad. His apprenticeship is accompanied by two fine ballads, “That Sly Old Gentleman (from Featherbed Lane),” which he delivers so convincingly that Blondell, listening in the hall, thinks he’s got an older babe in there, and the title number, a lullaby composed with Bing-friendly low-note swoops (bars five to seven and twenty-one to twenty-three). Thanks to Bing and pals, the millionaire is reunited with his family. The malevolent Claudius DeWolfe, whose show the millionaire sponsored, is fired, giving Bing his program. And that’s how crooners are born.

“In New York they’re on their knees begging for business,” Variety lamented, blaming the dearth of moviegoers on the World’s Fair, a disabling heat wave, and sporting events. ⁷³ Under the circumstances, East Side of Heaven would be lucky to take in $55,000 at Radio City, the paper warned. Yet a week later the tide came in and Bing’s picture emerged as a sizable hit in the most fabled of movie seasons, 1939. Reviews helped. The New York Daily News gushed, “Bing Crosby’s pictures are getting better and better. East Side of Heaven is the most delightfully amusing film he’s ever done.” ⁷⁴ Variety called it a “grand package of entertainment,” singling out its smart pace (“hitting a nice tempo at the start and rolling merrily to the finish”), and noted how unusual it was for a star to “toss his own coin into productions to get a shot at a cut of the profits.” ⁷⁵ Baby Sandy was declared by New York’s Herald Tribune “our favorite actor of the month.” ⁷⁶

In the year dominated by Gone With the Wind, the ten highest-grossing movies of record were dramas, with the exception of two nostalgic Judy Garland pictures: Babes in Arms, which re-creates minstrelsy and glorifies middle America, and The Wizard of Oz, which tells how Dorothy regains her middle-American home after bringing order to a foreign land. This was the year of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Jesse James, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and Drums Along the Mohawk. Pundits who divined a trend toward sobriety, however, had but a year to find out how wrong they were: Road to Singapore and Preston Sturges’s films were just around the corner. Butler told a reporter in 1946 that East Side of Heaven earned between $3 million and $4 million and saved Universal from going under. ⁷⁷ Had those numbers been accurate, his picture would surely have ranked in the top ten. On the other hand, everyone acknowledged that it did bail out Universal.

In tracking the fortunes of far more conventional folks than the unholy Beebes, East Side of Heaven marked a moderating turn in the selling of Bing Crosby. Ahead of him lay his wackiest comedies, powerful dramatic roles, and nostalgic detours, but Bing’s days as an acquiescent romantic lead, forever wooed, reluctantly wooing, were over.