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WHAT’S NEW

Al Jolson was like Mr. Great Singer of all time. Maurice Chevalier was like Mr. Entertainer of all time. Frank Sinatra is like Mr. Balladeer of all time. But Bing Crosby is like Mr. Everything of all time.

— José Ferrer (1974) ¹

When Universal hired Cliff Work as its new production chief, it fired Charles R. Rogers, who then attempted to stay afloat as an independent producer. One night at the Brown Derby, Rogers ran into the legendary vaudevillian and songwriter Gus Edwards, who had recently announced his retirement and was rumored to be suffering from paresis. They spoke of the old days, and Rogers told Gus that his life might make a good picture. After Edwards sent him an old autobiographical article he had written for Collier’s, Rogers made a preliminary production deal with United Artists. There was only one actor for the lead, and Rogers went to Paramount to see whether he could borrow Bing. Paramount had no intention of loaning him and did not have to worry about Rogers’s going to him directly, because East Side of Heaven fulfilled Bing’s outside option for the year. William LeBaron recognized a good idea, however, and invited Rogers to make the picture for him.

It was, in fact, a brilliant idea — on paper. Bing had just scored a hit as a vicarious papa, waving good-bye at the close of East Side of Heaven with Baby Sandy in his arms. Playing Gus Edwards, he would be surrounded by dozens of vicarious kids. The more you thought about the possibilities, the more compelling they became. Edwards was the king of kiddie acts back when Bing was first entering elementary school. He initially made his mark in 1896 as a member of the Newsboy Quintet, an act that consisted of teenage boys dressed in raggedy clothes, hawking papers and singing ballads. The German-born Edwards eventually proved a formidable Tin Pan Alley composer and publisher, with songs like “In Zanzibar,” “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” “Sunbonnet Sue,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” and “Jimmy Valentine.” In 1907 he wrote his biggest hit, “School Days,” which sold 3 million records (sung by Byron G. Harlan) and encouraged him to create a Broadway show in which forty young players strutted their stuff, to the utter indifference of the Great White Way. Undaunted, Edwards distilled from the show a vaudeville act, “School Boys and Girls,” that went on to enjoy phenomenal success for more than a quarter of a century. Imitators were legion.

By 1913 Variety reported sixty-two School Days acts touring the country, all of them sure-fire and very inexpensive, for as show-business chroniclers Abel Green and Joe Laurie Jr. observed, “The only props were a few desks and chairs [and] there were always stagestruck youngsters available to sing and dance.” ² In his many variations on the act (“Kid Kabaret,” “Band Box Revue,” “Blonde Typewriters”), Edwards introduced countless boys and girls, many later prominent, among them Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Groucho Marx, Walter Winchell, Elsie Janis, Sally Rand, Eleanor Powell, Georgie Price, Lila Lee, Jack Pearl, Bert Wheeler, Mervyn LeRoy, Ina Ray Hutton, Ricardo Cortez, Charles King, Ann Dvorak, and Ray Bolger. In 1939, a world remade by the Depression and an inevitable war, the country was once again gripped by kiddiemania. Shirley Temple, pushing twelve, had only another year or two at the top, but the public responded to children of all ages, from infancy (Baby Sandy) to teens (Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland). Had Humbert Humbert spent more time at the movies, he might have been a happy, happy man.

One can imagine the humming of Paramount’s wheels: perfect vehicle for Bing, perfect vehicle for child performers, perfect opportunity for shamelessly exploitative publicity (like importing sixteen orphans from as many orphanages for a press preview), perfect opportunity to discover and launch its very own Deanna Durbin. Her name was Linda Ware, a fourteen-year-old orphan from Detroit. The plenary possibilities of Gus Edwards’s story and the wonderful talents he discovered were sacrificed to the studio’s vain hope that her golden locks and faux-operatic voice would hit the kiddie jackpot. She was billed as “the new singing discovery of Charles R. Rogers, Discoverer of Deanna Durbin.” ³ But Ware was no more a match for Durbin than Kitty Carlisle and Gladys Swarthout had been for Jeanette MacDonald.

Worse, the script somehow devolved from the story of Edwards to the story of Bing. By the time it was ready to shoot, The Star Maker so little resembled Edwards and his career that the name of the protagonist was changed to Larry Earl and history was mooted with the attribution “suggested by the career of Gus Edwards.” That did not restrain Paramount from promoting “the heart-happy story of America’s greatest showman, Gus Edwards.” ⁴ The fictional plot concerned a conflict involving a children’s welfare organization that bans the hero’s shows and forces the hero to pioneer a newfangled invention. “It’s what they call radio or something,” one character remarks, allowing Bing/Larry/Gus to predict: “In a few years — remember this now — that little gimmick will have every star in show business singing and acting over it.” Every star but Gus Edwards, whose sole connection to radio was a local amateur talent program in Los Angeles for a couple of seasons in the mid-thirties, shortly before his retirement.

That was not the only instance of Bing’s story subsuming Edwards’s. In the tradition of Kraft Music Hall, The Star Maker offered seventy-seven-year-old Walter Damrosch his cinema debut, playing himself, as well as accompanying and avowing the greatness of Linda Ware. What Damrosch, who had convinced Andrew Carnegie to build a concert hall on New York’s Fifty-seventh Street and Tchaikovsky to conduct its opening night, thought of her number — Tchaikovsky’s “Valse des Fleurs” with words by Frank Loesser —is anyone’s guess, as no journalist is known to have asked him. Ware is less annoying as a trilling soprano than as a barrelhouse interpreter of “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” to which she brings the very mannerisms Bing parodied a few years later in Going My Way. The public did not encourage her career, but several reviewers kvelled: “a brilliant coloratura, a winning personality and a pleasing countenance” (Variety). ⁵

The drearily familiar Crosby character as personified by Larry Earl may be summed up by the titles of two of the songs he sings: Edwards’s “If I Was a Millionaire” (1910) and Burke and Monaco’s “A Man and His Dream.” Once again, he is the stubborn dreamer who cannot abide conventional jobs and seizes the day. What makes the picture different is that Earl acquires a wife. The preeminent stars of the Hollywood musical, like those of horror films, were rarely depicted with spouses, except in biopics. “Can you pay the grocer off with dreams?” asks Larry’s fiancée, Mary (a poorly written role played by a redheaded Mary Martin lookalike, Louise Campbell). “Sure, if you’ll just say yes,” Larry tells her, and in contrast to all his previous movies and most of those to follow, Bing marries.

The Star Maker is, in fact, the only picture Bing ever made playing a happily married man. He was on the brink of divorce in Mack Sennett’s One More Chance and would marry and divorce in Blue Skies. He would be bitterly divorced in Man on Fire, philosophically divorced in High Society, widowed in Just for You, and in deep marital trouble in The Country Girl. He was on the prowl or celibate in everything else.

It is not far-fetched to surmise that, in part, Bing plays a composite of his younger self and his father: the irresponsible husband who will not allow his wife to work yet cannot hold down respectable jobs that interfere with his joie de vivre. When he proposes to Mary, Larry promises her furs, diamonds, servants; eighteen months later we see her ironing in a cold-water flat as Larry spends their savings on a piano — not unlike Harry Crosby bringing home the phonograph and theater tickets while Kate despaired of paying the grocery bill. Like Kate and Dixie, Mary takes steps to ensure Larry’s success, sneaking into the car of impresario F. F. Proctor and charming him into seeing her tactless husband. Proctor installs Larry on the bottom of a bill that lists several of Bing’s favorite vaudeville artists, notably Eddie Leonard, Julian Eltinge, Van and Schenck, and Blanche Ring, most of whom he and David Butler would soon contrive to present in If I Had My Way.

The first half of The Star Maker has many pleasantries, not least a re-creation of the Newsboys (Larry is too old to be in the act, so the picture has him discovering them on a street corner, dancing to a hurdy-gurdy). Bing enjoyed the seven newsboys, among them Darryl Hickman, whom the Crosby talent agency signed and placed in The Grapes of Wrath, a prelude to his dozens of film roles in the forties and fifties; Danny Daniels, who did much of the solo tap dancing in the picture and went on to a long career as a choreographer on stage and screen; and Dante DiPaolo, who was a specialty dancer in movies, a dance director in Las Vegas, and an actor in Italian epics and giallos. “I auditioned five times,” DiPaolo remembered. “Bing was only at the final audition. That’s when Le Roy Prinz, our dance director, told me not to change a thing, because I was singing ‘Star Dust,’ and he told me, Do it exactly that way because Bing really likes ‘Star Dust.’There must have been six, seven hundred kids from Hollywood auditioning, not just for the seven newsboys, but all the kids in ‘School Days,’ tons of auditions.” ⁶

June Kuhn was a Sarah Lawrence student when she met Bob Crosby on her Easter break. Their marriage got off to a rocky start but lasted fifty-four years. This picture was taken in October 1938, about the time of the “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” session.

Rory Burke Collection

Harry and Kate Crosby loved the Hollywood life. Bing claimed his father used to buttonhole strangers to show them his (Bing’s) press clippings; his more forbidding mother became a habitué at the racetrack. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Several members of the Crosby circle were united when the twin daughters, Rory and Regan, of Bing’s friend and lyricist Johnny Burke were baptized. Shown on the steps of Saint Ambrose Church on Fairfax Avenue, January 11, 1942, are (left to right) Sammy Cahn, Jack Mass, Barney Dean, John Scott Trotter, Phil Silvers, Bing (Rory’s godfather), Dixie (holding Rory), Bob Hope, Delores Hope (holding Regan), Skitch Henderson, Pat O’Brien, Bessie Burke (in front), David Butler (Regan’s godfather), Georgie Hardwicke, Johnny Burke, Elsie Butler, Jean Stevens, and Dr. Arnold Stevens.

Quinn Burke Collection

Bing volunteered for military service and was asked to entertain servicemen. During a break on the sixty-five-city Victory Caravan in 1942, he relaxed with Bert Lahr, Oliver Hardy, and James Cagney.

Gene Lester

Bing was almost as accomplished a fisherman as he was a golfer. He owned many dogs, and even showed some of them off at competitions.

Susan Crosby Collection

Bing showed up intoxicated to record “Ave Maria” on April 25, 1945, and Jack Kapp had to reschedule the session. When photographer Gene Lester asked Bing if he was aware of the hole in his pants, Bing put his finger in it and said, “Oh, Jesus, hey, but that makes it convenient, doesn’t it?”Gene Lester

Bing shakes hands with Frank Tuttle, his favorite director of the 1930s, who brought a touch of René Clair whimsy to The Big Broadcast and achieved a blockbuster with Waikiki Wedding.Gary Giddins Collection

A lobby card for Double or Nothing (1937) shows Bing with Mary Carlisle, who taught him something about backgammon, and Martha Raye, who made her film debut with Bing. Each appeared in three of his movies.

Gary Giddins Collection

David Butler, who first directed Dixie and then Bing (East Side of Heaven) posed with Bing’s music director on the Kraft Music Hall, John Scott Trotter, at a Westwood Marching and Chowder Club production.

Rory Burke Collection

Bing records at Decca with a full complement of strings.

Gene Lester/Elsie Perry Collection

Bessie Burke, Barney Dean, Everett Crosby, and Bing’s friend and neighbor Dave Shelly at a Crosby party, 1940.

Rory Burke Collection

In 1935 Dixie costarred with John Boles, who had aced Bing out of a big number in King of Jazz. Her career soon ended, however, and she became reclusive, though she often accompanied Bing to the track.

above: Gary Giddins Collection

below: Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Bing, the silent-comedy connoisseur, affects a Chaplinesque stance during one of his countless charity golf matches with Bob Hope, who almost always lost.

Bill Milkowski Collection

Bing and Bob wrestle during a break on Road to Singapore, 1939. Usually they wrestled over lines.

Bill Milkowski Collection

Dorothy Lamour had to fight for her every line once Bob and Bing got started. Np one expected Road to Singapore to break attendance records and begin a twenty-year series.

Gary Giddins Collection

The fake feud between Bob and Bing continued for thirty-seven years. During a trip to Spain in 1953, Bing could not resist taking his best shot.

Susan Crosby Collection

By 1940 Bing was on top, but all he had achieved would soon seem like a mere prelude to what was to come during the war and after.

Gary Giddins Collection

Indeed, the producer claimed he auditioned 1,583 kids for the picture. Several incidents from those tryouts were added to the script, including the child who turned out to be a midget and the girl who would not sing despite her mother’s panicked pleas. Bing had fun on the set. The newsboys bought him a cake to celebrate his assumed thirty-sixth birthday. When Dante failed to hear the director call cut and kept dancing, Bing put his hat on him and it came down to his mouth. Nearly sixty years later, Dante married Rosemary Clooney, who remembered an incident in the 1970s, when they were in a pro shop: “Bing said to Dante, Try on this hat, and he took off the hat and threw it to him and the hat went down to the same place as when he was a kid. ‘Cause Bing had a big head. So Dante said he felt just exactly the same way as he did back then. Oh God, it was funny, to see the admiration Dante had for Bing after all those years.” ⁷ On several occasions Bing brought his own kids to the set to show off the three-part harmonies of Gary (almost six) and the twins (almost five).

That some uneasiness also existed is evident from Bing’s understated remark when asked, in 1976, about his most difficult film. “I’ve done some pictures where you didn’t quite know where they were going,” he answered. “I remember a picture called The Star Maker. The director didn’t like the picture but he had to do it — a guy named Roy Del Ruth, he was a good director — and the atmosphere on the set wasn’t too congenial because of that. Roy always treated me very well but wasn’t happy because he disliked things they had done with the script, but he had to go ahead with it. And that’s the only picture I can think of where there was even a smidgen of unpleasantness.” ⁸

On one occasion, as Barry Ulanov reported, Bing exercised his power with unruffled dispatch. By this time the star was accustomed to disbursing bit parts to old friends on their uppers. He examined the cast lists for possibilities and asked assistant directors to call the people he had in mind, leaving Bing’s name out of it. Bing had asked Del Ruth’s man to contact a friend to play an elevator operator. Making up one morning, he noticed someone else in the role and asked Del Ruth, “What happened? Couldn’t you get the guy I suggested?” Del Ruth told him, “We didn’t try. We thought this fellow would be better.” Bing nodded, “Well, maybe you’re right.” ⁹ He took off his toupee and observed what a lovely day it was, perfect for golf. Del Ruth quickly assured Bing that he would get hold of his choice right away and that both actors would get paid.

Bing was in superb voice. The old songs suited him as well as the new ones or better, especially the non-Edwards relic “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” beautifully sung by Bing to encourage a shy little girl during an audition and prettily shot by Karl Struss, who elsewhere puts shadows on Bing’s cheeks and focuses on his big, limpid eyes. In several scenes he is more aggressive than usual, reciting self-righteous speeches, but is splendidly disarming when teaching the kids confidence in a number that begins with a rhyming section reminiscent of Bert Williams and turns pure Bing as he sidles into Burke and Monaco’s “Go Fly a Kite.” As usual, he was billed after the title card, this time with five other cast members, undistinguished but for Ned Sparks, who was never funnier than as Larry’s child-loathing publicist.

The Star Maker received respectable reviews and made lots of money, beating the competition in almost every city. Paramount took a full-page ad, headlined BING BUSINESS! — inexplicably crowing that it outgrossed its own competing blockbuster, Cecil B. De Mille’s Union Pacific, in seven markets, from San Francisco to Boston. Louella Parsons praised Bing for daring to appear with those little “picture stealers,” noting, quite rightly, “Never have the old songs been sung with more feeling. Yesterday’s favorite tunes take on a new flavor when Bing croons them.” ¹⁰ Timeagreed that he sang them “as well as they have ever been sung” and praised the movie as “an engaging archaeological exploration into a vanished world of the U.S. amusement industry,” ¹¹ which was certainly true of the elaborate “School Days” number, with Bing in mortarboard, goatee, and glasses on the tip of his nose.

Despite The Star Maker’s success, Linda Ware disappeared, and poor ailing Gus Edwards, who lived another six years, got little in the way of a professional boost. One of the studio’s publicity stunts was an August 18 dinner in his honor at the Ambassador Hotel. It attracted freeloading newsmen in large numbers, but few luminaries. Bing was not present. The day before the premiere, he played in a California state golf championship at Del Monte, then went straight to Rancho Santa Fe, some said as an excuse to miss the opening. “One thing is certain,” a Time correspondent memoed his editor, “after he is through with a picture Crosby treats his time as his own, won’t go sailing around the country for studio publicity.” ¹²

The Star Maker, compromised though it is by the producer’s ambition to create a star, added to Bing’s prestige as an entertainer who covered the waterfront of American show business. It also helped usher in a new genre in musicals: sham biographies of popular entertainers who made their mark before or beyond movies. Many films were made in the 1930s about nineteenth-century composers — half a dozen about Johann Strauss alone. Many others exploited pop gossip. (Jolson decked Walter Winchell in 1933 for writing a Russ Columbo melodrama, Broadway Through a Keyhole, that everyone knew was about Ruby Keeler’s involvement with a gangster before she married Jolson.) But the only major attempt at dramatizing the story of a great showman was MGM’s lavish and immensely successful The Great Ziegfeld, in 1936.

Suddenly, in 1939, Paramount, Fox, and RKO turned out five musical biographies. Like The Star Maker, Fox’s Rose of Washington Square used a pseudonym for its thinly disguised depiction of Fanny Brice, but that was made without Brice’s consent — she sued and won a settlement. Real names were used in films purportedly telling the stories of Stephen Foster, Victor Herbert, and Vernon Castle, but they were dead, though Vernon’s wife and dancing partner, Irene, allowed RKO to turn their marriage into a Fred and Ginger vehicle. After Michael Curtiz directed James Cagney in the glimmering Yankee Doodle Dandy (George M. Cohan) in 1942, the floodgates opened: dozens of biopics, none as good, all of them fictitious, many ludicrous, especially in the casting: Victor Mature as Paul Dresser, Mickey Rooney as Larry Hart, Robert Walker as Jerome Kern (Jews were always played by conspicuously gentile Gentiles). Bing partook of the idiom, playing minstrel Dan Emmett in Dixie (1943) and testing as Will Rogers for a picture David Butler tried to launch.

Yet The Star Maker represented for Bing not an entry into a new decade but the closing of a door on the old. Where could he have gone from there? Screening Bing’s last picture of the 1930s, how could studio bosses fail to recognize a sad portent, a future of conventional marital amusements, a dozen versions of the same script: misunderstanding at breakfast, song, compromising situation with a secretary, song, mistaken identities, song, denouement, song. Yes, Bing was a far more accomplished actor than ever before, but he was also considerably harder to cast. His comedy was mellow, not brazen; his personality likable, not fervent. He could no more essay Cary Grant screwballs than Errol Flynn swashbucklers. Bing created the quintessential light leading man with a stunning voice, and — though he had not enjoyed a genuine smash since Waikiki Wedding — his popularity continued to hold. In 1939 he was Paramount’s top-ranked male draw (ahead of Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, and Jack Benny) and Universal’s second-ranked (after Charles Boyer). ¹³ But no one could predict how his persona might develop beyond the sort of decorous romances that sneaked up on him throughout the 1930s.

A transformation loomed ahead, triggered by the February 1940 release of Road to Singapore. In the brief interval before that picture began shooting, Bing concentrated on his recording career, continuing the prolific schedule of 1938. Usually, records had to be sacrificed when Bing was juggling a movie and his radio show, and not just because of time constraints. Each film required prerecording sessions; additional pressure on his voice was considered reckless. Yet between March and June — before and after The Star Maker — Kapp managed to squeeze in nearly a dozen sessions, eking out more than two dozen hits, though no megahits; it was the year (1939) when Glenn Miller’s sugared swing and Kay Kyser’s infantile gimmicks held sway.

Every change in Bing’s vocal style precipitated an alteration in his stature, in the nature of his renown. This Kapp understood too well. Just as Bing’s recent movies prefigured an increasingly housebroken maturity, so his new records would reflect his standing as a classicist, the troubadour laureate of American song. Considering Crosby’s beginnings at Decca (“Just a-Wearyin’ for You”) and the wistful successes of 1938, Kapp’s increasingly retro direction was surprising only in its tenacity. The good and the bad went hand in hand: Bing made many exceptional records in 1939 while hacking his way through sentimental fluff, patriotic airs, and songs from his own distant past. As always, his primary recording obligations were his movie songs, which occasioned few complaints — the Deccas were often vastly superior to the screen versions. For the rest, he was saddled with a profusion of mossy evergreens, and looking backward more often than ahead.

His first major hit of the New Year, recorded the previous December, four years after he turned it down as too high-class, was Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” It was a fitting beginning to the year of The Star Maker, a year largely consecrated to a revival of old styles of show business Bing had so decisively helped bury. Beyond movie and vaudeville songs, he recorded a few good standards; a couple of terrible songs, as favors; six remakes of youthful Crosby classics (plus two from the Whiteman period); and brief returns to Hawaii and the West. The patriotic songs added a new flavor to the mix. In all those sessions, he added only one number to the catalog of enduring pop standards, “What’s New?”

Yet 1939 was a good year for new songs. Among those Bing did not record that might have suited him to a T were “Day In — Day Out,” “All the Things You Are,” “I Thought About You,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “Some Other Spring,” “If I Didn’t Care,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “South of the Border,” and “Over the Rainbow.” Instead, he enriched Decca’s coffers with the likes of “Little Sir Echo” (an adaptation of the Boy Scouts’ anthem), “Whistling in the Wildwood,” and the inscrutably maudlin “Poor Old Rover,” which one would like to think was intended as a jape — after all, it was cowritten by Del Porter, an architect of Spike Jones’s City Slickers, and recorded with Spike himself on drums. ¹⁴ Audible evidence fails to support that hope.

Beyond the dubious material was the issue of John Trotter’s one-an-a-two-an-a arrangements and a clique of soloists who, outside the Hollywood studio system, would have made no bandleader’s A-list. Compared with Bob Crosby’s band, for example, which enjoyed an outstanding year with its new trumpet star, Billy Butterfield, and clarinetist Irving Fazola, Trotter’s regulars (trumpeter Andy Secrest, saxophonist Jack Mayhew) were also-rans, and while they served his arrangements proficiently, the question remains: in an era of phenomenal musicianship, why was its most prized vocalist (voted, in January 1939, number one crooner of the United States by song promoters and, more democratically, best male singer by the readers of Down Beat) so rarely challenged by his peers?

“What’s New?,” one of Bing’s two mightiest hits that year, resulted from a distant collusion with his baby brother’s band. While experimenting with a cycle of chord changes, Bob Haggart devised a melody and arranged it as a concerto for Billy Butterfield, whom he and Bob Crosby discovered playing in a Kentucky band shell. The record, “I’m Free,” made Butterfield a jazz star and convinced many that, with a lyric, the song could be a smash. Johnny Mercer, who wrote the band’s greatest success of the year, “Day In — Day Out,” tried his hand and, for once, was stumped. “He worked on it for two months,” Haggart remembered, “but he said, ‘I keep coming up with the same thing — I’m free, free as the birds in the trees, da da da da.’ And so he just never did it, and then along comes Johnny Burke, who changed the whole idea.” ¹⁵

Burke liked the tune and, as Haggart later learned, had a conversation at the time with Larry Crosby. Larry told him, “You know, I love your lyrics, but they’re all very poetic. Couldn’t you write something more conversational?” “Like what?” he asked. Larry said, “Like ‘what’s new?’ ‘how’s things?’ something like that, one-on-one.” ¹⁶ Haggart, who never met Burke, did not know he had written a lyric until he heard Bing’s record, arranged for Trotter by the gifted bandleader Claude Thornhill. As Bing’s record took off, other bandleaders (Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Hal Kemp) adapted the song as a feature for their vocalists, and it endured as a standard, cropping up decade after decade in versions by Louis Armstrong, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, and many others. Bing’s performance is piquant in its conversational tact: the coolly interrogative “what’s new?” belying the difficulty of a phrase that changes key after the first bar, from C to A flat; the atypical dropped-g on treatin’; clipped consonants on bit and admit; all contrasted with polished mordents and mellifluous high notes.

“What’s New?” typified the evolution in Bing’s style from, as critic John McDonough wrote, the “husky baritone of the 1931 Brunswicks to the mellow pipe organ” ¹⁷ of the 1940s — an organ so seemingly unaffected that, to paraphrase Huey Long, it made every man a crooner, at least in his own mind. Even Time, in its give-and-take manner, was touched: “Once more Crooner Crosby illuminates a dull song by singing it as though it were the best song he had ever heard.” ¹⁸

But consider the other five sides recorded at that June 30 session. Bing did himself and Harry Barris no service by recording his former partner’s laborious “Neighbors in the Sky,” which Kapp buried on the B-side of a middling duet with Connie Boswell, “Start the Day Right.” (A few months before, Bing had done Barris the real kindness of reprising three of his great songs from the Cocoanut Grove.) He was similarly at a loss trying to mine something from Walter Donaldson’s “Cynthia,” recorded at the behest of his song publisher friend Rocco Vocco. Donaldson had ruled the roost in the 1920s, turning out dozens of enduring hits, but by the mid-1930s his style was outmoded, and despite Hollywood assignments, he wrote only a few important songs, notably “Did I Remember?” With its wordy imagery and disharmonious repetition of the name Cynthia, his new opus had no chance. Bing’s forgotten record is not without appeal, despite an error (he turns a verb into a gerund), but Kapp buried it until 1940, when Bing scored Donaldson’s last two hits, written with Johnny Mercer, who joined Bing for buoyant duets on “Mister Meadowlark” and “On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen.”

The rest of the session was devoted to Gus Edwards — two admirable collaborations with the Music Maids. The first is a medley set up by the Maids (“School Days”) followed by savory Crosby snippets of “Sunbonnet Sue,” “Jimmy Valentine,” and the nimble “If I Was a Millionaire.” The last two are so pleasing, he might easily have made entire records of them. In the case of “Jimmy Valentine,” that may have been the initial intention, as a fluff take, from the movie prerecordings, survives with an ominous spoken introduction in the manner of “Skeleton in the Closet.” Just as Bing was finishing the first chorus, he slipped up and, without breaking stride, sang it into oblivion:

Look out! Look out!

For when you see his lantern shine

That’s the time to jump right up and shout

uh, Help!, Oh Jesus Christ, I blew the time

And I’m a dirty son of a bitch

When Jimmy Valentine…

Edwards had learned his trade in the early years of Tin Pan Alley vaudeville, when topicality meant everything. The year he wrote “Jimmy Valentine,” O. Henry’s good-hearted burglar had been revived as the hero of a popular play. In 1905 Edwards wrote “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” in recognition of the two automobiles that traversed half the country, from Detroit to Portland, in forty-four days. Composing the first hit tune to glorify the horseless carriage did not get Gus the free Olds he tried to pry out of the company, but it made him enough money to buy several. In later years, though, radio stations refused to play the song because it was considered akin to an advertisement. The embargo hurt sales of Bing’s superb version with the general public (the BBC banned it outright), but Decca scored all the same when Oldsmobile bought 100,000 discs as part of a pact with Paramount to cross-promote its 1940 model and The Star Maker.

Bing’s recorded treatment is far superior to that in the movie. Trotter’s brisk arrangement starts as a waltz, permitting one chorus each for Bing and the orchestra; then it switches to four-four for the Music Maids, followed by Bing, who enters swinging. Accompanied by the rhythm section and the Maids, he peaks with a suavely injected “automo-bub-bub-bubbel-in’,” before finishing with a Barris-style shhh! Four choruses in less than two and a half minutes: imagine if Trotter had opened it up with soloists and given Bing another chorus. Bix Beiderbecke rescued a tedious version of the song back in 1927, but for sheer élan, his chorus had nothing on Bing’s.

The movie songs produced other gems, often alchemized from chancy material. Three days after wrapping East Side of Heaven, he insightfully interpreted the songs for Decca. In the title number, his pearly vowels and nuances — he makes the word same (“it’s the same old Manhattan”) a worldly sigh of routine — make more of the song than it’s worth. (The first orchestral interjection will be recognized by many as the four-note riff from The Twilight Zone.) Burke took the idea for “Hang Your Heart on a Hickory Limb” from a maxim his wife often repeated, and inserted a Jesuitical piece of advice he figured Crosby would appreciate: “For every bit of pleasure there’ll be pain / If you feel that’s no bargain, then abstain.” Bing capers through the verse and into the chorus, employing his old technique of squeezing in extra syllables toward the end, leading Crosby expert and singer Arne Fogel to comment, “Only Bing can be so funky, swingy, and funny at the same time.” ¹⁹ Jimmy Monaco used an unusual fortyeight-bar aba format for “Sing a Song of Sunbeams,” a song that ushered in a spate of Crosbyan odes to sanguinity, most famously the 1944 “Swinging on a Star.”

Burke once explained his method for writing Bing’s lyrics, and it was no different than Carroll Carroll’s for writing radio scripts. “The most successful device,” he said, “was to listen to Bing’s conversation and either take my phrases directly from him or pattern some after his way of putting phrases together.” ²⁰ An evident example among the four songs he and Monaco wrote for The Star Maker is “Go Fly a Kite” (he rhymes wind and chagrined), which in Trotter’s staid arrangement makes for a less than impassioned record — until Bing’s Armstrongian closing chorus. The flat sentimentality of “A Man and His Dream” and “Still the Bluebird Sings” are partly redeemed by “An Apple for the Teacher” — in the picture a Linda Ware nonentity, but on record a jaunty duet for Bing and Connie Boswell, whose pouty on-the-beat southern inflections show precisely why the youthful Ella Fitzgerald (whom Bing later named as the best singer alive) adored her. Propelled by Perry Botkin’s guitar, it preceded “What’s New?” as a top seller.

Jack Kapp’s instincts aside, Bing’s new style lent itself to old songs, an ironic circumstance for the man who not too long before embodied Jazz Age modernity. Bing plainly delighted in the simple diatonic melodies of the bygone era, and the songs brought out his most ingenuous charm. Frank Sinatra debuted on records in 1939, with Harry James’s band, though it was little noted at the time. Yet four years later, to exploit his momentous triumph as a single, one of those selections with James, “All or Nothing at All,” was re-released and rocketed up the charts to become his first million-seller. In retrospect, the irony was unmistakable: at the moment Sinatra had extended the interpretation of lyrics — patented by Bing on records like “What’s New?” — into a darker and more personal realm, Bing had reserved much of his most poignant work for the easier mercies of nostalgia.

Despite the rearguard repertory, Bing did not succumb to musical apathy. He continued to find ways to enliven the old with nuance and power. “If I Had My Way” is exemplary, a Crosby waltz in which phrases resonate like gongs, thanks to perfect parallel mordents, over a slow but pulsing tempo; the voice is lovely, the high notes exquisite, and the emotions deeply persuasive and of a sort no one else could have mustered. The romantic vulnerability of a Sinatra is unsuited to these elemental melodies. They demand a bounteous voice and temperament to avoid bathos while cutting through the cobwebs. Despite its egregiously antiquated minstrel lyric, Bing’s “The Missouri Waltz” is a neglected gem. It suggests that the king of technology and prince of jazz was also the last nineteenth-century man, an artist genuinely besotted by the past — that is, genuinely capable of extracting nuggets of beauty and sentiment where his contemporaries found only corn.

On a few sessions Bing’s accompaniment combined John Scott Trotter’s Frying Pan Five (a name that promised more steam than it delivered) and the Foursome, a vocal choir that doubled on a variety of instruments. Bing had casually met two of the singers, Ray Johnson and Del Porter, in Spokane, when he was a Musicalader and they were appearing with a band at the Davenport Hotel. They later teamed with two other singers, worked for Mack Sennett, and scored on Broadway in Girl Crazy. A few Hollywood films followed, but they were about to head East again when Bing invited them to appear on KMH; soon they became regulars on Bob Burns’s summer replacement show. What Bing and Trotter liked about the Foursome, beyond their efficient harmonies, was their unison playing of the ocarina, a potato-shaped wind instrument with ten holes that produces pure tones (no partials or overtones). The combination of ocarinas and Del Porter’s clarinet provided a catchy freshness to oldies (“Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream”) and western songs (“When the Bloom Is on the Sage” and the bestselling “Alla en el Rancho Grande,” Bing’s first time singing in flawless Spanish). The sound inspired Burke and Monaco to write a song about the ocarina for Road to Singapore.

* * *

Bing recorded every week in March, early April, and — after completing The Star Maker — every week in June. His radio show continued to wax in popularity with the usual guests, including Frances Langford, William Frawley, Bert Lahr, Joan Bennett, Matty Malneck, Pat O’Brien, Leo McCarey, Florence George (Everett’s new wife), Freddie Bartholomew, Rudolph Ganz, Jackie Cooper, John Wayne, Gladys Swarthout, Walter Damrosch, Basil Rathbone, Walter Huston, Lucille Ball, and so forth. Bing filled his downtime with sporting events. He played tennis at the Palm Springs Racquet Club (along with Errol Flynn, Frank Morgan, and other film stars); participated in the broadcast of a two-minute Joe Louis fight; and traveled to Boston to watch Ligaroti come in next to last at Suffolk Downs, ending a meteoric career. Bing had bad luck of a different kind when his horse Midge raced at Hollywood Park and he sent a friend to bet a large sum on the nose; Midge won, but the friend did not get to the track on time. Bing found a few days to join Dixie in Palm Springs, where they threw a party at Cafe La Maze for the Eddie Lowes, the Dave Butlers, and the Herb Polesies. Then it was back to The Star Maker and Jack Kapp.

Part of Decca’s invasion of the past focused on new versions of Crosby classics from before 1934, before Decca. Jack and Bing had several possible motives. For one, they were good songs and, as Bing’s style had radically changed, warranted new interpretations. For another, many of the songs were by Bing’s friends and associates, so he was doing them a favor. For a third, the idea of making a movie based on Bing’s life had been in the air for a couple of years, since the deal Bing attempted to broker for Ted Crosby and Grover Jones, and was thought more likely now, given the vogue for pictures about contemporary entertainers. In that event, Decca would want to own versions of the essential records Bing had recorded for Brunswick. That was the nub of the matter. Brunswick had recently been acquired by CBS, guaranteeing an impending rivalry.

In 1938 William Paley, who had declined to invest in Decca when the recording business was moribund, bought ARC (the holding company for Brunswick and Columbia), with the intention of reviving Columbia as a prominent label. RCA Victor’s executive, Edward Wallerstein, itching to leave the company, had convinced Paley to purchase ARC for $700,000. Paley did not need much convincing. As the economy revived, he looked with increasing jealousy at David Sarnoff’s NBC, which not only controlled two networks to his one but operated the profitable and prestigious RCA. The record business had rallied: Kapp’s visionary pricing, Crosby’s steady and increasing sales, and the tremendous commercial breakthrough of the swing craze brought the industry back to heights approaching the glory days of 1927. The turnabout would be complete by 1940. Yet Paley had more than business on his mind. He wanted revenge.

Paley and Sarnoff had competed bitterly for ten years, frequently over cultural programming. At a time when intellectuals disdained radio and Capitol Hill vetted its contributions to the national good, the networks strove for prestige; highbrow signings were essential, even if they could not attract sponsors. In 1930 Paley brought off a historic coup by hiring the New York Philhamonic, under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, for Sunday-afternoon broadcasts. Toscanini remained a CBS staple until 1936, when he declined to renew his contract with the orchestra. Paley and the Philharmonic hoped he would change his mind but in the interim reluctantly accepted his no. Sarnoff and his programming chief, John Royal, did not. Toscanini was a prize catch, and they came up with an offer he could not refuse: NBC would create for him his own symphony orchestra. It was a stunning, buccaneering gamble, the kind Paley prided himself on making. Paley went to war. With RCA’s former chief, Waller-stein, in his camp and ARC in his pocket, he hoped to cut RCA off at the knees. His timing could not have been better.

By 1939 the synergy between records and radio had grown so significant, Variety initiated a new feature, “Network Plugs, 8 A.M. to 1 A.M.” — a list of the records most played on the flagship stations of the NBC (WEAF and WJZ) and CBS (WABC) networks, computed over a week. Twenty to forty plays in a week was considered high and certain to increase the sales of sheet music and records. The need for accurately tracked sales and playlists was answered in July 1940, when Billboard aced Variety and published its first chart of bestselling records, a signal tribute to a flourishing industry. By then, as Time reported in a September 1939 survey of the “Phonograph Boom,” it had “fattened into one of the fastest growing business in the U.S., with an annual gross of some $36,000,000.” ²¹ Time assigned most of the credit to “the five-year-old Decca concern, with Crosby as its Caruso.” ²² Decca sold 12 million records in 1939, second only to RCA (with 13 million), for an estimated annual gross of 4 million dollars. Bing accounted for a sixth of Decca’s sales — “a post-Caruso record record.” Fortune reported that Decca ceased to advertise because the company could no longer keep up with orders. In 1940 Decca sold 18 million records, still a close second to RCA.

Paley soon killed the various smaller ARC logos as well as Brunswick, reserving Columbia for his status signings, which included several symphony orchestras, along with such conductors as Stokowski (Toscanini’s rival), Mitropoulos, Rodzinski, and Stock, and just about any swing band with an open contract, including Goodman, Basie, Ellington, James, Krupa, Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey, and Kay Kyser. Then he borrowed a page from Decca’s playbook. Kapp’s reduced prices had revitalized the whole industry; Paley reduced the price of twelve-inch classical discs by half, to a buck apiece, driving a wedge into RCA’s dominance in the field (the one area Kapp neglected). Meanwhile, there was now the issue of who owned the Brunswick catalog that Kapp had nursed before leaving the company to create Decca. A deal was made. All Brunswick records made before Warner Bros. leased the company to ARC, in December 1931, would go to Decca — in which Warner Bros. maintained a financial interest. ²³ All Brunswicks made after Warner Bros. had given ARC a ten-year lease, including most of the Crosby sides, would remain part of CBS’s ARC holdings.

With Columbia going toe-to-toe with RCA and the increased acceptance of reissues, it was only a matter of time before both companies would release old Crosby sides. At Kapp’s suggestion, Bing recorded new versions of his benchmark recordings, including a couple that remained in the Decca trove. Kapp believed that the Bing of 1939 was far more acceptable to audiences than the Bing who originally recorded “Star Dust,” “I Surrender, Dear,” “It Must Be True,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” “Home on the Range,” and “Just One More Chance.” Most of those songs had been hits in late 1930 and early 1931; however mannered or naive they may have sounded in 1939, they had been lanterns in the musical landscape of their day. Good songs ought to withstand many and diverse interpretations, as indeed these did. Yet Bing’s remakes could only display, at best, a great singer singing great songs. They could not recapture the novelty of brand-new songs rendered in a brand-new style. The originals helped define the time in which they were created; the remakes helped define the ripening of Crosby. ²⁴

All the same, some were improvements over the originals. Bing was right to reclaim “Star Dust,” which had become one of the most performed of all songs in the eight years since he introduced the lyric. Unfortunately, he dropped the verse, but his entrance — after a spacey introduction with a long harp arpeggio (the kind Spike Jones later parodied in “Holiday for Strings”) — is alluring and his follow-through is flawlessly composed, if a bit stentorian. After East Side of Heaven, Bing invited Matty Malneck to record with him on this session, and passages in Malneck’s swirling arrangement would later be referenced by Gordon Jenkins in the setting he devised for a definitive 1956 Nat “King” Cole version. Malneck’s ensemble included Manny Klein and accordionist Milton DeLugg, both of whom are scored high so that Bing’s voice is the low instrument, an anchor for the others, especially on another strong tune from the session, “Deep Purple,” notable for Bing’s range and expansive low notes.

He was unable to replicate the magic of the 1933 “Home on the Range,” but he did bring a renewed authority to the Harry Barris remakes, ensuring their survival as standards. The new “I Surrender, Dear” is more deeply felt and conversational than the original. The long instrumental prelude and jazzy tempo changes of the Jimmy Grier arrangement are gone, but a comparison of the vocals reveals the greater finesse and weightiness he now brought to the song that had hastened his journey to network radio.

“Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” is more remarkable, supernally relaxed, especially in the effortlessly dramatized bridge. The song lends itself to Bing’s legato phrasing with a two-bar rhythmic pattern that occurs eleven times — that is, for twenty-two of its thirty-two bars: quarter note (wrap) quarter note (your) eighth note eighth note (trou-bles) quarter note (in) dotted half (dreams) quarter note (and). On every occasion, Bing expands the dotted half note, pushing the following quarter note into the next bar, producing a subtle syncopation and a canny example of his musical pulse at work. In a second take, sung at a brighter tempo, his embellishments are more overt, and it might have been chosen for release, except that an apparent change in the arrangement confused Bing as he headed into the final bridge, resulting in the most famous of Crosby fluffs, played out to the bitter end:

Castles may tumble, that’s fate after all

Life’s really funny that way

Sang the wrong melody, we’ll play it back

See what it sounds like, hey hey

They cut out eight bars, the dirty bastards

And I didn’t know which eight bars he was gonna cut

Why don’t somebody tell me these things around here

Holy Christ, I’m going off my nut.

The fluff take was instantly bootlegged, and fifty or so copies were released on a label stamped Triple-X. Soon numerous bootlegs of the bootleg were pirated — an underground hit.

Other kinds of nostalgia permeated Bing’s 1939 recordings. Accompanied by Victor Young, he turned to Gershwin for the first time in three years to essay exceedingly slow and reflective versions of “Somebody Loves Me” and “Maybe.” He also returned, after three years, to Dick McIntyre for two of his best Hawaiian songs, “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha” and “My Isle of Golden Dreams,” displaying the candor that enriched his readings of songs from the Gus Edwards era. His affection for the melodies is unmistakable, as is his evident enjoyment in the sound of his voice. On two occasions, in 1955 and 1960, ²⁵ Bing cited “My Isle of Golden Dreams” as his favorite record, an intriguing selection because Decca rarely saw fit to reissue it during the next sixty years. Say this much: it represents the purity of his voice and his agile control at a glorious peak. The phrasing is unerring, the high notes full and fair, and the mordents — varied in stress and duration — are never merely ornamental; they do something, advancing meaning and feeling.

Those qualities were no less apparent when, with Johnny Mercer’s lyric, he transformed “And the Angels Sing,” Benny Goodman’s jazzed-up fraylich — a Yiddish dance tune drawn from klezmer music — into a ballad. Goodman’s record propelled the jitterbugs with its heady two-beat interlude by trumpet player Ziggy Elman, who devised the piece. In turning it into a love song, Bing understates everything yet brings his own undulations into play: on the superb release, his mordents roll out like ripples in a stream.

For sentiment of another kind, in March Kapp recorded Bing singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” written in 1917 but suppressed by the composer because he thought it a shameless flag-waver, until Kate Smith asked him for a patriotic song on the eve of the Second World War. He also recorded Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner,” written in 1814 and decreed by an act of Congress as the national anthem in 1931. They were not chosen for musical or commercial value, though the convincingly sung Berlin song sold remarkably well — almost as well as Kate Smith’s. Bing’s take on the national anthem is unsurprising; he sings it straight and sober, as though he were standing in a ballpark. These records convey little significance today. They are musical heirlooms. But in their day they imparted a political meaning beyond rote patriotism.

In March 1939, when the Berlin and Key songs were recorded, patriotism was a sorely contested idea. In one of the strangest consequences of political opportunism, the far left (communists) and far right (American Firsters) snuggled together under the covers of isolationism. Hitler was not the problem, they agreed; it was either J. P. Morgan and Jewish bankers or commies and Jewish radicals, or the imminent invasion of an Asian horde (the Yellow Peril) sweeping westward to wipe out civilization, Christianity, and white people. Personalities as anomalous as Father Charles E. Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh were heard by millions on radio, arguing that Hitler was the last bulwark against greater evils. The country refused to consider war, and Roosevelt despaired of mobilizing aid for Europe. Even as he pushed through the Lend-Lease Act in 1941, providing credit for opponents of the Axis, the Almanac Singers sang, “Franklin D., listen to me /You Ain’t a-gonna send me ‘cross the sea.” ²⁶

“The Star Spangled Banner” is not an isolationist song. Before Bing, the last singer to make a popular record of it was John McCormack, in the spring of 1917, as General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces headed for France. In the immediate weeks before Bing made his version, Franco marched on Madrid, and Hitler — after conscripting all German youth and refusing to meet with Roosevelt — invaded Prague and Memel. A couple of weeks before that, in the United States, 22,000 Nazis congregated in Madison Square Garden; anti-Nazi protests of equal size followed. Music was invariably caught in the crosshairs: the Daughters of the American Revolution declared Marian Anderson unfit to perform in Constitution Hall because of her color; Germany banned jazz and swing; Russia purged the leadership of the Komsomol for permitting music that encouraged the rumba, tango, and jitterbug; Italy allowed swing but barred Jewish music and musicians as well as most American movies. In 1940 the recently resigned ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, addressed fifty top Hollywood executives at a luncheon and told them to “stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the democracies versus the dictators.” He warned them to “get those Jewish names off the screen.” ²⁷

In that context, the act of recording patriotic songs was neither pro forma, sentimental, nor innocent. Any doubts that Bing’s recordings endorsed a particular vision of America were swept aside the following summer when Decca released his four-sided Ballad for Americans. Earl Robinson, who wrote the music for John Latouche’s libretto, was not a rote liberal preaching tolerance; he was a loyal communist who supported the Hitler-Stalin pact, though his personal politics ran largely to issues of racial equality. A prolific composer, he was best known at the time for the classic union protest song “Joe Hill.” In 1938 he and Latouche created a forerunner to Ballad for Americans, “Ballad of Uncle Sam,” for the Federal Theater Project, which was roundly vilified by Texas congressman Martin Dies’s committee investigating “un-American” activities — like racially integrated theater. He slandered their work as “an American version of the ‘Internationale.’” ²⁸ “It died early,” Louis Untermeyer wrote in his notes to Bing’s LP release of Ballad for Americans, “with a noose of red tape around its neck.” ²⁹

After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the public grew resistant to native demagogues. Ballad for Americans debuted on CBS in November, introduced by Burgess Meredith and sung by the princely African American baritone Paul Robeson, and was a sensation. Variety described it as “a masterpiece of authentic American love of country.” ³⁰ Reader’s Digest concurred: “the finest piece of American propaganda.” ³¹ Robeson recorded it in February. Numerous singers (hundreds according to Earl Robinson), including Lawrence Tibbett and James Melton, performed it over the next few years. But Bing was the only popular singer to record it, in four parts, accompanied by Victor Young conducting the Decca Concert Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers. Robinson thought Tibbett’s version too operatic, but “Bing Crosby recorded the piece beautifully on Decca, and his version sold another twenty thousand copies. I remember gently exaggerating the Crosby style when I described his crooning to friends.” Robinson added, “By the way, he sang it in the lower Robeson key.” ³²

Bing did not approach the project lightly. He studied the work before the session, and his concentration in the studio was painstaking; everything had to be right. In contrast to his usual speed (five tunes in two hours, rarely more than two takes), he devoted an hour to each of the four segments. If the reviews were not overtly political, political righteousness fueled the cheers of latecomers to the world of popular music. “Bing Crosby came of age, musically speaking, in his last week’s album, Ballad for Americans,” wrote New York Post critic Michael Levin. “This is the finest recorded performance Bing had done to date and shows that in the last few years he has gone far beyond binging and has really learned how to sing.” When he finished patronizing Bing, Levin chanced a risky comparison with Paul Robe-son’s Victor set that undoubtedly gladdened the hearts of Kapp’s team: “For all of Robeson’s magnificent voice, we prefer the Crosby version. The recording is better, the orchestration is better, and the chorus is better trained.”

Ballad for Americans is now antiquated: a rabble-rousing, melting-pot, bleacher-cheer oratorio, narrated and sung by a bard who identifies himself, at the very end, as the personification of America. It begins:

In ‘76 the sky was red,

Thunder rumbling overhead,

Bad King George couldn’t sleep in his bed,

And on that stormy morn,

Old Uncle Sam was born. (Some birthday!)

Old Sam put on a three-cornered hat,

And in a Richmond church he sat,

And Patrick Henry told him that,

While America drew breath,

It was liberty or death.

(Did they all believe in liberty in those days?)

Nobody who was anybody believed it.

And everybody who was anybody, they doubted it.

Nobody had faith, nobody — nobody but, uh, Washington, Tom Paine,

Benjamin Franklin, Haym Salomon, Crispus Attucks, Lafayette.

Nobodies.

One imagines Kapp leaping at the opportunity to record it with the man he had helped establish as the personification of American song. Surely no great political courage was required, because suddenly every political group wanted to claim the work as its private anthem. The Republicans hired Ray Middleton (after Robeson declined) to sing it at the convention that nominated Wendell Willkie as its 1940 presidential candidate. One week earlier it was sung at the Communist Party convention. The political significance of Bing’s version lay in his personal standing, specifically the ethnicity he was now intent on making a crucial component of his public persona. Bing’s radio audience was estimated as high as 50 million. But when most people thought of an Irish Catholic on the air, the figure brought to mind was the increasingly repudiated Father Coughlin, whose pro-Hitler tirades had grown so bellicose that they provoked Irish American gangs to descend on Jewish neighborhoods to start fights.

Coughlin’s family had come to America in the same pre-Famine era as the Harrigans and, like them, had settled in Canada, where he was born in 1891. He and Bing started their radio careers on CBS and were considered among the idiom’s first masters. (Wallace Stegner has described Coughlin’s delivery as “such mellow richness, such heartwarming, confidential intimacy.”) ³³ William Paley refused to renew Coughlin’s contract after he accused CBS of censorship, but the relationship could not have survived the priest’s rabid antisemitism. NBC also refused to broadcast him, so Coughlin organized his own network of twenty-six independent stations and reached more people than ever before. By 1940 he was so far over the edge that Catholics turned from him in embarrassment (two years later Archbishop Edward Mooney, with the support of the Vatican, ordered him to cease publication of Social Justice, his noxious magazine). That same year Bing recorded the work in which the founding of America is traced to a family of patriots that includes a Jewish financier (Haym Salomon) and a runaway slave (Crispus Attucks). Ballad for Americanswas American history as refracted by New Deal liberalism and served with a spoon. But it worked, and through it Bing spoke his piece and balanced the scales.

Bing had never made much of his ethnicity. Every aspect of big-time entertainment discouraged him, and in any case, it would have been a stretch; his paternal Anglican side settled in America well before the Revolution, and his maternal Irish side arrived in New Brunswick in the 1830s. Unlike minstrelsy and vaudeville, which were steeped in ethnic stereotypes, Hollywood and radio insisted upon common denominators. The thinking was that a picture about Jews would attract only Jews, and a picture about Catholics would attract only Catholics, and so forth. No all-Negro picture had ever earned much money. Leo McCarey’s affecting Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) flopped, it was argued, because it was about old people, and they never turned out in sufficient numbers. The picture business was tough enough without deliberately limiting the number of ticket buyers. Since the end of the early-thirties gangster cycle, Hollywood’s product had steadily slouched toward the ethnically rinsed paradise of Louis B. Mayer’s beloved Carvel, MGM’s city on a hill, home to the confessor/jurist Judge Hardy and his son, Andy. Only character players could keep their accents, receding hairlines, noses, and names. In all the feature films he had made to date, Bing had never played a character with a name — Crosby, Danvers, Bronson, Williams, Jones (twice), Lawton, Grayson, Gordon, Crocker, Larabee, Poole, Marvin, Boland, Remsen, Beebe, Lawton, Martin, Earl — that could be construed as remotely Irish.

He now commenced a conversion, from all-American crooner to hyphenated-American nationalist, an ethnic in a land of ethnics, publicly and privately. At his behest, Larry and Ted began to investigate the family’s genealogy; in later years Bing would wear the emblem of his Irish forebears on his blazers. Yet long before that, as Coughlin’s name faded from public discourse and memory, Bing’s name became inextricably linked to the community of Irish American Catholics. American popular song derived from a motley of ethnicities; the one address where the efficacy of the melting pot could not be denied was Tin Pan Alley. It succeeded because the Jews, blacks, Italians, Anglos, southerners, westerners, midwesterners, and others refused to melt, all priding themselves on the particular heritages that fed their art. Bing, the prodigy of the Inland Empire raised on the diversity of recordings, found his cultural corner in rediscovering the Irish in his pedigree.

The transformation was apparently triggered by Ballad for Americans and was undoubtedly hastened by the war. Four months after recording the Robinson-Latouche cantata, Bing took the only outright political stand of his career, which seemed to undermine all he stood for by aligning him with the movie colony’s most conservative element. On the eve of the election, he gave a radio address in support of Wendell Willkie and lent his name to an advertisement in the New York Times, signed by 165 Hollywood figures determined to refute the notion that the “Mighty Motion Picture Industry” was united in supporting FDR’s third-term candidacy. ³⁴ Willkie, a moderate businessman who came to the public’s attention when he denounced special interests on the radio show Information, Please, could have passed for a liberal Democrat in any other season. But not in 1940, and not in opposition to FDR. Bing’s reputation as a reactionary was sealed through his affiliation with such right-wing signatories as Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper, Adolph Menjou, George Murphy, Mary Pickford, and Lew Ayres, who, having taken his role in All Quiet on the Western Front to heart, created his own tempest by declaring himself a conscientious objector. Inevitably, Bing was singled out. The Philadelphia Record published a vicious editorial, accusing Crosby alone of ingratitude and corruption; the first because he was “a two-bit crooner” when Roosevelt came to office and now boasted an income equal to “the titans of industry,” the second because Del Mar, referred to as “one of his racetracks,” used WPA money slated for a park. ³⁵

Bing was taken aback by the brouhaha. His politics, such as they were, had never been monolithic. He was no Roosevelt hater. In 1935 he had participated in fund-raising celebrations for the president’s birthday on the Warner Bros. lot. Moreover, when he returned to Kraft Music Hall after the election, on November 14, he made a plea for the nation to unite behind the president now that the contest was over. The editorial attack may have prompted that statement, but it was not the only way in which he distanced himself from the other signatories. When Roosevelt died in 1945, Bing sang “Faith of Our Fathers” and Brahms’s “Lullaby” on NBC’s two-hour memorial broadcast. Nor did he join the belligerents a few years later as a “friendly witness” during the HUAC’s reign of terror. Nor did he allow politics to influence his professional relationships. He sat out politics for good.

A month after the election, Bing surprised Kapp with a request to do a record. He rarely bothered to suggest numbers; he had always been content to leave repertory to Jack, except when he was doing a favor for someone. Now he wanted an arrangement prepared and studio time set aside to record “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?” It was his first Irish song, opening up a new area that even Jack had failed to consider. Victor Young was selected to write the arrangements and conduct the December 10 session, which produced four sides. Two of them reflected Bing’s authentic if neglected heritage (the other Irish song was “Where the River Shannon Flows”), and two reflected the southern Negro heritage he so often borrowed as his own, albeit as construed by Stephen Foster (“My Old Kentucky Home” and “De Camptown Races”). During the next few years he extended both lineages, playing minstrel Dan Emmett in Dixie and Irish American priest Father O’Malley in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, his way of tipping the scales in favor of liberal benovolence.