26

EASY RIDERS

You know, when we were doing a Road picture, he’d get out of his car at Paramount with his shoelaces untied. I’d say, “Don’t you have time to tie your shoelaces before you leave the house?” He’d say, “Oh, I stopped at Wilshire to hit a bucket of balls.” This was before we went to work in the morning.

— Bob Hope (1992) ¹

Bob Hope arrived in Los Angeles in September 1937 with his wife, Dolores, and, he would later admit, a “log-size chip on my shoulder.” ² He had been lured by a Paramount producer who thought he showed potential. But as an established Broadway star, he was defensive, suspicious, and truculent. Hollywood was not going to get the better of him. He had money saved, he told his agent, and if he did not like his part in The Big Broadcast of 1938, he was ready to return to New York. Dolores, dismayed when she realized her husband’s name meant nothing in Hollywood, was not too keen on moving anyway. Hope was nearing thirty-five, an advanced age to start out in pictures — not for a character actor, certainly, but for the leading man he meant to be. Between 1934 and 1936 he had made eight shorts in New York. After the first opened, Walter Winchell reported, “When Bob Hope saw his picture at the Rialto, he said, ‘When they catch John Dillinger… they’re going to make him sit through it twice.’” ³ Bob was more sanguine about his stage and radio work.

Leslie Townes Hope was born on May 29, 1903, the fifth of seven sons, in Eltham, England, a suburb of London. His father was a stonemason, his mother a singer who accompanied herself on harp and piano. The family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1907, and at ten Leslie demonstrated his inclination toward show business by impersonating Chaplin, the sensation of 1914. He dropped out of high school to study dancing with a hoofer, taking whatever jobs he could get — soda jerking, boxing, hustling pool. Soon Hope was giving dancing lessons, and he drafted his girlfriend for an act that played midwestern vaudeville houses. Later, teamed with dancer George Byrne, he traveled the Keith circuit all the way to New York, by which time he had changed his name. Hope and Byrne found work around, but rarely in, Manhattan before splitting up.

Bob’s first substantial stage role, as a butler (Screeves) in the 1928 flop Ups-a-Daisy, came to nothing. Yet while emceeing in small out-of-the-way joints, he discovered his ability to get laughs. He had no material and little experience telling jokes, but his fearlessly snappy style and determination to win approval pleased customers. He charmed them. Realizing that charm could take him only so far, he scrambled for jokes, collecting them from magazines, books, and other performers. His break came not as a comedian but as the second lead in Jerome Kern’s Roberta. His easy ability to get laughs earned him rave notices, which led to other Broadway shows and offers to appear on radio and in film shorts.

Mitchell Leisen and Harlan Thompson, the director and producer of a forthcoming movie in The Big Broadcast series, caught Hope in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, in which he and Eve Arden sang “I Can’t Get Started.” Paramount had a similar love duet lined up for its picture but was hesitant to cast an unknown. After Jack Benny turned down the role, however, they went back to Hope, who was now wowing audiences with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman in Cole Porter’s Red, Hot and Blue! He had one prior commitment — Bob had signed a twenty-six-week contract to deliver monologues on The Rippling Rhythm Revue, a Woodbury soap program with bandleader Shep Fields. Paramount guaranteed him a transcontinental hookup enabling him to fulfill the contract.

* * *

While Dolores unpacked at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Bob impatiently left for the studio, where he knew nobody but Leisen and Thompson. When they showed him his song, Robin and Rainger’s “Thanks for the Memory,” he was disappointed to learn that it was a duet, with Shirley Ross, not a solo. He changed his mind when a rehearsal pianist played it; he knew the song was a sure-fire hit. Before filming began, Bob called Bing. Theirs was the sort of friendship that thrives on competition, as became evident in the key interests that seemed to bind them at the hip — golf and a brinkmanship approach to comedy. They had little else in common. As Dolores noted, “Bing loved to hunt and fish, and Bob wouldn’t be caught hunting or fishing anything but a golf ball. Bob had no interest in horses. They lived entirely different lives, but they respected each other and loved working together. And eventually they found they loved each other very much.” ⁴

Their millions of fans in the 1940s and 1950s, when Bing and Bob emerged as one of the most adored teams in show-business history, would have been astonished to learn that the love Dolores spoke of did not blossom fully until 1961, when the two families shared a castle in England during the filming of The Road to Hong Kong, the least successful entry in the Road series but the most important to their relationship. Prior to 1961 their friendship, although genuine, was largely professional. Grievances, petty or serious, were not acknowledged or discussed, and socializing was sporadic, in part because Bob remained slightly in awe of Bing and because Bing believed that actors’ chemistry ought to be saved for the set. Yet they worked together so often, they saw more of each other than many avowed buddies: seven Road pictures, the Victory Caravan, charity events, radio and television broadcasts, Bing’s cameos in Bob’s movies, endless rounds of publicly covered golf. Bing died just as Melville Shavelson completed the script for what would have been their eighth road trip, Road to the Fountain of Youth.

Dolores had known Bing before she met Bob, in Philadelphia in 1927, when she and Ginger Meehan worked in Honeymoon Lane. She next saw him in 1932, when she sang at New York’s Richmond Club and a columnist referred to her as the female Crosby. Bing and Dixie came by the club, and she told them that the comparison unnerved her. That was the year Bing and Bob first met near the Friars Club and shared the stage at the Capitol Theater. Bob and Dolores were married in 1933. In the summer of 1935, while Bing and Dixie vacationed in Saratoga, Bing ran into Bob at Paul White-man’s opening at the Riviera Club — their only encounter in the interim between the Capitol and the Hopes’ arrival in Hollywood.

Yet within a few weeks, Bob’s name was appearing in the columns as a Crosby crony. A Paramount publicist orchestrated the November golf match in which the loser was purportedly obliged to work a day as an unpaid stand-in for the winner. The newspapers went along. “Crosby, champion of the Lakeside Club, is the favorite. Hope, a former Broadway stage actor, is new to the movies. Little is known here of his golfing prowess,” wrote a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune, as if the match were a serious sporting event. ⁵ Hope carded an 84 to Bing’s three-over-par 73.

The studio was less successful in its attempts to remodel Bob’s face. Unlike Bing, who refused to consider ear surgery, Hope was actually willing to have his nose unsloped if required. Dolores talked him out of it. The nose issue vanished, along with his anonymity west of the Mississippi, when The Big Broadcast of 1938 opened. “Thanks for the Memory” was greatly admired (though it did little for Shirley Ross); and Paramount’s advertising campaign, depicting the all-star cast in caricatured profiles, made Hope’s nose almost iconic. It remained only for Bing to call him Ski-nose — and Spoonface and Trout Snout and Ratchedhead and the Pepsodent Pinnochio, et al. — for a defect to be reassessed as a major asset.

Three months after the Woodbury series ended, Bob was added to the cast of Your Hollywood Parade, a Warner Bros. promotional program with emcee Dick Powell, sponsored by Lucky Strike and its intrusive despot, George Washington Hill, whom Hope remembered as constantly demanding more and more violins. It lasted only a few months, through March 1938. But that was time enough to draw national attention to Hope’s topical and leering one-liners and his fast, wisecracking delivery. Bob debuted as Bing’s guest on Kraft Music Hall in July, to promote his picture. Frank Woodruff, a J. Walter Thompson program director, called it “a very good show” but thought “Hope not quite at home in this set up.” ⁶ That remarkable evaluation may not have been completely off base; the show was little noticed, unlike Hope’s pas de deux with Bing two weeks later at Del Mar.

Bing invited Bob and Dolores to the track for the weekend. Dolores recalled of the August 6 clambake, “Bing was, naturally, master of ceremonies and he called Bob up and they started fooling, doing these same funny little things that they did at the Capitol when they were there. And somebody from Paramount said, They’re like cream and sugar. They were just marvelous together, really, a natural.” ⁷ The executives at ringside included Paramount producers William LeBaron and Harlan Thompson. “So they went back to the studio,” Bob recalled, “and everybody said, ‘How can they work that good together? My God.’ They didn’t know that we had done it for two weeks at the Capitol. And they said, ‘We gotta put these guys in a picture.’” ⁸

Yet back in Hollywood, second-guessing tempered the initial enthusiasm. Bing was Paramount’s bread and butter; Bob was, the studio hoped, up-and-coming. When the front office saw prints of The Big Broadcast of 1938, it picked up his option and rushed him into a tepid Burns and Allen vehicle, College Swing. He fared no better in Give Me a Sailor or the desperately titled Thanks for the Memory, all rolled out that year. Confidence in the idea of teaming him with Bing waned. How much interest could be generated by a crooner and a comedian, or for that matter, any two men who were not united by stormy drama? Buddy pictures had not yet found a niche in Hollywood beyond Laurel and Hardy and Saturday-matinee cowboys and their sidekicks. In his memoir Bob credits Bing with getting the project rolling: “Not everyone knows how shrewd he is when it comes to the entertainment business. He instantly recognized the value of the Road pictures as a way of getting a spontaneous ad-libby type of humor. There were doubters in the studio who shook their heads and said, ‘Well… I don’t know.’ But Bing was an important star. They listened to him. He was right.” ⁹

Captains of industry, like politicians, often trust the opinions of others more than their own, most especially in show business, where the sine qua non of survival is someone else to blame. Lord and Thomas, the advertising agency that placed Hope in The Rippling Rhythm Revue and Your Hollywood Parade, was unable to secure him his own program until his success on the Lucky Strike show and reviews of his first picture convinced Pepsodent toothpaste, which was looking to replace the ratings-damaged — how times had changed! — Amos ‘n’ Andy. The thirty-minute Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope triumphed from the start, ruling its Tuesday-night time slot (and lasting defiantly through 1950). With guest stars and regulars — at first, Judy Garland, bandleader Skinnay Ennis, and comedian Jerry Colonna, who sang like a police siren and hailed Hope with a trademark phrase, “Greetings, Gate!” — the show was brisk and surprising, chiefly because of Hope’s timely one-liners, which were often aimed at Hollywood. The popularity of The Pepsodent Show, in turn, convinced Paramount that it was on the right track and propelled the search for a script to team Hope and Crosby.

Screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman — the duo behind Waikiki Wedding, Paris Honeymoon, and The Star Maker — were given the task of finding a suitable property. They did not have far to look. After briefly considering a spurned Burns and Allen project called Havana, they turned to their own rusting script based on a story by Harry Hervey, a veteran of exotic intrigue (he plotted von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express). Initially adapted as a project for Bing in 1936, titled Follow the Sun, it was revised in 1938 by Butler and Ken Englund, to tell the story of Josh Mallon, heir to the Mallon Mercantile fortune, and his pal Ace Winthrop, the son of a horse thief, who board a ship and find themselves bound for Indochina. With Hartman on board, the script was retooled, retitled (Road to Mandalay), and offered as a knockabout escapade for Jack Oakie and Fred Mac Murray, who had clicked in a couple of 1936 films. ¹⁰ They or their agents turned it down. Now Hartman and Butler re-revised it for Bing and Bob, tricking it up with gags and places to insert songs.

To underscore a rivalry, it was decided to situate one woman between them. The studio chose Dorothy Lamour, formerly Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton of New Orleans, where she was born in 1914. When her parents divorced, her devoted mother married Clarence Lambour just long enough for Dorothy (as she was known) to take his name. At sixteen Dorothy won a beauty contest, and she and her mother relocated to Chicago, where she operated a hotel elevator and looked for a place to sing. A hotel acquaintance set her up with Everett Crosby, who took her to hear his brother Bing and introduced her to bandleader Herbie Kay, who hired and married her. On a tour in Texas, she showed Herbie a poster that providentially dropped the b from Lambour. Dorothy decided to keep it that way. She was soon hired to sing at New York’s Stork Club and the Greenwich Village boîte, One Fifth Avenue, where her repeat customers included Bob Hope. Paramount gave her a screen test, and she made a splash in 1936, as The Jungle Princess, draped in a strip of cloth called a sarong. She appeared that year on Kraft Music Hall. After a few more tropical epics — famously, John Ford’s The Hurricane — Lamour and sarong were all but synonymous.

Lamour liked to tell a story about leaving the Paramount commissary, laughing to herself, and running into two writers who asked her what was so funny. She told them she had just seen Bing and Bob hamming it up at a table, and said she would love to make a picture with them. Whether or not the incident had anything to do with her recruitment, the studio could not have dreamed up anyone more appropriate. Her beauty suggested a sultry innocence, nothing too serious; she could handle a melody, so there was no need to overdub her vocals; and she was a genuine mainstay of the very type of adventure movie they were about to burlesque.

In April 1939, while Bing was shooting The Star Maker, the studio announced that as soon as that film wrapped, he, Hope, and Lamour would begin work on Harlan Thompson’s production of Road to Mandalay. Filming was delayed until late in the year, by which time the title had evolved into Road to Singapore, ostensibly because that locale was considered more treacherous-sounding. ¹¹ Perhaps the studio also wanted to deflect an association with Kipling, one of whose Barrack-Room Ballads, “On the Road to Mandalay,” had been adapted (by Oley Speaks) as a popular song in 1907. The Burmese city had been appropriated for subsequent songs — Bing recorded “Rose of Mandalay” — which diluted any menace associated with the place. Kipling created the genre mocked by the Road movies, with his imperialist adventures set in United Kingdom protectorates, notably his short story “The Man Who Would Be King.” A measure of the Road series’ extended influence is John Huston’s enthralling 1975 film of Kipling’s tale, ripe with comical “ad-libby” colloquies between Sean Connery and Michael Caine that were inspired by Bing and Bob, not Kipling. The scene in which their laughter causes a lifesaving avalanche might have worked in Road to Utopia.

The magic of the Road movies has little to do with parody, romance, or music, though all three are essential to the blend. Rather, it stems from the interaction between the protagonists and what they bring out in each other. Bing was never more comically broad and inventive than with Bob; Bob was never more human and credible than with Bing. They are opposites who attract. Hope is brash and vain, yet cowardly and insecure. Crosby is romantic and self-possessed, yet manipulative and callous. Hope is hyperbole, Crosby understatement; Hope is the dupe, Crosby the duper. No one had the faintest notion of a series as Road to Singapore went before the cameras in early October, but everyone could see that it was not going to be an ordinary production.

Paramount assigned Victor Schertzinger to direct, an odd but salutary decision. He began as a concert violinist and entered Hollywood in 1916, writing the score for Thomas Ince’s Civilization. Within a year he had a duel career as a prolific director and songwriter; his One Night of Love, a hit picture and an even bigger hit song, in 1934, provided Grace Moore with her greatest success. By then he had directed dozens of films, and many more followed — not least a handsome adaptation of The Mikado. Schertzinger got the job because of his association with musicals, not farce. (His friendship with the Crosbys — he served as best man at Everett’s wedding to Florence George — could not have hurt.) Today, however, he is remembered almost entirely for his work during the two years preceding his death, in 1941: four pictures with Bing, including the first two Road ventures, and one with Lamour, The Fleet’s In, for which he wrote his most durable songs, “I Remember You” and “Tangerine.” Johnny Burke was retained to write the lyrics, but this time he wrote three songs with Jimmy Monaco and two with the director.

In the weeks before he was to begin the picture and resume duties at KMH, Bing took a break. He traveled by train to New York, chiefly to play golf at Meadowbrook with his friend Harvey Shaeffer. This was the trip when he bet Shaeffer $100 he could— anonymously — dive from the fifty-foot board at Billy Rose’s Aquacade Revue, collecting sixty-five dollars because he aborted the dive midair and landed feet first.

Dixie was relieved to have Bing out of town. The twins required tonsillectomies, and not wishing to distress him with recollections of Eddie Lang, she admitted them secretly to the Good Samaritan Hospital after his departure. The procedures went off without a hitch. Bing’s one professional obligation in New York was to record two songs — at Jack Kapp’s request — with the Andrews Sisters, a relatively new act Jack’s brother Dave had signed to the label. A year earlier the Andrews Sisters had recorded one of Decca’s all-time megahits, the English-language version of the Yiddish song “Bei Mir Bist du Schôn.”

Although Bing’s collaboration with the Andrews Sisters would stall for the next four years, it ultimately meant as much to his recording career as the Hope connection meant to his screen and radio careers in the same period. Call him lucky? The nuns of the order of the Poor Clares must have been working overtime. To him, it was just another session, one of Jack’s ideas, which he agreed to with some reluctance. Incredibly, he did not see the material until he arrived at the Fifty-seventh Street studio — early, as usual, for the 8:00 A.M.session. He was perched on the piano when the sisters, shivering with doubt, walked through the door.

They had become singers because of Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters, whose Woodbury broadcasts they listened to with the rapt attention Bing brought to the jazz records he and Al Rinker copied at Bailey’s. Maxene Andrews recalled: “My sister LaVerne had a fantastic musical memory. Her great love, outside of loving Bing, was the Boswell Sisters. LaVerne would very patiently teach Patty and me the intricate parts of their arrangements. But in our minds, Bing and the Boswell Sisters came together. You didn’t think of one without thinking of the other. So when Mr. Jack Kapp called us into his office and said, How would you like to record with Bing Crosby? — well, do you know what that felt like?” ¹² Kapp told them they could choose one tune, but the other would have to be “Ciribiribin,” an English-language version of a turn-of-the-century Neapolitan folk song — introduced, coincidentally, by Grace Moore in Victor Schertzinger’s One Night of Love.

After meeting with Kapp, they and arranger Vic Schoen repaired to the small apartment of Lou Levy, a music publisher and, subsequently, their manager and Maxene’s husband. “So we started to talk about it, all the nervous talk,” Maxene remembered: “How can we record with him? What’s he going to sing? How is he to sing with? What are we going to do? We don’t read music. It went back and forth.” ¹³ Vic wrote vocal and small-band arrangements for “Ciribiribin” and a novelty number, “Yodelin’ Jive,” and Dave Kapp hired Joe Venuti to lead a swinging little band with Bobby Hackett on trumpet.

“We walked into the studio and Bing never said a word. So we didn’t know whether we should say hello to him. We didn’t know anything.” Maxene did observe that his hat was slightly back on his head, but she did not yet know what that meant. Years later it was the first thing she looked for: “He could be very moody, but we could always tell what mood he was in because I never saw him without his hat in all the years I knew him. When he’d walk in, if his hat was square on his head, you didn’t kid around with him. But if it was back a little bit, sort of jaunty-like, then you could have a ball.” ¹⁴

Bing called Vic over and asked him to play the melodies, which he did with a one-finger demonstration at the piano. “My sister Pat sang along with him. From that point on, Bing always said, when we went in to a recording date, ‘Hey, Patty, come over here and show me what we’re going to sing.’ But at that time, we walked in and we had a sheet of paper, just one sheet, with all the lyrics of the songs typed out, and that’s all he got.” ¹⁵ The four singers shared the same mike — the sisters looking straight at him, mesmerized, and Bing singing away from them, in profile.

The date was over in a flash, and the women ran. “We flew out of that studio,” Maxene said. “I don’t think we said good-bye to anybody. We had been so uncomfortable and we were so nervous that maybe the record wouldn’t be good, and maybe we felt we weren’t good enough. We talked about it and we thought, you know, that would be the one record we’d make with Bing, but at least in our career we could say we recorded with Bing Crosby.” ¹⁶ The 78 was a two-sided hit.

While they fretted, Bing said to Jack, or so Jack reported to the sisters, “I will record with them anytime they want. They can pick the material. I want nothing to do with it. I just want to sing with them.” ¹⁷ In truth, he did go on to record nearly four dozen numbers with the sisters, as well as duets with Patty when she went out on her own; and Schoen did select and arrange most of the material. A third of their recordings reached Billboard’s top ten, and four — “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and “Jingle Bells,” 1943; “Don’t Fence Me In,” 1944; “South America, Take It Away,” 1946 — were certified with gold discs as million sellers.

Ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-four, the Andrews Sisters grew up in Minneapolis and apprenticed in vaudeville. They had little of the southern sass, improvisational bravado, or casual swing of the Boswells. But they had pizzazz, a unison pep that drove and inspired Bing. No personal connection ever developed. Although he presented them on the radio and used them in one film (the 1948 Road to Rio), the partnership existed almost exclusively on records, the most copious and commercially productive vocal alliance of his recording career. Their work is overall less compelling than entertaining, but the best of it is highly entertaining. The first two collaborations betray no nervousness or lack of preparation — though, to be sure, the charts did not require much in the way of interplay. Bing bends “Ciribiribin” to his rhythmic will, chimes with the girls, and sings the reprise in Italian. For good measure, Joe Venuti wails a sixteen-bar solo. Nothing could be done with the banal “Yodelin’ Jive” except soldier through it. Patty noted a physical facet of Bing’s time: “He had a thing with his foot. He would move it right to left, right to left, and so on —just like a metronome.” ¹⁸

Schertzinger was blindsided his first day on the set. He called for action, and the actors came to life, but much of the dialogue was strangely alien. “Victor was a nice fellow and he’d directed some fine pictures, but he’d had little experience with low comedy,” Bing states in his memoir. “For a couple of days when Hope and I tore freewheeling into a scene, ad-libbing and violating all of the accepted rules of movie-making, Schertzinger stole bewildered looks at his script, then leafed rapidly through it searching for the lines we were saying.” ¹⁹ He complained in the beginning but conceded that he had something special after he noticed the usually indifferent crew beaming. To the astonishment of his cameraman, William Mellor, Schertzinger relied more and more on master shots, often first takes. “After a couple of days,” Hope recalled, “he went to the commissary, to the table where we ate, and said, ‘You know, I know how to say start with these guys, but I don’t know when to say stop, because they ad-lib all the time.’ We did so much ad-libbing and kidding around, it was so different for the Road pictures, that everybody got a big kick out of it.” ²⁰

Bing was in particularly good humor after the first week of shooting and traveled to San Francisco for the weekend. On Sunday afternoon he sang two free sets at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, backed by George Olsen’s band. The announcement of his participation drew a record crowd of 187,730, causing such widespread congestion on the island that the roads were blocked and Bing had to be brought in by yacht.

Back on the set, Schertzinger received another wake-up call while they filmed a scene in which Bing and Bob crawl into bed. Bing would not remove his cap. The director became indignant as Bing coolly explained that he was not going to get up and retrieve the toupee; it was the last scene of the day and the golf course beckoned. He advised him to shoot the scene. Schertzinger decided on a showdown and sent a messenger to the front office, demanding arbitration. He learned where the power at Paramount rested when two executives rushed over to the recumbent Bing and asked, “Is everything all right, Bing? Do you need anything?” ²¹ Not a thing, Bing told them, everything was just fine. The executives left without a word to Schertzinger, who resumed filming, though the scene was later reshot.

Hope, bowled over by Bing’s savoir faire, to say nothing of his muscle, was certain that the hat stayed in the picture — much as Bing believed that Carole Lombard’s kicking-and-punching tantrum remained in We’re Not Dressing. But the scene in question finds him wearing his hairpiece. David Butler recalled a similar incident during the filming of Road to Morocco (the third journey), but without an executive summons. “Hell, Bing, you can’t wear a hat to bed,” he said of a turban. Bing said, “Sure I can, they wear ‘em all the time out there.” ²² That scene was also cut or reshot. Bing wears a copious assortment of hats throughout the series; in Road to Utopia he wears one in all but five or six scenes, perhaps a record. They served a purpose beyond relieving him of the toupee; they also made it easier to disguise the use of stunt doubles.

The writers were less amused by the antics. Hartman visited the set when the boys were in full throttle. He was visibly upset, and Hope baited him. “If you recognize anything of yours, yell ‘Bingo!’” he shouted. ²³ Hartman shot back, “Shut up, or I’ll put you back in the trunk” — meaning the script, on which the actors, however cocky, were ultimately dependent. “That was the truth,” said Melville Shavelson, who later collaborated with Hartman on many of Hope’s and Danny Kaye’s films, while contributing — “incognito, no credit, not very much money” — lines to the Roadpictures. “Basically, [Bing and Bob] did not change characters or anything else. That was the invention of Don Hartman and Frank Butler and continued through the other pictures.” ²⁴ Hartman complained about line changes to the producer. Bing claimed that he and Bob sneaked up to the projection room where rushes were viewed that evening, and when they heard the top brass laughing, they knew they were safe.

Lamour contributed to the ad-libbing legend, describing herself as stymied by their banter, struggling to “find the openings.” ²⁵ Hope recalled her pleading, “Why don’t you give me something to say?” and his retort, “Just twirl your sarong, you’ll be all right.” ²⁶ Told that Bing’s secretary on Road to Utopia said they gave Dottie a hard time, he laughed: “No, we never gave her a hard time. We gave her a good time. She was in every picture.” ²⁷ Lamour developed a sense of humor about it, though one can imagine the ratio of humor to anger at work when, after a scene in which they splashed soapsuds on her, she followed them into the commissary and dumped an entire canister of suds on their heads. The diners were amused, she wrote in her autobiography, “but the director wasn’t too thrilled. It meant that our hair, along with all our clothes, had to be dried again.” ²⁸

Her anger prevailed when it came to Anthony Quinn, playing her unsavory dance partner, Caesar. “Bing got me out of some embarrassing spots,” he conceded. “He always defended me.” ²⁹ The main incident concerned a routine with Dorothy that required him to snap a whip around her waist and reel her in for a snug dance. The great character actor Akim Tamiroff, though not in the cast, was accomplished with a bullwhip and instructed him. For safety’s sake, however, Quinn cracked the whip a foot away from her; then it was wrapped in place and he pulled her close. When they played the scene, she shoved him away and shouted, “I can’t dance with him. The son of a bitch has a hard-on!” ³⁰ Everyone on the set froze. Quinn did not feel he could respond: “I was just a small player then. I didn’t dare.” ³¹ The tension dissolved into laughter after Bing piped up: “You should be happy you can give someone a hard-on, Dottie.” ³²

Lamour once insisted, “After the first Road film, I never studied dialogue. Never. I’d wait to get on the set to see what they were planning. I was the happiest and highest-paid straight woman in the business.” ³³ Yet she cannot have been pleased by her abrupt demotion — second-billed in Road to Singapore, third-billed in Road to Zanzibar and ever after. Her roles were increasingly designed to support the boys. Even in Singapore she does not arrive until twenty minutes into the story. By the fifth trek, Road to Rio, Bing and Bob were able to force Paramount into a three-way split, and she never forgave them for not cutting her in. But by then her career had fallen apart. The Road movies were all she had, though she remained a mandatory ingredient. When Bing and Bob made the mistake of reducing her participation in The Road to Hong Kong to a glorified cameo, audiences bristled, especially as she was replaced by the dreary Joan Collins. Lamour’s predicament is implied in a publicity photograph taken during the shooting of Road to Singapore. All three are dressed in striped caftans, laughing. Dottie, in the center and holding a sitar, is doubled over with hilarity. On each side, looking no less merry, Bing and Bob lock eyes over her head, as if she weren’t there.

What each of them had that she lacked was a team of kibitzing writers. In truth, little of the ad-libbing was genuinely ad-libbed. For decades the scriptwriters privately seethed less at sabotage than at the notion that their work was improvised by actors. In later years Bing and Bob explained their peculiar ideas of ad-libbing. “You see, I just started my radio show,” Bob said, “and I had the greatest staff of writers, all young people like [Norman] Panama and [Melvin] Frank, who had just gotten out of college in Chicago; [Melville] Shavelson and [Milt] Josefsberg, two more young guys, brilliant. I had about six or seven, and I used to give them the Road scripts, and they’d make notes on the margins, so and so and so and so, and I’d go into Bing’s dressing room in the morning and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ and he would say, ‘Oh, that’s funny, that’s funny.’And so we’d ad-lib these things into the pictures and people would fall down laughing.” ³⁴

The biggest laughs came when Hope neglected to visit Bing’s dressing room, which was the case most of the time. The onscreen battle between Bing’s Josh Mallon and Bob’s Ace Lannigan (changed from Winthrop) over Lamour’s Mima was a Lindy hop compared to the offscreen competition for last laughs, which included Road-like double crosses. For example, Bob would have a writer provide Bing with a comic line on the QT, which Bing would happily deliver, expecting to stump Bob, not knowing that the writer had already given Hope a better rejoinder. Dolores Hope recalled, “There was a natural rivalry, which was a very healthy one, and what you see in the Road pictures is Bob and Bing as they really were. Typical of their personalities and everything about them — Bob low man on the totem pole most of the time. I think the Road pictures capture a great deal of their personalities.” ³⁵

Josh and Ace were a canny amalgam of Bing and Bob, as their friends knew them, and the manipulating partner and naive stooge invented by Butler and Hartman. The two men raced on and off the set to the writers — never those who received screen credit — for punch-ups and reassurances, attempting to outdo each other, much like the characters they played. To each of them, a writer would counsel, When Bob says this, you say that, or, When Bing does that, you do this. The rivalry invigorated them. “I heard they didn’t pal around so much outside their work, and yet they seemed like the greatest friends on the set,” Quinn recalled. “I must say Bob Hope was very challenging to him, because Bing was very fast on his feet and Bob had to keep him off balance constantly with his ad-libs. But Bing’s great asset was the facility of his mind, really quite remarkable.” ³⁶Shavelson noted, “Bob obviously wanted to be as sharp as he could, so he and Bing and the writers would go off the set and then come back and start off with a line that nobody knew where in the world it came from, and build from there.” ³⁷

“We thought it would lend spirit, you know, to the piece if we wouldn’t tell one another exactly what we were going to say,” Bing said in 1976. “You had to stick to the script in a general way, just keep the story line intact, but I would always prepare a few snappers, and of course he would have a sheath of snappers ready for me, and [Lamour] would be standing there in the middle, trying to get in something, crawl in somewhere. I think it helped the pictures and gave them an ad-libbed flavor… like a couple of hall-room boys clowning around. The writers didn’t like this too much. They were good-natured about it, I guess, but once in a while they put in an objection that we were tinkering with the story too much.” ³⁸ In another 1976 conversation, he said most of the carrying-on took place during the first two films. Told by a fan that “each movie, as a whole, seemed like an ad-lib,” Bing responded: “That was the brilliance of the entire enterprise. By the second or definitely the third Road, our styles had become so finely — I don’t want to say chiseled, but it does seem to apply — that the extremely superlative writers were able to create dialogue that appeared to be improvised off the cuff, but it wasn’t. Most of that material was completely scripted…. Of course, every now and then, we’d tear off a leaf of our own.” ³⁹

Bing protested too much. According to Paramount files, Road to Morocco was filled with bad ad-libbing, which Buddy DeSylva, who had become chief of production, ordered cut. Generally, the films are so seamless, it is difficult to believe that any genuine ad-libs survive beyond under-the-breath comments, like one in Road to Zanzibar, when Bing, counting a parcel of bonds, drops a reference to treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau. For one of his most memorable authentic ad-libs, in Morocco, he played straight man to a camel that spat across the set directly into Bob’s eye. Bob staggered into camera view, but before he could howl or David Butler could stop action, Bing merrily patted the camel’s flank and said, “Good girl, good girl.” Butler kept the whole incident in the film.

A comparison of Road to Morocco scripts, the margins offering alternative lines and jokes, reveals the kinds of written “ad-libs” that survived. Epigrammatic they are not. Several punch-ups are accomplished with a few added words. Bob’s character was intended to say, “You mean you’re thinkin’ of eatin’ me?”; instead, he says, “You mean you’d eat me? Without vegetables?” ⁴⁰ Bing’s character says of Bob’s departed aunt Lucy, “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” to which Bob was supposed to say, “Not Aunt Lucy”; instead he says, “Not Aunt Lucy. She was a Republican.” Sometimes each gets a zinger to replace dull dialogue, as when they are lost in the desert: “Any idea where we are?” “Unh-huh” was changed to (Bob:) “This must be the place where they empty all the old hourglasses”; (Bing) “I think this is what’s left after I clean my spinach.” One can imagine a writer secretly, as if touting a hot tip at the track, passing to Bing an improvement on (to Bob) “Why, you slimy, double-crossin’ eel” and (to Lamour) “We’ve been together since we were kids.” Instead, Bing calls Hope a “dirty, underhanded, sickle-snoot” and tells Lamour, “We were kids together, in the same class for years — till I got promoted.”

At other times Bing simply translates phrases into Bingese, as he often did (“Who’s that cute little nipper?” becomes “Who is that headstrong, impetuous boy?”). Butler admired Bing’s feeling for language, describing him as a “conversational” actor. ⁴¹ He told a reporter that Bing never read a script verbatim, that he added, deleted, and changed words to find a better fit. Butler gave him free rein, arguing, “You get some damn good stuff that way. You can always cut afterwards.” ⁴² Reviewing Road to Zanzibar in The New Republic, Otis Ferguson enlarged on that aspect of his ability. Noting Bing’s facile lingo, he wrote, “I believe him to be the first artist in popular expression today — not just slang for its own newness or to be different, but the kind of speech that is a kind of folk poetry, with its words of concision, edge, and cocky elegance fitted to speech rhythms, so that they may run free to the point, musical and easy.” ⁴³

Mort Lachman, a longtime Hope writer, began contributing to the series with the fourth outing, Road to Utopia, and traced the illusory ad-libbing to the way Bob and Bing interacted on radio. “Let me explain how it was done,” he said:

We did the same thing in movies as in radio. We would do a basic script and we would play it to the audience, on Monday night, a half-hour rehearsal. Then we would meet afterwards, and rewrite all night, and then on Tuesday, we would do it again, live, on the air. Bob liked a little extra, so we would give him a few asides, a few changes, a few things that belonged to him that Bing did not see. Bing would come with his writers — Bill Morrow, for one — who gave him things. Now on the movie set the same thing would happen. They would go through rehearsal and Hope would say, “You know I could use something here, I could use something there,” and we’d all write some jokes to go there. Then he’d pick the ones he wanted…. You have to understand they were playing to the guys on the set. What stayed in and didn’t stay in depended on what got a laugh from the crew. The cameramen broke up, the lighting men broke up, the carpenters broke up, set people broke up, sound people broke up. So the attitudes in the Road pictures were different than in most movies. And that led to the breaking of the fourth wall, because they started working directly to the audience. ⁴⁴

The writer — if one could call him that, since he never actually wrote anything — most often found in the crossfire of the Crosby-Hope food fight for nearly fifteen years was Barney Dean, the most fabled member of Bing’s extended family, beloved by all, as perhaps only a jester can be. He was the least likely figure in the inner circle: a short, round, shiny-headed, Jewish gnome with bright blue eyes. “A pixie in human form,” ⁴⁵ wrote Bing, comparing him to the seven dwarfs — “not Grumpy,” he stipulated, though his facial expression was so intense that he was sometimes called Cement Head. Reporters did not know what to make of him, because out of fierce loyalty to his benefactors, he had one answer to any question about Bing or Bob. He would put his right forefinger to his forehead, ponder deeply, and say, as if imparting privileged information, “Gee, I can’t remember now.” ⁴⁶

Barney Fradkin was born in Russia, in 1904, and came through Ellis Island to Brooklyn, at twelve. In 1920, after learning a time step, he got a job in vaudeville with Eddie Leonard’s minstrels; “I was the guy that got the sand from the shuffle dance because I had the least talent,” he told Barry Ulanov. ⁴⁷ He told Shavelson he was the “world’s youngest whirlwind dancer,” whatever that meant. ⁴⁸ Bing remembered he shuffled poorly and could not tap at all. Yet he toured in vaudeville for a decade before teaming up with dancer Sid Tar-radasch. Barney convinced his partner that Fradkin and Tarradasch would never fit on a marquee, so — eyeing silent film actress Priscilla Dean’s name on a billboard — they renamed themselves the Dean Brothers. They fared no better. Barney went into a short-lived comedy act and found stand-in work in Hollywood. By early winter 1939 he was peddling Christmas cards. Paramount allowed him to push his wares on the lot. When he went over to the stage where Road to Singapore was filming, Bing and Bob were delighted to see him.

Barney had shared vaudeville bills with Bob and was present, in 1931, when the Friars saluted Bing. While reminiscing, Dean took out of his pocket a card from a penny weight machine promising he would never lose his fortune. He said, “If I go back to my hotel and find they locked me out of my room, I’m going to sue the weighing machine people.” ⁴⁹ They returned to the set to shoot the “Sweet Potato Piper” number, involving dance breaks. Barney suggested a step, and they incorporated it into the routine. Bob recalled: “I said to Bing, ‘This guy’s too funny. He could help us with a lot of lines. Why don’t we get him on the set?’ So Bing called the assistant director and said, ‘Tell them I want to put Barney Dean on for writing here.’About five people came out from the front office to check, you know. They were so thrilled to be talking to Bing, they never even mentioned Barney Dean, and Barney went on working with us until he died. Every scene, we’d discuss it, and he would come up with a couple lines.” ⁵⁰

Barney demurred, for the most part. They devised the gags by themselves, he said, then gave him the credit. But he was always around, trading off between Bob’s pictures and Bing’s and aiding both when they collaborated. For a number of years, they arranged for Barney’s salary to be figured into the budget of each movie. In the Road to Morocco financial report, his contribution is described as twenty-nine bits and gags; a few are detailed, the rest summed up as “And several pieces of business which are very difficult to explain.” ⁵¹ After the war, concerned about his future, Bing and Bob asked Paramount to install Barney permanently on the writing staff. Paramount did not decline outright but dragged its heels.

Basil Grillo, who had just been hired to supervise Bing’s business interests, was inadvertently caught up in the dispute over Barney’s job. At that time he hardly knew Bing and needed him to sign some checks. Bing told him to meet him in his dressing room the next morning at nine but never showed. Instead, Leo Lynn came and told Basil to meet Bing in his dressing area on the set. It was early 1946, and they were filming Welcome Stranger. “I go out there and they’re shooting this big production number, ‘Country Style,’ with maybe a hundred dancers. And all of a sudden Bing comes off the set, and I think he’s coming to the dressing room. But he never shows. Now I’m really hurt. I’m taking all of this very personally, because I am sure he doesn’t like me.” ⁵² Bing disappeared for more than an hour, then returned to the set as Basil silently composed his resignation speech. “He saunters in and they get ready to shoot when he says, ‘Wait a minute, one of my men is here, I have to see him.’A hundred extras are waiting and Bing comes over to the dressing room. He greets me like I was his long-lost son, puts on that damn Irish charm — could charm you right out of your socks. And he sat down, signed the checks, chitchatted, and so on, wasting time. None of this makes sense to me at all.” ⁵³

Leo Lynn eventually explained it to him. “This particular day,” Grillo learned, “Bing and Bob went into the front office as soon as they got in the studio, and said, ‘Look, we want Barney Dean to have a contract, and we want it now. And we feel very bad, we feel very ill about this whole thing and we’re not going to be able to do much work until Barney gets a contract.’ “ Bing had been stalling everyone all day — his idea of a work stoppage. Bob, also filming on the lot, did the same thing. “At two o’clock that afternoon,” Basil said, “Barney had his contract signed, sealed, and delivered. That’s the kind of power they had, though they never really used it except as a last resort.” ⁵⁴

Shortly afterward, Bing put Grillo in charge of Bing Crosby Enterprises dictating a letter to that effect to his staff; no deals of any kind could be consummated without Basil’s personal approval. But Grillo continued to feel like an interloper until he went to see Bing one day in his dressing room. “I’m sitting there, waiting for Bing, and Barney comes in. He was a real nice little guy, but he didn’t know that anybody in the world existed other than Bing and Bob. Everybody else he called Major. He says, ‘Hi Bas, how are you today?’ Well, geez, I nearly fell off my chair. From Barney, this was real recognition. It meant I was accepted.” ⁵⁵

Songwriter Johnny Lange recalled a number he wrote for Walt Disney’s Song of the South (“Uncle Remus Said”): “Bing sang it several weeks in a row on his show, because I put the name Barney in the song. I drove Barney once to see the Ritz Brothers so he could sell postcards. Not long after that Bing and Bob Hope made a job for him at Paramount and he was making five hundred dollars a week.” ⁵⁶ Gary Crosby recalled Barney sitting off to the side of the set as the scenes were blocked. “After you block, you step out to get your makeup fixed while the lighting men light the thing and there’s about a twenty- or thirty-minute period there, and the old man and Hope would go over to Barney and say, ‘Give us something to make this thing better.’ So Barney threw lines to them. Then they come back and the director would say, ‘Roll ‘em,’ and the dialogue would be different from what they had just rehearsed. Barney was a sweet guy. Dad loved Barney Dean to death. He was at our house all the time.” ⁵⁷

Bing’s aversion to hospitals and funerals, evident after Eddie Lang’s death and more pronounced after the media circus attending Dixie’s, was absolute. His friends accepted his detachment as characteristic. He was consistent, demanding that his own funeral be held privately and secretively, before the cock crowed. So while some people groused, few were surprised that he did not visit Barney in the hospital, where he died of cancer in 1954. Barney’s death, two years after Dixie’s, was hard on Bing, but his way of acknowledging it was typical, a fitting gesture that — mutual friends agreed — Barney would have relished. Within weeks of the burial, Bing was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on Person to Person, a popular television program that specialized in fake candor, with Murrow sitting in the studio, asking prearranged questions of famous people who were filmed in their homes.

As Bing’s segment concluded, Murrow said, “Bing, thanks for letting us come visit you tonight….” Bing interrupted him. “Wait a minute, you’re not gonna get away. I have something else I want to show you. Don’t take off. This is really my pride and joy.” He strode into the hallway, as another camera picked him up, and, standing before a huge painting, said, breathlessly and without garbling a word:

Everyone has something in their home that they really like to go into rhapsodies about. This is a canvas by Sir Alfred Munnings, who was the head of the British Royal Academy for years. He’s considered the finest painter of the English country life and country scene. It represents the hunting scene and it recalls a very amusing story to me. Barney Dean, the late Barney Dean, the beloved gag writer who worked for us for so many years. We were having a party here. It was getting late-ish, four-ish or so. Just a few stragglers out in the hall, two or three people, you know how they like to dawdle at a party, hate to say good night. And Barney was looking up at the picture sort of ruminatively and I said, ‘Barney, what’s on your mind?’ Barney was from New York, Brooklyn, never left the pavement, never been off the bricks in his life, and he looked at the picture and said, ‘How come we never do this no more?’ Ed, I know you’re in a hurry. You’ve got a time factor back there in television that you’re fighting all the time, so I want to say good night to you. ⁵⁸

Another remembrance was inserted two years later into High Society, when Trummy Young, the trombonist in Louis Armstrong’s band, mutters, as they approach C. K. Dexter-Haven’s mansion, “I forgot my library card.” Barney made the crack when Bing brought him to a New Year’s Eve party at Winthrop Rockefeller’s estate in Tarrytown, as he recounts in his autobiography (Barney makes an early appearance, page two). Later at that same affair, as they stood unrecognized — Bing wasn’t wearing his hairpiece — on a gallery watching an indoor tennis game, a reveler asked them, “Has anyone seen Millicent?” Barney offered, “Maybe she’s upstairs playing polo.” ⁵⁹

Barney Dean stories, like those told of comedians Groucho Marx, Joe Frisco, W. C. Fields, or Phil Harris, became part of the currency of Hollywood wit. Skitch Henderson, the pianist whose career Bing launched when he made him a regular on his 1946 radio show, was present for one of Barney’s most frequently cited one-liners. “There was a coffee shop across Hollywood Boulevard and all of us would go — Bing, the writers, Barney, of course. And the Hollywood cops suddenly decided they didn’t want any jaywalking on Hollywood Boulevard. So we all cross the street, about five of us, and a cop strides up to us and puts his shoulder over Barney Dean, and before the cop can say a word, Barney asks, ‘How fast was I going officer?’” ⁶⁰

“I loved that man,” Eddie Bracken said. “He was great. We were doing a picture and a horse stepped on his toe. The first thing a normal person would say is ‘Ow!’ or scream. Barney turned around, looked at the horse, and said, ‘Jew hater.’” ⁶¹ The picture was Para-mount’s wartime flag-waver, Star Spangled Rhythm, in which Bing and Bob also appear. Barney showed up in Variety Girl, Duffy’s Tavern, and Thanks for the Memory — in all, two pictures with Bing and Bob, one with Bing, one with Bob. He is himself the subject of a punch line in Road to Zanzibar: Bob complains that he wants to return to the United States, and Bing says, “Yeah, you’ll wind up in Barney Dean’s Beanery, blowing up bloodwurst,” which doubled as a joke about Bing’s bu-bu-bu bs.

“There were nine million writers on the set, and all Bing or Bob wanted to talk to was Barney,” Mort Lachman recalled. “You know what they were jealous of? They were jealous of Barney’s affection.” ⁶² “He was their lucky charm,” Shavelson said. “They had to have Barney around, and he was such a nice guy. Bing was going to New York once, so he said to Barney, ‘Can I do anything for you?’ Barney says, ‘Yeah, go up to One hundred and twenty-first Street and so-and-so, the big building on the corner; you go to the thirteenth floor, ring the bell for Mrs. Rosenzweig. She’ll come to the door, she’s a nice lady. Give her five thousand dollars.’ Bing asks why. Barney says, ‘She’s my mother.’ Barney was the kind of guy who gave the head of the studio, Buddy DeSylva, a gold watch, and he had engraved on it, ‘This is a lot of shit, but when you don’t have any talent, you have to do these things.’” ⁶³

“Barney didn’t have a lot of confidence with women,” Rory Burke, Johnny’s daughter, recalled. ⁶⁴ After Jimmy Van Heusen joined the inner circle as Burke’s partner, he took it upon himself to fix up Barney. A bachelor of legendary appetites and connections, Van Heusen, a licensed pilot, was once presented with an airplane by one of Hollywood’s top madams. “They would go whoring,” Rory recalled. “I really should not have been hearing these things, but we had big ears and we’d kind of listen around the corners. But they couldn’t talk about it when Bing was around; he wouldn’t have liked that. Not at all. Bing was something of a gentleman in that respect. He might have gone along with them, but he wouldn’t be talking about it. Everybody had their part in looking out for Barney.” ⁶⁵ Barney called his protectors the hoodlum gentlemen, and with Bing and Bob occupying different social circles, he became a tether between them.

But there was a dark side to the friendship. Antisemitism was rife, and Bing occasionally received hate mail, calling him a “Jew lover. “ Rory Burke remembered Bing reading aloud one letter after the war, which said all the Jews should be gassed. Barney said, “Well, that’s one way to handle us.” ⁶⁶ Intolerance was a bond between them, because anti-Catholic hatred was also rampant. Rory recalled that before she and her siblings were sent to parochial schools, their father cautioned them not to tell anyone they were Catholic.

Barry Ulanov grew smitten with Barney while writing his book about Bing in 1948, invoking Etienne Gilson and Saint Augustine in his attempt to describe “the ‘cry’ and the ‘clamor’ of Barney’s heart.” He concluded, “It is no mere coincidence that this little Russian Jewish dancer with four steps should be such a close associate of the American Catholic singer.” ⁶⁷ Fifty years later he continued to ruminate about the relationship. “He was the jester, but there was a sour note, a pathos — if not tragic, then at least pathetic — that reinforces my understanding of Bing’s irony. Bing never freed himself from the fear that the source of his gift would dry up. There was always some small element of anxiety that fed into his sense of irony, which I have persuaded myself is his great talent — not just an amiable standing aside, but something better than that, more thoughtful than that. You’d never think of Barney Dean and Bing Crosby as a natural connection — so different in their backgrounds, in their attitudes. But I think Bing saw in him his shadow. Things Bing could not quite acknowledge, he could accept in Barney, some of whose stories had a very somber aspect. Of course, he was a very lovable man, too.” ⁶⁸

It is nonetheless obvious that many of Barney’s lines don’t travel well; the cautionary adage “you had to be there” is inescapable. The same is true of many Road wisecracks, at least on paper — not much to daunt the Marx Brothers, let alone Oscar Wilde or Billy Wilder. ⁶⁹ Yet the pictures abide as classic comedies, able to sustain grateful smiles even when they fail to elicit outright yucks. Along with the films of Preston Sturges and the last works of Lubitsch, they are among the few Hollywood comedies to survive the war years, successfully recycled for every subsequent generation. The film historian David Shipman expresses a prevalent tone when he writes, “They have turned out — surprisingly, I think — to be ageless.” ⁷⁰ Gilbert Seldes called them the “second great series of comedies with a group of stars made after sound came in,” the first being those of the Marx Brothers. ⁷¹ Their enchantment derives not from the jokes — whether copyrighted, kibitzed, or ad-libbed — but from the infinitely appealing and enigmatic rapport between the two principals.

Barney Dean aside, Bob was the shadow figure who transformed the cinematic Bing, alleviating the intrusive blandness and whetting Bing’s wit to a fine nub. As a foil, Bob deepened Bing’s ironic stance, his detachment, encouraging the sadistic touch present in almost all movie comedy, from Sennett and Chaplin to Fields and the Marxes, though inhibited in Bing’s post-Sennett work. Bing’s anxiety occasionally drove his characters to a stubborn solitude, a desire to escape to the ranch or the boat, to be left alone, to wallow in a lack of ambition. Even when the plot did not demand it, the actor’s nerveless independence suggested a willingness on the part of his characters to retreat from the world, a disposition his friends recognized in Bing. But love always sneaked up and roped him back. The absurdity of the Road movies gave him a lot more rope.

Like the torpid Paris Honeymoon, Road to Singapore is superficially concerned with a rich man who abandons his rich fiancée for a peasant girl. This time, he is not self-made but rather the heir to a shipping fortune who renounces responsibility, money, sex, and luxury in favor of a mock marital relationship with a buddy on whom he wreaks havoc. Bing’s Josh sets out for Singapore but (as usual for the series) never gets there. He does, however, get away. In the made-up province of Kaigoon, he is liberated, remade with an uncanny compound of independence, intelligence, cruelty, warmth, and indifference — no longer the romantic crooner of the 1930s, but more like the complicated man his associates recognized as Bing. As one Spokane classmate remarked to a reporter in the 1940s, the Road pictures unleashed the Bing he knew as a kid.

Road to Singapore begins a cycle in which Bing’s characters are obsessed with getting away for the sake of getting away. They rebel against inclusion. In Rhythm on the River, Holiday Inn, and Blue Skies, he is hell-bent on escaping the city, celebrity, fortune, and accountability; specifically, he spurns his too easily won — virtually unavoidable — success. When in Holiday Inn a Hollywood producer besieges him with offers other entertainers would die for, he gazes around at his isolated homestead and complains: the idea that he could be left alone to hibernate with his talent was too good to be true. In Road to Zanzibar and Road to Utopia, he and Bob are on the lam, fleeing evildoers or the repercussions of their own schemes. The furthest Bing could go to duck the mammon and romance eternally dropped in his unwilling lap was Father O’Malley’s cloister; in his last films the earth itself can no longer hold him — he flies in and out of the frame at the close of High Time (1960) and lands on the moon in the road trip that was supposed to end in Hong Kong.

Many of Bing’s roles lacked history beyond the conventions of Kraft Music Hall and light comedy. As Josh Mallon, he has a pedigree: his first movie father and a heritage of seafarers not unlike that of the Crosbys. Josh is agreeable, cocky, and attractive, but somehow not whole. He dismisses family tradition out of hand as stodgy and pompous: “That’s not for me, Dad, I want to be one of the boys, a regular guy.” His father (Charles Coburn) is reasonable and his fiancée (Judith Barrett) is pretty and pleasant, though he is so indifferent to her that one wonders how the engagement came about. The obligations of the business are hardly onerous. Yet Josh prefers to rough it with Ace, broke.

Audiences in 1940 understood the gist, even if they could articulate it no better than Josh or Ace. With recovery imminent and the war in Europe threatening to snare the United States, the Huck Finn reverie of a retreat from civilization and its feminizing ways had renewed appeal. Men in particular responded to the camaraderie of two resourceful and comical friends at a time when they were about to be plunged into the homosocial environment of combat. As Huck learned, you can escape only when the wolf (in this case, his father) is no longer at the door. Josh finds that feminization is everywhere he goes — and so is America.

The latter revelation was comforting. You could leave the United States without leaving it behind. Wherever Bing and Bob travel, they bring American outlooks, American morals, and most of all, American show business, primarily vaudeville. Even in Kaigoon, they hawk their wares with song and dance, like two old troupers on a smalltime circuit. From Road to Zanzibar on, the vaudeville connection is explicit — they play cheapjack performers of one sort or another, auguring the entrenchment of American pop culture around the world. They adapt and burlesque local customs and rituals, ultimately changing them into exotic reflections of home. The natives are their straight men, the villains their stooges, the women their props, the clothing their costumes. Yet the mayhem is quelled by decency and light. They are anarchists with sweet souls.

A month before the Los Angeles preview of Road to Singapore, in February 1940, Variety published its annual analysis of film stars and their box-office clout during the preceding year. Bing still ranked as the top male player at Paramount, while Bob straggled in at number ten. Varietyexpressed a guarded optimism about Bob’s future: his “questionable star quantity last year, progressed with Cat and Canary [a haunted-house comedy with Paulette Goddard], and properly tailored with material [he] can become a standard box office figure for the company.” ⁷² After SingaporeBob ascended to box-office heaven. In 1941 he was the first clown in five years, since Joe E. Brown, to make the Quigley top-ten poll. For a couple of seasons, his numbers eclipsed Bing’s. Yet rarely did one of Bob’s solo efforts make as much money as the Road films, while Bing’s solo vehicles often surpassed them.

The chemistry between Crosby and Hope was “like magic,” Mort Lachman said of Singapore. “It didn’t compare with Morocco or any of those later ones, but compared to the pictures it was playing against, it was a miracle to see those two guys come to life on the screen. They were wild. It was Wayne’s World in 1940.” ⁷³ In the first scene, a ship bearing Josh and Ace docks in Hawaii and they watch from the bow as fellow sailors are berated by their waiting wives.

Josh: You know, if the world was run right, only women would get married.

Ace: Hey, can they do that?

[Josh gives him a look.]

The lines are idiotic — the kind of thing you expect from Abbott and Costello. But something in their contrasting attitudes, in the ingenuousness of Bob’s delivery and the wry forbearance of Bing’s look, lets the audience know instantly that it has been introduced to a bona fide team — not just two actors but a rare and skillful duet, “cream and sugar,” in Dolores Hope’s phrase. Their timing is as reflexive and infallible as that of two jazz musicians trading fours. Bob insisted that Bing was the greatest straight man he ever saw, but as Lachman pointed out, “Hope was also the greatest straight man for Bing that there ever was. Hope was such a good target, and the audience loved when Bing put him down.” ⁷⁴

As in the next scene: a couple of menacing bruisers demand to know which of them dallied with their relation, Cherry, and Josh unhesitatingly points to Ace. When they order Ace to come with them, however, the unlikely heroes go into a practiced patty-cake routine, an infantile diversion that stymies their adversaries, until the last pat turns into two fists, aimed at their jaws. Here, in embryo, is the enigma of the friendship. They are at once true blue and murderously competitive. The relationship was not terribly puzzling to contemporaries, who lived in a world saturated with Crosby and Hope insult gags. They were ultimately as omnipresent as talk of DiMaggio’s streak or the war.

The gibes never did let up. They ricocheted back and forth from radio to movies to live appearances, eventually to television. Hope counted on them. Bing’s cameos in his films often got the last and best laughs, as in the closing shot of The Princess and the Pirate, when Virginia Mayo walks past Bob’s open arms and into Bing’s. Earlier in the picture Bob tells her about a show he did on the road to Morocco, ruined by “some overaged crooner with laryngitis [who] kept cramping my act.” But by then the jokes were no longer confined to his films. In Best Foot Forward (1943), Lucille Ball remarks, “We’ve covered more road than Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.” Until Bing’s death, thirty-seven years after Road to Singapore, neither performer could appear anywhere without making an obligatory crack about the other. The audience deciphered them as proof of an exemplary friendship.

Bing’s comic disdain may have been influenced by his friend Oliver Hardy, who originated the quiet, long-suffering gaze. But where Hardy’s impatience is a response to the fine mess he blames on Stan Laurel, Bing as often as not precipitates the mishaps that jeopardize him and Bob. His passive hostility is consistent with his male relationships in two previous films; he talked Stu Erwin into a suicide pact and betrayed his generosity in The Big Broadcast and tried to seduce his brother’s girl in Sing You Sinners. “I like most Bing Crosby films,” Martin Scorsese once remarked. “I was fascinated by his character. He’s charming, he sings all the time — and meanwhile, he’s swindling everybody. In the Road pictures, he takes advantage of Bob Hope from beginning to end — and still winds up with the girl. He uses Hope so badly, but with such integrity, such confidence. I used a variation of that in the Mean Streets relationship between Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.” ⁷⁵

As usual, autobiographical touches abound in Road to Singapore. In the homecoming scene in his father’s office, Bing references both sides of his own parentage. The writers drew on the Crosby sea captains to flesh out Josh’s background. And when his fiancée, Gloria, walks in, Bing reflexively removes his gum and hides it under the desk, as though she were his mother about to catch him with a cigarette or a drink. A newspaper headline reporting on the brawl also suggests the Crosby touch (or that of writers who, like Carroll Carroll and Johnny Burke, drew on his lingo): AGAIN IN DURANCE VILE.In the next episode Josh reels in a swordfish with overheated comical clumsiness, in stunning contrast to home movies in which Bing catches far larger fish with the aplomb of a Hemingway hero — an instance of his lack of actorly vanity.

Schertzinger delivered on his promise to spruce up the major musical numbers. The first, set in the stateroom of Josh’s prospective in laws, serves as a template for the off-kilter union between him and Ace. Surprisingly, Hope is the picture’s first singer, in a Burke and Schertzinger lampoon, “Captain Custard,” about a uniformed movie usher who fancies himself a military figure, replete with references to Bank Night, double features, and free dishes. When Gloria’s smug and insulting brother, Gordon — the sort of wealthy snob Josh does not want to become — sneers at Ace, Josh chivalrously announces that they are a team. He puts a fezlike box on his head and leaps into the number with a phrase about “pitching for Paramount,” which virtually erases the line between Josh and Bing and lets the audience know that it is in on a marvelous joke: this is a movie that knows it’s a movie.

This subtle assault on the fourth wall, which became less subtle in later Road films when a camel or a bear spoke directly to the audience, surprised people not because the device was untried but because of the context in which it appeared. It built on a tradition of character breaking employed by the zaniest of comedians, from Oliver Hardy looking straight at the audience in Two Tars, as if to say, “Look what I have to contend with,” to Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers cautioning the audience not to expect every joke to be good. Groucho revived the gambit in 1939, in At the Circus, but it was rarely used except in cartoons. In Singapore the actors never address the audience, but they make cracks to let us know that they know that we know that it is all artifice. They are goofing on their celebrity and the social contract celebrity implied in that era. From the first, when he played a crooner named Bing, Bing’s pictures often toyed with the audience’s involvement in his life. Now he conjured the illusion of letting down his guard entirely, and the audience felt it was seeing a new and brighter Bing.

With Bing/Josh involved in “Captain Custard,” it becomes a full-fledged vaudeville number, firmly establishing Bing and Bob as a couple. Indeed, Bob emerges for all practical purposes in a femme role; real women are employed tangentially in the piece and discarded on Bing’s entry. Bob wraps himself in a dresslike cape, shakes his hips, and bestows upon Bing a military kiss. In later films, the gender-bending was sometimes reversed. (In Zanzibar as they drink champagne in a nightclub, Bing squeaks in a little-girl voice, “Daddy, the bubbles make my nose tickle.” Bob looks around and asks, “Was that at this table?”) But either way, Bob was the schlemiel, a condition telegraphed by the names of his characters, which, except for Ace, were never monosyllabic. Bing played Chuck, Jeff, and Duke; Bob played Hubert, Orville, and Chester, except when he answered to nicknames like Turkey and Junior.

The “Captain Custard” number ends with the second patty-cake brawl in eighteen minutes. Clearly, they need to get away. Josh and Ace sail for Singapore and get as far as Kaigoon, with $1.28 between them. They make a curious pact to swear off women and go out to a saloon where the floor show is Mima and Caesar and his whip. (“I think he wants her to give up cigarettes,” Bing says after he lashes one from her mouth.) Yet another brawl ends as they spirit Mima to their hut, where she takes over, buying food, cleaning, and forcing Bing and Bob to sleep together under the same net. As they slumber, she sings “The Moon and the Willow Tree.” Ace begins to get up, but Josh grabs him: “The night air’s bad for you, Junior, back in the net.” Instead of driving them apart, Lamour’s Mima brings them closer. Bound by jealousy, each is afraid to let the other out of his sight.

Desperate for money, Ace remembers an old con called Spotto, a phony cleaning fluid (one of the writers probably remembered it from Bing’s Sennett short, One More Chance). To lure a crowd, they become vaudevillians, dressed alike in dark yachting caps, dark shirts, light pants. Mima, wearing an ankle-length skirt (no sarong in this ménage), joins them for a few whimsical bars of “An Apple for the Teacher.” Josh stops them and goes straight into the ocarina number “Sweet Potato Piper,” which includes diverting interplay as Bob exhibits his dancing skills and Bing fakes it, game as ever. Bing’s prerecording of the song for the film is far more jubilant and inventive than the Decca record he made a few weeks later. All three are supposed to be playing ocarinas, and at one point he acknowledges the prerecording by taking his fingers off the instrument as Bob’s eyes bug.

Having gathered the marks, they hawk Spotto, pulling the effortlessly funny Jerry Colonna from the crowd and sacrificing his white suit to its degenerative powers. While the trio dodges the police, Colonna is the subject of the best directorial conceit in the picture. Josh’s father, in search of his son, has cabled his branch in Kaigoon. As a clerk reads the message, he hears a high-pitched siren. Exasperated, he gets up and leaves his office to locate the source. The siren continues as he makes his way to a nearby building. Inside, seated at an upright organ, is his associate, Colonna, the siren. The camera cuts to him just as he finishes bleating what turns out to be the first note of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”

Meanwhile, Josh and Ace decide they cannot tolerate their sudden domesticity and argue about which of them will send Mima packing. This is perhaps the scene that best exemplifies what is most appealing about Crosby and Hope. The smooth and credible badinage is effective not because of the writing, which is mundane, but because its locker-room naturalness does not feel written or even acted. Bob was the most persuasively charismatic actor Bing had ever played against, his equal in most respects short of singing, and his better at physical comedy. Bing’s unmistakable pleasure in playing with a genuine accomplice is contagious.

They dispatch Mima only long enough to rescue her again from Caesar. Her return signals an abrupt change in mood. Josh and Ace have surrendered their bachelor mode; they are now on the road to domesticity, as each sells out the other in the contest for Mima. Any doubts about who will win are put to rest when Josh finally, nearly an hour into the movie, delivers the one indispensable ingredient in a Crosby film, a ballad. If Burke and Monaco’s “Too Romantic” is less memorable than songs Burke and Van Heusen composed for later Roads, it marked a turning point for Burke; it’s the best love song he had written for a Crosby film to date. (Significantly, the far superior “Imagination” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” appeared a few months later, written with Van Heusen for Sinatra. For Zanzibar Van Heusen was on the Crosby team.)

Bing’s edict to Burke to avoid I love yous was not strictly enforced; Johnny slid one in at the end of “What’s New?” tied to a cadence that obliges the singer to dispense with it quickly. But the challenge compelled him to be extra-inventive in getting the message across, sometimes with evasive results, as in “On the Sentimental Side” or “East Side of Heaven.” “Too Romantic,” however, is astutely tailored to emphasize Bing’s passive allure. It has him conceding a fear of intimacy because he is too romantic, too vulnerable: “moonlight and stars can make such a fool of me”; “wouldn’t I look a sight on bended knee.” He wants a sure thing: “Don’t let me fall unless it could all come true.” Bing’s rendition in the picture is more robust than his hit record but not nearly as aggressive as Lamour’s. She knows what she wants but has to put up with an obbligato of wisecracks. The song ends as Hope comes from behind and dunks Bing in the lagoon.

The feminization proceeds apace. Starving for food, they use another of Ace’s concoctions, an intended roach killer called Scramo, to darken their skins (Kaigoon requires more of a tanning than a blackening) so they can masquerade as natives at a feast. Josh and Ace wear womanly caftans that cover their breasts, and Bing plays even more broadly than Bob. After an obligatory bring-on-the-girls native dance, they flee from a ceremonial marriage requirement, at which point Gloria and Josh’s father arrive. Josh refuses to leave, but Mima, meaning to protect him from losing his fortune, pretends to love Ace. That sends him packing, after he delivers a maudlin tribute to good old Ace, the first and last time the series would forget itself so egregiously and descend to rank depths of stoic poignancy. Josh learns the truth and returns to Mima, as Ace happily presides like a child who has reconciled his divorced parents (a Hollywood convention of the period, popularized by Deanna Durbin). Still, the audience knows who the real couple is; a Spotto victim comes running in with a policeman, and the movie fades as Bing and Bob go into their patty-cake crouch.

The reviews were so tepid, Paramount excluded even the good ones from trade-paper ads, preferring to display the numbers as Singapore broke records at one theater after another. Time’s man plainly dozed: “Crooner Crosby, the lyric son of a businessman, has an irrepressible urge to be a beachcomber. He and Bob Hope take Miss Lamour beachcombing with them. Bing Crosby sings one song (’Kaigoon’) in Esperanto.” ⁷⁶ He does not. Many thought that though the film was slight, Bing and Bob deserved a reunion. The New York Times was less encouraging: “We would not go so far as to call the road closed, merely to say one proceeds at his own risk, with heavy going after Lamour.” The Times bestowed “an E for effort… and an SEC for an investigation of the possibilities it has squandered.” ⁷⁷

The movie opened, grandly enough, at the New York Paramount on a bill with the eagerly awaited revamped edition of Tommy Dorsey’s band. Under a huge display for the film and its stars, the marquee promised: “In person — Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra; Bunny Berigan, Buddy Rich, Frank Sinatra, Pied Piper Quartette, [tap dancers] Winfield and Ford; Extra Added Attraction — Red Skelton.” ⁷⁸ Sinatra had recently cut his first discs with Dorsey, two songs, the second a boyishly anemic cover of “Too Romantic.” The movie and the stage show made for an unbeatable combination, one Variety said gave the lie to the myth that Holy Week was bad for business. ⁷⁹ An elated New York Daily News headline blared: PARAMOUNT GOES GAY IN A LARGE WAY.But Singapore did not need live music to lure crowds. By March it had broken two-year records in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago. ⁸⁰ By April Paramount’s ads listed thirty cities where it was held over two, three, and four weeks. ⁸¹

Kate Cameron of the Daily News caught the spirit that ignited audiences. After expressing astonishment that Bing and Bob had not been teamed before — “Separately, they’re good, but together they’re a riot!” — she noted: “Road to Singapore is something I can’t explain. It is as goofy a bit of make-believe as I have seen upon a screen…. After the long list of heavy and so-called ‘significant’ films that hit the screen lately, Road to Singapore is a blessed relief. It’s naughty — but nifty.” ⁸² Cameron knew her readers. Hollywood flaunted its talent and diversity in 1940, producing a trove of films that made money and endured as classics or semi-classics: The Shop Around the Corner, Rebecca, His Girl Friday, The Great Dictator, Christmas in July, The Letter, The Bank Dick, The Sea Hawk, Brother Orchid, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, Pinocchio, The Great McGinty, The Grapes of Wrath, The Mortal Storm, Foreign Correspondent, My Favorite Wife, Rhythm on the River, The Mark of Zorro, The Philadelphia Story, Pride and Prejudice, and several others. Yet as splendid as those pictures were, Road to Singapore, with receipts of $1.6 million, was the top-grossing picture of the year. ⁸³

This was hardly a tribute to the public’s discernment. Most of the year’s top-ten moneymakers, excepting Rebecca and Road to Singapore, are forgotten today — The Fighting 69th, Arizona, Buck Benny Rides Again, North West Mounted Police, Kitty Foyle. While they disappeared, however, Singapore inaugurated a franchise that echoed through the culture during and after the war, persistently for more than twenty years. Until James Bond, the Road series was the most lucrative ever produced. For Bing, it indicated redefinition. His contemporaries had followed him for a decade; now a much younger audience was drawn to him as well. Neither Crosby nor Paramount nor, for that matter, Jack Kapp and Kraft could have imagined in 1940 that everything he had already achieved would be remembered, within a few short years, as merely a prelude to what followed — a bagatelle compared with the symphony of adulation he roused in the 1940s, when Bing Crosby was remade in the crucible of war.