Bing Crosby (104 page)

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.

This section includes all studio recordings in which Crosby participated between 1926 and July 6, 1940. With the exception
of two “fluffs” and dramatically different versions of “St. Louis Blues,” alternate or rejected takes are omitted.

The parenthetical information denotes Bing’s instrumental and vocal accompaniment. Bandleaders appear to the left of the slash
and vocalists to the right. When Bing shared billing with other artists, beginning in 1931, the costarring performer’s name
is preceded by a dash.

Vocal group
refers to singers in the Whiteman band other than the Rhythm Boys, though on occasion (as on “Changes”) the Rhythm Boys were
part of the vocal group; S denotes a Bing Crosby solo. In those instances when no musical director was credited, the ensemble
is identified by the name of the label, e.g., Brunswick (Brunswick Studio Orchestra).

All sessions before May 1931 were released under the names of various bandleaders or Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys, except for
a handful by Bing. Beginning with the May 4, 1931, session (“Were You Sincere?”), all recordings were released under Bing’s
name.