Bing Crosby (57 page)

The first order of business was to record the tunes from his films. Much of the material was grim, expressing the mood if
not the substance of the Depression in narratives of lost, doomed, or betrayed love. Bing’s stout delivery, cradled in richly
detailed arrangements, is at once heroic and haunted. He told an interviewer that same year, “I won’t sing sappy songs. A
crooner gets enough criticism. There’s no reason to invite more barbs by singing mush.”
⁵
None of the fourteen titles recorded that summer is mushy. “Learn to Croon” may be replete with la-di-das, but the attack
is bolder than any singing of the day short of opera. Yet so unaffected is Bing, he creates the illusion that anyone could
sing as well. Even his flawless intonation and splendid timbre have an unschooled, artless quality — the sound of a passionate
American rearing back and singing full bore. “Moonstruck,” also from the film, begins with a
moon/June
cliché and never gets much better, but it is emboldened by the assertiveness of Bing’s delivery. “Down the Old Ox Road,”
inverting the usual order of tempo adjustments, begins swinging and then slows down.

Better was to come. “I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House,” an odd Yiddische minor-key melody by Lew Brown, has
had no life beyond Bing’s original recording, yet he embraces the sad plight of the narrative with such sympathetic brilliance
— aided by Ellingtonian muted brasses to underscore the rhythm — that he enhances it with an intensity due an art song. Victor
Young’s undistinguished “My Love” begins with a surprising allusion to John McCormack; Bing enters unexpectedly high before
settling into a more comfortable midrange. With his forceful conception and execution, he turns a minor song into a satisfying
experience, soaring into the clouds at the end of the release. “Blue Prelude,” trumpeter Joe Bishop’s mesmerizing melody (it
was briefly Woody Herman’s theme in 1940), was outfitted with a Gordon Jenkins lyric and an Ellingtonian arrangement, plus
strong rhythm-section work and a fitting clarinet solo by James Briggs. Bing’s dynamics are most impressive in his rattling
last eight bars, but his overall attention to detail confers a structural design virtually unheard-of on a pop record.

The most successful of the Grier records and a huge national hit for Bing was “Shadow Waltz,” from
Gold Diggers of 1933.
Most of Al Dubin’s lines end in the maladroit phrase “to you”:

In the shadows, let me come and sing to you.

Let me dream a song that I can bring to you.

Take me in your arms and let me cling to you.

Bing takes the vowels in stride, building an overall arc for the performance that complements Harry Warren’s loping melody.
In some of his inflections
(song/bring),
one can hear the nascent style of Dean Martin, another young singer — fifteen at the time — who learned his trade by imitating
Crosby. After the first chorus, Bing attacks the verse a beat early, for dramatic emphasis. “There’s a Cabin in the Pines”
was one of several cabin songs (in the cotton, on the hilltop, in the sky), but Bing puts aside its rustic innocence in favor
of jazzy cadences and subtle backbeat phrasing. His mastery of time is no less marked in his rubato treatment of the verse
of “I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song.”

Bing’s immaculate bell-like projection deepens “The Day You Came Along,” from
Too Much Harmony,
as does his canny breath control, as he punctuates the turnback after the first eight bars with a wordless exclamation; he
turns an unimportant, repetitive song into a rousing anthem, building to a climactically rhythmic finish. His alchemy is perhaps
most luminous on the cryptically dark “Black Moonlight,” from the same film. The arrangement begins with pizzicato strings
answered by growly brasses and descending saxophones and advances with rhythmic change-ups and vivid voicings. Emotional yet
stoic, Bing displays all he knows about breathing and enunciation and dynamics to articulate its mood and import. These performances
refuted the critics who disparaged his allegedly anemic crooning, and demolished singers who could do no more than croon.

Shortly after the June sessions, Gary Evan Crosby was born at Cedars of Lebanon on June 27, 1933, weighing seven pounds six
ounces and named after Gary Cooper and Dixie’s dad. Richard Arlen had bet Bing $100 that the baby would be a girl and that
his newborn son, Richard Jr., would marry her. Instead, the infants were christened together and feted at a baby-dunking party
at the Crosby home. Weeks before, Kitty Lang had arrived to live with the Crosbys; they never spoke of Eddie’s death and funeral,
three months earlier. She helped Dixie shop for layettes and other items she would need in the hospital and stayed with her
through the delivery. She then ran into
the waiting room to tell Bing. “He was so happy. It was good to see him smile again. He said, ‘This calls for a celebration.’
Did we go to Chasen’s? Not exactly. We went to Sid’s Ice Cream Parlor for a banana split.”
⁶
Gary Cooper, delighted by his namesake, brought over a crib with
Gary
carved on it. Bing tried to match him with Kitty, who admired him on the screen, but she shyly demurred. Bing told her, “Now
that I have a son, I want him to be proud of me. I’m really going to settle down.”
⁷

For the next few years, he doted on Gary, taking him everywhere, not least the racetrack and swimming. Gary was said to be
exceptionally bright; Bing claimed that he could sing in tune when he was a year old. Gary would watch his father sing, and
cause much hilarity by moving his lips and mimicking his movements. But he was a difficult, colicky infant, and Dixie was
intimidated by the hospital nurse. Kitty thought the nurse, who insisted that Gary was having temper tantrums, less than sympathetic.
When she convinced Dixie to hire an “old-fashioned nurse,” the colic disappeared. Kitty showed Dixie how to bathe and feed
her baby; “although she was scared to death, she managed quite well.”
⁸
At one point Dixie fell and broke her elbow, fueling rumors that she was drinking. Bing rushed home from Catalina Island
to take her to the hospital. When Gary was four months old, the Paramount publicity department issued a four-page press release,
quoting Bing as hoping his son would be an actor and singer “a million times better than I am” — though he was not going to
push him into the profession. “Whatever he wants to do, we’ll smooth the road as far as it is possible to do so.”
⁹

All he demanded, Bing purportedly said, was that Gary, unlike himself, finish college. He also stipulated that his son be
a regular kid, no different from any other. He would be raised like a “typical American boy.”
¹⁰
But not entirely typical. In July, responding to threats in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Bing sought a bodyguard
to protect his wife and child. He offered the job to Marty Collins, the fighter who had come to his aid at Eddie’s funeral.
Collins remained on the payroll for three years, after which Bing helped him open his own bar.

The energy of the Grier recordings and the joy of fatherhood did not hold for
Too Much Harmony
— a rote backstage musical with a lack
luster performance by Bing. The picture was directed by former vaudevillian and Chaplin protégé Edward Sutherland and was
written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who idolized Bing and mimicked him at parties. Again, Bing’s role was an afterthought, this
time in a project originally intended for the other two stars. In 1929 Jack Oakie and Skeets Gallagher had enjoyed popular
triumphs with two films,
Close Harmony
and
Fast Company;
the latter is an adaptation, by Mankiewicz, of Ring Lardner’s
Elmer the Great
and remained Oakie’s perennial favorite among his own pictures.
Too Much Harmony
was devised as a reunion for Oakie and Gallagher but was shelved until producer William LeBaron got the idea to move them
into the background of a romance built around Bing.

Mankiewicz’s story, for which he received a larger screen credit than Sutherland, concerns Broadway headliner Eddie Bronson
(Bing), who is torn between the nice girl who adores him (Judith Allen) and the faithless, gold-digging bitch who uses him
(Lilyan Tashman). The outcome, unlike that of
The Big Broadcast,
holds no surprises. The film begins with Bing singing the final measures of “Learn to Croon” at a Chicago theater, establishing
continuity with
College Humor
not only for Bing but for Coslow and Johnston, who wrote the score. (They learned they had the job from Everett at Gary’s
christening party.) They wrote worthy songs, notably a hit sequel to “Please” called “Thanks.” Yet two superior numbers, “Black
Moonlight” and “The Day You Came Along,” were maddeningly assigned to Judith Allen and Kitty Kelly, who could neither sing
nor synchronize their lips. Allen’s song was dubbed by a singer whose streetwise head inflections, a cross between Dixie Lee
and Ethel Merman, are a far remove from her highborn speaking voice. Kelly appears as the salty paramour of a producer, Max
Merlin, played by a language-mangling Jewish comedian, Harry Green; in an instance of kitsch imitating life, her number was
created for her because she was the paramour of producer William LeBaron.

Another cast member with connections was Mrs. Evelyn Offield Oakie, Jack’s mother on- and offscreen, a feisty lady who left
a trail of anecdotes. She once convinced a Bank of Hollywood teller to give her all of Jack’s money the day before the bank
folded. On the set she regaled the actors with tales as they sat around her on canvas chairs emblazoned with their names.
When her chair tipped over, Bing
helped her up, asking, “Are you all right, Mrs. Offield?” “Bing,” she said, “I noticed that my name wasn’t on the chair and
it kind of upset me.”
¹¹
Bing admired Oakie, a master of double takes and sheepish grins, and insisted that he did not mind his rampant scene stealing,
his “twisting you around so that his face was in the camera while you talked to the backdrop.” He reasoned: “Sooner or later
there would be a spot in the picture in which I’d sing a song and Jack would be in the trunk.”
¹²

One of Bing’s best scenes is in the baggage car of a train, when he sings, all too briefly, “Boo Boo Boo,” another attempt
to cash in on his trademark; the tune rouses him more than the cast or script. Yet the most elaborate number belongs to Kitty
Kelly. “Black Moonlight” is an outlandish indulgence in which, through a trick of lighting, streetwalkers and dancers decked
out in Harlem drag change from black to white and back, while Kitty’s lips move in blissful disregard of the words she is
supposed to be miming. The jokes were older than the actors telling them. At one point Oakie and Gallagher exchange a breakneck
string of vaudeville jokes, including the one — “How can I keep my horse from frothing at the mouth?” — that got the Rhythm
Boys banned in Toledo.

Bing was not happy about his billing, especially on the pre-release posters. Paramount was giving him star treatment despite
his opposition. The company argued that his name was the movie’s biggest asset and ought to be played to the hilt; in any
case, the press materials were printed and it was too expensive to redo them. But Bing was intractable. He insisted they place
his name on the same title card as Oakie, Gallagher, and other principals, and the studio complied, creating new credits,
ads, lobby cards, and press packets.

Completed after five weeks, in mid-August, the film was distributed in September. Reviews were mixed. The
New York Times
found many “quite lively” scenes but cautioned admirers of “Mr. Crosby’s peculiar ballads” that they might be “disappointed
by his attempts to register admiration and affection.”
¹³
Variety
approved his ability in “the trouping department.”
¹⁴
The ludicrous Hearst columnist Louella Parsons was delighted with Kitty Kelly and her voice and thought the whole picture
“swell,” except for Judith Allen.
¹⁵
She counted herself, along with her son, as converted Bing fans — small wonder, as Mr. Hearst was set to produce Bing’s next
picture.

The majority of local reviewers held their collective nose, but adverse reviews notwithstanding, the public flocked to the
box office.
Too Much Harmony
was a smash in every region. Several theaters extended their bookings, a rare occurrence in 1933. In Pittsburgh it was the
first major draw in months; in Cincinnati it successfully competed with the road-show megahit
Dinner at Eight;
in Indianapolis, despite major competition and a dearth of ads, it beat everything else on the street; in New York it broke
the Paramount Theater’s house average and raked in $60,000 in one week — “like the old predepresh days,”
Variety
crooned.
¹⁶
Receipts from Europe were just as dazzling. In two weeks
Too Much Harmony
did more business at London’s Plaza Theatre than any movie since the advent of sound.
¹⁷

The picture that clinched Bing’s place in the coveted circle of top-ten box-office attractions, as calculated in an annual
poll of exhibitors conducted by Quigley Publications, was not made at Paramount. It came from MGM, at the behest of Marion
Davies and her powerful lover, William Randolph Hearst. The irony was much appreciated on the Paramount lot: in attempting
to boost Davies’s flagging popularity, Hearst borrowed two of Paramount’s leading men (first Bing in
Going Hollywood,
then Gary Cooper in
Operator 13).
In Hollywood’s pecking order, this was akin to Rolls-Royce renting upholstery from General Motors. The decision to borrow
Bing was initiated by MGM lyricist and former coproducer of the Morrissey revues, Arthur Freed. With his partner, Nacio Herb
Brown, Freed had written a fervent new song, “Temptation,” that he believed only Bing could put over. Davies was charmed by
Bing. But the jealous Hearst fretted about his reputation as a womanizing hell-raiser (he surely recalled the Berkeley frat
party that got his son Bill and Bing into trouble) and had to be persuaded.
College Humor’s
box-office receipts helped. He was undoubtedly comforted by the success of
Too Much Harmony,
which broke during the filming of
Going Hollywood.