Bing Crosby (59 page)

Though it was Marion’s production, with Bing taking second billing for the first and last time until he accepted character
parts in the 1960s, Bing dominates the film, greatly assisted by a terrific score. Inexplicably, he never recorded the title
song, but when he sings it in a production number set in Grand Central, reenacting his own recent decision to leave New York,
he is at his indomitable, swinging best. “Beautiful Girl” allows him to reveal his increasing ability to handle varied bits
of business, singing as he walks around
his hotel room, followed by Sterling Holloway and a microphone. He glides through a six-minute production number and romances
Marion with “After Sundown,” pouting like a teenager when she declines to sleep with him that evening. She changes her mind,
however, only to find him in Lili’s room. The Hays Office found that acceptable but vainly lobbied MGM to change the title:
“no Hollywood title should be used which would tend to undo the efforts made to disabuse the public mind of the unfavorable
impression of Hollywood which formerly obtained.”
²⁸

Sylvia does not find it acceptable, and when she gives him the cold shoulder, Bill does what Bing might have done in years
past. He goes on a bender in Mexican bordellos, precipitating the best scene in the picture. An unshaven derelict, Bill stares
into a shot glass, reeling between hallucinations of the dark and evil temptress Lili and the good and golden Sylvia. “It
was all very Russian Art Theater,” Bing later explained.
²⁹
He sings “Temptation” at his purple best, imbuing a melodramatic yet weirdly seductive style of pop with stentorian, heartbursting,
operatic gusto — part Jolson on his knees, part McCormack in his cups, and all youthful bravado. Keep your head down, his
mother might have said, but go for broke in song.

The initial response to
Going Hollywood
was positive. Needless to say, Hearst papers could not contain themselves. Louella had an attack of literary vapors trying
to do justice to its immortal glory: the picture “stands supreme as a perfect example of good entertainment with a heroine
beautiful enough to make every other girl wish she could be a Marion Davies.” Lest anyone think she was prejudiced, she added,
“She is so lovely that a murmur of admiration went through the theater, both in the scenes where she wears regulation street
dress and again in the beautiful costumes in the motion picture scenes.”
³⁰
The
New York Times
critic thought it “sprightly and jocular.”
³¹
Time
grudgingly conceded that it surpassed previous attempts at movies featuring radio singers, but could not resist disparaging
Bing as a reformed Vallée imitator.
³²
Time
ran a letter weeks later from Jackson Leichter, one of Paul Whiteman’s radio writers, who corrected several errors, including
the Vallée crack, and closed with a prediction: “Crosby’s popularity will grow. He has brains, a growing wisdom, a recently
acquired balance. He’s good for America.”
³³

* * *

Variety
gauged
Going Hollywood
as “an emphatic moneymaker,” but despite strong openings, it failed to become the runaway hit that would have earned back
its investment. MGM soon buried it. The trade paper was on firmer ground when it declared Bing “the present day disc best
seller.”
³⁴
Other record companies attempted to lure him away from Brunswick and Jack Kapp, who paid him $400 a disc plus royalties.
Victor offered him five times that. Kapp parried with a history lesson, comparing Brunswick’s steadfast buildup with the wobbly
loyalties of Victor and Columbia, which Bing had learned about firsthand during his time with Whiteman.

Bing did not need the lecture. He liked and trusted Kapp, who had an ace in the hole. Jack himself was fed up with Brunswick,
which rejected his bid to head the company, and determined to start a label of his own, with Bing’s contract as collateral.
If anyone could defy the majors in the middle of the Depression, Kapp was the man, and Bing would be in on the ground floor;
indeed, he would
be
the ground floor. While Jack considered his options, he continued to advance Bing’s transformation from crooner to all-American
troubadour.

A week after the Victor offer was rejected, Jack recorded Bing with a plush Lennie Hayton studio ensemble. He devoted half
the session to slightly accelerated versions of songs from
Going Hollywood,
“Beautiful Girl” and “After Sundown.” With two additional songs, he routed Bing on a new trail. “The Last Round-Up” was the
year’s most improbable hit, introduced at the New York Paramount by Irish tenor Joe Morrison, who was heard with George Olsen’s
band. Written by an erstwhile cowboy, Billy Hill (whose “There’s a Cabin in the Pines” had fizzled for Bing), it was a sensation
in spite of the incongruity of song, singer, and band; Olsen’s Columbia record, with Morrison singing the refrain, dominated
sales charts for two months. Victor and Brunswick raced in with bestselling versions by bandleaders Don Bestor and Victor
Young. But Kapp, convinced there was far more to round up, simultaneously released another two versions, by Guy Lombardo (Brunswick
6662) and Bing (Brunswick 6663). Lombardo’s sold almost as well as Olsen’s (they accounted for two of the year’s ten bestselling
discs). But Bing’s version, nestling directly under Lombardo’s, had the more lasting impact. His melancholy moonlit cry sold
the tune with the authenticity of a true western balladeer. When he sang it at the Los Angeles Paramount, the audience
leaped to its feet and cheered, as if for a patriotic song. Afterward, Gene Autry took up the song, and Paramount slapped
the title on a Randolph Scott western.

“Crosby was one of the main fellas in those days and if he sang a song and it was a halfway decent song, it became a hit,”
Roy Rogers recalled. “And what we would do, we’d take those big top hit songs and build a story around them and use them to
name our pictures.”
³⁵
Rogers himself would not become known as King of the Cowboys for nearly a decade, but he realized even then that Bing’s way
with western songs made them more appealing than did the gruff country singers of the early 1930s. Many other cowboy and country
singers agreed, and over the next few years Bing’s influence turned up unmistakably in the work of several western balladeers
who admired his timbre, enunciation, and feeling.

Bing, in turn, recorded dozens of western songs. Three years after “The Last Round-Up,” Paramount devised a horse opera for
him,
Rhythm on the Range,
introducing the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that brought Roy Rogers to Hollywood. In years to come, when Roy went out
on his own, Bing covered several of his hits, notably “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Cool Water.” An ironic intersection in their
careers took place in 1944, when Roy premiered “Don’t Fence Me In,” by the least likely of cowboys, Cole Porter, in
Hollywood Canteen,
and Bing (with the Andrews Sisters) scored the hit, selling millions. “The Last Round-Up” echoed in western circles as late
as 1947, when Autry made a movie with that title, underscoring his homage by including a rendition of an intervening Crosby
hit, “An Apple for the Teacher.”

Yet the most resonant of Bing’s cowboy records, by far, was made at the same session as “The Last Round-Up,” although it did
not initially sell as well. Bing’s version of “Home on the Range” turned a little-known saddle song into the most renowned
western anthem of all time. In November 1933, when his record was issued, the origin of “Home on the Range” was obscure and
widely debated. Folklorist John Lomax, who said he learned it from a black saloonkeeper in Texas, published it in 1910, in
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.
In 1925 a sheet-music arrangement found modest popularity; two years later Vernon Dalhart, the operatic tenor turned hillbilly
singer, recorded it for Brunswick. California’s radio cowboys picked it
up from him, and in 1930 the movies’ first crooning western star, Ken Maynard, recorded a version. Not until Bing sang it,
however, was the song embraced as a national hymn, so popular as to generate a farcical plagiarism suit that had the unintended
benefit of spurring an inquiry into the song’s history. It was traced to a poem, “Western Home,” written in the 1870s (without
the chorus or the phrase “home on the range”) by Dr. Brewster Higley, whose neighbor, Dan Kelley, set it to music.

Bing’s stirring performance transforms a nostalgic lament into an ode to pioneering, a dream of shared history, a vaguely
religious affirmation of fortitude in the face of peril. He made it a Depression song that ignores the Depression, expressing
longing, awe, and grace. Bing’s subtle embellishments enhance the melody, and his projection and control are unfailingly dramatic,
particularly during the soaring eight-bar release. His record offered a transcendent secularity, a well from which all Americans
could drink. More prosaically, it anticipated the golden age of gentle-voiced singing cowboys and the Irish sentiment of the
John Ford westerns that followed on their heels. FDR acknowledged “Home on the Range” as his favorite song. John Dillinger
escaped jail with a wooden gun and drove off singing “The Last Round-Up.”

Bing recorded “Home on the Range” twice in the late 1930s, neither version as compelling as the one from 1933, but the performance
about which he was most likely to regale friends occurred on August 16, 1935, when Bing and Dixie visited Saratoga for the
races. They attended a dinner for the turf riders. “I didn’t, uh, skip any drinks that were passed around,” he recalled.
³⁶
Afterward, they went to the Arrowhead nightclub, where Guy Lombardo’s band was broadcasting:

And it came over the NBC network that Will Rogers had just been killed up in Alaska with Wiley Post, and they were putting
together a memorial program — picking people from all over who could do things in tribute to Will Rogers, and they wanted
me to sing “Home on the Range.” I was going to have to do it in about ten minutes, and I was a little shaky, from the sauce
and from the realization that it was a solemn occasion, and it was a song he dearly loved, and they thought it should be used,
and I couldn’t remember the words. The time was drawing closer and closer and I kept asking if anybody knew the words. I knew
the first line, of course, “Give me a home,” and all of a
sudden I’m on the radio. And that was the first time that I really had flop sweat, my palms were wet, my brow was damp, and
they were playing the introduction, and there I was. Obviously, I had sobered up a little by that time, and I sang the first
line, thinking, “What the hell is the second line.” And it came, and then, “What’s the third line,” and it came. And it kept
coming, kept coming, until I was finished. And I was really finished then. I went home and lay down.
³⁷

Bing Crosby
—
he’s a different kind of ladies’ man, because he appeals to men! That’s the truth! Have you ever heard of the Malden, Massachusetts
Bing Crosby Club? There’s not a sixteen-year-old microphone-struck girl in it; no sir! That Bing Crosby Club up in the New
England state is composed of men all over twenty years of age and every one an athlete.

— Robert Trout, Wilkins Coffee Time
(1933)
¹

Shortly after going cowboy, Bing inaugurated a CBS radio series for Woodbury (“for the skin you love to touch”), a manufacturer
of women’s soap based in Cincinnati. The show represented a significant leap in his transition from radio crooner to radio
star. Instead of two fifteen-minute recitals a week, the Chesterfield schedule, Woodbury gave him a thirty-minute program
once a week, with an announcer, supporting players, and guests. Above all, radio could now boast: Crosby speaks! This came
as no surprise to the millions who had seen him do that very thing live and onscreen. Nor was it a revelation to fans who
had heard him plug his films in radio promotions. But on his own shows he had never been permitted to talk directly to his
radio following.

At first, his new freedom counted for little. The funny, relaxed, quick-thinking, verbally dexterous Bing was nowhere to be
found. He
stiffly intoned pro forma introductions like “I have the pleasure of singing tonight the feature song from Ben Bernie’s new
picture,
Shoot the Works.”
Bing had conjured up a personality in pictures. Now he had to find a complementary one for the air.

Easier said than done. Radio comedians invented personality trademarks that were consistently harped on, whether or not they
were true to life — Jack Benny’s cheapness, Eddie Cantor’s pep, Ed Wynn’s zaniness, Gracie Allen’s dizziness, Will Rogers’s
horse sense, Joe Penner’s idiocy. But Woodbury had hired Crosby as a romantic figure who would appeal to its female customers.
Turning him into a jokester was never an option, and Bing didn’t give his producer and writer, Burt McMurtrie, much to work
with: singer, film star, nice guy. What’s more, he was uneasy without a script. The stubborn confidence Bing displayed in
devising his film persona was less in evidence when it came to radio, though he knew what he would not do. He refused to accommodate
a studio audience or replace his theme song with a Woodbury jingle; when an advertising agent from New York indelicately criticized
his work, he threatened to walk. His contract called for thirteen shows at $1,750 per broadcast. By the second season he commanded
$6,000, keeping nearly half and paying for the orchestra and arrangements with the rest, thereby securing control over the
show’s contents.