Bing Crosby (62 page)

“Love in Bloom” handed Bing another megahit, topping sales charts for nearly four months — six weeks in the number one slot.
That year the Academy Awards initiated a best song category, and “Love in Bloom” was nominated. It lost to “The Continental”
(from
The Gay Divorcee)
but paved the way for a Crosby statistic that is not likely to be broken. Between 1934 and 1960 he introduced more songs
that were nominated for Academy Awards (fourteen) and more that won (four) than any other performer; Astaire and Sinatra tie
for second place with eight nominations each. Bing thought “Love in Bloom” “a good melody, easy to remember, a lovely song.”
²⁵
Kitty expected it to become her theme. Neither was pleased by what happened to it. As Jack Benny told the story, he and his
wife, Mary, went to a supper club one night, and the bandleader asked him to sit in. When Benny stepped up and borrowed a
violin, he noticed an arrangement of “Love in Bloom” on a music stand and played it with predictably amusing results. A columnist
wrote about his impromptu performance, and the next time the Bennys went to a club, the band serenaded them with “Love in
Bloom” as a joke. “So I decided to adopt it as my theme song,” Benny explained.
²⁶
Overnight the melody became a Pavlovian laugh-getter; no matter who played or sang it, audiences howled. “I always took umbrage
at that,” Bing said.
²⁷
Kitty felt she had been robbed.
²⁸

Few moviegoers noticed at the time, but Bing’s looks changed after
She Loves Me Not:
his ears were finally liberated. During one scene,
midway through filming, the hot lighting repeatedly loosened the spirit gum. According to Frank Westmore, “this happened no
less than ten times,” whereupon “Bing furiously refused to allow the errant ear to be stuck back.”
²⁹
Bing recalled, “They said you’ve got to put them back, we’ve got half the picture with your ears in — you put ‘em out, you’ll
look like a taxi with both doors open and you’ll never match the other scenes. So I said, all right, I’ll put ‘em back for
the rest of this picture. We had a couple weeks to go, and then the next picture, that was the end of it.”
³⁰
Wally Westmore involved himself in the battle, convincing Manny Cohen that Bing’s ears did not affect his voice.

Audiences paid little attention to his ears, but thanks to Lang’s astute camera work, they did begin to notice a unique and
endearing physical aspect of his speech: the fluttering cheeks and popping lips when he pronounced
w
or
b
words. A phrase like “Well, what is it?” suggested a goldfish recycling oxygen, a tic that kept mimics busy for years.

She Loves Me Not
outgrossed all of Bing’s previous pictures. This time most critics were disarmed, and not just the Louellas. Otis Ferguson
of
The New Republic
noted a plug in the film for Chase National (which had Paramount by the throat) but praised it for its honest professionalism.
“Bing Crosby sings pleasantly and even acts a bit,” he wrote.
³¹
Time
considered it “creditable,” reserving praise for Hopkins (“squeaks and wriggles pleasantly”) and the new songs while remaining
mum on the singers.
³²
An especially perceptive analysis of the Crosby phenomenon appeared in the
New York Herald Tribune.
After noting Bing’s obvious appeal to women, the writer continued:

Perhaps it is his uncompromising masculinity and obvious inability to overplay anything that make him so innocuous to his
own sex. Unlike most of the other radio names, he never seems to be trying to be charming. The toothy smile, the Sunday School
superintendent’s unction [play] no part in the Crosby technique. He borrows something from the old deadpan school of slapstick
comedy and something from the insouciant ogle of the professional masher to produce an effect of being congenitally at home
and sure of himself anywhere — not working hard in the least, just taking it as it comes.
³³

The better the public came to know Bing, the better it liked him; the more it learned, the more it wanted to learn. Paramount,
having signed him to another three-picture deal, put its publicity department
into overdrive to maximize the attraction of his personality. Of the several full-page ads it purchased in
Variety,
one took a conspicuously novel tack: a caricature of a man pushing a stroller and the boldfaced headline
SHE LOVES ME NOT IS BING CROSBY’S GREATEST TRIUMPH SINCE THE TWINS
!

While Bing was shooting films, flogging soap for Woodbury, and recording, Dixie was on every bit as tight a schedule. She
learned about her second pregnancy a few months after she gave birth to Gary. Kitty Lang, who helped nurse her as well as
the infant, had briefly left for New York to settle Eddie’s affairs, promising she’d be back before Dixie delivered. She returned
to find Dixie suffering from chronic back pain. An X ray revealed twins. Despite her distress, Dixie was pleased when tiny
Monogram Pictures called and asked her to star opposite Robert Armstrong in a quickie production they promised to complete
in less than two weeks. She asked Kitty to be her stand-in so they could continue to spend afternoons together. Kitty’s own
life had just taken an upward turn. Dixie’s friend, Alice Ross, now working as her secretary, located a small home for Kitty
in Toluca. With help from friends (Richard Arlen’s brother-in-law was the contractor), Kitty rebuilt it to suit herself, a
niece, and two dogs. When one of the dogs took ill, she took it to the local veterinarian, Dr. William Sexton. She became
Kitty Sexton.

Knowing that Dixie was pregnant, the film crew showed her every consideration. Kitty was paid handsomely — $200, nearly three
times the going rate for two weeks of extra work — and the shoot presented no problems. But the songs unnerved Dixie, who
feared everyone would compare her with Bing; she steeled herself with a few drinks before making the prerecordings. The film,
Manhattan Love Song,
was of no consequence, and Dixie looks pallid. Shortly after it was completed, in her fourth month, she experienced contractions
and her cautious doctor ordered her to bed, forbade parties and alcohol, and limited her time with Gary to visits in her bedroom,
where she remained for the next four months. Bing made up for it by being “a doting father,” Kitty remembered. “As a result,
Gary did become a little spoiled.”
³⁴

The twins were born six weeks premature, weighing less than four pounds each, on July 13, 1934. Their arrival was treated
as a major
news story. When Bing allowed them to be photographed with Gary for the press the following September, the
Los Angeles Times
ran the picture on its front page, right-hand column above the fold. As the babies lay in the incubator, Kitty visited the
ward with Bing and asked him about their names. He said, “Well, I’ll name the largest one Dennis Michael, after my family,
as he looks more Irish, and Dixie can name the other.”
³⁵
Dixie chose Phillip Lang, Phillip from the Greek “lover of horses,” and Lang after Eddie. When Ted’s wife, Hazel, had delivered
twin girls a few months before, Ted wrote Bing, “You have to have three of a kind to beat a pair of queens.” Bing now wired
his brother, “A pair of kings arrived today.”
³⁶

With only thirteen months separating Gary and the twins, two nurses were added to the household. Gary, resenting the interlopers,
began acting out to claim the attention of his parents. The fraternal rivalry would remain a constant in the boys’ lives,
generating countless fistfights and feuds and ultimately resulting in a break between Gary and Phillip. As her strength returned,
Dixie grew bored. The nurses took over her chores with the babies while she took up tennis, revealing a genuine talent for
the game until a kidney infection forced her to give it up. That, Kitty thought, “started Dixie drinking more than usual,
particularly as it meant she was sitting home again.”
³⁷

In the weeks between the completion of
She Loves Me Not
and the birth of the twins, Bing bought a sixty-five-acre property in Rancho Santa Fe, twenty-five miles north of San Diego,
five miles from Del Mar. The large adobe ranch house, with exterior walls two feet thick and a white wraparound porch supported
by beams and posts, was built a hundred years before, and Bing hired architect Lillian J. Rice to restore the cultivated simplicity
of the nineteenth-century Spanish style. At the same time, he modernized it, adding a new wing, a tennis court, and a swimming
pool. Dixie decorated with sturdy wooden furniture, brass adornments, gingham and chintz, keeping it spare to protect valuables
from the three infants, whose maple cribs were aligned in one room, with a rocking chair separating Gary’s from those of the
twins.

Except for one historic recording session (Decca’s first) on August 8, Bing was free until late in the month, when filming
on
Here Is My Heart
began. He and Dixie spent much of that time at the ranch, where her health improved as they entertained friends. Publicity
photographs of Bing and Dixie, looking trim, youthful, even enchanted, on the tennis court or by the pool glisten with romance.
Bing invested in his first racehorses and kept riding mounts at the ranch. He even labored with the work crew on the construction
site for days, returning to Hollywood with callused hands. That did not fit the image of the self-made prince and his devoted
princess, so publicity photographs focused on Bing in his yachting cap and Dixie — incandescently blond — in a bathing suit,
the loving pair incarnating a fantasy as appealing as any movie.

Back at Toluca, the old routine ensued. Bing returned to work while Dixie sat disconsolately at home. Her own career was little
more than a memory, despite the just-released
Manhattan Love Song,
of which
Variety
reported: “Film shows the potential value of Dixie Lee and Helen Flint, both of whom can go places if properly handled, especially
Miss Flint.”
³⁸
Dixie enjoyed Bing’s triumphs but envied them a little, too. She wilted when obliged to meet the press, always as an appendage
to Bing, never as an accomplished entertainer in her own right. A few drinks helped her face his clamorous public. Kitty suggested
to Bing that Dixie needed a mink coat and other accessories suitable to her station as a star’s wife. “You’re right,” he told
her. “I never thought of it.”
³⁹
The next day the two women went on a spree and bought everything Dixie wanted. At other times Dixie was loath to spend money
at all.

With Larry Crosby acting as her agent, Dixie was signed to star in a Paramount film,
Love in Bloom.
She of course had no say concerning the title, which exploited Bing’s song (though it was not performed in the picture) and
underscored her connection to the singer. But she was adamant that Paramount not promote her as Mrs. Bing Crosby. Paramount
hardly promoted her at all. Dixie had the central role but was billed fourth, after Burns and Allen and Joe Morrison, the
tenor who introduced “The Last Round-Up” — a strange choice for a leading man at Bing’s studio until one remembers that the
Crosby-style baritones who overwhelmed the business a few years later were not yet on the scene. Morrison proved no more tempting
to moviegoers than Lanny Ross and left the business within a year. So did Dixie. And yet
Love in Bloom,
though negligible, contains her best work. She brought pathos to the shamelessly clichéd role of a street-smart
trouper from the dregs of show business, and her sole musical number — Morrison did most of the singing — is the picture’s
undoubted highlight.

Most of the figures involved in the production had worked with Bing, including producer Benjamin Glazer, director Elliott
Nugent, and songwriter Mack Gordon, who composed the unmemorable songs without his partner, Harry Revel, though Revel received
screen credit anyway. But Dixie, never one to visit her husband’s sets, did not know the crew, and the crew did not know her.
They were all embarrassed by their first meeting.

Dixie had dyed her hair a golden red, and on the first day of shooting, Kitty was sent to wardrobe to find a matching wig
and a dress so that she could serve as her friend’s stand-in during lighting tests. The wardrobe mistress fitted her with
a wig that might have suited Harpo Marx and a tight sheath dress. As Wally Westmore worked on Dixie in her dressing room,
Kitty, feeling like a stuffed sausage, waited on the set. When the assistant stage manager called for cast and crew, she draped
a full-length mink over her shoulders, put on dark glasses, picked up a script and Dixie’s purse (which Dixie had asked her
to safekeep), and joined the others. Cameraman Leo Tover
(College Humor),
mistaking Kitty for the star, panicked. He had been told Dixie was pretty, he mumbled to his assistants. While Kitty baked
under the lights, Tover circled his team for a pep talk, imploring them, for Bing’s sake, to make Dixie look good. Minutes
later Larry brought in Dixie, groomed to gleaming perfection in a pleated dress. Tover ordered Kitty to work in street clothes.

Love in Bloom
effectively marked the end of Dixie’s career. She was twenty-three, though she looked older and warier.
Variety
said she played her part “excellently,”
⁴⁰
but only Larry thought it would boost her standing. Convinced that the experience “built up her confidence,”
⁴¹
he convinced Jesse Lasky to give her the lead in his doomed 1935 Fox production
Redheads on Parade,
in which the twins — not yet nine months old — make their debut and Dixie plays opposite the recurring John Boles. Larry
wrote Ted it was “sure fire to make her a star — the only gal in it. She made some great records for Decca, & is singing and
acting swell as I told her she does better without liquid stimulant — more natural.”
⁴²
But the picture bombed. Aside from a few radio spots (notably a star turn on Al Jolson’s
Shell Chateau)
and
two records with Bing, Dixie enjoyed no more professional hurrahs. The stage jitters that had always plagued her increased
to the point where she declined to appear in public. Yet, as the wife of one of the most adored men in America, her name was
known to everyone.