Bing Crosby (68 page)

Bing’s sessions, almost all with Jack present if not presiding, became known as the easiest in the business. He would arrive
early, chew gum and smoke his pipe, read the racing form or newspaper, run down the material if it was new to him, and stick
a pencil behind his ear. When he and the band were ready, he stepped over to the microphone, on which he habitually parked
his gum, and, on average, completed five songs in two hours. He coined a couple of descriptive phrases: a Kappastrophe was
an arrangement Jack disliked; those Jack approved were Kapphappy.

Bing and Dixie returned to California in early September so that Bing could begin preparing for
Anything Goes,
the hottest ticket on Broadway and the most expensive Crosby project to date. The movie rights alone cost $100,000; the negative
cost topped $1.1 million. If Larry Hart had a snit over “Swanee River,” imagine how Cole Porter must have felt about Hollywood’s
treatment of his worldly musicals. In New York he was toast of the town. In Hollywood he was just another ink-stained wretch
whose songs were not controlled by Famous Music. When RKO turned his
The Gay Divorce
into
The Gay Divorcee,
it canned his entire score except “Night and Day.”
Anything Goes
was another story. It was Porter’s masterpiece. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse had written an outstandingly droll book,
set entirely on an ocean liner, but it was Porter’s urbane words and music that made it a theatrical event. Paramount retained
only four of the show’s twelve songs, discarding “All Through the Night” and commissioning a ching-chong Chinese minstrel
number called “Shanghai-De-Ho.”

Censorship was at issue. The Motion Picture Production Code, introduced by Will Hays in 1930, had proved largely ineffectual
(even Hays’s perverse resolve, agitated by the Hearst papers, to squelch Mae West had came to little) until the summer of
1934, when he
hired Catholic journalist Joseph Breen as an enforcer. No sooner did Paramount purchase the rights to
Anything Goes
than Breen was told that the plot involved a gangster who impersonates a priest while toting a violin case with a machine
gun. “As you know,” he cautioned the studio, “recently official censor boards have been deleting scenes of machine guns in
the hands of anybody but police and other properly organized bodies.”
⁴⁴

Breen ultimately acceded to the machine gun, but not the “definitely suggestive”
⁴⁵
“All Through the Night” (“you and your love bring me ecstasy”), and warned that the showstopper “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” might
be interpreted as a burlesque of religion. After Breen went to work on the title song, Paramount hired the unrenowned Brian
Hooker (a lyricist for Rudolf Friml!) to revise Porter’s lyric. Yet despite three rewrites and submissions, “Anything Goes”
was relegated to background music for the credits. “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “You’re the Top” were cleansed of allusions
to cocaine, Minsky dancers, and Holy Moses, for what Breen termed “obvious reasons.”
⁴⁶
The Leo Robin—Frederick Hollander interpolation (one of three), “Shanghai-De-Ho,” offended him, too, not because it burlesqued
Chinese people, but for the “plainly vulgar meaning”
⁴⁷
of the line “Soon the chows and Pekinese will stay away from cherry trees.”

The script was trimmed of dozens of words and phrases (“hot pants,” “we’ll rub him out,” “snatch”) and situations, including
one in which it could be construed, the censors grumbled, that a woman passenger was asking directions to the ladies’ room.
Not all was lost. With Lindsay and Crouse adapting their own book, they salvaged much of the original story, and the cast
was outstanding: Ethel Merman re-creating her role of chanteuse Reno Sweeney; Charlie Ruggles, deftly handling the comedy
(though the New York critics lamented the absence of Victor Moore, who created Public Enemy No. Thirteen on the stage); Ida
Lupino, underemployed but enticing; and Bing, a costume-changing stowaway pursuing Lupino and pursued by Merman.

Because Bing’s role had to be revised from that of a juvenile, the new songs were intended to play to his strengths. Two succeed:
“Sailor Beware” is an energizing though pointless diversion, and “Moonburn” represents Hoagy Carmichael’s first movie sale.
(Bing helped another old friend by arranging a bit part for Eddie Borden, who toured with
Crosby and Rinker in the Will Morrissey revue.) Hoagy’s song employs period slang — “Get away from that window before you
get moon-burned,” Roscoe Karns told George Raft in
Night After Night
— and offers a balmy interlude, though the version heard in the picture does not compare with the jamlike record Bing made
for Decca with pianist Joe Sullivan, guitarist Bobby Sherwood, and an unknown bassist. “Truck on down,” Bing tells Sullivan,
and they do, for a “hot” classic.

The movie is no classic. Despite its ups, it suffers from a discursive, flattened feeling that restrains the zaniness. Director
Lewis Milestone, justly celebrated for the 1930
All Quiet on the Western Front,
was an odd choice for a musical; he promptly returned to dramas. He employs fancy shots and wipes, abetted by Karl Struss’s
exquisite photography, but the tempo is uneven and the remaining Porter songs are stiffed, either because Merman is too brazen
or Bing too controlled. They excel musically and comedically on “You’re the Top” yet fail to indicate a dalliance; nor do
they make much of the (bowdlerized) lyric’s polished wit. The critics were generally pleased.
Variety
wondered whether Bing’s jazzy singing was added “for the special benefit of the boys at the Famous Door,” a New York jazz
club.
⁴⁸
Time
loved it, including the new songs, describing it as “rapid, hilarious and competently directed by Lewis Milestone.”
⁴⁹
The Legion of Decency also thought it “hilarious” and “a good picture” but refused to recommend it because of “suggestive
dialogue and double-meaning lines.”
⁵⁰

Audiences flocked to see
Anything Goes,
extending its run in New York, Chicago, Hartford, Kansas City, Birmingham, Denver, and elsewhere. The picture received an
enormous boost from Bing’s new sponsor, Kraft, which plastered the title on delivery trucks and ordered salespeople to spread
the word. Paramount arranged tie-ins with magazines and special promotions in menswear and music shops. Though radio continued
to hurt theater receipts, the ether did wonders for Bing, and not just in marketing synergy.
Anything Goes
was the last picture he made before taking over
Kraft Music Hall.
His subsequent movies reflected an augmented stature. Kapp proved that Bing could be America’s voice.
KMH
repositioned him as every American’s neighbor.

Two unpredictable bad spots
—
(1) Bing muffled a top note. (2) Elissa Landi lost a page. Bob Burns had one very long story that took too long for the laughs.
There was so much fun and frolicking by cast it probably was not so enjoyable over the air.

—
H. C. Kuhl,
KMH
program report (1936)
¹

Jack Oakie, a popular guest in the early days of Bing’s tenure on
Kraft Music Hall,
liked to recount a cherished story about an appearance by Detroit Symphony Orchestra conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who was
also a concert pianist. Shortly before airtime, as Oakie told it, while humorist Victor Borge was warming up the studio audience,
director Cal Kuhl realized that the show was running long and anxiously asked Bing to instruct spectators not to applaud.
“You’re kidding,” Bing said.
²
Kuhl was adamant. There must be no applause, especially for Gabrilowitsch: “Now listen, we know he’s going to murder ‘em,
and if they get started applauding for him, he’ll louse up our time.”
³
Bing made the announcement.

The program was in progress when the pianist arrived, an entrance recalled in loving detail by Oakie, who was fascinated because
Gabrilowitsch was married to Clara Clemens, the daughter of his idol, Mark Twain. Oakie watched him doff his large-brimmed
fedora
and cape and pace silently, awaiting his turn. When Bing introduced him, Gabrilowitsch marched to the piano and, in Oakie’s
telling, “gave one of the greatest performances of his career! He played the last notes, lifted his hands, and held them above
the ivories in a dramatic pause.” The audience was quiet as a tomb. He just sat there, dazed. “Those silent moments, which
must have seemed an eternity to him, must have been one of the greatest shocks of his life,” Oakie observed. Finally, he bestirred
himself and, as if in a trance, walked off the stage and out of the building. Afterward, Bing wanted to know what was troubling
the maestro. “Bing,” Oakie asked, “did you tell him about the no-applause business tonight? ‘Oh, my God!’ was all Bing could
say.’Oh, my God!’”
⁴

This is classic show-business apocrypha: the setup, the details, the specific names, the vivid movielike finish. It even has
a second punch line. So thunderstruck was the musician, he left the building without his cheese basket, the sponsor’s much
coveted gift to each guest. Though something like that may have — or certainly should have — happened during radio’s golden
age, Oakie’s story is as much a fabrication as his idol’s “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Ossip Gabrilowitsch
never appeared on Bing’s show. Oakie himself appeared only once before Gabrilowitsch’s death. The pianist on that occasion
was Alexander Brailowski; Oakie was rebuked by the director for “discourteous” mugging during his spot.
⁵

But Oakie’s nuanced telling gives the game away, underscoring the absurdity of the tale: Victor Borge didn’t relocate from
Denmark to the United States until years later, and he joined the Crosby show as a regular cast member, not as an audience
warmer; Bing’s musical guests were invariably involved in patter with the star;
Kraft Music Hall,
like all network programs, was a minutely timed operation, and radio did not permit the luxury of “silent moments” (Bing
would be on the mike in an instant), especially when time was short. Above all, Oakie ignored a unique component of the show:
applause was
always
forbidden, by directive of Crosby himself, who found it disruptive and contrived. Bing particularly disliked what he called
“organized applause” at the start of the show, before he had done anything — or so he argued — to merit it. Had he been able
to persuade his sponsor, he would have had no audience at all. Listening to disc transcriptions of Bing’s early Kraft shows,
one is startled by the rapid intros and
outros surrounding musical numbers, the absence of any kind of mitigating response, the consequent fast pace and easy, nothing-special
ambience. One wouldn’t know an audience was present, but for its frequent laughter.

During Bing’s reign,
Kraft
became a lightning rod for comic yarns, some of which were actually true, for example, the often told tale of David Niven
and the bounteous cheese basket. Every guest received a large wicker hamper containing pounds of the sponsor’s products, individually
wrapped in cellophane, festooned with ribbons, and tied to a teakwood tray. Shortly before he was scheduled to appear, Niven
was warned by Samuel Goldwyn, to whom he was under personal contract, that the producer was entitled to whatever he was paid
for his radio work but would magnanimously allow the actor half. “When I got home,” Niven wrote in a memoir, “we meticulously
removed half the spread from the jars, cut every cheese in half, every sardine in half, then with an envelope containing a
check for half my salary from the show, I sent the lot to Goldwyn inside half the basket.”
⁶

Bing’s
Kraft Music Hall
generated droll postmortems in part because it represented something different for radio. It had become a way station for
entertainers high and low and was a must for Hollywood notables plugging their wares. A pleasure for listeners and performers
alike, thanks chiefly to Bing’s even keel on air and behind the scenes,
KMH
erased Hollywood’s last resistance to radio as a low-life competitor. Here was fresh ground, on which hillbilly comedian
Bob Burns and longhair icon Leopold Stokowski could mix it up under the benevolent gaze of ringmaster Bing. The show was so
effortlessly amusing, the humor so unforced, that the audience assumed it was largely if not entirely ad-libbed. This assumption
was shared even by people supposedly in the know, like the press. They believed
KMH
to be, no less than the numberless talk shows spawned in its wake, a playful hour in which Bing and friends shot the breeze,
joked, performed, and periodically took time out so the announcer could sell cheese.

That a program as complicated as
KMH,
with its repartee, musical numbers, commercials, and skits, could be produced off the cuff was about as likely, in 1936,
as Ossip Gabrilowitsch wandering off the set in silence. But the assumption was an unbeatable tribute to Bing’s
finest and longest-running characterization, as the relaxed, neighborly, decent, straight-shooting, genial host who was too
much himself, too much a creation of his own lazy tempo to read a script or mind cues. Whenever Bing cracked up or misread
or stumbled over a lovingly intoned ten-dollar word or scooped a punch line with his plucky baritone, he contributed to the
illusion of spontaneity. The genuinely impromptu moments, for Bing was no slouch at quips, were isolated. Never mind the thousands
who (quietly) attended his weekly broadcasts and saw the artists standing around a mike with scripts in hand; the radio-listening
audience had its own mind, and in that realm Crosby was simply not the rehearsal type. As his radio persona grew in stature,
it subsumed the personae he created on records and film.