Bing Crosby (82 page)

No effort was spared to attract the Hollywood community on August 5, which was declared Motion Picture Day. Each contest was
titled like the entrées on a Sunset Boulevard menu: The Actors, The Exhibitors, The Producers, The Directors, The Cameramen,
The Screen Writers, and The Stars. A Motion Picture Handicap offered a $3,000 purse for three-year-olds owned by people in
the business. The horses raced by Robert Riskin, Clark Gable, and Joe E. Brown won, placed, and showed; Bing’s entry, Rocco,
came in last. But nothing could dampen his spirits that day. He announced the race and then signed hundreds of autographs.
After the last race a screen was erected on the track for the premiere of Bing’s new picture,
Sing You Sinners,
a racetrack story in which his own horses participated. This in itself was an event, “Hollywood’s most novel preview,” a
reporter called it.
⁴¹
Drive-ins were practically unheard-of (the first one, erected in New Jersey in 1933, had few imitators until the late 1940s).
The audience at Del Mar marveled at the sight of planes overhead and the sound of train whistles in the distance as they watched
the movie. Bing was not around for the alfresco screening, however; he was rehearsing the script for the radio broadcast to
follow. It began with Del Mar’s theme song and proceeded with several stars lavishing praise on the picture and players, except
for Bing, who in mock desperation asked Pat O’Brien, “How did you like
my
work in the picture, Pat?” The predictable reply: “Oh, were you in the picture, too?”

The press, including 375 writers and photographers who were delivered to the gates on a special train, focused on Motion Picture
Day (Friday) and failed to report on Saturday evening’s entertainment, which proved more consequential. Bob Hope had relocated
to Los Angeles the previous year to appear in Paramount’s
The Big Broadcast of 1938.
Having renewed their friendship on the links and at the studio, Bing asked Hope to join him onstage to re-create the routines
they improvised at the Capitol Theater six years earlier. The crowd loved them, as did William LeBaron, an officer on the
Del Mar board and Paramount’s chief of production. The buzz that evening was, why doesn’t somebody put these guys into a picture?

The incident that ensured Del Mar’s survival took place the following Friday. Bing and Lin Howard had purchased the 6,000-acre
La Portena ranch in Argentina and shipped several horses back to the United States, a slow, arduous journey by sea and rail.
When the horses finally arrived, the six-year-old Ligaroti was promising but
unsteady, and for a while Bing and Lin considered selling him — he was offered to Louis B. Mayer for $75,000. They were glad
Meyer declined when, in March 1938, Ligaroti won a $5,000 handicap at Bay Meadows, San Mateo, by three lengths, completing
the mile course in 1:40. Another of their Argentine horses, Sabuesa, also won that day. In July Ligaroti won the $5,000 Aloma
Handicap at Hollywood Park. Unbilled, he also got to win the big race at the climax of
Sing You Sinners.
Word got around that Bing and Howard were claiming Ligaroti might be the best distance runner in the country, a boast that
Del Mar’s general manager, William Quigley, duly conveyed to Lin’s father, who owned the famous Seabiscuit.

Charles Howard had made a fortune in Buick dealerships. Seabiscuit added to it, winning more than a third of his starts over
a four-year period; in 1937 he was voted the nation’s number one handicap horse. Howard could not resist Quigley’s challenge,
and a match race was staged with a $25,000 purse, no public wagering, though spectators could bet among themselves. Bing and
Lin placed side bets with Howard (who grandly offered three-to-one odds) and Seabiscuit’s backers. The distance was set at
a mile and an eighth, with George (The Iceman) Woolf riding Seabiscuit and Noel (Spec) Richardson riding Ligaroti. A crowd
of 22,000 overflowed the stands — larger by a third than the previous record crowd. The match was broadcast by Bing and O’Brien
from a microphone on the grandstand roof, beneath which a cheering section wore Ligaroti sweaters and waved Ligaroti pennants,
chanting, “You can try and try and try, but you can’t beat Ligaroti!”

The race, euphemized by one sportswriter as “torrid,”
⁴²
was remembered by the man who announced it, Oscar Otis, as the most violent he had ever seen. Seabiscuit broke out first,
but at no time did either horse lead by more than half a length. The crowd went crazy, and so did the jockeys, flailing each
other and the horses with whips, grabbing at each other’s saddles and reins. Seabiscuit won by a nose in 1:49, setting a new
track record by four seconds. Spec Richardson immediately filed a protest against Woolf, who in turn claimed Richardson began
the melee by grabbing his whip hand. Track stewards launched an inquiry, observing that Seabiscuit had taken severe punishment,
showing welts on his neck and flank and breathing heavily, while Ligaroti, as one might expect of a Crosby horse,
“appeared cool and relatively little exerted.”
⁴³
Both jockeys were suspended for the meet, with a recommendation that the California Horse Racing Board suspend them for the
year. But as there was no pari-mutuel betting, the punishments could not be enforced. Dixie presented the prize money to Howard
in the winner’s circle. Bing graciously remarked to reporters, “It’s no disgrace to be beaten by the world champion.” Nationwide
coverage put Del Mar on the map.

Paramount provided a punch line for all the fuss in the form of a press release with Bing’s byline, in which he complains
that he was “on the set one day” and had to endure a barrage of jokes about his horses. “Oh well, let the clowns laugh,” he
muses, “[my horses] will be winning races some day.”
⁴⁴
No horses or races are mentioned in the release, but Paramount’s newest contract player makes an appearance. Bing laments
that while driving to Lakeside, Bob Hope pointed to a decrepit nag and said, “It looks like one of your horses. It’s stopped.”
⁴⁵
If the flacks were bent on reducing Bing to a routine of frazzled jokes, the front office seemed equally fixed on a standard
recipe for film scripts. Small wonder he found more enchantment in the stables and more excitement at a tee.

I remember somebody once said that Bing would have made a great Hamlet. I don’t know what Bing had to say about that. Oh,
my gosh, he would have been scared to death taking on Hamlet. But there was a feeling from people that there was something
much deeper about Bing.

— Anthony Quinn (1989)
¹

The
New York Sun
polled several personalities in 1938 for lists of their ten favorite films. Bing’s roster is individual, knowing, and surprisingly
impolitic given his own predictable roles in the most capital-oriented (“After all,” says Sammy Glick, “our pictures are shipped
out in cans. We’re in the canning business”) of the arts.
²

1. The Crowd
   
2. The Birth of a Nation
   
3. The Informer
   
4. Vivacious Lady
   
5. Any silent Chaplin film
   
6. Ditto
   
7. Ditto
   
8. A Farewell to Arms
   
9. The Big Parade
   
10. Lloyd Hamilton comedy
    

The list is striking in that seven of his selections are silent: Griffith’s landmark
The Birth of a Nation;
King Vidor’s two dramatic pinnacles,
The Crowd
and
The Big Parade;
and four comedies, three by Chaplin. Bing’s lifelong love of silent comedy is apparent throughout his work, and his devotion
to Chaplin in particular comes through on numerous occasions when he strikes a bowlegged pose or executes a pigeon-toed walk
or some sleight of hand with a prop. The three talkies include his only ballot for a Paramount picture, Frank Borzage’s pre-Code
A
Farewell to Arms,
with Gary Cooper;
The Informer,
John Ford’s celebrated treatment of a besotted traitor during the Irish Rebellion; and a new film,
Vivacious Lady,
George Stevens’s comedy of the classes in which nightclub singer Ginger Rogers marries botanist James Stewart.

Bing’s new film at the time his list appeared was
Sing You Sinners,
a determined effort to move beyond the standard Crosby persona movies that had grown increasingly similar. When William LeBaron
took over as Paramount’s chief of production (replacing the ill-suited Ernst Lubitsch), Adolph Zukor warned him he would have
difficulty finding stories for Bing. From the beginning the studio had a firm notion of what a Crosby story entailed. Joseph
Mankiewicz recalled Emanuel Cohen halting production on
Too Much Harmony
in 1933, explaining to him, “You have made one terrible mistake. You have Crosby falling in love with the girl. The public
will never accept that. You must make the girl fall in love with him!”
³
A year later Charles Samuels, hired to doctor a few scripts, was instructed, “Don’t forget that Crosby’s love scenes are
not like those of any other male star. He never makes love to the girl. She has to make love to him. Love and romance always
have to sneak up on Bing when he isn’t looking.”
⁴

Though
Pennies from Heaven
fits the template to a T, Bing was nevertheless aiming for greater variety when he and Manny Cohen produced it.
⁵
“I felt I had to play a different type of character, a real person,” he told a reporter. “All this singing for no reason
at all couldn’t go on. So I went into business for myself.”
⁶
Thirty years later he looked back on his 1930s films as a blur: “So much of what I did seems to run together…. A lot of those
pictures were, dare I say,
very similar.”
⁷
His list of favorites show how well aware he was of the gap between Cinema and the general run of Hollywood product, particularly
his own.

Returning to Paramount after
Pennies from Heaven,
in 1936, he worked for the fourth time with Frank Tuttle and for the fifth with Karl Struss, producing the blockbuster
Waikiki Wedding
— the third-highest-grossing picture of 1937. The project was chosen after two others fell through:
It Happened in Paradise,
a summer-camp musical, would have reunited him with Ida Lupino;
⁸
the more intriguing
Follow the Sun
would have reunited him with Burns and Allen and Norman Taurog (Paramount announced it as “made to the measure of that Crosby
smash,
We’re Not Dressing”)
while drawing directly on his ancestry in telling the story of a sea captain who ships from the Pacific Northwest to the
Orient to start a nightclub.
⁹
The switch to a Hawaiian setting may have been swayed by an important recording session that summer.

To Jack Kapp, Hawaiian songs meant a standard category of music, like cowboy or Christmas songs. They represented another
string for the Crosby bow, and Kapp was eager to record them. The Crosbys were planning to vacation in Hawaii in August, and
Jack told him it would be a nice gesture to telegraph their arrival with a couple of appropriate tunes, “Song of the Islands”
and “Aloha Oe.” He hired the perfect accompanist, Dick McIntyre and His Harmony Hawaiians, a quartet with steel and acoustic
guitars, ukelele, and bass. Five days after the record date, Paramount announced
Waikiki Wedding
as Bing’s next picture, though the decision had not yet been finalized;
¹⁰
weeks later the studio reversed itself with an announcement that
It Happened in Paradise
was back on schedule. Yet in the end, Paramount, like Decca, succumbed to the appeal of placing a lei around Bing’s neck.

If the years 1936 to 1940 were bumpy ones in Bing’s movie career, with equal rations of highs and lows, they represented an
important crossroads for his music. Once again his voice and attack were evolving. His newly modulated style was, as Rose
Bampton discerned, more accomplished. He sang with greater economy, a more reflective approach to lyrics; he employed longer
notes and balanced his expressive middle tones with polished plums from the high and low reaches of his range. The 1933 Jimmy
Grier records had captured
Bing climbing peaks; now, tempered yet emotionally resolute, he was willing to survey the valleys. The voice was still round
and robust, but he did not push it as hard. The nodes and attendant hoarseness had miraculously vanished, and the hollow ring
that crept into his voice in the mid-1940s was not yet evident. Whether romping with his brother’s jazz band or sighing of
trade-wind breezes, Bing in the mid-thirties was the most quietly assured male pop singer alive.

For Bing, Hawaiian songs occupied a middle ground between cowboy songs and pop ballads, and he pursued all three idioms with
unusually moody expressiveness. On Ray Noble’s lovely “The Touch of Your Lips,” his musing eloquence is befitting and expected.
On the two comically theatrical numbers from Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
(“I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”), his interpretations are unexpectedly rueful. The most impressive
of his new cowboy songs (including “We’ll Rest at the End of the Trail,” “A Roundup Lullaby,” “Empty Saddles” ) was “Twilight
on the Trail,” a lament introduced that year by Fuzzy Knight in
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
and sung by Bing as though it were an old western hymn. That’s how it may have sounded to President Roosevelt, who declared
it his favorite song after “Home on the Range”; Mrs. Roosevelt requested Bing’s record for the Roosevelt Library.