Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  Another standout, Walter Donaldson’s “Because My Baby Don’t Mean ‘Maybe’ Now,” opens with a chorus in which Bix Beiderbecke improvises figures that are closely shadowed by the band’s written phrases (a passage that shows why Ellington admired Challis). But the record is best known for Bing’s jaunty vocal; he completes several phrases with spirited bu-bu-bu-boos. Young fans began to note Bing’s spoken interjections, like “why say there” on “Wa Da Da” or “tell it” on “My Suppressed Desire” — which The New Yorker helpfully classified as not a “profound study in psychoanalysis, but [a] record full of surprises.” 55 In truth, the record’s only revelation is Bing’s blithe eight-bar scat episode.

  The Rhythm Boys were back in New York to play Christmas week at the Palace (Variety praised Bing’s ballad and the threesome’s “modulation of the vo-do-de-o stuff”) 56 and Newark’s Proctor on New Year’s Eve. The day before closing at the Palace, Bing made two records with the Ipana Troubadours, a radio orchestra led by Sam Lanin that included several of Bing’s jazz buddies (the Dorseys, Vic Berton, Manny Klein), though you would not know it from the staid arrangements. Bing’s hiring indicated his growing stature among top musicians. He got to sing a very good song, “I’ll Get By,” with a somewhat husky voice and tinge of Jolson, and a very bad one, “Rose of Mandalay,” which he nonetheless enhanced with his intrepid zip.

  On February 5 Whiteman inaugurated The Old Gold Hour, a successful series on WABC (the New York flagship of the Columbia Broadcasting System), airing Tuesdays at nine. Whiteman liked to tell how he originally offered the show to the president of NBC, who turned him down because his network already had a cigarette sponsor. Despite jealous sponsors, radio was about to enjoy a crushing if provisional triumph over its hated rival, the recording industry, aided by the stock market crash later in the year. Records were expensive, and radio offered free entertainment subsidized by advertising accounts. Even before the crash, the new medium flaunted its power. When the Radio Corporation of America took control of the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1928, it established RCA Victor, a division intended to manufacture nothing but radios (it produced 4 million that year alone). RCA would have been happy to wipe out the phonograph altogether. Instead, Victor officials held the fort, and RCA became the leading record label of the 1930s. Still, as late as 1939, when records rebounded with sensational sales, the networks (as opposed to independent stations) tried to keep them off the air.

  Old Gold initially paid Whiteman $5,000 per broadcast hour for sixteen weeks. William S. Paley, who had just been elected president of CBS, knew the bandleader’s popularity would draw stations nationwide to his network, especially when the band went on the road, broadcasting from a different city each week. Old Gold had other concerns. Its deal required Whiteman to present his Rhythm Boys — the trio evidently had an influential fan in the tobacco business. Perhaps the executive was fond of “Mississippi Mud” or thought a young trio would lure young smokers or recognized a musical turnaround taking place, favoring baritones over tenors. Maybe all three motives figured in his rationale. For a turnaround was indeed in the air. Sponsors wanted people to keep their radios on as much as possible, as a soothing background for millions of potential consumers. Higher voices are better for reaching theater balconies, but lower ones are more appealing in living rooms. Radio’s superior sound captured the subtle nuances of deeper voices.

  Whiteman cheerfully reinstated the Rhythm Boys at double their salaries ($300 each). He had another use for them beyond radio. A few months earlier, in the fall of 1928, when Herbert Hoover was elected president, Paul had agreed to star — for two-fifths of the net — in Universal’s “super-special 100 per cent talker,” King of Jazz. Carl Laemmle, Universal’s president, and Jimmy Gillespie signed the contracts at New York’s Harmony Club, agreeing to go into production in March with director Wesley Ruggles. Nothing about this production would go as planned.

  11

  OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

  Get yourself set for the biggest news you’ve ever heard since the advent of the audible screen….

  — advertisement, Variety (1929) 1

  The first screenwriter assigned to the project had little sympathy with Whiteman’s ideas. 2 When their discussions collapsed, the film was rescheduled for the fall and the band planned to head for the Coast in May. Now there were four months to fill, but Whiteman’s plate never remained empty for long. A couple of unexpected opportunities had come his way shortly before the New Year. Florenz Ziegfeld celebrated the first anniversary of his production of Show Boat by launching two new shows in December: an Eddie Cantor musical, Whoopee, on December 4, at the New Amsterdam Theatre, and a completely revised version of his after-hours nightclub revue, Midnight Frolic, three weeks later on the New Amsterdam Roof. Whoopee was a smash, but George Olsen, its featured bandleader and the conductor slated for Midnight Frolic, battled with Ziegfeld, who accused him of reserving his best arrangements for leading lady Ethel Shutta, Olsen’s wife. After Olsen quit or was fired, Ziegfeld hired Whiteman for both shows at a salary rumored to be the highest ever offered a bandleader. 3

  On December 29 Whiteman moved his operation into Whoopee with much fanfare and not a little calamity. When Paul gave the downbeat for a dance sketch, the band segued into one piece while lead trumpeter Charlie Margulis started another. Certain that everyone else was wrong, the crocked Margulis figured he could fix things by playing extra loud. Musicians recounted Whiteman sputtering, “Get me a pistol. Somebody kill the son of a bitch. I’ll tear him apart with my hands!” 4 For the finale, the stage rolled over the pit, scaring the hell out of Whiteman, who had not been warned of this innovation in stagecraft. He ran out and, realizing his mistake, could not get back in. Cantor went on a tear, parodying Paul with a drumstick for a baton. The delighted audience assumed it was all planned.

  After the curtain, the band and numerous luminaries took the elevator to the Midnight Frolic on the lavish roof, fashioned by Austrian theatrical designer Joseph Urban with pastel colors and lights, glass balconies, and a “pearl” curtain that was actually made of transparent medical capsules painted silver. The roof boasted a chic kitchen with matching prices. Ziegfeld stars, including Fanny Brice and Helen Morgan, stopped by to sing one or two numbers, but the Frolic was Whiteman’s show. He was more at home in a nightclub than in a pit trying to tailor his music to actors.

  During this time, the Rhythm Boys were playing their week at the Palace. They finished the engagement the same night Whiteman entered the cast of Whoopee, and two days later they were back on tour, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They were not scheduled for Whoopee, although Bing was whisked into the studio to record a fast, impeccably articulated version of the Eddie Cantor showstopper “Makin’ Whoopee.” By mid-January Whiteman was also on the road, playing weeks in Cincinnati and Detroit, where he hired Andy Secrest, an able if uninspired trumpet player who could handle the jazz solos when Bix was ailing. Returning to Manhattan for the February 5 commencement of his Old Gold show, Paul resumed double duties at the New Amsterdam for nearly three months. When in town the Rhythm Boys occasionally appeared in the roof shows and even in Whoopee, performing an interpolated song. More often they were sent on area tours, returning Tuesdays to take their places on the Old Gold broadcasts.

  Meanwhile, in Hollywood, to mark his son’s twenty-first birthday, Carl Laemmle Sr. appointed Carl Laemmle Jr. general manager of Universal and dropped the much publicized and hugely expensive Whiteman film in his lap. Junior immediately replaced Wesley Ruggles with Hungarian director Paul Fejos (whose succes d’estime of 1928, The Last Moment, details the last days of a suicide) and assigned the script to Edward T. Lowe (whose thin vita later included Poverty Row Charlie Chans and Bulldog Drummonds). Both men were dispatched to New York, and one can scarcely imagine what Paul made of them. Fejos proposed a history of the orchestra with actors playing the musicians. Under no circumstance was Whiteman going to make a movie about his band without his band; he could
not believe anyone would suggest such a thing. Universal obliviously informed the trades that an eight-week shooting schedule would begin June 1 so that Paul could return home for the August racing season at Saratoga. But the start-up was delayed again when Fejos and Lowe limped back to Hollywood. They were accompanied by Ferde Grofe, whom Whiteman asked to orchestrate the score; at least he could get started.

  Concurrently, something entirely unexpected happened to popular music: it got younger. The new sound was favored almost exclusively by women, and the object of their passion was not Bing but rather Hubert Prior Vallee, a singer, saxophonist, and bandleader who renamed himself Rudy in honor of his idol, saxophone virtuoso Rudy Wiedoeft. As a Yale undergraduate who spent six years earning a philosophy degree, Vallee led a sticky-sweet band called the Yale Collegians. He believed he possessed rare insight regarding his generation’s musical tastes, which he construed as a desire for rah-rah Ivy League songs, adapted European ballads, and mildly risque novelties about stupid or easy girls. Briefly the public validated his judgment. In 1928 he brought his band, renamed the Connecticut Yankees, into New York’s Heigh-Ho Club, achieving widespread recognition as WABC aired his sets. When he opened at Keith’s 81st Street in February 1929, success became spectacle as mounted police cordoned off an area to accommodate hundreds of fans, many of them teenagers.

  Vallee’s trademark appurtenance was a small megaphone, his greeting a jaunty “Heigh-ho, everybody,” his sound a dry, nasal baritone that detractors (they were legion) derisively characterized as “crooning.” By March Vallee had three simultaneous hit records. By June he was starring in a hit film, The Vagabond Lover, which was advertised, “Men hate him — women love him.” By 1930 he had published the first of three unintentionally hilarious autobiographies, fabled for their pettiness and vaunted modesty. (“I apparently have always been like the great surgeon who is too busy performing his superb and skillful operations to take any bows for what he does so easily and naturally.”) 5 By 1931, after watching Crosby perform, Vallee, whose theme song was “My Time Is Your Time,” proved sufficiently astute to observe to friends, “My time is short.” Yet Vallee’s startling popularity helps explain Bing’s strangely uneven recordings in the months before he left for California. They suggest a bout of indecision, as if Bing had lost his compass and was no longer certain what kind of singer he wanted to be.

  Bing was now twenty-five and prized by the musicians he admired as well as numerous fans. With Whiteman granting him the freedom to freelance for Columbia sessions, he was in demand to provide “vocal refrains” for studio orchestras. Before the Vallee hysteria set in, Bing was on a roll. He demonstrated confidence at a date by a Sam Lanin outfit, inflecting Spencer Williams’s “Susianna” with a felt ebullience, cannily shading the lyrics with his measured breathing. On the British evergreen “If I Had You,” he embellishes the melody and stresses the vowels, often with a slight turn or mordent. The next day he was on hand for the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, a recording unit copiloted by Jimmy and Tommy, the battling brothers from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, two of the most sought-after freelancers in New York. Glenn Miller arranged the material, and for the first time Bing’s chorus was backed by the ingenious guitarist Eddie Lang. On “The Spell of the Blues,” Bing bends notes for bluesy effect and, despite one Jolsonesque ringer, is clearly his own man. He is no less assured on Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” encouragingly supported by Lang. Best of all is “My Kinda Love,” a flimsy song that he projects stirringly without a trace of the frangible crooning style.

  Several days after Vallee’s theatrical breakthrough, however, Bing recorded with Whiteman and for the first time appeared discombobulated. He sang two waltzes — including his second Berlin tune, “Coquette” — in a key too high for him and in a style that might be described as a poised croon, deft but diffident. The second tune, “My Angeline,” was deemed unreleasable; a week later Bing gave Whiteman an acceptable version, but even then his top notes were soft. Bing was clearly in a state, and we can only speculate about what threw him. Perhaps he would have been more himself if Challis, not William Grant Still, had arranged “Coquette.” Perhaps he withered under the glare of the despotic anti-jazz producer Eddie King. Perhaps he simply had a bad day. Most likely, Vallee had gotten to him in a way drink never did, as witness the far more significant follow-up session.

  On March 14, encouraged by the Vallee phenomenon, Columbia offered Bing his first date under his own name. He was backed by three Whiteman musicians (violinist Matty Malneck, pianist Roy Bargy, guitarist Snoozer Quinn). All his experience during the four years since the Musicaladers should have been consolidated in this hour, yet the records are unaccountably lifeless. Spurred by the vitality he achieved on “My Kinda Love” with the Dorseys, Bing chose to rerecord it, but this time he overloaded the song with self-conscious vocal techniques; for the first time, he was thrown off-kilter by a doubled-up tempo change. On the wholly undistinguished song “Till We Meet,” he sounds not unlike singers he was in the process of demolishing.

  By contrast, he was in splendid form a few weeks later, in April, for arguably the best of the Rhythm Boys sessions. “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together,” by Harry Barris and Billy Moll (“I Want a Little Girl”), recounts an ornithological covenant while advancing the merrily subversive subtext of miscegenation, a theme previously explored in 1924, when Eva Taylor, accompanied by Louis Armstrong, recorded “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.” Bing begins the number with his hand cymbal and sings his solo parts with aplomb, using mordents and a midrange croon, but without the corn of “My Kinda Love.” Later passages suggest a rapping modernism, and the unison harmonization shows the trio at its best. In case anyone doubted the soloist’s identity, “Louise” begins with a phone call for Bing (“I wonder who could be calling when I’m recording,” he grouses. “Louise? That’s different.”) The phone found its way into their live act. On some nights the routine had Hollywood on the line, calling for Bing to make pictures. And why not? After all, Hollywood had called Rudy Vallee.

  Returning to the studio with Whiteman, Bing appeared perplexed once again, casting about for style. He did as well as could be expected on the ineffable Jolson tearjearker “Little Pal,” tossing in a tearful mordent and somehow managing to sound rational. The potentially vital “Reaching for Someone,” a Challis arrangement recorded on Bing’s twenty-sixth birthday, is marred by his misguided attempt to vocally mimic Tram’s saxophone glissandi at the turnbacks, a tasteless conceit in an otherwise fine performance and one he never repeated. Bing, Tram, and Bix all enliven “Oh, Miss Hannah,” a southern song (“the moon am shining bright”). Bing stresses the word roses with a mordent employed not for sentiment but to underscore rhythmic pulse, and swells the final cadence. Yet at the same session he is indifferently orotund on Gus Edwards’s “Orange Blossom Time.”

  Unlike Armstrong, who was born practically fully formed, Bing flirted with styles before settling into one unremittingly his own, one that would prove applicable to every kind of song. His natural reserve led him toward an economy of expression, but the times encouraged his inclination toward grandiloquence. To a certain degree his dilemma was created by his obligation to fulfill Whiteman’s requirements. When he was afforded good material, Bing could make the whole band shine. But Paul’s more bombastic pieces demanded a stolid projection. The miracle of Bing’s tenure with the band is how consistently he held himself apart from its pomposity. Like Bix, Bing seems to open a window and let in fresh air almost every time he stands up to solo. Only in the spring and summer of 1929, Vallee’s brief time in the sun, did Bing blink. He was the one, after all, who should have been moving into the limelight, not that mewling throwback to the kind of dullards he and Louis Armstrong were consigning to oblivion.

  Bing’s musical confusion did not detract from his appetite for good times, leading to one professional and personal lapse that almost ended in disaster. Whiteman’s orchestra played a two-week
engagement at the Pavillon Royal on Long Island’s Merrick Road. On Sunday, May 12, Bing, Al, Harry, and Mischa Russell, a violinist in the band, entertained some Ziegfeld Follies girls at the apartment of a wealthy friend. Late in the afternoon their host proposed a sailboat cruise on Long Island Sound. As they launched onto the water, Bing leaned against the rail, hoisted a glass of champagne, and began a song just as the boat hit a wave. He was tossed overboard. Wind drove the boat 300 yards before the skipper could come about. Bing’s expertise as a swimmer saved him. He was treading water and laughing when they fished him out — reason enough to return to New York and resume the festivities.

  At 2:00 A.M. the Whiteman foursome and the Ziegfeld girls repaired to the apartment of one of the chorines. They slept late and missed the bus Whiteman had chartered to take his musicians to Long Island. When they realized that there was no way they could make the gig in time, they knew they were in serious trouble and had no recourse but to apologize profusely. Whiteman threatened to fire them. The boys had never seen him angrier. Yet he calmed down when they promised to reform. Asked years later whether Bing had been hard to handle, Paul replied, “No, he was never hard to handle. But sometimes he was hard to find.” 6

  On May 24, hours before the Whiteman caravan headed west, Bing made his second date as a leader. Backed by three musicians, this time including Lang on guitar, he covered Vallee’s adaptation of a German song, “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,” humming, whistling, and finishing with jazzy adornments. But then he lost his moorings on “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be?,” missing a note and veering out of tune on a scat break. Even his usually flawless time failed him. Bing needed a break from New York.