Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  The Whiteman—Old Gold Special chugged out of Pennsylvania Station on May 24, a privately chartered train of eight coaches, two for baggage alone, another for Paul’s Duesenberg. The party of fifty included thirty-five musicians, managers, a crew of audio experts, staff arranger William Grant Still, the vice president of P. Lorrillard (Old Gold footed the bills), and reporters, most notably Variety’s Abel Green, who filed regular dispatches along the way as, over the course of twelve days, the band performed — in addition to weekly broadcasts — free concerts in sixteen cities, from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City. It was a public-relations bonanza, the showbiz story of the year. When they did not have a hall, the band performed on the train’s extended observation platform, and no one complained when local radio stations set up microphones. Indeed, the sponsor was overjoyed to have the whole country tracking the bandleader’s journey to California. “This is a nite club, all stag, on wheels,” Green reported, “except that the club is going all hours, day and night.” 7 In Nebraska the band entertained 4,500 at Omaha’s City Auditorium in the afternoon and 1,500 at the Lincoln train station at night. In Denver Whiteman participated in a much photographed reunion with his parents. Throughout the trip black porters (“Ethiops” in the parlance of Variety) greeted him as king and treated him accordingly.

  Shortly before the band left New York, the premier violin-guitar team of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang signed on as members of the troupe (previously they had been contracted for individual recordings), and they provided much of the journey’s intramural entertainment, not all of it musical. Along with banjoist Mike Pingitore and violinist Wilbur Hall, they formed a string quartet to serenade the king at dinner. Venuti was a dedicated practical joker. Heading through Utah and finding Bix in a dead sleep, he gathered sand buckets (used to extinguish fires) from passenger cars and heaped the sand on Bix’s lap, the adjoining seat, and the floor. When Bix came to and blanched, Venuti reassured him that they had safely emerged from the worst sandstorm in years. Bix protested, “Why didn’t someone wake me up? I could have suffocated.” 8

  Lang and Venuti were two prodigiously talented Italians from Philadelphia. After Bix, they were arguably the most influential white jazz musicians of the 1920s, serving as a sort of template for the famed European jazz ensemble of the 1930s, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which featured guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelly. They blended their instruments in virtuoso ten-string exercises that combined classicism and swing in astonishing breakneck exhibitions, but they were also capable of poignant lyricism. Inseparable in their school years, they remained personally and musically close and had no need for arrangements; once they agreed on a key, they could improvise all evening. Yet as individuals they could not have been more different. Venuti, a physically imposing man with a growly voice and temperament, was a resolute gambler and joker, said to be the only man to nettle the placid King of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers. (When they shared a stage bill in the 1940s, Joe struck up a conversation with Roy as he awaited a cue astride his palomino, Trigger; while they conversed, Venuti triggered the horse with his violin bow, producing an immoderate erection that convulsed the audience.) Joe was a loner who worked when he felt like it, an eccentric and natural comedian — just the type of personality Bing relished.

  Lang was his polar opposite: quiet, thoughtful, responsible, a ruminative Catholic. Bing came to regard him as a counterpart. Eddie was one of the few people in Bing’s life to get beyond the role of a jester or playmate and become a genuine confidant. He was Bing’s most intimate friend, almost certainly the closest he would ever have. Until Lang’s tragic death in 1933, they traveled together, making wonderful music on records and in films. Eddie’s wife, Kitty, whom he met in 1920, when she was touring in a Ziegfeld Follies road company and he was playing banjo with a band in Philadelphia, described him as a “shy boy with black, curly hair and grey-green eyes. He could barely say hello, but he had the sweetest smile I ever saw.” 9 They eloped in 1926, enduring rough times until the good jobs began coming Eddie’s way. He introduced Kitty to Bing in a nightclub: “Eddie and I were with Jimmy Dorsey and his wife Janey. Bing came over to our table and sat down for a few minutes. He was a happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, a perfect gentleman at all times, though he had had a few drinks. Eddie told me afterwards that he believed this guy Bing would go places as he had everything going for him once he settled down to business.” 10

  “Well we are wending our way westward and having a truly marvelous time of it,” Bing wrote home to his mother. After detailing the itinerary, he penitently reassured Kate: “If nothing else our return to Whiteman has been fruitful because of this trip. Not only are we having a great time but my name is being prominently featured in the newspapers and in the broadcasts and considerable invaluable publicity thus redounds to me. What awaits us on the Coast is as yet problematical and whether we get much of a break in the picture or not I can’t tell now. However, I intend to bear down heavily and really try to accomplish something worth while.” 11 He told her that they figured to be in Los Angeles on June 20 and that she could write him in care of Everett, who had recently married the former Naomi Tillinghast and settled in what Bing later described to Kate as a “cute home.” 12

  The band pulled into Los Angeles at 3:00 P.M. on June 6 for a covert huddle with Universal officials, then continued to San Francisco to play a week of vaudeville at the Pantages Theater. The official arrival in Los Angeles, preceding yet another week of vaudeville, was accompanied by the usual ballyhoo at Central Station: speech by the mayor, key to the city, all the contract players Universal could muster as a welcoming committee, plus a crowd of 500 fans. This was White-man’s first visit to California in three years — he had been away since the time he recruited Bing and Al. Carl Laemmle brought the musicians to the lot to show off a clubhouse he had built for them, called Whiteman Lodge, complete with rehearsal room, fireplace, billiard tables, library, lockers, and showers. Transportation problems were solved when a Ford dealer offered each of Whiteman’s men a Model A roadster, almost at cost, the payments to be deducted from their salaries over the course of their stay. Whiteman ordered thirty-five. Bing chose a convertible. As a promotional gimmick, each roadster sported a prominent spare tire with the potato-head caricature, which became a carrot for highway patrolmen who learned that if they followed one long enough, they would get to issue a summons or two.

  During an impromptu interview, Whiteman made the ominous remark “I haven’t seen the script yet, but I can tell you one thing. Jazz is losing out to the slower rhythms. You might print that and quote me!” 13 If his statement was intended as grievance, he himself was partly to blame, having decided to hire a team of conventional writers like Mabel Wayne (who wrote Whiteman’s hit “In a Little Spanish Town”) and L. Wolfe Gilbert (who wrote the Jolson classic “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee”), when he might have had his pick of the sophisticated songwriting talents lighting up Broadway. He also chose to leave Challis at home in favor of Grofe and Still. Whiteman’s concert violinist, Kurt Dieterle, thought he made that decision because Challis was too painstaking and slow for the Hollywood mill. Challis, however, was not nearly as slow as scriptwriter Ed Lowe. When Whiteman checked in with the front office on June 24, he was flabbergasted to learn that there was no script. Furthermore, Grofe complained that time and again he was asked to score a tune and after finishing the job was told the tune had been scrapped.

  Aside from radio broadcasts, the band had nothing to do except golf, party, drink, and drive around, all on the Universal dole. Mischa Russell was arrested for drunk driving and held by a peculiarly liberal turnkey; when some of his friends visited the lockup, they were informed that Russell and his jailer had gone to the movies but that they were welcome to wait if they liked. Comedy turned to tragedy six weeks into their stay when several musicians took off in a fleet of cars for a gig in Santa Barbara. Venuti broke from his lane to pass a slowpoke and crashed into an oncoming vehicle. His wrist was
badly mangled; for a while it was feared he would never play again. His passenger, Mario Perry, an accordionist and one of Whiteman’s earliest associates, died en route to the hospital. The two women in the other car, though unharmed, filed suit against Venuti and Whiteman. Hollywood had become a nightmare.

  Bing stayed out of trouble. “Universal gave the boys two hundred dollars a week, each boy,” Kurt Dieterle recalled, “and we also had the Old Gold broadcasts — that was another fifty dollars. The first three months they were rewriting the story, five of us who were golfers — Chet Hazlett, Roy Bargy, Bing and Al Rinker, and myself — went and joined Lakeside. Hazlett bought a regular membership and the rest of us bought associate memberships for five hundred dollars. We didn’t do a lick of work as far as the orchestra. The five of us went to Lakeside in the morning, played a round of golf, each with our own caddy. After lunch we would play another eighteen holes.” 14 Bing, Dieterle, and Mischa Russell rented a house for the summer on Fairfax Avenue and hired a cook. They visited Universal only on payday. Bing recalled Whiteman’s saying, “Well, thanks a lot for managing to get over here for your checks — thanks a lot.” 15

  In those days, the membership of Lakeside Golf Club was dominated by the film industry, and Bing became friendly with several actors, including Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers, Oliver Hardy, and Johnny Weissmuller. But his entree into Hollywood really began to take wing after the Rhythm Boys, alone among the Whiteman musicians, sought a steady job. “We are trying to line up some extra work while here but the rehearsals and radio just about make it impossible,” Bing wrote Kate, overstating their labors:

  However, we plan an opening at the Montmartre cafe in Hollywood for a short time to see how it works out. This will help to tide us over during our enforced idleness. Picture work is, of course, possible for the trio, but we are prevented from doing any of this until the Universal picture is completed, and even in that it is quite probable that we’ll be left on the cutting room floor. In the meantime I am going to make some screen tests for MGM, as has been suggested to me quite often since my arrival here, and, who knows, something may come of them? 16

  The Rhythm Boys were a hit at the Montmartre Cafe, but nothing came of Bing’s MGM tests or of subsequent tests at Fox, where casting director Jim Ryan complimented Bing’s singing and asked him to read lines for chief of production Winfield Sheehan. Bing recalled Sheehan’s saying, “Very good, but the ears are wingy.” Bing told the tale on TV in 1971: “I thought he said, ‘The years are winging,’ and I said, no, I’m twenty-whatever-I-was-then. He said, ‘No, the ears are winging, there’s no way we can photograph you, it would be a lot of big problems.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid that there just isn’t a place for you in pictures.’ I went on my way and the years went by and I finally belonged to the same church he did, Blessed Sacrament out in Beverly Hills. He used to sit in the third row, so when I went to communion, I’d come back and as I passed him I’d go [he mimed flapping his ears].” 17 Bing never forgot the slights of those days and polished the particulars like old silver. To Jim Ryan he attributed the crack “A camera pointed straight at you would make you look like a taxi with both doors open.” 18

  Though he continued to make the studio rounds, Bing did not seem especially ambitious to those who worked with him. A member of Whiteman’s radio cast, Dorothea Ponce of the Ponce Sisters, who occasionally sang with Bing, remembered: “He didn’t seem star material at the time. He was simply a part of the weekly program with the Rhythm Boys. I never thought of him going out on his own and leaving them.” 19 Bing rarely showed his hand. Sometimes he appeared not to know what cards he was holding. Rudy Vallee told of Bing’s diffidence one evening in Baltimore, when he shared a bill with the trio:

  Above the chatter of the diners the Rhythm Boys might just as well have stayed in bed; no one was paying the slightest attention to them. But suddenly a hush fell upon this crowd of Baltimore’s elite. One of the Rhythm Boys was singing a song called “Montmartre Rose,” and even though he lacked any amplification or means of channeling his sound waves to us, his voice commanded instant silence [and] when he finished the crowd applauded wildly and cried for more. As though he were oblivious to their shouts and applause, almost as though he were hard of hearing, he threaded his way back through the tables and passed by our sax section, not more than a foot and a half from me. I was struck by the lack of expression on his face, which was a mask of complete indifference. Bing Crosby was a hit and didn’t even know it! 20

  Bing undoubtedly did know it, but he was not inclined to let on, then or ever. Although he sang solo on Whiteman’s broadcasts as often as he sang with the trio, neither he nor his partners acknowledged the inevitable split that had to come. Whiteman attempted to stifle his ambitions, threatening to fire him if he continued to seek screen tests. Yet pressure from Everett and established agents was building for him to go out on his own. They all wanted a piece of him.

  The young Hollywood crowd was captivated by Bing’s casually handsome composure. After the Second World War, an observer suggested that if a celestial visitor arrived at a cocktail party seeking an earthling leader and was directed to a group in which Bing was chatting with Winston Churchill and Douglas MacArthur, it would probably assume Crosby was the guy in charge. Even in 1929, when he was scrambling after a new career and shying from responsibility, peering at his future through the mist of rotgut whiskey and generally preferring a life on the fairway, Bing imparted a near regal nonchalance. His innate propriety deflected the kind of vanity that curdles into narcissism. The distinct warmth that defined his singing and later his acting made him seem cool yet approachable. A young contract player named Sylvia Picker observed, “Truthfully, there wasn’t a girl in town who wasn’t nuts about Bing Crosby.” 21 His working-class man’s-man insouciance was found no less fascinating by men. He had none of the brilliantined conceit and manicured irony rife in Hollywood. He came across as an extraordinary ordinary guy.

  The Rhythm Boys worked the entire month of July at Eddie Brandstatter’s Montmartre Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard. They were billed as Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys and touted as the “Musical Sensation of Los Angeles,” “America’s Foremost Entertainers,” 22 and, in a stretch even by Tinseltown’s standards, “Direct from Ziegfeld’s Roof in Their First Appearance Outside of New York.” 23 The second-story cafe was a blocklong room with banquet tables (packed for fashionable luncheons), a small dance floor ringed with tables, and a bandstand. It was the hot spot of the moment, and fans routinely crowded under the ornate marquee to see who entered: a mix of celebrities and coddled would-be stars of the new all-talking picture business. The Los Angeles Evening Express trumpeted Brandstatter’s coup in luring the trio away from New York (“at great expense”), 24 and the club boasted increasing receipts as young Hollywood turned out every night to be in on something new and adventurous.

  Bill Hearst and his college friends from San Francisco were regulars, as was another acquaintance from vaudeville days, Phil Harris, who had just returned from a long tour of Australia and was playing drums and coleading a band. “The Montmartre was the place, that and the Cocoanut Grove,” said Harris. “And that’s the first time I heard him do a ballad, ‘I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,’ and he knocked the roof in with it. When Bing finished, I mean, I never heard anything like it, you could hear a pin drop.” 25 The crowd demanded an encore, and the boys reprised their flagwaver, “Mississippi Mud.” The trio was invited to countless parties, including one in Catalina at which Bing and Al ended up squiring Lita Grey Chaplin, recently divorced from Charlie Chaplin, and her friend, starlet Catherine Dale Owen. One thing led to another, and the Rhythm Boys were soon engaged for a week in a vaudeville package at the Orpheum, billed second (“syncopated song, melody, comedy you will talk about for months”) to Lita, “California’s own crooning beauty.” 26 They played two shows daily at the Orpheum, then rushed to make their evening sets at the Montmartre.

  Among the starlets and hopefuls who crowded the
Montmartre was a young couple, each recently signed to Fox. He was Frank Albertson, the busy character actor who would be remembered as Sam Wainright in It’s a Wonderful Life and the lecherous millionaire robbed by Janet Leigh in Psycho. At that time, he was a fleshy-faced second lead and a friend of Bing’s, eager to introduce him to his beautiful seventeen-year-old date. She was Dixie Lee, an introverted but temperamental southern-born actress and singer who dyed her dark hair platinum blond and was fully expected to make the transition from starlet to star. Frank and Dixie had worked together in two films, in the star-studded chorus of Happy Days and as the second leads in The Big Party (both released in 1930). Before she arrived in Hollywood, Dixie had won a singing contest in Chicago that eventually led to a job understudying Peggy Bernier in Good News. Known as Dixie Carroll in those days, she had heard about Bing from her roommates, Bernier and Holly Hall, both of whom complained about his habit of last-minute cancellations. “I just wanted to meet this character once and tell him off,” Dixie said in 1946. When Bing did call her in Chicago, wanting to meet her, Dixie asked one of her roommates to handle him: “You tell that guy I’m not in the habit of going places to meet anybody — especially him.” 27 Yet at the Montmartre, seeing and hearing him for the first time, she coyly asked Frank to introduce her to him by her real name, Billie Wyatt. Dixie and Bing struck no sparks that night, but Bing was flattered when she returned to hear him sing, especially when he found out she was the well-known Fox starlet Dixie Lee.