Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  In late August, nearly three months after his arrival in Hollywood, Universal presented Whiteman with a script. He read it with disbelief. To his utter bewilderment, the studio intended to make him a leading man in a conventional love story. Hollywood’s incomprehensible, always unsuccessful attempts to make romantic figures of rotund or oddball music personalities would eventually sink the cinematic aspirations of performers ranging from Kate Smith to Liberace to Pavarotti; it is to Whiteman’s credit that he was appalled rather than tempted by Universal’s blandishments. Paul prepared to leave California as soon as possible. He would return when the studio could assure him that it had a reasonable story idea. If Whiteman was mad, the Laemmles were livid: they had already spent $350,000 and had nothing to show for it. After broadcasting on August 27, Whiteman’s troupe boarded the train for New York and an emergency job Jimmy Gillespie had lined up at the Pavillon Royal. They had a stowaway in Hoagy Carmichael, who had come west on his own without the prospect of work and without finding any; he shared a berth with Bing.

  In fact, Whiteman made off with much more than Hoagy. At a party in New York a year earlier, he had met Margaret Livingston, who played the vamp in the bulrushes in F. W. Murnau’s masterwork, Sunrise, a movie Whiteman adored and screened repeatedly. Though married to his second wife, Paul devoted much of his California sojourn — when not in attendance at the dozens of parties thrown in his honor by such film luminaries as Marion Davies, Richard Barthelmess, and Ronald Colman — to his courtship of Livingston, who was filming on the Universal lot. In 1931, after he complied with her ultimatum to diet, they married; they remained a devoted couple until his death in 1967.

  He did no less well on the musical front, as Bing and Al finally found a way to favor their benefactress, Mildred Bailey. Paul made it clear he wasn’t hiring anybody, including Hoagy, but Bing and Al knew that if they could get Whiteman to hear Mildred, he’d fall under her spell. Millie became friendly with several guys in the band that summer. She took them horseback riding in the Hollywood Hills, cooked up a storm, and served her home brew, which created quite a sensation, as decent beer was hard to find. Bing and Al encouraged her to throw a party for the band and its leader. Whiteman, a prodigious beer drinker, happily accepted the invitation. As Bing recalled, “Paul didn’t know it at the time, but he was a goner when he walked into the house.” 28

  Hoagy, Roy Bargy, and pianist-arranger Lennie Hayton took turns at Millie’s Steinway. Rinker describes what happened next: “Finally, Bing turned to Mildred and said, ‘Hey, Millie, why don’t you sing a song?’ No one had ever heard her sing but they all joined in, ‘Yeah, c’mon, Millie, let’s have a song.’At first, Mildred acted reluctant, but I knew it wouldn’t last long.” 29 She asked Al to accompany her on “(What Can I Say, Dear) After I Say I’m Sorry,” and “she sang the hell out of the song.” After a brief silence everyone started to cheer, and Whiteman, who had been in the kitchen, asked who was singing. Bing barked, “That was Millie, Al’s sister.” Whiteman joked, “Don’t tell me that there’s one in the family who can sing!” He then walked over, kissed her, and asked for an encore. “All her past experience singing in speakeasies and night spots came out as she sang. Her small, pure voice gave the songs feeling and meaning, and you knew you were hearing a singer who was very special,” Al wrote. 30 That night Paul hired her to sing the popular lament “Moanin’ Low” on Tuesday’s Old Gold show. Weeks later she was on the train to New York, a contract in her purse — the first “girl singer” to tour with an orchestra. A year later she was the highest-salaried performer on Whiteman’s payroll.

  * * *

  On the previous occasion when Whiteman played the Pavillon Royal, Bing had fallen into the Long Island Sound and almost lost his job, if not his life. This time he had a dire experience of another sort. Bing and his brothers told the story so often that it became family lore, the details mutating in the telling. Apparently the evening began when Kitty Lang rounded up some Ziegfeld girls for a party and Bing found his companion less than stimulating. In their 1937 fictionalized biography, Ted and Larry Crosby say he left the table and walked to the bandstand to hear a new song, “Singin’ in the Rain,” and returned to find his date “pouting.” The gerund has the ring of discernment, because Bing could not abide pouting and found emotional neediness as unpleasant as emotional dishonesty.

  He left for another speakeasy, where a Valentino wannabe — padded shoulders, greased hair parted in the middle — recognized him and bought him a drink. Bing joined the stranger’s party, embarking on a forty-eight-hour brandy binge. He came to in a strange hotel room and stumbled into the bathroom seconds before the front door was blasted open by machine-gun fire and his companions were sprayed by bullets, all wounded but none killed. Bing stayed in the bathroom “for what seemed hours,” 31 until a cop opened the door and asked him who he was, eliciting an innocent-bystander routine that Bing claimed surpassed anything he did in the movies. The next day he learned he had spent two days in the hideout of Machine Gun Jack McGurn, the dapper Capone killer who had taken part months earlier in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and had slit the throat of singer (later, thanks to McGurn, comedian) Joe E. Lewis.

  However mortified Bing may have been by his behavior — and if the McGurn story was embellished, his predilection for a binge was not — he continued to make professional strides. During the band’s weeks in New York, before Universal summoned them back to resume (or begin) work on King of Jazz, Whiteman and Columbia refused to record the Rhythm Boys because they had failed to develop any new material. Barris was not included in any sessions at all. But Bing was still in demand for studio work.

  He had finally exorcised the demon Vallee and was now intent on insulating himself from the word crooner, a term that due chiefly to Vallee was almost always used disparagingly, often implying deviance. Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell denounced crooning as a force for evil and invited parishioners to share his “sensation of revolting disgust at a man whining a degenerate song, which is unworthy of any American man.” 32 Pundits followed suit. The Springfield Union, enraged to the point of grammatical chaos, reviled crooning as a “gratuitous insult to that intelligent person which rightfully expects a better return for its expensive investment in radio equipment.” 33

  What, we may ask, were such laughable denunciations really about? Is the subtext nothing more than fear of homosexuality, and if so, why all the indignation over Vallee and not the Nick Lucases, Gene Austins, and Jack Fultons who preceded him? We may agree, from a musical point of view, that Vallee and company were “whining,” but the diatribes, with their emphases on manliness and words like degenerate augur Hitler’s excuses for banning Weimar artists. In truth, Vallee was a big, convenient target. The real prey was the entire sexual undercurrent manifest in the Jazz Age, particularly its music, which along with Prohibition lured women into saloons and crossed racial boundaries. A youth music almost by definition implies rebellion, family tension, the potential for anarchy.

  Bing’s singing was nothing if not virile. He would cause a far greater furor than Vallee, but the Cardinal O’Connells of the world could never tag him with imputations of effeteness. After Bing achieved his breakthrough, the word crooner would usually be used descriptively or with admiration. In September Bing recorded for the first time in four months, since the high-strung “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be?,” and gave free rein to his natural tones. His heartiness uplifts Grofe’s arrangement of “Waiting at the End of the Road,” an Irving Berlin song memorably introduced in King Vidor’s black musical film, Hallelujah. This was the pre-Vallee Bing, restored and confident. His effortless swing was the flash point for the session, which proved to be Bix’s last with Whiteman.

  Bix, drinking excessively, was coming apart at the seams and ruined several takes. A few days later Paul put him on a train for his family home in Davenport, Iowa, hoping he would cure himself. Paul kept him on salary for months, until it became clear he would not be coming back to the band.
Bix returned to New York, though, and freelanced on several sessions — playing a memorably affecting solo on his last as a leader, “I’ll Be a Friend (With Pleasure).” He died in August 1931 at twenty-eight. “Every once in a while he’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and make me change beds with him,” recalled Bing, 34 who refused to concede that Bix was an alcoholic, maybe because, like himself, he could go without liquor for days at a time. But Bing was kidding himself, more than twenty years after the fact, when he wrote of a man who often started his day with four ounces of gin, “In the end, it was his lack of sleep and his physical exhaustion which broke his health and killed him.” 35

  Bing’s third session under his own name, in late September, was little better than the first two and suffered from pompous, non-jazz accompaniment. Columbia probably wanted to disabuse him of his inclination to scat or embellish. On the movie tango “Gay Love” (written by Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare for The Delightful Rogue), he emotes with a purple bravado that prefigures his hit recording of “Temptation,” the movie tango composed for him a few years later, sobbing the high notes and employing a robust attack no one could misconstrue as crooning. 36 No less operatic is his work with Whiteman on two Vincent Youmans songs, “Great Day” and “Without a Song.” On the former he staunchly sings the verse before disappearing into a trebly choir. “Without a Song,” however, taken at a peppy tempo that displeased its composer, is a Crosby coup of the sort that encourages one to speculate on how inspiring it must have been to, say, Frank Sinatra, who was fourteen when the Youmans numbers were released on a hugely popular platter. Bing’s phrasing, breathing, vibrato, and projection are superbly coordinated, and he pins the high note free and clear, demonstrating hardly a trace of his or anyone else’s mannerisms. His vocal is the more remarkable for crowning an otherwise dreary arrangement.

  Bing is more in his element and again in marvelous voice with Whiteman on Lennie Hayton’s pert arrangement of “If I Had a Talking Picture of You,” backed by Lang and Venuti. The chemistry between Bing and Eddie is fully realized on “After You’ve Gone,” a delightfully cool William Grant Still arrangement with voicings that blend rather than separate the strings and the winds, as well as a climax that includes an Andy Secrest solo in the style of Bix and a Joe Venuti solo in a style all his own, complete with sparkling break. Directly after the session Whiteman returned to Hollywood, with the band following a day or so later. This time there was no hoopla, no dispatches from the front, no broadcasts, just a quick jaunt to get the damn movie made.

  * * *

  On October 22, 1929, a few days before the Whiteman band regrouped in Hollywood, Charles Mitchell, chairman of National City Bank, responded to the sense of dread enveloping Wall Street with consoling words: “I know of nothing fundamentally wrong with the stock market or with the underlying credit structure.” 37 On October 23 Paramount and Warners called off their negotiations for a merger that might have completely altered Hollywood history — not a moment too soon. Twenty-four hours later, Black Thursday, the market imploded as nearly 13 million shares were traded at a loss of $6 billion. The band arrived in Los Angeles a day later; like most Americans, the musicians were undistracted by the crash. Few of them were in the market, and no one believed that the panic on Wall Street would be anything more than a brief inconvenience. In days that followed, experts reassured the country that the market had stabilized. But on Tuesday, as Paul resumed broadcasting, the bottom fell out; nearly 16.5 million shares were traded at a loss of three times the money circulating in the entire nation. Hollywood digested Black Tuesday with Variety’s famous headline: WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.

  Few Americans were worried even at that stage, certainly not members of the Whiteman band, several of whom had secured raises just before the trip. No one saw the big bad wolf of the Depression slavering at the door. Nor could anyone have imagined that, by a Hollywood-style contradiction, the nation’s financial ruin would have an even more salubrious impact on the fortunes of show business than Prohibition. True, the movie business would never again enjoy the figures of 1929, when 23,000 theaters were visited by an average of 95 million people a week. By 1936 the number of screens would be shaved by a third and would not rise beyond 20,000 until the 1980s. The number of weekly filmgoers would also decline permanently, slashed by radio and television and the Internet to a late-nineties average of 22 million. Still, never was escapist entertainment needed more than during the Depression. Hollywood rose to the occasion.

  As the wolf settled in for a lengthy stay, entertainment provided solace and balm. But reduced prices and varied giveaways were not enough to lure people into trading hard-earned pennies for filmed vaudeville. They wanted magic and romance and novelty; stories with happy endings and a chastened wolf. Whiteman’s King of Jazz would turn out to be a mammoth casualty of that demand — a sad irony, because Universal’s was the most magical revue of an era in which every studio felt obliged to release an oversize, vaudeville-style parade of talent. Had King of Jazz been finished on time, it almost certainly would have been a smash hit. Instead, because of the delays that plagued the production, the first film revue announced was the last to be released; it would appear just as the excitement surrounding “audible variety” ended.

  When Universal signed Whiteman, it had no major stars, an inconvenience the studio hoped to disguise with Whiteman’s status and a supercolossal production. Junior Laemmle decided that the solution to his script problems was a variety show. His writer, Edward Lowe, could stay on to provide continuity between the numbers, but Laemmle sought a top theatrical showman to replace his director, Paul Fejos. Whiteman lobbied for John Murray Anderson, a former dancer with whom he had worked at the Paramount Theater in 1928 and whose lush and innovative direction of The Greenwich Village Follies (1919-24) thrilled Broadway. He was hired at $50,000, half Whiteman’s salary, but an extraordinary sum considering his total lack of movie experience. Anderson, the nucleus of a formidable crew, brought in set and costume designer Herman Rosse, who won King of Jazz’s only Academy Award (he later worked on set decor for Frankenstein), and choreographer Russell Markert, who went on to create the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Junior asked Anderson to meet with Fejos and cameraman Hal Mohr to discuss the use of a twenty-eight-ton crane and boom camera built for the just released musical Broadway. He then fired Fejos but retained Mohr — an innovator in color photography — and two other cameramen, color expert Ray Rennahan and special-effects wizard Jerry Ash. Anderson insisted that Universal shoot the entire picture in the two-strip process (red-orange and blue-green) developed by Technicolor.

  Never before had a Hollywood studio bestowed upon a first-time director as much money and control as Universal yielded to John Murray Anderson; nor would any studio follow suit until RKO imported Orson Welles from New York a decade later. Whatever he desired, he received — dozens of extras in flamboyant and costly foreign costumes, a 500-foot bridal veil, the first-ever Technicolor cartoon, film rights (estimated at $50,000) to “Rhapsody in Blue.” He did accept a few constraints. The nightclub act of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante held out for too much money, and negotiations with Rodgers and Hart fell through. But he was able to reassign the score to the team that had written his recent Broadway flop, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac: Jack Yellen and Milt Ager, old-school songsmiths whose many hits included “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He kept only two of Mabel Wayne’s tunes, including the waltz “It Happened in Monterey.”

  Anderson also recruited sixteen chorus girls and two sister acts: the Sisters G, a Yiddish vocal and dance team from Europe, and the Brox (originally Brock) Sisters, a close-harmony trio who got their start by auditioning for Irving Berlin on the telephone from their home in Edmonton, Canada. They became regulars in Berlin’s Music Box Revues, including one in 1924 staged by Anderson. The Brox Sisters were already in Hollywood; along with Cliff Edwards, they introduced “Singin’ in the Rain” in MGM’s The
Hollywood Revue of 1929. Bing became smitten with the pretty married one, Bobbe.

  Junior, preoccupied with his production of All Quiet on the Western Front, not only allowed Anderson three months to rehearse and shoot the picture but permitted him to improvise sequences as he advanced, shooting acres of film. A script was transcribed after the fact. Rehearsals began November 6, but as of December 11 Universal had yet to nail down a final cast. An ad in Variety boasted “the biggest news you’ve ever heard since the advent of the audible screen… a luxury of song, dance, music, and joy.” 38 The promised lineup of performers included Joseph Schildkraut, Mary Nolan, Ken Maynard, and Hoot Gibson, none of whom appeared in the finished film. The shooting was fraught with problems. The Technicolor lighting was so severe that it peeled the varnish off the violins (a Warners technician measured the heat on a closed Technicolor soundstage at 140 degrees). It was impossible to move the crane, erect sets, or film dancers while recording music, a problem Whiteman solved with a prophetic fiat: “Let’s prerecord it.” 39

  Most early recording engineers in the movies were moonlighting radio technicians, who considered prerecording an affront to their craft. They played out the old debate between live (radio) and canned (records) entertainment, a debate that peaked in 1946, when Bing produced the first transcribed network radio show. The soundmen argued that the public had accepted direct recording in earlier films and pointed to disastrous attempts at dubbing in Fejos’s Broadway. Although a few musicals had been prerecorded in part — most notably, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” in MGM’s The Broadway Melody a year earlier — live recording remained the standard procedure until 1932, when Paramount prerecorded Love Me Tonight and Warners followed suit with 42nd Street. Whiteman, though, was adamant and he prevailed. That decision not only expedited the filming but produced clean musical tracks. The cast mimed to records as carpenters hammered the sets, just like in the recently departed days of silent movies.