Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  No incident in this period is more emblematic of Bing’s ambivalence about stardom and success than his arrest that November for drunk driving. As maddening as the seemingly endless production of King of Jazz was, the picture held tremendous promise for Bing. His screen tests and auditions had led nowhere, but Whiteman offered him a prominent role in what everyone expected to be one of the most important pictures of the coming season. In addition to numbers with the Rhythm Boys, he would be featured as soloist in a lavish episode built around the key song in the Yellen-Ager score, “Song of the Dawn.” He scuttled his chance.

  The trouble began with a tiff during the rehearsal of “A Bench in the Park,” a Brox Sisters number for which the Rhythm Boys provided harmony. As recalled by Bobbe Van Heusen, nee Brox, Bing arrived on the soundstage cheerful and slightly flush with drink. Bobbe had argued with him about his drinking before. This time she got mad. “I was told to sit on his lap during the number and I refused. I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “It was really silly, like kid stuff, you know. But I wouldn’t do it. So he went out and got drunk and he practically drove through the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. And of course he was arrested, and came to rehearsals with two detectives for the rest of the picture.” 40

  Despite several versions of the tale and the disappearance of Bing’s arrest record, no one disputes the basic facts. After the rehearsal and argument with Bobbe, Bing walked to Whiteman Lodge, where an elaborate studio-catered party was in progress, celebrating the end of the first week’s filming. The musicians played, Bing sang, and shortly after midnight, a woman asked him to drive her to her hotel. As they approached the Roosevelt, Bing made a left turn into an oncoming car with such force that he and his passenger were knocked over the windshield and onto the pavement. He was fine, but the woman was bloody and unconscious. Bing carried her into the Roosevelt lobby, where the house doctor assured him that she was all right. Just then a policeman collared him and the other driver — who in Bing’s account was more inebriated than he was — and took them to Lincoln Heights jail.

  Kurt Dieterle, the violinist Bing roomed with, observed, “Well, Bing is a boy that does what he wants when he wants to do it. This night I went out for a date after I had my dinner, and the woman cooking for us said, ‘How about Mr. Crosby?” I said, ‘Just leave it on the stove, he’ll be back later, I’m sure.’ I went out and came home. He wasn’t home yet, must have been after twelve, one o’clock. I was in bed when the phone rings, and who was it? Bing. I said, ‘Where in the hell are you?’ He said, ‘I’m in jail.’ Said he got into a confrontation. ‘It’s cold here, bring me a couple blankets.’That was the end of our apartment with Bing. I gave it up and moved in with Roy Bargy and his family.” 41

  The next morning Jimmy Gillespie arranged bail and a trial was set for the following week. Bing agreed to plead guilty and pay the fine, but at the hearing he could not resist riling the judge. He arrived in court directly from the golf course, wearing green plus fours, an orange sweater, and check socks. The judge, noting the H.B.D. (had been drinking) complaint, asked if he was familiar with the Eighteenth Amendment. Bing’s reply ran along the lines of “Only remotely” (according to his brothers’ account) 42 or “Yes, but nobody pays much attention to it” (according to his own). 43 He was sentenced to sixty days.

  Unable to contact his friends, Bing stewed in his cell for a day, until his brother Everett discovered he had not come home. Bing was stung by the severity of the sentence, and Whiteman was irate. The combined pleas of Ev, Whiteman, and Laemmle succeeded in getting him transferred to a Hollywood jail with a liberal visitation policy. After a great deal more pleading, Bing’s new jailers agreed to a scheme that allowed him to work at the studio under police escort and return to his cell after the day’s shooting. But it took two weeks to make that deal, and Whiteman could not or would not postpone “Song of the Dawn.” He gave the number to John Boles, a thirty-five-year-old former World War I spy and stage actor who had made the transition from silent to talking films with his chesty operatic voice and conventional Hollywood good looks: dark hair, trim mustache, square jaw, gleaming eyes. As the closest thing to a movie star in the cast, billed second to Whiteman, Boles was an obvious choice for the number, an ersatz aria with the martial optimism expected of at least one song in every Hollywood revue.

  Bing steamed, complaining repeatedly to Everett that Paul should have waited for him. Whiteman, sick of waiting, argued that he could not afford to postpone a major production number, though at this stage he undoubtedly felt little compunction in lowering the boom on Bing. Whiteman barely acknowledged him when he returned to the set. Bing’s continuing obsession with the accident and its aftermath is evident in his repeated assertion — until the day he died, decades after there was any reason to airbrush the story — of his innocence and relative sobriety. He may indeed have been the victim of a bad driver and a zealous cop. But it was his brazen court performance that ruined his chance and required him to explain to Kate why he would not be featured as promised.

  In one of his memoir’s oddest passages, Bing considers what might have happened had he performed “Song of the Dawn” in King of Jazz. Observing with a trace of resentment that it “certainly helped” Boles, he concludes that it all worked out for the best, because the number might have short-circuited his career. “He had a bigger voice and a better delivery for that kind of song than I had,” Bing wrote. “My crooning style wouldn’t have been very good for such a number, which was supposed to be delivered a la breve like the ‘Vagabond Song.’ I might have flopped with the song. I might have been cut out of the picture. I might never have been given another crack at a song in any picture.” 44

  Bing had a gift for mocking his own powers: note the humble reference to his “crooning style.” But any doubts he or anyone else may have entertained about his ability to sell “Song of the Dawn” had been put to rest right after the film wrapped, when he recorded it with Whiteman. Bing never sounded more determined to prove how stentorian he could be; yet even belting that operatic rubbish, he lightens an overwrought arrangement with a touch of impudent swing. Still, he had self-inflicted a professional wound, and his indignation and guilt would not let it heal. Bing suffered several disappointments during the next year. Sometimes he feared he would never get another shot at Hollywood, while Boles, who had made many films, continued to make many more. However facetious Bing meant to be in his 1953 memoir, his desperation back in 1930 was real, and it survived in his fixation on a song and a movie that are no better remembered than John Boles.

  On New Year’s Eve the picture’s production was threatened again by a car accident, in which violinist Mischa Russell suffered four broken vertebrae and trombonist Boyce Cullen a broken arm, though this time the other driver accepted full blame. A week later, in an attempt to quell rumors of catastrophe, Paul, Grofe, Anderson, Rosse, Markert, and featured vocalist Jeanette Loff took a seasonal-greetings ad in Variety, announcing their joy in completing King of Jazz. When that failed to squelch the gossip, Junior Laemmle arranged for reporters to visit the set to watch him shake hands with Whiteman.

  Bing’s jail sentence was ultimately reduced by a third, and he was released before the New Year. Bobbe Brox never did agree to sit on Bing’s lap for “A Bench in the Park,” which was consequently staged with the Rhythm Boys chirping behind the bench. “He had to come to the rehearsal with those detectives and he looked so terrible. He didn’t like it very well,” Bobbe recalled, laughing. “But he was so charming, so very charming. I loved Bing and we were good friends for a long, long time. He was lots of fun — great sense of humor, fun to be with. But he did something a lot of boys do at that age. They do not know how to hold their liquor. That was the only thing about Bing that I didn’t like. Of course, he grew up, thank goodness, and never did that anymore and we remained friends.” 45

  In her last years Bobbe claimed that she and Bing might have married but for his drinking. Apparently she had forgotten that a
year earlier she had married William Perlberg, who booked the sisters and had helped secure the Montmartre engagement for the Rhythm Boys. Perlberg later became a film producer and worked closely with Bing. After she ended their long marriage (some thirty-five years), Bobbe married another Crosby associate, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen. Bing sent them a telegram in 1969 that, in Bobbe’s recollection, read: “I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to see my two oldest friends married — to each other.” 46

  The film finally wrapped on March 11, 1930, and by then the Whiteman band had resumed its theatrical jobs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, reaping tremendous gates. (Variety reported that when the band went into “Rhapsody in Blue,” a woman advised her girlfriend, “That’s the Old Gold theme song.”) 47 During the weeks leading up to the film’s April 20 premiere in Hollywood and May 2 premiere in New York, Whiteman ceaselessly plugged the cast and songs on radio and recorded the main tunes for Columbia. Universal announced that Anderson would be retained to direct a second film with Whiteman. Everyone was hopeful.

  They were whistling in the dark. At $1.5 million, King of Jazz cost more than four times the average musical. Translated into today’s dollars, the budget was as high as a modern special-effects action extravaganza (about $75 million) — this in a year when movie tickets averaged thirty-five cents. The industry began to realize that the vogue for filmed vaudeville was over shortly before King of Jazz debuted, when Paramount Pictures released Paramount on Parade (a revue packed with real stars) and saw business fall sharply in the first weeks. Universal’s hopes sank precipitously. King of Jazz opened well at the Los Angeles Criterion. Variety projected first-week receipts of $18,000. But business tapered off so badly by the third day that the theater took in only $13,000. Variety ran an unusually vicious review, attacking Anderson (“who knew nothing about picture direction and didn’t seem to know any more either at the finish of the film”) 48 and accurately predicting a two-week life span. Most critics, however, were dazzled and supportive.

  As Bing feared, Boles was singled out (typically: “John Boles throttles all competition in the singing cinema”) 49 while the Rhythm Boys were mentioned only in passing. The picture did well in Philadelphia, fair in San Francisco, and died in Indianapolis. Yet Universal believed the public could be swayed, and pulled out all the stops for the New York debut at the Roxy, presenting the film in tandem with a stage show that starred Whiteman and George Gershwin. 50 Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times wrote, “There is no sequence that isn’t worth witnessing and no performance that is not capable in this fast paced picture.” 51 But for once, there was too much Whiteman. The public, surprisingly, favored All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone’s scalding World War I film, which saved Universal’s hash and won Junior Laemmle an Academy Award for best picture. Junior would not be picking up options on Whiteman or Anderson (indeed, he threatened to sue Paul over food and telegram expenses). Nor would he make any more musicals for a while, though he approved nine foreign versions of King of Jazz, including a German edition emceed by Joseph Schildkraut, with two additional numbers by the Sisters G, and a Hungarian one with Bela Lugosi. 52 Junior would find his forte in monsters and vampires, initiating the great Universal horror cycle of the 1930s. But the Depression defeated him, and when his splendid 1936 film of Show Boat stumbled at the box office, he left pictures for good at age twenty-eight.

  Universal took a million-dollar bath and did not begin to recoup until the picture was reissued in 1933, on the coattails of 42nd Street. (Bing, by then a major star, was embarrassed to find himself top-billed.) Yet as the New York Times and other papers noted, King of Jazz was a singular film, and it endures as Anderson’s triumph. Its ingenious visual effects bely his novice status and proved highly influential. It remains a Rosetta stone of early American pop, incarnating a multicultural display intended for a white middlebrow audience. The picture begins with Bing’s voice, singing through the credits (“Music hath charms, though it’s classy or jazz”), and ends with “The Melting Pot of Music,” an extravaganza featuring leggy Spanish dancers, men in jodphurs, and concertina, bagpipe, and balalaika players (but no Africans), all ultimately dissolving into the image of Maestro Whiteman taking a bow. We are told at the outset that “jazz was born in the African jungle to the beat of the voodoo drums,” but the only black person in the film is a smiling six-year-old girl cradled in White-man’s lap for a laugh.

  King of Jazz exists in a bubble of racial and mercantile timidity. All references to blacks are aged in minstrel conventions, among them a snippet of “Old Black Joe” and dancer Jacques Cartier decked out as an African chieftain, dancing in silhouette on a gigantic drum. Yet the Cartier number underscores the film’s tremendous impact: the silhouette trick was used by Fred Astaire in his tribute to Bill Robinson in Swing Time; the drum dance was developed by Robinson himself in Stormy Weather. Many of Anderson’s ideas were imitated in later pictures, from the miniature musicians climbing out of a valise (Bride of Frankenstein) to cardboard skyscrapers (42nd Street) to concentric tuba and trombone orbits (the two-reeler Jammin’ the Blues). Visual abstractions for “Rhapsody in Blue” are abundant with tropes later elaborated by Busby Berkeley: pianist Roy Bargy morphing into five pianists, aerial shots, giant dislocated heads, kaleidoscopes.

  Musically, the film is dreary except for “Rhapsody” and the few examples of jazz, which consist of Lang and Venuti playing “The Wild Dog” and the numbers involving Bing. Despite the hullabaloo over “Song of the Dawn” (Boles, in a bolero outfit, looks and sounds as dated as the rouged and lipsticked tenors in other scenes), Bing is handsomely represented and in excellent form. He swings the song behind the opening titles as well as a spiritual lip-synched by a Walter Lantz cartoon character, interpolates a bu-bu-bu-boo in top hat behind the Brox Sisters; and jives two numbers with the Rhythm Boys. Whether he is on- or offscreen, his voice is buoyant and bright, agelessly rhythmic. The Rhythm Boys sequence is the best evidence we have of how enchanting they were at their peak and how natural Bing was in front of a camera from the start. Al Rinker is tall and handsome, standing with his hand in his pocket. Harry Barris is so chipper, he can’t sit still. Yet on “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together,” only Bing adds deft physical touches, waving his hand, inclining his head. For “Happy Feet,” Al and Harry play two pianos and Bing stands in the middle. As Harry pretends to execute a dance step, Bing gives the camera a wide-eyed look that momentarily breaches the fourth wall. Bing’s light marcelled hair is receding and his rouge is a bit thick, but he is utterly relaxed. With his double takes and mock solemnity, he is our contemporary, winking across time.

  The Rhythm Boys continued with the band when Whiteman left California to play Canada. Incredibly, Paul was barred from entering the country at Vancouver: orchestra leaders, he learned, were “entertainers” and “as such could play from theater stages, but not at dances.” 53 After days of wrangling, the tour detoured for a week to Seattle and Portland before finally heading home to New York. But a contretemps that week permanently poisoned the waters between Paul and Bing. In his memoir Bing explains that a bootlegger dunned him for money he claimed was due for a quart of “day-old pop-skull”; 54 when Bing contested the debt, the bootlegger demanded money from Whiteman, who complied over Bing’s objection and then deducted the amount from Bing’s salary. That led to an argument, Bing wrote, that ended when Whiteman told him, “When we get to Seattle, we’ll part friends and that’ll be the end of it.” 55 Years later, however, Bing related a different version of events to his second wife, Kathryn: Whiteman had confronted him in front of the band and accused him of stealing his liquor. “I was outraged by that and quit,” he told her. 56

  In any case, neither Bing nor his partners quit in Seattle. They traveled with the band back to New York and made the break shortly after arriving. They had several reasons beyond Bing’s pique, chiefly a desire to return to California. A couple of days after his jail sentence was commuted, Bing had en
countered Dixie Lee again at a party, and they had continued to see each other almost every night. Now, in New York, he was inconsolable without her. One evening he telephoned her from his room at the Belvedere and fell asleep without breaking the connection. His roommate, Frank Trumbauer, found him in the morning cradling the phone. The cost was $130.75, paid by Tram, who saved the bill as a souvenir. Barris, too, had become infatuated with a singer, Loyce Whiteman (no relation to Paul), who demonstrated sheet music in a Glendale shop. Al didn’t have a steady girl, but he was no less determined than the others to stay off the road. After three years and four months, the trio decided to break with Whiteman and return to Los Angeles.

  On April 30, the morning after an Old Gold broadcast, Bing told Whiteman of their intentions. Paul agreed to abrogate their contract but asked them to keep it quiet so as not to interfere with his imminent premiere at the Roxy. “It was time to go out on our own and also the right time for Paul to let us go,” recalled Al. “His band payroll was very high and his contract with Columbia was soon to end. On our part, the Rhythm Boys had not followed through on our own recordings and we didn’t seem to have the incentive to pursue our recording career. It was a friendly parting and we wished each other good luck.” 57

  For Bing, the “pop-skull” incident may have added to a grudge he was already carrying. In February — a month before King of Jazz wrapped, but after Bing’s work on it was done — Paramount rushed into production a Nancy Carroll musical called Honey but could not settle on a leading man. They needed an appealing young actor who could sing. Studio chief B. P. Schulberg asked songwriter Sam Coslow for a recommendation. Coslow had known Bing in New York and now heard rumors that he was ready to leave the band. He drove to Loew’s State, where Whiteman was working, and found Bing heartbroken about losing “Song of the Dawn” and eager for a real movie part. “He was confident he could get by with it,” Coslow recalled in his autobiography. All Bing wanted was the same $200 Whiteman paid him, a standing contract (“After all, I have a steady job with this outfit”), and guaranteed parts for Al and Harry. Coslow relayed the good news, and Schulberg sent two talent scouts to Loew’s State to audition Bing. “For about 24 hours, he was under consideration,” Coslow wrote. “But the following day they auditioned a young actor named Stanley Smith. He couldn’t sing very well, but somehow he got the part — don’t ask me why.” 58 Stanley Smith was one of the ineffectual tenors in King of Jazz.