by Gary Giddins
Yet Bing persisted in the belief that he could make it as an actor, despite his lack of experience (beyond plays at Gonzaga), his ready acknowledgment of his thespian limitations, and his looks, which did not jibe with the vogue in leading men. He was appealing, to be sure, with azure eyes and handsome features, but he had those wingy ears, a rapidly receding hairline, and an expanding waist. In just about every interview he ever gave, Bing was consistently and unreasonably modest about his abilities as an actor. He even, perhaps disingenuously, remarked that he won his 1944 Oscar because the good actors were away doing war work. (His rival nominees included Cary Grant and Charles Boyer.) He insisted that all he ever did was play himself.
The wonder is that he was so certain playing himself would do the trick. Bing quietly, pragmatically weighed his strengths and limitations, confident that the former would carry the day. In the long view, he probably shortchanged his dramatic talents by clinging too closely to the Bing Crosby persona. Yet in 1930 that persona existed only in his mind. His belief that he could beat the odds by being himself followed from his conviction that he could remake himself as a “type,” a new movie genus, Bingus crosbyanis. In learning to play himself, he had to invent himself. And he invented himself as a man whose decency others might want to emulate.
Rumors circulated that he took bit parts whenever he could; Bing or the Rhythm Boys were said to have been involved in such obscurities as The Lottery Bride and Many a Slip, either blending into crowds or landing on the cutting-room floor. One newspaper reported that Bing and Dixie were slated for MGM’s film of Good News; if in fact they were considered for that adaptation, Bing must have been especially galled to learn that the juvenile lead went to Stanley Smith (who had recently beat him out for a part in Honey), while the femme lead went to the oddly disconsolate stage star Mary Lawlor, who lacked Dixie’s spirit.
While the Rhythm Boys were spinning their wheels, agents were more than willing to take a chance on them. Bing all too casually encouraged more than a few, including Everett, who did not quite understand the business yet; William Perlberg, who had arranged the Montmartre job; and Edward Small, who sued when Bing hit the big time. But the guy who came through in their hour of need was Leonard Goldstein. Years later, when Goldstein was reaping a fortune with quickie westerns and lowbrow franchises (Ma and Pa Kettle, Francis the Talking Mule), he regaled journalists with his claims of discovering Bing: “I found him in the gutter. He chucked a cigar butt, and there I was right after it.” 28 Two Plus Fours had not helped either of them. Now he had a better idea.
Goldstein had first heard Bing and Al when they were with the Morrissey revue. His twin brother, Bob, later a power at Fox, was then manager of Abe Lyman, renowned for leading the orchestra at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove. Leonard tried in vain to get Lyman to hire the Rhythm Boys. When Lyman left the Grove in 1926, his pianist, Gus Arnheim, took charge for three years. Arnheim, in turn, left for a lengthy tour; during the years the Rhythm Boys were making their name with Whiteman, he traveled to Europe and enhanced his reputation before returning to the Grove in early 1930. Goldstein knew Arnheim would appreciate what Lyman had declined. The Grove’s manager, Abe Frank, agreed to hire the boys at $450 a week, $50 less per man than they had received from Whiteman. Goldstein was not happy and neither were the boys, but they accepted the offer. Gus Arnheim and arranger Jimmy Grier, a friend and fan of Bing’s, were ecstatic.
The Ambassador Hotel, with its private bungalows, intrigued the film crowd from the time it opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1920. Abe Frank knew that a nightclub on the premises could not miss. Within a year the main ballroom was transformed into the 1,000-seat Cocoanut Grove, complete with prop palm trees and fake monkeys grabbing fake coconuts. By 1930 the style was Hollywood Moroccan; the palms and monkeys were set against white stucco arches, and a red carpet extended from the top of a wide stairway in the hotel lobby all the way to the Grove. The Depression could not lay a glove on the place. Limousines crowded the entrance at night. On July 14 at 10:00 P.M.,Arnheim featured the Rhythm Boys in his two-hour broadcast over KNX, a powerful station that covered the Pacific Coast and reached as far inland as Colorado. The next night he officially introduced them to the audience at the Grove, and they were a sensation.
Much of young Hollywood had heard the trio at the Montmartre a year before, but the Grove was more established and posh, well known for its star nights and college nights, and as the venue (through 1936) for the Academy Awards ceremony. The Grove merged society (royalty, mobsters) and moviedom, a flush following that adored the Rhythm Boys, who appeared nightly and at Saturday teas. “We would show off our latest outfits generally on Tuesday nights, which is when the Hollywood crowd of that time gathered regularly at the Cocoanut Grove,” director Mervyn LeRoy recalled. “We would all have the same table, week after week. We went to see, and to be seen.” 29
If you couldn’t get in, you could hear them on the two-hour radio broadcasts. Anthony Quinn, a kid who would later appear in three of Bing’s movies, never missed a broadcast. He was the only one in his Mexican American neighborhood with a radio: “All the kids from all over would gather out my window and I would turn the sound up so that they could hear [Bing]. So he was quite a hero to us.” 30
Arnheim’s was strictly a sweet band, but he admired good musicians — he apprenticed such jazz stars as Woody Herman, Budd Johnson, and Stan Kenton. He recruited Loyce Whiteman, who was courted by the recently divorced Barris, and Irish tenor Donald Novis at the same time as the Rhythm Boys but counted on the trio to add zest to a fourteen-piece outfit that, by Paul Whiteman’s standards, was stiff and impassive. One band member whose life was transfigured by Bing was Russ Columbo, a capable violinist who knew just enough Joe Venuti licks to handle a two-bar break. Russ doubled as singer with two other musicians in a high-voiced trio, but what made him stand out were his dark good looks. A Valentino type with slicked-back hair, he was personable and alert, smiling as he played. After observing Bing for a few months, he began to appreciate what could be done with a microphone (he could barely be heard without one) and realized he was a light baritone, not a tenor, and could put over a ballad in a manner not unlike Bing’s. Some listeners claimed they could not tell the difference on evenings when Bing failed to show and Columbo went on in his place. Neither Goldstein nor Bing was amused by the similarity; Columbo soon left Arnheim to embark on a successful if tragically short-lived career.
At first the Grove engagement seemed charmed. Bing spent his days at the golf course and encountered little pressure on the job. He behaved. Movie stars said hello and became friends. For a change, Al did some drinking while Harry continued to nip at his flask, but Bing generally abstained. In those first few months, Bing established himself as a ballad soloist with no little help from Barris, whose song-writing efforts finally paid off in tunes discerningly tailored to the Crosby cry. They worked out a schedule with Arnheim. Once a night, between dances, they performed one of their numbers alone on the bandstand. For the rest of the evening, they sang choruses with the band. Al noticed something he had not seen before: “When the Rhythm Boys or Bing were singing from the bandstand all the dancers… would practically stand still and watch us and when the band took over they would dance again.” 31
The more observant gawkers may have realized they were witnessing something historic: Bing’s innovative perfection of a new instrument, the microphone. It was his ultimate ally, perfectly suited to his way with dynamics and nuance and timbre. As he explored gradations in projection, Bing collaborated with the electric current as if he were romancing a woman. He played the mike with a virtuosity that influenced every singer to follow, grounding it as a vehicle of modernism. Overnight, megaphones became a joke, as the tradition of vocal shouting receded into an instant prehistory. Two years earlier Al Jolson had been at the peak of his popularity; now he would be recast as the beloved reminder of old-fashioned show business. With the microphone elaborating the subtleties of his delivery,
Bing was reinventing popular music as a personal and consequently erotic medium.
The modern style of American popular singing, as distinct from the theatrical emoting of the minstrel and vaudeville eras, dominated the interpretation, understanding, and even the composition of contemporary songs throughout the Western world for most of the twentieth century. That style was originated by four performers, each to some degree rooted in jazz and blues: Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby. The first to make their influence felt were Smith, born in 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Waters, born two years later in Chester, Pennsylvania. Both women were formed in the crucible of tent shows and black vaudeville; their talents were tried and tested by audiences that dared them not to be great. Inevitably, they became rivals, and Ethel’s popular triumph over Bessie, whom she described as “all champ” 32 and whom her contemporaries acknowledged as Empress of the Blues, represents a moment when the black blues tradition was assimilated by mainstream American pop.
In their day Smith was the least widely known of the four, but as the finest heavy-voiced blues singing (some said shouting) contralto of the era, she influenced Waters and Louis Armstrong. She established vocal techniques intrinsic to the American style, notably an undulating attack in which notes are stretched, bent, curved, moaned, and hollered. Smith perfected and popularized an old style of melisma that Jeannette Robinson Murphy captured with lively accuracy in an 1899 issue of Popular Science Monthly. Attempting to instruct white singers in the art of “genuine Negro melodies,” Murphy asked:
What is there to show him that he must make his voice exceedingly nasal and undulating; that around every prominent note he must place a variety of small notes, called “trimmings,” and he must sing tones not found in our scale; that he must on no account leave one note until he has the next one well under control?… He must often drop from a high note to a very low one; he must be very careful to divide many of his monosyllabic words in two syllables…. He must also intersperse his singing with peculiar humming sounds — “hum-m-m-m.” 33
Murphy titled her article “The Survival of African Music in America,” but as musicologist Peter Van Der Merwe has shown, the stylistic elements she enumerated could also be found in Celtic music, particularly the Irish caoin, or lament. That may help to explain why the impact of Bessie Smith and other blues singers was felt most profoundly not only among Sephardic Jews, who shared with African Americans the tradition of the pentatonic scale, and Italians, who reveled in operatic projection, but by the Irish in precincts like the one in Spokane. Smith brought to modern American popular music the freedom to ad-lib melody and rhythm. Given her range of little more than an octave, she proved that emotional power does not depend on conventional vocal abilities.
Ethel Waters was another story. Though initially characterized as a blues singer, she came to embody the aspirations of black performers determined to make it on “white time.” With her lighter voice and higher range, she may have lacked the weighty sonority of Bessie Smith, but her superb enunciation and gift for mimickry established her as a virtuoso capable of irrepressible eroticism (she was the queen of the double entendre) and high-toned gentility. Sophie Tucker, one of the giants of white vaudeville, was so taken with young Ethel that she offered to pay her for singing lessons. Young white jazz acolytes of the 1920s were mesmerized by Waters and Smith, but it was Ethel’s smooth, articulate attack that had the greater appeal for Bing when Mildred introduced him to her records. If Bessie belonged to the blues, Ethel stood astride the whole swirling tapestry of American song.
Like a world-shaking conqueror — Alexander the Great razing Thebes yet creating Alexandria — Louis Armstrong was the most extreme force American music had ever known. A man of exceptional generosity, Armstrong would have been incapable of consciously destroying anything. Yet having assimilated almost every valuable tradition in nineteenth-century vernacular music, sacred or secular, he offered a comprehensive revision that supplanted them all. Born in the direst and most violent district of New Orleans, in 1901, he liberated American music instrumentally and vocally, uniting high and low culture. The mandarins wanted an American voice, and here it was — improvised yet durable, serious yet ribald, resolute yet startling. Musicians were permanently transformed by him and his music; they went away feeling freer, more optimistic, ambitious, and willing to take risks. Louis anchored — as Bessie Smith could not — blues as the foundation of America’s new music. He proved — as Ethel Waters could not — that swing, a seductive canter as natural and personal as your heartbeat, was its irreducible rhythmic framework.
Bing Crosby was the first and, for a while, the only white singer who fully assimilated the shock of Armstrong’s impact, and his loyalty never wavered. A year before he died, while playing the London Palladium, Crosby learned of the death of his friend, lyricist Johnny Mercer. The BBC requested an interview and sent a camera crew to the theater. Joe Bushkin, the pianist and leader of Bing’s quartet, recalled that Bing was very upset and spoke at length to the reporter of his friendship with Mercer; toward the end of the interview, Bing added, “I loved his singing.” Afterward, Bushkin told him how glad he was that Bing had mentioned Johnny’s often neglected singing. They reminisced about Mercer, when out of the blue, Bing said, “I gotta tell you, Joe, do you realize that the greatest pop singer in the world that ever was and ever will be forever and ever is Louis Armstrong?” Bushkin said, “Of course, I love Louis’s singing.” Bing said, “It’s so simple. When he sings a sad song you feel like crying, when he sings a happy song you feel like laughing. What the hell else is there with pop singing?” 34
One of the most significant things Bing learned from Louis was that the contagious pulse later called swing did not have to be exclusive to jazz. It was a universally expressive technique that could deepen the interpretation of any song in any setting. However subtle or modest, that pulse created a steady grid while focusing the song’s momentum. Bing’s uncanny ability to hear “the one” — the downbeat of each measure — was unheard of among white singers in the 1920s. It never left him. Jake Hanna, the drummer in Bushkin’s quartet, insisted, “Bing had the best, the absolute best time. And I played with Count Basie and that’s great time. You just followed him and he carried you right along, and so unassuming.” 35 Most of the singers who imitated Bing in the twenties and thirties — Russ Columbo, Perry Como, Dick Todd — took the superficial aspects of his style without the jazz foundation, which is why so much of their work is antiquated. Bing, on the other hand, did not imitate Armstrong; he understood that Louis’s message was to be yourself. That meant not simulating a black aesthetic but applying it to who he was and what he knew as a Northwestern third-generation Anglo-Irish Catholic, reared on John McCormack and Al Jolson, Dixieland and dance music, elocution and minstrelsy, comedy and vaudeville.
In addition to exemplary time and articulation, Bing was blessed with sterling pitch. “He was always on target,” said Milt Hinton, who played bass with the Bushkin quartet. “He was very theoretical about his singing, about diction and dynamics and things like that. I said, ‘How in the hell do you do that?’ He said, ‘Well, I get in my car and go to the golf course and I’m singing in my car, and when I’m playing I’m singing.’ His selection of words and what the meaning of a particular word was — he would really think about it, you know. You usually just hear a guy sing, but Bing knew the meaning of words and how he wanted the band to accent those certain things.” 36
To the mix as developed by Smith, Waters, and Armstrong, Bing added three elements that proved crucial to the fulfillment of popular singing: his expansive repertoire, expressive intimacy, and spotless timbre. Those facets grounded him as the first great ballad singer in jazz. Ethel Waters recorded a few ballads before Bing, but in a bold, plangent style more appropriate to vaudeville than romance. Bing prompted singers — and instrumentalists — to go beyond the familiar repertoire, even as he inspired songsmiths to handcraft ballads suitable to his
singular talent. His sound had little precedent: rich, strong, masculine, and clean. Listeners who were put off by vernacular growls and moans could understand his relatively immaculate approach. Having absorbed his early influences, he rarely borrowed the expressive colorations of the blues. His one accommodation to the pervasive use of melisma was the Irish mordent. His phrasing was his own, aggressive yet gentle, heartfelt yet humorous.
Few patrons at the Cocoanut Grove could have foreseen how far Bing’s renown would advance. But thousands of fans, even at that early stage, knew they were hearing something new and personal — a performer who sang to you, not at you, who told a story, who made you cry and laugh. The movie colony adopted and championed him. Veteran actor Walter Huston remembered him in those days as “one of the most likable, friendly fellows that I have ever met.” 37 Most of those cheering were of the younger generation. Lupe Velez introduced Bing to Gary Cooper, who became a good pal; they sailed together, often with Richard Arlen. When Bing finally won the attention of the studios, he turned down generous offers from Fox and Warners to follow Cooper to Paramount; a year later he named his first son after him.
Songwriters and publishers often dropped by the Grove, as did directors and producers. So did childhood friends, including Bing’s Gonzaga rival, Mike Pecarovich, who now coached at Loyola and occasionally brought his students to hear Bing. Bud Brubaker, a Pecarovich ballplayer who later became operations manager at Del Mar racetrack, recalled, “It was always jam-packed. They had a small dance floor and everybody was dancing. The Rhythm Boys would come out and sing six or eight songs during the evening’s program and Bing was already the leader. His style was completely different than anybody else. We’d dress semiformal and everybody had a date. It was Prohibition so they couldn’t serve booze. You brought your own. What you’d do is order fruit punch or something like that and they would bring you a setup and then you’d pour your own under the table. No one bothered you.” 38