by Gary Giddins
On May 28 the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News asked the “question being mouthed feverishly among radio fans”: 13 What happened to the Rhythm Boys? A week later the paper reported that despite “an army of listeners’ frets and complaints,” they would not return “unless contractual difficulties between them and the proprietors of the Cocoanut Grove, not to mention the musicians’ union, are ironed out.” 14 The union got involved after Frank filed a complaint, in which he admitted that the original contract had lapsed but insisted that he was entitled to a nine-month option or financial remuneration. Implausibly, the union sided with management and imposed a blacklist that remained in effect for four months, during which time the trio could perform neither on radio nor on records. “My run-in with Abe Frank was the end of the Rhythm Boys,” Bing concluded. 15
He could afford to feel sanguine, however, with the sealing of the Sennett deal. Why Harry and Al did not participate in the two-reelers is not known. Perhaps they were tiring of the backseat and did not want supporting roles in vehicles created around Bing. Rinker never commented on the decision, except to describe Bing’s acceptance of Sennett’s proposal as “a wise decision” and admit that the group’s demise “was a relief to me.” 16 In any case, Sennett and Bing renegotiated the contract to their mutual benefit, amending the price from $1,000 for the trio to $600 for Bing.
The Rhythm Boys never officially announced their breakup, and fans continued to hope for their reappearance, even as Frank advertised a contest for replacements. The three contest winners — including Jack Smith, who continued to work on radio and as host of TV shows like You Asked for It — called themselves the Ambassadors. 17 Radio reviewer Kenneth Frogley dismissed them as “an imitation. Has lots of pep, but not enough genuine melodic music.” Barris served as the group’s music director. Arnheim and his announcer, Nelson Case, had asked Loyce Whiteman to convince Harry to return. She found him drunk and helped get him into shape. He needed money and accepted the offer. If anyone still had illusions of the Rhythm Boys’ getting together, Harry’s work with the Ambassadors scotched them.
“Barris, Bing, and I parted on the best of terms,” Rinker recalled in the unpublished memoir he wrote shortly before his death in 1982. “Bing went to his Mack Sennett job, Barris stayed on at the Grove for a while, and I went my own way.” 18 Al’s way was, according to a Variety account in July 1931, initially paved by Bing Crosby Ltd., a shortlived alliance between Bing, Barris, and Marchetti, which paid him a salary and may have facilitated his first job, touring in vaudeville on the same Fanchon and Marco circuit that had provided him and Bing with their start nearly six years earlier. 19 In that period Al began to compose and completed his first successful piece, “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater” (debuted by Whiteman at the Metropolitan Opera House and recorded by him). For a while he was part of the vocal group backing Kay Thompson on radio. Then, in 1936, he became producer and director of CBS music programs (his first show was a substantial hit, The Saturday Night Swing Club) and prospered.
Harry did not fare as well. While continuing to direct the Ambassadors, he married Loyce and created an act with her. Having completed Frank’s disputed option, Harry and Loyce were in good standing with the union and free to move on. They worked at New York’s Park Central Hotel and toured the country, settling for a while in Las Vegas. He played with several big bands through the 1940s, briefly leading one of his own, and backed comedian Joe E. Brown on his tours of army camps. But Harry’s drinking was out of control; it cost him his songwriting talent — he never had another hit after 1935 — and, eventually, his marriage. Until his death in 1962, he survived on royalties and the ministrations of the Bing Crosby office.
In addition to recording “I Surrender, Dear” and “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” three times each during Harry’s life (and once after his death), featuring them in Sennett and early Paramount films, and performing them often on radio and television (thereby ensuring their value as annuities), Bing saw to it that Harry received regular movie work, including credited bits in at least eighteen Paramount pictures, seven of them with Bing. In all, Harry appeared in more than fifty movies between 1930 and 1950, usually as a band member, pianist, or emcee. His finest screen moment is as the jivey, gum-chewing accompanist who encourages Irene Dunne to rag “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” in Universal’s 1936 Show Boat. The movie roles were Bing’s way of helping him without appearing to hand out charity. (He did as much for many old friends.) Harry told his daughter, Marti, that a guest shot with Bing on radio paid the hospital costs of her birth. 20
Marguerite Toth, the receptionist in the Crosby office at 9028 Sunset between 1945 and 1962, said, “I know he supported Harry Barris when Barris was so sick. I believe he paid the house payment to keep it from foreclosure.’ 21 Basil Grillo, who managed Crosby’s finances, spoke of a confidential list of old friends of Bing’s: if anyone on the list was in need of financial help, he was to provide it, no questions asked. “I was given carte blanche to see that Harry was taken care of, “ Grillo recalled, “just as I was given carte blanche to take care of Mildred Bailey’s hospital bills. It was a losing battle with Harry, but we did the best we could.” 22 Harry titled his last song “Never Been So Lost.” 23
And Al? “I specifically don’t remember doing anything for Al,” Grillo said. “Mostly because as far as I know, he didn’t need anything. At least it was never brought to our attention.” 24 Al’s daughter, Julia, concurred: “Dad didn’t need any help from Bing. Dad made a very good living. He produced radio shows and that’s how he met my mother, on the Kay Thompson show — she was a singer, Elizabeth Rinker. He had a good job and we lived very well, I’d say upper middle class. He called himself a runaway Catholic and said he left the church because his knees hurt. There was no rift between him and Bing, no betrayal. What was Bing supposed to do? Slow his life down — put it on hold? That’s crazy.” 25 Yet in Al’s memoir, written in part to counter a scurrilous attack on Crosby that claimed Al as its primary source, 26 he expresses a nearly morose anxiety regarding the distance between them, at one point consigning himself to the KOBBC club, an acronym among insiders for “kissed off by Bing Crosby.”
In spite of his frustration, Al acknowledged Bing’s decency toward him. But no matter what Bing did, it never felt right to him. In 1943 Whiteman invited Al to participate in a broadcast reunion of the Rhythm Boys. “It had been over 12 years since the Rhythm Boys had split up,” Al wrote, “and I was rather surprised that Bing, who was now an established star, would agree to appear.” When they met at the studio, the band applauded, and the show was a great success. “After rehearsal,” Al continued, “Bing invited me out for a game of golf at the Bel-Air Country Club. We had a good match and were just as competitive as when we last played together over 13 years ago.” Yet he was offended because when he asked Bing why he did the show, Bing told him he figured “he owed Whiteman a favor,” when by Al’s lights he should have done it “out of sentiment.” Later he learned that Bing was offered and refused his usual fee, insisting that it be divided between Al and Harry, an act that merely fueled his suspicions: “This was a nice gesture, but I’m inclined to feel that it was his way of squaring things up with us.” 27 When four years later Al sent him a song he had written, “Suspense,” Bing recorded it, though it was neither good nor successful. What Al wanted was no longer possible: an intimate channel to Bing, founded on sentiment.
They met for the last time in 1973, when Al was attempting to produce an original musical program for television, The French Quarter. He showed it to Phil Harris, who suggested it would be perfect for Bing and phoned him. Bing instantly agreed to do the show, before seeing the script. A conference was arranged. “When he arrived at the meeting, he was very friendly and seemed glad to see me,” Al wrote. “He and I reminisced at lunch about the old times.” They went up to Phil’s hotel to play the score and show Bing the dialogue and story. “He was very attentive, and after we had gone over the show, he seemed very pl
eased and said he would be glad to do it.” Al wanted something more. “Although he seemed to have friendly feelings toward me, I no longer cared whether his friendliness was genuine or not. Too many years had gone by, and who he was and what he did no longer mattered to me.” 28
Skitch Henderson, a pianist who made his reputation as a regular on one of Bing’s 1940s radio shows, said, “When Bing closed the door on you, it never opened. And I think Rinker, who I didn’t know well, but I knew him as a performer and respected what he had been, had his heart broken. Something happened between them. Nobody knows what it was.” 29 Rinker knew, or thought he did. Shortly before he died, he offered an explanation to his old friend Kurt Dieterle, the violinist who had roomed with Bing during the King of Jazz, and to Don Eagle, a musician turned writer, who interviewed him for a magazine piece. “Al wasn’t too assertive,” Eagle noted. “I asked him, ‘When did the turning point come?’ He says, ‘One night I drove Bing home in my car when he was living with Kurt on Fairfax in West Los Angeles. I dropped him off and Bing wanted to borrow some money from me, which I didn’t have or was not going to loan or something like that. So he slammed the door of the car and walked away.’ He said from then on a strain was there.” 30 Dieterle added, “Instead of loaning him the money, Al lectured Bing on his behavior. Bing wasn’t someone you lectured.” 31
Now on his own, working with Mack Sennett’s Educational Pictures in the Hollywood Hills, in 1931, Bing turned out four two-reelers in three months — two in June, a third in July, a fourth in August. On average, each involved no more than two days’ shooting. Sennett later said he had briefly doubted Bing’s ability to carry the pictures and hired comedian Arthur Stone to share the load. Yet Bing completely dominates the shorts, which are fascinating for the way they establish in embryonic form the Crosby persona — exuberant and mischievous, dreamy and stubborn, often callow, sometimes petulant — that would emerge in Bing’s feature films of the 1930s.
The first short, I Surrender Dear, received a limited release on the West Coast but was broadly redistributed in September, after Bing triumphed on national radio. Educational could then advertise him as “California’s famous discovery who has become the country’s favorite overnight.” Moviegoers were pleased, and so were the trade papers. Photoplay reported, “The [Sennett] shorts… not only get over the Crosby voice, but the Crosby personality, which seems to be quite sumpin’.” 32 Motion Picture Herald thought “the baron of baritones” (as he was billed) “personable,” adding that he “can act sufficiently to put over his songs and has a really beautiful voice.” 33 Variety agreed: “Crosby displays capital comedy sense, plays with assurance and certainty.” 34
Today it is difficult to grasp the degree to which radio threatened Hollywood. Many theaters suspended projection of films at 7:00 P.M. and piped in Amos ‘n’Andy, which might otherwise have kept patrons at home. Sennett realized that just as talking pictures offered audiences a chance to hear the voices belonging to beloved faces, they provided a chance to see the faces belonging to beloved broadcast voices. In the world of Bing’s two-reelers, everyone knows how Bing sounds, but no one knows what he looks like. And since Bing never carries ID, the only way he can prove himself to women or police officers is to sing. His resonant low notes and seductive phrasing invariably win the day and the girl.
The motif of Bing’s voice as universally recognizable was a bit presumptuous, since the first four Sennetts (two more followed in 1932) were shot before Bing succeeded on network radio, when his fame on the airwaves was based almost exclusively on Arnheim’s West Coast broadcasts and his guest appearances on other local programs. Yet even then, Bing and other invisible singers were accused of seducing wives and daughters with their laryngeal wiles. Radio’s role in the battle of the sexes had greatly changed. Back in 1923, when mostly men donned earphones to surf the air on crystal sets, a Mrs. Cora May White of Minneapolis divorced her husband because “radio mania” 35 had alienated his affections. Now men complained of perverse crooners beguiling their women. Their scorn provided another theme for the Sennett shorts. Bing, embodying a rare balance of humility and audacity, never merely wins the girl: he steals her, usually from one of her parents (never both) and her fiance, who loathe radio crooners and conspire in vain to foil his unstoppable charms. A class distinction is explicit in these battles. While Bing is a regular Joe, the foiled suitors are rich and prissy (effeminate Franklin Pangborn plays the unlikely lover twice) or European and prissy. They usually end up falling into a pool of water or getting whacked on the backside as Bing drives off with the lady.
I Surrender Dear is unusual among the Sennetts in allowing Bing to indulge in vaudeville verbosity and banter, a result of the teaming with Arthur Stone. He mimes his own recording of “Out of Nowhere,” using postures he picked up in his barnstorming days with Al and Harry. The second short, One More Chance (for which his salary was raised to $750), is more overtly personal and departs from the formula to present him as a married salesman, Bing Bangs. He parodies “I Surrender, Dear” with lyrics about a laundry detergent (leading to a routine later recycled and much improved in Road to Singapore), before leaving with his wife, Ethel Bangs, for California. They endure many disasters on the way: an Indian threatens to scalp Bing, who, wearing a wretched hairpiece, says, “Maybe you’re right, so far it’s only a bald spot.” When Ethel announces her intention to leave him for her lover, Percy, Bing confronts her in a nightclub scene that recalls his public rewooing of Dixie, and sings “Just One More Chance.” It’s an extraordinary moment, because the real Bing shines through in all his swinging, funny, improvisational glee. 36 His spontaneity clearly startled actress Patsy O’Leary, who looks genuinely surprised when he kisses her and cannot keep a straight face as he rocks the tune. He concludes by finger-popping his cheek.
A lingering instinct for minstrelsy is pursued in Dream House. Bing plays singing plumber Bing Fawcett, who accidentally gets black house paint on his face, leading a black casting director to hire him as a black actor. When he kisses the leading lady (before spiriting her away from his rival and her mother), he inadvertently gives her a blackface mustache and goatee that suits her mannish hairdo, as he dons a womanly turban. 37 Transvestism is more salient in Billboard Girl, in which the swishy brother of Bing’s paramour pretends to be her (he wears his sister’s undergarments for authenticity) and Bing can’t tell the difference. Bing ultimately whisks the real sister away from her fiance and irate father, whose objections echo those expressed in life by Dixie’s dad. While making this film, Bing realized he could avoid hairpieces by wearing hats, and wore one in every scene.
Before Sennett’s cameras rolled, Marchetti and Everett had invited offers from radio and vaudeville. Having picked up a few pointers from Leonard Goldstein, Everett mailed two records — “I Surrender, Dear” and “Just One More Chance” — to William S. Paley, president of the Columbia Broadcasting System. What Kapp and Sennett had done for Bing on records and in movies, Paley could accomplish on network radio. The prize was a nightly fifteen-minute show that would be relayed by the network all over the country. A CBS representative offered Bing an audition with the proviso that he come to New York, but Bing had qualms about making the trip. He was beginning to realize his Hollywood dreams and did not want to be apart from Dixie. Yet when word got back that Russ Columbo was pursuing the same course, Bing agreed to give it a shot. For his resourcefulness, Everett was officially signed on as Bing’s manager.
Yet Paley had never received Everett’s package. While Bing was ruminating about the audition, the CBS chief was on board the SS Europa, en route to the Continent. On his third day at sea, or so it was related in a CBS press release, Paley heard “I Surrender, Dear” wafting from the stateroom of a fellow passenger. He ascertained the name of the singer and radioed his New York office for information. Upon arriving in Europe, Paley was advised of Bing’s fame in California, shown a Sennett short, and warned that “radio and theatrical impresarios were vying in submis
sion of contracts to the young baritone.” 38
This was not entirely true. Roger Marchetti was asking $2,500 per week for Bing, an astronomical fee that, as Variety reported, “drew a batch of yawns.” 39 The best offers the lawyer received were an RKO vaudeville tour at $1,500 and a featured spot in Earl Carroll’s Vanities at $1,000. NBC expressed interest, but not beyond a three-figure salary. Nonetheless, Paley instructed Columbia to sign Crosby for a sustaining show at $1,500, a remarkable sum for a show subsidized by the network in the hope of luring a sponsor. (Kate Smith received a third of that for her sustainer.) In later years Paley would embellish the story, making it a near perfect match for Mack Sennett’s: the CBS underlings tell him he’s crazy (Bing is a drinker and unreliable), but he overrules them and mandates a contract.
Bing was signed to a fifteen-minute show, Monday through Saturday: the routine would be three vocals, one instrumental by the band, and no talk except by the network’s announcer. In Bing’s recollection, Paley wanted him on the air right away but had to wait while Marchetti settled the American Federation of Musicians ban instigated by Abe Frank. CBS was taking no chances. It postponed its announcement of Bing’s signing until the AFM ruled that his unfavorable status applied only to Los Angeles. 40 The stall allowed Marchetti to settle with Frank before he learned of Bing’s improved finances; Frank demanded a payoff of $7,500, which was nearly two-thirds of what he had paid Bing for a year’s work at his club. Still, the delay was no more than a week or two, and Bing left for New York on August 11. CBS scheduled his debut for August 31, a Monday evening at 11:00 P.M. Bing did not make it.