Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  15

  THE CROSBY CLAUSE

  Listen in on the hilarious secrets and romances your radios never reveal!

  — Paramount advertisement, The Big Broadcast (1932) 1

  Paramount and Bing closed the deal on Wild Waves, which was retitled The Crooner and Broadcasting before the studio settled on The Big Broadcast. On April 13 Bing, Dixie, and the terrier, Cremo, embarked on a five-month tour of the Paramount-Publix circuit in an elaborate publicity drive for the picture, which was scheduled to shoot midway through the tour, beginning June 11. During the seven-week westward leg of the journey, Bing broadcast fifteen-minute shows Mondays and Wednesdays at stops where the theater chain had him booked; upon arriving in California, he would play local venues for a month and make the film, then resume a schedule of broadcasts and theaters as he worked his way back to New York. Bing had hoped to bring along a small combo with Joe Venuti and Jimmy Dorsey but was obliged to settle for just Lennie Hayton, who served as musical director and conducted theater-pit orchestras, and Lang, who worked at Bing’s side, seated on a high stool that allowed them to share a mike. Bing called Eddie his “good luck charm.” 2

  A couple of weeks into the tour, Variety ran an ad cosigned by Everett Crosby and William Paley, in which Bing says “THANKS EVERYBODY See You in the Fall.” 3 Bing’s brother identified himself as the singer’s personal manager, and Paley was credited with “personal direction,” which reflected nothing more than his desire to keep Bing on his network.

  Dixie and Kitty Lang grew close during the trip. Kitty remembered, “Every town we went to, we were alone most of the time due to rehearsals and shows the boys were doing. We only saw them at dinner or after the last show of the evening.” Bing and Eddie spent off-hours shooting pool, playing cards, and talking music. Bing “always listened to Eddie’s advice as to how to sing certain phrases in a tune,” Kitty said. 4 In booking their accommodations, Everett invariably arranged connecting rooms. While the boys rehearsed, the girls went horseback riding or shopping in the morning, occasionally taking in a movie in the afternoon.

  The tour zigzagged — Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, New Haven, Chicago (again), Minneapolis, St. Louis — before touching down in Los Angeles. In Boston Bing joined Jack Benny and George M. Cohan in a minstrel show and, using a pseudonym, entered an amateur-talent contest at the behest of two vaudeville chums, Les Reis and Artie Dunn. He lost. In Chicago Bing recorded five tunes with Isham Jones’s orchestra during the first stopover, and four with a Frankie Trumbauer unit during the second. Those sides produced Crosby’s classic versions of two of the most indelible and rhythmically energized songs in the American canon, both created by black songwriters.

  Maceo Pinkard’s hugely popular “Sweet Georgia Brown” was written in 1925 and was introduced by bandleader Ben Bernie. The song is disarmingly fluent given its distinct qualities. Structurally, it avoids the prevalent aaba format in favor of abac; harmonically, it employs a cycle of fifths but averts the tonic chord until midway; melodically, it is uncannily buoyant, making a slow treatment virtually impossible. Bing’s performance with Isham Jones, whose dance band was studded with jazz players (including Woody Herman), is jubilant. Lang strums a two-bar transition to introduce Bing, who is loose, unhurried, letter-perfect. Bing rarely begins phrases on the one, preferring to coolly syncopate them against the ensemble rhythm. No singer of that era understood as well as Bing Louis Armstrong’s proclivity for superimposing implied rhythms over stated ones. But where Armstrong flows, Bing inclines toward a two-beat lockstep, underscored by his practice of adding words to heighten swing; for example, in the space of the phrase, “I’ll tell you why and you know I don’t lie, not much,” he sings, “And I’ll tell you just why, you know that I do not lie, not much.” 5 A Bixlike solo by trumpeter Chelsea Quealey and Jack Jenny’s graceful trombone precede his scat solo and handsomely embellished reprise.

  Bing’s sparked rendition of Shelton Brooks’s “Some of These Days,” a milestone song of 1910 that became Sophie Tucker’s theme a year later, is even more successful. By any measure, it is one of his greatest performances. Reunited with Trumbauer, who led an ensemble of his regulars plus Lang and Hayton (who dictated the arrangements at the session), Bing is in peak voice and eager to please. Lang begins with vigorous strumming, almost as if the record had faded up on a number in progress, and four bars later Bing rides in — swinging and bending notes, indulging a fetching cry (no mordents today), even clipping a few high notes, while perfectly enunciating the virtually rhymeless lyric. In his superb scat solo, Bing emulates Bix and the result is rhythmically more varied than his usual ad-lib choruses; he inventively uses riffs, rests, and a diminished scale — harmonizing with Lang’s turnback chords at bar sixteen. Solos by Lang, trumpeter Nat Connant, and Tram may be smoother, but Bing’s solo is the one that stays in the mind, not least his closing, “tweet, tweet, tweet, twee twee.”

  Bing was in exceptional form in Chicago, giving indifferent songs like “Lazy Day” and “Cabin in the Cotton” more than their due. He rises to a dramatic righteousness on the latter, as if, having been mockingly entwined with Columbo and Vallée, he were determined to sever himself from the depiction of crooners as small-voiced wimps. A couple of weeks later, Bing explained to a reporter, “A crooner is someone who always sings softly, never raising his voice to full strength. I raise mine to full volume whenever the song calls for it.” 6 Yet before he left the Windy City, he confided to Tram that he felt his future lay not in music but in the movies. 7

  On June 12, the day after shooting was originally scheduled to begin, the Crosby party arrived at L.A.’s Union Station and was greeted by the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra (chief rival to the Cocoanut Grove band) for speeches courtesy of Paramount’s public-relations department. Bing and Dixie rented Sue Carol’s house, where they had lived in lieu of a honeymoon, and Eddie and Kitty took an apartment. “But we always stayed close together,” Kitty recalled. 8 The start-up for The Big Broadcast was delayed until July 5. That gave Bing time to fulfill his obligations to Sennett and film a promotional reel for Paramount’s series Hollywood on Parade.

  The final two Sennett shorts employed the same basic formula as before, but the scripts now reflected Bing’s renown as a national radio personality and the general disparagement of crooning. In Sing, Bing, Sing, 9 Franklin Pangborn fires a gun at Bing and crows, “It’s always open season for crooners.” That film also includes the first allusion in the series to the Depression. When the girl’s father vows that his daughter will never marry a radio singer, Bing replies, “That’s where you’re wrong. Prosperity is just around the crooner.” Bing’s final film for Sennett, the appealing Blue of the Night, indulges in a few inside jokes (Bing pretends to be a reporter named Jack Smith, the name of his successor at the Grove) but is more notable as the screen debut of his theme song and for his lovely rendering of “Auf Wiedersehen,” a song well suited to the lush timbre of his midrange.

  For some reason, Bing never recorded “Auf Wiedersehen,” but he sang it again in the first of the four Hollywood on Parade publicity shorts he made in 1932 and 1933. None of the stars were paid for their appearances in these one-reelers, which pretend to depict them candidly, though every shot was carefully staged. In the one made to promote The Big Broadcast, actor Stu Erwin, his costar, has the distinction of delivering the first documented joke about Bing’s fabled fortune, when he announces that Bing appears “by permission of his broker.” Bing does a routine with two other stars of the picture, George Burns and Gracie Allen, who greets him as Morton Downey. “No,” Bing tells her, “I’m Rudy Vallée.”

  In the 1950s, when television ravaged movie box office receipts, movie studios fought back with everything from biblical spectacles to 3-D projection to double-D bottle blondes, not to mention the trinity spelled out by Cole Porter: “If you want to get the crowd to come around / You’ve got to have glorious Technicolor / Breathtaking Cinemascope and / Stereophonic sound.” 10 In the early 1930
s radio was just as threatening; it bedeviled the record and motion picture industries and every other area of entertainment that required people to leave their homes. The movie studios were stymied in trying to subvert its growing power. Amos ‘n’Andy did not work as a movie, and musical revues were dead on arrival.

  Radio’s monstrous intrusion may be inferred by the first important picture to reflect radio culture, the 1931 horror epic Frankenstein. Updated to the twentieth century, James Whale’s film is dizzy with radio talk and apparatuses as the scientist bridles electricity to replicate life, wearing earphones and muttering about correct frequencies. His creation has two bolts resembling vacuum tubes in its neck to attract electric current that will transform it into virtual humanity. Frankenstein captured the unstated fear of electricity — its invisible inroads into everyday life.

  The statistics were ominous. In 1930 fewer than a third of American homes had radios; by 1935 fewer than a third did not. The average listener spent upward of four hours a day beside an entertainment device that cost nothing beyond the purchase price yet supplied constant diverse programming. Between 1930 and 1932 weekly movie attendance and receipts fell by a third. Theaters offered double features (generating the need for more product and the assembly of B-picture units and studios) and two-for-ones or half-price tickets. When those gambits failed, movie houses resorted to outright giveaways: hams, dishes, and, ultimately, money — a Fox exhibitor copyrighted Bank Night, a lottery to which more than 4,000 theaters subscribed. As if the challenges of radio and the Depression weren’t bad enough, the church intervened. The Motion Picture Production Code, created in 1930 by Catholic publisher Martin Quigley and a Jesuit priest, Daniel Lord, had exerted influence among the faithful. But as of mid-1934 it would be taken up and strictly enforced by the studios — good news for Shirley Temple; bad news for Nick and Nora Charles, who were sentenced to separate beds.

  The Code loomed as particularly baleful for Paramount, Hollywood’s most sophisticated studio, home to the movies’ randiest performers, Mae West and Maurice Chevalier; the unfettered anarchy of the Marx Brothers; outlandish director Josef von Sternberg and his Trilby, Marlene Dietrich; and resplendent director Ernst Lubitsch, who was appointed head of production when he could no longer explore boudoir sallies, ménage à trois, and the joys of theft. Those talents raked in a fortune, and soon they would all be gone. Yet in 1932, when Bing and eight other radio acts were recruited for The Big Broadcast, Paramount did not anticipate the coming chill. Nor could it foresee the impact Bing would have on its fortunes or that of the industry. It simply hoped to capitalize on Mack Sennett’s notion: if the country was crazy over radio singers, maybe it would pay to see what some of them looked like.

  After signing Crosby, Paramount made two shrewd decisions. The first was to jettison every aspect of William Manley’s Wild Waves except the radio-station setting, turning a satire into a variety show. Manley had started out as a radio writer (Snow Village Sketches) and achieved his success on Broadway by crunching the hand that fed him. Hollywood, however, sought a rapprochement with radio and its listeners. Bing was to be the most prominently featured of the several CBS radio stars Paramount hired for the picture, and it seemed reasonable to have him play some version of himself. Still, in presenting Bing Crosby as a character named Bing Crosby, the film took the cult of personality a step beyond established custom. 11

  True, Laurel and Hardy used the same names on- and offscreen, and a few stars routinely appeared in roles that combined their real first names (Al Jolson usually played a guy named Al, Eddie Cantor almost always played a guy named Eddie) with made-up surnames, as Bing did in the Sennett shorts. In 1932 Jack Benny and Burns and Allen were extending their vaudeville personae into radio characters of the same names, a practice that would confuse a generation of listeners. (Asked if Jack Benny was really cheap, the professionally ditzy Gracie Allen replied, “Am I stupid?”) Bing never appeared as Bing in any of his subsequent pictures, but his movie character, established in his first feature, would remain fairly constant from one film to the next. Audiences would presume the man onscreen was no different at home: exceptionally likable if, as revealed in The Big Broadcast, not entirely admirable.

  Paramount’s second smart move was to assign the picture to Frank Tuttle, who in 1932 was one of the studio’s most highly regarded contract directors. A Yale graduate who had served as assistant editor at Vanity Fair and as publicist for the New York Philharmonic and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (he married dancer Tatiana Smirnova), Tuttle came to Hollywood as a writer and was encouraged to direct by veteran filmmaker Allan Dwan. He was tall, lean, bespectacled, donnish, and famously efficient; he helped found the Screen Directors Guild. Tuttle had made stars of Clara Bow and Eddie Cantor in silent pictures and would do as much for Bing, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, no one played a more prominent role than Tuttle in Bing’s first decade in Hollywood. They worked together on six pictures between 1932 and 1939, and when Bing formed his production company in 1945, he hired Tuttle to direct its first feature. Bing once named him and Leo McCarey as his two favorite directors — a remarkable statement, as McCarey was widely ranked with John Ford and Frank Capra as one of America’s greatest filmmakers in the years between the advent of sound and the end of the Second World War.

  Yet Tuttle was soon forgotten, his reputation demolished by his craven performance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. 12 Tuttle had been a Communist Party member for eleven years, breaking off in early 1949. After a witness named him and his career was put on the line, he signed a loyalty oath and appeared as a friendly witness, confirming thirty-six names the committee already had and inadvertently adding three more (wives of the accused). Tuttle’s liberal politics were well known in the years before he joined the party and dismayed no one, certainly not Bing. During the filming of The Big Broadcast, Tuttle introduced Bing to John Bright, a screenwriter (The Public Enemy) who was raising money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. Bright asked Bing for a contribution. “He asked me one simple question,” Bright remembered, and quoted Bing as follows: “Nine colored boys in the South accused of rape. They didn’t do it. How much do you want?” 13 Bing wrote him a check for $1,000.

  Looking back on that incident, Bright attempted to explain Bing’s generosity. “He had worked with black people in the music industry all his life and had never shown any prejudice. That was the early thirties. Later on, he became very, very reactionary.” 14 In truth, he was far from reactionary and rarely discussed politics at all. Despite his resentment of confiscatory wartime taxes and a traditional Catholic’s distrust of change, his conservative inclinations tended to be undercut by his live-and-let-live disposition. Nancy Briggs learned as much in 1960, when she worked as Basil Grillo’s secretary in the largely Republican offices of Bing Crosby Enterprises, Inc. “I was at the water cooler getting a drink,” she recalled. “I was so proud, I had just gotten a JFK button. Larry [Crosby] came back and said, ‘You don’t wear that in this office.’And all of a sudden there was Bing — he just appeared out of nowhere. He said, ‘Larry, you don’t tell anybody what to do in this office.’ He said, ‘You don’t tell anybody not to wear a JFK button or a Republican button or a Communist button if they want to.’ Larry kind of folded and Bing said, ‘Good luck, Nancy,’ and walked off.” 15

  Bing was tagged a conservative for criticizing FDR during the 1940 election, for appearing in a Chesterfield-sponsored propaganda short during the Korean War, and for supporting religious causes, like The Christophers (a progressive organization also supported by Jack Benny and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson), yet he let it be known that he opposed the Vietnam War, advocated the legalization of marijuana, and despised Richard Nixon. In politics, he publicly declared himself only once, for Wendell Willkie, the most liberal Republican presidential candidate of the century, after Theodore Roosevelt. He instantly regretted it, and though he later appeared on radio with Democrat Alben Barkley (
Truman’s vice president) and played golf with President Kennedy, he never again professed sides, never allowed himself to be exploited by or photographed with a politician. Basil Grillo said, “He didn’t believe actors should be influencing people on serious matters. It didn’t make any difference what it was… he thought actors should not use their prominence that way.” 16

  Like several men important in Bing’s career (Buddy DeSylva, David Butler, Stuart Erwin), Frank Tuttle had worked with Dixie before he encountered Bing, directing her in Clara Bow’s futile comeback, No Limit, which Dixie had filmed shortly after her wedding. But he bonded quickly with Bing, who, like many actors, enjoyed working with Tuttle. “He was very much a gentleman,” Tuttle’s daughter Helen Votachenko observed of her father, “not at all abrasive.” 17 Bing especially admired his comédie talent. With few exceptions, most of his work was bland, but given the right story and performers, Tuttle could summon forth a visual flair worthy of his masters, Ernst Lubitsch and René Clair. He made his name with the startlingly inventive 1926 Eddie Cantor silent comedy, Kid Boots, and in 1933 he directed Cantor’s finest talkie, Roman Scandals, the giddiest antifascist pro-socialist picture of Hollywood’s golden age. Today Tuttle is best remembered for the 1942 Graham Greene thriller, This Gun for Hire, the scathing portrait of capitalist venality that paired and made stars of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. But The Big Broadcast, his thirty-ninth picture, is perhaps his most charming film. It not only launched Bing but initiated a successful series at Paramount and helped revive the benighted musical, which got an even bigger boost a few months later with the release of Warner Bros.’ 42nd Street.

  An homage to René Clair, 18 who pioneered the blending of musical and visual effects in such influential films as Sows les Toits de Paris and Le Million, The Big Broadcast is a brisk confection that marries song, sex, comedy, and trickery and might almost be considered an American Le Million, with radio replacing opera as its setting. Tuttle adapted several of Clair’s trademarks, among them long traveling shots, miniature sets, accelerated motion, recitatives, sound effects, and silent sequences, adding his own touches, including animation, visual puns, and clever editing that integrates into a Hollywood setting footage of entertainers (Cab Calloway, Kate Smith, Arthur Tracy, Vincent Lopez, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters) who were shot at Astoria Studios in New York.