by Gary Giddins
Writer-producer Benjamin Glazer concocted a story, and George Marion Jr. dressed the bare-bones situation with details drawn from Bing’s own life. But if Paramount had no qualms about presenting Bing in the role of a reckless, alcoholic libertine, it drew the line at allowing his ears to wave and his pate to shine. Bing was required to spend the better part of a day at the House of Westmore, while Wally Westmore’s protégé, Harry Ray, fitted him for a hairpiece and glued back his ears. Wally, who later named Bing his all-time favorite client, flatly refused to work on the singer when he first arrived at Paramount, and tried to discourage the studio from signing him. His animus stemmed from an evening two years earlier when he had taken his wife to hear the Rhythm Boys at the Cocoanut Grove and Bing retched onstage. So it fell to Harry Ray to overcome Bing’s aversion to a procedure described by the makeup clan’s chronicler, Frank West-more: Ray had to “stick back the ears and then wrap Crosby’s head with a turban until he was sure they’d stay pinned back.” 19 Ray tried to convince Bing to have surgery to flatten his ears (recently undertaken by George Raft), but Bing refused, much as he loathed the daily ritual. “It was terrible,” Bing remembered. “They put this glue back there and it hurt, it would sting, and after a few days, the skin would get raw. Oh, I hated it. They kept popping out — the lights would be hot and all of a sudden one of these things would pop out, and the director would holler, ‘Cut! Fix that guy’s ears.’” 20
Tuttle was more concerned with Bing’s acting. After screening the Sennett shorts with Glazer, he expressed his delight with Bing’s voice and personality, and concern about his awkwardness: “Bing didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.” Tuttle’s fears were allayed as soon as they began shooting. “Bing was extremely cooperative and his sense of comedy was first-rate from the opening shot,” he wrote. “His approach was casual and he liked to move around. We worked out interesting pieces of business so that he wouldn’t have to just stand there and deliver a number.” The physical business minimized Bing’s tendency to gesticulate, and his acting improved markedly. Tuttle admired Bing’s predilection for working with top performers and learning from them, and he got a kick out of Bing’s verbal gifts: “Between shots he spoke a language of his own, a slang-enriched Americanese that is almost impossible to describe, but was amusing as it was unique.” 21
Bing did win one argument against Hollywood conventions. He refused to accept top billing, reasoning that if the film tanked, it would sink his career. Although he played the lead role, Bing was second-billed to Stu Erwin, who had a track record in movies. (By contrast, Guy Lombardo refused to appear in The Big Broadcast after learning he would be billed below Crosby.) 22 Bing considered his judgment vindicated the following year, when Kate Smith’s much ballyhooed Hello, Everybody! turned out to be her movie hail and farewell. He believed that if she had been billed as one of many performers rather than as the sole reason for making or seeing the picture, she might have survived the debacle. Billing aside, few radio stars were able to make the transition to movies; after Bing, the most successful was Bob Hope, who debuted at Paramount six years later in The Big Broadcast of 1938.
Bing never took his stardom for granted. Even when he topped the Quigley box-office poll five years running (an unprecedented achievement), his movie contracts always contained “the Crosby clause,” as it became known in the industry, enjoining producers from billing him alone above the title. His insistence on sharing credit — or blame — prompted David O. Selznick to cite him as the smartest man in movies. (Selznick had another reason to value his acuity. In 1937 Bing sent him a note to suggest Hattie McDaniel for the role of Mammy in Gone With the Wind, to which Selznick replied, “Dear Bing, Thanks for the suggestion. And also for not wanting to play Scarlett.”) 23
Almost two decades later, when The Country Girl was released in 1954, much was made of Bing’s courage in playing an alcoholic, because of his own past. Yet from the beginning, his movies were filled with autobiographical references that track every stage in his life, from his drinking days to his love of horses and sports to his problems dealing with his sons. Those allusions range from inside jokes to blatant reenactments and contribute to a portrait of a highly unorthodox film idol, one who always got the girl yet was most admired for playing a celibate. Audiences and critics often failed to notice the darker aspects of his persona and the way it linked Crosby’s life and art. Consider The Big Broadcast.
The picture opens with a shot of an electric speaker, from which a voice announces, “Clear all stations for the big broadcast!” As the camera pans over a board of publicity photos of radio stars, the performers come alive one by one and sing a few bars of their theme songs, beginning with Bing’s peppy strain of “Where the Blue of the Night.” During the ensuing credits, an orchestra plays “Please,” one of only two songs (“Here Lies Love” is the other) written for the film, and the first of many hits tailored for Bing by the resourceful team of lyricist Leo Robin and composer Ralph Rainger.
The only sound heard in the first episode is the beating of a clock, a ticktocking rhythm to which the action is precisely measured, partly through the use of reverse action, still frames, and other camera tricks. When the sponsor, Mr. Clapsaddle, tromps down the corridor, a terrified cat liquefies and slides under a door. The first words are not spoken but displayed in a wire that fills the screen one word at a time,like the typed opera review in Citizen Kane:BING ISN’T HERE YET. Panic ensues. When a station manager motions for Cab Calloway to fill in for Bing, music supplants the ticking and a clarinetist mimes on a rubbery instrument (literally a licorice stick, slang for clarinet). Clapsaddle, who is the president of Griptight Girdles, orders the station to fire Bing — the Griptight Troubadour — for chronic lateness. The scene cuts to accelerated footage of Bing driving a cab through traffic while the cabdriver lounges in the backseat. Bing screeches to the curb and is mobbed by hundreds of women, including an elderly lady who leaps from a wheelchair, all in silence except for the musical score. Disheveled, covered in lipstick, Bing races to the studio in time to sing the last line of “I Surrender, Dear.”
Bing is absentminded, we are told, because he is in love with Mona Lowe (Sharon Lynne, whose every appearance is augured by a few bars of Ralph Rainger’s “Moanin’ Low”), whom he plans to marry. This disturbs Anita, secretary to station manager George Burns, who tells her Bing isn’t her type. She sighs, “Yes he is. He’s everybody’s type. That’s the trouble.” Anita is played by sloe-eyed Leila Hyams, an alluring former model and vaudevillian whose brief Hollywood career included a couple of shock movies (Freaks, The Island of Dr. Moreau) and an enchanting and largely improvised two-minute scene teaching Roland Young to play drums in Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap. The purehearted Anita will surely win Bing from the haughty vamp, or so we think, especially after Mona suddenly elopes with a millionaire.
A trio of telephone operators harmonize over Mona’s perfidy, which Bing doesn’t know about: “He blew out of here so bright and breezy / And he’s probably in some speakeasy.” Cut to Stu Erwin as jilted millionaire Leslie McWhinney, getting drunk in the same speak where Bing, unaware that he too has been jilted, is buying rounds. Bing attempts to cheer him up, but is crestfallen to find that Leslie has never heard of Bing Crosby. After learning from a newspaper headline how low Mona is (much as the real Bing learned from a newspaper that Dixie had taken a powder), he gets loaded with Leslie, as Arthur Tracy and his accordion maul “Here Lies Love.” A sensational traveling shot through a model of the city shifts the scene to Bing’s art deco apartment, where he convinces Leslie that they have no choice but suicide. As soon as he raises the subject, the cinematography changes: Crosby looms in a doorway, Leslie is beset by shadows (a parody of James Whale’s horror style at Universal). The radio blares “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.” They turn on the gas and collapse in a stupor, hallucinating a skull and ghosts and… no, not Frankenstein’s monster, but Arthur Tracy and his accordion.
&n
bsp; Anita drops by with the joyful news that Bing was not fired after all. Finding the men unconscious, she carries them to the bedroom, where the waking Leslie nervously asks Bing, “Are we married?” During a nicely handled mistaken-identity scene about who is in the shower (it’s Anita), Bing inadvertently mangles his theme song, substituting when for where and transposing the lyric (“and the blue of her eyes crowns the gold of her hair”); either no one noticed or no one thought it worth retaking. Anita emerges from the shower and reveals herself as Leslie’s beloved and Bing’s adoring angel. Encouraged by her to rethink his life and career, Bing deadpans one of his best lines: “You sing into a little hole, year after year. And then you die.”
Bing falls for Anita but regrets taking her from the magnanimous Leslie, who buys the troubled radio station and arranges an all-star broadcast to save it. Happily, the plot takes a backseat to a couple of privileged musical interludes: Bing’s brief but lively chorus of “Dinah,” accompanied by a rhythmic and uncredited bootblack (anticipating Fred Astaire’s “A Shine on Your Shoes” number in The Band Wagon), and a beautiful “Please” by Bing and Eddie Lang, who was cast at Bing’s insistence. Then Mona returns — to a crashing orchestration of her theme — and Bing is once again besotted. She has had her marriage annulled, she declares, and has made off with a fat settlement. Bing, reenacting the Peggy Bernier debacle in Chicago, goes off with her, assuring Leslie he’ll be back in plenty of time for the big broadcast. But when the forlorn Leslie tracks him down, Bing gets rid of him by pretending to be soused.
Leslie has a brainstorm: he’ll pass off a Crosby recording as the real thing. The rest of the film veers between an extended silent sequence in which Leslie attempts to find a record late at night and interpolations of the radio stars, introduced by their respective announcers (“… the songbird of the South with her Swanee music, your own Kate Smith”). Unable to locate a playable disc, Leslie commences a caterwauling impersonation of the reckless crooner, backed by Lang. Just then, Bing coolly arrives and croons to his lover, Mona, who sports a black eye (that’ll teach her), thereby saving his job while following his worst impulses. Bing goes off with the shameless vamp. Anita settles for Leslie.
Critics complained that the film and Bing’s character were unbelievable. Variety was unusually captious, grousing that The Big Broadcast was neither exposé nor documentary, predicting that it would fail everywhere but “the hinterland.” The critic nonetheless considered the picture a “credit to Crosby as a screen juve possibility” despite a “dizzy and uncertain role which makes him misbehave as no human being does.” (The piety of that last comment was ingested with more than a grain of hilarity by Bing’s friends.) The reviewer was especially troubled by scenes depicting Bing’s tardiness, which, he insisted, could have “no foundation in fact, for the biggest of ether names know better.” He was also affronted by Sharon Lynne’s false bosom (“so artificial it’s bound to be noticed by the femmes”) and bangs. 24
Some reviewers revised the script in their heads, refusing to accept what they had seen, for example, the Spokesman-Review: “Bing is unable to decide whether he prefers Miss Lynne, the siren, or Leila Hyams, the sweet girl from Texas, and in the end Miss Hyams turns out to be Erwin’s old sweetheart from the great open spaces.” 25 Others ignored the plot to announce the arrival of a new star. The New York Daily Mirror: “No radio star ever has photographed better, or faced the cameras with greater poise and assurance than the pleasing Bing.” 26 The New York American: “Bing Crosby is the star, make no mistake about it. The ‘Blue of the Night’ boy is a picture personality, as he demonstrated in his two-reelers. He has a camera face and a camera presence. Always at ease, he troupes like a veteran.” 27 In its newspaper advertisements, Paramount cut to the chase: “Stars of Stage, Screen and Radio in a lightning-fast, romantic drama of Radio-land! Listen in on the hilarious secrets and romances your radios never reveal!”
The picture did only fair business in New York, where the radio stars could be seen in person, but made a fortune around the country, far surpassing expectations. The studios turned out eleven musicals in 1932 (down from seventy-eight in 1930), and five made money, four of them for Paramount: two Maurice Chevalier classics (Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor’s One Hour With You, Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight); the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers; and The Big Broadcast. The fifth was Leo McCarey’s Eddie Cantor entry, The Kid from Spain, for Samuel Goldwyn. But Chevalier bedroom farces were on the censors’ death list — even The Big Broadcast put them on their guard (Leila Hyams’s shower scene, revealing her ankles, was excised in Ohio and Pennsylvania) — and Cantor and the Marxes represented a fading stage tradition transferred to movies. 28
Bing embodied something native and new. Paramount, reeling from the Depression, banked its future on him. Despite several popular films, the studio lost nearly $16 million in 1932, and in the first days of 1933, Paramount-Publix went into receivership. After a bloodbath that consumed its production heads and pushed even foxy Adolph Zukor “upstairs,” the company was reorganized as Paramount Pictures. In the time between the premiere of The Big Broadcast at New York’s Paramount (October 14) and the bankruptcy hearing (January 26), the studio offered Bing a $300,000 contract for five pictures to be made over three years and announced that he would star in College Humor come spring. Other studios had also bid for Crosby’s services, but Paramount had two advantages: it was the first major studio to come calling, and it was home base to Gary Cooper, whose friendship and advice meant a lot to Bing. In many respects, the two men were alike. Privately, what Frank Tuttle said of Cooper applied equally well to Bing: “Despite his friendly warmth, he never let you get really close.” 29 They were the sort of friends who could spend days together on a fishing boat without feeling the slightest inclination to unburden themselves. As film actors, they were perceived as strong, solitary, men’s men, taken to heart by a public that gleaned a comforting familiarity in their reticence.
In December Variety reported, FILM MUSICALS ARE BLOOMING. 30 Hollywood was beginning to understand the kind of entertainment a bowed and bleeding nation demanded — not the Lubitsch touch but a hearty American slap on the back.
16
BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?
He would sing at the drop of a hat. He would sing all the time. He’d sing when he was riding a bicycle, he’d sing when he was walking down the street, he’d sing on a train — he had a singing habit.
— Rosemary Clooney ( 1991 ) 1
Launched by The Big Broadcast, Bing Crosby’s career soared in a steady arc, a trajectory ascending with greater velocity every year until, at its late-1940s pinnacle, he would be transformed from an actor-singer-star into an incontestable national icon, a match for motherhood, apple pie, and baseball. Pundits would resort to epic encomiums, saluting him, not untypically, as “the first of the Universal Common Men.” 2 Even before then, the adulation was such that, in the recollection of his eldest son, it blurred the boundaries between “God and dad, because everybody revered both of them.” Looking back at his early childhood, Gary Crosby recalled, “People crossing streets, running up to the side of the car, or, if I was in some place, coming over and kneeling in front of me to tell me what a wonderful man he was and what a thrill it must be to be his son, and how they loved him so much, and he had done so much for them, and his singing was so great, and it went on and on and on, the way people spoke about God.” 3
Before a society invests its dreams in an individual, particularly one without military power, it must detect in him the exemplary tribal disposition. Bing was quintessentially American, cool and upbeat, never pompous, belligerent, or saccharine, never smug or superior. He looked down on no one and up to no one. In an age when other nations invested everything in despots, America could feel proud not only of Bing but of its pride in Bing.
The transformation was gradual and largely unforeseeable, ultimately tethering Bing and the country in a pact neither could afford to break. Having left
his wildness behind him and having attained prosperity far beyond that of Whiteman or the “ancient king” of his high-school reverie, Bing was able to mine a magical perquisite of old Hollywood, the power to remake oneself. He was free to choose and reject aspects of his past, or images from his imagination, to concoct the better man he resolved to be. In Hollywood, shopgirls became queens, cowards warriors, gay men Don Juans, scoundrels gentlemen, and gentlemen mugs. Bing created the most astute role of the era, and he played it exceedingly well for forty-five years — never more engagingly than during the 1930s, when his metamorphosis was fresh and providential. During Prohibition he had been a drunk. During the Depression he became, FDR-like, an aristocrat of the people: a North Star of stability, decency, and optimism.
Yet while he allowed the Paramount publicity department and brother Larry to reinvent him in a blizzard of press handouts, he found the conversion from entertainer to secular priest disturbing. It violated his sense of irony and modesty. “That modesty is real, realer than anybody understood,” Barry Ulanov, his first biographer, would later reflect. “Quite apart from faith, in the sense of something you believe in and follow, he had in his education an introduction to some of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known — tough, philosophical minds.” In short, Ulanov argued, he was too well educated not to be modest. “Audiences felt that about him,” he continued, “and didn’t feel envious — they didn’t feel this guy should not have so much talent, success, and money. I never heard that, not once. Audiences were knocked out by him because they recognized in him a person who did not exaggerate his skills, who even had doubts about those skills.” 4 The taller he stood, the more Crosby ducked flattery. “He is a very odd individual,” wrote Adolph Zukor of the man who rescued his movie empire from insolvency. “He doesn’t like to listen to praise. He likes to listen to criticism.”