Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  He continued to pack them in at theaters as well. Irving Mills negotiated an impressive $3,000 for a week at the Albee in Brooklyn (he shared the bill with vaudeville legends Weber and Fields). In March Bing returned to the Capitol Theater to share a bill with Eddy Duchin’s band and Milton Berle, who relished the marquee — BERLE DUCHIN CROSBY— though, in fact, Bing hijacked the audience, performing numerous encores and clowning with the comedian for the finale. 24

  It is tempting to imagine that every time Bing stepped out on a stage in 1933, his last year as a concert performer until 1975, aspiring singers experienced jolts of recognition. Within ten years the pop-music terrain would be crowded with his musical offspring — among them Perry Como, Dick Todd, Herb Jeffries, Bob Eberle, Buddy Clark, Andy Russell, Bob Carroll, Dick Haymes, Bob Stewart, and Tony Martin, who remembered, “We all loved to sing like Bing — to listen to Bing was taking lessons.” 25 In the same period, Bing’s influence reached country singers like Jimmy Wakely, Roy Rogers, and Eddie Arnold, and European singers like Paris’s Jean Sablon or London’s Jack Cooper, Denny Dennis, and Sam Costa, who noted, “All the singers tried to be Crosbys. You were either a high Crosby or a low Crosby.” 26 Even Count Basie’s majestic blues shouter Jimmy Rushing revised his style after hearing Bing. Rushing, who named Bing, Louis Armstrong, and Ethel Waters as his favorites, was “a high Crosby,” according to Costa’s formulation. 27 The finest “low Crosby” was Billy Eckstine, who covered numerous Crosby hits and bred a generation of bass-baritones known among musicians as the Black Bings. 28

  Yet none of those singers, however popular or distinctive, provided Crosby with any real competition. Only one singer challenged him. Right before Bing played the Capitol, he and Eddie Lang worked a week at Jersey City’s Journal Square Theater. In attendance, with his girlfriend and future wife, Nancy Barbato, was seventeen-year-old Frank Sinatra, who credited Bing’s performance that day with his own decision to embark on a musical career. Sinatra set out to fulfill his ambition immediately; by 1934 he was singing with the Hoboken Four, with whom he auditioned for Major Bowes and his Original Amateur Hour. One of the quartet’s numbers was an imitation of the Crosby-Mills Brothers record, “Shine.”

  Despite his tremendous impact, Crosby was going through a transitional period, as he attempted to jettison mannerisms in favor of a more level, straightforward, speechlike approach. At the same time, he was helping define the American songbook by introducing a batch of important new tunes. For Sinatra, Bing’s 1933 recordings provided a trove of durable material as well as a guide to vocal devices he could use, reject, or revise. Consider Bing’s hit record of “Street of Dreams,” with its ominous lyric by Sam Lewis and dramatically ascending melody by Victor Young. 29 Bing begins with a dark rendition of the verse, establishing the theme of opium-induced dreams; stresses the first chorus with mordents; and, inspired by Tommy Dorsey’s breathless chorus (thirty-two bars without a rest), demonstrates his skillful phrasing in the finale as he glides without a pause into and out of the release. Sinatra, nine years later, discarded the sinister verse as well as Bing’s fluttery mordents but retained the breathless phrasing, meticulous enunciation, and feeling for the song’s drama.

  If Sinatra thought Bing’s 1933 records dated, Bing himself seems to have chafed at the pedestrian arrangements. In “Try a Little Tenderness,” a love song peculiarly germane to the Depression (“women do get weary / wearing the same shabby dress”), he spurs the sluggish tempo with adornments like the unexpected high note on happiNESS. In a recording with Guy Lombardo of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” he counters the band’s hopelessly rigid inflections with his own infallible rhythmic pulse and caps his first chorus with a blues locution. Surprisingly, Lombardo’s clipped brasses, buttered reeds, and staccato rhythms propel Bing (much as Lombardo-style arrangements had roused Louis Armstrong to fanciful flights a couple of years earlier). Bing’s embellishments are relatively mild, but his time is vigorous, particularly on “You’re Beautiful Tonight, My Dear,” a second-rate song made unaccountably affecting in his sure interpretation. His buoyant scat solo and reprise on “Young and Healthy” are insurgent statements of self in the face of Lombardo’s stuffy rectitude. “Young and Healthy” and “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” both from 42nd Street, were combined on a platter that topped sales charts twice within a month — first one side, then the flip.

  For Bing’s next sessions, Kapp returned him to the arms of old friends, but despite Bing’s evident enthusiasm, the results are uneven. Lennie Hayton backed him with a crew that included Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, trumpeter Sterling Bose, and forgotten drummer Stan King, who knew how to drive home an out-chorus, as on “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Yet the session’s highlight turned out to be the last record by Bing and the Mills Brothers, “My Honey’s Lovin’Arms.” Bing vigorously romps the first chorus, the brothers imitate instruments in the second, and Bing ad-libs against the scrim of their harmonies in the third. This savory performance boasts a rapid-fire in-joke that Crosby expert Fred Reynolds has noticed: in the third chorus (of take A), Bing does an easily overlooked but unmistakable Jolson imitation on the line “I know that I belong.” Bing’s teaming with the Mills Brothers had been initiated by the singers, not Kapp, and from now on it would continue only on the radio.

  A couple of weeks later, with four violins added to the mix, Bing covered Ruth Etting’s hit “You’ve Got Me Crying Again” and gave his all to the Depression tearjerker “What Do I Care, It’s Home,” almost overcoming Roy Turk’s quatrain: “It’s a weathered shanty / On a barren mountainside /You may think it’s rough / But mom and I are satisfied.” The material was marginally better at a session with the Dorsey Brothers, for which Bing played a supporting role, singing single choruses as he had in his Whiteman days. Two faux-preacher numbers, “Stay on the Right Side of the Road” and “Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn,” elicit his asides in southern dialect. Yet Bing and the band — including the masterly trumpet player Bunny Berigan — grill the smart, energetic arrangements to a turn.

  On nearly all his recordings, at his radio broadcasts, and in theaters, Bing was backed by Eddie Lang, sitting at his right elbow, sharing a microphone, steadying him with strummed chords, leading him with calculated arpeggios, pacing him with a lissome yet resolute accompaniment. He “just made you feel like you wanted to ride and go,” Bing said. 30 They looked out for each other on- and offstage. “Eddie had everything to do with the radio show,” said Barry Ulanov, “but he also took a great deal of responsibility for Bing as a person, Bing as a singer, Bing as someone who could be a front man for the music that Lang loved.” 31 In return, Bing stipulated that Paramount include Eddie in all his projects, specifically guaranteeing him a speaking role in College Humor. Lang’s Paramount contract, netting him $15,000 per Crosby picture plus a salary of $1,000 a week while touring, made him the highest-paid sideman in the country.

  Eddie was apprehensive about his part in College Humor. He was suffering from chronic and painful laryngitis and worried that he might not be up to it. Bing encouraged him to have his tonsils removed, and the doctor assured Eddie that a tonsillectomy was a safe and simple procedure. The operation was scheduled for Sunday morning, March 26, at ten, so that Eddie would be able to leave for the Coast with Bing on Wednesday. A few days earlier Dixie had asked Kitty Lang to join her and Sue Carol on a steamship voyage that would take them to California via stops in Bermuda and Cuba. Kitty wanted to go but told Dixie that she could not leave Eddie during the operation and would travel by train with the boys. As he was wheeled into the elevator, Eddie asked her to buy a racing form so he could pick her a winner on Monday.

  When Eddie came out of surgery, the doctor told Kitty he was fine but heavily sedated and suggested she go home. She refused, and remained by his bed for hours with a racing form in her lap, comforted by a nurse who told her that patients often slept that long. At 5:00 P.M., the nurse took his pulse and raced from the room. An oxygen m
achine was wheeled in, but he had hemorrhaged and it was too late. “I must have screamed, for I remember hearing a child start screaming, too, and realized that it was someone down the hall and that I must not frighten this child,” Kitty recalled. A doctor gave her an injection, and she felt her throat constrict until she could not speak. “Someone must have called Bing on the phone, he was at the Friars Club. Needless to say, he came right over and into the waiting room. He fell on his knees with his head in my lap and started to sob, ‘Kitty, he was my best friend.’ “ 32

  When the news was announced, the radio networks observed a minute of silence for the luminous twenty-nine-year-old musician who more than anyone else invented jazz guitar in the era before Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. Kitty waived the autopsy, and Eddie’s brother Tom made arrangements to send the body home to Philadelphia, where friends and relatives filled the family home. Eddie’s father, who had built him his first instrument out of a cigar box and thread, paced the floor for days while Kitty sat in a trance. She lost thirty pounds. “I remember someone touching my shoulder and telling me that Bing had arrived to take me to the funeral. Poor dear Bing, my heart went out to this great man who was sitting on top of the world as the greatest singer the world had ever known, and yet he lost the one companion who had been instrumental in putting him there.” 33

  The service was hell for Bing, his first taste of the madness of celebrity. He was accustomed to autograph seekers in person and through letters; these he efficiently answered, usually plugging his current projects. But until now he had been mobbed only in The Big Broadcast, and that was for laughs. At Eddie’s service, people closed in on him and turned the ceremony into a circus. In their haste “just to touch him,” in Kitty’s words, they overturned pews and the appalled priest was forced to implore mourners to take their seats. Bing was already phobic about hospitals and funerals, but this was unendurable, an intrusion on his and the family’s grief, and he resolved never to let it happen again. A welterweight named Marty Collins volunteered to protect Bing, who was impressed with his manner and effectiveness. Afterward, when Bing and Kitty had a moment alone, he asked her to Los Angeles to stay with him and Dixie, promising her a home as long as she wanted. Dixie had become pregnant during filming of The Big Broadcast and was expecting in June. They needed her, he said. Kitty joined them in April, and Bing looked out for her all his life. But a part of Bing died with Eddie, and he never allowed anyone else to get as close.

  Bing’s public statements were typically reserved, mostly mourning the loss of Eddie’s talent. He elaborated a little in 1939, writing that Eddie “had good sense and saved me from many a jam. And I don’t mean music session. Naturally, when I got into a musical solo spot, it was a great comfort to have such an artist with me. Eddie made me do my best when the break came, and I give him full credit.” 34 Mutual friends were astonished by Bing’s seeming lack of emotion. Only a few intimates were allowed to see how tortured he was by Eddie’s passing, having advised him to undergo the operation. “Joe Venuti confirmed he was absolutely wrecked,” Barry Ulanov said, “and I don’t think he was capable of that kind of attachment again.” 35 In his 1948 biography, Ulanov suggests that Lang’s death hastened Bing’s retreat from jazz. But surely the influence of Jack Kapp and the obligations of stardom would have channeled him into the mainstream with or without Eddie. Bing’s recordings had long reflected his inclination to move in and out of jazz, and as Ulanov wrote, his jazz style “might have proved too strong for complete public acceptance.” 36 Yet in Eddie Lang, he had a partner on- and offstage, a trusted friend with the same musical moorings, the same attitudes, the same rhythmic pulse.

  Bing tracked down Dixie in the Caribbean and phoned her to ease the shock of Eddie’s death. When Dixie, Sue, and Everett’s wife, Naomi (who took Kitty’s place on the voyage), arrived in Hollywood, Dixie moved in with Sue. Bing followed on the Santa Fe Chief, traveling with Mary Pickford, the eternal waif of silent pictures and a loyal Crosby fan; her companion, Countess DiFrasso (American heiress Dorothy Taylor, subsequently an escort of mobster Bugsy Siegel); and Sue’s husband, Nick Stuart. Dixie greeted them at the Pasadena station. Bing and Dixie moved in with Sue and Nick and then rented the Stuarts’ home while they traveled. With Paramount paying the musician and line charges, Bing was able to complete his Chesterfield contract on the West Coast. Paramount wanted as much of Bing as it could get. A couple of weeks into College Humor, the studio prepared him with a new script (Too Much Harmony), to go into production almost immediately. It also announced plans to feature Bing in a musical version of a stage play Cloudy with Showers (never made) and a series of two-reel shorts, all of which reinforced his decision to go Hollywood for good.

  In anticipation of their first child, the Crosbys began to build their first real home, at 4326 Forman Avenue in the Toluca Lake area. Dixie’s dad, Evan Wyatt, supervised the construction, which included a miniature balcony off the front hallway. At a party, actor Jack Oakie asked Wyatt its purpose and was told, “That’s so Bing can sing to his guests as they arrive.” 37

  Paramount requested Bing to fill out a publicity questionnaire. This time Bing and not Everett provided the answers. Eleven years later Ed Sullivan discovered the form in his files and published it in his syndicated column. 38 It is an illuminating portrait of Bing and the period. Bing gave his New York address (160 West Fifty-ninth Street) as home, his name as Harry Lillis Crosby Jr., and his childhood ambition “to be an actor.” His favorite fictional heroes: Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, François Villon. * Real-life hero: Theodore Roosevelt. First radio job: with AI Rinker on KFI, Los Angeles, 1927. First childhood job: selling the Saturday Evening Post. Married: Dixie Lee. No children. Five outstanding figures in history: Jesus, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Napoleon, Disraeli, Lincoln. Outstanding figures of 1933: in sports, Babe Ruth; in theater, John Barrymore; in literature, Shaw; in music, Ravel; in politics, Mussolini. Favorite stage actors: Alfred Lunt, Katharine Cornell. Film actors: Helen Hayes, Lee Tracy. Radio artists: Burns and Allen. Comedian: Jimmy Durante. Dish: Lobster diavolo. Flower: gardenia. Jewel: diamond. Axiom: Take it easy. Least favorite color: lavender.

  Of which compliments was he most proud?: “Ring Lardner wrote me, saying he was glad I was returning to the air. My wife generally comments favorably on my efforts and my dad maintains I sing better than Jolson. Coming from this unbiased source, I treasure this highly.” Favorite fan: “My mother, because she is very sincere and never hesitates to criticize when she figures criticism is due.” Did he ever fail to make a broadcast?: “On various occasions, while broadcasting in California, I found the thoroughbred delights of Caliente superior to the prospect of facing a mike.” How would he retire: “I would go nicely to California — buy a home, a boat, a car. I’d take up some light business (i.e., buy a piece of a prosperous business); travel abroad a bit; fish and golf in the interim, and visit the various racetracks. And raise a small family.” Good memory? “Quick memory, but retentive power bad.” Prompt for appointments?: “Yes, that is, lately.” Favorite expressions: “’Yeah, man,’ is one of them.” What broadcast of his own did he recall with the most pleasure? “Opening night on the Chesterfield program. After all hope had been abandoned, it was infinitely pleasurable after many months to get a break again.” Favorite song: “Sweet Sue.” Favorite classical number: “Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune.” Least favorite: “No dislike for anything musical, but Beethoven and Wagner leave me unresponsive.” Favorite books: Of Human Bondage, Point Counter Point, A Farewell to Arms, Round Up (Ring Lardner). Favorite poets: Keats, Browning, Shelley, Longfellow. Quotation: “’Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Eccentric? “In dress, tend slightly to the bizarre.” Hunches? “Sometimes I bet a hunch on a horse. A horse named Bingo won at Latonia and paid 40 to 1. Professionally, I don’t go by hunches.”

  A year before Sullivan published those answers, humorist H. Allen Smith included a chapter on his a
ttempt to research Bing’s life in his book Life in a Putty Knife Factory (1943). Allen excerpted a twenty four-page “bio-book” that Bing filled out at CBS in 1933, which restates and amplifies comments in the Paramount press book, for example, his response to “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” After observing that he would go to California and buy a prosperous business, fish, golf, visit the track, raise a small family, he continues:

  If a million bucks ever came my way, I could doubtless distribute a considerable amount to relatives, etc., in loans, and still have enough to carry out the program described. I’m pretty socialistic in this connection and really don’t think anyone is entitled to or should have more than they need to live comfortably. My wants are comparatively simple and with half a million I could possibly scrape along somehow. In point of fact, if I ever connect with the aforesaid amount, I’ll wash up. 39

  Small wonder the CBS bio-book was suppressed! In addition to the familiar Crosby wit and verbiage, and the predictive limning of a character he would play in movies throughout the 1930s, Bing suggests he just might be the sort of wild-eyed usurer capable of pulling the lever for Norman Thomas.