by Gary Giddins
College Humor took its title from the popular magazine that H. N. Swanson founded in 1920. Initially intended as a potpourri,of jokes, cartoons, and verses collected from undergraduate newspapers, it earned a reputation in the 1930s for launching talent; its contributors included S. J. Perelman and Philip Wylie. The jokes are now as antediluvian as those in Joe Miller’s Jests and not as funny, but they underscored a view of college as an interval consecrated to sex, puns, and football, much the same view propounded by Paramount in its rash of college movies, beginning with the Marx Brothers burlesque, HorseFeathers, and going downhill from there. As a genre, movies set in college peaked in the silent era, a time when Knute Rockne made higher education synonymous with football and Good News translated his Barnumesque hoopla to Broadway, inspiring enduring film parodies by Harold Lloyd (The Freshman) and Buster Keaton (College). Campus musicals (not dramas, as Paramount discovered with Confessions of a Co-ed) drew audiences throughout the 1930s and 1940s, disappeared in the 1950s, rallied in the 1960s as social protest movies, and resumed their more lunatic pedigrees in the frat house and slasher epics that followed.
The movie College Humor is maddeningly inane and dull, and would be no better remembered than College Rhythm, College Swing, or College Holiday if not for Crosby’s involvement. But it was a hit that validated the genre, produced three popular songs, and substantiated Bing’s box-office appeal. In the long run, the film proved of greater significance to Bing for professional associations that took root. Director Wesley Ruggles was sitting pretty with an Academy Award nomination for Cimarron when he was given the assignment, boosting its A-picture cachet. A former Keystone Kop and the director originally announced for King of Jazz, Ruggles was the first husband of actress Arline Judge, a friend and drinking companion of Dixie’s, later renowned for her front-page marital escapades. Ruggles’s association with Bing outlasted the marriage and led, in 1938, to Bing’s breakthrough performance in Sing You Sinners. Screenwriters Claude Binyon and Frank Butler separately went on to write more than a dozen of Bing’s most important films, including Sing You Sinners, Going My Way, Holiday Inn, and most of the Road pictures. Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston, who wrote the score, had already given Bing “Just One More Chance” and would turn out several more of his signature hits. According to Coslow, College Humor was the “prize that every songsmith in the land coveted.” 40
Most of the cast were pretty long in the tooth to play college students, but the atmosphere was convivial, especially for Bing and his pals Richard Arlen and Jack Oakie. Like Bing, Arlen was an expert swimmer and spirited carouser, but he grew intense and stiff in front of a camera — never more so than as the hulking, unshaven, hard-drinking football star who, after expulsion from school, turns painfully maudlin. As his roommate, Oakie, a gifted comic ham, endures a disturbingly violent initiation into the fraternity before replacing Arlen to win the big game. Oakie described a ritual required to make Bing starlike: the glued ears (“many’s the time Dick Arlen and I flipped those ears loose to get off early”) 41 and the donning of corset, padded shoulders, shoe lifts, and hairpiece. Oakie razzed him as “the robot of romance.” 42
Bing, oddly enough, does not play a student (that would come a year later), but rather Professor Danvers of the drama department, a representative of the adult world, albeit one who teaches by singing and is swooned over by coeds, including Barbara Shirrel, Arlen’s girl and Oakie’s sister, played by the appealing Mary Carlisle. After defending Arlen against expulsion, Danvers loses his job and runs off with Barbara, becoming a successful crooner. “You can hear him but you can’t see him,” marvels Oakie, spooning with his girl to the car radio. Bing’s role was pumped into the script as an afterthought — it’s Oakie’s movie — and he doesn’t show up for reels at a time. He’s a one-man chorus in the first half, singing a few strains while the plot is tugged forward by the students. In the second half, he continues as a musical commentator while displaying world-class obtuseness about women, especially Barbara, whose infatuation (“He’s a swell egg,” she confides) provides him with the picture’s one memorable line. He has just been dismissed and is furiously packing his belongings when she walks in and asks him, “Do you mind if I take off my shoes?” He retorts, “I wouldn’t care if you took off your, ahh, shoes.”
Bing doesn’t exactly underact; he doesn’t do much acting at all. When he plays anger, his breathing seems rehearsed, and he’s little more than an extra during the big game. Still, while Oakie mugs like the devil to keep the film alive, Crosby and his husky easygoing voice steal it. The picture is a creaking antique, but Bing’s performance is attractive in a way that Oakie’s entertaining shtick and Arlen’s histrionic glowering are not. The best of his songs, “Learn to Croon,” is introduced as a classroom sing, with a Kate Smith lookalike delivering the line “just bu bu bu bu.” “Down the Old Ox Road,” which concerns a lovers’ lane and is expanded by a long recitative, caused controversy. As directed by Ruggles, it becomes, in Coslow’s opinion, “a sneaky bit of lyrical quasi-pornography.” 43 Everyone can find the Ox Road, the production demonstrates, except three long-nosed virgins who wear glasses and oversize collars and are definitely out of place on a campus that thrives on sex and touchdowns. Burns and Allen are wasted as Scottish caterers.
The picture represented a break for Mary Carlisle, a twenty-year-old blonde with a provocative glint in her eye who was under contract to MGM but on perennial loan-out to Paramount for college movies. This was her biggest part to date, and Bing liked her well enough to cast her in two subsequent films, by which time he had the clout to approve his leading ladies. They became friends on the second film (Double or Nothing, 1937), but on the first he kept to himself, retiring to his dressing room as soon as he completed a scene and to the track or golf course at the end of the day. She admired his professionalism: “I worked with Lionel Barrymore and a lot of good actors, but Bing had something about him that was so natural, like Spencer Tracy. They were thinkers, very intelligent, and Bing was well read and terribly funny — he had a really marvelous vocabulary. He always knew his lines. It was always something else that went wrong in a scene, never Bing.” 44
One morning, however, he appeared to revert to his old ways. “We had a big set with an orchestra,” Carlisle recalled, “and Bing wasn’t there. So they did a lot of rehearsing and then about ten-thirty, I was going back to my dressing room because he hadn’t arrived, when the big doors opened and up drives Bing. He stops and says, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m gonna make it today.’ I guess he’d been out on the town, but he was absolutely charming and you couldn’t be mad. I said, ‘You’re a very bad boy.’ But that was the only time. He was wonderful. He didn’t get mad, didn’t argue, wasn’t temperamental. He was just nonchalant about everything.” 45
Well, almost everything. Carlisle noticed that he was self-conscious about his weight and height; he wore his watch on his inside wrist because, he told her, it made his hands seem less pudgy. And he wore lifts. He once told the diminutive Alan Ladd, who followed him at Paramount Pictures, how pleased he was that Ladd was shorter than he was. Bing maintained that he was five nine, but an office secretary, Nancy Briggs, recalled a visit to his home when he wore slippers and she realized he was just about her height — five seven. 46
The shooting of College Humor, in the spring of 1933, coincided with a siege of paranoia on the Paramount lot. Dwarfish Emanuel Cohen was appointed chief of production that year, and no one knew from one day to the next whether the studio would survive or for how long. It might have gone under if not for Mae West’s two 1933 megahits, I’m No Angel and She Done Him Wrong, which grossed more than $2 million each and earned West a place on the annual Quigley box-office poll, the first Paramount player ever to make the list. The uncertainty encouraged the manipulative Cohen to sign West, Gary Cooper, and Bing to personal contracts, much to the horror of his bosses, the bankers in New York, who controlled Paramount’s purse strings and canned him in retaliation, in 1934. Th
e pervasive fear worked its way through the ranks and, if nothing else, sparked a carefree social whirl.
The center for partying on Paramount’s lot was Gary Cooper’s dressing room, prominently located on the stars’ row of bungalows and adjoining that of Carole Lombard. Bing once remarked that the reason they all gravitated there was that Gary was so well liked and Carole told the raunchiest stories. Coop’s happy hour became a ritual for drinking, singing, and trade talk. Marlene Dietrich liked to stop beside Bing’s dressing room to hear him sing and play records, especially those of Richard Tauber. “The crooner confided to me that Tauber had taught him to breathe properly and how to modulate his phrasing,” she wrote. “This common passion brought us together.” 47
Contract players at Paramount were inclined to huddle in defense. Everyone knew the studio was in dire trouble, so its stars were sometimes needled as also-rans. MGM was said to have the glamour queens and Warners the stalwart men. Yet Paramount was beginning to forge a new, postcontinental style with Bing, Coop, Lombard, Fredric March, Cary Grant, Miriam Hopkins, George Raft, Charles Laughton, and Claudette Colbert. West and Dietrich were huge, but the approaching hooves of censorship threatened their commercial value. A symbolic changing of the guard occurred when Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich’s cunning director and a specialist in erotic decadence, walked into the Paramount commissary and found Bing at his table. “The air was electric,” wrote columnist Harrison Carroll in 1934. “Bing looked up and said politely: ‘I came in here and I was hungry, so I just sat down at a table.’… Sternberg turned on his heel and went to another table.” 48 Within two years Sternberg was gone from Paramount, and soon after from Hollywood.
Workers before and behind the cameras survived the months of uncertainty by playing as hard as they worked. A secretary remembered, “At five, the cameras stopped and out came the bottles and everyone screwed on the desks.” 49 Her image conveys the whistling in-the-dark gaiety of a studio that produced hit after hit yet remained on the brink of collapse — a studio that, unlike all the others, had a revolving door where the head of production sat. To make things worse that summer, the technicians went on strike. Bing, who forever maintained his common touch with crews, earned their respect by asking about the dispute in the studio canteen and leaving money with instructions to “keep the boys in beer for the rest of the afternoon.” 50
College Humor was rushed into theaters in June, barely a month after principal photography ended. Reviewers were remarkably forbearing. The New York Times considered it “an unsteady entertainment” but detected “heartily amusing patches” and especially liked Bing for his “sense of humor and his subterranean blue notes.” 51 The Los Angeles Times approved Bing’s “most important role in this peppy film music comedy.” 52 Variety reported, “Crosby makes his best showing to date with a chance to handle both light comedy and romance. His pale face make-up is the only flaw so it looks like all he needs is a new paint job and another good role.” 53 The reliably condescending Time, however, thought it a “frantic little absurdity,” fit for “rural cinemaddicts whose tastes in diversion have been shaped by wireless” and observed of Bing his “inappropriate calm which is his chief distinction.” 54
The critics were kinder than the censors. James Wingate of the Hays Office warned against the use of hell, pansies, and -punk, and anything that could be construed as satirizing college life: “In this connection,” he wrote a Paramount executive, “[we] suggest that the college president be played straight and not as a heavy paunchy man, or in any other derogatory manner. Also, we would recommend that you do whatever you can to minimize the bitterness of the theme of the picture, which is that a college education does not necessarily spell success in later life.” 55 Bing and other cast members promoted the film onstage and on the air, and the public — not just Time’s rubes — lined up for tickets, filling the studio’s coffers at theaters around the country.
* * *
Two long-term intimates joined the Crosby circle during the making of College Humor. Paramount’s publicity campaign included a beauty competition to crown Miss College Humor. The winner was an exquisite young woman from Tucumcari, New Mexico, with golden hair and porcelain skin, named Bessie Patterson. Her prize was a bit part in a Crosby film, but because she was underage, she did not collect for a few years. When the time came, Bing introduced her to Johnny Burke, who became his most accomplished lyricist and Bessie’s husband. The often tumultuous marriage of the Burkes would parallel that of Bing and Dixie.
Leo Lynn reentered Bing’s life while Bing was driving down Sunset Boulevard and noticed his Gonzaga classmate crossing the road. Leo was a few years older than Bing, but they had appeared together in school concerts and plays. Bing pulled over and asked what he was doing in Hollywood. Leo explained that he was working as driver and assistant to English actor Clive Brook. Bing said he needed someone, too. Leo gave Brook his notice that afternoon. He remained Bing’s aide-de-camp until Bing’s death, a quiet, omnipresent, loyal keeper of the keys for forty-four years.
“Leo was almost the shape of Mr. Crosby,” said Alan Fisher, the Crosby butler in the 1960s and 1970s. “A peculiar-looking guy. Leo’s eyes were slightly odd, but they were blue and he was stocky, as Mr. Crosby was in those days before he became thinner. So Leo became his stand-in and driver and would do anything personal for Mr. Crosby.” 56 Leo was always around, a shadow, easy to be with, diffident but friendly. “Bing never had an entourage, never,” Rosemary Clooney said. “The entourage was Leo. That was it.” Bing was comfortable with Leo. They had no need to keep up a conversation, and Leo could read his mind when he got in a mood, like the time in the 1950s when he recorded with Clooney and the producer’s friends packed the control room. “Bing would do things I could never figure out,” Clooney recalled. “He sat in a chair facing the wall and I said, ‘You want to go through with this?’ and he said, I’ll be with you in a moment.’ He wanted the people out of the control room, but he didn’t say it. You were supposed to divine these things sometimes with him. But Leo came back with his sandwich and saw right away what was going on.” 57
Still, despite the Gonzaga connection, Leo was an employee before he became a friend, a fact that helped define his role as Bing’s right-hand man, a member of the inner circle who knew his place, a place somewhat belied by his working-class manner and reserve. Phil Harris turned the spotlight on Leo whenever he came to see his Las Vegas nightclub act: “There’s a friend of mine in the audience I want you to meet. His name is Leo Lynn. You can’t get through to see Bing Crosby without going through him.” 58 After Eddie Lang’s death, Bing unburdened himself to no one. Leo, who played life as close to the vest as Bing, mirrored the change in him. He was a different kind of confidant — one who didn’t unload his confidences or expect others to unload theirs.
17
UNDER WESTERN SKIES
I’d like to be able to sing like the crooners. The reason is a crooner gets his quota of sentimentality with half his natural voice. That’s a great saving. I don’t like to work.
— Bing Crosby, Time (1934) 1
Paramount was determined to keep Bing in harness. Two months after wrapping College Humor, he began shooting Too Much Harmony, enjoying little rest in the interim beyond a week in May spent with Dixie at Palm Springs. On returning to Hollywood, he agreed to shoot six shorts and, within days, accompanied director Arvid E. Gillstrom to Yosemite Park to make two, Please and Just an Echo. 2 In the first, Bing once again plays Bing. Driving his car, he comes upon a fair maiden with a flat tire and an overbearing clownish suitor. As it happens, she teaches singing and Bing — looking younger and more attractive than in College Humor — asks for lessons. After dispatching her beau, Elmer Smoot (Vernon Dent doing a malevolent Oliver Hardy), in a vocal contest, Bing drives into the sunset with her, pecking her on the lips and nodding his head to seal his accomplishment.
In Just an Echo Bing proves he can stay on a horse, as a forest ranger who orders campers to douse their
cigarettes. One miscreant is his captain’s daughter, with whom he, once again, rides into the sunset. Bing disliked Just an Echo — he thought it poorly edited — and it disappeared, apparently for good. When College Humor exceeded box-office expectations, the studio realized Bing was too important for two-reelers and abruptly canceled the four remaining shorts.
Instead, he participated in another Hollywood on Parade promotional short, exchanging compliments with Mary Pickford, Para-mount’s first major star and the queen of Hollywood royalty. She retired that year, at forty, but returned in 1935 to introduce Bing in the MGM Technicolor two-reeler Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove, a film terminally dated except for Bing’s complacent, almost alien intelligence and his measured rendering of “With Every Breath I Take.” That same unassuming flair is evident in the Paramount reel, as he, every inch the film star, genially accepts Pickford’s praise. Eight years earlier he had grudgingly roused himself from sleep to accompany Al Rinker to California. Now he felt flush, confident of his success — and he wanted his parents at hand. Kate and Harry, in their early sixties, were ready to enjoy easier times. After twenty years in the small brown house near Gonzaga, they left Spokane for a new life. For a while they lived with Bing, who wrote his brother Ted about selling the house: “I don’t imagine the folks will ever return there, except for a visit. This climate is less rigorous and accordingly better for them.” 3 Months later he bought them a place of their own in Toluca Lake, at nearby 4366 Ponca Avenue. Harry Crosby readily took to Hollywood: “He’d sit down on a bus and introduce himself,” Bing marveled. “’Harry Crosby Sr., I’ve got a few clippings,’ and he’d show my clippings.” 4 Mother Crosby discovered the ponies.