by Gary Giddins
In June Bing reunited with bandleader Jimmy Grier, Gus Arnheim’s former arranger at the Grove, for three recording sessions, followed by a fourth in August. Bing’s pleasure in working with Grier cannot in itself explain the magnetic extravagance of his singing on those dates. Perhaps he was expressing his delight in his success or his happiness with Dixie or anticipation of their first child or solid roots indicated by their new home or all of the above or something else entirely. But never before had Bing performed with so much nervy adrenaline; his voice seemed to burst with vitality. Neither Brunswick nor Columbia, the label that eventually acquired ownership of the records, ever thought to collect the Grier sessions for an album, yet they are all of a piece: exuberant readings of mostly second-rate songs, exemplifying the jazz creed, Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
The first order of business was to record the tunes from his films. Much of the material was grim, expressing the mood if not the substance of the Depression in narratives of lost, doomed, or betrayed love. Bing’s stout delivery, cradled in richly detailed arrangements, is at once heroic and haunted. He told an interviewer that same year, “I won’t sing sappy songs. A crooner gets enough criticism. There’s no reason to invite more barbs by singing mush.” 5 None of the fourteen titles recorded that summer is mushy. “Learn to Croon” may be replete with la-di-das, but the attack is bolder than any singing of the day short of opera. Yet so unaffected is Bing, he creates the illusion that anyone could sing as well. Even his flawless intonation and splendid timbre have an unschooled, artless quality — the sound of a passionate American rearing back and singing full bore. “Moonstruck,” also from the film, begins with a moon/June cliché and never gets much better, but it is emboldened by the assertiveness of Bing’s delivery. “Down the Old Ox Road,” inverting the usual order of tempo adjustments, begins swinging and then slows down.
Better was to come. “I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House,” an odd Yiddische minor-key melody by Lew Brown, has had no life beyond Bing’s original recording, yet he embraces the sad plight of the narrative with such sympathetic brilliance — aided by Ellingtonian muted brasses to underscore the rhythm — that he enhances it with an intensity due an art song. Victor Young’s undistinguished “My Love” begins with a surprising allusion to John McCormack; Bing enters unexpectedly high before settling into a more comfortable midrange. With his forceful conception and execution, he turns a minor song into a satisfying experience, soaring into the clouds at the end of the release. “Blue Prelude,” trumpeter Joe Bishop’s mesmerizing melody (it was briefly Woody Herman’s theme in 1940), was outfitted with a Gordon Jenkins lyric and an Ellingtonian arrangement, plus strong rhythm-section work and a fitting clarinet solo by James Briggs. Bing’s dynamics are most impressive in his rattling last eight bars, but his overall attention to detail confers a structural design virtually unheard-of on a pop record.
The most successful of the Grier records and a huge national hit for Bing was “Shadow Waltz,” from Gold Diggers of 1933. Most of Al Dubin’s lines end in the maladroit phrase “to you”:
In the shadows, let me come and sing to you.
Let me dream a song that I can bring to you.
Take me in your arms and let me cling to you.
Bing takes the vowels in stride, building an overall arc for the performance that complements Harry Warren’s loping melody. In some of his inflections (song/bring), one can hear the nascent style of Dean Martin, another young singer — fifteen at the time — who learned his trade by imitating Crosby. After the first chorus, Bing attacks the verse a beat early, for dramatic emphasis. “There’s a Cabin in the Pines” was one of several cabin songs (in the cotton, on the hilltop, in the sky), but Bing puts aside its rustic innocence in favor of jazzy cadences and subtle backbeat phrasing. His mastery of time is no less marked in his rubato treatment of the verse of “I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song.”
Bing’s immaculate bell-like projection deepens “The Day You Came Along,” from Too Much Harmony, as does his canny breath control, as he punctuates the turnback after the first eight bars with a wordless exclamation; he turns an unimportant, repetitive song into a rousing anthem, building to a climactically rhythmic finish. His alchemy is perhaps most luminous on the cryptically dark “Black Moonlight,” from the same film. The arrangement begins with pizzicato strings answered by growly brasses and descending saxophones and advances with rhythmic change-ups and vivid voicings. Emotional yet stoic, Bing displays all he knows about breathing and enunciation and dynamics to articulate its mood and import. These performances refuted the critics who disparaged his allegedly anemic crooning, and demolished singers who could do no more than croon.
Shortly after the June sessions, Gary Evan Crosby was born at Cedars of Lebanon on June 27, 1933, weighing seven pounds six ounces and named after Gary Cooper and Dixie’s dad. Richard Arlen had bet Bing $100 that the baby would be a girl and that his newborn son, Richard Jr., would marry her. Instead, the infants were christened together and feted at a baby-dunking party at the Crosby home. Weeks before, Kitty Lang had arrived to live with the Crosbys; they never spoke of Eddie’s death and funeral, three months earlier. She helped Dixie shop for layettes and other items she would need in the hospital and stayed with her through the delivery. She then ran into the waiting room to tell Bing. “He was so happy. It was good to see him smile again. He said, ‘This calls for a celebration.’ Did we go to Chasen’s? Not exactly. We went to Sid’s Ice Cream Parlor for a banana split.” 6 Gary Cooper, delighted by his namesake, brought over a crib with Gary carved on it. Bing tried to match him with Kitty, who admired him on the screen, but she shyly demurred. Bing told her, “Now that I have a son, I want him to be proud of me. I’m really going to settle down.” 7
For the next few years, he doted on Gary, taking him everywhere, not least the racetrack and swimming. Gary was said to be exceptionally bright; Bing claimed that he could sing in tune when he was a year old. Gary would watch his father sing, and cause much hilarity by moving his lips and mimicking his movements. But he was a difficult, colicky infant, and Dixie was intimidated by the hospital nurse. Kitty thought the nurse, who insisted that Gary was having temper tantrums, less than sympathetic. When she convinced Dixie to hire an “old-fashioned nurse,” the colic disappeared. Kitty showed Dixie how to bathe and feed her baby; “although she was scared to death, she managed quite well.” 8 At one point Dixie fell and broke her elbow, fueling rumors that she was drinking. Bing rushed home from Catalina Island to take her to the hospital. When Gary was four months old, the Paramount publicity department issued a four-page press release, quoting Bing as hoping his son would be an actor and singer “a million times better than I am” — though he was not going to push him into the profession. “Whatever he wants to do, we’ll smooth the road as far as it is possible to do so.” 9
All he demanded, Bing purportedly said, was that Gary, unlike himself, finish college. He also stipulated that his son be a regular kid, no different from any other. He would be raised like a “typical American boy.” 10 But not entirely typical. In July, responding to threats in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Bing sought a bodyguard to protect his wife and child. He offered the job to Marty Collins, the fighter who had come to his aid at Eddie’s funeral. Collins remained on the payroll for three years, after which Bing helped him open his own bar.
The energy of the Grier recordings and the joy of fatherhood did not hold for Too Much Harmony — a rote backstage musical with a lack luster performance by Bing. The picture was directed by former vaudevillian and Chaplin protégé Edward Sutherland and was written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who idolized Bing and mimicked him at parties. Again, Bing’s role was an afterthought, this time in a project originally intended for the other two stars. In 1929 Jack Oakie and Skeets Gallagher had enjoyed popular triumphs with two films, Close Harmony and Fast Company; the latter is an adaptation, by Mankiewicz, of Ring Lardner’s Elmer the Great and remained
Oakie’s perennial favorite among his own pictures. Too Much Harmony was devised as a reunion for Oakie and Gallagher but was shelved until producer William LeBaron got the idea to move them into the background of a romance built around Bing.
Mankiewicz’s story, for which he received a larger screen credit than Sutherland, concerns Broadway headliner Eddie Bronson (Bing), who is torn between the nice girl who adores him (Judith Allen) and the faithless, gold-digging bitch who uses him (Lilyan Tashman). The outcome, unlike that of The Big Broadcast, holds no surprises. The film begins with Bing singing the final measures of “Learn to Croon” at a Chicago theater, establishing continuity with College Humor not only for Bing but for Coslow and Johnston, who wrote the score. (They learned they had the job from Everett at Gary’s christening party.) They wrote worthy songs, notably a hit sequel to “Please” called “Thanks.” Yet two superior numbers, “Black Moonlight” and “The Day You Came Along,” were maddeningly assigned to Judith Allen and Kitty Kelly, who could neither sing nor synchronize their lips. Allen’s song was dubbed by a singer whose streetwise head inflections, a cross between Dixie Lee and Ethel Merman, are a far remove from her highborn speaking voice. Kelly appears as the salty paramour of a producer, Max Merlin, played by a language-mangling Jewish comedian, Harry Green; in an instance of kitsch imitating life, her number was created for her because she was the paramour of producer William LeBaron.
Another cast member with connections was Mrs. Evelyn Offield Oakie, Jack’s mother on- and offscreen, a feisty lady who left a trail of anecdotes. She once convinced a Bank of Hollywood teller to give her all of Jack’s money the day before the bank folded. On the set she regaled the actors with tales as they sat around her on canvas chairs emblazoned with their names. When her chair tipped over, Bing helped her up, asking, “Are you all right, Mrs. Offield?” “Bing,” she said, “I noticed that my name wasn’t on the chair and it kind of upset me.” 11 Bing admired Oakie, a master of double takes and sheepish grins, and insisted that he did not mind his rampant scene stealing, his “twisting you around so that his face was in the camera while you talked to the backdrop.” He reasoned: “Sooner or later there would be a spot in the picture in which I’d sing a song and Jack would be in the trunk.” 12
One of Bing’s best scenes is in the baggage car of a train, when he sings, all too briefly, “Boo Boo Boo,” another attempt to cash in on his trademark; the tune rouses him more than the cast or script. Yet the most elaborate number belongs to Kitty Kelly. “Black Moonlight” is an outlandish indulgence in which, through a trick of lighting, streetwalkers and dancers decked out in Harlem drag change from black to white and back, while Kitty’s lips move in blissful disregard of the words she is supposed to be miming. The jokes were older than the actors telling them. At one point Oakie and Gallagher exchange a breakneck string of vaudeville jokes, including the one — “How can I keep my horse from frothing at the mouth?” — that got the Rhythm Boys banned in Toledo.
Bing was not happy about his billing, especially on the pre-release posters. Paramount was giving him star treatment despite his opposition. The company argued that his name was the movie’s biggest asset and ought to be played to the hilt; in any case, the press materials were printed and it was too expensive to redo them. But Bing was intractable. He insisted they place his name on the same title card as Oakie, Gallagher, and other principals, and the studio complied, creating new credits, ads, lobby cards, and press packets.
Completed after five weeks, in mid-August, the film was distributed in September. Reviews were mixed. The New York Times found many “quite lively” scenes but cautioned admirers of “Mr. Crosby’s peculiar ballads” that they might be “disappointed by his attempts to register admiration and affection.” 13 Variety approved his ability in “the trouping department.” 14 The ludicrous Hearst columnist Louella Parsons was delighted with Kitty Kelly and her voice and thought the whole picture “swell,” except for Judith Allen. 15 She counted herself, along with her son, as converted Bing fans — small wonder, as Mr. Hearst was set to produce Bing’s next picture.
The majority of local reviewers held their collective nose, but adverse reviews notwithstanding, the public flocked to the box office. Too Much Harmony was a smash in every region. Several theaters extended their bookings, a rare occurrence in 1933. In Pittsburgh it was the first major draw in months; in Cincinnati it successfully competed with the road-show megahit Dinner at Eight; in Indianapolis, despite major competition and a dearth of ads, it beat everything else on the street; in New York it broke the Paramount Theater’s house average and raked in $60,000 in one week — “like the old predepresh days,” Variety crooned. 16 Receipts from Europe were just as dazzling. In two weeks Too Much Harmony did more business at London’s Plaza Theatre than any movie since the advent of sound. 17
The picture that clinched Bing’s place in the coveted circle of top-ten box-office attractions, as calculated in an annual poll of exhibitors conducted by Quigley Publications, was not made at Paramount. It came from MGM, at the behest of Marion Davies and her powerful lover, William Randolph Hearst. The irony was much appreciated on the Paramount lot: in attempting to boost Davies’s flagging popularity, Hearst borrowed two of Paramount’s leading men (first Bing in Going Hollywood, then Gary Cooper in Operator 13). In Hollywood’s pecking order, this was akin to Rolls-Royce renting upholstery from General Motors. The decision to borrow Bing was initiated by MGM lyricist and former coproducer of the Morrissey revues, Arthur Freed. With his partner, Nacio Herb Brown, Freed had written a fervent new song, “Temptation,” that he believed only Bing could put over. Davies was charmed by Bing. But the jealous Hearst fretted about his reputation as a womanizing hell-raiser (he surely recalled the Berkeley frat party that got his son Bill and Bing into trouble) and had to be persuaded. College Humor’s box-office receipts helped. He was undoubtedly comforted by the success of Too Much Harmony, which broke during the filming of Going Hollywood.
Paramount agreed to the loan-out, reasoning that a little MGM stardust could not hurt the value of its property; besides, Hearst always paid his way. Everett, who closed Bing’s deal, put to good use the rumors about Davies’s leisurely way of working. He negotiated a payment of $2,000 a week above and beyond a lump sum. This produced a windfall as the picture, slated to shoot between August 30 and October 13, wrapped several weeks late, netting Bing $75,000 and leading Time to describe him as “probably the world’s best paid male singer.” 18 Bing relished Going Hollywood for the partying and the clique of top-notch talent.
It had all begun when Cosmopolitan, the production company Hearst created for Marion Davies, bought a treatment called Paid to Laugh, by Frances Marion, a prolific scenarist of the silent era who also directed a few Davies films. A synopsis was given to playwright and novelist Donald Ogden Stewart, then at the beginning of a stellar career as a screenwriter — Holiday, Love Affair, The Philadelphia Story — that was curtailed twenty years later by the blacklist. He completed his final draft in August, by which time six songs were written by Brown and Freed, the team that put the MGM musical on the map in 1929 with The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and The Broadway Melody. Supervising the musical score and fashioning some of the most refined movie arrangements of the era was Lennie Hayton, who became a mainstay of the Freed unit in 1942. Davies, at thirty-six, was six years older than Bing and looked it; she required a premier cinematographer and found one in George Folsey, who shot The Big Broadcast among numerous other black-and-white films and would also become a Freed unit regular, setting Technicolor standards in pictures like Meet Me in St. Louis and Ziegfeld Follies. Walter Wanger, soon to be a major force in Hollywood, was chosen to produce.
Last on board was director Raoul Walsh, a legend at forty-six, though his best work lay ahead of him (The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde, White Heat). He accepted the picture because he was eager to work with its two stars. Walsh had known and admired Bing as far back as the Cocoanut Grove (“he had come a
long way with talent and a big future sticking out all over him”), 19 and he wanted to meet Marion, by then a reluctant actress, often maligned as Hearst’s Galatea by those who had never seen the superb comedienne’s work. Born to an Irish Catholic family that prospered in the Garment Center, Raoul grew up in a posh Manhattan town house bustling with servants and visited by the celebrities of a fading era, among them Edwin Booth, Diamond Jim Brady, Buffalo Bill, and John L. Sullivan. Yet, like Bing, he had a yen for the wild side, which he exercised swimming in the East River and frequenting Bowery saloons and bordellos.
Walsh was fifteen when his mother died and an uncle took him to Cuba. He made his way to Mexico, where a job driving cattle led to parts in western movies and an apprenticeship with D. W Griffith, who cast him as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation. He developed into an instinctive and stylish filmmaker, renowned for dynamic action scenes; an early triumph was The Thief of Bagdad, with Douglas Fairbanks. Though Walsh directed few musicals during his long career, he loved the sentimental ditties of old New York, and several of his most hard-bitten pictures are cued to those songs. Wearing an imposing eye patch, the result of an automobile mishap, he was not averse to drinking and brawling. He was popular with actors, though he could be acerbic on the set, grumbling his pet phrase “otra vez” — Spanish for “another time” or “not now” or “let’s get the hell out of here,” depending on his inflection.
Stu Erwin was again recruited as a rich, nebbish producer. Walsh filled out the cast with Fifi D’Orsay as the bad girl competing for Bing’s attention, comic Patsy Kelly as Marion’s pal, and sour Ned Sparks as a film director. Hearst summoned them all to San Simeon, his 350,000-acre estate, commanding thirty miles of shoreline. Bing reluctantly boarded a plane with the director and the songwriters. They were ensconced at the castle for the week, rehearsing and socializing with, among others, Winston Churchill, who puffed on a cigar and generally ignored them. One night at dinner, Marion, who was born and bred in Brooklyn, asked Walsh if as a boy he had ever visited Rockaway Beach. When he assured her he had, she named him Rockaway Raoul, which Bing amended to Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.