by Gary Giddins
Except for exteriors filmed at Walsh’s Encino ranch, the film was made on the MGM lot, where Marion had a bungalow fit for the mistress of the world’s wealthiest press lord: fourteen rooms. The powers at MGM were tiring of Hearst, especially his tirades about Norma Shearer, executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, and the roles he thought Marion and not Shearer should have been given, like Marie Antoinette and Elizabeth Barrett. For her part, Marion was tired of the whole routine. Hearst pushed her into unsuitable parts and rammed her down the throats of his tabloid readers, and she went along to please him. Yet she had long ago proved herself a sparkling comic actress with a trenchant gift for mimicry, especially in such movies produced by Thalberg and directed by King Vidor as Show People, remembered for her hilarious spoofs of Mae Murray and Gloria Swanson. Neither she nor Hearst thought filmmaking should crimp a good party, however, and they let Wanger worry about the hopeless task of keeping the train on track. The costs eventually exceeded $900,000, making Going Hollywood Marion’s most expensive movie, and consequently a money-losing hit.
The aspect of talking pictures that most bothered Marion was having to learn dialogue. Taking literally the idea that one could memorize something one slept on, she kept her script under her pillow. “But that didn’t work,” she admitted. “When I got on the set, I didn’t know one line of it.” Nor was she inclined to walk the block and a half from her bungalow to the set before eleven. She refused the assistant director’s pleas, with the excuse that she was studying her lines. “Bing got mad at me every once in a while, but W.R. never did. He used to coax us not to work.” 20 Bing would arrive at nine, make up, and wait two hours for Marion, who was accompanied by a five-piece band that serenaded her between shots. They would listen to pop tunes for half an hour, at which time Walsh would tear himself away from such pursuits as driving golf balls into a canvas net or playing cards or conducting the band, to discuss the first scene. Then they repaired to lunch, a two-hour production in Marion’s bungalow, described by Bing as Lucullan: Rhine wines, foie gras, chicken in aspic, Bombay duck. Now they needed to make up again, after which they paused for another musical interlude, and finally prepared to shoot around five. “Flushed with the success of our first scene,” Bing noted, 21 they were ready to tackle another, but either the crew punched out or Hearst stepped in to avoid overtime. Alone, Marion did her close-ups. “That was kind of smart of me, anyway,” she said. 22
Soon a competition in pranks evolved, as Raoul encouraged Bing to trick Marion into acting scenes when the cameras were not rolling and the mikes were off. Once, Marion, who was terrified of horses, looked out from her bungalow and saw Bing and Raoul on white steeds, determined to ride into her living room; she locked the door in the nick of time. The day they shot “We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines,” Bing and Marion had imbibed an excess of Rhine wine. The scene required them to stroll through a field of eight-foot cellophane daisies that waved from side to side like pendulums. Bing and Marion, waving a bit themselves, found the swaying reeds so nauseating that they could barely stand. Marion cried out for Bing to hang on to her, and they made a pact not to look at the daisies. In the completed film, they walk through the scene with Bing singing to the sky and Marion gazing raptly at the side of his face.
They became good friends. “He was very cute and very sweet, and he was crazy about his wife Dixie,” Marion said. He talked about Dixie constantly, phoning between shots, until Marion suggested he pretend that she was Dixie to rev up their love scenes. “Oh, no,” he told her, “you’re not nearly as pretty.” “I understand that,” she said, “but just close your eyes.” Marion named Bing and Cooper as her favorite leading men, for the same reason: “Gary would give the star the benefit of the scene. Only a real man does that, and Bing did that, too. Other actors don’t.” 23 Bing described Marion as generous, charming, funny, with a “heart as big as Santa Monica.” 24 Both of them enjoyed the irascible Walsh. At a wrap party at San Simeon, Bing announced that he and Arthur Freed had written a song about Walsh, set to the melody of “The Bowery.” He performed it, complete with spoken interlude in which he mimicked Walsh’s voice and manner:
Rollicking Rockaway Raoul
When clad on the beach in a towel,
He’s terrific, colossal, stupendous, and grand.
He’s the lay of the land, of the land.
Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery,
He never goes there anymore.
A good pal and true,
That old Kerry blue,
Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.
[Spoken] Hello, Greenwood! Greenwood! Get me a bottle of that Royal George. What? No Royal George? Oh, Newman, is it too late to replace Greenwood? And where’s my Bull Durham, goddamnit, where’s my Bull Durham? No Bull Durham? Nuts! I tell you what we’ll do, Bing, we’ll go over to Davies’ bungalow. Maybe she’ll pop out with a drink. Okay, let’s go. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s Waange-er, Wanger. Turn ‘em over quick! Wanger’s here. Bing, otra vez.
Rollicking Rockaway Raoul,
He thinks highbrow operas are foul,
But bimbos and sailors and chippies and such,
He gives them that old Rao-oul Walsh touch.
“Otra vez,” “otra vez,”
We’ll never hear that anymore.
And now that we’re through,
MGM can go screw,
Says Rollicking Rockaway Raoul. 25
As Bing’s best attempt at lyric writing to date, it reveals a more penetrating talent for satiric observation than for love songs, and he wrote several more in later years. This one was recorded on the spot (after giggling through the opening lines, he sings it with characteristic esprit) and found its way to the underground circuit of Crosby collectors. According to Walsh, MGM moguls were so incensed by the song’s last line and the implication that Walsh and associates fiddled while studio chief Louis B. Mayer burned (even if Hearst, and not MGM, footed the bill), they barred Bing and Walsh from the lot for life and would have fired Freed but for an ironclad contract. 26 Except for a B-film by Walsh — who enjoyed a dazzling twenty years at Warners — and Bing’s appearance in the Cocoanut Grove two-reeler, both in 1935, neither man worked at MGM until after Mayer was deposed, in 1951.
Going Hollywood was forgotten for decades, until excerpts appeared in the 1974 compilation That’s Entertainment!, reviving interest in a fascinating film. By then the Bing persona had become so upright, at least in memory, that one chronicler of film musicals described “Temptation” as “a drunken paean to lust and self-loathing [and] the last thing one associates with Crosby.” 27 That may be true today, but it wasn’t in 1933. In two of his first four movies, Bing played a man with a drinking problem; in one he attempts suicide, and in all four he lusts and is lusted after, usually by two women. Going Hollywood was the formula as before, but with intriguing twists.
Marion’s Sylvia is a French teacher at an impossibly stuffy girls’ school where the rest of the faculty is spinsterish, butch, or old. Transported by the voice of Bill Williams (Bing) on her contraband radio, she quits her job and pursues him — despite his consistent rejections — to his hotel bedroom, train stateroom, and movie set, calmly disparaging his hot-tempered fiancée and leading lady, Lili (D’Orsay). Sylvia is a female version of the Sennett Bing, who invariably runs off with the affianced. Here, he is passive and vulnerable, while Sylvia dogs his tracks, refusing to be thwarted. The comical sparring for power between Erwin’s producer and Sparks’s director parallels the catfights between Sylvia and Lili. Sparks riotously mimics Walsh, grousing and grumbling, contemptuously walking off whenever the producer arrives on the set. At one point he snarls at his stars: “Off to Rockaway Beach for the both of ya, if you don’t get this right.”
Davies is fun to watch, in part because she is so clearly uninvolved with the proceedings, sleepwalking through scenes and almost falling over during a dance routine that unflatteringly reveals her pudgy legs — she looks at her feet like Ruby Keeler and wa
ves her arms to keep upright. One remarkable shot is an almost gratuitous example of what George Folsey’s glamour photography could achieve for an aging ingenue. Sylvia lies in bed at school, listening to Bill on the radio, and the camera gazes at her face for an astonishing ninety-plus seconds, with only two brief cutaways. In a soundstage scene, she appears in blackface as an extra — Bill doesn’t recognize her — yet charmingly reveals herself with a beautifully unadorned smile. Bill reaches past her to a black boy and rubs his cheek; “I’s real, Massa Williams,” the kid says. Erwin, who also fails to recognize her, tells her she’s changed quite a bit. “It’s the climate,” Sylvia deadpans. But it is more than climate; it’s going Hollywood, which means she walks onto a set with no thespian experience and is chosen — after Lili conveniently throws a fit — to play the lead in the picture. Ever the mimic, Marion/Sylvia does a mean Fifi/Lili.
Though it was Marion’s production, with Bing taking second billing for the first and last time until he accepted character parts in the 1960s, Bing dominates the film, greatly assisted by a terrific score. Inexplicably, he never recorded the title song, but when he sings it in a production number set in Grand Central, reenacting his own recent decision to leave New York, he is at his indomitable, swinging best. “Beautiful Girl” allows him to reveal his increasing ability to handle varied bits of business, singing as he walks around his hotel room, followed by Sterling Holloway and a microphone. He glides through a six-minute production number and romances Marion with “After Sundown,” pouting like a teenager when she declines to sleep with him that evening. She changes her mind, however, only to find him in Lili’s room. The Hays Office found that acceptable but vainly lobbied MGM to change the title: “no Hollywood title should be used which would tend to undo the efforts made to disabuse the public mind of the unfavorable impression of Hollywood which formerly obtained.” 28
Sylvia does not find it acceptable, and when she gives him the cold shoulder, Bill does what Bing might have done in years past. He goes on a bender in Mexican bordellos, precipitating the best scene in the picture. An unshaven derelict, Bill stares into a shot glass, reeling between hallucinations of the dark and evil temptress Lili and the good and golden Sylvia. “It was all very Russian Art Theater,” Bing later explained. 29 He sings “Temptation” at his purple best, imbuing a melodramatic yet weirdly seductive style of pop with stentorian, heartbursting, operatic gusto — part Jolson on his knees, part McCormack in his cups, and all youthful bravado. Keep your head down, his mother might have said, but go for broke in song.
The initial response to Going Hollywood was positive. Needless to say, Hearst papers could not contain themselves. Louella had an attack of literary vapors trying to do justice to its immortal glory: the picture “stands supreme as a perfect example of good entertainment with a heroine beautiful enough to make every other girl wish she could be a Marion Davies.” Lest anyone think she was prejudiced, she added, “She is so lovely that a murmur of admiration went through the theater, both in the scenes where she wears regulation street dress and again in the beautiful costumes in the motion picture scenes.” 30 The New York Times critic thought it “sprightly and jocular.” 31 Time grudgingly conceded that it surpassed previous attempts at movies featuring radio singers, but could not resist disparaging Bing as a reformed Vallée imitator. 32 Time ran a letter weeks later from Jackson Leichter, one of Paul Whiteman’s radio writers, who corrected several errors, including the Vallée crack, and closed with a prediction: “Crosby’s popularity will grow. He has brains, a growing wisdom, a recently acquired balance. He’s good for America.” 33
* * *
Variety gauged Going Hollywood as “an emphatic moneymaker,” but despite strong openings, it failed to become the runaway hit that would have earned back its investment. MGM soon buried it. The trade paper was on firmer ground when it declared Bing “the present day disc best seller.” 34 Other record companies attempted to lure him away from Brunswick and Jack Kapp, who paid him $400 a disc plus royalties. Victor offered him five times that. Kapp parried with a history lesson, comparing Brunswick’s steadfast buildup with the wobbly loyalties of Victor and Columbia, which Bing had learned about firsthand during his time with Whiteman.
Bing did not need the lecture. He liked and trusted Kapp, who had an ace in the hole. Jack himself was fed up with Brunswick, which rejected his bid to head the company, and determined to start a label of his own, with Bing’s contract as collateral. If anyone could defy the majors in the middle of the Depression, Kapp was the man, and Bing would be in on the ground floor; indeed, he would be the ground floor. While Jack considered his options, he continued to advance Bing’s transformation from crooner to all-American troubadour.
A week after the Victor offer was rejected, Jack recorded Bing with a plush Lennie Hayton studio ensemble. He devoted half the session to slightly accelerated versions of songs from Going Hollywood, “Beautiful Girl” and “After Sundown.” With two additional songs, he routed Bing on a new trail. “The Last Round-Up” was the year’s most improbable hit, introduced at the New York Paramount by Irish tenor Joe Morrison, who was heard with George Olsen’s band. Written by an erstwhile cowboy, Billy Hill (whose “There’s a Cabin in the Pines” had fizzled for Bing), it was a sensation in spite of the incongruity of song, singer, and band; Olsen’s Columbia record, with Morrison singing the refrain, dominated sales charts for two months. Victor and Brunswick raced in with bestselling versions by bandleaders Don Bestor and Victor Young. But Kapp, convinced there was far more to round up, simultaneously released another two versions, by Guy Lombardo (Brunswick 6662) and Bing (Brunswick 6663). Lombardo’s sold almost as well as Olsen’s (they accounted for two of the year’s ten bestselling discs). But Bing’s version, nestling directly under Lombardo’s, had the more lasting impact. His melancholy moonlit cry sold the tune with the authenticity of a true western balladeer. When he sang it at the Los Angeles Paramount, the audience leaped to its feet and cheered, as if for a patriotic song. Afterward, Gene Autry took up the song, and Paramount slapped the title on a Randolph Scott western.
“Crosby was one of the main fellas in those days and if he sang a song and it was a halfway decent song, it became a hit,” Roy Rogers recalled. “And what we would do, we’d take those big top hit songs and build a story around them and use them to name our pictures.” 35 Rogers himself would not become known as King of the Cowboys for nearly a decade, but he realized even then that Bing’s way with western songs made them more appealing than did the gruff country singers of the early 1930s. Many other cowboy and country singers agreed, and over the next few years Bing’s influence turned up unmistakably in the work of several western balladeers who admired his timbre, enunciation, and feeling.
Bing, in turn, recorded dozens of western songs. Three years after “The Last Round-Up,” Paramount devised a horse opera for him, Rhythm on the Range, introducing the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that brought Roy Rogers to Hollywood. In years to come, when Roy went out on his own, Bing covered several of his hits, notably “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Cool Water.” An ironic intersection in their careers took place in 1944, when Roy premiered “Don’t Fence Me In,” by the least likely of cowboys, Cole Porter, in Hollywood Canteen, and Bing (with the Andrews Sisters) scored the hit, selling millions. “The Last Round-Up” echoed in western circles as late as 1947, when Autry made a movie with that title, underscoring his homage by including a rendition of an intervening Crosby hit, “An Apple for the Teacher.”
Yet the most resonant of Bing’s cowboy records, by far, was made at the same session as “The Last Round-Up,” although it did not initially sell as well. Bing’s version of “Home on the Range” turned a little-known saddle song into the most renowned western anthem of all time. In November 1933, when his record was issued, the origin of “Home on the Range” was obscure and widely debated. Folklorist John Lomax, who said he learned it from a black saloonkeeper in Texas, published it in 1910, in Cowboy Songs and Othe
r Frontier Ballads. In 1925 a sheet-music arrangement found modest popularity; two years later Vernon Dalhart, the operatic tenor turned hillbilly singer, recorded it for Brunswick. California’s radio cowboys picked it up from him, and in 1930 the movies’ first crooning western star, Ken Maynard, recorded a version. Not until Bing sang it, however, was the song embraced as a national hymn, so popular as to generate a farcical plagiarism suit that had the unintended benefit of spurring an inquiry into the song’s history. It was traced to a poem, “Western Home,” written in the 1870s (without the chorus or the phrase “home on the range”) by Dr. Brewster Higley, whose neighbor, Dan Kelley, set it to music.
Bing’s stirring performance transforms a nostalgic lament into an ode to pioneering, a dream of shared history, a vaguely religious affirmation of fortitude in the face of peril. He made it a Depression song that ignores the Depression, expressing longing, awe, and grace. Bing’s subtle embellishments enhance the melody, and his projection and control are unfailingly dramatic, particularly during the soaring eight-bar release. His record offered a transcendent secularity, a well from which all Americans could drink. More prosaically, it anticipated the golden age of gentle-voiced singing cowboys and the Irish sentiment of the John Ford westerns that followed on their heels. FDR acknowledged “Home on the Range” as his favorite song. John Dillinger escaped jail with a wooden gun and drove off singing “The Last Round-Up.”
Bing recorded “Home on the Range” twice in the late 1930s, neither version as compelling as the one from 1933, but the performance about which he was most likely to regale friends occurred on August 16, 1935, when Bing and Dixie visited Saratoga for the races. They attended a dinner for the turf riders. “I didn’t, uh, skip any drinks that were passed around,” he recalled. 36 Afterward, they went to the Arrowhead nightclub, where Guy Lombardo’s band was broadcasting: