Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  And it came over the NBC network that Will Rogers had just been killed up in Alaska with Wiley Post, and they were putting together a memorial program — picking people from all over who could do things in tribute to Will Rogers, and they wanted me to sing “Home on the Range.” I was going to have to do it in about ten minutes, and I was a little shaky, from the sauce and from the realization that it was a solemn occasion, and it was a song he dearly loved, and they thought it should be used, and I couldn’t remember the words. The time was drawing closer and closer and I kept asking if anybody knew the words. I knew the first line, of course, “Give me a home,” and all of a sudden I’m on the radio. And that was the first time that I really had flop sweat, my palms were wet, my brow was damp, and they were playing the introduction, and there I was. Obviously, I had sobered up a little by that time, and I sang the first line, thinking, “What the hell is the second line.” And it came, and then, “What’s the third line,” and it came. And it kept coming, kept coming, until I was finished. And I was really finished then. I went home and lay down. 37

  18

  MORE THAN A CROONER

  Bing Crosby — he’s a different kind of ladies’ man, because he appeals to men! That’s the truth! Have you ever heard of the Malden, Massachusetts Bing Crosby Club? There’s not a sixteen-year-old microphone-struck girl in it; no sir! That Bing Crosby Club up in the New England state is composed of men all over twenty years of age and every one an athlete.

  — Robert Trout, Wilkins Coffee Time (1933) 1

  Shortly after going cowboy, Bing inaugurated a CBS radio series for Woodbury (“for the skin you love to touch”), a manufacturer of women’s soap based in Cincinnati. The show represented a significant leap in his transition from radio crooner to radio star. Instead of two fifteen-minute recitals a week, the Chesterfield schedule, Woodbury gave him a thirty-minute program once a week, with an announcer, supporting players, and guests. Above all, radio could now boast: Crosby speaks! This came as no surprise to the millions who had seen him do that very thing live and onscreen. Nor was it a revelation to fans who had heard him plug his films in radio promotions. But on his own shows he had never been permitted to talk directly to his radio following.

  At first, his new freedom counted for little. The funny, relaxed, quick-thinking, verbally dexterous Bing was nowhere to be found. He stiffly intoned pro forma introductions like “I have the pleasure of singing tonight the feature song from Ben Bernie’s new picture, Shoot the Works.” Bing had conjured up a personality in pictures. Now he had to find a complementary one for the air.

  Easier said than done. Radio comedians invented personality trademarks that were consistently harped on, whether or not they were true to life — Jack Benny’s cheapness, Eddie Cantor’s pep, Ed Wynn’s zaniness, Gracie Allen’s dizziness, Will Rogers’s horse sense, Joe Penner’s idiocy. But Woodbury had hired Crosby as a romantic figure who would appeal to its female customers. Turning him into a jokester was never an option, and Bing didn’t give his producer and writer, Burt McMurtrie, much to work with: singer, film star, nice guy. What’s more, he was uneasy without a script. The stubborn confidence Bing displayed in devising his film persona was less in evidence when it came to radio, though he knew what he would not do. He refused to accommodate a studio audience or replace his theme song with a Woodbury jingle; when an advertising agent from New York indelicately criticized his work, he threatened to walk. His contract called for thirteen shows at $1,750 per broadcast. By the second season he commanded $6,000, keeping nearly half and paying for the orchestra and arrangements with the rest, thereby securing control over the show’s contents.

  McMurtrie had produced Paul Whiteman’s Old Gold shows and hailed from Spokane. He understood Bing’s style and potential as well as anyone but could do little more than suggest the rudiments of a radio identity for him. On the first show, Bing sang “Thanks,” “Tomorrow,” and “The Last Round-Up”; bantered with announcer Ken Niles about cosmetics; and introduced Lennie Hayton’s instrumentals and a vocal by a teenage singer, Mary Lou Raymond. Billboard liked the show, relieved that “he neither whistled nor dabbled in his famous impromptu obbligatos.” 2

  A livelier atmosphere started taking hold in December, after Bing prevailed upon Woodbury to sign the Mills Brothers as weekly regulars, singing their own numbers and — significantly — backing his. Though little noted or remembered, their hiring represented a landmark for racial integration in radio and music, preceding by two years Benny Goodman’s road tour with Teddy Wilson and by three Jack Benny’s signing of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. When the Mills Brothers were unavailable, Bing sustained the broadcast’s high spirits with the Boswell Sisters, whom he famously introduced as “three girls with but a single thought: harmony. And what harmony.”

  Hayton, basking in the attention of the movie studios, did not renew his Woodbury contract after the first season. His replacements included Gus Arnheim, Jimmy Grier, and ultimately Géorgie Stoll, who conducted the orchestra on more than half of Bing’s seventy-two Woodbury shows, from mid-1934 through the end of 1935. 3 Like Bing, Stoll was an Armstrong fanatic, but little of that emerged in his arrangements, which, judging from the three surviving episodes, were rather stuffy and unswinging. Other regulars on the show included the singers Kay Thompson, Irene Taylor, the Three Rhythm Kings, and the Williams Sisters — Laura, Alice, and Ethelyn. Alice went on to work with the Music Maids, a popular addition to Kraft Music Hall during Bing’s tenure.

  The show was an instant ratings success. The New York World-Telegram observed that of the radio singers who had won so much acclaim only two years earlier, Bing alone maintained “the same level of popularity,” adding that he might easily have sustained the Woodbury ratings through the summer had he not “put his foot down” and insisted upon a vacation. 4 The same paper conducted a national radio poll, publishing the results in February 1934. Bing won Best Popular Male Singer and the Boswells, Best Harmony Team. With the Boswells or the Mills Brothers at his side, Bing didn’t need much in the way of guests, and he had few good ones — mostly dull comics and stillborn starlets. Radio had yet to become acceptable to Hollywood’s supernovas, many of whom would later snub television for the same reason: it was free and common. But in plugging his concurrent movies, Bing scored appearances by his leading ladies, notably Carole Lombard, Kitty Carlisle, Miriam Hopkins, and Joan Bennett, prefiguring the movie colony’s delayed appreciation of radio as a publicity bonanza.

  Bing’s years of undergraduate oratory had taught him that great speakers don’t pontificate to the great unwashed. They make contact with their fellows. That was Bing’s natural way, enabling him to speak as intimately via the microphone as he sang. Orotund announcers were on their way out — they were silly at best, snobbish at worst. Bing occasionally reached for their affectations (his Woodbury performance of “Just a-Wearyin’ for You” is painfully genteel), but he got over the temptation quickly, poking fun at the highfalutin by italicizing a rolled r or inserting a ten-dollar word in his plainspoken repartee.

  Bing was not the only radio personality who tailored his style to speak to individuals at home rather than to a massive congregation. Nor was he the only one to understand that the public responded to a well-spoken man as long as he refrained from talking down to them. Bing may have learned a trick or two from President Roosevelt, that master of aristocratic candor, whose “fireside chats” debuted seven months before the Woodbury show. 5 With 60 million people tuned in to his first Sunday-evening broadcast, March 12, 1933, FDR spoke warmly and directly, without patronizing folksiness or condescension: “My friends, I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” 6 He said it was safe to put money in the bank, and people did. His secretary of labor (and the nation’s first female cabinet member), Frances Perkins, recalled, “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” 7 Roosevel
t’s inauguration won Outstanding Broadcast in the New York World-Telegram poll.

  Roosevelt had begun using radio when he was governor of New York. He was more practiced than Bing in projecting personality through speech. Yet he applied basically the same techniques of directness and enunciation that Bing had mastered in selling his musical style. On one occasion FDR seemed to acknowledge Bing’s influence. According to Eddie Cantor, during a March of Dimes broadcast from Warm Springs, Georgia, the president tested the microphone by “crooning in a cracked baritone, ‘When [sic] the blue of the night… bub-bub-bub-boo!’” 8 The wonder of it is that so few, beyond Bing and Roosevelt, recognized radio’s unique power to convey rapport and empathy.

  Still, compared with what he later achieved on radio, Bing sounded hesitant on the Woodbury show, though his artless, neighborly way struck a chord. Listeners who once tuned in to hear the crooner now discovered a friend. Bing, logically, began to infuse the show with elements of his personal life. After he attended the Rose Bowl game between Stanford and Columbia in 1934, he talked about it over the air. After Dixie gave birth to twins during his summer break, he employed them in a song cue: “Speaking as the father of twins, I might say, in fact I will say, that it is a double pleasure to be back on this program again. As a result thereof ‘I’m humming, I’m whistling, I’m singing.’” The dialogue was often fairly stilted, but it was appealingly modest, even adorable, and usually revealed his singular personality:

  Niles: Say, have you learned much about [the twins]?

  Bing: No. It’s a new racket for me. But what would you like to know?

  Niles: Well, tell me something about them, anything.

  Bing: Well, twins usually look alike, having been born more or less under the same conditions and having no preference in the matter.

  Niles: There you go, Bing!

  Bing: Sure, and if they resemble their mother, they have what might be called a flying start in life.

  Niles: What if they resemble their father?

  Bing: Well, in that case, they should be held right side up and patted lightly on their respective backs.

  Niles was invariably upbeat, nudging the audience about Bing’s linguistic playfulness. Bing was more earnest, taking his time, peppering convoluted phrases with slang, and averting banality with little more than a slightly reticent, vernacular charm.

  It was too vernacular for Woodbury. On the surface, the company seemed content with its spokesman. Before Bing took his summer break, the sponsor celebrated his success with a giveaway:

  Niles: We think you’ll agree the Woodburys have done two very important things this year. They’ve brought Bing Crosby back to this radio audience, with whom he is such a favorite. And they’ve created a ten-cent size of Woodbury’s facial soap in order that new millions may enjoy the blessings of this scientific beauty aid at a price never heard of before. Tonight Woodbury’s makes you an extraordinary offer. In exchange for ten cents, one dime, Woodbury’s will send you an attractive gift, the Woodbury loveliness kit [and] an autographed photograph of Bing Crosby…. Please send a dime, not stamps. 9

  Yet despite solid ratings, the marriage between sponsor and spokesman was rocky. Woodbury argued that Bing’s cool delivery did not confer enough dignity on its products. That impression solidified after Variety conducted a street-corner poll on sponsor recognition: fewer than one-fourth of those queried knew who paid Bing’s bills. For his part, Bing had a hard time with Woodbury’s idea of dignity, as expressed in commercials that managed to insult the very women it hoped to reach. One sketch began with Ken Niles confiding to Bing that he was in love with a woman he had never seen. When Bing tells him he is “full of that boulevard gin,” Niles explains that she wears a mask. Two songs later Niles reveals that she removed the mask and was so homely that he pretended not to know her. “Sure glad you didn’t get stuck with her,” Bing commiserates, to which Niles responds: “The poor thing, Bing, and you know, there are hundreds just like her, who if they only knew about Woodbury’s facial soap might easily capture such a prize as Bing or, ah, me.”

  What really rankled Woodbury was Bing’s effectual control of the series. By May 1935 the company made clear its intention to challenge him. The first showdown took place after Bing announced on the air that his friend, actor Andy Devine, would be a guest the following week. The sponsor told Bing that Devine could not appear because his voice, a comically strained gargle caused by a childhood accident, was unsuitable for the air. Next week Bing arrived at the station with Devine and calmly refused to go on unless Andy accompanied him. Minutes before airtime Woodbury backed off and inadvertently launched Devine’s long career as a radio entertainer.

  Bing refused to relinquish authority in choosing songs or guests, and the company refused to renew his contract, which was up June 11, 1935. Yet even with the end in sight, the clashes continued; at one point Bing would have walked (John Boles, of all people, was hired as an emergency substitute) had not CBS convinced him to complete his obligation. After Woodbury, Bing would not be at liberty for long. NBC became interested in him late that summer when Bing appeared alongside the Dorsey Brothers as guests of Kraft Music Hall’s ratings-challenged host, Paul Whiteman. By December Bing would be Kraft’s new host, commencing an eleven-year run that not only redefined the variety show — it reinvented the image of Bing Crosby.

  One reason professional strife never got the better of Bing is that he always had so many fish to fry. Pursuing work and play with equal diligence, he consigned virtually every minute of his day to a schedule — to the dismay of his family, which was not always accorded prime time. While Woodbury was pulling its hair, Bing shot one picture after another: four features and one short subject between January 29, 1934, and January 19, 1935. After he completed Too Much Harmony, Bing owed Paramount one picture on his original contract. Chagrined by the difference in quality between MGM’s Going Hollywood and its own Crosby vehicles, the studio resolved to make it a first-rate production. Paramount could ill afford to lose him and had recently endured a reminder of his finicky independence.

  Paramount’s stars had been assigned small parts in a film of Alice in Wonderland, in which they were disguised by makeup intended to approximate John Tenniel’s illustrations. While the other contract players signed on, Bing (through Everett) opened negotiations. Although he could not see the point of appearing under a mound of makeup, he agreed to participate on two conditions: a week’s salary and permission to do another picture for an outside studio. Paramount agreed to the first and balked at the second. Furious at Bing’s intransigence, the studio offered his part to Russ Columbo before settling on Cary Grant. It also signed Lanny Ross, a tenor who became popular on the Show Boat radio hour, promising a big buildup and casting him in College Rhythm (opposite Jack Oakie as a football star). As insurance against Crosby, Ross was marginally more viable than, say, John Boles, and the executives knew it.

  They also knew that Bing had been damn shrewd to avoid Alice in Wonderland, a miserable flop, and that although Everett served as his cover, Bing made the decisions. As Bob Crosby once noted, “A lot of people thought Everett was a financial wizard, but he wasn’t. He would maybe get a call from someone that would want Bing to make a picture, and he’d go to Bing and say, Do you want to do it or don’t you want to do it? And Bing would say yes or no or I want more money or I’d like to read the script, whatever.” 10 While Lewis Carroll took Paramount to the cleaners, Bing prepared for the adaptation of another British classic, by Carroll’s young Scottish contemporary, James M. Barrie.

  The Admirable Crichton, a comedy about class divisions and the perfect butler, had been Hollywoodized as a silent film, Male and Female, and was now decked out as a musical, ominously titled Cruiseto Nowhere. Enigmatically renamed We’re Not Dressing, the result was frothy and absurd but vastly entertaining, the class war having been reduced to a more dependable formula of boy meets girl, annoys girl, wins girl, rejects girl, and walks into sunset with girl. In this inst
ance, the girl is a rich and haughty brat, played by Carole Lombard, and the boy a lowly sailor (who wants to be an architect, so it’s all right) employed on her yacht. The yacht sinks and, mirabile dictu, all the stars drift to the same spot on an apparently deserted island, where the sailor’s skills create a turnabout, placing him in charge. An elaborate joke involving Lombard’s panties (an example of pre-Code raffishness) uncovers the presence elsewhere on the island of a pair of natural scientists. Before the castaways learn they are not alone, however, the sailor (Bing) has brought Lombard down a peg, and they are chastely reconciled.

  The making of We’re Not Dressing, including three weeks of shooting on Catalina Island, was a happy experience for everyone, especially Bing and Lombard, who became fast friends (although she was then engaged to his rival Russ Columbo). 11 It was an important picture for her, the first to suggest the screwball flair for comedy she unleashed in Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, and other films before her much lamented death in a plane crash. She had not been the studio’s first choice. Miriam Hopkins demurred because she thought the script trivialized Barrie, and Paramount unsuccessfully asked MGM for the loan of Karen Morley or Mae Clarke (Charles Butterworth and W. C. Fields were also sought, presumably for the role played by Leon Errol). Two years earlier Lombard had turned down the Leila Hyams part in The Big Broadcast, which might well have salvaged Carole’s faltering career. She leaped at the offer of a second shot in a Crosby picture.