Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  Carole, bemused by Bing’s cool tact, played off it between takes in a series of practical jokes. Bing enjoyed her dedicated swearing — “colorful epithets” he described as “good, clean, and lusty. Her swearwords weren’t obscene. They were gusty and eloquent. They resounded, they bounced. They had honest zing!” 12 With amazement, he described her dash to the ocean after inadvertently dousing herself with wintergreen: “She appeared practically unclothed,” he wrote, the adverb added as a gentlemanly euphemism. 13 She occasionally enlivened the set by flashing him. While breakfasting at Catalina’s St. Catherine Hotel, where elderly regulars stared disapprovingly at the movie clan, she “came slinking in” and loudly cried, “Bing! Did I leave my douche bag in your room last night?” 14 For two days she sent Bing a one-word telegram every fifteen minutes or so: the word was NOW. “The fact that she could make us think of her as being a good guy rather than a sexy mamma is one of those unbelievable manifestations impossible to explain,” Bing wrote. “She was the least prudish person I’ve ever known.”

  Carole had one weak point, however; she could not stand to have her face touched, and one scene called for Bing to slap her. At her request, he refrained during rehearsal, but when the scene was filmed, she responded violently. Howard Hawks liked to take credit for creating Lombard as a comic actress by encouraging her to kick John Barrymore in the balls in Twentieth Century. According to Bing, she required no coaching; she kicked, punched, bit, screamed, tore off his toupee, and finally “wept hysterically.” 15 Bing recalled that he refused to do a second take and that some of the tantrum was actually used, but it wasn’t. In the film, she returns his slap with a kiss.

  Bing also had trouble with Bruno, the ship’s pet bear, whom the sailor is obliged to soothe with a lullaby, “Good Night Lovely Little Lady.” One scene in which he narrowly averted disaster did get into the film. While brushing the bear’s fur, Bing sings “She Reminds Me of You.” Bruno suddenly tries to get away. Bing grins but continues lip-synching while manfully holding on.

  Norman Taurog directed We’re Not Dressing with brisk confidence, sprinkling story points amid musical numbers, not allowing a dull moment to intrude in its seventy-four minutes, thanks to a splendid cast — Burns and Allen (never better), Ethel Merman, Leon Errol, Ray Milland — and no less than six songs expertly rendered by Bing as the radiant, funny Lombard gazes at him, alternately happy and dismissive, but mostly happy, especially during his swing chorus on “May I?” The film’s luminous look was created by photographer Charles Lang. Like many great stars, Bing developed a keen interest in cinematography, realizing that its masters influenced not only a film’s veneer but the actors’ glamour. More than half of his fifty-four features (excluding those in which he makes cameo or one-song appearances) were shot by just four of Hollywood’s most accomplished cameramen: Lang, Karl Struss, Lionel Lindon, and George Barnes. Lang worked on six Crosby pictures, and his contribution here is evident in the sharp black-and-white contrasts, plush shots of Catalina, and unmistakable aura surrounding the principals.

  Though cheeky and adult, We’re Not Dressing lacks the sophistication of the year’s best comedies, It Happened One Night and The Thin Man, but remains a standout among the musicals of 1934. Dames and The Merry Widow, though more assured, restate the tried-and-true formulas of Busby Berkeley and Ernst Lubitsch. By contrast, We’re Not Dressing and The Gay Divorcee (the first film in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers assume lead roles) augur the musicals to come, for they are built around virtuoso American performers, not the stock juveniles, backstage wannabes, and Continental rascals of the past. Ballyhooed by Paramount for featuring more Crosby songs than any of its predecessors, We’re Not Dressing proved that Bing could enchant audiences through three-minute vocal close-ups and offered his most informal and amusing performance to date.

  He was immeasurably aided by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel’s energetic score, which exploits his gifts for jazz and lullabies. Bing had known the team in New York — they entertained at his Friars Club send-off — and loved the way Gordon, an ebullient man and lively singer, demonstrated his new songs. For their first Paramount picture they wrote “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?,” which became an outstanding Crosby recording at the close of 1933 — boldly expressive and stoked with understated rhythm. We’re Not Dressing was their second film, and no less than five of its songs became Crosby hits: “May I?,” “Once in a Blue Moon,” “She Reminds Me of You,” “Good Night Lovely Little Lady,” and “Love Thy Neighbor.” Inevitably, Gordon and Revel were hired for his next film, which went into production in April, the same month We’re Not Dressing opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the usual lively crowds.

  Most critics found it breezy fun and generously lauded Bing (the New York World-Telegram called him “an excellent comedian”), while Time reliably snorted: “Interspersed liberally with shots of Crooner Crosby’s blank, adenoidal face, We’re Not Dressing is fair entertainment, easy-going, incredible and sanitary.” If the movie was all those things, it was clearly because of and not in spite of Bing — not least the sanitary part. Bing looks desolate during his big love scene, which lacks the anticipated kiss. Lombard supplies heat in her revealing gowns, as does an exasperated Bing, when he drags her off and chains her to a tree. “I suppose a fate worse than death awaits me,” she says. “How do you know it’s worse than death?” he replies. “You’ve never been dead, have you?” 16 Bing’s acting had improved, though he was still given to moonfaced pouts. A breakthrough would occur late in the year with Here Is My Heart. But first came the gender-reversal comedy, She Loves Me Not.

  Miriam Hopkins did not know Bing would be her costar when she accepted the role of Curley Flagg, a nightclub hoofer who witnesses a murder and hides out in a Princeton dorm, disguised as a boy. The role of college student Paul Lawton was first offered to Gary Cooper, who refused it because he feared Hopkins would steal the picture, her forte. A busier, twitchier actress never lived, though she could be highly effective in dramatic roles. She Loves Me Not, however, was farce with a pedigree, first as a novel (by Edward Hope), then as a Howard Lindsay stage hit, which was packing the Forty-sixth Street Theater as the film went into production and did not close until four months after the movie’s release. All the play’s political satire was deleted, but Paramount retained a few barbs about salacious movie producers and arrogant press flacks. Gordon and Revel wrote three songs, but Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin contributed the picture’s immensely popular ballad, “Love in Bloom.” One Paramount executive demanded that their song be pulled, citing it as too sophisticated for the general public.

  Hopkins’s scene-stealing shenanigans were legendary, 17 but her confidence was shaken when she saw that the picture would now be perceived as a Bing Crosby vehicle. The imperturbable Bing, fast becoming renowned for his letter-perfect first takes, knew how to handle her, as she explained to interviewer John Kobal:

  And do you know another doll was Bing Crosby. Oh my God! We did She Loves Me Not. Now I thought I was a dramatic actress, you see, and I want to rehearse everything first. I was on his radio show all the time, and I said, “Bing can’t we rehearse this show?” He ran through it once and we went out and sat in his car and had a cigarette. And I said, “Can’t we do it again?” And he said: “Sweetie, no! We’d get stale. Let’s just do it, you know, we’ve got the line. I’ll say something and [you] ad-lib back and forth with me.” Well, there was one scene in She Loves. I said: “Bing, I’d like to rehearse this with you.” He says…, “Now, you know very well, you’ve been in the theater and New York, and I’m just a guy who dropped a load of pumpkins.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘dropped a load of pumpkins?’” And that was the famous line, “I’m just a guy who dropped a load of pumpkins,” you know. Oh, but so darling! 18

  Kitty Carlisle, who played the university president’s daughter and Paul’s true love, considered Hopkins surprisingly nice, “the most generous of colleagues, offering to rehearse before each scene.” 19 Car
lisle had appeared in only one other film, Murder at the Vanities, but — trained in opera and theater — she tended to look upon Hollywood from an aristocratic perch, condescending and ambitious. Yet she was startled by Bing’s singing. “I was a serious singer, I had studied seriously, and I was impressed by his technique, his effortlessness, the fact that his voice was so much bigger and more available for, really, operatic roles than you saw in the movies. To me there was Bing Crosby and then everybody else.” She also marveled at his unaffectedness: “He certainly didn’t pamper himself. He’d come in chewing gum and eating chocolate and then just begin to sing and it was melting.” They had little in common and nothing to talk about, she with her “European social training” and he “a man’s man who got along very well with the crew.” She could recall only one personal moment off the set, when Bing showed her “a very pretty, rather modest diamond necklace. He said, Did I like it, did I think [Dixie] would like it? I said I think she’d adore it.” 20

  Bing was enthusiastic about the film, but the overall pressure was beginning to tell. Bing confided to Ted his need for a break:

  I am three weeks along into She Loves Me Not a collegiate comedy with a couple songs, from the play now current in New York. It has a terrific script, great dialogue, and grand situation. I don’t see how it can fail to be a great laugh picture, and fine for me.

  Dad had some teeth out the other day and was a little out of line for a bit, but is okay now. I have been so busy I haven’t seen much of mother or anyone else for that matter, but at last reports she was in good health and spirits. Everett is, of course, living the life of Riley, and his family are well.

  I finish the picture in another week, the radio May 26th, and following this plan on resting for possibly a couple months. Feeling a little tired, and further income in May & June will put me in a very disagreeable income tax bracket. So I might as well rest as give it back to Uncle Sam. I am trying to pick up a ranch near San Diego, not too elaborate, and if successful, you can come down and start me off rite on some intensive gentleman farming. 21

  Elliott Nugent, a successful stage actor, director, and playwright, directed She Loves Me Not with little flair, from a script by producer Benjamin Glazer. The film has dated badly, in part because Hopkins, in her determination to be funny, goes so far over the top that no one can reign her in, certainly not Bing or Eddie Nugent, who plays Paul’s housemate, Buzz (the role that made Burgess Meredith a Broadway star). The most persuasive bits poke fun at Hollywood: Buzz’s father (George Barbier) is a producer who intends to capitalize on Curley’s notoriety by putting her in a picture (replacing one Yvonne Lamour, a name that was considered satirical until Dorothy Lamour came to town). He promises his backers that her clothes will be ripped off in every scene, while she remains a virginal victim of circumstance. 22

  She Loves Me Not is of interest for the way it cuts against the grain of the era’s other transvestite movies, in which women invariably play men as serious and sexually repressed. Hopkins’s Curley Flagg is initially hesitant about entering the dorm. But as soon as she loses her hair to Paul’s scissors and trades in her clothes for Buzz’s pajamas, she becomes sexually ravenous, while the boys act like affronted fops. Paul stammers and turns schoolmarmish: “Now you listen to me, Curley Flagg, I got no more interest in you than I have in the United States Senate.” But the joke is muffled, because Curley is very girly — mascara will do that. Only a murderous goon is, briefly, confused by her wiles; he figures she’s gay.

  Bing, who turned thirty-one during filming, is an absurdly seasoned undergraduate. He offers a few comical double takes (notably a Stan Laurel turn at the end), but his vest buttons do not close. “He was very good in movies except that he didn’t look right,” Kitty Carlisle remembered. “He had a behind the size of a barn. There’s a shot in She Loves Me Not where he turns and walks — I mean, it was like a ship leaving shore. But Bing could make fun of anything about himself. He was not at all pompous.” 23 A mystery to several leading ladies who felt neglected by him off the set, Bing — as he once said of his association with Bob Hope — preferred to save it all for the camera, a practice that clearly pays off in his duets with Kitty. However aloof he may have acted between takes, he genuinely lights up as he sings to her “Straight from the Shoulder” and “Love in Bloom,” at the thirty-minute mark. Kitty, too, registers delight when they sing together. One reason the duets are so convincing is that Nugent shot them live, an unusual and risky decision. “Why we did it live I’ll never know,” Kitty said. “I never asked questions. I got onto the set at nine and there was a little orchestra and we recorded. I was so nervous I thought I’d jump out of my skin. We did it two or three times and that was the end of it.” 24 Watching footage of Carlisle and Bing, Para-mount’s pint-size studio chief Emanuel Cohen must have imagined he was brewing his own version of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He signed Kitty to Bing’s next film.

  “Love in Bloom” handed Bing another megahit, topping sales charts for nearly four months — six weeks in the number one slot. That year the Academy Awards initiated a best song category, and “Love in Bloom” was nominated. It lost to “The Continental” (from The Gay Divorcee) but paved the way for a Crosby statistic that is not likely to be broken. Between 1934 and 1960 he introduced more songs that were nominated for Academy Awards (fourteen) and more that won (four) than any other performer; Astaire and Sinatra tie for second place with eight nominations each. Bing thought “Love in Bloom” “a good melody, easy to remember, a lovely song.” 25 Kitty expected it to become her theme. Neither was pleased by what happened to it. As Jack Benny told the story, he and his wife, Mary, went to a supper club one night, and the bandleader asked him to sit in. When Benny stepped up and borrowed a violin, he noticed an arrangement of “Love in Bloom” on a music stand and played it with predictably amusing results. A columnist wrote about his impromptu performance, and the next time the Bennys went to a club, the band serenaded them with “Love in Bloom” as a joke. “So I decided to adopt it as my theme song,” Benny explained. 26 Overnight the melody became a Pavlovian laugh-getter; no matter who played or sang it, audiences howled. “I always took umbrage at that,” Bing said. 27 Kitty felt she had been robbed. 28

  Few moviegoers noticed at the time, but Bing’s looks changed after She Loves Me Not: his ears were finally liberated. During one scene, midway through filming, the hot lighting repeatedly loosened the spirit gum. According to Frank Westmore, “this happened no less than ten times,” whereupon “Bing furiously refused to allow the errant ear to be stuck back.” 29 Bing recalled, “They said you’ve got to put them back, we’ve got half the picture with your ears in — you put ‘em out, you’ll look like a taxi with both doors open and you’ll never match the other scenes. So I said, all right, I’ll put ‘em back for the rest of this picture. We had a couple weeks to go, and then the next picture, that was the end of it.” 30 Wally Westmore involved himself in the battle, convincing Manny Cohen that Bing’s ears did not affect his voice.

  Audiences paid little attention to his ears, but thanks to Lang’s astute camera work, they did begin to notice a unique and endearing physical aspect of his speech: the fluttering cheeks and popping lips when he pronounced w or b words. A phrase like “Well, what is it?” suggested a goldfish recycling oxygen, a tic that kept mimics busy for years.

  She Loves Me Not outgrossed all of Bing’s previous pictures. This time most critics were disarmed, and not just the Louellas. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic noted a plug in the film for Chase National (which had Paramount by the throat) but praised it for its honest professionalism. “Bing Crosby sings pleasantly and even acts a bit,” he wrote. 31 Time considered it “creditable,” reserving praise for Hopkins (“squeaks and wriggles pleasantly”) and the new songs while remaining mum on the singers. 32 An especially perceptive analysis of the Crosby phenomenon appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. After noting Bing’s obvious appeal to women, the writer continued:

  P
erhaps it is his uncompromising masculinity and obvious inability to overplay anything that make him so innocuous to his own sex. Unlike most of the other radio names, he never seems to be trying to be charming. The toothy smile, the Sunday School superintendent’s unction [play] no part in the Crosby technique. He borrows something from the old deadpan school of slapstick comedy and something from the insouciant ogle of the professional masher to produce an effect of being congenitally at home and sure of himself anywhere — not working hard in the least, just taking it as it comes. 33

  The better the public came to know Bing, the better it liked him; the more it learned, the more it wanted to learn. Paramount, having signed him to another three-picture deal, put its publicity department into overdrive to maximize the attraction of his personality. Of the several full-page ads it purchased in Variety, one took a conspicuously novel tack: a caricature of a man pushing a stroller and the boldfaced headline SHE LOVES ME NOT IS BING CROSBY’S GREATEST TRIUMPH SINCE THE TWINS!

  While Bing was shooting films, flogging soap for Woodbury, and recording, Dixie was on every bit as tight a schedule. She learned about her second pregnancy a few months after she gave birth to Gary. Kitty Lang, who helped nurse her as well as the infant, had briefly left for New York to settle Eddie’s affairs, promising she’d be back before Dixie delivered. She returned to find Dixie suffering from chronic back pain. An X ray revealed twins. Despite her distress, Dixie was pleased when tiny Monogram Pictures called and asked her to star opposite Robert Armstrong in a quickie production they promised to complete in less than two weeks. She asked Kitty to be her stand-in so they could continue to spend afternoons together. Kitty’s own life had just taken an upward turn. Dixie’s friend, Alice Ross, now working as her secretary, located a small home for Kitty in Toluca. With help from friends (Richard Arlen’s brother-in-law was the contractor), Kitty rebuilt it to suit herself, a niece, and two dogs. When one of the dogs took ill, she took it to the local veterinarian, Dr. William Sexton. She became Kitty Sexton.