by Gary Giddins
Knowing that Dixie was pregnant, the film crew showed her every consideration. Kitty was paid handsomely — $200, nearly three times the going rate for two weeks of extra work — and the shoot presented no problems. But the songs unnerved Dixie, who feared everyone would compare her with Bing; she steeled herself with a few drinks before making the prerecordings. The film, Manhattan Love Song, was of no consequence, and Dixie looks pallid. Shortly after it was completed, in her fourth month, she experienced contractions and her cautious doctor ordered her to bed, forbade parties and alcohol, and limited her time with Gary to visits in her bedroom, where she remained for the next four months. Bing made up for it by being “a doting father,” Kitty remembered. “As a result, Gary did become a little spoiled.” 34
The twins were born six weeks premature, weighing less than four pounds each, on July 13, 1934. Their arrival was treated as a major news story. When Bing allowed them to be photographed with Gary for the press the following September, the Los Angeles Times ran the picture on its front page, right-hand column above the fold. As the babies lay in the incubator, Kitty visited the ward with Bing and asked him about their names. He said, “Well, I’ll name the largest one Dennis Michael, after my family, as he looks more Irish, and Dixie can name the other.” 35 Dixie chose Phillip Lang, Phillip from the Greek “lover of horses,” and Lang after Eddie. When Ted’s wife, Hazel, had delivered twin girls a few months before, Ted wrote Bing, “You have to have three of a kind to beat a pair of queens.” Bing now wired his brother, “A pair of kings arrived today.” 36
With only thirteen months separating Gary and the twins, two nurses were added to the household. Gary, resenting the interlopers, began acting out to claim the attention of his parents. The fraternal rivalry would remain a constant in the boys’ lives, generating countless fistfights and feuds and ultimately resulting in a break between Gary and Phillip. As her strength returned, Dixie grew bored. The nurses took over her chores with the babies while she took up tennis, revealing a genuine talent for the game until a kidney infection forced her to give it up. That, Kitty thought, “started Dixie drinking more than usual, particularly as it meant she was sitting home again.” 37
In the weeks between the completion of She Loves Me Not and the birth of the twins, Bing bought a sixty-five-acre property in Rancho Santa Fe, twenty-five miles north of San Diego, five miles from Del Mar. The large adobe ranch house, with exterior walls two feet thick and a white wraparound porch supported by beams and posts, was built a hundred years before, and Bing hired architect Lillian J. Rice to restore the cultivated simplicity of the nineteenth-century Spanish style. At the same time, he modernized it, adding a new wing, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. Dixie decorated with sturdy wooden furniture, brass adornments, gingham and chintz, keeping it spare to protect valuables from the three infants, whose maple cribs were aligned in one room, with a rocking chair separating Gary’s from those of the twins.
Except for one historic recording session (Decca’s first) on August 8, Bing was free until late in the month, when filming on Here Is My Heart began. He and Dixie spent much of that time at the ranch, where her health improved as they entertained friends. Publicity photographs of Bing and Dixie, looking trim, youthful, even enchanted, on the tennis court or by the pool glisten with romance. Bing invested in his first racehorses and kept riding mounts at the ranch. He even labored with the work crew on the construction site for days, returning to Hollywood with callused hands. That did not fit the image of the self-made prince and his devoted princess, so publicity photographs focused on Bing in his yachting cap and Dixie — incandescently blond — in a bathing suit, the loving pair incarnating a fantasy as appealing as any movie.
Back at Toluca, the old routine ensued. Bing returned to work while Dixie sat disconsolately at home. Her own career was little more than a memory, despite the just-released Manhattan Love Song, of which Variety reported: “Film shows the potential value of Dixie Lee and Helen Flint, both of whom can go places if properly handled, especially Miss Flint.” 38 Dixie enjoyed Bing’s triumphs but envied them a little, too. She wilted when obliged to meet the press, always as an appendage to Bing, never as an accomplished entertainer in her own right. A few drinks helped her face his clamorous public. Kitty suggested to Bing that Dixie needed a mink coat and other accessories suitable to her station as a star’s wife. “You’re right,” he told her. “I never thought of it.” 39 The next day the two women went on a spree and bought everything Dixie wanted. At other times Dixie was loath to spend money at all.
With Larry Crosby acting as her agent, Dixie was signed to star in a Paramount film, Love in Bloom. She of course had no say concerning the title, which exploited Bing’s song (though it was not performed in the picture) and underscored her connection to the singer. But she was adamant that Paramount not promote her as Mrs. Bing Crosby. Paramount hardly promoted her at all. Dixie had the central role but was billed fourth, after Burns and Allen and Joe Morrison, the tenor who introduced “The Last Round-Up” — a strange choice for a leading man at Bing’s studio until one remembers that the Crosby-style baritones who overwhelmed the business a few years later were not yet on the scene. Morrison proved no more tempting to moviegoers than Lanny Ross and left the business within a year. So did Dixie. And yet Love in Bloom, though negligible, contains her best work. She brought pathos to the shamelessly clichéd role of a street-smart trouper from the dregs of show business, and her sole musical number — Morrison did most of the singing — is the picture’s undoubted highlight.
Most of the figures involved in the production had worked with Bing, including producer Benjamin Glazer, director Elliott Nugent, and songwriter Mack Gordon, who composed the unmemorable songs without his partner, Harry Revel, though Revel received screen credit anyway. But Dixie, never one to visit her husband’s sets, did not know the crew, and the crew did not know her. They were all embarrassed by their first meeting.
Dixie had dyed her hair a golden red, and on the first day of shooting, Kitty was sent to wardrobe to find a matching wig and a dress so that she could serve as her friend’s stand-in during lighting tests. The wardrobe mistress fitted her with a wig that might have suited Harpo Marx and a tight sheath dress. As Wally Westmore worked on Dixie in her dressing room, Kitty, feeling like a stuffed sausage, waited on the set. When the assistant stage manager called for cast and crew, she draped a full-length mink over her shoulders, put on dark glasses, picked up a script and Dixie’s purse (which Dixie had asked her to safekeep), and joined the others. Cameraman Leo Tover (College Humor), mistaking Kitty for the star, panicked. He had been told Dixie was pretty, he mumbled to his assistants. While Kitty baked under the lights, Tover circled his team for a pep talk, imploring them, for Bing’s sake, to make Dixie look good. Minutes later Larry brought in Dixie, groomed to gleaming perfection in a pleated dress. Tover ordered Kitty to work in street clothes.
Love in Bloom effectively marked the end of Dixie’s career. She was twenty-three, though she looked older and warier. Variety said she played her part “excellently,” 40 but only Larry thought it would boost her standing. Convinced that the experience “built up her confidence,” 41 he convinced Jesse Lasky to give her the lead in his doomed 1935 Fox production Redheads on Parade, in which the twins — not yet nine months old — make their debut and Dixie plays opposite the recurring John Boles. Larry wrote Ted it was “sure fire to make her a star — the only gal in it. She made some great records for Decca, & is singing and acting swell as I told her she does better without liquid stimulant — more natural.” 42 But the picture bombed. Aside from a few radio spots (notably a star turn on Al Jolson’s Shell Chateau) and two records with Bing, Dixie enjoyed no more professional hurrahs. The stage jitters that had always plagued her increased to the point where she declined to appear in public. Yet, as the wife of one of the most adored men in America, her name was known to everyone.
Another career ended, tragically, on September 2, 1934, when Russ Colum
bo died in a bizarre shooting accident, at twenty-six. Though no longer a major rival, he had continued to shadow Bing, aiming for a career in movies. Appearing in the tawdry Broadway Through a Keyhole (based on Ruby Keeler’s affair with a mobster when she was young), he did well enough to land a contract with Universal. But Latin lovers were out of season, and his Wake Up and Dream was a disaster; that it provided him with his first hit in two years, “When You’re in Love,” could be largely attributed to the controversy surrounding his death.
Russ had been killed while visiting a friend, Hollywood photographer Lansing Brown, who showed him a set of antique dueling pistols, not realizing that one pistol held a live charge. When it went off accidentally, the bullet ricocheted off a mahogany desk and through Columbo’s eye. A new Columbo legend sprang to life as Carole Lombard, who called Russ “the great love of my life,” 43 and other friends conspired to keep Russ’s ailing mother from learning of his death; they regularly sent her checks and letters purportedly mailed by her son from various European cities where he claimed to be in great demand. The charade continued until Mrs. Columbo’s passing, two years after Lombard lost her own life. At the funeral, Carole had sobbed uncontrollably, comforted by Bing, who served as a pallbearer. Five years later she married Clark Gable. In January 1942, while returning from a midwestern tour to promote U.S. bonds, Carole Lombard died in a plane crash, at thirty-three.
Larry’s disappointment with Dixie’s retreat from show business was matched by his general frustration with the entertainment world and his brothers. He wrote to Ted: “Bing too heavy — testy & hard to handle. May quit anytime. Ev a big shot, etc. The future — very indefinite. All depends. This is a tough racket! Nothing done in a business way! Merit is the last thing that counts.” 44 Yet at that very moment, Bing’s film acting was rising to a new level. While Dixie vainly went through the paces of her comeback, Bing completed the picture that would at last convert his detractors and secure his position as a captivating comic actor — Here Is My Heart. Improbably, the plot hinges on antique dueling pistols.
Adapted from Alfred Savoir’s play The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (filmed in 1926), the picture reunited Bing with director Frank Tuttle and inaugurated his long collaboration with his favorite cameraman in the prewar period, Karl Struss. Having served up “Love in Bloom,” Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger helped Bing to three more brass rings with their new score: the perennial jazz standard “Love Is Just Around the Corner” (written by Robin with Lewis Gensler), the bygone “With Every Breath I Take,” and the classic ballad “June in January,” which dominated sales charts for nearly two months.
As casting began, Paramount sounded out the idea of promoting Bing and Kitty Carlisle as a new romantic team by asking exhibitors for their opinions. The results convinced Manny Cohen he was on the right track. The pair’s costars included some of the finest character actors in the business: Roland Young, Alison Skipworth, Akim Tamiroff, and William Frawley (a longtime Crosby pal), as well as the mysterious Marian Mansfield, a fetching and enthusiastic young woman whose only other appearance in pictures was a minor role in Dixie’s Love in Bloom.
Once again Carlisle was touched by Bing’s professionalism and modesty. “He was always right, Johnny-on-the-spot. We had Alison Skipworth and Roland Young and Reginald Owen, three first-class stage stars, much older than we were, and we were doing a scene with them, and he turned to me and he said, ‘What the hell are we doing starring in this movie with those folks?’ He could not get over the fact that they were the supporting cast.” 45 According to Tuttle, the script was written by Harlan Thompson (who shares screen credit with Edwin Justus Mayer) with an assist from playwright Vincent Lawrence, who was hired to write an extended love scene between a waiter (Bing) and an impossibly lofty White Russian princess (Kitty). “They played it to the hilt,” Tuttle wrote. He believed that Bing had “developed into a first-rate comedian” and was especially tickled by an episode in which Bing serves the Russians while wearing a fake mustache that falls into their soup: “He played this broad scene with the telling seriousness of an accomplished farceur.” 46
The story concerns a radio singer named J. Paul Jones, who, having made his first million, sets out to do all the things he dreamed of doing as a boy, including fishing dead center in the Atlantic Ocean, singing “Yankee Doodle” to the Sphinx, presenting dueling pistols owned by John Paul Jones (no relation) to the Naval Academy, and marrying a princess. He already has one of the pistols and learns that the second is owned by Princess Alexandra, in Monte Carlo. Money and class drive the plot. To get access to the princess, he pretends to be a waiter, secretly purchasing the hotel to further his ruse. When he discovers that the high-living Russians are penniless, he surreptitiously stuffs their purses with cash. As in We’re Not Dressing, he brings the highborn down to his own exemplary plane. “You can’t offend royalty,” his hotel manager cautions. “No, you probably can’t,” Bing says, “but let’s make an effort anyhow.” He ultimately lands his princess and converts her family to capitalism, offering one relative an honest day’s work as a hotel doorman.
The Ruritanian romance between commoner and royalty was old hat long before 1934, but Bing gives it a new twist, playing the commoner as an Everyman American of such good and honest disposition that Old World values crumble before him. His performance is utterly relaxed and infectious. He more than holds his own with those eminent stage actors, taking quiet command of every scene, confidently inserting Bingisms: a pet phrase (“keep it shady”) or a cowboy inflection or an Oliver Hardy chin waggle. Bing’s love of the old comedians is particularly apparent in a scene in which he adopts the mustache and squint made famous by Jimmy Finlayson, a ubiquitous actor in the classic shorts of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.
Tuttle, who propels the film at a clip, is no less sure of the material. A sequence in which several servants squeeze Bing into his waiter uniform is worthy of Lubitsch, and a strangely disconnected passage in which Bing stalks a man down a corridor is his homage to silent comedy. No little credit must go to Karl Struss, who won the first Academy Award for cinematography, for Sunrise. Bing finally looks handsome, every vestige of callowness gone. Struss shadows Bing’s features to make them appear chiseled and strong, while his eyes are limpidly romantic. In one diverting scene, the camera is all but stationary as Bing governs and sustains the action on his own: he is in his room, listening to his own record of “June in January,” whistling a duet, reading a paper, changing from a robe to a dinner jacket, singing along. When his recorded self finishes with a head tone, he kibitzes, “Well, you made it.”
Paramount knew it had something special and issued several publicity shots, most featuring Tuttle, including one with Kitty and Bing hanging on to the director’s tall shoulders. As usual, Bing did not allow himself to be billed alone or above the title; in the ads Carlisle’s name is the same size as his. But billing, publicity, and good reviews did not help her case at Paramount, which deemed her neither beautiful nor charming enough to go the distance. “There was something in Photoplay that I was sort of the young star of the year. And I got notices,” she recalled. “I really thought I was on my way. That’s why I was so surprised when they paid me off and sent me home.” 47
The reviews focused on the leading man. “Bing Crosby is something more than a crooner; he is a comedian with a perfect sense of timing,” declared the New York Daily News. 48 The venture was praised by Variety as “an excellent example of musical comedy picture making,” especially Bing’s duet with his own recording. 49 Even Time, which months earlier had found the Crosby face blank and adenoidal, capitulated: “To cinemaddicts who share the Princess’ feeling about crooners, Here Is My Heart will reveal that Bing Crosby is not only an accomplished singer but a talented comedian.” 50 Marquis Busby expressed the consensus in the Los Angeles Examiner: “As I see it, Clark Gable, Fredric March, and Gary Cooper had better take a good look at the writing on the wall. They’d better hurry and take some singing lessons. Now all t
he studios are looking for another Bing Crosby.” 51
Yet Here Is My Heart was for many years a forgotten film, out of circulation since the 1930s. Paramount’s copies rusted, and the picture was presumed lost, though Bing’s version of the commoner had a lingering afterlife. Billy Wilder reworked it in his script for Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, in which a Soviet snob succumbs to the American way, and in his self-directed The Emperor Waltz (1948), starring Bing as a phonograph salesman who brings to heel an Austrian countess. Then in July 1977, three months before his death, Bing invited film preservationist and Crosby collector Bob DeFlores to his home to screen for him some rare short films Bing had not seen since they were made. At the end of the day, he offered DeFlores anything he wanted from his nearly complete vault collection, including a pristine duplicate of the original print of Here Is My Heart. The picture’s long neglect is puzzling because it is central to Bing’s canon, both for the quality of his performance and for launching his new image as an all-American character: a plucky, eternally boyish, self-made millionaire with a common touch and uncommon voice.
Midway through shooting Here Is My Heart, Tuttle threw a party for Bing and Dixie to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, a lavish Beverly Hills affair climaxing with a midnight swim.’ It had been a blessed year — the twins, the ranch, a career of limitless horizon. On Christmas Day, shortly after the film debuted in New York, Bing celebrated the reopening of the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, a bedroom community northeast of Los Angeles. It was a momentous occasion. The original Santa Anita was built in 1907 and failed quickly; but the new one, constructed at a site several miles from the first, brought racing back to the San Gabriel Valley for the first time in twenty-five years. Bing invested $10,000 to secure box seats. Hardly a day passed that he did not visit his investment.