Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  On Christmas night he sang “Silent Night” on the radio, initiating a tradition that continued for forty-three years and associated him as closely with Christmas as anyone since Charles Dickens, if not Santa Claus. When the 1934 Quigley poll was tabulated, Bing was seventh among the top-ten box-office attractions, the first and — until 1936, when Gary Cooper scored — only Paramount male to make the list. One other Paramount player, Mae West, also ranked, for the last time, in a field dominated by stars at Fox (Will Rogers, Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple) and MGM (Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressler, Norma Shearer). For Bing, who became a fixture in the poll, placing in fourteen of the next twenty years, the victory signaled a new beginning. He was about to take charge of Kraft Music Hall and, with Jack Kapp, revolutionize the record business.

  19

  DECCA

  I know how to keep my pulse on the multitude.

  — Jack Kapp (1947) 1

  The cornerstone years of the Bing Crosby legend stretch from 1934 to 1954, peaking in the middle and late 1940s. During those two decades his popularity attained an unexampled luster at home and abroad. What changed in 1934, to accelerate the public’s acceptance of him? After all, he had been a successful entertainer for nine years — he had recorded much of his finest music while triumphing on the stage, on the air, and in motion pictures. The answer has less to do with the nature of his work than with Bing’s willingness to redefine his public role. He was now on the verge of reinventing common-denominator aesthetics, creating a national popular music that pleased everyone. The cost, in the opinion of many observers, was encroaching blandness.

  Like the once knavish, now suburbanized Mickey Mouse or the once succulent, now prim Betty Boop, Bing had to be housebroken. America’s puritan strain always kicks in when disaster strikes, especially after a long night of partying, as though depressions and plagues and floods and earthquakes were retribution for staying out till dawn. Time to sober up and knuckle down. But whereas Mickey and Betty became so innocuous as to be of no use except as corporate symbols and souvenir adornments, Bing blossomed in the process. His own moralistic streak emboldened him as an actor and personality. What his singing forfeited in muscularity, it gained in poignancy. When he periodically reasserted his jazz chops, he revealed a maturity and eloquence that often trumped his Jazz Age triumphs. In this regard, Bing’s metamorphosis suggests Chaplin, who reduced his Tramp’s original sadistic streak in favor of a pathos that afforded him far greater nuance. Like Charlie, Bing never totally abandoned his scampish irreverence, as became clear in the 1940s Road movies. Nor was his stubborn streak diminished, as corporate chiefs who crossed him or underestimated his resolve learned to their dismay.

  The new Bing, projected in the mid- and late 1930s, was propelled on four fronts: movies, records, radio, and public relations. In each arena he was guided by knowing and determined pilots, true believers.

  Six months before his death, Bing was asked by a radio interviewer whom he would most like to thank for his success. He gave what had become his standard answer: “I think it would be the A and R man at Brunswick and then Decca Records, Jack Kapp. I was just going on the air for the first time when I signed with him and he had me on a recording program that embraced every type of music — sextets, choral music, light opera, liederspiel, jazz, ballads, comic songs, plays, recitations…. And that kind of diversified record program, I believe, was the most important thing in the advancement of my career. I thought he was crazy, but I did what he told me.” The interviewer observed that Bing simply took hold of every opportunity, to which Bing rejoined: “I wasn’t doing it. He was doing it. He’d say, ‘You ought to do this,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, Jack, this is silly.’And he’d say, ‘You come on down and do it,’and I’d do it because I thought he was a nice guy and he had good taste. I know I didn’t have any. I just did it because he wanted me to.” 2

  Jack Kapp and Bing Crosby had at least four things in common: outsize ears, a love of Al Jolson, remarkably retentive memories, and the belief that in matters of taste, the public is usually right. The last did not come naturally to Bing, but Jack patiently converted him, one record at a time, overcoming Bing’s misgivings and downright disdain. Jack did not live long enough to witness the inevitable split between mass taste and his own, though it is entirely possible he might have rolled with the punches for another generation. Bing, who lived long enough to feel abandoned, attempted to roll and even rock, following the dictum of the man he increasingly prized as the principal architect of his career. Kapp’s law was simple: melody. His brother, Dave, during a vacation in Virginia, photographed a statue of Pocahontas with her arms raised in prayer and added Jack’s mantra as a caption, “Where’s the melody?” Dave mailed the picture to Jack, who enlarged it, printed several copies, and posted them in Studio A and other strategic places in the Decca offices.

  In Bing. Kapp recognized the ultimate melodist, a true bard for the times. It was Kapp who stubbornly clung to the idea that Bing could become America’s voice, the first Everyman singer. He had to combat cynics who characterized Bing as a mewling crooner, which was easy enough, but he also had to mollify and restrict Bing while convincing him of his potential. Jack, who could not play or sing a note, was Bing’s most formidable collaborator. “I regard his association with me as something of a sacred trust,” Kapp would write in 1949. “Moreover, I believe there has been a mutuality of faith, and from that mutual faith came the renascence of an industry which was once decadent and which is now a source of world-wide entertainment and cultural education.” 3

  Bing trusted him unequivocally. “All the song-pluggers that used to annoy the artists asked him to record their songs or sing them on the radio,” recalled Frieda Kapp, Jack’s widow. “But he wouldn’t. He would say, ‘If Jack says I should do it, I’ll do it.’ That’s how loyal he was.” 4 Asked to name the important people in his career, Bing offered a fairly consistent list over the years, including his mother and father, Everett, Leo McCarey, William Paley, John O’Melveny, Buddy DeSylva, and one or two more. But he always began with Jack and always for the same reason: his policy of musical diversification. Bing rarely included anyone in that litany with whom he had a personal or formative association, except his parents and Everett. Unless specifically asked, he did not short-list Al Rinker, Paul Whiteman, Harry Barris, Eddie Lang, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, or even Dixie. He kept a separate mental file for the power brokers and advisers who had helped him mold his career, publicly honoring them yet keeping them at bay. As much as he and Jack liked each other, they rarely socialized. As far as Frieda could recall, they never dined alone.

  Frieda could not figure it out: “Bing was very, very fond of my husband, but he was a cold person to know. We bought a house on East Sixty-fourth Street during the war, when the prices were down to nothing, a beautiful five-story house. And Bing came to New York one year, and Jack would have loved to have him come to our house. But he wouldn’t. The next day in the studio, Jack says, ‘What did you do over the weekend?’ He said, ‘Oh, I went to a Jewish show.’ So Jack says, ‘What did you do in a Jewish show? You don’t understand Yiddish.’ Bing says, ‘I didn’t have to. The woman sitting next to me told me what was going on.’Jack would have been proud to show him that house, but Bing would never let anyone get that close. But Jack was crazy about him.” 5

  Bing was crazy about Jack, too; he forbade his business manager from auditing Decca royalty statements (until after Jack’s death), for fear of embarrassing him. “If he was your friend, he was a good friend,” Frieda said. Yet he could be oddly unfeeling. In the late thirties, the Kapps stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the summer months, while Jack recorded. One night they threw an elaborate party in Bing’s honor at the hotel swimming pool, with Jimmy Durante leading the orchestra. “There must have been about two, three hundred people there that night,” Frieda recalled. “Hours go by and no Bing. Never showed up. Never showed up. Forgot.” 6

  Nothing
underscored the bond between them more than Bing’s steady refusal of incredibly lucrative offers from rival labels — at one point nearly $6,000 a disc. “The idea of working for anyone else was preposterous to me,” Bing wrote, “and I never gave those offers serious consideration. With Jack I felt that I was in the hands of a friend and that whatever he told me to do was right. “ 7

  Bing’s allegiance made Decca possible. The record industry hit rock bottom in 1932 and 1933, and yet — as Kapp complained to anyone he could buttonhole — the companies stubbornly refused to lower the price of discs, which sold for seventy-five cents or a dollar. In 1921, 110 million discs were sold; Paul Whiteman’s “Whispering” alone accounted for 2 million sales. In 1933 the total figure was down to 10 million. Many people were certain that the business was bound for obsolescence. Desperate to recoup a fraction of their losses, record labels merged or dissolved. By 1934 only two were standing: Victor, which was shielded by RCA’s radio network, and the American Record Company (ARC), a branch of Consolidated Film Industries, which monopolized the market for bargain discs (stock arrangements, unknown singers) in chain stores like Woolworth’s. As a holding company, ARC acquired Columbia and several smaller labels. Artist royalties counted for little in that climate, when the average disc moved a thousand copies and hits were tabulated in the realm of 40,000 sales, sometimes as few as 20,000. “Love in Bloom” was considered a smash at 36,000. Yet Bing refused the big advances, wagering that Kapp could restore the industry.

  Jack Kapp was born in Chicago on July 15, 1901, the eldest of four children. 8 His Russian immigrant father, Meyer, became a distributor for Columbia Records in 1905 and opened the Imperial Talking Machine Shop, selling phonographs, discs, cylinders, and sheet music. Jack went into the business immediately after high school and displayed a singular flair for sales; he was said to have memorized the catalog numbers of every record in the store’s inventory as well as the addresses and phone numbers of faithful customers. He married Frieda Lutz, his childhood sweetheart, in 1922 and with his younger brother, Dave, opened the Kapp Record Store. Four years later he joined Brunswick-Balke-Collender, a company that made bowling balls and billiard tables and operated Brunswick Records and its race affiliate (distributed largely in black neighborhoods), Vocalion. Put in charge of Vocalion, Jack hired a black recording director, J. Mayo Williams, and scouted, signed, or produced such legendary musicians as King Oliver, Jimmie Noone, Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Andy Kirk, and Louis Armstrong (whose OKeh contract he dodged by releasing the discs as Lil’s Hot Shots), as well as hillbilly, blues, and jug bands. He also worked with established Brunswick stars such as Al Jolson, Fletcher Henderson, and Ted Lewis, developing personal relationships with them all.

  In 1930, largely as a result of Jolson’s hugely successful hit “Sonny Boy,” which Kapp recorded over the protests of his employers, Warner Bros. bought Brunswick for $5 million and relocated Jack to New York, where he worked with comptroller Milton Rackmil. As general manager of recording, he hired Victor Young as his house conductor and signed Bing, Mildred Bailey, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Glen Gray, Cab Calloway, and more, an exceedingly smart roster. But Warners had not figured on the Depression and soon wanted out of the record business. While maintaining ownership (the sales value was meager), Warners practically gave the company to ARC on a ten-year lease, hoping for royalties down the road. With Brunswick now established as ARC’s flagship, Kapp recorded more than ever. The company dispatched him to England in 1932, to sell Brunswick’s British franchise to the audacious stockbroker, Edward R. Lewis.

  Three years earlier Lewis had taken control of the foundering English Decca Company and turned it around. The mysterious name, Decca, coined in 1916 by a company that produced the first portable gramophone, has no meaning. According to Decca producer and historian Geoff Milne, it was devised, like Kodak, as a word that can be pronounced only one way anywhere in the world. Lewis needed a source for American artists, and Brunswick was ideal. By 1934 Bing sold more discs in England than in the United States; “Please” exceeded 60,000 sales and “The Last Round-Up” 80,000, double the numbers in America. Despite discrete backgrounds, Kapp (the Chicago Jew) and Lewis (the future knight of the realm) spoke a similar lingo concerning records. Lewis endorsed Jack’s conviction that the industry’s salvation lay in marketing premium performers on premium labels at bargain prices. They hatched a plan.

  When Brunswick’s president, Edward Wallerstein, disclosed that he was going to Victor, Jack was certain the company would appoint him president. In April 1934 Kapp, Rackmil, and Columbia sales manager E. F. Stevens induced Lewis to finance a 50 percent option on the still independent Columbia for what Lewis described as “the astonishingly low price of $75,000,” plus an option to buy Brunswick from Consolidated Film. 9 The idea was to fold Columbia into Brunswick, creating a new combine that would in turn be purchased by English Decca. Arriving in the United States for the first time, Lewis was greeted at the dock by his lawyer, Milton Diamond, and an underwriter. (Curiously, he sought the participation of William Paley, who declined; four years later, after the industry rebounded, thanks largely to Decca, Paley’s CBS bought ARC for nearly ten times as much — a bargain even at that price.) Kapp assured Lewis that in the unlikely event he was blocked from Brunswick’s presidency, he would resign and take Bing, whose contract had an escape clause allowing him to leave with Jack. Lewis went home thinking the deal was set. But as soon as he arrived in Southampton, Diamond summoned him back. They had been betrayed.

  Consolidated Film’s ARC had bought Columbia (for $70,500) and reneged on the Brunswick option. “We decided there and then,” Lewis recalled, “to form a new record company.” 10 Kapp prepared to resign, as promised, and so did Rackmil and Stevens. On the surface, the venture seemed nuts. All but Lewis would be leaving lucrative positions without even having an office to go to; indeed, for several weeks they operated out of Milton Diamond’s suite. But Kapp convinced Lewis they had everything but financing: the most popular singer in the United States as well as the goodwill of numerous top artists, producers, and distributors who liked and believed in Jack. Furthermore, he was certain they could cut a deal with Warners Bros. to buy a pressing plant and office space that had fallen into disuse when ARC took Brunswick off the movie studio’s hands. Above all, they had a radical idea: premium records at discount prices.

  Lewis believed, contrary to common wisdom, that “the end of an unparalleled slump” was the ideal time to start a company. He was convinced of a “terrific latent demand for records,” if they were affordable. 11 The men made their plans, and on July 14 Lewis sailed home once again. Two days later Kapp resigned his post at Brunswick. He wired Bing, who agreed to stick with him in the absence of a written contract, for a $10,000 guarantee. Jack immediately announced the formation of a new record company, Decca, with himself president (Lewis grudgingly allowed him the title, believing he held the balance of power as chairman and chief stockholder), Stevens vice president, Rackmil treasurer, and Diamond secretary. English Decca issued 25,000 common shares, holding 18,000, which it used to procure subscriptions to raise a $250,000 operational base. Remaining shares were divided among Jack (1,250), Stevens (750), and Warners (5,000). When Jack declared that a Decca disc would sell at fifty cents, the industry rolled its eyes and groaned. “If Decca can’t get 75 cents for Crosby, Casa Loma, etc., just as Brunswick, then what’s the use?” a nonplussed Variety asked. 12

  The loyalties Kapp had cultivated paid off instantly. Brunswick thought its roster impregnable, but every artist represented by Rockwell-O’Keefe followed Bing to Decca — Glen Gray’s Casa Loma band, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. Victor Young hired on as Decca’s music director and house conductor. Guy Lombardo, Isham Jones, Ted Lewis, and Earl Hines also made the leap, as did such new additions to the Kapp family as Chick Webb, Ethel Waters, Art Tatum, Noble Sissle, Johnny Mercer, Jimmie Lunceford, and Bob Crosby, a middling singer who, at twe
nty-one, was appointed front man for a cooperative orchestra that made its name combining swing and Dixieland. Within a year Jack enjoyed the particularly sweet coup of signing Louis Armstrong, the beginning of a twenty-year association with Decca. Kapp gutted Brunswick’s production team, too, recruiting engineers and producers, among them J. Mayo Williams and Joe Perry, who he asked to set up Decca’s Los Angeles studio and supervise recording sessions by Bing and others.

  “We lived in Oakland,” Joe’s widow, Elsie Perry, recalled, “and Jack Kapp called us about six o’clock in the morning, and he said to Joe, ‘I want you to go to the office today and quit your job.’ He says, ‘I’m forming Decca and I want you with me.’ And so Joe — ‘cause he loved Jack Kapp, they were like brothers almost, you know — went to the office and he put in his resignation. The next year Jack asked us to move to Los Angeles.” 13 Joe went on to produce such classics as Bing’s “White Christmas,” Jolson’s “Anniversary Song,” Armstrong’s “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” Nat Cole’s “Sweet Lorraine,” Ella Fitzgerald’s “Stairway to the Stars,” and Judy Garland’s “You Made Me Love You.” 14 Bing named a racehorse after him, Decca Joe.

  Jack also engaged, no less brusquely, his brother, Dave, who was working as a talent representative in Chicago, averaging ninety dollars a week. Jack told him to make a field trip to record a singer in the Midwest. When Dave complained, Jack said, “Don’t you understand? We got a new record company and you’re with us” — at fifty dollars a week. 15 Dave was so effective developing the hillbilly catalog that Decca cornered the country-music market for years. While Jack was recruiting staff and performers, Warners — as he predicted — solved the problem of office and studio space. In exchange for its 5,000 shares of Decca stock, it turned over a New York office building at 799 Seventh Avenue, a factory that made radio transcriptions, pressing equipment, and a $60,000 promissory note. 16