by Gary Giddins
Jack: Yeah, Brunswick will, too.
Bing: You want it that way?
Jack: For Christ’s sake, come on.
Bing: Jack, you’ve got fifteen minutes.
Jack: All right, you can make it in six.
Bing: You want it that way?
Jack: Come on, sing the first chorus.
Bing: The boys don’t want to sit around here…
Kapp: They do.
Bing:… and listen to this endless bickering. They want to either get it made or go home.
Jack: I know! They want to go home!
Bing: And I’m sure I’m similarly minded. And I won’t even make any excuses.
Jimmy: Let’s make “Dippermouth.”
Bing: All right. [crowd laughter]
Jack: Come on, Bing. Sing the first chorus.
Bing: No.
Jack: You might as well do it right.
Bing: Let’s not do it at all.
Jack: But why do that? Seems like it’ll be a terrific hit.
Jimmy: Who is this guy anyway, what happened?
Bing: Who?
Jimmy: That guy.
Bing: You know the son of a bitch.
Jack: Oh, what’s the difference? You’re in the picture, aren’t you? Son of a bitch or no son of a bitch, you’re still in The Big Broadcast.
Bing: I might get myself taken out. What do you think of that?
Jack: Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what you do. If you get yourself taken out, we’ll make it two ways. One my way and one your way. If you get yourself taken out, I’ll release your way. If it stays, you gotta make it my way. Bing: Is that a bargain for you? [crowd laughter] How do you like that? Would you like a dance record of “Wished on the Moon” with a vocal chorus, me singing it, or not? No? G’bye.
Jack: If you turn back the clock four years, it’d be entirely different. We can’t do it now. I’m telling you we can’t do it. C’mon, c’mon.
Bing: I’m on my way, Jack.
Jack: C’mon, c’mon, Bing.
Bing: Nooo, what have I got to do? Swear out an affidavit? You want that, Jack?
Jack: Listen, do whatever you want, Bing. I’m not going to argue with you. This means more to you than it does to me.
Bing: Jack, it don’t mean a fuck to me.”
Jack: Well, you sing it in The Big Broadcast. The picture will…
Bing: I think it would be a nice record with just a swell arrangement and a vocal chorus.
Jack: In all my experience, I’ve never seen you in such an arbitrary mood. Bing: Well…
Jack: And I want to tell you, you just —just because you happen to have it in for a fellow by the name of Diamond.
Bing: No, that’s not it — that’s partly it, yes.
Jack: I say this, though, it has nothing to do with the song. He can be a son of a bitch, but if the tune is great, you should do it right.
Bing: It’s got nothing to do with it.
Jack: Yes, it has.
Bing: My reasons for doing it this way are threefold.
Jack: All right, give me the first one.
Bing: First I’m very hoarse…
Jack: [shouts to control booth] Are we getting this down?
Bing:… this afternoon and I don’t think I can sing any more than one chorus and do it well. Secondly, the guy who controls the tune is a pirate.
Jack: Well, supposing he is?
Bing: Thirdly, I think the record as discussed and arranged would be an interesting salable piece of property which you can well afford to have on your shelves, [crowd laughter]
Jack: That’s where it would probably stay!
Bing: Now, if you want it that way, say yes and if you don’t, say no and let’s stop fucking around.
Jack: Up to you, Bing.
Bing: I’m telling you what I want to do.
Jack: I can’t argue with you if your mind is made up.
Bing: Been made up for days.
Jack: It has?
Bing:… talked it over the phone, we discussed this at great length.
Jack: Who did you discuss it with?
Bing: Uhhh, T. J. Rockwell. Might as well put him in the middle.[much crowd laughter]
Jack: Do it any way you want. I don’t care. What can I do?
Bing: Maybe I can’t even do it, Jack. I don’t know. 43
He did it, barely, his tones taut and breaking. Years later Kapp, who preserved the recorded contretemps in Decca’s archives, liked to complain that Bing won the argument but that the record did not sell. In fact, “I Wished on the Moon” was a substantial hit, outselling the Two for Tonight songs and crowning Decca’s sales list before the movie was released — a telling example of a song’s appeal overriding a singer’s failings and possibly gaining a touch of mystique from the surprising brevity of the vocal. Subsequent disputes between Bing and Jack are neither documented nor rumored. Perhaps Bing was genuinely chagrined by the episode. In any case, he doubled his recording agenda for the next year, resuming Kapp’s program in November with two long, back-to-back sessions, scoring a number one hit with “Red Sails in the Sunset” and doing nearly as well with “On Treasure Island” (a bewitching performance marred by an uncharacteristically corny Victor Young arrangement) and the songs from the movie on which Bing was currently working.
Bing’s sessions, almost all with Jack present if not presiding, became known as the easiest in the business. He would arrive early, chew gum and smoke his pipe, read the racing form or newspaper, run down the material if it was new to him, and stick a pencil behind his ear. When he and the band were ready, he stepped over to the microphone, on which he habitually parked his gum, and, on average, completed five songs in two hours. He coined a couple of descriptive phrases: a Kappastrophe was an arrangement Jack disliked; those Jack approved were Kapphappy.
Bing and Dixie returned to California in early September so that Bing could begin preparing for Anything Goes, the hottest ticket on Broadway and the most expensive Crosby project to date. The movie rights alone cost $100,000; the negative cost topped $1.1 million. If Larry Hart had a snit over “Swanee River,” imagine how Cole Porter must have felt about Hollywood’s treatment of his worldly musicals. In New York he was toast of the town. In Hollywood he was just another ink-stained wretch whose songs were not controlled by Famous Music. When RKO turned his The Gay Divorce into The Gay Divorcee, it canned his entire score except “Night and Day.” Anything Goes was another story. It was Porter’s masterpiece. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse had written an outstandingly droll book, set entirely on an ocean liner, but it was Porter’s urbane words and music that made it a theatrical event. Paramount retained only four of the show’s twelve songs, discarding “All Through the Night” and commissioning a ching-chong Chinese minstrel number called “Shanghai-De-Ho.”
Censorship was at issue. The Motion Picture Production Code, introduced by Will Hays in 1930, had proved largely ineffectual (even Hays’s perverse resolve, agitated by the Hearst papers, to squelch Mae West had came to little) until the summer of 1934, when he hired Catholic journalist Joseph Breen as an enforcer. No sooner did Paramount purchase the rights to Anything Goes than Breen was told that the plot involved a gangster who impersonates a priest while toting a violin case with a machine gun. “As you know,” he cautioned the studio, “recently official censor boards have been deleting scenes of machine guns in the hands of anybody but police and other properly organized bodies.” 44
Breen ultimately acceded to the machine gun, but not the “definitely suggestive” 45 “All Through the Night” (“you and your love bring me ecstasy”), and warned that the showstopper “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” might be interpreted as a burlesque of religion. After Breen went to work on the title song, Paramount hired the unrenowned Brian Hooker (a lyricist for Rudolf Friml!) to revise Porter’s lyric. Yet despite three rewrites and submissions, “Anything Goes” was relegated to background music for the credits. “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “You’re the Top” were cleansed
of allusions to cocaine, Minsky dancers, and Holy Moses, for what Breen termed “obvious reasons.” 46 The Leo Robin—Frederick Hollander interpolation (one of three), “Shanghai-De-Ho,” offended him, too, not because it burlesqued Chinese people, but for the “plainly vulgar meaning” 47 of the line “Soon the chows and Pekinese will stay away from cherry trees.”
The script was trimmed of dozens of words and phrases (“hot pants,” “we’ll rub him out,” “snatch”) and situations, including one in which it could be construed, the censors grumbled, that a woman passenger was asking directions to the ladies’ room. Not all was lost. With Lindsay and Crouse adapting their own book, they salvaged much of the original story, and the cast was outstanding: Ethel Merman re-creating her role of chanteuse Reno Sweeney; Charlie Ruggles, deftly handling the comedy (though the New York critics lamented the absence of Victor Moore, who created Public Enemy No. Thirteen on the stage); Ida Lupino, underemployed but enticing; and Bing, a costume-changing stowaway pursuing Lupino and pursued by Merman.
Because Bing’s role had to be revised from that of a juvenile, the new songs were intended to play to his strengths. Two succeed: “Sailor Beware” is an energizing though pointless diversion, and “Moonburn” represents Hoagy Carmichael’s first movie sale. (Bing helped another old friend by arranging a bit part for Eddie Borden, who toured with Crosby and Rinker in the Will Morrissey revue.) Hoagy’s song employs period slang — “Get away from that window before you get moon-burned,” Roscoe Karns told George Raft in Night After Night — and offers a balmy interlude, though the version heard in the picture does not compare with the jamlike record Bing made for Decca with pianist Joe Sullivan, guitarist Bobby Sherwood, and an unknown bassist. “Truck on down,” Bing tells Sullivan, and they do, for a “hot” classic.
The movie is no classic. Despite its ups, it suffers from a discursive, flattened feeling that restrains the zaniness. Director Lewis Milestone, justly celebrated for the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, was an odd choice for a musical; he promptly returned to dramas. He employs fancy shots and wipes, abetted by Karl Struss’s exquisite photography, but the tempo is uneven and the remaining Porter songs are stiffed, either because Merman is too brazen or Bing too controlled. They excel musically and comedically on “You’re the Top” yet fail to indicate a dalliance; nor do they make much of the (bowdlerized) lyric’s polished wit. The critics were generally pleased. Variety wondered whether Bing’s jazzy singing was added “for the special benefit of the boys at the Famous Door,” a New York jazz club. 48 Time loved it, including the new songs, describing it as “rapid, hilarious and competently directed by Lewis Milestone.” 49 The Legion of Decency also thought it “hilarious” and “a good picture” but refused to recommend it because of “suggestive dialogue and double-meaning lines.” 50
Audiences flocked to see Anything Goes, extending its run in New York, Chicago, Hartford, Kansas City, Birmingham, Denver, and elsewhere. The picture received an enormous boost from Bing’s new sponsor, Kraft, which plastered the title on delivery trucks and ordered salespeople to spread the word. Paramount arranged tie-ins with magazines and special promotions in menswear and music shops. Though radio continued to hurt theater receipts, the ether did wonders for Bing, and not just in marketing synergy. Anything Goes was the last picture he made before taking over Kraft Music Hall. His subsequent movies reflected an augmented stature. Kapp proved that Bing could be America’s voice. KMH repositioned him as every American’s neighbor.
20
KRAFT MUSIC HALL
Two unpredictable bad spots — (1) Bing muffled a top note. (2) Elissa Landi lost a page. Bob Burns had one very long story that took too long for the laughs. There was so much fun and frolicking by cast it probably was not so enjoyable over the air.
— H. C. Kuhl, KMH program report (1936) 1
Jack Oakie, a popular guest in the early days of Bing’s tenure on Kraft Music Hall, liked to recount a cherished story about an appearance by Detroit Symphony Orchestra conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who was also a concert pianist. Shortly before airtime, as Oakie told it, while humorist Victor Borge was warming up the studio audience, director Cal Kuhl realized that the show was running long and anxiously asked Bing to instruct spectators not to applaud. “You’re kidding,” Bing said. 2 Kuhl was adamant. There must be no applause, especially for Gabrilowitsch: “Now listen, we know he’s going to murder ‘em, and if they get started applauding for him, he’ll louse up our time.” 3 Bing made the announcement.
The program was in progress when the pianist arrived, an entrance recalled in loving detail by Oakie, who was fascinated because Gabrilowitsch was married to Clara Clemens, the daughter of his idol, Mark Twain. Oakie watched him doff his large-brimmed fedora and cape and pace silently, awaiting his turn. When Bing introduced him, Gabrilowitsch marched to the piano and, in Oakie’s telling, “gave one of the greatest performances of his career! He played the last notes, lifted his hands, and held them above the ivories in a dramatic pause.” The audience was quiet as a tomb. He just sat there, dazed. “Those silent moments, which must have seemed an eternity to him, must have been one of the greatest shocks of his life,” Oakie observed. Finally, he bestirred himself and, as if in a trance, walked off the stage and out of the building. Afterward, Bing wanted to know what was troubling the maestro. “Bing,” Oakie asked, “did you tell him about the no-applause business tonight? ‘Oh, my God!’ was all Bing could say.’Oh, my God!’” 4
This is classic show-business apocrypha: the setup, the details, the specific names, the vivid movielike finish. It even has a second punch line. So thunderstruck was the musician, he left the building without his cheese basket, the sponsor’s much coveted gift to each guest. Though something like that may have — or certainly should have — happened during radio’s golden age, Oakie’s story is as much a fabrication as his idol’s “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Ossip Gabrilowitsch never appeared on Bing’s show. Oakie himself appeared only once before Gabrilowitsch’s death. The pianist on that occasion was Alexander Brailowski; Oakie was rebuked by the director for “discourteous” mugging during his spot. 5
But Oakie’s nuanced telling gives the game away, underscoring the absurdity of the tale: Victor Borge didn’t relocate from Denmark to the United States until years later, and he joined the Crosby show as a regular cast member, not as an audience warmer; Bing’s musical guests were invariably involved in patter with the star; Kraft Music Hall, like all network programs, was a minutely timed operation, and radio did not permit the luxury of “silent moments” (Bing would be on the mike in an instant), especially when time was short. Above all, Oakie ignored a unique component of the show: applause was always forbidden, by directive of Crosby himself, who found it disruptive and contrived. Bing particularly disliked what he called “organized applause” at the start of the show, before he had done anything — or so he argued — to merit it. Had he been able to persuade his sponsor, he would have had no audience at all. Listening to disc transcriptions of Bing’s early Kraft shows, one is startled by the rapid intros and outros surrounding musical numbers, the absence of any kind of mitigating response, the consequent fast pace and easy, nothing-special ambience. One wouldn’t know an audience was present, but for its frequent laughter.
During Bing’s reign, Kraft became a lightning rod for comic yarns, some of which were actually true, for example, the often told tale of David Niven and the bounteous cheese basket. Every guest received a large wicker hamper containing pounds of the sponsor’s products, individually wrapped in cellophane, festooned with ribbons, and tied to a teakwood tray. Shortly before he was scheduled to appear, Niven was warned by Samuel Goldwyn, to whom he was under personal contract, that the producer was entitled to whatever he was paid for his radio work but would magnanimously allow the actor half. “When I got home,” Niven wrote in a memoir, “we meticulously removed half the spread from the jars, cut every cheese in half, every sardine in half, then with an envelo
pe containing a check for half my salary from the show, I sent the lot to Goldwyn inside half the basket.” 6
Bing’s Kraft Music Hall generated droll postmortems in part because it represented something different for radio. It had become a way station for entertainers high and low and was a must for Hollywood notables plugging their wares. A pleasure for listeners and performers alike, thanks chiefly to Bing’s even keel on air and behind the scenes, KMH erased Hollywood’s last resistance to radio as a low-life competitor. Here was fresh ground, on which hillbilly comedian Bob Burns and longhair icon Leopold Stokowski could mix it up under the benevolent gaze of ringmaster Bing. The show was so effortlessly amusing, the humor so unforced, that the audience assumed it was largely if not entirely ad-libbed. This assumption was shared even by people supposedly in the know, like the press. They believed KMH to be, no less than the numberless talk shows spawned in its wake, a playful hour in which Bing and friends shot the breeze, joked, performed, and periodically took time out so the announcer could sell cheese.
That a program as complicated as KMH, with its repartee, musical numbers, commercials, and skits, could be produced off the cuff was about as likely, in 1936, as Ossip Gabrilowitsch wandering off the set in silence. But the assumption was an unbeatable tribute to Bing’s finest and longest-running characterization, as the relaxed, neighborly, decent, straight-shooting, genial host who was too much himself, too much a creation of his own lazy tempo to read a script or mind cues. Whenever Bing cracked up or misread or stumbled over a lovingly intoned ten-dollar word or scooped a punch line with his plucky baritone, he contributed to the illusion of spontaneity. The genuinely impromptu moments, for Bing was no slouch at quips, were isolated. Never mind the thousands who (quietly) attended his weekly broadcasts and saw the artists standing around a mike with scripts in hand; the radio-listening audience had its own mind, and in that realm Crosby was simply not the rehearsal type. As his radio persona grew in stature, it subsumed the personae he created on records and film.