by Gary Giddins
Bing: I’m delighted to hear it, and may I say that all day long I’ve been admiring your splendid red suspenders.
Mischa: A great many pianists wear suspenders exactly like these.
Bing: Any reason?
Mischa: Yes. To hold up their pants. 38
The joke was older than vaudeville, a cousin to minstrelsy’s road-crossing chicken, yet it generated an enormous response, in part because Levitski was delivering it, but chiefly because Bing did not see it coming and cracked up. His script read, “Because the flannel is soft and doesn’t cut into the shoulders the way elastic suspenders do.” Radio laughter galvanized audiences with its titillating suggestion of an indiscretion, especially Bing’s, for he was almost always unflappable.
Kuhl marveled at Bing’s ability to pilot the show no matter what the obstacles, sometimes sacrificing his own numbers. “Drastic cutting, late in the game, hurt show,” Kuhl noted of one program, “but not as much as if Bing with typical, Quixotic gallantry, hadn’t insisted Avalon Boys do two numbers at expense of his own medley, which we cut.” 39 When Bette Davis’s segment was shortened for time, Kuhl wrote, “an ad-lib of Bing’s” (unpreserved) saved John Reber “the price of orchids.” 40 At times, Bing’s ad-libbing proved “the only way out when the free speech of the show gets beyond control — and it’s the free speech that makes the show.” 41
After KMH had been rolling for a few months, the New York Post radio columnist observed that what began as “a slightly casual touch” quickly “crystallized into an attitude of catch-as-catch-can good humor,” adding that no other show could so ingratiatingly offer artists of the caliber of Harold Bauer and Lotte Lehmann: “Mr. Crosby presents them not as something that the audience ought to like but as something that the audience will like.” 42 Bing’s presumption flattered his listeners. Their presumption that he was one of them, despite his much publicized prosperity in times of economic woe, flattered Bing. Movie-star wealth was an ancient story by the mid-1930s — the fantastic estates and servants and blocklong cars, the yachts and exotic playgrounds. But on Bing, who so obviously enjoyed his good fortune, it looked good, providing vicarious pleasure for his fans, as well as a measure of proof that the system — America itself — was not in irreversible decline.
* * *
The KMH Bing was almost instantly reflected on the silver screen. Paramount bought a Damon Runyon story, “Money from Home,” that Ernst Lubitsch wanted to direct him in; the idea, in part, was to show off Bing’s riding abilities. The story was rejected, however, in favor of Rhythm on the Range, a contemporary western designed to capitalize on Bing’s success with cowboy songs. The plot, a wire hanger on which to drape the music and comedy, recycled one of the Depression’s favorite fairy tales, apotheosized in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night: a wealthy and beautiful heiress runs out on her effete fiancé and finds happiness with a penniless, average Joe — average like Clark Gable or Bing Crosby. Bing himself had snared an heiress in We’re Not Dressing, and he would get two more in Double or Nothing and Doctor Rhythm. In the early drafts, the heiress was a mere showgirl fleeing the bright lights, and Jack Oakie and singer Frances Langford were set to costar. Those plans were scuttled with many others. Paramount kept Bing on salary for three months before a story was finally approved.
After producer Benjamin Glazer hired director Norman Taurog, and a roomful of writers cobbled together the script, production was delayed by the search for a leading lady. The contenders included Jean Arthur and Olivia de Havilland, but the choice narrowed to two talented but little-known Paramount starlets: sweet-faced nineteen year-old former model Marsha Hunt and stunning twenty-two-year-old University of Washington graduate Frances Farmer. “I lost out, and it broke my heart,” Hunt recalled. “For once, instead of just being a pretty young thing, like most leading-lady roles, here was something where Bing sang to you. He would win her, lose her, and win her back, and then fade out. Frances, who was not a comedienne, got the role, and it broke my heart.” 43 Hunt’s booby prize was a publicity stunt: she escorted two frogs representing Bing and Burns to the annual jumping frog contest at Angel’s Camp, a ghost town in northern California. Neither frog won.
By the time the film began to shoot, in late April, KMH had been on the air for three months, and Burns was tapped to reprise his role of Bing’s pal on the big screen. He had already played small roles in a few Saturday-matinee westerns, but Rhythm on the Range established him as a briefly dependable if minor movie star in his own right. Playing opposite Burns was another newcomer, a veteran vaudevillian of nineteen, who some thought walked away with the picture. Martha Raye was an original, and if her knockabout antics quickly dated, they overwhelmed audiences in the 1930s. Sharing a stage with her parents since the age of three, Maggie, as she was known to friends, climbed the lower rungs of show business, desperate to make herself known and liked. She perfected an aggressive and lusty attack, shorn of vanity. She was also a stunning singer, and her powerful rhythmic sense and brassy projection might have earned her a reputation as a Swing Era warbler. Yet she trusted only her comedie ability, a talent recognized by Charlie Chaplin, who cast her as his unsinkable victim in the 1947 Monsieur Verdoux and allowed her to steal their every scene. Maggie’s wacky humor was bolstered by a rubbery face centered on a square maw of a mouth and a curvaceous figure that gave a shivery edge to her manhungry bellow, “Ooooh boy!”
While singing at a club outside Los Angeles, she signed up for a Sunday-night turn at the more glamorous Trocadero, where performers on the make entertained performers who could afford places like the Trocadero. In the audience were Jimmy Durante and Joe E. Lewis, who assisted her with friendly heckling, and an astonished Norman Taurog, who offered her a screen test. At Benjamin Glazer’s request, Sam Coslow went down to the joint where she was working and volunteered to write a specialty number for her test. The result, “Mister Toscanini,” was perfect — part fake ballad and part raucous swinger. The test delighted Glazer and Taurog, who resolved to add the song as well as Maggie to the picture. In order to avoid offending a living maestro, however, a change in title was mandated. Reborn as “Mr. Paganini,” it became her trademark number. Coslow recalled that at a sneak preview of the picture, Raye’s delivery of the song literally stopped the show — the audience cheered until the projectionist reran the scene.
That response was appropriate enough for a movie that was, in effect, filmed radio — specifically, filmed Kraft Music Hall. It is not a succession of radio numbers strewn around a plot, like The Big Broadcast, but rather a variety show in which plot is routinely interrupted to accommodate specialty numbers. The action revolves around Bing, but his character has little history or depth beyond his on-air personality. In this kind of picture, it does not matter whether he is decked out in a Stetson or a yachting cap; he is basically the same guy — winning, then losing, then winning the girl while singing like nobody’s business. Ever the cordial host, he took it upon himself to soothe the nerves of movie newcomers Raye and Frances Farmer, calming them down and boosting their confidence.
It’s a shame Rhythm on the Range didn’t have a script worthy of the potential chemistry between Bing and Farmer, whose brief, stormy career virtually began here. (Howard Hawks saw the rushes and chose her for Come and Get It, her best film; the next year she joined New York’s Group Theater to star in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy.) An opalescent blond beauty, she was obliged to dye her hair bright red, as was Raye, the better to accommodate Karl Struss’s cinematography. Farmer was slim, secure, and observant, an expert listener with the manner of a patrician coed, cocking her head and looking at her costar with bemused innocence. She described the filming as “a long sweet nightmare,” 44 claiming that she never really knew what the film was about. But as the only cast member who wasn’t called upon to be musical or funny, she brought depth to a shallow role. The fetching contrast between Crosby’s chaste shyness and her glimmering frankness defined a new motif in Bing’s movies: the KMH-era Bing, u
nlike the Sennett Bing, is always pursued, never in pursuit. Bing and Dixie invited Frances and her husband, actor Leif Erickson, to Rancho Santa Fe. Bing was enchanted by her. After the wrap he gave her a diamond necklace she treasured all her life.
Bing enjoyed making Rhythm on the Range and more than a decade later said the part of Jeff Larabee, the singing cattleman turned rodeo performer, was his favorite. Much of the filming was done on location in the High Sierras, where, as he wrote, “every prospect pleases and only work is vile.” 45 He took full advantage of the opportunities to fish and ride and claimed that the experience of working on the picture inspired him to purchase, in 1943, his own working ranch in Elko, Nevada. Bing avowed that he wore no makeup beyond a suntan and dropped twelve pounds before shooting commenced, though he looks chunky in his flannel shirts and jeans. His most exhaustive preparation entailed two weeks’ perfecting a technique for hand rolling cigarettes. In the film he hands the results to Frances; Mother Crosby’s boy refrained from puffing onscreen.
With its quartet of stars and an octet of contributing songwriters, the picture is so free with in-jokes and non sequiturs that it doesn’t even bother to deliver on the promised confrontation with the bad guys who vainly contrive to kidnap the heiress. Bing’s Jeff Larabee was named after an offscreen character in Two for Tonight. His boss, the mannish Aunt Penny (Lucille Webster Gleason), suggests, as she stomps around Madison Square Garden, Bing’s ancestor Cornelia Thurza Crosby, the trout expert who scandalized that very venue by wearing a green skirt seven inches above the floor. Since Martha Raye was known for a drunk routine, one was pointlessly thrown in, allowing her to murder “Love in Bloom.” Bing, who routinely used his movies to employ friends, found a slot for Louis Prima, whose jazz was pulling them in at the Famous Door, and Bob Nolan’s Sons of the Pioneers, including Leonard Slye, who later changed his name to Roy Rogers. His most important hand up was to a new acquaintance who had been working New York and Hollywood for years with infrequent success, Johnny Mercer.
Born in Savannah in 1909, Mercer got his break as Bing had, with Whiteman. Although he sang with southern-fried gusto and occasionally played juveniles (Leo McCarey thought he had potential as a film actor), Mercer was first and last a lyricist of genius, known for his peerless ear for the vernacular. Except for two or three revues, however, he enjoyed little attention on Broadway, and in two years out West he placed songs in only three pictures, notably To Beat the Band (“If You Were Mine”). But none were hits, and offers were drying up. While driving home to Savannah through Texas, he came up with an idea — words and music — for a song about ersatz westerners. He showed “I’m an Old Cowhand” to Bing, who put it in the film and later made a jolly and tremedously popular record with Jimmy Dorsey. “I really think he saved my Hollywood career,” Mercer said. 46
It marked the beginning of a long personal and professional relationship. “It was my good fortune to know him when he was married to Dixie and his boys were small,” Mercer wrote a friend long afterward. “They often rode on my back and I enjoyed the happy days around the track and poolside with this most attractive couple. She was very kind to me, as I was in such awe of him and she knew it. Also, I was a Southerner, and she made me feel at home. I shall never forget their kindness to a very young writer and performer.” 47 The film rendition of Mercer’s song lacks the swinging élan of the record, but it’s the picture’s hot spot, a jam session in which Bing, Raye, Burns, Prima, and the Sons of the Pioneers trade choruses, each leading to a satirical break, for example:
I know all the songs that the cowboys know,
’Bout the big corral where the doagies go,
’Cause I learned them all on the radio.
Yippy I O Ki Ay.
Bing displays many facets of his vocal and comedie charms. When he sings “Empty Saddles” mounted on a horse in Madison Square Garden, his pianissimo head tones are uniquely affecting, a style derived from John McCormack and beyond the ken of most popular singers; Sinatra, for example, never attempted it, though Presley did. Bing’s love of silent comedians comes through when least expected; while serenading Farmer in a boxcar headed west (and hanging a modesty curtain in the process), he does a funny Stan Laurel nod. When they finally reach the ranch and embark on “I’m an Old Cowhand,” he demonstrates all his patented vaudeville shtick — jerky short-arm movements, tap dancing, torso wiggling — and, backed by guitar only, swings the tail of his solo chorus.
Rhythm on the Range easily returned its million-dollar investment as one of the top-grossing pictures of the year, number one on Para-mount’s roster. It was, as usual, a smash in towns and cities all over the country, breaking several house records, including one in Tucumcari, New Mexico, where the marquee promised, “Bessie Patterson in Rhythm on the Range.” Bessie, whose walk-on was so fast that even her mother had to forbear blinking to see it, was the girl who had won the Miss College Humor contest in 1933, for which she was promised a bit part. Now that she was eighteen, Paramount gave it to her, quietly. She was not necessary for the publicity campaign, which began with Bing, in cowboy regalia, whistling a few measures of “Where the Blue of the Night” while preserving his hands and feet in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Kraft delivery trucks were billboarded with the film for weeks. A thousand Kraft dealers in New York alone were provided window displays. Jukeboxes were prepped with Crosby records. The reviewers went along, although Variety was at a loss for a pigeonhole: not really a western, it advised, not really a musical — the cowboy stuff takes place in New York, the jazzy stuff takes place at the ranch, and most of it takes place on the road. Nevertheless, the paper concluded, Crosby “will satisfy most everybody.” 48
* * *
Bing had planned to spend the summer — the racing season — in New York with Dixie and made plans to travel there with Everett and his wife. But with KMH finding its footing, John Reber persuaded him to postpone the ten-week vacation stipulated in his contract until September, to continue broadcasting. Bing probably didn’t need a lot of persuading. On June 1 the Crosbys took possession of their new home at 10500 Camarillo Street. 49 The custom-tailored southern colonial could accommodate three boys and more, should any arrive, as well as servants. It was a picture-postcard house, and the Crosbys loved it. Bing’s dad regarded it with awe as a “mansion or palace.” “It sure is some place,” he remarked. 50
A driveway curved through a ranging front lawn and up to the front door, while out back nearly half a block of trees made way for a tennis court, pool, bathhouse, and chicken coop. The roof, flat but for two modest gables, shaded a porch the length of the house with the help of six slim pillars. Inside, the spacious and pillared foyer faced a magnificent winding staircase that led to the bedrooms on a balconied second floor. Downstairs were Bing’s den and bar, a playroom, and the living room — with fireplace and imposing chandelier — where Christmas and other parties were held. The design and furnishings mixed Georgian, Regency, Chippendale, Dresden, Victorian, and more; the walls were a panorama of linen, damask, and mirrors, the colors dark oak and a sedate blue-gray. The twenty rooms were, on balance, snug and lived-in. An official of the American Institute of Decorators remarked that no more than two rooms, the living room and dining room, could be described as formal. 51 The new house motivated Bing to renegotiate contracts; his price soared to $150,000 per picture, $3,500 per broadcast.
He decided to maximize his summer schedule by shooting the independent film he had wrangled from Paramount. Although the studio had fired Manny Cohen, he continued to hold contracts with Bing (and Mae West and Gary Cooper). If Paramount expected distribution rights, it was badly mistaken. Cohen formed Major Pictures Corporation with Bing, Everett, and John O’Melveny and sought bids for distribution of its first project, which as yet had neither story nor score, only Bing. Columbia’s Harry Cohn won, and an agreement was drawn up. They would film a musical in which Columbia, Bing Crosby, Inc., and Cohen each owned a third. Paramount claimed not to care, shrugging off t
he deal as no different than a loan-out, which was true to a degree, except that loaning Bing was tantamount to making a cash donation to a rival studio, and an independent production relieved the recipient of any obligation to return the favor.
They decided to move ahead with a story called The Peacock’s Feather, by Katherine Leslie Moore, as elaborated by screenwriter Jo Swerling (The Whole Town’s Talking, It’s a Wonderful Life) and retitled Pennies from Heaven. Within weeks of wrapping Rhythm on the Range, Bing was on a soundstage again, this time as an ex-con who dreams of singing and playing lute on a gondola in Venice. Pennies from Heaven was neither the best nor the most successful picture Bing made, but it was surely the most emblematic of those that preceded the Road series and Going My Way, presenting him literally in the role with which many people already associated him, that of an American troubadour. The film’s immense impact on his career was manifest in its recruitment of Johnny Burke and John Scott Trotter, who became, respectively, his principal songwriter and musical director.
And, as it was Bing’s project, he had the clout to repay an old debt. He wanted Louis Armstrong in the film. Cohen balked, seeing no reason to entail the expense of flying him in and having no desire to negotiate with Armstrong’s crude, mob-linked but devoted manager, Joe Glaser. Bing refused to discuss the matter. The Reverend Satchel-mouth was about to make his Hollywood debut. What’s more, though his part was small (one musical number, two comic exchanges), Louis would be top-billed as part of a quartet of stars. 52 No black performer had ever been billed as a lead in a white picture. The combination of Louis’s delightful performance and billing that presumed his magnitude as an artist greatly enhanced his career. Louis had previously appeared in two shorts and a (long-lost) independent feature; after Pennies from Heaven he became a Hollywood regular, instantly signed by Paramount for Martha Raye and Mae West vehicles and subsequently asked to provide cameos in pictures made for Warners, MGM, Columbia, Goldwyn, and others.