Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  Sadly, Bing and Louis do not get to perform a vocal duet, though it would have been easy to schedule one in the nightclub scene that features Armstrong’s band. Evidently, this was a bow to the color line, which was harder to breach in movies than on radio or records. The two do share a vaudeville sketch, however, in which Louis shows off his distinct yet never fully exercised acting skills for the first time. Their camaraderie is unmistakable. Bing, as usual, is the straight man and Louis the clown — a chicken-stealing, mathematically challenged yard worker who is also, conveniently, a genius entertainer. Variety found Armstrong the picture’s strongest asset, not only “as an eccentric musician but as a Negro comedian.” 53 Armstrong himself enthusiastically recounted his role thirty years later:

  Those scenes I had with Bing in that picture were Classics. Especially the scene where he wanted to open this Big Time Haunted House Night Club. But he didn’t have enough loot to open this joint. And he liked our little seven piece band. So… He said Henry (that was my name in the film), I would like to hire your band and I will give you and your boys ‘TEN’ percent of the business, so you go and talk it over with your Musicians. Come back tomorrow and let me know as to what conclusion your boys came to. The next day I was right on time. And — Mr Poole (Bing’s name) met me halfway in the back yard, saying Henry, have your boys decided yet? And I said, Mr Poole, I talked it over with my boys and told them you are willing to give them ten percent of the business. And my boys said that they cannot figure out ten percent as we’re only seven men. So if you will be so kind as to give us seven percent, We’ll — Just then Mr Poole said, OK Henry, it’s a deal. And I smiled as I walked away saying Mr Poole, thank you very much. — I told those guys that you would do the right thing. — ‘GASSUH’ personified.

  Oh, I could run my mouth about my Man Crosby — those Broadcasts moments, and Stuff — why you’d be reading for years. But I must say this. Here’s paying tribute to one of the finest Guys in this musical and wonderful world. With a heart as big. (As the world) Carry on Papa Bing, 01 Boy!! You will still be giving young singers food for thoughts (Musically) for Generations to come. 54

  Bing’s other costars were less enchanting: Madge Evans, an attractive but wooden former child star who left Hollywood two years later, and Edith Fellows, a talented scampy thirteen-year-old who soon suffered her own problems making the transition to grown-up roles. As Patsy, the beleaguered orphan whom Bing befriends, Fellows was the first of several screen children he aided over the years. In his movie roles Bing more often rescued lost children than bore his own. He seemed genuinely fond of Fellows. Nanette Fabray, a child performer herself and Fellows’s roomate, recalled Bing’s visiting her when she was in bed with the flu and later arranging a fancy dinner for both girls.

  The cursory plot has Bing feuding with Madge Evans for eight reels and marrying her in the ninth. Yet the picture opens with a startling scene: Bing behind bars on a smuggling charge, absurdly awaiting his impending release in the same cell block as a killer on his way to the electric chair. In a strangely upbeat mood, the killer asks Bing to deliver a letter to the family of his victim (Patsy and her grandfather, played by Donald Meek), leaving them an old abandoned house in New Jersey.

  Pennies from Heaven, despite its fantastical script, is one of the few Depression musicals to acknowledge the Depression, albeit without actually using the D-word. In the pre-Code years Busby Berkeley invoked hard times and suicidal bitterness in his Warners musicals, but by 1935 Fred and Ginger and Eleanor Powell and even Berkeley himself were setting their work in the rarefied chambers of penthouse ballrooms and battleships. Pennies from Heaven, probably the only Hollywood musical set in a part of New Jersey other than Atlantic City, presents a vision of contented socialism in which everyone is pleasant except people with jobs: the latter are carnival tricksters, social workers, municipal officials, and landlords. The only direct political shot is taken at the Townsend Plan, a shady pyramid-pension scheme conceived by a retired doctor in California, subscribed to by millions in the period before Social Security. Larry Poole’s view of privation is the familiar refrain of live and let live, formulated as only a Crosby character can: “I’m the last of the troubadours,” he says, “the friend of man. I envy nobody and I’m sure nobody envies me.”

  Bing is most effective in early scenes. He kept his weight down this time, and he looks seasoned and even slightly angular. While singing for coins, he encounters Patsy at a fair and performs “So Do I” in an effectively sentimental episode, the song reinforced by plush strings and woodwinds, his audience a montage of working-class neighbors, the treacle cut by close-ups of Bing. His line readings are sharp, and his composure and canny physical movements contribute to the impression that he has the makings of a deeper actor than previously suspected. The KMH spirit is asserted in an improvised group-sing (“Old MacDonald”) and in his dialogue with Armstrong and others. He mines laughs from lines that do not necessarily contain them.

  The film is pushed amiably forward by director Norman Z. McLeod, an underrated comedy specialist, who presided when the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Danny Kaye, and Bob Hope did some of their finest movie work; he later directed Bing and Bob in Road to Rio. But Pennies from Heaven derives its staying power largely from a remarkable score. Composer Arthur Johnston had, with Sam Coslow, written one of Bing’s breakthrough songs, “Just One More Chance,” along with the scores for College Humor and Too Much Harmony. He now surpassed himself in the company of a lyricist ten years his junior, Johnny Burke, who, like Carmichael and Mercer, achieved his place in Hollywood through Bing.

  “One of the best things that’s happened to me is a one hundred and forty-five pound Irish leprechaun named Johnny Burke,” Bing wrote. 55 Born in northern California in 1908 and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Burke was a small, round-faced, hammy wag who endeared himself to Bing instantly. He had been knocking around music publishing houses for years, writing songs, mostly novelties, with Harold Spina. “Annie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” was their one substantial hit, thanks to Fred Waring and Guy Lombardo, though Fats Waller and the Dorseys had fun with their “My Very Good Friend, the Milkman.” Burke did anonymous work-for-hire at Fox but never managed to get a song into the movies, so Bing was taking a chance on him for his first independent production. He was to become one of Bing’s closest friends, until his drinking put a wedge in their relationship. For seventeen years Burke, whom Bing called the Poet, was his personal songwriter, the man behind a string of evergreens introduced by Bing through movies or records or both, among them “This Is My Night to Dream,” “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “An Apple for the Teacher,” “What’s New?,” “Swinging on a Star,” “Sunday, Monday or Always,” “But Beautiful,” “Like Someone in Love,” and “It Could Happen to You.” In all, he wrote twenty-three film scores for Bing, more than 120 expressly tailored songs.

  Johnny got off to a rousing start with Pennies from Heaven, especially the title song, for which he wrote a singular, much imitated and parodied verse:

  A long time ago, a million years B.C.

  The best things in life were absolutely free.

  But no one appreciated a sky that was always blue;

  And no one congratulated a sun that was always new.

  So it was planned that they would vanish now and then

  And you must pay before you get them back again;

  That’s what storms were made for

  And you shouldn’t be afraid for…

  And into the famous chorus, a winning variation on the Depression tenet that life is as often as not a bowl of cherries. The song was so cogent, Bing and McLeod elected to shoot it live, with the orchestra on the soundstage, forgoing the economy-minded practice of prerecording. The even-keel swing of Johnston’s abac melody, with its recurring rhythmic motif of four quarter notes (“Ev-ry-time-it rains it rains pen-nies-from-heav en”) and an expansive double-triplet measure toward the close, make it memo
rably accessible and helped ensure its acceptance.

  The whole score was popular and widely covered: Count Basie swung “Pennies from Heaven,” and Billie Holiday and Artie Shaw each recorded three selections. Of the score’s five songs, four yielded Decca hits for Bing (“Pennies from Heaven,” “Let’s Call a Heart a Heart,” “So Do I,” and the charged “One, Two, Button Your Shoe,” with a counting game setting off the stanzas) and one for Armstrong, the exhilarating “Skeleton in the Closet.” That tune — performed by a masked studio group with drummer Lionel Hampton in the film but recorded with Jimmy Dorsey’s band — was singled out by many critics as the film’s pinnacle.

  Bing’s “Pennies from Heaven” dominated sales of records and sheet music for more than three months. His record established a “new high in gross sales all over the country,” according to Down Beat, which credited Bing’s continuing popularity to his ability to “sing a sweet ballad with the same finesse he displays in warbling a ‘get-off’ tune.” 56 Kapp was so certain of the record’s success that before releasing it, he recorded a second version, with Bing, Louis, and Frances Langford. The song was nominated for an Academy Award (it lost, reasonably enough, to the Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields ballad “The Way You Look Tonight”). In England it was said to be the most recorded movie melody since the start of talking pictures.

  * * *

  Writing songs is one thing, orchestrating them another. Because Pennies from Heaven was independent, the production did not have access to the Paramount music department. Columbia was not known for musicals, and Arthur Johnston was not sufficiently trained to arrange his melodies for a score. Burke suggested to Bing that he farm out the assignment to his friend, John Scott Trotter. 57 Knowing of Trotter’s long association with the Hal Kemp band and admiring his arrangements for the band’s singer, Skinnay Ennis (“Got a Date with an Angel”), Bing readily agreed. Trotter had been with Kemp from the beginning, when they organized a student band at the University of North Carolina that declined to play stock arrangements and, as a result, developed an original style. Kemp led a sweet band that occasionally played hot jazz; Bunny Berigan was the main soloist, and Trotter the pianist and chief arranger. He had met Bing once in 1930, on a night when Kemp was rehearsing late, long after the ballrooms had closed. Bing and Hoagy Carmichael walked in, the latter so excited about a new song he had written that, with Bing cheering him on, he took a running dive and slid the length of the dance floor on his belly, holding aloft the new manuscript: “Star Dust.”

  After Trotter left Kemp in 1936, he visited the West Coast for the first time, as a tourist. He had taken an apartment for a few months when Burke arrived with his wife to work on the film. Like Burke, he was twenty-eight, and for a while all three lived together. When Burke told him about the picture, Trotter protested that he was on vacation and turned it down — until he saw the songs. He arranged all but the Armstrong number. On the day the recording of the score was completed, Trotter packed his car and headed for New York, where a job awaited him with ARC, supervising recordings by the Andrews Sisters, Duke Ellington, Raymond Scott, and others, including a few historic sessions by Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson. (John Hammond, the initiator of the Holiday series, dismissed Trotter as an intrusive executive, but the presence of Bunny Berigan and Pennies from Heaven songs would seem to support Trotter’s claim to having produced those sides.) In June 1937 he received a wire from Larry Crosby: CAN YOU BE HERE 2IST. DORSEY LEAVING. YOURE TO TAKE OVER MUSIC ON KRAFT SHOW.

  The Swing Era was in full flower, and Jimmy Dorsey felt he was missing out. Tommy and many musicians he came up with were now leading popular bands, and their record sales not only were unprecedented for jazz but were stimulating the whole recording industry. And here was Jimmy, nationally prominent because of his role on KMH yet reined in by it all the same. He was encouraged to leave by Kapp, for whom he had already scored one hit, and his agent, Cork O’Keefe. With Fud Livingston writing his arrangements (“Too hot for you, Uncle Fud?” Bing ad-libs on their tub-thumping version of “I’m an Old Cowhand”) and an appealing Crosby-style baritone in Bob Eberle (who attended each KMH broadcast as a band member but never sang on the show), Jimmy was ready for the road. Carroll Carroll later implied that had Jimmy not quit, he would have been removed by Kraft in favor of a more versatile musical director. In any event, Jimmy left after the July 1 broadcast and prospered with the Swing Era.

  Trotter could hardly have been more different. Of his July 8 debut, Cal Kuhl’s only comment was that the featured instrumental was “not effective.” 58 But that was Bing’s final show of the season. When he returned in October, Bing and John Scott became working chums. Writing for Hal Kemp, Trotter had developed a vibratoless staccato style that he characterized as a refined Schottische rhythm; Johnny Mercer, a fan, more colorfully described it as a “typewriter” attack, clipped and orderly. 59 Trotter had also become accustomed to doubling the melody for singers who needed all the help they could get, while Bing preferred an arranger who let the singer alone. He surprised Trotter by emphasizing that opera orchestrations do not double the singer’s line and asked him to write “just that way.” 60 Bing chose the songs he sang on the air, in contradistinction to those he waxed for Jack Kapp. After each show, Trotter recalled, “Bing would go into the booth and select his numbers for the following week.” 61 He listed them on the left-hand page of a loose-leaf binder; a secretary typed them on the right-hand page. Trotter took the selections and went to work arranging them, his job for the next seventeen years.

  He was a huge but nimble and amiable man, as obsessed with cooking and antiques as he was with music. Though immensely well liked, Trotter was something of a loner, traveling the country to sample fabled restaurants or to London to visit Georg Solti, his lifelong friend. His solitary, self-sufficient manner appealed to Bing. John Scott, a popular weekend and dinner guest, maintained a friendship with the Crosbys long past the KMH and Decca years, encouraged by Bing’s second wife, Kathryn. Trotter never married, never lived with a lover; if he was gay, no one knew for certain. Alan Fisher, the Crosby butler during his second marriage, said, “He was totally asexual. Wasn’t interested in women, wasn’t interested in men, wasn’t a closet anything. He was very close to the first Mrs. Crosby and, if anything, closer to the second Mrs. Crosby, who adored him. He formally helped decorate their homes. Extremely good taste, beautifully mannered, witty and funny, the children loved him. John Scott Trotter coming to stay was always a joy. Bing Crosby loved him, I’d have to say that. And if he was going to confide in anyone, I’d almost say it would have been him. They always sat in the library to talk.” 62

  “He was fun,” Johnny Burke’s daughter, Rory, remembered. “He was at our pool all the time, a very large man in his swimming trunks, a little flamboyant with a big face, lots of curly brown hair, burly, strong, light on his feet — I can still see him jumping off the diving board.” 63 Stories of his devotion to food are legion. “When we had the private house he used to come often,” Frieda Kapp recalled. “A lovely fellow. Big. Once he came to the house after one of our holidays and we had a lot of gefilte fish left. And Jack says, ‘Give some of this gefilte fish to John.’ I said, Are you crazy? John, a southern gentile, what’s he going to do with it? He ate the entire platter.” 64 Carroll Carroll told of a weekend morning when John called Carroll’s wife to say he was making vichyssoise and wanted to bring them some. They arranged to have dinner that night, but John never showed. He apologized in the morning, explaining that the soup was so good that he ate it all himself, then went to sleep.

  In selecting musicians for the band, a new experience for Trotter, he drew on Hollywood studio players and added a small string section (it grew over the years) to the conventional big-band instrumentation. To sustain the swing and spontaneity Bing demanded, he peppered the ensemble with jazz musicians, including two former Whiteman trumpeters, Andy Secrest, whose solos carried a hint of Beiderbecke’s bright lyricism, and (when he could get him) Man
ny Klein, whose lustier attack was in demand all over town. Trotter also recruited trombonist Abe Lincoln, who became a Dixieland regular; drummer Spike Jones, who achieved much fame as a musical parodist; and, most important, guitarist Perry Botkin, who had worked as a New York session man with Victor Young, Red Nichols, and Crosby himself, on the later Brunswicks. Like Trotter, Perry was a large man and a Crosby loyalist; he occupied Eddie Lang’s chair for the next two decades. He was also a studio politician, and Trotter appointed him contractor, in charge of hirings. As the band grew, with violas and cellos, Trotter took to farming out many if not most of the arrangements. Among the young writers he apprenticed were Nelson Riddle and Billy May.

  “Really, I can think of so many times when he has rescued me from glaring gaffes and melodic clichés,” Bing wrote of Trotter, “when his choice of material, his arrangements, his use of voices and instruments meant the success of an album or a record.” He continued with the usual excessive modesty: “If I am able to distinguish the good from the bad, if I know anything about music at all, what little I know rubbed off Trotter onto me.” 65 What surely rubbed off on him was John Scott’s musical conservatism. For if he helped make KMH homier than ever, the cost was the accelerated weaning of Bing from jazz and his corresponding conversion to a more decorous and conventional style. Trotter was Bing’s man, not Decca’s, but as a versatile musician who preferred the middle of the road, he was a dream come true for Jack Kapp. Trotter conducted the majority of Bing’s records, but Jack knew better than to allow him full rein.

  As the impoverished thirties caromed into the murderous forties, the middle of the road — alongside Bing — was for many the only place to be. Crosby embodied stability, his life an apparently open book, his voice a healing balm. “The other man puts a nickel in the phonograph,” John Steinbeck writes in The Grapes of Wrath, “watches the disk slip free and the turntable rise up under it. Bing Crosby’s voice — golden.” 66 Bing was everywhere. KMH filled out the world’s mental picture of the man it knew from records, pictures, and fan magazines. If those close to him found him remote, ultimately unknowable, those at a distance thought they knew him about as well as you could know a man. Everyone thought he could sum up the public and private Bing, including a calypso legend named Roaring Lion. In 1938, when Portuguese businessmen paid his way from Trinidad to New York to popularize the music of the islands, the Lion played for President Roosevelt and appeared on Rudy Vallées show. After Bing dropped by for one of his recording sessions, the Lion commemorated his idol with a song released by Decca in 1939. It was called, simply, “Bing Crosby.”