Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  The Crowd

  The Birth of a Nation

  The Informer

  Vivacious Lady

  Any silent Chaplin film

  Ditto

  Ditto

  A Farewell to Arms

  The Big Parade

  Lloyd Hamilton comedy

  The list is striking in that seven of his selections are silent: Griffith’s landmark The Birth of a Nation; King Vidor’s two dramatic pinnacles, The Crowd and The Big Parade; and four comedies, three by Chaplin. Bing’s lifelong love of silent comedy is apparent throughout his work, and his devotion to Chaplin in particular comes through on numerous occasions when he strikes a bowlegged pose or executes a pigeon-toed walk or some sleight of hand with a prop. The three talkies include his only ballot for a Paramount picture, Frank Borzage’s pre-Code A Farewell to Arms, with Gary Cooper; The Informer, John Ford’s celebrated treatment of a besotted traitor during the Irish Rebellion; and a new film, Vivacious Lady, George Stevens’s comedy of the classes in which nightclub singer Ginger Rogers marries botanist James Stewart.

  Bing’s new film at the time his list appeared was Sing You Sinners, a determined effort to move beyond the standard Crosby persona movies that had grown increasingly similar. When William LeBaron took over as Paramount’s chief of production (replacing the ill-suited Ernst Lubitsch), Adolph Zukor warned him he would have difficulty finding stories for Bing. From the beginning the studio had a firm notion of what a Crosby story entailed. Joseph Mankiewicz recalled Emanuel Cohen halting production on Too Much Harmony in 1933, explaining to him, “You have made one terrible mistake. You have Crosby falling in love with the girl. The public will never accept that. You must make the girl fall in love with him!” 3 A year later Charles Samuels, hired to doctor a few scripts, was instructed, “Don’t forget that Crosby’s love scenes are not like those of any other male star. He never makes love to the girl. She has to make love to him. Love and romance always have to sneak up on Bing when he isn’t looking.” 4

  Though Pennies from Heaven fits the template to a T, Bing was nevertheless aiming for greater variety when he and Manny Cohen produced it. 5 “I felt I had to play a different type of character, a real person,” he told a reporter. “All this singing for no reason at all couldn’t go on. So I went into business for myself.” 6 Thirty years later he looked back on his 1930s films as a blur: “So much of what I did seems to run together…. A lot of those pictures were, dare I say, very similar.” 7 His list of favorites show how well aware he was of the gap between Cinema and the general run of Hollywood product, particularly his own.

  Returning to Paramount after Pennies from Heaven, in 1936, he worked for the fourth time with Frank Tuttle and for the fifth with Karl Struss, producing the blockbuster Waikiki Wedding — the third-highest-grossing picture of 1937. The project was chosen after two others fell through: It Happened in Paradise, a summer-camp musical, would have reunited him with Ida Lupino; 8 the more intriguing Follow the Sun would have reunited him with Burns and Allen and Norman Taurog (Paramount announced it as “made to the measure of that Crosby smash, We’re Not Dressing”) while drawing directly on his ancestry in telling the story of a sea captain who ships from the Pacific Northwest to the Orient to start a nightclub. 9 The switch to a Hawaiian setting may have been swayed by an important recording session that summer.

  To Jack Kapp, Hawaiian songs meant a standard category of music, like cowboy or Christmas songs. They represented another string for the Crosby bow, and Kapp was eager to record them. The Crosbys were planning to vacation in Hawaii in August, and Jack told him it would be a nice gesture to telegraph their arrival with a couple of appropriate tunes, “Song of the Islands” and “Aloha Oe.” He hired the perfect accompanist, Dick McIntyre and His Harmony Hawaiians, a quartet with steel and acoustic guitars, ukelele, and bass. Five days after the record date, Paramount announced Waikiki Wedding as Bing’s next picture, though the decision had not yet been finalized; 10 weeks later the studio reversed itself with an announcement that It Happened in Paradise was back on schedule. Yet in the end, Paramount, like Decca, succumbed to the appeal of placing a lei around Bing’s neck.

  If the years 1936 to 1940 were bumpy ones in Bing’s movie career, with equal rations of highs and lows, they represented an important crossroads for his music. Once again his voice and attack were evolving. His newly modulated style was, as Rose Bampton discerned, more accomplished. He sang with greater economy, a more reflective approach to lyrics; he employed longer notes and balanced his expressive middle tones with polished plums from the high and low reaches of his range. The 1933 Jimmy Grier records had captured Bing climbing peaks; now, tempered yet emotionally resolute, he was willing to survey the valleys. The voice was still round and robust, but he did not push it as hard. The nodes and attendant hoarseness had miraculously vanished, and the hollow ring that crept into his voice in the mid-1940s was not yet evident. Whether romping with his brother’s jazz band or sighing of trade-wind breezes, Bing in the mid-thirties was the most quietly assured male pop singer alive.

  For Bing, Hawaiian songs occupied a middle ground between cowboy songs and pop ballads, and he pursued all three idioms with unusually moody expressiveness. On Ray Noble’s lovely “The Touch of Your Lips,” his musing eloquence is befitting and expected. On the two comically theatrical numbers from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (“I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”), his interpretations are unexpectedly rueful. The most impressive of his new cowboy songs (including “We’ll Rest at the End of the Trail,” “A Roundup Lullaby,” “Empty Saddles” ) was “Twilight on the Trail,” a lament introduced that year by Fuzzy Knight in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and sung by Bing as though it were an old western hymn. That’s how it may have sounded to President Roosevelt, who declared it his favorite song after “Home on the Range”; Mrs. Roosevelt requested Bing’s record for the Roosevelt Library.

  Hawaiian songs combined affecting melodies and the down-home spirituality Bing found in western ballads. The glissandi of the steel guitar (guitars were always magic for him) complemented his vocal glides; the dilatory tempos exercised his handsome stalwart timbre. Yet Bing’s affinity for South Seas idylls seemed clouded at the first session. The larghissimo tempo triggered a vague trembling and self-conscious use of mordents. Kapp immediately scheduled a follow-up, this time recording “South Sea Island Magic” and “Hawaiian Paradise,” and the improvement is unmistakable; the mordents are natural and the high notes weighted by a robustness and subtly swinging pulse. “South Sea Island Magic,” the more accomplished performance, sold decently in the period before “Pennies from Heaven” took over, dominating sales for the rest of the year. With “Hawaiian Paradise,” Bing waved across the Pacific to its composer, Harry Owens, the bandleader who had auditioned him and Al Rinker at Cafe Lafayette in 1926. A professional since the age of fourteen, Owens had seemed so much more experienced back then, but he was only a year older than Bing. Now he led the band at Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where Bing and Dixie would spend their first evening on the island.

  On Sunday, August 30, 1936, two weeks after he returned to the studio with Dixie to record their duets, they boarded the SS Lurline for a five-week vacation. When the ship docked at Oahu on September 3, photographers captured Bing at breakfast and, as one reporter wrote, “shuffl[ing] his way through a jam of shrill flappers who ogled at the nonchalant swing of his 178-lb. body, the fluttering of his pale blue eyes.” 11 The Crosbys had arranged to stay at a private home at Kaalawai with Lindsay Howard and his wife and other friends.

  Like everyone else on the island, Owens was excited about their arrival and wondered whether Bing would remember him. His doubts were allayed that evening, when Bing strode to the bandstand and said, “Hi, Harry, is this tryout night?” 12 He asked the name of the tune the band had just played.

  A couple of years earlier, Owens had written a ballad to commemorate the birth of his daughter, Leilani. When he told
Bing the song was called “Sweet Leilani,” Bing made a joke about not being able to pronounce it, but during the course of the evening he requested the unpronounceable title another five or six times. The following morning Bing phoned Harry to tell him he wanted the song for his next picture and asked whether he could ride over on a motorbike he had just rented. Harry was overwhelmed but ambivalent. The song was so personal to him and his family that he was disinclined to commercialize it. He asked Bing to listen to his other songs, including “Dancing Under the Stars,” “Palace in Paradise,” and “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha,” all of which Bing eventually recorded. Undeterred, Bing proposed a characteristic solution to Owens’s quandary.

  For all his straightforwardness, Bing was in two areas a master of indirection. When it came to the requisite love songs in his movies, he asked Johnny Burke to avoid the phrase I love you in favor of roundabout metaphors (e.g., “You Don’t Have to Know the Language,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Sunday, Monday or Always”). When it came to money, he devised intricate ways to be charitable without the appearance of actually giving away money. These ranged from schemes to allow Gonzaga to participate in a TV show to arranging bit work to making secret bequests. Indeed, his brother Bob resented him for years for refusing to help his band out of a bind early in his career, only to learn years later that the man who did help him was operating under Bing’s instructions. According to Owens, Bing said, “I won’t permit you to commercialize on ‘Sweet Leilani,’” then offered to set up a trust fund that would collect all royalties for the education of Leilani and any future children Harry might have. 13 They made a test recording the next afternoon. Bing asked Harry to hum the tune so he would not miss any notes. “How fast he learned,” Owens noted. “Once through and he knew it perfectly.” 14

  The next few weeks were idyllic. Though besieged by fans, he swam, golfed, motorbiked, and tried surfing and motor gliding. He attended a meeting of Kamaaina Beachcombers’ Hui, a sportsmen’s organization dedicated to promoting swimming in the islands, and took a sampan from Honolulu to Kaunakakai, where a crowd paraded him through town to the steps of Molokai market. Deeply moved by the warmth of his reception, he sang “Hawaiian Paradise” and attempted “Na Lei O Hawaii,” though he didn’t know all the words. He stayed overnight on Molokai and hunted deer the next day.

  Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the film was beginning to take shape as producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. hired Don Hartman and Frank Butler to write a script, and Eddie Sutherland (Hornblow’s man on Mississippi) to direct. Paramount renewed Bing’s contract for another two years, though he had nine months remaining on the old one. Only five days earlier Bing had played his part in the negotiations by wiring columnist Sheila Graham that he might retire from the screen with the fulfillment of his present contract; 15 LeBaron thought Bing wholly capable of doing just that. Whether or not Bing was actually in contact with Hornblow, he did not inform him of “Sweet Leilani” until his return to the mainland on October 8, at which time he also displayed an expanded waistline that forced him to accept a stringent liquid diet.

  Hornblow, an intelligent and cultured man in private life, was notoriously megalomaniacal on the set. Eddie Sutherland remembered him issuing pointless edicts, like “Crosby’s got to be here at nine.” “Well, Crosby can get there when he feels like it, you know,” Sutherland explained. “What are you going to do, keep him after school? Crosby’s a most generous man. He’ll give you three months to work on a script if you’re not ready, but then he’ll say, ‘I’m not coming in on Saturday, I want to go to the races.’You say, ‘Fine,’ and you shoot around him. But this man would say, ‘He’s got to be here Saturday.’” 16 Hornblow’s response to “Sweet Leilani” was an emphatic no. Bing tried to convince him that the song had proved itself in Hawaii, and showed him a fitting spot for it in the script, to no avail. He let the matter slide — until shooting began.

  Robin and Rainger, who wrote the picture’s score, had been very good to Bing in the past with “Please,” “Love in Bloom,” and “June in January,” among others. They were in no position to take umbrage at the insertion of a new song, as Rodgers and Hart did when Bing interposed “Swanee River” in Mississippi. Hornblow, on the other hand, remembered that tiff all too well, though he may have forgotten the positive things that came from Bing’s stubbornness. For Bing, more than a song was at stake; there was the promise to Harry, and his pride in being able to recognize a winning number. After all, his previous attempts to help struggling tunesmiths had been rewarded with Carmichael’s “Moonburn,” Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” and the score to Pennies from Heaven.

  By the time the picture went into production in December, Horn-blow had replaced Sutherland with Frank Tuttle, who was particularly enthusiastic about the challenge of creating Waikiki Beach on the Paramount lot, a feat he credited to the “ingenuity of the set designers and constructors, who built an entire Hawaiian village on one of the sound stages with an amazingly realistic sky backing.” 17 Only scenic shots and a chase scene, using doubles, were photographed in Hawaii. While Tuttle busied himself staging the musical numbers, Bing behaved with customary professionalism, pleased to be surrounded by a cast of amusing friends, including Bob Burns, Martha Raye, George Barbier, and Grady Sutton, and an appealing and musical leading lady, Shirley Ross. 18 The filming was almost complete in February, when they came to the sequence where Bing thought “Sweet Leilani” belonged. He brought it up, and Hornblow refused. Bing told him, “When you change your mind, I’ll be back,” and left to play golf. 19 He stayed away for two days, until Hornblow relented. After they shot the scene, Bing cabled Hawaii:

  DEAR HARRY, I FILMED SWEET LEILANI SEQUENCE TODAY. COME SATURDAY AM RECORDING SONG FOR DECCA. TRUST FUND DOCUMENTS IN MAIL. THINGS LOOKING UP. BETTER PLAN ON HAVING A DOZEN MORE KEIKIS. ALOHA TO ALL. BING. 20

  * * *

  Like Rhythm on the Range, Waikiki Wedding is an elaboration of Kraft Music Hall, though more stylish than the earlier film. Tuttle’s imaginative staging and limber camera are evident from the opening scene, a long traveling shot magnificently handled by Struss, showing a wedding ceremony and dwelling on the prettiest girls. He directed the film’s primary song, “Blue Hawaii,” as a duet, in which Bing recites each line of the lyric before Ross blends her voice with his, to avert the cliché of characters who are “letter perfect in the words of a song when they’ve never had a chance to learn them.” 21 Only in Hollywood would a director aim for realism in presenting a song, when not an ounce of realism pertains anywhere else in the picture.

  The plot requires Bing, playing a press agent, to romance Ross, the winner of a Miss Pineapple Princess competition, in order to dissuade her from returning to her California home and fiancé before the publicity value of her victory can be fully exploited. While love sneaks up on him, he contrives to keep her busy with a fake adventure involving hostile islanders; in effect, he frames a big con, engaging numerous actors to fool his mark. The device is engaging because through much of the picture the audience is no wiser than Ross, as a preposterous story unfolds, concerning an iconic pearl and a vengeful volcano. We learn shortly before she does that we have been duped by a scheming publicist who has conjured up a script within the script. After the fraud is exposed, Waikiki Wedding turns shamelessly routine: the leading lady must choose between her society fiancé on the mainland and a recumbent Bing on his boat.

  In one scene Bing is obliged to knock out a tribal chief, played by Anthony Quinn, who recalled, “We were supposed to fight and I didn’t know much about fighting in pictures. I had fought in the ring, so, I mean, a man is gonna hit me, he hits me. But Bing hit pretty hard. So I went down. I should have ducked. Then he apologized and that made us wonderful friends.” 22 Quinn had been working in pictures for less than a year, mostly as an extra or a hood. Waikiki Wedding was his first substantial part. Because he was half Mexican and sensitive to studio discrimination, Quinn was gratified by Bing’s easy tolerance:

  Bing
was one of the most amazing people in the world because he had worked with so many minorities, and minorities were having a lot of trouble in those days, my gosh. And Bing understood, he understood what I must have been going through and he was most helpful to me, his whole attitude. I always loved him because of the way he treated [people]. There was a shoeshine man at the entrance to the Paramount gate named Oscar. And Bing was one of his favorites because Bing came in and, I mean, he could talk the talk and he was wonderful at it. And Oscar and he would laugh, but there was nothing about Bing that was patronizing. He had worked with Louis and all the great musicians of the time and was used to being with blacks and Mexicans and all kinds of minorities. So he was actually wonderful to work with and made you at ease, put me at my ease. 23

  For all its polish, Waikiki Wedding is a minor period piece, dated by low humor — instead of Rhythm on the Range’s bull, the characters have to contend with Burns’s pet pig — and the change-ups between patter and music. Bing holds the fort as the nominal star, looking youthful and earnest, coming to the fore chiefly in song. The real stars are Struss’s depth-of-field photography and the songs, primarily “Blue Hawaii,” an ideal vehicle for Bing; the first two phrases are confined to a range of four notes near middle C, the third leaps upward an octave, where the song remains until it descends for the second eight bars, and the release is lovely. “In a Little Hula Heaven” (an affable jump tune that Bing recorded swingingly with Jimmy Dorsey) and “Sweet Is the Word for You” are also effective. The one ineptly staged song is “Sweet Leilani,” obscured by the squealing of the pig, which at the initial showing in Honolulu so affronted the patrons and composer that the print was angrily shipped back to Hollywood.