by Gary Giddins
But, as Bing soon wired Owens: HEAR YE, HEAR YE! WAIKIKI WEDDING, AFTER FLOPEROO IN HAWAII, IS SMASH HIT ALL OVER THE USA. ALSO MY DECCA RECORD OF SWEET LEILANI JUST TOPPED ONE MILLION PLATTERS. SO SMILE MAN. 24 The reviews were modestly positive and generally out of touch. Variety prophesied, “None of the songs here will hit the top performance brackets,” though it thought them deserving of “a minor play on the air.” 25 Time dismissed the “pseudo-Hawaiian” ditties but considered the picture a “mild pleasantry,” singling out for praise the pig, who “steals the show by oinking at suitable moments.” 26 The New York Times found it “friendly, inoffensive, reasonably diverting.” 27 Melody Maker, in England, huffed, “If this is the best that Paramount can do with Crosby, then I seriously suggest that they loan him permanently to Columbia — the firm which made such a success of Pennies from Heaven.” 28
The public loved Waikiki Wedding — Variety declared it socko everywhere, including Europe. In a season when theaters scrambled for patrons, Bing once again filled the coffers, eliciting trade-paper headlines like CLEVELAND PEACEFUL EXCEPT FOR CROSBY’S WHAM $21,500. 29 In three weeks it broke the Los Angeles Paramount’s all-time house record, and then went on to ring up bigger numbers at its New York adjunct (on a bill with the Eddy Duchin band). The picture’s domestic gross exceeded $1.5 million, ranking it third in 1937, after two MGM releases, Maytime and The Good Earth. 30 The one other top-ten entry from Paramount was a Gary Cooper vehicle, The Plainsman. Beyond that, news at the studio was bleak. Two of its matchless legends departed, diminished by the lilliputians in the Hays Office: Paramount canceled Mae West; Marlene Dietrich left in dismay. Ordered to reduce his budget of $30 million by a sixth, William LeBaron informed Zukor and the powers in New York that he preferred to step down and produce independently (an action he postponed until 1941).
When it came to musicals, each film factory claimed a discrete turf and stuck to it. MGM, self-consciously tony in every regard, had its Broadway Melody series, milking the Great White Way for ambience and source material. Warner Bros. sent its mugs and broads frolicking in the Gold Diggers movies, each climaxing with an erotic kaleidoscope of bare limbs. RKO had it both ways with Fred and Ginger, working-class hoofers who looked rich and stayed in the nicest places. Paramount alone made a complete reversal. Hollywood’s most sophisticated establishment in the pre-Code era found its salvation in Big Broadcasts and was now content to advertise itself as the “radio recruitment studio” while boasting of profits from rubbish like Mountain Music, a hee-haw farce with Bob Burns and Martha Raye. Paramount’s one sure attraction, money in the bank, was Crosby. In the long view of Bing’s career, however, the popularity of Waikiki Wedding proved less significant than his handling of its songs.
Bing had not sung for Decca in six months, not since the duets with Dixie shortly before their vacation. In February 1937, accompanied by Lani McIntyre (Dick’s brother) and His Hawaiians, he recorded “Blue Hawaii” and “Sweet Leilani.” The former, beginning with an attention-jolting steel-guitar glissando and superbly executed throughout, was a hit. The song endured for decades as a minor standard, recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley, who made a movie of that name. “Sweet Leilani” did not fare as well in the long run. But it was a phenomenon in its day, commercially one of the most significant, and musically one of the most unusual, releases in the history of American popular music.
What did listeners think, in the spring of 1937, hearing “Sweet Leilani” on the radio? A plush glissando sets the stage for a high Hawaiian tenor — Lani McIntyre — singing a chorus backed by a humming ensemble and a contralto’s obbligato. If forewarned by an announcer that this was the new Crosby record, did people wonder if he had joined the castrati? And if not forewarned, how surprised must they have been when, seventy-seven seconds into a three-minute side, the exotic vocalist is suddenly supplanted by the reassuring virility of Bing’s dulcet baritone? It was a nervy arrangement, to say the least. Yet the switch from Mclntryre to Bing underscored the latter’s homey familiarity in a new and categorical way. It was like wandering through a strange city and suddenly meeting an old friend. Bing’s reading is felt and faultless, from the ascending glide of the title phrase to the comely embellishment on the repeat of “heavenly flower” to the drawn-out closing “dream.”
“Sweet Leilani” dominated sales charts for an astonishing six months, more than a third of that period in the number one spot (it was pushed aside briefly by another Bing Crosby record, “Too Marvelous for Words”). As the best-selling American disc in eight years, since the stock market crash, it was acclaimed as a turning point for the recording industry and a good sign for the national economy. That the record also boosted movie queues gave Hollywood reason to cheer as well.
The song was nominated for an Academy Award, in competition with the evergreens “That Old Feeling” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (a Gershwin song favored to win) and the deciduous “Whispers in the Dark” and “Remember Me?” (by Harry Warren and Al Dubin). The last probably would not have been nominated had it not also generated an enormous and delightfully whimsical Crosby hit, as arranged by John Scott Trotter to combine musty polka rhythms and a Bixian trumpet solo (by Andy Secrest), which Bing echoes in his jazzy finish.
The overwhelming popularity of “Sweet Leilani” vindicated Bing’s faith in it, not only proving once again his interpretive powers but also trumping Hornblow, who never produced another Crosby picture. But the song’s epochal success cannot disguise its essential triteness. The first of Bing’s twenty-one gold discs is à quintessential bauble of the 1930s, a seductively nostalgic record that helped define its era — it helped trigger a craze for anything Polynesian — and yet echoes eerily in ours. The gold record and Oscar nomination were small potatoes compared with this statistic: it sold 54 million units of sheet music. 31
Hawaii had been promoting itself as paradise in the Pacific for half a century, landing squarely on America’s pop-culture map in 1915 when San Francisco’s Pan-Pacific Exhibition introduced hula girls, steel guitars, and ukeleles. That year the mainland was swaying to songs like “On the Beach at Waikiki,” “Song of the Islands,” and “Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?” Bing heard them on the family record player, and the following summer he watched Jolson light up Spokane’s Auditorium with “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula.” A fancy for ukeleles swept the nation in the 1920s. Yet it was not until the mid-1930s, when Hawaii started its own recording industry and began broadcasting shortwave, that kindling was provided for an all-out Hawaiian vogue. Bing lit the match in the spring of 1937.
Within months Hollywood resembled a Hawaiian theme park, as restaurants and nightclubs replaced 1920s jungle decor with bamboo, parrots, and waterfalls; floor shows complete with hula and/or sword dancers; and generic Cantonese cuisine masquerading as luau fixings. If you could not follow the Hollywood big shots to the Hawaiian surf for deductible holidays (they claimed to be scouting locations), you could hobnob at Luana, King’s Tropical Inn, Hula Hut, Club Hawaii, Zamboanga, Seven Seas, and Hawaiian Paradise, among others. It did not last long. With the advent of the conga line, the bamboo was scrapped for gaucho chic and the steadfast pu-pu platter modified to accommodate coconut shrimp. But Hawaii was now regarded less as a distant territory than as a tropical extension of the United States, and by the mid-1940s the issue of statehood (unrealized until 1959) was on the table.
Hawaiian songs, mostly ersatz, were now a staple of American popular music. They answered the need for pure escapism, conjuring a world without breadlines, dust bowls, or the rumble of war while melding with the simple melodicism of country-and-western music —a connection manifested in the frisson of gliding steel guitars. Legend attributes the birth of that instrument to Joseph Kekuku, who got the idea in or about 1909, when he accidentally dropped a comb that slid across the frets of his guitar. Steel guitars were occasionally heard in country-music records in the 1920s, a mellower version of the slide techniques already familiar in
the work of such black guitar innovators as gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson and bluesman Charley Patton. After Bob Wills featured Leon McAuliffe on “Steel Guitar Rag” in 1936, they were everywhere in country music, virtually plaiting the two styles as one, as in Roy Acuff’s 1937 “Steel Guitar Chimes,” an adaptation of “Maui Chimes.”
Bing recorded more than forty Hawaiian or Hawaiian-style songs and arrangements, and several of those performances are sublime, notably those from 1939 and 1940, including “My Isle of Golden Dreams,” which he singled out as a personal favorite (“I think I sounded fairly tolerable in that record”), 32 “Aloha Kuu Ipo Aloha” (words by Dick McIntyre, his most frequent Hawaiian accompanist), and a definitive adaptation of “Where the Blue of the Night,” backed by the Paradise Island Trio. One of his most evocative records of 1937 connects Hawaii, country, and jazz in the context of a ballad that might have been written in the days of Carrie Jacobs Bond. Lani McIntyre composed “The One Rose,” but Bing recorded it with a Victor Young ensemble (violins and harp, no guitars), producing a sui generis lament that breaches the generic boundaries. However much he disliked singing the phrase I love you, he could make of it a powerful cri de couer; reprising the line “Each night through love land,” he evinces his flair for embellishment with Armstrongian finesse. In “The One Rose,” Bing achieved the universality Jack Kapp envisioned.
At the March 1938 Academy Awards ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel, which Bing typically declined to attend (Bob Burns emceed, and Bob Hope made his Oscar night debut), Jimmy Grier conducted the nominated songs and confidently predicted the Gershwins would triumph. The trophy, however, went to Harry Owens, who accepted it with a short speech giving full credit to Bing. No one at the time seemed to find it ironic or farcical that Owens was handed the statuette by a gracious Irving Berlin. The relatively unknown Owens was the first songwriter to win as composer and lyricist — a distinction he held until 1943, when the fifty-five-year-old Berlin was at long last honored for the ultimate Crosby megahit, “White Christmas.”
In the months leading up to Oscar night, Bing instigated contracts for Owens at Paramount and Decca; made his dramatic radio debut (opposite Joan Blondell) in an adaptation of She Loves Me Not for CBS’s Lux Radio Theater, receiving rave notices; and completed two new pictures, filmed in the summer and autumn of 1937.
Double or Nothing stuck to the formula, with a recurring Depression twist. This time the four principals are brought together by a millionaire’s will. The deceased has instructed his lawyers to drop twenty-five billfolds around the city containing $100 and the law firm’s address. Every honest soul who returns the money is given $5,000 and the chance to participate in a competition. The first to legitimately double the money within thirty days wins the estate. Naturally, contemptuous heirs are on hand to foil their attempts, and naturally the most insidious of the heirs has an attractive daughter. The people who return the billfolds are played by Bing, Martha Raye, Andy Devine, and William Frawley. The romantic interest is provided by Mary Carlisle, of College Humor, who wore a “pale ice blue dress, perfectly beautiful,” she said, that complemented Bing’s eyes — “blue blue blue blue, they were gorgeous eyes.” 33 The conceit was lost to black-and-white cinematography.
The stars, abetted by several specialty acts, provide an improbable number of diverting scenes in a film woodenly directed by Theodore Reed. This was his second Paramount film in a brief and negligible career, floated for a couple of years by the Henry Aldrich series (Para-mount’s answer to Andy Hardy). Not that Reed got much help from the quartet of credited scenarists, who probably never sat in the same room together. 34 Yet the performers are engaging, as are the songs, including three by Burke and Johnston (the Pennies from Heaven team) and two by Ralph Freed (Harry Barris’s partner on “Little Dutch Mill”) and Burton Lane, who six years before had helped Bing choose his theme song. “Smarty,” the upbeat opening number, was the first of several Lane songs Bing recorded.
Sam Coslow, who helped put Martha Raye on the map with “Mr. Paganini,” wrote another showstopper for her this time around, “It’s On, It’s Off,” her character’s theme song from her days in burlesque. Every time she hears it, she begins to strip. Frank Tuttle once described Maggie as a “combination of Marie Dressler and Fannie Brice. She appeals to the down-to-the-earth fans and the sophisticates.” 35 Even the Hays Office approved, relieved that there was no “undue exposure,” 36 though Australian censors deleted a shot of a padlock on Raye’s dress. The strip number was treated with a uranium-tone azure, the first time since the silent era that Paramount had used tinting. MGM and Fox also experimented with tints in this period, but after The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the rise of Technicolor, the practice was discontinued for good.
In compliance with Bing’s demand not to be advertised as the “sole star,” the studio top-billed him and Raye, a departure from custom, as she was not his romantic interest. 37 The reviewers were generally content, and the picture was a nationwide hit, yielding three top Crosby records: “The Moon Got in My Eyes” (a chart-topper), in which he effortlessly finesses a profusion of awkward oo and long-i diphthongs; “It’s the Natural Thing to Do,” with its singspiel interlude typifying Bing’s KMH personality; and “Smarty,” an insolently buoyant yet amusingly nuanced swinger. All were recorded at his first session with Trotter.
Double or Nothing is studded with personal references and jokes. The marriage of high and low that came to define KMH is evident as Bing swings “Smarty” in a diner while a chef bawls opera. Bing’s love of silent comedy is manifest in a scene in which he sets his straw hat on fire to attract Carlisle’s attention, a scene played at a leisurely tempo. As Mary’s mother, Fay Holden reads Hobo Harry’s Revenge to learn the lingo of lowlifes. Martha Raye interjects “Muddy Water” while belting “Listen My Children, And You Shall Hear.” Mike Pecarovich has a walk-on (as in Waikiki Wedding). Exceedingly strange vaudeville acts are interpolated. Bing’s character’s ambition is to open a nightclub, for which he hires a Singband — an all-girl choir dressed in tight black-satin dresses, scatting melodies conducted by Harry Barris (the first of his many bit parts in Crosby films). When Bing and Raye do their own scat number, Harry joins in for a few measures, closing with a Rhythm Boys hahh!
Of the singers who prerecorded the Singband tracks — gypsies who worked at all the studios — only a few were chosen to actually appear on camera, among them Trudy Erwin: “We sang on risers in this nightclub set, and we were there for days and days — you know how those things go. I was taking a rest on a little cot that was beside the set, and all of a sudden something was hitting me and I looked up and it was Bing throwing spit wads at me. That’s when I first met him.” 38 Within two years Trudy became a fixture on KMH, first as a member of the Music Maids, then as a single. “He was always completely relaxed — you’d never know he was acting. He always seemed the same to me. Singing was the same way, so natural and a wonderful ear.” 39
A private joke between Bing and Carlisle surfaces in dialogue leading into “It’s the Natural Thing to Do.” She asks him, “How’s for a rousing game of backgammon?” Bing ad-libs, “Well, jacks is really my racket, but I’ll pitch in with you.” On College Humor Mary grew accustomed to Bing doing his job and leaving the set to pursue other interests. During Double or Nothing he casually asked if she played backgammon. “He was all gung ho for playing and on the set all the time,” she recalled. “There were several years in between the first picture and the next and he had grown up, shall we say. But he hadn’t changed a bit. He was very nonchalant about everything. He always knew his lines, but it wasn’t like he was playing a part or acting. He was just there and he did it. He was delightful, never upstaged anyone, though he must have known the tricks of the trade — like you step back a bit and get your face in and everyone has to look at you. Bing was not like that. He was very generous and never tried to hog anything. He knew the tricks, but it wasn’t his style.” 40
If he didn’t compete for th
e camera, he struggled mightily to hold his own against Mary in their backgammon tournament. “It was a rage then,” she said of the game, “and he wanted to learn it. He asked if I had a board and I said yes and he said, ‘Bring it tomorrow.’ We started to play and he said, ‘Let’s see, what’ll we play for?’ I said, ‘Bing, you don’t even know how to play the game, now why would you play for money?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s more fun like that.’ We played through the whole picture and I kept winning and winning and winning. He never went to his dressing room like he used to — it was always, ‘Get the board, come on, let’s play.’ When we finished the picture, he owed me a good bit of money, a fair amount in those days.” 41 Reluctant to pay up, he persuaded her to play double or nothing until he was in the hole for $1,200. He promised to send a check but did not. Instead, he arranged for Mary, who was under contract to the Bing Crosby, Inc., talent agency, to star in Doctor Rhythm, which went into production a few months after Double or Nothing wrapped.
Bing called and he said, “We’re gonna do it together again,” and I said, “Oh, I’m so pleased.” I said, “You know, I bet I know why you want me in the picture.” He said, “Why?” I said, “I bet you’re gonna try and get your money back.” And I want to tell you, we played. And Frank Tuttle was the director and they have pictures of us on the set, you know, with the board between us and playing away, with Frank looking on. And I kept winning and winning, and finally it was about two weeks before the picture finished and he said, “Why don’t we play a really good big game?” And I said, “What do you mean by big?” And he gave me a figure. I said, “Why, Bing you’re out of your mind. I don’t play for that kind of money.” He said, “Whose money are you playing with?” I said, “Oh, yeah. All right.” So we started with this figure and it was an automatic double game. We both threw doubles. Then he was doing well, so he doubled it again. And then I thought I could beat him, so I doubled it again. So it was lot of money. And do you know that he won that game? We never played again. 42