by Gary Giddins
He proved no less masterly on “Summertime,” recorded at his first reunion with Matty Malneck, who had played so prominent a role in establishing Bing with the Paul Whiteman band. Matty’s medium-slow arrangement has enough bounce to animate Bing, who inflects the descriptive, cautionary lyric for meaning, employing those bass-baritone swoops that were influencing numerous young singers in the 1930s. After the ensemble plays a one-bar unison Bixian rip in the interlude, Bing closes with a surprise reprise of the phrase “don’t you cry.”
“A Blues Serenade” also summoned recollections of days gone by, though the song itself was only three years old. It was written by Frank Signorelli, whose Original Memphis Five kept Bing’s circle jumping in Spokane, and Mitchell Parish, who wrote the lyric to “Star Dust.” The first try ended in a Crosby fluff take, which begins with a nice muted trumpet solo by Manny Klein but is otherwise stilted. The botched take might have sufficed if Bing had not veered out of tune on the coda; holding fast to the wrong pitch, he drones, “What the hell happened to me, son of a bitch,” and then tells Malneck, “Let them play the melody.” The blunder snapped him to attention, and the second take is far more persuasive. He floats the dreamy melody, underscoring the consonants in the phrase “one that I could kiss and cling to,” and employs a long rest to syncopate the reprise.
The quintessential Crosby ballad of 1938, however, emerged from the session that produced “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” as well as the less memorable Sing You Sinners songs and a mildly engaging Robin and Rainger cowboy song (“Silver on the Sage”). “Mexicali Rose” was written by bandleader — and later California state senator— Jack Tenny, while working a border town in 1923. The piece languished until the mid-thirties, when Gene Autry sang it on records and in a movie. It was brought to Bing’s attention by Carroll Carroll’s secretary at a KMH rehearsal, when Bing could not come up with a tune. “I heard my mother humming a pretty song,” she told him. 39
Bing sang “Mexicali Rose” for four months on the air before making a record that infused it with the vivid and wistful melancholy he had used to transform so many commonplace and even trite songs (“Home on the Range,” “Black Moonlight”). He made the song resonate as a quasi-western hymn for the last days of the Depression. Autry reclaimed it a year later in a movie of the same name, but in his or anyone else’s hands, it was merely a sentimental love song. Bing’s interpretation produced a frisson, an eerily palpable suggestion of what the times sounded and felt like. We tend to recall 1938 with the images of swing — stomping feet and flying skirts. “Mexicali Rose” renders the flip side, far from the ballrooms, where the night is black, inert, and full of longing. The force of his reading transcends the lyric and its southwestern setting.
John Trotter’s clever arrangement, with its staccato wind instruments marching against a small contingent of strings, is more polka than mariachi — a neat trick either way for a waltz. Aldous Huxley observed that the waltz was originally conceived, in 1770, as a “jovial, bouncing, hoppety little tune” fit for a child’s nursery, “almost completely empty of emotional content,” but that by a century later it had become the very rhythm of eros, “densely saturated with amorous sentiment, languor and voluptuousness.” 40 In waltzes such as “The One Rose” and “Mexicali Rose,” strong emotions are retained, but despite the romantic text, eros — now the province of swinging four-four — is supplanted by chilling loneliness, relieved only by the cathartic identification between the listener and singer. Bing admired Trotter’s arrangement and navigates it with confidence, holding back the sentiment like a dam. Bing is in the details: the goldfish puckering on the bs in “big brown eyes”; the tender head tone on hold followed by the barrel-chested me in the phrase “kiss me once again and hold me”; the contrast between the distant hollow timbre on the first syllables of crying and pining, and the satisfying mordent on the suffixes.
Bing’s sides with Bob Crosby followed “Mexicali Rose” onto the hit parade in the closing weeks of the year, but his last hit of 1938 was a return to solemnity that launched a new tradition for the record business and the country. In December Kapp issued Bing’s “Silent Night”: not a new version, but the one he had made in 1935. Before 1938 reissues of any kind were rare and usually came out on bargain-label subsidiaries so as not to compete for consumer dollars with new product; during the past decade Victor, Brunswick, and Columbia combined enjoyed no more than six or seven reissue hits. But with the vast increase in record sales in 1938, reissues became more profitable. RCA re-released old records by Tommy Dorsey and Kay Kyser; Brunswick did the same with early sides by Raymond Scott, Louis Armstrong, and most timely of all, the Boswell Sisters — their 1935 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” rode the coattails of the duet by Bing and Connie. Jack followed the trend when he reissued Decca’s first big hit, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around,” and its first Christmas song, “Silent Night.”
But “Silent Night” was like no other reissue, thanks to its seasonal attachment. Kapp realized that it had the makings of a national observance. Bing’s holiday classic could be brought to market year after year, with dependable results. Over the next few years, the annual release of Christmas songs would become a recording-industry staple and a holiday tradition as steadfast as Christmas trees, fruitcakes, and Dickens. Where once Americans had celebrated with carols, hymns, and the Messiah, they would now grow accustomed to hearing — and buying by the millions — pop-record perennials, first Bing’s “Silent Night” and (as of 1942) “White Christmas,” and then a spate of new songs conceived to exploit the demand, from Nat “King” Cole’s “The Christmas Song” and Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to Harry Simeone’s “The Little Drummer Boy” and Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock,” and on and on.
And what of his concurrent movies? Paris Honeymoon was remembered by its participants for a pun, alas not in the picture, delivered grandiloquently by Bing in reference to his costar, Franciska Gaal. The Budapest-born actress and cabaret star was brought to America by Cecil B. De Mille for The Buccaneer, the first of three Hollywood pictures she made in 1938, after which — her starlight diminished — she returned to Europe. A beautiful, wired Kewpie doll with beseeching Luise Rainer eyes and the pep of Miriam Hopkins on a diet of triple-espressos, she played basically the same role in Paris Honeymoon (which has no honeymoon and only a few minutes of Paris) and MGM’s The Girl Downstairs: an unyielding peasant girl who lands a millionaire. When she wasn’t chewing up scenery and actors, she raged off camera at cast and crew. After one violent tantrum, she stormed off the set. Bing broke the stunned silence: “I’d like to divide Gaal into three parts.” 41
The picture, rushed to fulfill Bing’s three-picture quota that year, was not without promise. Paramount reassembled the Waikiki Wedding team. Frank Tuttle and Karl Struss shot a Frank Butler and Don Hartman script, and Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger supplied the songs. The studio certainly appeared confident. It issued a publicity release revealing that Bing might rethink the “freak” 42 clause in his contract prohibiting it from billing him above the title: “It may be ‘Bing Crosby and Franciska Gaal in Paris Honeymoon,’” the release timorously announced. 43 The studio even attempted to have a print of the film interred, instead of a Crosby record, in a 6,177-year time capsule created by Thornwell Jacobs of Oglethorpe University. 44 Paramount assured Jacobs that its latest cellulose film stock would last 100 years but failed to explain what use that would be to a capsule under seal until 8114. (Jacobs chose 6,177 years because that’s how far back from 1938, he said, the Egyptians developed calendars.)
Bing himself knew the picture was a runt, and far from accepting star billing had his name listed, after the title, on the same card as five other actors, of whom Akim Tamiroff, possibly inspired by Gaal, wins honors for over-the-top histrionics that broke up Tuttle and Bing. His big speeches, as the con-man mayor of a Ruritanian country, are filmed in single-camera setups over Bing’s shoulders, with few reaction shots to break h
is timing. The plot reverses the male fantasy of a few years earlier in favor of a Cinderella variation; instead of an heiress forsaking her kind for a common Joe, the self-made millionaire abandons his wealthy fiancée to anoint a poor serving girl. The trouble is that Bing’s heiress as played by Shirley Ross (his leading lady in Waikiki Wedding) is more appealing than the wacky laundress played by Gaal. By the time Gaal’s Manya tells Bing’s Lucky she loves him (really? he had no idea), Bing plays their scenes as though he were contemplating root canal.
Bing’s Lucky is every bit as superstitious as Fred Astaire’s Lucky in the 1936 classic Swing Time, which is also contrived around a postponed engagement. Strangely, no one remarked on the similarities. The movie begins with an inside joke. Lucky’s butler, Edward Everett Horton (known for his pictures with Astaire, but an old acquaintance of Bing’s from Reaching for the Moon), retrieves a shoe from a horse that trumpet player and memoirist Max Kaminsky would later describe as “a moth-eaten, sway-backed, ancient yellow nag.” 45 The horse had been a birthday gift from Joe Venuti, so Bing put it in the picture. Returning with the horseshoe, Horton points out a joke that Bing’s radio audience could appreciate: Lucky wears argyle socks with his dress suit.
Frank Capra rated Bing “in the top ten of all actors” and explained why: “He has a complete faculty of being able to work with props; you give many actors props and they can’t do it, but he can juggle balls and have Bob Hope cracking ad-libs on the side and still say his stuff.” 46 Bing’s first song as Lucky, a rich cowboy, is a sterling example. He dons his Stetson and sings “The Funny Old Hills,” casually performing a world of shtick: making and twirling a lariat, chewing, spitting, hopping up and down on a bed, stroking a nonexistent mustache (a favorite bit of mime he repeated in East Side of Heaven, If I Had My Way, and elsewhere). Bing amused the crew with one ad-lib that did stay in the picture. He is supposed to kiss Ross, who wears a veil. Instead of lifting the veil and taking her in his arms, as every other actor would have done, he tells her, “You better lift up that pup tent,” before bestowing his peck. 47 Ross and Bing sing a bathtub duet that got past the censors because Bing telephones his part, crooning, “I have eyes to see with,” long-distance, as she soaks.
The mediocre score yielded three substantial hits, arranged by Trotter: the loping “Funny Old Hills,” the exceptionally well-sung “I Have Eyes,” and the patronizing “You’re a Sweet Little Headache.” Bing’s energetic warbling could not, however, salvage “Joobalai,” a fatuous attempt at a peasant folk song that portends the kind of novelties Perry Como made his province in the 1950s. The records did not help the picture, Bing’s least successful to date. When it debuted at the New York Paramount in January 1939, live music won the day. Bob Crosby’s Bob Cats, wrote the New York Daily News reviewer, were “the answer to an alligator’s prayer.” 48
East Side of Heaven was an altogether more pleasant experience for Bing and moviegoers. It developed a situation that had first been exploited in Pennies from Heaven: Bing as a surrogate father. After the back-to-back disappointments of Doctor Rhythm and Paris Honeymoon, he needed a pick-me-up movie quick and, having fulfilled his Paramount obligation for the year, was entitled to produce this one himself. His friend David Butler said, “Why don’t you let me do your outside picture?” 49 Butler, riding high as the director responsible for the incredibly profitable stardom of six-year-old Shirley Temple, had left Fox and was negotiating a deal with Universal. Bing told him to go for it.
Butler surrounded himself with story men, chiefly the then ailing William Conselman (he died a year later) and James Kern, who had come to Hollywood as a member of the comedy-vocal group the Yacht Club Boys (sort of a musical Ritz Brothers). Out of respect for Conselman, Butler gave him the screenwriting credit on East Side of Heaven but in interviews for the Directors Guild of America’s oral-history program said that he and Kern devised the story. In any case, Universal pounced. To be sure, the studio was desperate and would likely have signed Bing had he wanted to play Ming the Merciless in a Flash Gordon serial. Deanna Durbin was its only moneymaker and, for that matter, only star. Early in the year two erstwhile RKO executives, Nate Blumberg and Cliff Work, were recruited to revive Universal’s fortunes, and by the early 1940s the company would be in the chips with W. C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Maria Montez, and a monster revival. East Side of Heaven was a transitional project, and in order to get Bing back on the lot for the first time since King of Jazz, Universal conceded him a 50 percent profit split in exchange for his services and personal investment of half the final budget.
It was a wise deal for all concerned. With Bing’s money on the line, he was doubly inspired to make an entertaining picture while keeping an eagle eye on the budget. The latter function he delegated to Herb Polesie, who served as his associate producer (the movie credits do not acknowledge a producer, though Polesie shares a card with Butler for original story). A wonderful cast was assembled, with Joan Blondell, Mischa Auer, Irene Hervey, C. Aubrey Smith, Jerome Cowan, and a personality from Bing’s first days in Los Angeles, Jane Jones, the big-boned singer and hostess of the speakeasy where Mildred Bailey worked. The production number with Jones, as the owner of the Frying Pan Cafe, introduced — as singing waitresses — the Music Maids, who simultaneously became regulars on the Kraft Music Hall. For good measure, Matty Malneck and his orchestra and pianist Joe Sullivan were also drafted.
For Universal, the most important member of the supporting cast turned out to be the infant daughter of a milkman, who upon hearing of the studio’s need for a ten-month-old baby dropped four snapshots along with the morning milk on the doorstep of Charles Previn, Universal’s musical director. The pictures were turned over to Butler, who told Life he hired the baby without asking its sex and did not know he had a girl in a boy’s part for two days. 50 He later admitted he tested numerous babies and found the milkman’s, Sandra Henville, to be the cutest. “I said, ‘Nobody will know if this is a boy or girl. We’ll call it a boy.’ We put the kid in as Baby Sandy, and the kid was wonderful.” 51 The studio made another picture with Baby Sandy, then disclosed that she was a girl and made a bunch more — eight in all, and all moneymakers. Only the studio of Maria Montez could have mined silver from a gurgling genderproof infant. When her three-year contract ended, Sandy did a cameo for Republic and retired at age four.
“East Side of Heaven was good fun under the expansive aegis of D. Wingate Butler,” a buoyant Bing wrote Johnny Mercer after completion. “Never engaged in a more pleasant and, I hope, profitable enterprise. The budget was astonishingly low and, if John Public takes to the picture favorably, we’re a cinch to make a meg or two.” 52 Butler had known Bing since the Cocoanut Grove. He directed Dixie in Fox Movietone Follies and mistakenly believed that Dixie and Bing met at a party he and his wife gave for a visiting German opera company. “Bing was there, and he sang with all the opera fellows, and we were very friendly,” he recalled. 53 The two men grew closer at Del Mar (“the happiest days of my life”). 54 An early investor, Butler led the cheering squad for Ligaroti at the famous match race.
Born in San Francisco in 1894, Butler began in movies as an actor for Thomas Ince in 1913 and earned major parts in numerous pictures for D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, and John Ford before he turned to directing in 1927. An impersonal but prolific and reliable filmmaker, he made lucrative comedies and musicals for every major studio over a thirty-year period before turning to television in the late 1950s (all six seasons of Leave It to Beaver, among dozens of episodes for other programs). The year before his death-in 1979, Butler was awarded an honorary lifetime membership in the Directors Guild of America — the fifth director so honored. A portly, funny, easygoing man with a passion for sports, he was a perfect match for Bing.
As Universal anticipated, the production was pragmatic and efficient. With a script completed early in the new year of 1939, the cameras began to roll on Friday, January 13. Polesie’s first status report was optimistic; they scheduled the picture f
or thirty-six days, but figured forty more reasonable. A week later he presented a budget — “worked over and reduced in every possible way” 55 — of $686,000, noting they had fallen behind two days and would exceed that sum if they fell behind any more. The weekly status reports were written with an inflated sense of drama (“only fair progress during the past week,” “a rather disastrous setback last night”), 56 as if to lowball expectations, but the model production averaged fifteen minutes of footage a week, and most of the delays concerned Sandy, who was not permitted to work more than four hours a day. Butler maximized the shoot by switching to a different set when Sandy was whisked away; if he did not have to shoot close-ups, he replaced her with a doll.
Bing sang all the songs, so the prerecordings were a snap, though they were made in a novel way. He was accompanied solely by a pianist playing softly. The orchestra dubbed its part onto his playback recordings, Butler recalled, “because Bing ad-libbed a lot. We had a piano playback that wasn’t very loud, so that the other music would cover it.” 57 Butler enjoyed his professionalism: “He was the fastest man that I ever saw in my life with learning a song. He’d get a song, and come over and say to Johnny Burke, ‘Play it.’ Johnny would play it a couple of times. He’d start humming it, and then the third time he’d sing it — he’d know it perfectly.” 58 He was no less gratified by Bing’s acting: “He did everything you wanted him to do. I never saw such an actor. He’d do it, and do it very well. The only thing — we always kidded him about wanting to leave his hat on. He never wanted to put that toupee on.” 59