by Gary Giddins
Some exteriors were shot day-for-night between dinner and sunrise, to accommodate Bing’s radio obligations, and one street scene with seventy-five extras was ruined by unexpected rainfall followed by winds that “blew all rain clouds away but made recording and photographing impossible.” 60 To make up for lost time, they often worked Saturday nights until the small hours. Polesie estimated midway that they would need forty-two days (six more than scheduled), provided the big production number in the Frying Pan Cafe (“Hang Your Heart on a Hickory Limb”) went smoothly, 61 but a week later two more days were lost when Joan Blondell fell ill during makeup and was hospitalized for “a severe cold and throat infection “ 62 — not a total loss, because in her absence the rest of the company could rehearse the musical number. Filming finished March 7, after forty-four shooting days and an overrun of $10,000. 63
During the next ten days, the 137½-minute rough cut was edited to eighty-six minutes in time for a successful preview. Even so, a battle with the censors had to be decided. Joseph Breen had warned against shooting certain bits: “This gag of the baby wetting its diapers must be omitted”; “This gag of Danny investigating the baby’s sex must be omitted”; “The following line is suggestive and must be changed or omitted: ‘This is just like spring practice, but wait till the season starts.’” 64 When studio chief Cliff Work informed Breen he would go to the New York board to persuade it — “in the friendliest possible manner” 65 — to allow the baby to wet its diaper, Breen harrumphed in a letter to Will Hays that Universal disregarded his script warnings and shot offensive scenes, urging him to block the trespass of “what we call, here, toilet gags.” 66 In almost every instance Universal prevailed. The picture premiered April 7 in Miami and opened a month later at Radio City Music Hall — Bing’s debut in New York’s landmark movie theater. As Bing anticipated, it made a meg or two, but Paramount was probably more envious of the billing than the profits: “Bing Crosby and Joan Blondell in East Side of Heaven.”
Bing’s usual routine was in no way hindered by the six days per week shooting schedule — a phenomenon no less remarkable for being absolutely typical. Each week he produced an hour program for Kraft Music Hall, requiring his presence at two-hour rehearsals on Wednesdays at 3:30 and seven-and-a-half-hour rehearsals on Thursdays at 11:00, followed at 7:00 by the broadcast, after which he ate at the Universal commissary and worked all night, reporting again on Friday morning. His KMH guests in that month and a half included the usual motley of Hollywood players and concert stars, among them Grete Stuckgold, Spring Byington, Colonel Snoopnagle, Humphrey Bogart, Nigel Bruce, Emanuel Feuermann, Elizabeth Patterson, Gregor Piatigorsky, Wayne Morris, Henry Fonda, Ellen Drew, Rose Bampton, Joan Bennett, Joseph Calleia, Lloyd Nolan, Frances Langford, and William Frawley. Some of his finest singing in the period was heard on radio, including fully realized interpretations of songs he never recorded, for example Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (a new song he offered in two discrete arrangements) and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson’s old ditty “Together.” One major change took place at KMH, when Paul Taylor’s Choristers concluded their contract with the February 9 show. The program report for February 16 notes, “Didn’t seem to miss the choir,” 67 but the next week a new choir of five debuted, the Music Maids, KMH fixtures for the next six years.
Two Music Maids had crossed Bing’s path before. Alice Ludes, married to NBC audio engineer Ed Ludes, was one of the Williams Sisters, a trio that performed regularly on Bing’s Woodbury show, and Trudy Erwin (who later married Bing’s audio engineer, Murdo MacKenzie), freelanced in the Double or Nothing Singband. Each of the five members was between seventeen and twenty-three when the group was formed early in 1939 by Erwin and Dottie Mesmer; the others were Denny Wilson and Bobbie Canvin, who soon left to sing with Tommy Dorsey’s band and was replaced by Trudy’s high-school classmate, Pat Hyatt. They won instant acceptance. Though their popularity on the air did not translate into much of a recording career beyond a handful of discs with Bing, they appeared in a few movies and on the soundtracks of a few more. By the time East Side of Heaven circulated, they had been on KMH for several weeks, and many assumed they were put in the film to capitalize on their radio renown. Actually, they were hired for the film — their agent was Larry Crosby — before Bing approved them for the program.
“Larry called us one day and said, would we like to audition for some show on NBC,” Trudy Erwin recalled. “So we did ‘Hawaiian War Chant’ in Studio B at NBC, no accompaniment, nobody onstage, just Larry, ourselves, and the mixer — my husband now, though we didn’t know each other then, of course.” 68 Bing listened to their transcriptions, and a week later Larry called and asked whether they would like to be on Kraft Music Hall. They had no idea they were auditioning for Bing. Some nights they were allowed to perform on their own, but mostly they backed Bing and provided half-chorus interludes for his songs. “It was a lot of fun. Once in a while, he would take us to the Brown Derby on Vine. He didn’t eat very much, maybe a salad. In those days, he’d have a big breakfast and no dinner, that’s how he finally took off weight. I never thought he was too heavy, but that’s what he did. Very disciplined, except when he went wild — in his work, I mean. The most fun was the dress rehearsal that just preceded the show by maybe an hour. He would kid around and try to break us up and sing the wrong lyrics and just do all kinds of stuff.” 69 Bing, who invented monikers for everyone (Murdo MacKenzie was Heathcliff, Johnny Mercer was Verseable), called the Music Maids the Mice. “I don’t know why he did that,” Trudy said, “maybe because we got in a little circle and talked at rehearsal.” 70 Alice Ludes speculated, “Well, the sponsor made cheese.” 71
The combined radio and movie work failed to sate Bing’s energy. On his first free Sunday, he took Dixie, the Edmund Lowes, and Lin Howard to the races and then to Club 17, where the great stuttering comedian Joe Frisco entertained. The picture’s third weekend coincided with Bing’s third annual pro-am tournament at Rancho Santa Fe. The first in which Bob Hope played, it is now chiefly remembered for the presence of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the 1932 Olympic gold medalist who became a championship golfer in the 1940s. At the 1939 Crosby she was accepted as a competitor by mistake; she remains the only woman to have participated in the tournament. In 1974, when Bing futilely lobbied to permit women pros to play the Crosby on Monterey Peninsula, he recalled how much Babe had added to the event. (Women were allowed to play as of 1977.) The following Sunday he guest-starred on a new CBS series, The Gulf Screen Guild Show, a popular anthology to which Hollywood stars donated services because fees were given to the Motion Picture Relief Fund. A few weeks later Bing and Dixie attended a preview of David Butler’s Kentucky, his last Fox picture and one close to the director’s heart, as it concerned horse breeders. A photograph of the couple entering the theater shows Dixie in a sheath gown and fur jacket, smiling, while Bing, in a light overcoat and fedora, mugs, thumbs at chin and fingers spread to frame his exaggerated grin.
East Side of Heaven is little remembered today, a victim of MCA’s disregard for most of the Universal catalog, which it acquired in 1962. To be sure, the film was a mild amusement in its day and seems no more profound today; the sentimental final shot of Bing and Baby Sandy will make you coo or wince. But it entertains throughout. Butler, who did not consider himself a thinker, knew how to avoid longueurs. The picture also represents a change in Bing’s screen character, a transition that points ahead to the deadpan comedy he perfected in the Road pictures and the maturity that defined his 1940s persona. Photographed by George Robinson (a Universal veteran better known for his work on horror films), East Side of Heaven looks and feels like an early-forties film, with grayer shades and a relaxed tempo, not to mention Bing’s shorter and wavier toupee.
One reason Crosby accepted billing above the title was the prominence of Joan Blondell; he allowed the same exception for Sing You Sinners because of Fred MacMurray’s stature. Blondell was the first major Hollywood actress t
o play opposite Bing since Miriam Hopkins in 1934. Some of his leading ladies became stars after working with him (Carole Lombard, Joan Bennett, Ida Lupino, Frances Farmer), but the only Crosby cast members during the past five years with box-office clout were MacMurray and W. C. Fields. Joan Blondell had spent her entire childhood in vaudeville and emerged in the 1930s as one of the most popular and reliable performers on the Warners lot. She was equally at home in gangster pictures (usually opposite James Cagney or Warren William) and musicals (usually opposite her husband, Dick Powell). Now, however, she was freelancing. East Side of Heaven was an important role for her, secured by Bing, who had enjoyed working with Joan a year earlier on the Lux Radio Theater.
The movie opens with a private joke. Jimmy Monaco, who wrote the score with Johnny Burke, had gotten married in November and recently returned from his honeymoon. In the first scene Bing is at work at the Postal Union, singing greetings on the phone. One message — to Alice from Kitty — probably refers to Dixie’s friends, but there is no doubt about the next one: to Mr. and Mrs. James Monaco, whom we see in the midst of a violent quarrel, until she slams the phone down. After work Bing walks into a hotel lobby and casually exchanges greetings (he poses à la Hermes and twirls his invisible mustache) with Matty Malneck, who is leading a band no one else pays any attention to. 72 Bing had gone to hear Malneck in a Los Angeles club and impulsively offered his band a part in the picture; as there was no nightclub sequence, Butler planted it in the crowded lobby. Bing then strolls to the receptionist, Blondell, and attempts to pick her up, but it’s a game. They are, in fact, engaged; their marriage has been postponed, as so often occurs in Depression movies. Unlike in Sing You Sinners, she is the one who wants to delay until he gets a decent job. Their interplay throughout the film is appealing and funny.
The Production Code is tweaked in the next scene, in which we see Bing and his roommate, Mischa Auer, asleep in a double bed (one of the few scenes in which Bing does not wear a hat); under the Code, married couples were required to sleep in single beds, but single men could cozy up under the same sheets. Asked by Bing to be his best man, Auer responds: “If the best man is the best man, why does the bride marry the groom?” The censors were more concerned about the villain of the piece, a radio gossip named Claudius De Wolfe, played to unctuous perfection by Jerome Cowan. Butler based the character on real-life society wag Lucius Beebe, known for his tag line “Are you happy, honey?” Seeing the phrase in the script, Breen wrote Universal, “There must be of course no ‘pansy’ suggestion about the line, ‘Are you happy, honey?’”
The convoluted plot involves an imperious old millionaire who is trying to take his infant grandson from the wife of his alcoholic son. Meanwhile, Bing takes a job as a singing driver for the Sunbeam Taxi Company, auditioning for the job with the peppiest song in the underrated Monaco-Burke score, “Sing a Song of Sunbeams.” “The cruising troubadour,” as he is known, offers a free ride and song to customers to build up business. The Crosby hero has come a long way in one year from the hard-work-is-for-saps credo of Sing You Sinners, but he continues to exemplify the idea of the common-man singer.
The mother leaves the baby in his cab, allowing Bing a kind of “spring practice” to be the perfect dad. His apprenticeship is accompanied by two fine ballads, “That Sly Old Gentleman (from Featherbed Lane),” which he delivers so convincingly that Blondell, listening in the hall, thinks he’s got an older babe in there, and the title number, a lullaby composed with Bing-friendly low-note swoops (bars five to seven and twenty-one to twenty-three). Thanks to Bing and pals, the millionaire is reunited with his family. The malevolent Claudius DeWolfe, whose show the millionaire sponsored, is fired, giving Bing his program. And that’s how crooners are born.
“In New York they’re on their knees begging for business,” Variety lamented, blaming the dearth of moviegoers on the World’s Fair, a disabling heat wave, and sporting events. 73 Under the circumstances, East Side of Heaven would be lucky to take in $55,000 at Radio City, the paper warned. Yet a week later the tide came in and Bing’s picture emerged as a sizable hit in the most fabled of movie seasons, 1939. Reviews helped. The New York Daily News gushed, “Bing Crosby’s pictures are getting better and better. East Side of Heaven is the most delightfully amusing film he’s ever done.” 74 Variety called it a “grand package of entertainment,” singling out its smart pace (“hitting a nice tempo at the start and rolling merrily to the finish”), and noted how unusual it was for a star to “toss his own coin into productions to get a shot at a cut of the profits.” 75 Baby Sandy was declared by New York’s Herald Tribune “our favorite actor of the month.” 76
In the year dominated by Gone With the Wind, the ten highest-grossing movies of record were dramas, with the exception of two nostalgic Judy Garland pictures: Babes in Arms, which re-creates minstrelsy and glorifies middle America, and The Wizard of Oz, which tells how Dorothy regains her middle-American home after bringing order to a foreign land. This was the year of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Jesse James, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and Drums Along the Mohawk. Pundits who divined a trend toward sobriety, however, had but a year to find out how wrong they were: Road to Singapore and Preston Sturges’s films were just around the corner. Butler told a reporter in 1946 that East Side of Heaven earned between $3 million and $4 million and saved Universal from going under. 77 Had those numbers been accurate, his picture would surely have ranked in the top ten. On the other hand, everyone acknowledged that it did bail out Universal.
In tracking the fortunes of far more conventional folks than the unholy Beebes, East Side of Heaven marked a moderating turn in the selling of Bing Crosby. Ahead of him lay his wackiest comedies, powerful dramatic roles, and nostalgic detours, but Bing’s days as an acquiescent romantic lead, forever wooed, reluctantly wooing, were over.
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WHAT’S NEW
Al Jolson was like Mr. Great Singer of all time. Maurice Chevalier was like Mr. Entertainer of all time. Frank Sinatra is like Mr. Balladeer of all time. But Bing Crosby is like Mr. Everything of all time.
— José Ferrer (1974) 1
When Universal hired Cliff Work as its new production chief, it fired Charles R. Rogers, who then attempted to stay afloat as an independent producer. One night at the Brown Derby, Rogers ran into the legendary vaudevillian and songwriter Gus Edwards, who had recently announced his retirement and was rumored to be suffering from paresis. They spoke of the old days, and Rogers told Gus that his life might make a good picture. After Edwards sent him an old autobiographical article he had written for Collier’s, Rogers made a preliminary production deal with United Artists. There was only one actor for the lead, and Rogers went to Paramount to see whether he could borrow Bing. Paramount had no intention of loaning him and did not have to worry about Rogers’s going to him directly, because East Side of Heaven fulfilled Bing’s outside option for the year. William LeBaron recognized a good idea, however, and invited Rogers to make the picture for him.
It was, in fact, a brilliant idea — on paper. Bing had just scored a hit as a vicarious papa, waving good-bye at the close of East Side of Heaven with Baby Sandy in his arms. Playing Gus Edwards, he would be surrounded by dozens of vicarious kids. The more you thought about the possibilities, the more compelling they became. Edwards was the king of kiddie acts back when Bing was first entering elementary school. He initially made his mark in 1896 as a member of the Newsboy Quintet, an act that consisted of teenage boys dressed in raggedy clothes, hawking papers and singing ballads. The German-born Edwards eventually proved a formidable Tin Pan Alley composer and publisher, with songs like “In Zanzibar,” “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” “Sunbonnet Sue,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” and “Jimmy Valentine.” In 1907 he wrote his biggest hit, “School Days,” which sold 3 million records (sung by Byron G. Harlan) and encouraged him to create a Broadway show in which forty young players strutted their stuff, to the utter indifference of the Great White Way. Undaunted, Ed
wards distilled from the show a vaudeville act, “School Boys and Girls,” that went on to enjoy phenomenal success for more than a quarter of a century. Imitators were legion.
By 1913 Variety reported sixty-two School Days acts touring the country, all of them sure-fire and very inexpensive, for as show-business chroniclers Abel Green and Joe Laurie Jr. observed, “The only props were a few desks and chairs [and] there were always stagestruck youngsters available to sing and dance.” 2 In his many variations on the act (“Kid Kabaret,” “Band Box Revue,” “Blonde Typewriters”), Edwards introduced countless boys and girls, many later prominent, among them Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Groucho Marx, Walter Winchell, Elsie Janis, Sally Rand, Eleanor Powell, Georgie Price, Lila Lee, Jack Pearl, Bert Wheeler, Mervyn LeRoy, Ina Ray Hutton, Ricardo Cortez, Charles King, Ann Dvorak, and Ray Bolger. In 1939, a world remade by the Depression and an inevitable war, the country was once again gripped by kiddiemania. Shirley Temple, pushing twelve, had only another year or two at the top, but the public responded to children of all ages, from infancy (Baby Sandy) to teens (Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland). Had Humbert Humbert spent more time at the movies, he might have been a happy, happy man.
One can imagine the humming of Paramount’s wheels: perfect vehicle for Bing, perfect vehicle for child performers, perfect opportunity for shamelessly exploitative publicity (like importing sixteen orphans from as many orphanages for a press preview), perfect opportunity to discover and launch its very own Deanna Durbin. Her name was Linda Ware, a fourteen-year-old orphan from Detroit. The plenary possibilities of Gus Edwards’s story and the wonderful talents he discovered were sacrificed to the studio’s vain hope that her golden locks and faux-operatic voice would hit the kiddie jackpot. She was billed as “the new singing discovery of Charles R. Rogers, Discoverer of Deanna Durbin.” 3 But Ware was no more a match for Durbin than Kitty Carlisle and Gladys Swarthout had been for Jeanette MacDonald.