Bing Crosby
Page 70
The magic of the Road movies has little to do with parody, romance, or music, though all three are essential to the blend. Rather, it stems from the interaction between the protagonists and what they bring out in each other. Bing was never more comically broad and inventive than with Bob; Bob was never more human and credible than with Bing. They are opposites who attract. Hope is brash and vain, yet cowardly and insecure. Crosby is romantic and self-possessed, yet manipulative and callous. Hope is hyperbole, Crosby understatement; Hope is the dupe, Crosby the duper. No one had the faintest notion of a series as Road to Singapore went before the cameras in early October, but everyone could see that it was not going to be an ordinary production.
Paramount assigned Victor Schertzinger to direct, an odd but salutary decision. He began as a concert violinist and entered Hollywood in 1916, writing the score for Thomas Ince’s Civilization. Within a year he had a duel career as a prolific director and songwriter; his One Night of Love, a hit picture and an even bigger hit song, in 1934, provided Grace Moore with her greatest success. By then he had directed dozens of films, and many more followed — not least a handsome adaptation of The Mikado. Schertzinger got the job because of his association with musicals, not farce. (His friendship with the Crosbys — he served as best man at Everett’s wedding to Florence George — could not have hurt.) Today, however, he is remembered almost entirely for his work during the two years preceding his death, in 1941: four pictures with Bing, including the first two Road ventures, and one with Lamour, The Fleet’s In, for which he wrote his most durable songs, “I Remember You” and “Tangerine.” Johnny Burke was retained to write the lyrics, but this time he wrote three songs with Jimmy Monaco and two with the director.
In the weeks before he was to begin the picture and resume duties at KMH, Bing took a break. He traveled by train to New York, chiefly to play golf at Meadowbrook with his friend Harvey Shaeffer. This was the trip when he bet Shaeffer $100 he could— anonymously — dive from the fifty-foot board at Billy Rose’s Aquacade Revue, collecting sixty-five dollars because he aborted the dive midair and landed feet first.
Dixie was relieved to have Bing out of town. The twins required tonsillectomies, and not wishing to distress him with recollections of Eddie Lang, she admitted them secretly to the Good Samaritan Hospital after his departure. The procedures went off without a hitch. Bing’s one professional obligation in New York was to record two songs — at Jack Kapp’s request — with the Andrews Sisters, a relatively new act Jack’s brother Dave had signed to the label. A year earlier the Andrews Sisters had recorded one of Decca’s all-time megahits, the English-language version of the Yiddish song “Bei Mir Bist du Schôn.”
Although Bing’s collaboration with the Andrews Sisters would stall for the next four years, it ultimately meant as much to his recording career as the Hope connection meant to his screen and radio careers in the same period. Call him lucky? The nuns of the order of the Poor Clares must have been working overtime. To him, it was just another session, one of Jack’s ideas, which he agreed to with some reluctance. Incredibly, he did not see the material until he arrived at the Fifty-seventh Street studio — early, as usual, for the 8:00 A.M.session. He was perched on the piano when the sisters, shivering with doubt, walked through the door.
They had become singers because of Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters, whose Woodbury broadcasts they listened to with the rapt attention Bing brought to the jazz records he and Al Rinker copied at Bailey’s. Maxene Andrews recalled: “My sister LaVerne had a fantastic musical memory. Her great love, outside of loving Bing, was the Boswell Sisters. LaVerne would very patiently teach Patty and me the intricate parts of their arrangements. But in our minds, Bing and the Boswell Sisters came together. You didn’t think of one without thinking of the other. So when Mr. Jack Kapp called us into his office and said, How would you like to record with Bing Crosby? — well, do you know what that felt like?” 12 Kapp told them they could choose one tune, but the other would have to be “Ciribiribin,” an English-language version of a turn-of-the-century Neapolitan folk song — introduced, coincidentally, by Grace Moore in Victor Schertzinger’s One Night of Love.
After meeting with Kapp, they and arranger Vic Schoen repaired to the small apartment of Lou Levy, a music publisher and, subsequently, their manager and Maxene’s husband. “So we started to talk about it, all the nervous talk,” Maxene remembered: “How can we record with him? What’s he going to sing? How is he to sing with? What are we going to do? We don’t read music. It went back and forth.” 13 Vic wrote vocal and small-band arrangements for “Ciribiribin” and a novelty number, “Yodelin’ Jive,” and Dave Kapp hired Joe Venuti to lead a swinging little band with Bobby Hackett on trumpet.
“We walked into the studio and Bing never said a word. So we didn’t know whether we should say hello to him. We didn’t know anything.” Maxene did observe that his hat was slightly back on his head, but she did not yet know what that meant. Years later it was the first thing she looked for: “He could be very moody, but we could always tell what mood he was in because I never saw him without his hat in all the years I knew him. When he’d walk in, if his hat was square on his head, you didn’t kid around with him. But if it was back a little bit, sort of jaunty-like, then you could have a ball.” 14
Bing called Vic over and asked him to play the melodies, which he did with a one-finger demonstration at the piano. “My sister Pat sang along with him. From that point on, Bing always said, when we went in to a recording date, ‘Hey, Patty, come over here and show me what we’re going to sing.’ But at that time, we walked in and we had a sheet of paper, just one sheet, with all the lyrics of the songs typed out, and that’s all he got.” 15 The four singers shared the same mike — the sisters looking straight at him, mesmerized, and Bing singing away from them, in profile.
The date was over in a flash, and the women ran. “We flew out of that studio,” Maxene said. “I don’t think we said good-bye to anybody. We had been so uncomfortable and we were so nervous that maybe the record wouldn’t be good, and maybe we felt we weren’t good enough. We talked about it and we thought, you know, that would be the one record we’d make with Bing, but at least in our career we could say we recorded with Bing Crosby.” 16 The 78 was a two-sided hit.
While they fretted, Bing said to Jack, or so Jack reported to the sisters, “I will record with them anytime they want. They can pick the material. I want nothing to do with it. I just want to sing with them.” 17 In truth, he did go on to record nearly four dozen numbers with the sisters, as well as duets with Patty when she went out on her own; and Schoen did select and arrange most of the material. A third of their recordings reached Billboard’s top ten, and four — “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and “Jingle Bells,” 1943; “Don’t Fence Me In,” 1944; “South America, Take It Away,” 1946 — were certified with gold discs as million sellers.
Ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-four, the Andrews Sisters grew up in Minneapolis and apprenticed in vaudeville. They had little of the southern sass, improvisational bravado, or casual swing of the Boswells. But they had pizzazz, a unison pep that drove and inspired Bing. No personal connection ever developed. Although he presented them on the radio and used them in one film (the 1948 Road to Rio), the partnership existed almost exclusively on records, the most copious and commercially productive vocal alliance of his recording career. Their work is overall less compelling than entertaining, but the best of it is highly entertaining. The first two collaborations betray no nervousness or lack of preparation — though, to be sure, the charts did not require much in the way of interplay. Bing bends “Ciribiribin” to his rhythmic will, chimes with the girls, and sings the reprise in Italian. For good measure, Joe Venuti wails a sixteen-bar solo. Nothing could be done with the banal “Yodelin’ Jive” except soldier through it. Patty noted a physical facet of Bing’s time: “He had a thing with his foot. He would move it right to left, right to left, and so on —just like a metronome.” 18
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Schertzinger was blindsided his first day on the set. He called for action, and the actors came to life, but much of the dialogue was strangely alien. “Victor was a nice fellow and he’d directed some fine pictures, but he’d had little experience with low comedy,” Bing states in his memoir. “For a couple of days when Hope and I tore freewheeling into a scene, ad-libbing and violating all of the accepted rules of movie-making, Schertzinger stole bewildered looks at his script, then leafed rapidly through it searching for the lines we were saying.” 19 He complained in the beginning but conceded that he had something special after he noticed the usually indifferent crew beaming. To the astonishment of his cameraman, William Mellor, Schertzinger relied more and more on master shots, often first takes. “After a couple of days,” Hope recalled, “he went to the commissary, to the table where we ate, and said, ‘You know, I know how to say start with these guys, but I don’t know when to say stop, because they ad-lib all the time.’ We did so much ad-libbing and kidding around, it was so different for the Road pictures, that everybody got a big kick out of it.” 20
Bing was in particularly good humor after the first week of shooting and traveled to San Francisco for the weekend. On Sunday afternoon he sang two free sets at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, backed by George Olsen’s band. The announcement of his participation drew a record crowd of 187,730, causing such widespread congestion on the island that the roads were blocked and Bing had to be brought in by yacht.
Back on the set, Schertzinger received another wake-up call while they filmed a scene in which Bing and Bob crawl into bed. Bing would not remove his cap. The director became indignant as Bing coolly explained that he was not going to get up and retrieve the toupee; it was the last scene of the day and the golf course beckoned. He advised him to shoot the scene. Schertzinger decided on a showdown and sent a messenger to the front office, demanding arbitration. He learned where the power at Paramount rested when two executives rushed over to the recumbent Bing and asked, “Is everything all right, Bing? Do you need anything?” 21 Not a thing, Bing told them, everything was just fine. The executives left without a word to Schertzinger, who resumed filming, though the scene was later reshot.
Hope, bowled over by Bing’s savoir faire, to say nothing of his muscle, was certain that the hat stayed in the picture — much as Bing believed that Carole Lombard’s kicking-and-punching tantrum remained in We’re Not Dressing. But the scene in question finds him wearing his hairpiece. David Butler recalled a similar incident during the filming of Road to Morocco (the third journey), but without an executive summons. “Hell, Bing, you can’t wear a hat to bed,” he said of a turban. Bing said, “Sure I can, they wear ‘em all the time out there.” 22 That scene was also cut or reshot. Bing wears a copious assortment of hats throughout the series; in Road to Utopia he wears one in all but five or six scenes, perhaps a record. They served a purpose beyond relieving him of the toupee; they also made it easier to disguise the use of stunt doubles.
The writers were less amused by the antics. Hartman visited the set when the boys were in full throttle. He was visibly upset, and Hope baited him. “If you recognize anything of yours, yell ‘Bingo!’” he shouted. 23 Hartman shot back, “Shut up, or I’ll put you back in the trunk” — meaning the script, on which the actors, however cocky, were ultimately dependent. “That was the truth,” said Melville Shavelson, who later collaborated with Hartman on many of Hope’s and Danny Kaye’s films, while contributing — “incognito, no credit, not very much money” — lines to the Road pictures. “Basically, [Bing and Bob] did not change characters or anything else. That was the invention of Don Hartman and Frank Butler and continued through the other pictures.” 24 Hartman complained about line changes to the producer. Bing claimed that he and Bob sneaked up to the projection room where rushes were viewed that evening, and when they heard the top brass laughing, they knew they were safe.
Lamour contributed to the ad-libbing legend, describing herself as stymied by their banter, struggling to “find the openings.” 25 Hope recalled her pleading, “Why don’t you give me something to say?” and his retort, “Just twirl your sarong, you’ll be all right.” 26 Told that Bing’s secretary on Road to Utopia said they gave Dottie a hard time, he laughed: “No, we never gave her a hard time. We gave her a good time. She was in every picture.” 27 Lamour developed a sense of humor about it, though one can imagine the ratio of humor to anger at work when, after a scene in which they splashed soapsuds on her, she followed them into the commissary and dumped an entire canister of suds on their heads. The diners were amused, she wrote in her autobiography, “but the director wasn’t too thrilled. It meant that our hair, along with all our clothes, had to be dried again.” 28
Her anger prevailed when it came to Anthony Quinn, playing her unsavory dance partner, Caesar. “Bing got me out of some embarrassing spots,” he conceded. “He always defended me.” 29 The main incident concerned a routine with Dorothy that required him to snap a whip around her waist and reel her in for a snug dance. The great character actor Akim Tamiroff, though not in the cast, was accomplished with a bullwhip and instructed him. For safety’s sake, however, Quinn cracked the whip a foot away from her; then it was wrapped in place and he pulled her close. When they played the scene, she shoved him away and shouted, “I can’t dance with him. The son of a bitch has a hard-on!” 30 Everyone on the set froze. Quinn did not feel he could respond: “I was just a small player then. I didn’t dare.” 31 The tension dissolved into laughter after Bing piped up: “You should be happy you can give someone a hard-on, Dottie.” 32
Lamour once insisted, “After the first Road film, I never studied dialogue. Never. I’d wait to get on the set to see what they were planning. I was the happiest and highest-paid straight woman in the business.” 33 Yet she cannot have been pleased by her abrupt demotion — second-billed in Road to Singapore, third-billed in Road to Zanzibar and ever after. Her roles were increasingly designed to support the boys. Even in Singapore she does not arrive until twenty minutes into the story. By the fifth trek, Road to Rio, Bing and Bob were able to force Paramount into a three-way split, and she never forgave them for not cutting her in. But by then her career had fallen apart. The Road movies were all she had, though she remained a mandatory ingredient. When Bing and Bob made the mistake of reducing her participation in The Road to Hong Kong to a glorified cameo, audiences bristled, especially as she was replaced by the dreary Joan Collins. Lamour’s predicament is implied in a publicity photograph taken during the shooting of Road to Singapore. All three are dressed in striped caftans, laughing. Dottie, in the center and holding a sitar, is doubled over with hilarity. On each side, looking no less merry, Bing and Bob lock eyes over her head, as if she weren’t there.
What each of them had that she lacked was a team of kibitzing writers. In truth, little of the ad-libbing was genuinely ad-libbed. For decades the scriptwriters privately seethed less at sabotage than at the notion that their work was improvised by actors. In later years Bing and Bob explained their peculiar ideas of ad-libbing. “You see, I just started my radio show,” Bob said, “and I had the greatest staff of writers, all young people like [Norman] Panama and [Melvin] Frank, who had just gotten out of college in Chicago; [Melville] Shavelson and [Milt] Josefsberg, two more young guys, brilliant. I had about six or seven, and I used to give them the Road scripts, and they’d make notes on the margins, so and so and so and so, and I’d go into Bing’s dressing room in the morning and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ and he would say, ‘Oh, that’s funny, that’s funny.’And so we’d ad-lib these things into the pictures and people would fall down laughing.” 34
The biggest laughs came when Hope neglected to visit Bing’s dressing room, which was the case most of the time. The onscreen battle between Bing’s Josh Mallon and Bob’s Ace Lannigan (changed from Winthrop) over Lamour’s Mima was a Lindy hop compared to the offscreen competition for last laughs, which included Road-like double cross
es. For example, Bob would have a writer provide Bing with a comic line on the QT, which Bing would happily deliver, expecting to stump Bob, not knowing that the writer had already given Hope a better rejoinder. Dolores Hope recalled, “There was a natural rivalry, which was a very healthy one, and what you see in the Road pictures is Bob and Bing as they really were. Typical of their personalities and everything about them — Bob low man on the totem pole most of the time. I think the Road pictures capture a great deal of their personalities.” 35
Josh and Ace were a canny amalgam of Bing and Bob, as their friends knew them, and the manipulating partner and naive stooge invented by Butler and Hartman. The two men raced on and off the set to the writers — never those who received screen credit — for punch-ups and reassurances, attempting to outdo each other, much like the characters they played. To each of them, a writer would counsel, When Bob says this, you say that, or, When Bing does that, you do this. The rivalry invigorated them. “I heard they didn’t pal around so much outside their work, and yet they seemed like the greatest friends on the set,” Quinn recalled. “I must say Bob Hope was very challenging to him, because Bing was very fast on his feet and Bob had to keep him off balance constantly with his ad-libs. But Bing’s great asset was the facility of his mind, really quite remarkable.” 36 Shavelson noted, “Bob obviously wanted to be as sharp as he could, so he and Bing and the writers would go off the set and then come back and start off with a line that nobody knew where in the world it came from, and build from there.” 37