by Gary Giddins
“We thought it would lend spirit, you know, to the piece if we wouldn’t tell one another exactly what we were going to say,” Bing said in 1976. “You had to stick to the script in a general way, just keep the story line intact, but I would always prepare a few snappers, and of course he would have a sheath of snappers ready for me, and [Lamour] would be standing there in the middle, trying to get in something, crawl in somewhere. I think it helped the pictures and gave them an ad-libbed flavor… like a couple of hall-room boys clowning around. The writers didn’t like this too much. They were good-natured about it, I guess, but once in a while they put in an objection that we were tinkering with the story too much.” 38 In another 1976 conversation, he said most of the carrying-on took place during the first two films. Told by a fan that “each movie, as a whole, seemed like an ad-lib,” Bing responded: “That was the brilliance of the entire enterprise. By the second or definitely the third Road, our styles had become so finely — I don’t want to say chiseled, but it does seem to apply — that the extremely superlative writers were able to create dialogue that appeared to be improvised off the cuff, but it wasn’t. Most of that material was completely scripted…. Of course, every now and then, we’d tear off a leaf of our own.” 39
Bing protested too much. According to Paramount files, Road to Morocco was filled with bad ad-libbing, which Buddy DeSylva, who had become chief of production, ordered cut. Generally, the films are so seamless, it is difficult to believe that any genuine ad-libs survive beyond under-the-breath comments, like one in Road to Zanzibar, when Bing, counting a parcel of bonds, drops a reference to treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau. For one of his most memorable authentic ad-libs, in Morocco, he played straight man to a camel that spat across the set directly into Bob’s eye. Bob staggered into camera view, but before he could howl or David Butler could stop action, Bing merrily patted the camel’s flank and said, “Good girl, good girl.” Butler kept the whole incident in the film.
A comparison of Road to Morocco scripts, the margins offering alternative lines and jokes, reveals the kinds of written “ad-libs” that survived. Epigrammatic they are not. Several punch-ups are accomplished with a few added words. Bob’s character was intended to say, “You mean you’re thinkin’ of eatin’ me?”; instead, he says, “You mean you’d eat me? Without vegetables?” 40 Bing’s character says of Bob’s departed aunt Lucy, “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” to which Bob was supposed to say, “Not Aunt Lucy”; instead he says, “Not Aunt Lucy. She was a Republican.” Sometimes each gets a zinger to replace dull dialogue, as when they are lost in the desert: “Any idea where we are?” “Unh-huh” was changed to (Bob:) “This must be the place where they empty all the old hourglasses”; (Bing) “I think this is what’s left after I clean my spinach.” One can imagine a writer secretly, as if touting a hot tip at the track, passing to Bing an improvement on (to Bob) “Why, you slimy, double-crossin’ eel” and (to Lamour) “We’ve been together since we were kids.” Instead, Bing calls Hope a “dirty, underhanded, sickle-snoot” and tells Lamour, “We were kids together, in the same class for years — till I got promoted.”
At other times Bing simply translates phrases into Bingese, as he often did (“Who’s that cute little nipper?” becomes “Who is that headstrong, impetuous boy?”). Butler admired Bing’s feeling for language, describing him as a “conversational” actor. 41 He told a reporter that Bing never read a script verbatim, that he added, deleted, and changed words to find a better fit. Butler gave him free rein, arguing, “You get some damn good stuff that way. You can always cut afterwards.” 42 Reviewing Road to Zanzibar in The New Republic, Otis Ferguson enlarged on that aspect of his ability. Noting Bing’s facile lingo, he wrote, “I believe him to be the first artist in popular expression today — not just slang for its own newness or to be different, but the kind of speech that is a kind of folk poetry, with its words of concision, edge, and cocky elegance fitted to speech rhythms, so that they may run free to the point, musical and easy.” 43
Mort Lachman, a longtime Hope writer, began contributing to the series with the fourth outing, Road to Utopia, and traced the illusory ad-libbing to the way Bob and Bing interacted on radio. “Let me explain how it was done,” he said:
We did the same thing in movies as in radio. We would do a basic script and we would play it to the audience, on Monday night, a half-hour rehearsal. Then we would meet afterwards, and rewrite all night, and then on Tuesday, we would do it again, live, on the air. Bob liked a little extra, so we would give him a few asides, a few changes, a few things that belonged to him that Bing did not see. Bing would come with his writers — Bill Morrow, for one — who gave him things. Now on the movie set the same thing would happen. They would go through rehearsal and Hope would say, “You know I could use something here, I could use something there,” and we’d all write some jokes to go there. Then he’d pick the ones he wanted…. You have to understand they were playing to the guys on the set. What stayed in and didn’t stay in depended on what got a laugh from the crew. The cameramen broke up, the lighting men broke up, the carpenters broke up, set people broke up, sound people broke up. So the attitudes in the Road pictures were different than in most movies. And that led to the breaking of the fourth wall, because they started working directly to the audience. 44
The writer — if one could call him that, since he never actually wrote anything — most often found in the crossfire of the Crosby-Hope food fight for nearly fifteen years was Barney Dean, the most fabled member of Bing’s extended family, beloved by all, as perhaps only a jester can be. He was the least likely figure in the inner circle: a short, round, shiny-headed, Jewish gnome with bright blue eyes. “A pixie in human form,” 45 wrote Bing, comparing him to the seven dwarfs — “not Grumpy,” he stipulated, though his facial expression was so intense that he was sometimes called Cement Head. Reporters did not know what to make of him, because out of fierce loyalty to his benefactors, he had one answer to any question about Bing or Bob. He would put his right forefinger to his forehead, ponder deeply, and say, as if imparting privileged information, “Gee, I can’t remember now.” 46
Barney Fradkin was born in Russia, in 1904, and came through Ellis Island to Brooklyn, at twelve. In 1920, after learning a time step, he got a job in vaudeville with Eddie Leonard’s minstrels; “I was the guy that got the sand from the shuffle dance because I had the least talent,” he told Barry Ulanov. 47 He told Shavelson he was the “world’s youngest whirlwind dancer,” whatever that meant. 48 Bing remembered he shuffled poorly and could not tap at all. Yet he toured in vaudeville for a decade before teaming up with dancer Sid Tar-radasch. Barney convinced his partner that Fradkin and Tarradasch would never fit on a marquee, so — eyeing silent film actress Priscilla Dean’s name on a billboard — they renamed themselves the Dean Brothers. They fared no better. Barney went into a short-lived comedy act and found stand-in work in Hollywood. By early winter 1939 he was peddling Christmas cards. Paramount allowed him to push his wares on the lot. When he went over to the stage where Road to Singapore was filming, Bing and Bob were delighted to see him.
Barney had shared vaudeville bills with Bob and was present, in 1931, when the Friars saluted Bing. While reminiscing, Dean took out of his pocket a card from a penny weight machine promising he would never lose his fortune. He said, “If I go back to my hotel and find they locked me out of my room, I’m going to sue the weighing machine people.” 49 They returned to the set to shoot the “Sweet Potato Piper” number, involving dance breaks. Barney suggested a step, and they incorporated it into the routine. Bob recalled: “I said to Bing, ‘This guy’s too funny. He could help us with a lot of lines. Why don’t we get him on the set?’ So Bing called the assistant director and said, ‘Tell them I want to put Barney Dean on for writing here.’About five people came out from the front office to check, you know. They were so thrilled to be talking to Bing, they never even mentioned Barney Dean, and Barney went on working with us until he died. Ever
y scene, we’d discuss it, and he would come up with a couple lines.” 50
Barney demurred, for the most part. They devised the gags by themselves, he said, then gave him the credit. But he was always around, trading off between Bob’s pictures and Bing’s and aiding both when they collaborated. For a number of years, they arranged for Barney’s salary to be figured into the budget of each movie. In the Road to Morocco financial report, his contribution is described as twenty-nine bits and gags; a few are detailed, the rest summed up as “And several pieces of business which are very difficult to explain.” 51 After the war, concerned about his future, Bing and Bob asked Paramount to install Barney permanently on the writing staff. Paramount did not decline outright but dragged its heels.
Basil Grillo, who had just been hired to supervise Bing’s business interests, was inadvertently caught up in the dispute over Barney’s job. At that time he hardly knew Bing and needed him to sign some checks. Bing told him to meet him in his dressing room the next morning at nine but never showed. Instead, Leo Lynn came and told Basil to meet Bing in his dressing area on the set. It was early 1946, and they were filming Welcome Stranger. “I go out there and they’re shooting this big production number, ‘Country Style,’ with maybe a hundred dancers. And all of a sudden Bing comes off the set, and I think he’s coming to the dressing room. But he never shows. Now I’m really hurt. I’m taking all of this very personally, because I am sure he doesn’t like me.” 52 Bing disappeared for more than an hour, then returned to the set as Basil silently composed his resignation speech. “He saunters in and they get ready to shoot when he says, ‘Wait a minute, one of my men is here, I have to see him.’A hundred extras are waiting and Bing comes over to the dressing room. He greets me like I was his long-lost son, puts on that damn Irish charm — could charm you right out of your socks. And he sat down, signed the checks, chitchatted, and so on, wasting time. None of this makes sense to me at all.” 53
Leo Lynn eventually explained it to him. “This particular day,” Grillo learned, “Bing and Bob went into the front office as soon as they got in the studio, and said, ‘Look, we want Barney Dean to have a contract, and we want it now. And we feel very bad, we feel very ill about this whole thing and we’re not going to be able to do much work until Barney gets a contract.’ “ Bing had been stalling everyone all day — his idea of a work stoppage. Bob, also filming on the lot, did the same thing. “At two o’clock that afternoon,” Basil said, “Barney had his contract signed, sealed, and delivered. That’s the kind of power they had, though they never really used it except as a last resort.” 54
Shortly afterward, Bing put Grillo in charge of Bing Crosby Enterprises dictating a letter to that effect to his staff; no deals of any kind could be consummated without Basil’s personal approval. But Grillo continued to feel like an interloper until he went to see Bing one day in his dressing room. “I’m sitting there, waiting for Bing, and Barney comes in. He was a real nice little guy, but he didn’t know that anybody in the world existed other than Bing and Bob. Everybody else he called Major. He says, ‘Hi Bas, how are you today?’ Well, geez, I nearly fell off my chair. From Barney, this was real recognition. It meant I was accepted.” 55
Songwriter Johnny Lange recalled a number he wrote for Walt Disney’s Song of the South (“Uncle Remus Said”): “Bing sang it several weeks in a row on his show, because I put the name Barney in the song. I drove Barney once to see the Ritz Brothers so he could sell postcards. Not long after that Bing and Bob Hope made a job for him at Paramount and he was making five hundred dollars a week.” 56 Gary Crosby recalled Barney sitting off to the side of the set as the scenes were blocked. “After you block, you step out to get your makeup fixed while the lighting men light the thing and there’s about a twenty- or thirty-minute period there, and the old man and Hope would go over to Barney and say, ‘Give us something to make this thing better.’ So Barney threw lines to them. Then they come back and the director would say, ‘Roll ‘em,’ and the dialogue would be different from what they had just rehearsed. Barney was a sweet guy. Dad loved Barney Dean to death. He was at our house all the time.” 57
Bing’s aversion to hospitals and funerals, evident after Eddie Lang’s death and more pronounced after the media circus attending Dixie’s, was absolute. His friends accepted his detachment as characteristic. He was consistent, demanding that his own funeral be held privately and secretively, before the cock crowed. So while some people groused, few were surprised that he did not visit Barney in the hospital, where he died of cancer in 1954. Barney’s death, two years after Dixie’s, was hard on Bing, but his way of acknowledging it was typical, a fitting gesture that — mutual friends agreed — Barney would have relished. Within weeks of the burial, Bing was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on Person to Person, a popular television program that specialized in fake candor, with Murrow sitting in the studio, asking prearranged questions of famous people who were filmed in their homes.
As Bing’s segment concluded, Murrow said, “Bing, thanks for letting us come visit you tonight….” Bing interrupted him. “Wait a minute, you’re not gonna get away. I have something else I want to show you. Don’t take off. This is really my pride and joy.” He strode into the hallway, as another camera picked him up, and, standing before a huge painting, said, breathlessly and without garbling a word:
Everyone has something in their home that they really like to go into rhapsodies about. This is a canvas by Sir Alfred Munnings, who was the head of the British Royal Academy for years. He’s considered the finest painter of the English country life and country scene. It represents the hunting scene and it recalls a very amusing story to me. Barney Dean, the late Barney Dean, the beloved gag writer who worked for us for so many years. We were having a party here. It was getting late-ish, four-ish or so. Just a few stragglers out in the hall, two or three people, you know how they like to dawdle at a party, hate to say good night. And Barney was looking up at the picture sort of ruminatively and I said, ‘Barney, what’s on your mind?’ Barney was from New York, Brooklyn, never left the pavement, never been off the bricks in his life, and he looked at the picture and said, ‘How come we never do this no more?’ Ed, I know you’re in a hurry. You’ve got a time factor back there in television that you’re fighting all the time, so I want to say good night to you. 58
Another remembrance was inserted two years later into High Society, when Trummy Young, the trombonist in Louis Armstrong’s band, mutters, as they approach C. K. Dexter-Haven’s mansion, “I forgot my library card.” Barney made the crack when Bing brought him to a New Year’s Eve party at Winthrop Rockefeller’s estate in Tarrytown, as he recounts in his autobiography (Barney makes an early appearance, page two). Later at that same affair, as they stood unrecognized — Bing wasn’t wearing his hairpiece — on a gallery watching an indoor tennis game, a reveler asked them, “Has anyone seen Millicent?” Barney offered, “Maybe she’s upstairs playing polo.” 59
Barney Dean stories, like those told of comedians Groucho Marx, Joe Frisco, W. C. Fields, or Phil Harris, became part of the currency of Hollywood wit. Skitch Henderson, the pianist whose career Bing launched when he made him a regular on his 1946 radio show, was present for one of Barney’s most frequently cited one-liners. “There was a coffee shop across Hollywood Boulevard and all of us would go — Bing, the writers, Barney, of course. And the Hollywood cops suddenly decided they didn’t want any jaywalking on Hollywood Boulevard. So we all cross the street, about five of us, and a cop strides up to us and puts his shoulder over Barney Dean, and before the cop can say a word, Barney asks, ‘How fast was I going officer?’” 60
“I loved that man,” Eddie Bracken said. “He was great. We were doing a picture and a horse stepped on his toe. The first thing a normal person would say is ‘Ow!’ or scream. Barney turned around, looked at the horse, and said, ‘Jew hater.’” 61 The picture was Para-mount’s wartime flag-waver, Star Spangled Rhythm, in which Bing and Bob also appear. Barney showed up in Variety
Girl, Duffy’s Tavern, and Thanks for the Memory — in all, two pictures with Bing and Bob, one with Bing, one with Bob. He is himself the subject of a punch line in Road to Zanzibar: Bob complains that he wants to return to the United States, and Bing says, “Yeah, you’ll wind up in Barney Dean’s Beanery, blowing up bloodwurst,” which doubled as a joke about Bing’s bu-bu-bu bs.
“There were nine million writers on the set, and all Bing or Bob wanted to talk to was Barney,” Mort Lachman recalled. “You know what they were jealous of? They were jealous of Barney’s affection.” 62 “He was their lucky charm,” Shavelson said. “They had to have Barney around, and he was such a nice guy. Bing was going to New York once, so he said to Barney, ‘Can I do anything for you?’ Barney says, ‘Yeah, go up to One hundred and twenty-first Street and so-and-so, the big building on the corner; you go to the thirteenth floor, ring the bell for Mrs. Rosenzweig. She’ll come to the door, she’s a nice lady. Give her five thousand dollars.’ Bing asks why. Barney says, ‘She’s my mother.’ Barney was the kind of guy who gave the head of the studio, Buddy DeSylva, a gold watch, and he had engraved on it, ‘This is a lot of shit, but when you don’t have any talent, you have to do these things.’” 63
“Barney didn’t have a lot of confidence with women,” Rory Burke, Johnny’s daughter, recalled. 64 After Jimmy Van Heusen joined the inner circle as Burke’s partner, he took it upon himself to fix up Barney. A bachelor of legendary appetites and connections, Van Heusen, a licensed pilot, was once presented with an airplane by one of Hollywood’s top madams. “They would go whoring,” Rory recalled. “I really should not have been hearing these things, but we had big ears and we’d kind of listen around the corners. But they couldn’t talk about it when Bing was around; he wouldn’t have liked that. Not at all. Bing was something of a gentleman in that respect. He might have gone along with them, but he wouldn’t be talking about it. Everybody had their part in looking out for Barney.” 65 Barney called his protectors the hoodlum gentlemen, and with Bing and Bob occupying different social circles, he became a tether between them.