by Gary Giddins
18. Rinker.
19. “[Rinker] was salaried to Bing Crosby Ltd which is owned by Crosby, Barris and Roger Marchetti, local lawyer.” Variety, July 28, 1931.
20. AI, Marti Barris.
21. AI, Marguerite Toth.
22. AI, Basil Grillo.
23. AI, Joe Porter.
24. AI, Basil Grillo.
25. AI, Julia Rinker.
26. Shepherd and Slatzer, Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man.
27. Rinker.
28. Ibid.
29. AI, Skitch Henderson.
30. AI, Don Eagle.
31. AI, Kurt Dieterle.
32. Photoplay, Sept. 1931.
33. Motion Picture Herald, Oct. 10, 1931.
34. Variety, Nov. 10, 1931.
35. Eberle, Music in the Air,p. 13.
36. Another excellent number is “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” a fine song he never otherwise recorded.
37. According to the original cast notes, Ginger Rogers was proposed for the role of Bing’s beloved, which went instead to Ann Christy.
38. “Bing Crosby Signs with Columbia,” Columbia Broadcasting System press release, Aug. 22, 1931.
39. “CBS Gets Crosby; Musicians’ Ban in L.A. Only,” Variety, Aug. 25, 1931.
40. Ibid.
PART TWO
14. Big Broadcast
1. Louis Armstrong, Time (1955).
2. AI, Artie Shaw.
3. Young would go on to conduct more Crosby recordings that anyone except John Scott Trotter.
4. AI, Burton Lane. Arthur Jarret, “a fairly popular singer in those days,” chose Lane’s song as his theme after Bing turned it down, “but my song never made it.”
5. AI, Marti Barris.
6. Circumstantial evidence of his involvement in “Where the Blue of the Night’s pretty if rarely heard verse was provided by rival Russ Columbo, who, upon hearing Bing sing the chorus on the air, rushed to record it. Columbo’s version, made five days before Bing’s, lacks the verse, probably because he had no way of knowing that one had been added.
7. Crosby’s authorship has been challenged on only one song, by Harry Tobias, the lyricist who submitted “At Your Command” to Harry Barris. Yet Tobias, in an interview conducted sixty years after the fact, also insisted that he wrote the music, which, if true, would make it the only melody he wrote during a long career as a lyricwriter. Lane said Bing did not request participation in “Love Came Into My Heart,” though he performed it on the air before introducing “Where the Blue of the Night.” Bing minimized his work as a songwriter in a 1976 radio interview with John Salisbury: “I wrote a couple of things with Harry Barris, nothing serious. I wrote a lot of material, parodies, verses, special material on television, radio, and in the films, gag songs, nothing popular, nothing that made a hit.”
8. Thomas, Harry Warren and the Hollywood Musical, p. 2.
9. New York Times, Aug. 30, 1931.
10. Transcription of Sept. 2, 1931, CBS broadcast, The Chronological Bing Crosby, Vol.11 (Jonzo).
11. Salisbury interview, op. cit.
12. Smith, In All His Glory, p. 92.
13. Shepherd and Slatzer, Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man,p. 161.
14. Time memo on O’Keefe, op. cit.
15. Memo of background interview with Simon Ruskin, M. Gleason, Aug. 14, 1949. TIA.
16. “Bing Crosby Debunks Himself,” op. cit.
17. Lucky, p. 111.
18. Letter from Agnes Law to Philip K. Eberle, cited in Eberle, Music in the Air, p. 102.
19. Memo of background interview with Edgar Sisson, May 16, 1949. TIA.
20. AI, Gary Stevens.
21. AI, Artie Shaw.
22. AI, Gary Stevens.
23. Variety, Sept. 8, 1931 ; the same article listed the selections performed on that first show.
24. AI, Gary Stevens.
25. AI, Artie Shaw.
26. AI, Gary Stevens.
27. Variety, Sept. 8, 1931.
28. Columbo’s 1928 recording (with Gus Arnheim) of “Back in Your Own Backyard,” made shortly after Bing’s “01’ Man River,” shows how stiffly rearguard his original attack was. The more winning Columbo sides (“Prisoner of Love,” “All of Me”) followed in 1931, by which time he had assimilated the Crosby style, though he avoided mordents along with rhythm.
29. AI, Ken Roberts. “I think Freddy conducted Monday and Tuesday nights, when Bing wasn’t there. Victor Young was hired specifically for Bing — that’s all he did.”
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. Roberts worked with Bing again during the war, when Bing specifically requested him, and at charity events: “And then many many years later — I guess at about 1976 — I was still working at CBS doing a soap opera every day, and I was walking through the corridors and a friend of mine brought Bing in to be on an interview show with Pat Collins and he saw me and said ‘Kenneth, are you still here?’ He was still such a nice, sweet, simple fellow.”
32. Variety, Oct. 27, 1931.
33. Variety, 1931, cited by Wilbur W. Hindley in the Spokesman-Review, Dec. 27, 1931.
34. Mildred Bailey, Jack Oakie, and Bob Hope also claimed to have coined the name “the Groaner.” Hope and Oakie are out of the question — they did not know Crosby until 1932. Dorsey may have picked up the phrase from Bailey, known for her verbal swiftness (Tommy was not), but he was apparently more aggressive about using it.
35. Duke Ellington, Carter Harmon Interview Collection, Smithsonian Institution, cited in Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo,p. 119.
36. Kiner, Directory & Log of the Bing Crosby Cremo Singer Radio Series.
37. Ruskin memo, op. cit. Dr. W. James Gould, Ruskin’s successor as throat specialist to stars and politicians, pointed out in the 1990s that performing surgery on Bing’s node would have been irresponsible.
38. Lucky,p. 113.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Billboard, Nov. 13, 1931.
42. Variety, Nov. 10, 1931. The reporter, Bige, was Joe Bigelow, who later became an account executive in charge of Kraft Music Hall.
43. Memo of background interview with Mclnerny and others, 1940s (undated). TIA.
44. Sisson memo, op. cit.
45. AI, Donald Mills.
46. AI, Frieda Kapp.
47. AI, Burton Lane.
48. AI, Artie Shaw.
49. AI, Red Norvo.
50. AI, Ken Roberts.
51. AI, Gary Stevens.
52. AI, Ken Roberts.
53. They were Paul Bracco and Phil Taylor, interviewed by Time. Mclnerny memo, op. cit.
54. AI, Artie Shaw.
55. Mack Sennett Collection, Folder 1450,AMPAS.
56. In the 1976 John Salisbury interview, Bing was asked to comment on Ellington: “I recorded a couple of times with Duke and used to see him all the time. We were friendly, but I never worked a great deal with Duke. I had great admiration for him as a composer and a bandleader — one of the greatest, one of the all-time greats in both fields, conducting, arranging. A giant, a real giant. And a nice man, a real reasonable type, good taste. Classy guy.”
57. Mize, Bing Crosby and the Bing Crosby Style,p. 125.
58. Gramophone, Dec. 1932, cited in Bing, Apr. 1996.
59. Bing collaborated on the lyrics of this with two obscure songwriters, Irving Wallman and Max Wartell.
60. Ulanov, The Incredible Crosby, p. 88.
61. Thompson, Bing,p. 52.
62. Adams, Here’s to the Friars, p. 155.
63. New York Daily News, Feb. 25, 1932.
64. “Crooner Crosby Faces Suit for Earnings Share,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1932.
65. Letter from Eleanor Hard, Editorial Department, Time, to Mr. E. J. Crosby, Dec. 12, 1931. HCC.
66. Letter from E. J. Crosby to Eleanor Hard, undated. HCC.
15. The Crosby Clause
1. Paramount ad, The Big Broadcast (1932), reprinted in Bingtalks, May-Aug. 1995.
2. KGM.
; 3. Variety, Apr. 26, 1932.
4. KGM.
5. This refers to the second take (B) of “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
6. Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1932.
7. Evans and Kiner, Tram, p. 154.
8. KGM.
9. The working title was The Girl in the Transom.
10. “Stereophonic Sound,” from the film Silk Stockings (1955).
11. At one point Paramount planned to call Crosby’s character Bing Hornsby, and a cast list went out with that name; numerous reviews, including those in Variety and the Spokesman-Review, stated that Bing played Hornsby despite numerous references to Crosby throughout the film.
12. The Tuttle material was drawn from an unpublished memoir, They Started Talking, which despite the ironic title ignores the HUAC hearings; plus “Frank Tuttle Discusses Why He Is ‘Informer’,” New York Herald Tribune, May 25, 1951; “Tuttle Confesses Paying 10G Into Red Coffers— Brands 39 as Commies,” Variety, May 25, 1951; “Film Old Timer Frank Tuttle 10 Yrs. a Red, Names 36 More,” New York Daily News, May 25, 1951; “Film Maker Rues 10 Years a Red,” New York Times, May 25, 1951; “Tuttle Admits to 10 Years as Red; Names 30 Other Commies,” Hollywood Reporter, May 25, 1951; “Tuttle, Ex-Film Director, Ex-Red, Broke,” Los Angeles Examiner, July 3, 1954; “Frank Tuttle, Veteran Movie Director, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 7, 1963; and press releases issued by Paramount in 1934 and by Warner Bros. in 1956. The witness who named Tuttle was screenwriter and superinformer Richard J. Collins.
13. McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, p. 148.
14. Ibid.
15. AI, Nancy Briggs.
16. AI, Basil Grillo.
17. AI, Helen Votachenko. Tuttle was also diabetic. Bing wrote of an incident when producer Herb Polesie and Tuttle visited him to go over a new script: “About half way through, Frank began getting slower and slower in his reading. Finally, with bowed head, he was able to gasp out, ‘orange juice.’ He was going into a coma or some kind of blackout.” Bing and Herb dashed into the kitchen and found oranges, but not a knife to cut them. Bing frantically tore open oranges with his hands until he had a glassful. The moral, he concluded: “Know thine own kitchen.” Bing Crosby, unpublished papers.
18. Clair, who pioneered the creative use of sound, initially declared talking movies “a redoubtable monster.” Many years later, in a 1959 TV interview (Le Million, DVD), he pointed out the decline of the great physical comedians of the silent era and observed that the best comedians of the sound era came from radio.
19. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, p. 94.
20. Frost interview, op. cit.
21. Tuttle memoir.
22. “Crosby-Lombardo billing keeps Guy out of Par picture!” Variety, July 5, 1932.
23. Hattie, by Carlton Jackson (Madison), cited in Bing, Dec. 1991.
24. Variety, Oct. 18, 1932.
25. Spokesman-Review, Oct. 28, 1932.
26. New York Daily Mirror, cited in Alvin H. Marill, “Bing Crosby,” Films in Review, June-July 1968.
27. New York American, in ibid.
28. In a letter from Jason S. Joy of the MPAA to Harold Hurley at Paramount, Sept. 30, 1932: “The exception referred to is the sequence in the bathroom, into which are injected a couple of undress shots which we cannot help but consider unfortunate in that they do not seem to be called for by the action, and in fact appear almost offensively out of place in a story as free as this is from sex implications. While we have not yet got to the point of making scenes like these a Code matter, nevertheless they are being so generally injected into pictures that we are becoming more than a little concerned. Censors in a number of places inevitably cut them out; and so, if you are thinking of trimming the picture at all, we would urge you very earnestly to consider eliminating at least one of these shots, in the interest of censorship and, we believe, good taste and sound policy.” MPAA files, AMPAS.
29. Tuttle memoir.
30. Variety, Dec. 13, 1932.
16. Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
1. AI, Rosemary Clooney.
2. Whitney Balliett, Saturday Review, June 27, 1953.
3. AI, Gary Crosby.
4. AI, Barry Ulanov.
5. CBS signed blackface singer and future character actor Jay C. Flippen to fill out its programming in Bing’s absence.
6. Variety, Aug. 8, 1932.
7. John A. Myer, M.D., “Cigarette Century,” American Heritage, Dec. 1992.
8. Strangely, Bing’s version is ponderous and orotund. It survived as a classic tenor saxophone solo by Chu Berry until Sinatra found the right gait for it, though the definitive version was recorded in 1958 by Billy Eckstine (Imagination, EmArcy), who often revived Crosby ballads.
9. Informed in 1994 of Bing’s true birth date, Hope paused, then howled with pleasure, “That Bing! That Bing!”
10. AI, Bob Hope.
11. Ibid.
12. Variety, Dec. 6, 1932.
13. New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 3, 1932.
14. Variety, July 26, 1932.
15. A 1944 ad, C. Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co., unidentified magazine. Collection of Eric Anderson.
16. Variety, Jan. 31, 1933: “Bing Crosby pays the Shuberts $50 for the rights to do ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime at the Palace.’”
17. Vallée begins his October 27, 1932, Columbia recording as follows: “This is Rudy Vallée again, stepping perhaps a bit out of character.”
18. Studs Terkel liner notes, Songs of the Depression, a record anthology issued by Book of the Month Club, 1980.
19. Crosby and the nation would have been astonished to learn that twenty years on, “the Depression’s theme would become prosperity’s forbidden melody,” as Murray Kempton wrote (Part of Our Time, 1955), after Jay Gorney was probed by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a communist.
20. On that record, Lennie had accompanied Jack Fulton’s vocal on celesta. Another connection with the song is that Sue Carol helped introduce it.
21. Writing about “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in the 1970s, musicologist Charles Hamm concluded, “It was difficult to lose faith in a country that had produced a Bing Crosby.” Liner notes, Brother Can You Spare a Dime?: American Song During the Great Depression (New World), 1977.
22. Variety, Jan. 10, 1933.
23. Variety ranked the top twelve shows as follows: Jack Pearl, Eddie Cantor, EdWynn, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Rudy Vallée, Burns and Allen, Myrt and Marge, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ben Bemie, Fred Allen, Kate Smith. Feb. 28, 1933.
24. Milton Berle and Haskell Frankel, Milton Berle (New York: Dell, 1975),p. 144.
25. AI, Tony Martin.
26. Friedwald, Jazz Singing, p. 103.
27. Ibid.
28. Earl Coleman, a self-described Black Bing who recorded with Charlie Parker in 1947 and revived his career as a ballad singer thirty years later, insisted that the first Black Bing was LeRoy Felton, who sang with Benny Carter’s band (e.g., Carter’s recording of “More than You Know”). Carter himself took a flier at singing in the Crosby style (“Synthetic Love,” 1933). As early as 1932, Harlan Lattimore, the vocalist with Don Redman’s orchestra, was billed as “the Negro Bing Crosby.” After the enormous success of Billy Eckstine, other Black Bings included Herb Jeffries, Al Hibbler, Arthur Prysock, and Johnny Hartman. AI, Earl Coleman, Benny Carter.
29. This was Bing’s second consecutive hit with a Victor Young tune, after “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance.”
30. Thompson, Bing, p. 58.
31. AI, Barry Ulanov.
32. KGM.
33. Ibid.
34. Bing Crosby, “Mutual Liking for Spaghetti Made Eddie and Bing Pals,” Down Beat, May 1939.
35. AI, Barry Ulanov.
36. Ibid.
37. Oakie, Jack Oakie’s Double Takes, p. 118.
38. Ed Sullivan, “Little Old New York,” New York Daily News, Apr. 10, 1944.
39. Smith, op. cit.,p. 264.
40. Coslow, Cocktails for Two,p
. 134.
41. Oakie, Jack Oakie’s Double Takes,p. 63.
42. Ibid.
43. Coslow, Cocktails for Two,p. 135.
44. AI, Mary Carlisle.
45. Ibid.
46. AI, Nancy Briggs.
47. Dietrich, Dietrich, p. 104.
48. Harrison Carroll, Los Angeles Evening Herald Express, Sept. 25, 1934.
49. AI, Max Wilk.
50. Frank Steiner of Paramount to Frank Murphy, Bing, Oct. 25, 1967.
51. Andre Sennwald, New York Times, June 23, 1933.
52. Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1933.
53. Variety, July 25, 1933.
54. “Musicomedies of the Week,” Time, July 1933.
55. MPAA files, AMPAS.
56. AI, Alan Fisher.
57. AI, Rosemary Clooney.
58. AI, Sheila Lynn.
17. Under Western Skies
1. “Bing Crosby Debunks Himself,” op. cit., cited in Time, Jan. 1, 1934.
2. Long thought to be lost, Please was discovered and marketed in the 1990s by film preservationist Bob DeFlores. Only one reel of Just an Echo is believed to exist; as of 2000, the collector who found that reel has refused to let anyone else see it. In 1976 DeFlores asked Bing about Just an Echo: “And he says, ‘Well, I’m just not happy with it.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He says the editing was real poor. He said, ‘I’d be in a Mountie uniform on a horse and the camera angle would be from the left and then all of a sudden a sharp cut and I’d be somewhere else.’ He remembered this after forty-five years.”
3. Letter from Bing to Ted Crosby, Tuesday (undated) 1934. HCC.
4. Collins interview, op. cit.
5. W. E. Oliver, “Bing Calm Despite Stress,” Los Angeles Evening Herald Express, June 14, 1933.
6. KGM.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Paramount press release by Dave Keene, Oct. 27, 1933.
10. Ibid.
11. Oakie, Jack Oakie’s Double Takes,p. 129.
12. Lucky, pp. 117—18.
13. Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, Sept. 23, 1933.
14. Variety, Sept. 26, 1933.
15. Louella O. Parsons, Hearst syndicate, Sept. 29, 1933.
16. Variety, Oct. 1933.
17. Variety, Nov. 14, 1933.
18. Time, Jan. 1, 1934.
19. Walsh, Each Man in His Time, p. 257.
20. Davies, The Times We Had,p. 119.
21. Lucky, pp. 119—20.