Bing Crosby (100 page)

In April 1939, while Bing was shooting
The Star Maker,
the studio announced that as soon as that film wrapped, he, Hope, and Lamour would begin work on Harlan Thompson’s production
of
Road to Mandalay.
Filming was delayed until late in the year, by which time the title had evolved into
Road to Singapore,
ostensibly because that locale was considered more treacherous-sounding.
¹¹
Perhaps the studio also wanted to deflect an association with Kipling, one of whose
Barrack-Room Ballads,
“On the Road to Mandalay,” had been adapted (by Oley Speaks) as a popular song in 1907. The Burmese city had been appropriated
for subsequent songs — Bing recorded “Rose of Mandalay” — which diluted any menace associated with the place. Kipling created
the genre mocked by the
Road
movies, with his imperialist adventures set in United Kingdom protectorates, notably his short story “The Man Who Would Be
King.” A measure of the
Road
series’ extended influence is John Huston’s enthralling 1975 film of Kipling’s tale, ripe with comical “ad-libby” colloquies
between Sean Connery and Michael Caine that were inspired by Bing and Bob, not Kipling. The scene in which their laughter
causes a lifesaving avalanche might have worked in
Road to Utopia.

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

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.