Bing Crosby (37 page)

As Bing feared, Boles was singled out (typically: “John Boles throttles all competition in the singing cinema”)
⁴⁹
while the Rhythm Boys were mentioned only in passing. The picture did well in Philadelphia, fair in San Francisco, and died
in Indianapolis. Yet Universal believed the public could be swayed, and pulled out all the stops for the New York debut at
the Roxy, presenting the film in tandem with a stage show that starred Whiteman and George Gershwin.
⁵⁰
Mordaunt Hall in the
New York Times
wrote, “There is no sequence that isn’t worth witnessing and no performance that is not capable in this fast
paced picture.”
⁵¹
But for once, there was too much Whiteman. The public, surprisingly, favored
All Quiet on the Western Front,
Lewis Milestone’s scalding World War I film, which saved Universal’s hash and won Junior Laemmle an Academy Award for best
picture. Junior would not be picking up options on Whiteman or Anderson (indeed, he threatened to sue Paul over food and telegram
expenses). Nor would he make any more musicals for a while, though he approved nine foreign versions of
King of Jazz,
including a German edition emceed by Joseph Schildkraut, with two additional numbers by the Sisters G, and a Hungarian one
with Bela Lugosi.
⁵²
Junior would find his forte in monsters and vampires, initiating the great Universal horror cycle of the 1930s. But the Depression
defeated him, and when his splendid 1936 film of
Show Boat
stumbled at the box office, he left pictures for good at age twenty-eight.

Universal took a million-dollar bath and did not begin to recoup until the picture was reissued in 1933, on the coattails
of
42nd Street.
(Bing, by then a major star, was embarrassed to find himself top-billed.) Yet as the
New York Times
and other papers noted,
King of Jazz
was a singular film, and it endures as Anderson’s triumph. Its ingenious visual effects bely his novice status and proved
highly influential. It remains a Rosetta stone of early American pop, incarnating a multicultural display intended for a white
middlebrow audience. The picture begins with Bing’s voice, singing through the credits (“Music hath charms, though it’s classy
or jazz”), and ends with “The Melting Pot of Music,” an extravaganza featuring leggy Spanish dancers, men in jodphurs, and
concertina, bagpipe, and balalaika players (but no Africans), all ultimately dissolving into the image of Maestro Whiteman
taking a bow. We are told at the outset that “jazz was born in the African jungle to the beat of the voodoo drums,” but the
only black person in the film is a smiling six-year-old girl cradled in White-man’s lap for a laugh.

King of Jazz
exists in a bubble of racial and mercantile timidity. All references to blacks are aged in minstrel conventions, among them
a snippet of “Old Black Joe” and dancer Jacques Cartier decked out as an African chieftain, dancing in silhouette on a gigantic
drum. Yet the Cartier number underscores the film’s tremendous impact: the silhouette trick was used by Fred Astaire in his
tribute to Bill Robinson
in
Swing Time;
the drum dance was developed by Robinson himself in
Stormy Weather.
Many of Anderson’s ideas were imitated in later pictures, from the miniature musicians climbing out of a valise
(Bride of Frankenstein)
to cardboard skyscrapers
(42nd Street)
to concentric tuba and trombone orbits (the two-reeler
Jammin’ the Blues).
Visual abstractions for “Rhapsody in Blue” are abundant with tropes later elaborated by Busby Berkeley: pianist Roy Bargy
morphing into five pianists, aerial shots, giant dislocated heads, kaleidoscopes.

Musically, the film is dreary except for “Rhapsody” and the few examples of jazz, which consist of Lang and Venuti playing
“The Wild Dog” and the numbers involving Bing. Despite the hullabaloo over “Song of the Dawn” (Boles, in a bolero outfit,
looks and sounds as dated as the rouged and lipsticked tenors in other scenes), Bing is handsomely represented and in excellent
form. He swings the song behind the opening titles as well as a spiritual lip-synched by a Walter Lantz cartoon character,
interpolates a
bu-bu-bu-boo
in top hat behind the Brox Sisters; and jives two numbers with the Rhythm Boys. Whether he is on- or offscreen, his voice
is buoyant and bright, agelessly rhythmic. The Rhythm Boys sequence is the best evidence we have of how enchanting they were
at their peak and how natural Bing was in front of a camera from the start. Al Rinker is tall and handsome, standing with
his hand in his pocket. Harry Barris is so chipper, he can’t sit still. Yet on “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together,”
only Bing adds deft physical touches, waving his hand, inclining his head. For “Happy Feet,” Al and Harry play two pianos
and Bing stands in the middle. As Harry pretends to execute a dance step, Bing gives the camera a wide-eyed look that momentarily
breaches the fourth wall. Bing’s light marcelled hair is receding and his rouge is a bit thick, but he is utterly relaxed.
With his double takes and mock solemnity, he is our contemporary, winking across time.

The Rhythm Boys continued with the band when Whiteman left California to play Canada. Incredibly, Paul was barred from entering
the country at Vancouver: orchestra leaders, he learned, were “entertainers” and “as such could play from theater stages,
but not at dances.”
⁵³
After days of wrangling, the tour detoured for a week to Seattle and Portland before finally heading home to New York. But
a contretemps that week permanently poisoned the waters between Paul and Bing.
In his memoir Bing explains that a bootlegger dunned him for money he claimed was due for a quart of “day-old pop-skull”;
⁵⁴
when Bing contested the debt, the bootlegger demanded money from Whiteman, who complied over Bing’s objection and then deducted
the amount from Bing’s salary. That led to an argument, Bing wrote, that ended when Whiteman told him, “When we get to Seattle,
we’ll part friends and that’ll be the end of it.”
⁵⁵
Years later, however, Bing related a different version of events to his second wife, Kathryn: Whiteman had confronted him
in front of the band and accused him of stealing his liquor. “I was outraged by that and quit,” he told her.
⁵⁶

In any case, neither Bing nor his partners quit in Seattle. They traveled with the band back to New York and made the break
shortly after arriving. They had several reasons beyond Bing’s pique, chiefly a desire to return to California. A couple of
days after his jail sentence was commuted, Bing had encountered Dixie Lee again at a party, and they had continued to see
each other almost every night. Now, in New York, he was inconsolable without her. One evening he telephoned her from his room
at the Belvedere and fell asleep without breaking the connection. His roommate, Frank Trumbauer, found him in the morning
cradling the phone. The cost was $130.75, paid by Tram, who saved the bill as a souvenir. Barris, too, had become infatuated
with a singer, Loyce Whiteman (no relation to Paul), who demonstrated sheet music in a Glendale shop. Al didn’t have a steady
girl, but he was no less determined than the others to stay off the road. After three years and four months, the trio decided
to break with Whiteman and return to Los Angeles.

On April 30, the morning after an Old Gold broadcast, Bing told Whiteman of their intentions. Paul agreed to abrogate their
contract but asked them to keep it quiet so as not to interfere with his imminent premiere at the Roxy. “It was time to go
out on our own and also the right time for Paul to let us go,” recalled Al. “His band payroll was very high and his contract
with Columbia was soon to end. On our part, the Rhythm Boys had not followed through on our own recordings and we didn’t seem
to have the incentive to pursue our recording career. It was a friendly parting and we wished each other good luck.”
⁵⁷

For Bing, the “pop-skull” incident may have added to a grudge he was already carrying. In February — a month before King of
Jazz
wrapped, but after Bing’s work on it was done — Paramount rushed into production a Nancy Carroll musical called
Honey
but could not settle on a leading man. They needed an appealing young actor who could sing. Studio chief B. P. Schulberg
asked songwriter Sam Coslow for a recommendation. Coslow had known Bing in New York and now heard rumors that he was ready
to leave the band. He drove to Loew’s State, where Whiteman was working, and found Bing heartbroken about losing “Song of
the Dawn” and eager for a real movie part. “He was confident he could get by with it,” Coslow recalled in his autobiography.
All Bing wanted was the same $200 Whiteman paid him, a standing contract (“After all, I have a steady job with this outfit”),
and guaranteed parts for Al and Harry. Coslow relayed the good news, and Schulberg sent two talent scouts to Loew’s State
to audition Bing. “For about 24 hours, he was under consideration,” Coslow wrote. “But the following day they auditioned a
young actor named Stanley Smith. He couldn’t sing very well, but somehow he got the part — don’t ask me why.”
⁵⁸
Stanley Smith was one of the ineffectual tenors in
King of Jazz.

Bing thought Whiteman had nixed the deal. That seems unlikely. Weeks earlier Whiteman had allowed him to participate in MGM’s
The March of Time,
a blockbuster that threatened to dwarf all the other movie revues. Bing was retained for two scenes and billed as “Bing Crosby,
Paul Whiteman Soloist.”
The March of Time
was a strange mixture of stage veterans (Weber and Fields, Fay Templeton), newcomers (Skin Young, Benny Rubin), and extravagant
production numbers. Bing sang “Poor Little G String,” backed by an all-girl orchestra and the Albertina Rasch Ballet, but
was little more than a prop in his second scene, made up as an old man with wig and mustache listening to a boy violinist.
Just as the picture neared completion, the
King of Jazz
fiasco sobered MGM’s accountants. Rather than pour more cash into a sure loser, MGM not only shut down its “giant screen
carnival” but destroyed most of the film stock. The more expensive numbers were recycled into later pictures,
⁵⁹
but all that remains of Bing’s labors is an eight-by-ten glossy.

In later years Bing’s tributes to Whiteman were reserved, if sincere: “I’m impressed by how kind he was. When I was younger
and more hot-headed, I used to think he should line my pockets with more gold. But I confess he owes me nothing. It’s the
other way around.”
⁶⁰
They had little more to do with each other beyond a few radio appearances. Whiteman had his own troubles. Old Gold dropped
his show, and his record sales evaporated. After he opened at the Roxy, he fired ten musicians and shaved the salaries of
the survivors by 15 percent. Bing’s timing had not failed him. The musicians Whiteman let go were his jazzmen — among them
Lang, Venuti, Hayton, and Challis. For three years, beginning when he hired his Walla Walla boys, Paul had intelligently felt
his way into jazz. Now he returned to his old formula (though he later recruited such jazzmen as Jack Teagarden and Red Norvo).

Challis thought the band began to slide downhill in 1929 and blamed radio, which consumed arrangements as fast as jokes. The
luxury of taking one’s time to perfect a piece was sacrificed to the demand for quantity. Worse, radio counted blandness as
an asset, desirable to sponsors and song-pluggers. Challis briefly freelanced for Henderson and Ellington, until he could
no longer ignore the hated medium and signed on for three years with Kate Smith.
⁶¹
By the early days of the Swing Era, he was considered old hat and was soon forgotten; not until the mid-1970s was he rediscovered
by jazz fans. As for Whiteman, his celebrity and energy kept him afloat for years, but he never recovered his reign. He abandoned
jazz just as it was about to enjoy a sweeping triumph in America’s mainstream. An embittered, cynical public demanded a new
and honest music that spoke directly to its dreams and fears. Few in 1930 could have imagined that the scepter would fall
to a twenty-seven-year-old Rhythm Boy.

They say I left a trail of broken hearts behind me when I left California for New York. Now I wouldn’t do a thing like that.
The fact is I left a trail of broken bottles and unpaid bills.

— Bing Crosby (1931)
¹

For years a story circulated on the Fox lot about an eye-level chink in the exterior of one building’s wall. The culprit was
peppery Dixie Lee. Whenever she passed, a swain or two could be depended upon to whistle, “I wish I were in Dixie.”
²
On one occasion she picked up a stone and hurled it in the direction of her tormentor with such force as to cause the damage,
which naturally came to be known as Dixie’s Hole. Dixie was no pushover, but she was a relatively typical product of the era:
a shapely, shy, talented, if not especially ambitious teenager for whom show business was as much a lark as a living. In an
age of infinite chorus lines (employed on the stage, in movies, at nightclubs), not even a depression could quell the demand
for attractive young women with educated legs or lilting voices or inviting smiles. Dixie was lovelier than most and more
capable; on film she radiated sauciness in a smart, sad-eyed way. She had a strong unaccented shopgirl’s voice and, like her
contemporary Jean Harlow, was fashionably plebeian. Harlow, however, was the tough-broad type, whereas Dixie was vulnerable,
acerbic but wounded.