Bing Crosby (42 page)

As a result, most of Bing’s friends endorsed his belief that — unlike Dixie and his sons — he was never truly alcoholic, because
true alcoholics do not remain casual drinkers, as Bing did, nursing a scotch for hours or enjoying an occasional blowout with
no disruptive effects. They chalked up his hell-raising days to the culture of Prohibition and paraphrased Saint Augustine’s
reflection “Our real pleasure was simply in doing something that was not allowed.”
⁵⁶
Yet Bing had displayed undeniable symptoms of clinical alcoholism — blackouts and binges and self-destructive conduct. In
time, the years 1927-31 would represent to him the abandoned period of his wildness, an alcoholic maze that devoured one Bing
Crosby and delivered another. Dixie’s decree inaugurated his transformation. Yet like many who possess a genius for self-control,
Bing was impatient with those who did not.

Boys, I admit I never heard of a crooner in slapstick comedy, but until we flung ‘em, nobody ever heard of a custard pie in
slapstick comedy. All I know is, this boy entertains…. I’m going to sign Crosby.

— Mack Sennett, King of Comedy (1954)
¹

If Bing had good reason to believe in luck, having fallen upward every step of his career, he now had reason to marvel at
rehabilitation. For suddenly grand doors were opening.

The first of three powerful gatekeepers was the smart and daring record producer Jack Kapp, a genial businessman with an unerring
memory for names and faces, who knew every facet of the record business. Kapp began working at thirteen in his family’s store,
the Imperial Talking Machine Shop, and it was said he understood records the way Irving Thalberg understood movies. His lifelong
dictum was an accusatory question: Where’s the melody? His ability to assess popular taste was considered all but infallible.
If the negative face of Kapp’s demotic appetite was an implacable aversion to music he did not like, there was plenty that
he genuinely loved; he was a pioneer in signing jazz, blues, and country artists and was the first to record cast albums of
Broadway shows. In 1934 he would create Decca Records and transform the industry, but in 1931 he was general manager for the
Brunswick label, building an imposing roster —
the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Victor Young, Cab Calloway, Glen Gray, Duke Ellington, and his personal favorite,
Guy Lombardo.

In March Bing engaged an established entertainment lawyer, Roger Marchetti, who along with Everett prevailed upon Kapp to
listen to a few of Bing’s Arnheim recordings. Kapp already knew Bing’s singing from the Whiteman days and did not need persuading.
He signed him to a six-month contract with a renewal option favoring the company, which was then controlled by Warners. A
couple of weeks later, Kapp traveled to California to supervise his first Crosby session, recording “Out of Nowhere” and “If
You Should Ever Need Me.” The latter, a negligible song, is memorable only for a singular reprise with an intimate barrel-down
Crosby low note that fluttered the hearts of his fans.

But “Out of Nowhere” was a benchmark, an outstanding song by Hollywood composer John Green, who a year earlier had written
the melody of “Body and Soul” (one of the most recorded songs of all time, though Bing, oddly enough, never sang it). Expertly
backed by Bennie Krueger’s orchestra and recorded with vivid immediacy, Bing emphasizes the song’s balladic drama with parallel
caesuras, or pauses, that also underscore rhythmic momentum. Marred only by a touch of Jolsonesque whinnying on the verse,
his performance is rife with details, especially in his opening chorus: the mordent on
free,
the full two-bar sustain on
me,
the bravura selling of
nowhere.
He attacks the last chorus with a huskier mask and reveals Armstrong’s influence by syncopating the phrase
with my memories.
By April “Out of Nowhere” was a top-selling record, the first released under Bing’s name.

An unexpected dividend of his first Brunswick recording was an invitation to appear with the Rhythm Boys in a potboiler,
Confessions of a Co-ed,
singing “Out of Nowhere.” The picture, his first job at Paramount, was the sort of thing Hays Office censors were supposed
to stamp out (coed gets pregnant by one man, marries another, leaves him for the first). Bing appears mercifully early, at
the school dance, wearing a terrible slicked-down hairpiece. His solo number is sung in his reveling jazz mode; he does justice
to the song but projects little in the way of movie-star charisma. In distinct contrast, the trio number that follows is restrained
and dry — his partners clearly hold him back. A dancing couple interrupts Bing mid-song for no other reason than to shout
his name: a salute to the growing fame of his suave moniker.

Bing owed one more session to Arnheim, who provided him with two bouncy numbers. Bing is irrepressible on “I’m Gonna Get You,”
inserting the comment “’cause I’ll never stand for that” in the space of two beats, transfiguring a nothing song into a frolic.
“Ho Hum!,” with Loyce Whiteman, is notable as the first of Bing’s numerous recorded duets with women singers. His ease and
wit are unmistakable, but the trite number scarcely indicates his particular genius for the format. Bing would establish the
duet as a pop-music staple, raising it to a level many emulated in vain. He inspired other singers with his spontaneity, humor,
and professional empathy, all of which Loyce experienced on the night she opened at the Grove. Arnheim had called her to the
stage for her first solo, and Bing could see that she was trembling with fright. He escorted her to the mike and sang the
opening phrases with her; when she was able to continue alone, Bing smoothly backed off the bandstand. The “Ho Hum!” session
was significant for another reason: it marked the end of his sideman career. He now placed himself squarely in the hands of
Jack Kapp and would nestle there until Kapp’s death in 1949.

According to Sam Coslow, the song “Just One More Chance” originated when his partner, Arthur Johnston, came up with the title
and four suitable notes: “The next phrase [“to prove it’s you alone I care for”] popped into my brain like a flash.”
²
They discussed the futility of writing a song without an assignment, and Johnston suggested they fashion it for a singer,
not a production: how about Bing? They tailored the melody to his “croony ballad style.” Bing, who loved it, rehearsed with
Johnston and then introduced the song on an afternoon radio show,
Musical Cocktail.
³
He sang it again that night on the Grove broadcast. The impact was incredible. Clubgoers demanded encores, and radio fans
besieged stores for a record that didn’t exist. Kapp returned to Hollywood and put his operation on red alert. He set up a
session and asked Bennie Krueger, a Brunswick artist and friend, to contract a band. Krueger assembled a small group with
piano, bass, clarinet, and three or four violins and voiced the instruments to make the band sound larger, an inventive (and
economical) trick that would become a trademark of Kapp recordings. Within two weeks the disc was in stores, and Kapp promoted
the hell out of it.

“Just One More Chance” easily outsold “Out of Nowhere,” dominating sales in June, until it was supplanted by two more Crosby
hits
in July, followed by another in August, two more in September, and four more in October. And so it went: Bing would continue
to average sixteen charted singles per year through 1950, peaking in 1939 with twenty-seven (a feat broken only by the Beatles
in 1964, with thirty), never falling below double digits until 1951, when he placed nine singles in the top twenty-five. This
unparalleled twenty-year accomplishment is not likely ever to be equaled.

Coslow observed of “Just One More Chance”: “Never before, and never since, has a song of mine been established as a smash
hit so quickly.”
⁴
Yet it does not rank among Bing’s finest performances; indeed, many of his records that year are stylized to the point that
they seem far more dated than his jazz choruses with Whiteman, not to mention his incandescent recordings of the mid- and
late thirties. Yet these were the sides that established the Crosby style and fashion. “Just One More Chance” was considered
prototypical Bing, an obvious choice for lampooning by animators (he was a favorite target of Looney Tunes) and comics. He
sings, whistles, and hums; exhibits an unusual degree of nasality; goes over the top fusing mordents to
bu-bu-bu-boos.
If “I Surrender, Dear” was a hit, “Just One More Chance” was a phenomenon.

Bing was about to become the defining voice of his era, and for many people, this was the salvo that announced his arrival.
It did for him, in 1931, what “All or Nothing at All” would do for Frank Sinatra in 1943, what “Heartbreak Hotel” would do
for Elvis Presley in 1956, what “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would do for the Beatles in 1964. The sales for “Just One More
Chance” were relatively modest, a fraction of those Bing achieved a few years later, but large enough to alter his standing.
He could no longer be claimed exclusively by jazz fans who knew him way back when or by insiders at the Cocoanut Grove. The
buzz was heaviest in colleges and among women. Most of his enraptured fans had never seen him and didn’t really know anything
about him. But as far as they were concerned, Bing, at twenty-eight, was young and he was theirs.

The second gatekeeper was, by Hollywood’s turnstile standard, a legendary has-been: the original king of comedy, Mack Sennett.
He visited the Grove in early May and was, according to his often fanciful memoir, taken with Bing and with his fans. He was
amazed by the
number of “sophisticated and show-wise people [who] were repeat customers.”
⁵
Mack invited Bing to his table for a drink and asked him to visit the studio and make some tests. As Sennett tells it, his
crew thought him crazy to think he could combine crooning and slapstick, to which Sennett responded, “All I know is, this
boy entertains.”
⁶
In truth, he extended a similar invitation to Arnheim’s popular tenor Donald Novis.

One of Sennett’s writers, former actor and director Earle Rodney (who would cowrite all six of Sennett’s Crosby pictures),
was surprised by the auditions and explained why to his son, Jack Hupp, one of the more ardent Crosby fans at Hollywood High.
Hupp recalled: “He told me Bing and Novis had been out to the studio. And Donald Novis had one of the most beautiful tenor
voices you ever heard. I thought it was interesting, because my father said that when Novis got through singing, the guys
out there had tears in their eyes. But the thing he noticed about Crosby was he had a great sense of comedy, which I got a
kick out of, because Bing hadn’t acted and he didn’t do any comedy at the Grove. My father said, ‘You know, Crosby is not
only a wonderful singer, but he’s got a real fine sense of comedy.’ He was impressed.”
⁷
Sennett, who discovered or directed most of the great silent-screen comedians (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon,
Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd, Ben Turpin, among many others), had recently made a distribution deal with Paramount’s
Adolph Zukor. Like every other producer, he was looking for actors with good voices. A singer with comic timing was a godsend.

If Bing wanted to cut loose from the Rhythm Boys, he was not admitting as much to himself or them. Just as he had insisted
that Sam Coslow find roles for Al and Harry in
Honey,
he attempted to involve them in the Sennett films. The letter he received from Sennett’s assistant general manager on May
18, 1931, confirmed an agreement for an option on the services of all three in a picture to go into production on or before
June 15; it stipulated that Sennett had fifteen days to exercise the option and that the three men would be paid $1,000 a
week while engaged in the production. Bing signed (“Rhythm Boys by Bing Crosby”)
⁸
and Al and Harry initialed the letter. on May 20, a Wednesday. They must have felt relieved by the deal, because on the previous
Saturday the Rhythm Boys had failed to show
up at the Cocoanut Grove. They had long complained about Abe Frank’s refusal to raise their salaries, and now, as the job
approached its first anniversary, they declared grievances, insisted that their contract was up, and — presumably advised
by Bing’s lawyer, Roger Marchetti — walked off the job.

It has been argued since Bing’s death that he betrayed Al and Harry, as if he could have remained tied to them any more than
Armstrong could have remained tied to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band or Sinatra to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Certainly,
Bing played at best a passive role in the breakup, ignoring its inevitability until his less assured partners forced the issue.
That he attempted to involve them in the Sennett venture suggests his ambivalence about striking out as a single, despite
his solo success. But the Rhythm Boys no longer created anything new — why bother when the customers wanted to hear Bing?
They rarely saw one another except on the job. Bing represented something daring and refreshing in music, while the trio,
with its conventional harmonies, usually voiced in thirds, was now significantly outclassed by two vocal groups that had once
been inspired by them: the Boswell Sisters and Mills Brothers each enjoyed their first hit records that year.
⁹