Bing Crosby (43 page)

Al was the first to speak of leaving; he had been champing at the bit as early as March: “I had become more and more dissatisfied
with my role as part of the Rhythm Boys. Harry Barris was writing songs, Bing was becoming recognized as a soloist, and I
was somewhere in between. The Rhythm Boys no longer always performed as a set group, as we did with Whiteman, and I saw no
future for me in the present situation. I didn’t have the voice or the ambition to be a solo singer, but more important, I
wanted to get into something that I thought was more legitimate.”
¹⁰
The trio was simply going through the motions and sometimes didn’t even do that. When Bing or Harry arrived late or missed
a show, Arnheim would cover for them by casually rescheduling their numbers, increasing Abe Frank’s ire.

A blowup was inevitable. In his memoir, Bing concedes the failings of the trio, but not without resentment at Frank’s intransigence.
“Toward the end of our engagement at the Grove,” he recalled, “we didn’t take our responsibilities seriously enough to suit
Abe Frank.”
¹¹
Bing justifiably insisted that the trio was grossly underpaid, and Frank
justifiably pointed to the shows he missed, usually on Tuesdays, when Bing was reluctant to conclude his long weekends with
Dixie. But the squabble turned rancorous. Bing and his advisers probably felt that the Grove was holding him back, but they
never came right out and said so. Instead, Bing looked for an affront that would justify his leaving. He found it: “When I
failed to get back for the Tuesday-night show once too often, he docked my wages.” Bing packed up. “Of course Abe was within
his rights legalistically speaking,” he acknowledged, “but I thought he was pretty small about it, so I quit.”
¹²
The Rhythm Boys were nothing without Bing, so Al and Harry also quit, presenting a unified front. They claimed to be on strike,
demanding a raise and the repeal of Bing’s fine.

On May 28 the
Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News
asked the “question being mouthed feverishly among radio fans”:
¹³
What happened to the Rhythm Boys? A week later the paper reported that despite “an army of listeners’ frets and complaints,”
they would not return “unless contractual difficulties between them and the proprietors of the Cocoanut Grove, not to mention
the musicians’ union, are ironed out.”
¹⁴
The union got involved after Frank filed a complaint, in which he admitted that the original contract had lapsed but insisted
that he was entitled to a nine-month option or financial remuneration. Implausibly, the union sided with management and imposed
a blacklist that remained in effect for four months, during which time the trio could perform neither on radio nor on records.
“My run-in with Abe Frank was the end of the Rhythm Boys,” Bing concluded.
¹⁵

He could afford to feel sanguine, however, with the sealing of the Sennett deal. Why Harry and Al did not participate in the
two-reelers is not known. Perhaps they were tiring of the backseat and did not want supporting roles in vehicles created around
Bing. Rinker never commented on the decision, except to describe Bing’s acceptance of Sennett’s proposal as “a wise decision”
and admit that the group’s demise “was a relief to me.”
¹⁶
In any case, Sennett and Bing renegotiated the contract to their mutual benefit, amending the price from $1,000 for the trio
to $600 for Bing.

The Rhythm Boys never officially announced their breakup, and fans continued to hope for their reappearance, even as Frank
advertised a contest for replacements. The three contest winners —
including Jack Smith, who continued to work on radio and as host of TV shows like
You Asked for It
— called themselves the Ambassadors.
¹⁷
Radio reviewer Kenneth Frogley dismissed them as “an imitation. Has lots of pep, but not enough genuine melodic music.” Barris
served as the group’s music director. Arnheim and his announcer, Nelson Case, had asked Loyce Whiteman to convince Harry to
return. She found him drunk and helped get him into shape. He needed money and accepted the offer. If anyone still had illusions
of the Rhythm Boys’ getting together, Harry’s work with the Ambassadors scotched them.

“Barris, Bing, and I parted on the best of terms,” Rinker recalled in the unpublished memoir he wrote shortly before his death
in 1982. “Bing went to his Mack Sennett job, Barris stayed on at the Grove for a while, and I went my own way.”
¹⁸
Al’s way was, according to a
Variety
account in July 1931, initially paved by Bing Crosby Ltd., a shortlived alliance between Bing, Barris, and Marchetti, which
paid him a salary and may have facilitated his first job, touring in vaudeville on the same Fanchon and Marco circuit that
had provided him and Bing with their start nearly six years earlier.
¹⁹
In that period Al began to compose and completed his first successful piece, “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater” (debuted by Whiteman
at the Metropolitan Opera House and recorded by him). For a while he was part of the vocal group backing Kay Thompson on radio.
Then, in 1936, he became producer and director of CBS music programs (his first show was a substantial hit,
The Saturday Night Swing Club)
and prospered.

Harry did not fare as well. While continuing to direct the Ambassadors, he married Loyce and created an act with her. Having
completed Frank’s disputed option, Harry and Loyce were in good standing with the union and free to move on. They worked at
New York’s Park Central Hotel and toured the country, settling for a while in Las Vegas. He played with several big bands
through the 1940s, briefly leading one of his own, and backed comedian Joe E. Brown on his tours of army camps. But Harry’s
drinking was out of control; it cost him his songwriting talent — he never had another hit after 1935 — and, eventually, his
marriage. Until his death in 1962, he survived on royalties and the ministrations of the Bing Crosby office.

In addition to recording “I Surrender, Dear” and “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” three times each during Harry’s life (and
once after his death), featuring them in Sennett and early Paramount films, and
performing them often on radio and television (thereby ensuring their value as annuities), Bing saw to it that Harry received
regular movie work, including credited bits in at least eighteen Paramount pictures, seven of them with Bing. In all, Harry
appeared in more than fifty movies between 1930 and 1950, usually as a band member, pianist, or emcee. His finest screen moment
is as the jivey, gum-chewing accompanist who encourages Irene Dunne to rag “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” in Universal’s 1936
Show Boat.
The movie roles were Bing’s way of helping him without appearing to hand out charity. (He did as much for many old friends.)
Harry told his daughter, Marti, that a guest shot with Bing on radio paid the hospital costs of her birth.
²⁰

Marguerite Toth, the receptionist in the Crosby office at 9028 Sunset between 1945 and 1962, said, “I know he supported Harry
Barris when Barris was so sick. I believe he paid the house payment to keep it from foreclosure.’
²¹
Basil Grillo, who managed Crosby’s finances, spoke of a confidential list of old friends of Bing’s: if anyone on the list
was in need of financial help, he was to provide it, no questions asked. “I was given carte blanche to see that Harry was
taken care of, “ Grillo recalled, “just as I was given carte blanche to take care of Mildred Bailey’s hospital bills. It was
a losing battle with Harry, but we did the best we could.”
²²
Harry titled his last song “Never Been So Lost.”
²³

And Al? “I specifically don’t remember doing anything for Al,” Grillo said. “Mostly because as far as I know, he didn’t need
anything. At least it was never brought to our attention.”
²⁴
Al’s daughter, Julia, concurred: “Dad didn’t need any help from Bing. Dad made a very good living. He produced radio shows
and that’s how he met my mother, on the Kay Thompson show — she was a singer, Elizabeth Rinker. He had a good job and we lived
very well, I’d say upper middle class. He called himself a runaway Catholic and said he left the church because his knees
hurt. There was no rift between him and Bing, no betrayal. What was Bing supposed to do? Slow his life down — put it on hold?
That’s crazy.”
²⁵
Yet in Al’s memoir, written in part to counter a scurrilous attack on Crosby that claimed Al as its primary source,
²⁶
he expresses a nearly morose anxiety regarding the distance between them, at one point consigning himself to the KOBBC club,
an acronym among insiders for “kissed off by Bing Crosby.”

In spite of his frustration, Al acknowledged Bing’s decency toward him. But no matter what Bing did, it never felt right to
him. In 1943
Whiteman invited Al to participate in a broadcast reunion of the Rhythm Boys. “It had been over 12 years since the Rhythm
Boys had split up,” Al wrote, “and I was rather surprised that Bing, who was now an established star, would agree to appear.”
When they met at the studio, the band applauded, and the show was a great success. “After rehearsal,” Al continued, “Bing
invited me out for a game of golf at the Bel-Air Country Club. We had a good match and were just as competitive as when we
last played together over 13 years ago.” Yet he was offended because when he asked Bing why he did the show, Bing told him
he figured “he owed Whiteman a favor,” when by Al’s lights he should have done it “out of sentiment.” Later he learned that
Bing was offered and refused his usual fee, insisting that it be divided between Al and Harry, an act that merely fueled his
suspicions: “This was a nice gesture, but I’m inclined to feel that it was his way of squaring things up with us.”
²⁷
When four years later Al sent him a song he had written, “Suspense,” Bing recorded it, though it was neither good nor successful.
What Al wanted was no longer possible: an intimate channel to Bing, founded on sentiment.

They met for the last time in 1973, when Al was attempting to produce an original musical program for television,
The French Quarter.
He showed it to Phil Harris, who suggested it would be perfect for Bing and phoned him. Bing instantly agreed to do the show,
before seeing the script. A conference was arranged. “When he arrived at the meeting, he was very friendly and seemed glad
to see me,” Al wrote. “He and I reminisced at lunch about the old times.” They went up to Phil’s hotel to play the score and
show Bing the dialogue and story. “He was very attentive, and after we had gone over the show, he seemed very pleased and
said he would be glad to do it.” Al wanted something more. “Although he seemed to have friendly feelings toward me, I no longer
cared whether his friendliness was genuine or not. Too many years had gone by, and who he was and what he did no longer mattered
to me.”
²⁸

Skitch Henderson, a pianist who made his reputation as a regular on one of Bing’s 1940s radio shows, said, “When Bing closed
the door on you, it never opened. And I think Rinker, who I didn’t know well, but I knew him as a performer and respected
what he had been, had his heart broken. Something happened between them. Nobody knows what it was.”
²⁹
Rinker knew, or thought he did. Shortly before he died, he offered an explanation to his old friend Kurt Dieterle, the
violinist who had roomed with Bing during the
King of Jazz,
and to Don Eagle, a musician turned writer, who interviewed him for a magazine piece. “Al wasn’t too assertive,” Eagle noted.
“I asked him, ‘When did the turning point come?’ He says, ‘One night I drove Bing home in my car when he was living with Kurt
on Fairfax in West Los Angeles. I dropped him off and Bing wanted to borrow some money from me, which I didn’t have or was
not going to loan or something like that. So he slammed the door of the car and walked away.’ He said from then on a strain
was there.”
³⁰
Dieterle added, “Instead of loaning him the money, Al lectured Bing on his behavior. Bing wasn’t someone you lectured.”
³¹

Now on his own, working with Mack Sennett’s Educational Pictures in the Hollywood Hills, in 1931, Bing turned out four two-reelers
in three months — two in June, a third in July, a fourth in August. On average, each involved no more than two days’ shooting.
Sennett later said he had briefly doubted Bing’s ability to carry the pictures and hired comedian Arthur Stone to share the
load. Yet Bing completely dominates the shorts, which are fascinating for the way they establish in embryonic form the Crosby
persona — exuberant and mischievous, dreamy and stubborn, often callow, sometimes petulant — that would emerge in Bing’s feature
films of the 1930s.

The first short, I
Surrender Dear,
received a limited release on the West Coast but was broadly redistributed in September, after Bing triumphed on national
radio. Educational could then advertise him as “California’s famous discovery who has become the country’s favorite overnight.”
Moviegoers were pleased, and so were the trade papers.
Photoplay
reported, “The [Sennett] shorts… not only get over the Crosby voice, but the Crosby personality, which seems to be quite
sumpin’.”
³²
Motion Picture Herald
thought “the baron of baritones” (as he was billed) “personable,” adding that he “can act sufficiently to put over his songs
and has a really beautiful voice.”
³³
Variety
agreed: “Crosby displays capital comedy sense, plays with assurance and certainty.”
³⁴

Today it is difficult to grasp the degree to which radio threatened Hollywood. Many theaters suspended projection of films
at 7:00
P.M
. and piped in
Amos ‘n’Andy,
which might otherwise have kept patrons at home. Sennett realized that just as talking pictures offered audiences a chance
to hear the voices belonging to beloved faces, they
provided a chance to see the faces belonging to beloved broadcast voices. In the world of Bing’s two-reelers, everyone knows
how Bing sounds, but no one knows what he looks like. And since Bing never carries ID, the only way he can prove himself to
women or police officers is to sing. His resonant low notes and seductive phrasing invariably win the day and the girl.