Bing Crosby (47 page)

Which is not to say he didn’t slip up a few times. Frieda Kapp, Jack’s widow, recalled the Paramount run as the period when
Jack began pressuring Bing to dispense with the trademarks that had given him cachet ever since the Whiteman years. Jack summed
them up as the “bu-bu-bu-boos,” by which he also meant scat singing and jazz. Kapp was determined to establish Bing as the
first entertainer who was all things to all people, and as his instincts usually proved sound, Bing grew to depend on them.
But it was not always easy, and one of their discussions apparently sent Bing on a bender. “That was the beginning of Bing’s
success, taking away the
bu-bu-bu-boos
at the Paramount Theater,” as Frieda remembered it. “I remember very well that [Jack] took the
bu-bu-bu-boo
away from him and he did not appear that night at the Paramount. They found him drunk somewhere. After that, of course, he
went back and became a great success.”
⁴⁶

His sporadic unsteadiness was also apparent on the air. “A couple of times during the early weeks, I remember him fumbling
on the radio,” said Burton Lane. “I never saw him drinking, but if he blew a lyric,there would be talk on the street, you
know, around the music publishers.”
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Artie Shaw remembered a broadcast when Bing “was so drunk he was staggering. He wouldn’t stay near the mike, somebody had
to hold him there.”
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In Shaw’s opinion, the problem was Dixie. The scuttlebutt had it that she had come to New York to keep him off the sauce
but was drinking too much herself.

Shortly before Bing took off for New York, Dixie Lee embarked on a nightclub engagement in Los Angeles at the Embassy club.
She arrived in New York after completing the gig, and friends said they seemed happy together. “Bing and Dixie were living
at the Essex
House, which was very new, and Mildred and I were married and staying with Joe and Sally Venuti, nearby on Fifty-fifth Street,”
Red Norvo recalled. “And so we gave parties at Joe’s apartment, the six of us, and they were wonderful.”
⁴⁹
Bing and Dixie bought a white terrier and named it Cremo. “Dixie came to the studio once or twice,” Ken Roberts remembered,
“and she was like a little waif. I heard after that she drank a lot. I don’t know. Bing had a reputation for drinking, but
I never saw him drunk. When he was working he was very serious.”
⁵⁰
Yet a turnabout was taking place. At Dixie’s urging, Bing had straightened out, but in trying to keep up with him and in
warding off loneliness when he worked late, she now turned increasingly to alcohol.

Meanwhile, Everett ran rampant, pulling strings, making deals. “Everett was running Bing’s life at that time,” or so it seemed
to Gary Stevens. “He was all business, looking out for Bing’s welfare on a very strict, cold basis.”
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He was not greatly liked or respected. Ken Roberts thought that “he just kind of latched on to this brilliant young brother.”
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Everett was known as a tippler and a chaser. Members of the Paramount stage crew
⁵³
described an incident that occurred when Everett followed Bing onstage as he was about to climb onto the seat of the crane
that suspended him over the audience. During their hurried conversation, before the curtain rose, Everett noticed they were
standing near a trapdoor that opened on the girls’ dressing area. Somehow he managed to fall through the trap as the crane
took Bing on his ride. The orchestra had to play extra loud to cover the shrieking from down below.

In the all-time classic Everett story, however, he plays a bit part. “There was a shoeshine boy near CBS at Sunset and Vine
in Hollywood,” Artie Shaw recalled, “and he was working on one man, when the man he just finished gave him a dime tip, which
was a normal tip back then, and walked away. So the shoeshine boy says, ‘Thanks, Mr. Crosby,’ and the new customer says, ‘Was
that Bing Crosby?’And the kid says, ‘No, that’s the wrong Crosby.’ Everett was known as the wrong Crosby for the rest of his
life.”
⁵⁴

Yet for all his rough edges, Everett proved an effective deal-maker as the Crosby phenomenon billowed. Young Gary Stevens
helped the process along by convincing CBS’s three vocal stars — Kate Smith, Morton Downey, and Bing — to pose for a picture
he placed in the
New York World-Telegram;
it was quickly picked up by the Associated Press. Bing refused to wear his hairpiece for the picture, the last time that
would happen in a publicity shot.

In January Mack Sennett asked Bing to complete a biographical card for his public-relations office. Everett filled it out,
creating bits of the Crosby myth that persisted from one press release to another, from one screen-idol magazine to the next.
He got little right beyond eyes (blue), hair (light), pastimes (golf and swordfishing), and current address (the Essex House).
But he did create Bing’s official birth date of May 2, 1904. Though he shaved only a year from Bing’s real age, Everett thought
he was being canny; he figured Bing had to be thirty-one or thirty-two and that he was doing him a favor keeping him in his
twenties in what promised to be his breakthrough year in movies. He declined to fill in height and weight, identified his
first Sennett film as
One More Chance
(it was
I Surrender Dear),
and traced his nickname to his childhood affection for popguns. Unable to resist adding a little more color, he appended
a few Whiteman tales and the comment: “claims his watch has been in every pawnshop across country”
⁵⁵

Everett could afford to make the pawnshop crack, because those days were behind Bing. With Dixie on furlough from Fox, she
made the rounds with him. They enjoyed their relative prosperity, his increased renown, New York, and each other. Bing focused
intently on singing and rarely turned down an opportunity to work. He sang so often, it’s a wonder his node didn’t cause greater
affliction. On a Saturday evening in February, toward the end of the Paramount engagement, Bing moonlighted at New Jersey’s
Newark Armory at a Radio Artists Ball, where a dollar ticket rewarded fans with Crosby, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters,
Nick Lucas (“Tip Toe Through the Tulips with Me”), and Bennie Krueger’s orchestra. Five evenings later he hightailed it from
his last show at the Paramount to the Columbia studio where Duke Ellington was setting up. Between midnight and one, they
recorded two Ellington arrangements of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Although they admired and liked each other (Duke created
his concerto version of “Frankie and Johnny” for Bing’s radio show in 1941; the last recording Bing made in the United States
was for a memorial tribute to Duke in 1977), this was the only time Bing
formally recorded as a soloist with Ellington and one of the few times he recorded the blues.
⁵⁶
A pity on both counts, for the result is a gem — or, more precisely, two gems.

The second (B) take was initially released and remains the best known of the two, beginning with a slap-tongue introduction
by baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and proceeding with glowing choruses by trumpeter Cootie Williams and trombonist Joe
Nanton. After a short piano transition, Bing sings two twelve-bar choruses, backed by a covey of clarinetist Barney Bigard,
Carney, and guitarist Fred Guy, whose dynamic strumming suggests a banjo. Bing continues with the two sixteen-bar refrains
(Ellington dispenses with the tango rhythm of the original), backed at first by Nanton and then by the previously noted trio.
He coolly improvises phrases with such authority that when he forgets the lyric, he is able to unhesitatingly fake — in true
blues tradition — a closing refrain. At which point the tempo is doubled as the great alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges wails
a chorus, setting up a stirring passage by Bing, one of the finest examples of scat singing in that era. He concludes at half
tempo with the beautifully modulated line “And I love my baby [critic J. T. H. Mize astutely singled out the “slow and deliberate
tilt on
baby”]
⁵⁷
till the day I die.”

That closing phrase probably clinched the choice of take B, but the verdict was actually settled on a question of gender;
in Bing’s first try, the St. Louis woman pulled “that gal around,” instead of the man she was supposed to be pulling. The
A take has rewards of its own, beginning with an orchestral introduction and a ferocious Cootie Williams solo that establishes
a far earthier mood, peaking with one of Bing’s headiest jazz moments on record. Before Hodges completes his double-time chorus,
Bing — Louislike — leaps in and commands the saxophonist’s last four bars as a scat runway for his own elated chorus. In neither
version does Bing make an effort to mimic expressive blues techniques. He enjoyed, as did Ellington, the contrast between
his level tones and the band’s idiosyncratic timbres. The record was reviewed later that year in Britain’s
Gramophone:
“After the ballad performances to which Bing has been devoting most of his time lately the brilliance of his rhythmic style
will be surprising, even to those who remember the days when, with Harry Barris and Al Rinker [he] created quite a sensation
as a hot singer.”
⁵⁸

Bing played it both ways, hot and cool, all season. If the material was uninspired, as it often was, he managed to wring something
personal
from it anyway, for example, “Starlight,” a poised though raspy-voiced reading of an undistinguished ballad that shows how
comfortable he had become as a stylist, no longer trying so hard to turn or sigh a note. Jack Kapp’s persistence in getting
him to simplify his attack paid off without diminishing Bing’s gift for drama. He gives full measure to the bygone lament
“My Woman,” transforming an awkward song into a charmer with mild echoes of jazz and tango.
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Eddie Lang was invariably at his side, a kind of jazz conscience. In arranging “Paradise,” Victor Young allowed Bing and
Lang to waltz the last sixteen bars largely on their own, and on “You’re Still in My Heart,” he had Lang double-time the second
chorus.

The most popular Crosby recording that month was a stunning reunion with the Mills Brothers on “Shine.” A minstrel song fashioned
for a revue in 1909 by two black songwriters (Ford Dabney and the influential lyricist-publisher Cecil Mack), “Shine” did
not achieve success until the 1920s, by which time its self-pity and ethnic cliches (“Just because my hair is curly / Just
because my teeth are pearly”) were more likely to invite parody than outrage. In 1931 Louis Armstrong had made the song an
exuberant virtuoso showcase, practically transforming the epithet “Shine” into a badge of honor. In their 1932 version, the
Mills Brothers politely phrase the outmoded lyric. Then Bing jumps in, imbuing every word with swing, rhythmically and sonorously
overwhelming the trite caricature. When the Millses reprise the chorus, Bing interpolates spoken responses that suggest a
benign carny barker (“man’s got curly hair!” “also got pearly teeth!”) and adds an Armstrongian “ohhh, keep on smiling.” Bing’s
scat solo on “Shine” was his most inventive to date, surpassing “Dinah” in its rhythmic variety and assurance.

He fared less successfully on Victor Young’s “Lawd, You Made the Night Too Long,” an incongruously heavy-handed record with
Don Redman’s elegant orchestra and the Boswell Sisters, with whom he does not interact. Sadly, that was the last time he appeared
on record with the Boswells, though they worked together on radio numerous times. It was also the last time he recorded in
New York before embarking — that very afternoon (April 13) — on the tour that brought him back to Hollywood.

Bing’s departure from New York had been hastened in part by Cremo’s surprise decision, in February, not to renew his radio
contract. George
Washington Hill saw no need to explain why. According to one observer, the clean-cigar company was shocked to discover, after
four months, that women who faithfully listened to Bing did not smoke cigars. Another traced the rupture to one of Hill’s
advertising boasts, “There is no spit in Cremo.” Bing’s show had become notorious for its distasteful commercials, shudderingly
recited by announcer David Ross (“Spit,” he would begin, “is a horrid word”), concerning the dreadful effects of saliva.
⁶⁰
The story went that one of Hill’s lieutenants manufactured a private run of hand-rolled (and tongue-sealed) cigars and distributed
them with the Cremo label. Hill was allegedly mortified to realize that those Cremos did undoubtedly contain spit and withdrew
all sponsorship for the product.

Bing and Everett were not overly worried at first. CBS had every intention of keeping Bing on the air until a new sponsor
could be found. Yet the network forbade him from including Dixie in the show, perhaps fearing that a wifely presence would
undermine his potency as a heartthrob balladeer. Bing was sufficiently concerned about his future in radio to accept the injunction,
which hammered home the career reversals that had taken place in the seventeen months since they were married. Cremo’s retreat
was not untimely. Bing had failed to give his voice the prescribed rest, so Dr. Ruskin sent him to another specialist, Chevalier
Jackson, who apparently frightened him into a brief repose. As Bing related to biographer Charles Thompson, Jackson warned
him that surgery might turn him into “a boy soprano” and advised, “If you rest and don’t even answer the phone — don’t talk,
don’t do anything — [the nodes will] recede.”
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Bing took ten days off before resuming broadcasts, again with Fred Rich’s band, but only three times a week. Cremo’s layoff
also made it easier for him to return to California to shoot the two remaining shorts on his Sennett contract. While Bing
continued working the Paramount, Everett was less preoccupied with finding him a new sponsor than with lining up a feature
film to make the trip worthwhile.

Meanwhile, Bing’s standing in show business reached a new plateau. During the week of his last Cremo appearance (February
27), Bing was honored with a midnight dinner at the Friars Club — “a particularly funny night,” according to the club’s chronicler,
Joey Adams, and the first time the industry paid him tribute.
⁶²
The speakers included Jack Benny, George Burns, Irving Berlin, Rudy Vallee,
William Paley, George Jessel, Walter Donaldson, and Damon Runyon. At the end of the evening, George M. Cohan presented Bing
with a lifetime membership card made of gold. In March the public joined in a roast of the whole crooning triad, stimulated
by a song, “Crosby, Columbo and Vallee” (“Who do husbands hate their wives to listen to? / Crosby, Columbo and Vallee!”).
Vallee sued to have his picture removed from the sheet music but could do nothing when Merrie Melodies lampooned him and Bing
in a cartoon of the same name.