Bing Crosby (50 page)

When Rudy Vallee first heard Bing, he observed, “My time is short.” Bing thumbs through
Radio Mirror
with Rudy on the cover, 1933.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Listen in on the hilarious secrets and romances your radios never reveal!

— Paramount advertisement,
The Big Broadcast
(1932)
¹

Paramount and Bing closed the deal on
Wild Waves,
which was retitled
The Crooner
and
Broadcasting
before the studio settled on
The Big Broadcast.
On April 13 Bing, Dixie, and the terrier, Cremo, embarked on a five-month tour of the Paramount-Publix circuit in an elaborate
publicity drive for the picture, which was scheduled to shoot midway through the tour, beginning June 11. During the seven-week
westward leg of the journey, Bing broadcast fifteen-minute shows Mondays and Wednesdays at stops where the theater chain had
him booked; upon arriving in California, he would play local venues for a month and make the film, then resume a schedule
of broadcasts and theaters as he worked his way back to New York. Bing had hoped to bring along a small combo with Joe Venuti
and Jimmy Dorsey but was obliged to settle for just Lennie Hayton, who served as musical director and conducted theater-pit
orchestras, and Lang, who worked at Bing’s side, seated on a high stool that allowed them to share a mike. Bing called Eddie
his “good luck charm.”
²

A couple of weeks into the tour,
Variety
ran an ad cosigned by Everett Crosby and William Paley, in which Bing says “THANKS
EVERYBODY See You in the Fall.”
³
Bing’s brother identified himself as the singer’s personal manager, and Paley was credited with “personal direction,” which
reflected nothing more than his desire to keep Bing on his network.

Dixie and Kitty Lang grew close during the trip. Kitty remembered, “Every town we went to, we were alone most of the time
due to rehearsals and shows the boys were doing. We only saw them at dinner or after the last show of the evening.” Bing and
Eddie spent off-hours shooting pool, playing cards, and talking music. Bing “always listened to Eddie’s advice as to how to
sing certain phrases in a tune,” Kitty said.
⁴
In booking their accommodations, Everett invariably arranged connecting rooms. While the boys rehearsed, the girls went horseback
riding or shopping in the morning, occasionally taking in a movie in the afternoon.

The tour zigzagged — Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, New Haven, Chicago (again), Minneapolis, St. Louis — before touching
down in Los Angeles. In Boston Bing joined Jack Benny and George M. Cohan in a minstrel show and, using a pseudonym, entered
an amateur-talent contest at the behest of two vaudeville chums, Les Reis and Artie Dunn. He lost. In Chicago Bing recorded
five tunes with Isham Jones’s orchestra during the first stopover, and four with a Frankie Trumbauer unit during the second.
Those sides produced Crosby’s classic versions of two of the most indelible and rhythmically energized songs in the American
canon, both created by black songwriters.

Maceo Pinkard’s hugely popular “Sweet Georgia Brown” was written in 1925 and was introduced by bandleader Ben Bernie. The
song is disarmingly fluent given its distinct qualities. Structurally, it avoids the prevalent
aaba
format in favor of
abac;
harmonically, it employs a cycle of fifths but averts the tonic chord until midway; melodically, it is uncannily buoyant,
making a slow treatment virtually impossible. Bing’s performance with Isham Jones, whose dance band was studded with jazz
players (including Woody Herman), is jubilant. Lang strums a two-bar transition to introduce Bing, who is loose, unhurried,
letter-perfect. Bing rarely begins phrases on the one, preferring to coolly syncopate them against the ensemble rhythm. No
singer of that era understood as well as Bing Louis Armstrong’s proclivity for superimposing implied rhythms over stated ones.
But where
Armstrong flows, Bing inclines toward a two-beat lockstep, underscored by his practice of adding words to heighten swing;
for example, in the space of the phrase, “I’ll tell you why and you know I don’t lie, not much,” he sings, “And I’ll tell
you just why, you know that I do not lie, not much.”
⁵
A Bixlike solo by trumpeter Chelsea Quealey and Jack Jenny’s graceful trombone precede his scat solo and handsomely embellished
reprise.

Bing’s sparked rendition of Shelton Brooks’s “Some of These Days,” a milestone song of 1910 that became Sophie Tucker’s theme
a year later, is even more successful. By any measure, it is one of his greatest performances. Reunited with Trumbauer, who
led an ensemble of his regulars plus Lang and Hayton (who dictated the arrangements at the session), Bing is in peak voice
and eager to please. Lang begins with vigorous strumming, almost as if the record had faded up on a number in progress, and
four bars later Bing rides in — swinging and bending notes, indulging a fetching cry (no mordents today), even clipping a
few high notes, while perfectly enunciating the virtually rhymeless lyric. In his superb scat solo, Bing emulates Bix and
the result is rhythmically more varied than his usual ad-lib choruses; he inventively uses riffs, rests, and a diminished
scale — harmonizing with Lang’s turnback chords at bar sixteen. Solos by Lang, trumpeter Nat Connant, and Tram may be smoother,
but Bing’s solo is the one that stays in the mind, not least his closing, “tweet, tweet, tweet, twee twee.”

Bing was in exceptional form in Chicago, giving indifferent songs like “Lazy Day” and “Cabin in the Cotton” more than their
due. He rises to a dramatic righteousness on the latter, as if, having been mockingly entwined with Columbo and Vallée, he
were determined to sever himself from the depiction of crooners as small-voiced wimps. A couple of weeks later, Bing explained
to a reporter, “A crooner is someone who always sings softly, never raising his voice to full strength. I raise mine to full
volume whenever the song calls for it.”
⁶
Yet before he left the Windy City, he confided to Tram that he felt his future lay not in music but in the movies.
⁷

On June 12, the day after shooting was originally scheduled to begin, the Crosby party arrived at L.A.’s Union Station and
was greeted by the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra (chief rival to the Cocoanut Grove
band) for speeches courtesy of Paramount’s public-relations department. Bing and Dixie rented Sue Carol’s house, where they
had lived in lieu of a honeymoon, and Eddie and Kitty took an apartment. “But we always stayed close together,” Kitty recalled.
⁸
The start-up for
The Big Broadcast
was delayed until July 5. That gave Bing time to fulfill his obligations to Sennett and film a promotional reel for Paramount’s
series
Hollywood on Parade.

The final two Sennett shorts employed the same basic formula as before, but the scripts now reflected Bing’s renown as a national
radio personality and the general disparagement of crooning. In
Sing, Bing, Sing,
⁹
Franklin Pangborn fires a gun at Bing and crows, “It’s always open season for crooners.” That film also includes the first
allusion in the series to the Depression. When the girl’s father vows that his daughter will never marry a radio singer, Bing
replies, “That’s where you’re wrong. Prosperity is just around the crooner.” Bing’s final film for Sennett, the appealing
Blue of the Night,
indulges in a few inside jokes (Bing pretends to be a reporter named Jack Smith, the name of his successor at the Grove)
but is more notable as the screen debut of his theme song and for his lovely rendering of “Auf Wiedersehen,” a song well suited
to the lush timbre of his midrange.

For some reason, Bing never recorded “Auf Wiedersehen,” but he sang it again in the first of the four
Hollywood on Parade
publicity shorts he made in 1932 and 1933. None of the stars were paid for their appearances in these one-reelers, which
pretend to depict them candidly, though every shot was carefully staged. In the one made to promote
The Big Broadcast,
actor Stu Erwin, his costar, has the distinction of delivering the first documented joke about Bing’s fabled fortune, when
he announces that Bing appears “by permission of his broker.” Bing does a routine with two other stars of the picture, George
Burns and Gracie Allen, who greets him as Morton Downey. “No,” Bing tells her, “I’m Rudy Vallée.”

In the 1950s, when television ravaged movie box office receipts, movie studios fought back with everything from biblical spectacles
to 3-D projection to double-D bottle blondes, not to mention the trinity spelled out by Cole Porter: “If you want to get the
crowd to come around / You’ve got to have glorious Technicolor / Breathtaking Cinemascope and / Stereophonic sound.”
¹⁰
In the early 1930s radio
was just as threatening; it bedeviled the record and motion picture industries and every other area of entertainment that
required people to leave their homes. The movie studios were stymied in trying to subvert its growing power.
Amos ‘n’Andy
did not work as a movie, and musical revues were dead on arrival.

Radio’s monstrous intrusion may be inferred by the first important picture to reflect radio culture, the 1931 horror epic
Frankenstein.
Updated to the twentieth century, James Whale’s film is dizzy with radio talk and apparatuses as the scientist bridles electricity
to replicate life, wearing earphones and muttering about correct frequencies. His creation has two bolts resembling vacuum
tubes in its neck to attract electric current that will transform it into virtual humanity.
Frankenstein
captured the unstated fear of electricity — its invisible inroads into everyday life.

The statistics were ominous. In 1930 fewer than a third of American homes had radios; by 1935 fewer than a third did not.
The average listener spent upward of four hours a day beside an entertainment device that cost nothing beyond the purchase
price yet supplied constant diverse programming. Between 1930 and 1932 weekly movie attendance and receipts fell by a third.
Theaters offered double features (generating the need for more product and the assembly of B-picture units and studios) and
two-for-ones or half-price tickets. When those gambits failed, movie houses resorted to outright giveaways: hams, dishes,
and, ultimately, money — a Fox exhibitor copyrighted Bank Night, a lottery to which more than 4,000 theaters subscribed. As
if the challenges of radio and the Depression weren’t bad enough, the church intervened. The Motion Picture Production Code,
created in 1930 by Catholic publisher Martin Quigley and a Jesuit priest, Daniel Lord, had exerted influence among the faithful.
But as of mid-1934 it would be taken up and strictly enforced by the studios — good news for Shirley Temple; bad news for
Nick and Nora Charles, who were sentenced to separate beds.

The Code loomed as particularly baleful for Paramount, Hollywood’s most sophisticated studio, home to the movies’ randiest
performers, Mae West and Maurice Chevalier; the unfettered anarchy of the Marx Brothers; outlandish director Josef von Sternberg
and his Trilby, Marlene Dietrich; and resplendent director Ernst Lubitsch, who was appointed head of production when he could
no longer
explore boudoir sallies, ménage à trois, and the joys of theft. Those talents raked in a fortune, and soon they would all
be gone. Yet in 1932, when Bing and eight other radio acts were recruited for
The Big Broadcast,
Paramount did not anticipate the coming chill. Nor could it foresee the impact Bing would have on its fortunes or that of
the industry. It simply hoped to capitalize on Mack Sennett’s notion: if the country was crazy over radio singers, maybe it
would pay to see what some of them looked like.

After signing Crosby, Paramount made two shrewd decisions. The first was to jettison every aspect of William Manley’s
Wild Waves
except the radio-station setting, turning a satire into a variety show. Manley had started out as a radio writer
(Snow Village Sketches)
and achieved his success on Broadway by crunching the hand that fed him. Hollywood, however, sought a rapprochement with
radio and its listeners. Bing was to be the most prominently featured of the several CBS radio stars Paramount hired for the
picture, and it seemed reasonable to have him play some version of himself. Still, in presenting Bing Crosby as a character
named Bing Crosby, the film took the cult of personality a step beyond established custom.
¹¹

True, Laurel and Hardy used the same names on- and offscreen, and a few stars routinely appeared in roles that combined their
real first names (Al Jolson usually played a guy named Al, Eddie Cantor almost always played a guy named Eddie) with made-up
surnames, as Bing did in the Sennett shorts. In 1932 Jack Benny and Burns and Allen were extending their vaudeville personae
into radio characters of the same names, a practice that would confuse a generation of listeners. (Asked if Jack Benny was
really cheap, the professionally ditzy Gracie Allen replied, “Am I stupid?”) Bing never appeared as Bing in any of his subsequent
pictures, but his movie character, established in his first feature, would remain fairly constant from one film to the next.
Audiences would presume the man onscreen was no different at home: exceptionally likable if, as revealed in
The Big Broadcast,
not entirely admirable.