Bing Crosby (53 page)

His later success on all fronts was so profound, it is difficult to believe that in 1932, while Paramount was preparing to
launch him as a major film star, Bing thought he might be washed up on the air. His association with CBS had soured — perhaps,
he feared, for good. After Cremo canceled him and he returned to Los Angeles, Bing continued to appear for CBS on a sustaining
show that paid him no salary
except for a default guarantee of $400, should he not have a theatrical job in any given week. CBS was motivated to make certain
he did, not only to save the fee but because the network booked his vaudeville appearances for a 10 percent commission. As
if those terms weren’t invidious enough, CBS asked Bing (and other artists) to accept a 15 percent cut in June, promising
a raise when his contract was renewed. He agreed, only to learn on July 15, when the old contract expired, that CBS demanded
an additional cut of 20 percent, reducing his default payments to $250. Again he consented, waiving the promised raise and
taking the 20 percent cut. But when the new contract arrived on July 18, two weeks into the production of
The Big Broadcast,
he discovered that CBS’s artists bureau had increased its commission for his concert performances. CBS was treating him like
a mark. That evening, an hour before his broadcast, Crosby informed the network’s New York office that he would not appear.
A week later he casually announced that when the picture wrapped, he would take off for the Mexican coast on a fishing trip.
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But Bing was less confident than he sounded. He postponed the fishing excursion two weeks and appeared free of charge on
California Melodies,
an evening series on the CBS affiliate, KHJ. In
Variety’s
interpretation, Bing was “giving his services gratis once a week… to show that CBS can’t do without him.”
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Ev flew to New York, assuring him that the free broadcasts were having a softening effect. Bing left for his vacation in
mid-August and spent two weeks cruising Mexico’s waters, deep-sea fishing with Eddie Lang, Lennie Hayton, and actors Lew Ayres
and Nick Stuart, returning with an ill-suited if symbolically carefree mustache. When he learned that CBS would not budge,
he refused to broadcast until a sponsor was contracted. Not an easy task. The public may have been clamoring for Bing, but
the Depression had advertisers anxious and uncertain.

Meanwhile, his theatrical appearances drew capacity crowds in Oakland, Los Angeles, Glendale, Pasadena, Riverside, Pomona,
and San Bernardino. He broke Jolson’s house record at San Francisco’s Fox Theater, taking in $40,000 for the week. On September
16, the day after he closed at the Fox, Bing recorded for the first time since May. “Please” was timed for the premiere of
The Big Broadcast,
and its punning lyric shaped a melody that ideally suited Bing’s style. Whole notes at the beginning and end of the leading
phrase (“Please
lend your little ear to my pleas”) showcase Bing’s beseeching timbre, the first generating a hiccupy mordent and dramatic
entrance. Bing’s record, with Anson Weeks’s band and Lang’s guitar, was an enormous success, topping sales charts in November
and December — an early example of marketing synergy between movies, records, and radio. Paramount adopted “Please” as the
title for a Crosby two-reeler and required him to reprise it in his second feature film,
College Humor.
The song remained a staple of his career: He re-recorded it in 1940, scoring a second hit, and parodied it nearly twenty
years after that for a TV skit in which his sons instruct him in rock ‘n’ roll, turning the mordent into a Presleyan split
vowel (“pli-ease”). One young listener who discovered the song in those years was John Lennon, who credited it as the inspiration
for the Beatles’ “Please Please Me.”

Those successes worked in Everett’s favor as he labored to put Bing back on radio. Working against him, in addition to his
brother’s increasing reputation for willfulness after the CBS walkout, was corporate suspicion (perhaps mixed with desire)
that the rage for Crosby, though heating up, might fizzle out. Under the circumstances, no one knew for sure if Everett’s
formidable asking price was high or reasonable or, just possibly, low.

The most powerful of advertisers was the tobacco industry, which shamelessly marketed cigarettes with the flapdoodle once
lavished on snake oil. The carnage wrought by tobacco was first noticed in the early 1930s, with the increase in lung cancer;
in 1932 the
American Journal of Cancer
traced the disease directly to cigarette tar. Cigarettes had been tagged coffin nails long before the turn of the century,
but those imprecations were often dismissed as puritanical caution against anything pleasurable. Big tobacco, with a pleasurably
addictive product and infinite funds, blithely promised better digestion, weight control, and improved speaking and singing
abilities. Camel urged a regimen of five cigarettes at Thanksgiving dinner, one after each course; Lucky Strike claimed support
from “20,679 Physicians.”
⁷
Everett opened negotiations with Chesterfield.

Bing and Dixie left for New York on October 5, arriving as “Please” began topping sales lists everywhere. They lived in New
York for the next five and a half months, until filming began on
College Humor.
While Everett worked to nail down a sponsor, Bing secured himself a
new agent at Mills-Rockwell, the powerful musical concern whose client list included Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, the Mills
Brothers, Glen Gray, Don Redman, and Victor Young. An offshoot of the Rockwell-O’Keefe Theatrical Agency, it was run by Irving
Mills, Tommy Rockwell, and Cork O’Keefe, who lined up November concert bookings as Everett hammered away at Chesterfield and
Bing enjoyed weeks of suspenseful leisure.

October 14 was a memorable day. It began with Bing recording three songs: “Here Lies Love” from the picture, as well as two
songs he established as standards, Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean?,” and his collaboration with Victor Young and lyricist
Ned Washington, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.”
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Within hours
The Big Broadcast
began its run at the Paramount, establishing him at last as a Hollywood player. In the evening, while shmoozing on the street
near the Friars Club, Bing was introduced to Bob Hope, a fast-talking comic and vaudevillian then appearing on Rudy Vallées
radio show and on Broadway in
Ballyhoo of 1932.
Bing’s friendliness surprised and gratified Hope. They were the same age; Bing was twenty-six days older, though his purported
1904 birthdate convinced Bob that he was himself the older man.
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But Bing’s career had advanced well beyond that of Hope’s. Six weeks later they shared a bill at the Capitol Theater, with
Bing headlining and Bob
(Ballyhoo of 1932
had flopped) as emcee.

The Capitol engagement lasted only a week, December 2-8, but that was long enough for Bing and Hope to dream up routines that
emerged as unexpected highlights on a workaday bill with comic acrobats, radio impressionists, and the Abe Lyman band. “I
did an act, you know, impressions,” Hope recalled, “and so I talked Bing into doing it at the Capitol and it just played like
gangbusters. We’d play two politicians meeting in the street and we’d say hi, hi, and then we’d go into each others’ pockets,
or two conductors who end up dueling with their batons, and it went over so big — stuff they really laughed at.”
¹⁰
Their chemistry blossomed between shows at a nearby saloon, O’Reilly’s, where the two traded show-business tales and quips
and made each other laugh. Bing, a model audience for anyone he thought funny, flourished in the presence of gifted performers,
and Hope admired his confidence, speed, and ease — his willingness to try new things. “Bing’s career was doing pretty good,
coming
along,” Bob said, “but he was just the same then as he always was, a good straight-ahead guy.”
¹¹

Reviewers who caught only the first day’s shows missed out.
Variety
praised “Bu-bu-bu-Bing” for his “baritoning” and lauded Lang as “a guitarist whose swell strumming detracts at first but
eventually helps out the Crosby singing,” ignoring the rest of the bill.
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The
New York Herald Tribune
cheered Bing for a “merry return, combining songs and comedy in a pleasing act” and added that Hope’s material was old but
effective.
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No one wrote of the Crosby-Hope interplay, but Bob’s brother returned with a (silent) movie camera and captured their infectious
energy. Hope broke big the next year, playing a lead in Jerome Kern’s
Roberta,
six years before making his first movie with Bing.

After months of dickering, Chesterfield signed Bing to a thirteen-week contract, two CBS broadcasts per week at $2,000, beginning
January 4, 1933, with Lennie Hayton conducting. Chesterfield initially offered the show to NBC, which Bing tried to interest
in creating a broadcasting outlet in San Francisco, permitting him more time to make movies. NBC seemed sympathetic, but those
talks ended when Lucky Strike, an NBC sponsor, objected to a rival cigarette company’s being represented on the network. Chesterfield
knew the feeling: it had stalled sealing Bing’s contract on the grounds that his Cremo connection was too fresh in the public
mind.
¹⁴
Chesterfield decided seven months was an appropriate buffer to rid Bing of the Cremo taint.

For Bing, who smoked cigarettes when he did not have a pipe, the Chesterfield deal marked the beginning of an on-and-mostly-off
relationship that lasted twenty years, producing two radio shows,
The Music That Satisfies
(January-April 1933) and
The Bing Crosby Show
(1949-52) and several print campaigns. The association troubled him and his mother, who badgered him not to shill for tobacco.
But Chesterfield had given him what he considered a badly needed break, and he maintained the affiliation partly out of loyalty.
Even so, he refused to be shown in print ads with a cigarette in his mouth, especially after a magazine ran an ad in which
the art director had penciled one in. In a 1944 ad he neatly avoids the product altogether. Pictured at a desk, its open drawer
overflowing with cigarette cartons,
an improbably well-dressed Bing reflects, “There’s no friend like an old friend and that’s how I’ve felt about Chesterfield
ever since I first sang for them several years ago.”
¹⁵

As soon as the radio deal was signed, Paramount — its executives flaunting the success of
The Big Broadcast
while fighting off creditors — announced that
College Humor
would go before the cameras in April, after the Chesterfield show ended. The studio was treading water, chaotically. Until
1931, when ticket sales sharply declined, Paramount had ignored the Depression, acquiring new theaters, a music division,
and massive debt. Now the studio filed for bankruptcy, and in the course of a bitter restructuring, two of Hollywood’s pioneers,
Jesse Lasky and B. P. Schulberg, were forced out. Adolph Zukor, whose extravagant policies helped put the company in jeopardy,
was appointed chairman of the board, a face-saving charade to camouflage his removal from the seat of power. A lot was riding
on Bing.

Crosby, too, had avoided facing the Depression in his work. But in the months before he launched
The Music That Satisfies
and during the weeks it aired, he resumed a prolific recording schedule. At an early-morning session on October 25, he addressed
the Depression musically for the first time. Two of the three planned songs were negligible items by Harry Woods (whose “Side
by Side” had done well for the Rhythm Boys). With Hayton conducting an ensemble of five winds, four strings, and rhythm, Bing
began with a firm reading of “Linger a Little Longer in the Twilight,” extending to his mate a promise to “dream our cares
away,” then whistling like a chirpy bird. “We’re a Couple of Soldiers” is a maudlin muddle about combating hardship with patriotic
diligence: “Trouble and hard luck we face with a grin / Like regular soldiers we never give in.” Hayton’s arrangement begins
with marching brasses, and as Bing sings the second chorus, a slight flutter suggests he might crack up, which is precisely
what happened on the second take, the first of the semilegendary Crosby breakdowns, known for his quick-witted and off-color
ad-libs. Bing sings with authority for more than two minutes, until Eddie Lang waffles an arpeggio that Tommy Dorsey critiques
in an extended raspberry, convulsing the singer. What makes the ensuing minute hilarious is Bing’s and the band’s insistence
on completing the take as he steadies himself for a measure or two and then cracks up again. At
the coda, he ad-libs: “We’re a couple of nances, Uncle Salvi and me. Station house!”
Nance
is period slang for a homosexual; Uncle Salvi is Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro); the station house is showbiz overstatement
for the fate of performing truants.

The session grew suddenly serious for the next selection, a song from a new Broadway revue,
Americana,
with a melody by Jay Gorney and an emphatic lyric by E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg.
¹⁶
Instead of tritemetaphors, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” paints vivid images of veterans (“half a million boots went slogging
through hell”), laborers, and farmers who believed they were “building a dream,” only to find themselves destitute and forgotten.
Bing recorded his version three weeks after
Americana
opened. Brunswick rushed the platter to stores, and within two weeks it was the best-selling record in the nation — the one
Tin Pan Alley hit that addressed the darkness in American life. Columbia quickly issued a version by Rudy Vallée that begins
with a spoken introduction (he describes the song as “poignant and different”),
¹⁷
and Jolson sang it on his radio show. But other versions pale beside Bing’s, a perfectly pitched statement of protest and
empathy, dignified but not somber, rueful but not bitter, heroic but not overwrought. As Studs Terkel would later note, he
“understates [the song] beautifully,” all the better to allow the words to “explode.”
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Bing’s record emerged as an emblem of the era.
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