Bing Crosby (56 page)

One morning, however, he appeared to revert to his old ways. “We had a big set with an orchestra,” Carlisle recalled, “and
Bing wasn’t there. So they did a lot of rehearsing and then about ten-thirty, I was going back to my dressing room because
he hadn’t arrived, when the big doors opened and up drives Bing. He stops and says, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m gonna make
it today.’ I guess he’d been out on the town, but he was absolutely charming and you couldn’t be mad. I said, ‘You’re a very
bad boy.’ But that was the only time. He was wonderful. He didn’t get mad, didn’t argue, wasn’t temperamental. He was just
nonchalant about everything.”
⁴⁵

Well, almost everything. Carlisle noticed that he was self-conscious about his weight and height; he wore his watch on his
inside wrist because, he told her, it made his hands seem less pudgy. And he wore lifts. He once told the diminutive Alan
Ladd, who followed him at Paramount Pictures, how pleased he was that Ladd was shorter than he was. Bing maintained that he
was five nine, but an office secretary, Nancy Briggs, recalled a visit to his home when he wore slippers and she realized
he was just about her height — five seven.
⁴⁶

The shooting of
College Humor,
in the spring of 1933, coincided with a siege of paranoia on the Paramount lot. Dwarfish Emanuel Cohen
was appointed chief of production that year, and no one knew from one day to the next whether the studio would survive or
for how long. It might have gone under if not for Mae West’s two 1933 megahits,
I’m No Angel
and
She Done Him Wrong,
which grossed more than $2 million each and earned West a place on the annual Quigley box-office poll, the first Paramount
player ever to make the list. The uncertainty encouraged the manipulative Cohen to sign West, Gary Cooper, and Bing to personal
contracts, much to the horror of his bosses, the bankers in New York, who controlled Paramount’s purse strings and canned
him in retaliation, in 1934. The pervasive fear worked its way through the ranks and, if nothing else, sparked a carefree
social whirl.

The center for partying on Paramount’s lot was Gary Cooper’s dressing room, prominently located on the stars’ row of bungalows
and adjoining that of Carole Lombard. Bing once remarked that the reason they all gravitated there was that Gary was so well
liked and Carole told the raunchiest stories. Coop’s happy hour became a ritual for drinking, singing, and trade talk. Marlene
Dietrich liked to stop beside Bing’s dressing room to hear him sing and play records, especially those of Richard Tauber.
“The crooner confided to me that Tauber had taught him to breathe properly and how to modulate his phrasing,” she wrote. “This
common passion brought us together.”
⁴⁷

Contract players at Paramount were inclined to huddle in defense. Everyone knew the studio was in dire trouble, so its stars
were sometimes needled as also-rans. MGM was said to have the glamour queens and Warners the stalwart men. Yet Paramount was
beginning to forge a new, postcontinental style with Bing, Coop, Lombard, Fredric March, Cary Grant, Miriam Hopkins, George
Raft, Charles Laughton, and Claudette Colbert. West and Dietrich were huge, but the approaching hooves of censorship threatened
their commercial value. A symbolic changing of the guard occurred when Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich’s cunning director and
a specialist in erotic decadence, walked into the Paramount commissary and found Bing at his table. “The air was electric,”
wrote columnist Harrison Carroll in 1934. “Bing looked up and said politely: ‘I came in here and I was hungry, so I just sat
down at a table.’… Sternberg turned on his heel and went to another table.”
⁴⁸
Within two years Sternberg was gone from Paramount, and soon after from Hollywood.

Workers before and behind the cameras survived the months of uncertainty by playing as hard as they worked. A secretary remembered,
“At five, the cameras stopped and out came the bottles and everyone screwed on the desks.”
⁴⁹
Her image conveys the whistling in-the-dark gaiety of a studio that produced hit after hit yet remained on the brink of collapse
— a studio that, unlike all the others, had a revolving door where the head of production sat. To make things worse that summer,
the technicians went on strike. Bing, who forever maintained his common touch with crews, earned their respect by asking about
the dispute in the studio canteen and leaving money with instructions to “keep the boys in beer for the rest of the afternoon.”
⁵⁰

College Humor
was rushed into theaters in June, barely a month after principal photography ended. Reviewers were remarkably forbearing.
The
New York Times
considered it “an unsteady entertainment” but detected “heartily amusing patches” and especially liked Bing for his “sense
of humor and his subterranean blue notes.”
⁵¹
The
Los Angeles Times
approved Bing’s “most important role in this peppy film music comedy.”
⁵²
Variety
reported, “Crosby makes his best showing to date with a chance to handle both light comedy and romance. His pale face make-up
is the only flaw so it looks like all he needs is a new paint job and another good role.”
⁵³
The reliably condescending
Time,
however, thought it a “frantic little absurdity,” fit for “rural cinemaddicts whose tastes in diversion have been shaped
by wireless” and observed of Bing his “inappropriate calm which is his chief distinction.”
⁵⁴

The critics were kinder than the censors. James Wingate of the Hays Office warned against the use of
hell, pansies,
and
-punk,
and anything that could be construed as satirizing college life: “In this connection,” he wrote a Paramount executive, “[we]
suggest that the college president be played straight and not as a heavy paunchy man, or in any other derogatory manner. Also,
we would recommend that you do whatever you can to minimize the bitterness of the theme of the picture, which is that a college
education does not necessarily spell success in later life.”
⁵⁵
Bing and other cast members promoted the film onstage and on the air, and the public — not just
Time’s
rubes — lined up for tickets, filling the studio’s coffers at theaters around the country.

* * *

Two long-term intimates joined the Crosby circle during the making of
College Humor.
Paramount’s publicity campaign included a beauty competition to crown Miss College Humor. The winner was an exquisite young
woman from Tucumcari, New Mexico, with golden hair and porcelain skin, named Bessie Patterson. Her prize was a bit part in
a Crosby film, but because she was underage, she did not collect for a few years. When the time came, Bing introduced her
to Johnny Burke, who became his most accomplished lyricist and Bessie’s husband. The often tumultuous marriage of the Burkes
would parallel that of Bing and Dixie.

Leo Lynn reentered Bing’s life while Bing was driving down Sunset Boulevard and noticed his Gonzaga classmate crossing the
road. Leo was a few years older than Bing, but they had appeared together in school concerts and plays. Bing pulled over and
asked what he was doing in Hollywood. Leo explained that he was working as driver and assistant to English actor Clive Brook.
Bing said he needed someone, too. Leo gave Brook his notice that afternoon. He remained Bing’s aide-de-camp until Bing’s death,
a quiet, omnipresent, loyal keeper of the keys for forty-four years.

“Leo was almost the shape of Mr. Crosby,” said Alan Fisher, the Crosby butler in the 1960s and 1970s. “A peculiar-looking
guy. Leo’s eyes were slightly odd, but they were blue and he was stocky, as Mr. Crosby was in those days before he became
thinner. So Leo became his stand-in and driver and would do anything personal for Mr. Crosby.”
⁵⁶
Leo was always around, a shadow, easy to be with, diffident but friendly. “Bing never had an entourage, never,” Rosemary
Clooney said. “The entourage was Leo. That was it.” Bing was comfortable with Leo. They had no need to keep up a conversation,
and Leo could read his mind when he got in a mood, like the time in the 1950s when he recorded with Clooney and the producer’s
friends packed the control room. “Bing would do things I could never figure out,” Clooney recalled. “He sat in a chair facing
the wall and I said, ‘You want to go through with this?’ and he said, I’ll be with you in a moment.’ He wanted the people
out of the control room, but he didn’t say it. You were supposed to divine these things sometimes with him. But Leo came back
with his sandwich and saw right away what was going on.”
⁵⁷

Still, despite the Gonzaga connection, Leo was an employee before
he became a friend, a fact that helped define his role as Bing’s right-hand man, a member of the inner circle who knew his
place, a place somewhat belied by his working-class manner and reserve. Phil Harris turned the spotlight on Leo whenever he
came to see his Las Vegas nightclub act: “There’s a friend of mine in the audience I want you to meet. His name is Leo Lynn.
You can’t get through to see Bing Crosby without going through him.”
⁵⁸
After Eddie Lang’s death, Bing unburdened himself to no one. Leo, who played life as close to the vest as Bing, mirrored
the change in him. He was a different kind of confidant — one who didn’t unload his confidences or expect others to unload
theirs.

I’d like to be able to sing like the crooners. The reason is a crooner gets his quota of sentimentality with half his natural
voice. That’s a great saving. I don’t like to work.

—
Bing Crosby,
Time
(1934)
¹

Paramount was determined to keep Bing in harness. Two months after wrapping
College Humor,
he began shooting
Too Much Harmony,
enjoying little rest in the interim beyond a week in May spent with Dixie at Palm Springs. On returning to Hollywood, he
agreed to shoot six shorts and, within days, accompanied director Arvid E. Gillstrom to Yosemite Park to make two,
Please and Just an Echo.
²
In the first, Bing once again plays Bing. Driving his car, he comes upon a fair maiden with a flat tire and an overbearing
clownish suitor. As it happens, she teaches singing and Bing — looking younger and more attractive than in
College Humor
— asks for lessons. After dispatching her beau, Elmer Smoot (Vernon Dent doing a malevolent Oliver Hardy), in a vocal contest,
Bing drives into the sunset with her, pecking her on the lips and nodding his head to seal his accomplishment.

In
Just an Echo
Bing proves he can stay on a horse, as a forest ranger who orders campers to douse their cigarettes. One miscreant is his
captain’s daughter, with whom he, once again, rides into the sunset. Bing disliked
Just an Echo
— he thought it poorly edited —
and it disappeared, apparently for good. When
College Humor
exceeded box-office expectations, the studio realized Bing was too important for two-reelers and abruptly canceled the four
remaining shorts.

Instead, he participated in another
Hollywood on Parade
promotional short, exchanging compliments with Mary Pickford, Para-mount’s first major star and the queen of Hollywood royalty.
She retired that year, at forty, but returned in 1935 to introduce Bing in the MGM Technicolor two-reeler
Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove,
a film terminally dated except for Bing’s complacent, almost alien intelligence and his measured rendering of “With Every
Breath I Take.” That same unassuming flair is evident in the Paramount reel, as he, every inch the film star, genially accepts
Pickford’s praise. Eight years earlier he had grudgingly roused himself from sleep to accompany Al Rinker to California. Now
he felt flush, confident of his success — and he wanted his parents at hand. Kate and Harry, in their early sixties, were
ready to enjoy easier times. After twenty years in the small brown house near Gonzaga, they left Spokane for a new life. For
a while they lived with Bing, who wrote his brother Ted about selling the house: “I don’t imagine the folks will ever return
there, except for a visit. This climate is less rigorous and accordingly better for them.”
³
Months later he bought them a place of their own in Toluca Lake, at nearby 4366 Ponca Avenue. Harry Crosby readily took to
Hollywood: “He’d sit down on a bus and introduce himself,” Bing marveled. “’Harry Crosby Sr., I’ve got a few clippings,’ and
he’d show my clippings.”
⁴
Mother Crosby discovered the ponies.

In June Bing reunited with bandleader Jimmy Grier, Gus Arnheim’s former arranger at the Grove, for three recording sessions,
followed by a fourth in August. Bing’s pleasure in working with Grier cannot in itself explain the magnetic extravagance of
his singing on those dates. Perhaps he was expressing his delight in his success or his happiness with Dixie or anticipation
of their first child or solid roots indicated by their new home or all of the above or something else entirely. But never
before had Bing performed with so much nervy adrenaline; his voice seemed to burst with vitality. Neither Brunswick nor Columbia,
the label that eventually acquired ownership of the records, ever thought to collect the Grier sessions for an album, yet
they are all of a
piece: exuberant readings of mostly second-rate songs, exemplifying the jazz creed, Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that
you do it.