Bing Crosby (74 page)

He decided to maximize his summer schedule by shooting the independent film he had wrangled from Paramount. Although the studio
had fired Manny Cohen, he continued to hold contracts with Bing (and Mae West and Gary Cooper). If Paramount expected distribution
rights, it was badly mistaken. Cohen formed Major Pictures Corporation with Bing, Everett, and John O’Melveny and sought bids
for distribution of its first project, which as yet had neither story nor score, only Bing. Columbia’s Harry Cohn won, and
an agreement was drawn up. They would film a musical in which Columbia, Bing Crosby, Inc., and Cohen each owned a third. Paramount
claimed not
to care, shrugging off the deal as no different than a loan-out, which was true to a degree, except that loaning Bing was
tantamount to making a cash donation to a rival studio, and an independent production relieved the recipient of any obligation
to return the favor.

They decided to move ahead with a story called
The Peacock’s Feather,
by Katherine Leslie Moore, as elaborated by screenwriter Jo Swerling
(The Whole Town’s Talking, It’s a Wonderful Life)
and retitled
Pennies from Heaven.
Within weeks of wrapping
Rhythm on the Range,
Bing was on a soundstage again, this time as an ex-con who dreams of singing and playing lute on a gondola in Venice.
Pennies from Heaven
was neither the best nor the most successful picture Bing made, but it was surely the most emblematic of those that preceded
the
Road
series and
Going My Way,
presenting him literally in the role with which many people already associated him, that of an American troubadour. The film’s
immense impact on his career was manifest in its recruitment of Johnny Burke and John Scott Trotter, who became, respectively,
his principal songwriter and musical director.

And, as it was Bing’s project, he had the clout to repay an old debt. He wanted Louis Armstrong in the film. Cohen balked,
seeing no reason to entail the expense of flying him in and having no desire to negotiate with Armstrong’s crude, mob-linked
but devoted manager, Joe Glaser. Bing refused to discuss the matter. The Reverend Satchel-mouth was about to make his Hollywood
debut. What’s more, though his part was small (one musical number, two comic exchanges), Louis would be top-billed as part
of a quartet of stars.
⁵²
No black performer had ever been billed as a lead in a white picture. The combination of Louis’s delightful performance and
billing that presumed his magnitude as an artist greatly enhanced his career. Louis had previously appeared in two shorts
and a (long-lost) independent feature; after
Pennies from Heaven
he became a Hollywood regular, instantly signed by Paramount for Martha Raye and Mae West vehicles and subsequently asked
to provide cameos in pictures made for Warners, MGM, Columbia, Goldwyn, and others.

Sadly, Bing and Louis do not get to perform a vocal duet, though it would have been easy to schedule one in the nightclub
scene that features Armstrong’s band. Evidently, this was a bow to the color line, which was harder to breach in movies than
on radio or records. The
two do share a vaudeville sketch, however, in which Louis shows off his distinct yet never fully exercised acting skills for
the first time. Their camaraderie is unmistakable. Bing, as usual, is the straight man and Louis the clown — a chicken-stealing,
mathematically challenged yard worker who is also, conveniently, a genius entertainer.
Variety
found Armstrong the picture’s strongest asset, not only “as an eccentric musician but as a Negro comedian.”
⁵³
Armstrong himself enthusiastically recounted his role thirty years later:

Those scenes I had with Bing in that picture were Classics. Especially the scene where he wanted to open this Big Time Haunted
House Night Club. But he didn’t have enough loot to open this joint. And he liked our little seven piece band. So… He said
Henry (that was my name in the film), I would like to hire your band and I will give you and your boys ‘TEN’ percent of the
business, so you go and talk it over with your Musicians. Come back tomorrow and let me know as to what conclusion your boys
came to. The next day I was right on time. And — Mr Poole (Bing’s name) met me halfway in the back yard, saying Henry, have
your boys decided yet? And I said, Mr Poole, I talked it over with my boys and told them you are willing to give them ten
percent of the business. And my boys said that they cannot figure out ten percent as we’re only seven men. So if you will
be so kind as to give us seven percent, We’ll — Just then Mr Poole said, OK Henry, it’s a deal. And I smiled as I walked away
saying Mr Poole,
thank
you
very
much. — I told those guys that you would do the right thing. — ‘GASSUH’ personified.

Oh, I could run my mouth about my Man Crosby — those Broadcasts moments, and Stuff — why you’d be reading for years. But I
must say this. Here’s paying tribute to one of the finest Guys in this musical and wonderful world. With a heart as big. (As
the world) Carry on Papa Bing, 01 Boy!! You will
still
be giving young singers food for thoughts (Musically) for Generations to come.
⁵⁴

Bing’s other costars were less enchanting: Madge Evans, an attractive but wooden former child star who left Hollywood two
years later, and Edith Fellows, a talented scampy thirteen-year-old who soon suffered her own problems making the transition
to grown-up roles. As Patsy, the beleaguered orphan whom Bing befriends, Fellows was the first of several screen children
he aided over the years. In his movie roles Bing more often rescued lost children than bore his own. He seemed genuinely fond
of Fellows. Nanette Fabray, a child performer
herself and Fellows’s roomate, recalled Bing’s visiting her when she was in bed with the flu and later arranging a fancy dinner
for both girls.

The cursory plot has Bing feuding with Madge Evans for eight reels and marrying her in the ninth. Yet the picture opens with
a startling scene: Bing behind bars on a smuggling charge, absurdly awaiting his impending release in the same cell block
as a killer on his way to the electric chair. In a strangely upbeat mood, the killer asks Bing to deliver a letter to the
family of his victim (Patsy and her grandfather, played by Donald Meek), leaving them an old abandoned house in New Jersey.

Pennies from Heaven,
despite its fantastical script, is one of the few Depression musicals to acknowledge the Depression, albeit without actually
using the D-word. In the pre-Code years Busby Berkeley invoked hard times and suicidal bitterness in his Warners musicals,
but by 1935 Fred and Ginger and Eleanor Powell and even Berkeley himself were setting their work in the rarefied chambers
of penthouse ballrooms and battleships.
Pennies from Heaven,
probably the only Hollywood musical set in a part of New Jersey other than Atlantic City, presents a vision of contented
socialism in which everyone is pleasant except people with jobs: the latter are carnival tricksters, social workers, municipal
officials, and landlords. The only direct political shot is taken at the Townsend Plan, a shady pyramid-pension scheme conceived
by a retired doctor in California, subscribed to by millions in the period before Social Security. Larry Poole’s view of privation
is the familiar refrain of live and let live, formulated as only a Crosby character can: “I’m the last of the troubadours,”
he says, “the friend of man. I envy nobody and I’m sure nobody envies me.”

Bing is most effective in early scenes. He kept his weight down this time, and he looks seasoned and even slightly angular.
While singing for coins, he encounters Patsy at a fair and performs “So Do I” in an effectively sentimental episode, the song
reinforced by plush strings and woodwinds, his audience a montage of working-class neighbors, the treacle cut by close-ups
of Bing. His line readings are sharp, and his composure and canny physical movements contribute to the impression that he
has the makings of a deeper actor than previously suspected. The
KMH
spirit is asserted in an improvised group-sing (“Old MacDonald”) and in his dialogue with Armstrong and others. He mines
laughs from lines that do not necessarily contain them.

The film is pushed amiably forward by director Norman Z. McLeod, an underrated comedy specialist, who presided when the Marx
Brothers, W. C. Fields, Danny Kaye, and Bob Hope did some of their finest movie work; he later directed Bing and Bob in
Road to Rio.
But
Pennies from Heaven
derives its staying power largely from a remarkable score. Composer Arthur Johnston had, with Sam Coslow, written one of
Bing’s breakthrough songs, “Just One More Chance,” along with the scores for
College Humor
and
Too Much Harmony.
He now surpassed himself in the company of a lyricist ten years his junior, Johnny Burke, who, like Carmichael and Mercer,
achieved his place in Hollywood through Bing.

“One of the best things that’s happened to me is a one hundred and forty-five pound Irish leprechaun named Johnny Burke,”
Bing wrote.
⁵⁵
Born in northern California in 1908 and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Burke was a small, round-faced, hammy wag
who endeared himself to Bing instantly. He had been knocking around music publishing houses for years, writing songs, mostly
novelties, with Harold Spina. “Annie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” was their one substantial hit, thanks to Fred Waring and Guy
Lombardo, though Fats Waller and the Dorseys had fun with their “My Very Good Friend, the Milkman.” Burke did anonymous work-for-hire
at Fox but never managed to get a song into the movies, so Bing was taking a chance on him for his first independent production.
He was to become one of Bing’s closest friends, until his drinking put a wedge in their relationship. For seventeen years
Burke, whom Bing called the Poet, was his personal songwriter, the man behind a string of evergreens introduced by Bing through
movies or records or both, among them “This Is My Night to Dream,” “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” “Moonlight Becomes You,”
“An Apple for the Teacher,” “What’s New?,” “Swinging on a Star,” “Sunday, Monday or Always,” “But Beautiful,” “Like Someone
in Love,” and “It Could Happen to You.” In all, he wrote twenty-three film scores for Bing, more than 120 expressly tailored
songs.

Johnny got off to a rousing start with
Pennies from Heaven,
especially the title song, for which he wrote a singular, much imitated and parodied verse:

A
long time ago, a million years B.C.

The best things in life were absolutely free.

But no one appreciated a sky that was always blue;

And no one congratulated a sun that was always new.

So it was planned that they would vanish now and then

And you must pay before you get them back again;

That’s what storms were made for

And you shouldn’t be afraid for…

And into the famous chorus, a winning variation on the Depression tenet that life is as often as not a bowl of cherries. The
song was so cogent, Bing and McLeod elected to shoot it live, with the orchestra on the soundstage, forgoing the economy-minded
practice of prerecording. The even-keel swing of Johnston’s
abac
melody, with its recurring rhythmic motif of four quarter notes (“Ev-ry-time-it rains it rains pen-nies-from-heav en”) and
an expansive double-triplet measure toward the close, make it memorably accessible and helped ensure its acceptance.

The whole score was popular and widely covered: Count Basie swung “Pennies from Heaven,” and Billie Holiday and Artie Shaw
each recorded three selections. Of the score’s five songs, four yielded Decca hits for Bing (“Pennies from Heaven,” “Let’s
Call a Heart a Heart,” “So Do I,” and the charged “One, Two, Button Your Shoe,” with a counting game setting off the stanzas)
and one for Armstrong, the exhilarating “Skeleton in the Closet.” That tune — performed by a masked studio group with drummer
Lionel Hampton in the film but recorded with Jimmy Dorsey’s band — was singled out by many critics as the film’s pinnacle.

Bing’s “Pennies from Heaven” dominated sales of records and sheet music for more than three months. His record established
a “new high in gross sales all over the country,” according to
Down Beat,
which credited Bing’s continuing popularity to his ability to “sing a sweet ballad with the same finesse he displays in warbling
a ‘get-off’ tune.”
⁵⁶
Kapp was so certain of the record’s success that before releasing it, he recorded a second version, with Bing, Louis, and
Frances Langford. The song was nominated for an Academy Award (it lost, reasonably enough, to the Jerome Kern and Dorothy
Fields ballad “The Way You Look Tonight”). In England it was said to be the most recorded movie melody since the start of
talking pictures.

* * *

Writing songs is one thing, orchestrating them another. Because
Pennies from Heaven
was independent, the production did not have access to the Paramount music department. Columbia was not known for musicals,
and Arthur Johnston was not sufficiently trained to arrange his melodies for a score. Burke suggested to Bing that he farm
out the assignment to his friend, John Scott Trotter.
⁵⁷
Knowing of Trotter’s long association with the Hal Kemp band and admiring his arrangements for the band’s singer, Skinnay
Ennis (“Got a Date with an Angel”), Bing readily agreed. Trotter had been with Kemp from the beginning, when they organized
a student band at the University of North Carolina that declined to play stock arrangements and, as a result, developed an
original style. Kemp led a sweet band that occasionally played hot jazz; Bunny Berigan was the main soloist, and Trotter the
pianist and chief arranger. He had met Bing once in 1930, on a night when Kemp was rehearsing late, long after the ballrooms
had closed. Bing and Hoagy Carmichael walked in, the latter so excited about a new song he had written that, with Bing cheering
him on, he took a running dive and slid the length of the dance floor on his belly, holding aloft the new manuscript: “Star
Dust.”