Bing Crosby (87 page)

Bing later said of O’Connor, “He could sing, dance, do comedy, do anything, thoroughly accomplished, thoroughly grounded in
every aspect of show business because of his many years in vaudeville.”
⁷⁶

Sing You Sinners
was Bing’s sixteenth picture as a film star and broke the pattern of all he had previously done. Johnny Burke and Jimmy Monaco
wrote three songs (a fourth was not used), of which “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” was hugely popular; the interpolated
“Small Fry,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, as performed by the Beebe brothers in rustic drag, was also considered
a highlight of the film. Yet strictly speaking, the picture is not really a musical, as Bing sings only one solo and all the
songs emerge from the plot. For the first and only time (except when he played a priest or, late in life, character roles),
Bing does not get the girl and for the first time since
The Big Broadcast,
he plays a lout, complete with a drunk scene in which he reaches his nadir by making a pass at his brother’s fiancée. “Sometimes
I turn into such a heel, I surprise myself,” he broods as Fred MacMurray undresses him and puts him to bed. Bing tells him,
“You’re the kind of fella I wanna be.”

For the part of Martha, MacMurray’s sweetheart, Artie Jacobson recommended an inexperienced seventy-five-dollar-a-week starlet
named Terry Ray. Ruggles liked her but warned that she would have to be approved by Bing, per his contract. Jacobson brought
her to Stage One, where Bing was prerecording, and, as she waited outside, told him about her. Bing said if he and Ruggles
selected her, that was good enough for him. “He didn’t want to see her,” Jacobson said.
⁷⁷
Artie had known Bing for years, mostly from luncheon encounters in the commissary. “I fell in love with the guy,” he said,
although they had never worked together. “I can go on all afternoon and tell you about the virtues of Bing Crosby. He was
a wonderful guy, but he had to like you. He wasn’t the easiest guy in the world to get to know.”
⁷⁸
Jacobson told him, “Since you’re being so nice about it, you deserve the pleasure of seeing what will happen in her eyes
when you tell her that she’s got the job.” He brought her into the stage and said, “Bing, will you tell this little lady something?
Just say these words, ‘You have the job.” Bing deadpanned, “You have the job.”
⁷⁹
She fainted.

After walk-ons or bits in a dozen pictures (including
Rhythm on the Range),
Terry Ray suddenly found herself a leading lady, as Ellen Drew. The studio changed her name a couple of times before settling.
Bing joked that he was so confused by the name changes, he called her Ellen Terry, after the legendary dame of the nineteenth-century
English stage. In a press release issued under his name, he expresses pleasure at not having to labor for her hand: “The only
break I get in the picture is that I don’t get the girl — Fred gets her. And believe me that’s a relief. I’ve made enough
love scenes in the past five or six years. And I haven’t got a one in
Sing You Sinners.
Whoopee! What a break!”
⁸⁰

Artie Jacobson received a break as well. The roving head of the talent department was fired for auditioning female talent
in hotel rooms. When a Paramount executive learned from Ruggles how O’Connor and Drew came to be in
Sing You Sinners,
he gave Jacobson the job.

The shoot was fun for Bing, not least because his costars included some two dozen of his horses; track scenes were filmed
on location at the Pomona Fairgrounds and Santa Anita. On May 2 production on the soundstage was halted as a cake was wheeled
out to salute Crosby’s thirty-fourth birthday. Ironically, the character he played, Joe Beebe, is identified as being Bing’s
real age, thirty-five. As was the case with many of his previous pictures,
Sing You Sinners
overflows with biographical allusions, the kindest of which poke fun at Bing’s persona, the rest taking him to task with
a severity befitting a singing sinner. In the first two shots, Ruggles and Karl Struss establish a neighborhood not unlike
the one Bing knew as “the holy land.” As the willful Mother Beebe and her sons march to church and sing “Shall We Gather at
the River,” Joe (Bing) irreverently chews gum. At dinner Mother makes it clear that Joe is her pet; since macaroni will make
him fat, she cooks his favorite dish, pot roast, which his brothers detest.

Dave is engaged to Martha but uses Joe’s laziness and the family’s insolvency as an excuse to postpone marriage. He resents
having to sing in a trio for ten dollars a night, echoing the view of the combative young men who heckled Bing long ago at
Lareida’s Dance Pavilion. “I’m a man, doggone it,” MacMurray’s Dave says, “and I want to stay one.” Mike (O’Connor) similarly
complains that he’s being turned into a Buster Brown. Bing, more than ever, embodies a version of Harry Crosby, the optimistic
dreamer who never quite measures up. Mother Beebe (Elizabeth Patterson) observes, “His father was the same way. He just drifted
along without a worry in the world until you
boys started coming along.” Bing takes Martha to a roadside dance hall where the bandleader, Harry Barris, persuades him to
get up and sing. Barris is as kinetic as ever. Bing is so cool that you can’t believe no one has advised him to go to Hollywood
and become a star. He works the room, singing “Don’t Let That Moon Get Away,” dancing with customers, playing drums with cutlery
on the bar, executing a nifty before resuming his seat.

The personal references keep on coming. Chagrined after making a fool of himself over Martha, he tells his mother, “I don’t
fit in this town, so I’m going somewhere I can do the family some good” — Los Angeles with a hard
g.
Relocated, he bets two bucks on a horse named Toluca. In a beautifully executed routine with actor Tom Dugan as a tout, Bing
captures the madness of gambling and winning as he trades one ticket for another, finally winning a substantial sum. He sends
for the family and meets the train wearing plaids and stripes that outstrip even Bing Crosby’s hallucinogenic taste. The family
is appalled to learn that he has invested all his money in a horse, Uncle Gus (played by Ligaroti and others). “Whatever you
do, don’t worry,” he tells his mother, who is obliged to pay the cab fare. “Yes,” she says, “I’m afraid we all know each other
too well.”

The study of a wastrel soon deteriorates into the familiar racetrack picture, but with a strange moral: long shots pay off
better than dull jobs. The old-time revivalism of the title is nowhere echoed in the movie, but the combination of feckless
optimism and family ties, bound within a veneer of realism, won over press and public. The New York
Daily News
implored Claude Binyon to devise a sequel, because the Beebes “are the sort of family, like the Joneses and the Hardys, that
could continue indefinitely on the screen under Wesley Ruggles’s astute direction.”
⁸¹
Time
conceded the picture was “tolerable comedy, jigging playfully from farce to melodrama like a kite with no tail,” while lamenting
that it was “no preachment for the typically American virtues.”
⁸²

Bing received splendid reviews — not just for his portrayal but for the character of Joe Beebe.
Life
ran a pictorial on the fight scene, noting, “Crooner Bing Crosby abandons the romantic roles for which his stocky figure
makes him unsuited and takes a comfortable, happy-go-lucky part that fits him like a glove…. His Joe Beebe is a model of simple,
unpretentious acting.”
⁸³
Calling the picture “the funniest
comedy on Broadway, including all the side streets,”
New York Times
critic Bosley Crowther was inspired to offer a groaningly awkward KMH-style Crosby joke: “The only noteworthy difference
between reality and
Sing You Sinners,
at the Paramount, is that in the movies Crosby’s horse wins — an unprecedented thing which may be explained by the fact that
Bing must have undoubtedly had a hand in the script.”
⁸⁴
To which Jimmy Durante might have exasperated, “Everybody wants to get into da act!”

But then, everyone
was
in the act. The
Times
reviewer’s inclination to refer to Bing as he might to Stan or Ollie (as opposed to Mr. Cagney, Mr. Astaire, Miss Davis,
et al.) implied an uncommon assumption of intimacy with the private identity of a movie star. “But you’ve got to know the
character of Bing to appreciate the family comedy of
Sing You Sinners,”
Crowther adumbrated with a surplus of pronouns: “Bing is the type that’s lovable, but that lies around reading in hammocks,
or goes out and drinks too much, and come homes pie-eyed, and that propagates a new scheme for getting rich quick every weekend
or so.”
⁸⁵
The New Republic’s
Otis Ferguson agreed: “The main thing was the character of Bing Crosby, who can sing and also be a swell feller.”
⁸⁶
Life
could not distinguish between Bing on- and offscreen, even when it purported to be trying:

To see Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby on the Paramount lot is to set him down as the most modest and easygoing of Hollywood stars.
This appearance is deceptive. For though Bing is modest, he is also one of the most enterprising actors in the film city.
When his acting chores are over, he loves to hop in his bright red Cadillac, skip down 118 miles to his 120-acre ranch where
he breeds and trains a stable of racehorses…. Between times he broadcasts weekly over the radio, turns out popular Decca records,
plays the drums for pleasure, acts as adviser to a third brother’s orchestra and raises his family of four boys including
Twins Philip [sic] and Denis [sic].
⁸⁷

In short, when critics said that Bing plumbed new depths as an actor, they meant he was playing himself more credibly than
ever before. His screen persona was not as ingenuous as Cooper’s, or as manly as Gable’s, or spirited as Cagney’s, or funny
as Grant’s, but it had a matchless, overriding aplomb, a self-reliance that bordered on impertinence. It had always been there
when he sang. Now it was
evident when he acted. Bing retained the righteous assurance of silent-era movie clowns, vulnerable and impervious. Like Chaplin,
he seemed most alone in a crowd. Small wonder Leo McCarey recognized in him the ideal movie priest. “There was a feeling from
people that there was something much deeper about Bing,” Anthony Quinn remembered.
⁸⁸
And Donald O’Connor mused, “I think you have a tendency to dismiss someone acting so very natural. With the Stanislavsky
kind of school, you try to act natural but you’re acting. Bing was one of the finest natural actors who ever lived. To do
that is a hell of an acting job. He studied that. The other person who was very close to that was Spencer Tracy, but Spencer
was more dramatic than Bing. Bing was softer. Much softer. Came at you through the back door.”
⁸⁹

Bing’s revocation of Horatio Alger’s school of gumption in
Sing You Sinners
represented a new turn in his persona. The ethical switch —from Hard Work, Pluck, and Ambition Conquer Adversity to Daydreamer
Picks Winning Horse and Saves Family — was a fantasy designed to salve more than Depression worries. Economic burdens were
now rivaled by international chaos. In the weeks surrounding the August 1938
Sing You Sinners
premiere at Del Mar, Germany and Japan conscripted millions of reserves; Italy expelled its Jews; President Roosevelt pledged
that the United States would not support Europe against the Reich; Prime Minister Chamberlain threatened war over Hitler’s
attack on Czechoslovakia, only to recant weeks later at Munich. Those stories vied with tales of native anxiety: on September
10, 55,000 hungry people trampled a Republican Party banquet in Pittsburgh; on October 30 Orson Welles staged a radio adaptation
of
The War of the Worlds,
and hundreds of people abandoned their homes to escape martians. A year later, as Hitler invaded Poland, Dorothy would refuse
to surrender on the Yellow Brick Road.

So eager were people to dream a dream of good luck and better times, they seemed “inured to hardship,” as Barbara Bauer observed
of the reception to
Sing You Sinners
and its “dispiriting soup kitchen and bread line atmosphere.” Money or the lack of it, she wrote, was at the center of every
scene: “Life has music for the Beebes only because the three brothers must sing for their supper. And there’s something irredeemably
pathetic about seeing a ‘small fry’ so heavily
burdened by his family’s problems.”
⁹⁰
Yet public and press roared at the pratfalls of the Beebes, trusting in Bing, whose existence was proof enough that hard
times would pass. For a souvenir, one could bring home his ebullient recording of “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” number
one in sales for a month and second only to Ella Fitzgerald’s more clamorous fantasy “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (also on Decca),
as the year’s best-selling record.

More remarkably, Bing was acknowledged as the second-highest-paid actor at any of the Hollywood studios.
⁹¹
Paramount’s Claudette Colbert ranked first, at $426,944, followed by Bing, at $410,000, and freelancer Irene Dunne, at $405,222.
They were the only three to top $400,000, though none ranked among the top ten 1938 box-office draws, according to the 1938
Quigley poll. Their incomes implied keen business sense and an autonomy that, in Bing’s case, was fortified by his predominance
in all media. His stature differed from the others in another way. While Paramount took great care to find suitable properties
for Colbert, a Crosby property was presold by virtue of his presence alone. He was unlikely to find himself in a film he himself
would have regarded as a potential classic. He was equally unlikely to find himself in a flop.