Bing Crosby (101 page)

Lamour contributed to the ad-libbing legend, describing herself as stymied by their banter, struggling to “find the openings.”
²⁵
Hope recalled her pleading, “Why don’t you give me something to say?” and his retort, “Just twirl your sarong, you’ll be
all right.”
²⁶
Told that Bing’s secretary on
Road to Utopia
said they gave Dottie a hard time, he laughed: “No, we never gave her a hard time. We gave her a good time. She was in every
picture.”
²⁷
Lamour developed a sense of humor about it, though one can imagine the ratio of humor to anger at work when, after a scene
in which they splashed soapsuds on her, she followed them into the commissary and dumped an entire canister of suds on their
heads. The diners were amused, she wrote in her autobiography, “but the director wasn’t too thrilled. It meant that our hair,
along with all our clothes, had to be dried again.”
²⁸

Her anger prevailed when it came to Anthony Quinn, playing her unsavory dance partner, Caesar. “Bing got me out of some embarrassing
spots,” he conceded. “He always defended me.”
²⁹
The main incident concerned a routine with Dorothy that required him to snap a whip around her waist and reel her in for
a snug dance. The great character actor Akim Tamiroff, though not in the cast, was accomplished with a bullwhip and instructed
him. For safety’s sake, however, Quinn cracked the whip a foot away from her; then it was wrapped in place and he pulled her
close. When they played the scene, she shoved him away and shouted, “I can’t dance with him. The son of a bitch has a hard-on!”
³⁰
Everyone on the set froze. Quinn did not feel he could respond: “I was just a small player then. I didn’t dare.”
³¹
The tension dissolved into laughter after Bing piped up: “You should be happy you can give someone a hard-on, Dottie.”
³²

Lamour once insisted, “After the first
Road
film, I never studied dialogue. Never. I’d wait to get on the set to see what they were planning. I was the happiest and
highest-paid straight woman in the
business.”
³³
Yet she cannot have been pleased by her abrupt demotion — second-billed in
Road to Singapore,
third-billed in
Road to Zanzibar
and ever after. Her roles were increasingly designed to support the boys. Even in
Singapore
she does not arrive until twenty minutes into the story. By the fifth trek,
Road to Rio,
Bing and Bob were able to force Paramount into a three-way split, and she never forgave them for not cutting her in. But
by then her career had fallen apart. The
Road
movies were all she had, though she remained a mandatory ingredient. When Bing and Bob made the mistake of reducing her participation
in
The Road to Hong Kong
to a glorified cameo, audiences bristled, especially as she was replaced by the dreary Joan Collins. Lamour’s predicament
is implied in a publicity photograph taken during the shooting of
Road to Singapore.
All three are dressed in striped caftans, laughing. Dottie, in the center and holding a sitar, is doubled over with hilarity.
On each side, looking no less merry, Bing and Bob lock eyes over her head, as if she weren’t there.

What each of them had that she lacked was a team of kibitzing writers. In truth, little of the ad-libbing was genuinely ad-libbed.
For decades the scriptwriters privately seethed less at sabotage than at the notion that their work was improvised by actors.
In later years Bing and Bob explained their peculiar ideas of ad-libbing. “You see, I just started my radio show,” Bob said,
“and I had the greatest staff of writers, all young people like [Norman] Panama and [Melvin] Frank, who had just gotten out
of college in Chicago; [Melville] Shavelson and [Milt] Josefsberg, two more young guys, brilliant. I had about six or seven,
and I used to give them the
Road
scripts, and they’d make notes on the margins, so and so and so and so, and I’d go into Bing’s dressing room in the morning
and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ and he would say, ‘Oh, that’s funny, that’s funny.’And so we’d ad-lib these things into
the pictures and people would fall down laughing.”
³⁴

The biggest laughs came when Hope neglected to visit Bing’s dressing room, which was the case most of the time. The onscreen
battle between Bing’s Josh Mallon and Bob’s Ace Lannigan (changed from Winthrop) over Lamour’s Mima was a Lindy hop compared
to the offscreen competition for last laughs, which included Road-like double crosses. For example, Bob would have a writer
provide Bing with a comic line on the QT, which Bing would happily deliver, expecting to stump Bob, not knowing that the writer
had already
given Hope a better rejoinder. Dolores Hope recalled, “There was a natural rivalry, which was a very healthy one, and what
you see in the
Road
pictures is Bob and Bing as they really were. Typical of their personalities and everything about them — Bob low man on the
totem pole most of the time. I think the
Road
pictures capture a great deal of their personalities.”
³⁵

Josh and Ace were a canny amalgam of Bing and Bob, as their friends knew them, and the manipulating partner and naive stooge
invented by Butler and Hartman. The two men raced on and off the set to the writers — never those who received screen credit
— for punch-ups and reassurances, attempting to outdo each other, much like the characters they played. To each of them, a
writer would counsel, When Bob says this, you say that, or, When Bing does that, you do this. The rivalry invigorated them.
“I heard they didn’t pal around so much outside their work, and yet they seemed like the greatest friends on the set,” Quinn
recalled. “I must say Bob Hope was very challenging to him, because Bing was very fast on his feet and Bob had to keep him
off balance constantly with his ad-libs. But Bing’s great asset was the facility of his mind, really quite remarkable.”
³⁶
Shavelson noted, “Bob obviously wanted to be as sharp as he could, so he and Bing and the writers would go off the set and
then come back and start off with a line that nobody knew where in the world it came from, and build from there.”
³⁷

“We thought it would lend spirit, you know, to the piece if we wouldn’t tell one another exactly what we were going to say,”
Bing said in 1976. “You had to stick to the script in a general way, just keep the story line intact, but I would always prepare
a few snappers, and of course he would have a sheath of snappers ready for me, and [Lamour] would be standing there in the
middle, trying to get in something, crawl in somewhere. I think it helped the pictures and gave them an ad-libbed flavor…
like a couple of hall-room boys clowning around. The writers didn’t like this too much. They were good-natured about it, I
guess, but once in a while they put in an objection that we were tinkering with the story too much.”
³⁸
In another 1976 conversation, he said most of the carrying-on took place during the first two films. Told by a fan that “each
movie, as a whole, seemed like an ad-lib,” Bing responded: “That was the brilliance of the entire enterprise. By the second
or definitely the third
Road,
our
styles had become so finely — I don’t want to say chiseled, but it does seem to apply — that the extremely superlative writers
were able to create dialogue that appeared to be improvised off the cuff, but it wasn’t. Most of that material was completely
scripted…. Of course, every now and then, we’d tear off a leaf of our own.”
³⁹

Bing protested too much. According to Paramount files,
Road to Morocco
was filled with bad ad-libbing, which Buddy DeSylva, who had become chief of production, ordered cut. Generally, the films
are so seamless, it is difficult to believe that any genuine ad-libs survive beyond under-the-breath comments, like one in
Road to Zanzibar,
when Bing, counting a parcel of bonds, drops a reference to treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau. For one of his most memorable
authentic ad-libs, in
Morocco,
he played straight man to a camel that spat across the set directly into Bob’s eye. Bob staggered into camera view, but before
he could howl or David Butler could stop action, Bing merrily patted the camel’s flank and said, “Good girl, good girl.” Butler
kept the whole incident in the film.

A comparison of
Road to Morocco
scripts, the margins offering alternative lines and jokes, reveals the kinds of written “ad-libs” that survived. Epigrammatic
they are not. Several punch-ups are accomplished with a few added words. Bob’s character was intended to say, “You mean you’re
thinkin’ of eatin’ me?”; instead, he says, “You mean you’d eat me? Without vegetables?”
⁴⁰
Bing’s character says of Bob’s departed aunt Lucy, “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” to which Bob was supposed to say, “Not
Aunt Lucy”; instead he says, “Not Aunt Lucy. She was a Republican.” Sometimes each gets a zinger to replace dull dialogue,
as when they are lost in the desert: “Any idea where we are?” “Unh-huh” was changed to (Bob:) “This must be the place where
they empty all the old hourglasses”; (Bing) “I think this is what’s left after I clean my spinach.” One can imagine a writer
secretly, as if touting a hot tip at the track, passing to Bing an improvement on (to Bob) “Why, you slimy, double-crossin’
eel” and (to Lamour) “We’ve been together since we were kids.” Instead, Bing calls Hope a “dirty, underhanded, sickle-snoot”
and tells Lamour, “We were kids together, in the same class for years — till I got promoted.”

At other times Bing simply translates phrases into Bingese, as he often did (“Who’s that cute little nipper?” becomes “Who
is that
headstrong, impetuous boy?”). Butler admired Bing’s feeling for language, describing him as a “conversational” actor.
⁴¹
He told a reporter that Bing never read a script verbatim, that he added, deleted, and changed words to find a better fit.
Butler gave him free rein, arguing, “You get some damn good stuff that way. You can always cut afterwards.”
⁴²
Reviewing
Road to Zanzibar
in
The New Republic,
Otis Ferguson enlarged on that aspect of his ability. Noting Bing’s facile lingo, he wrote, “I believe him to be the first
artist in popular expression today — not just slang for its own newness or to be different, but the kind of speech that is
a kind of folk poetry, with its words of concision, edge, and cocky elegance fitted to speech rhythms, so that they may run
free to the point, musical and easy.”
⁴³

Mort Lachman, a longtime Hope writer, began contributing to the series with the fourth outing,
Road to Utopia,
and traced the illusory ad-libbing to the way Bob and Bing interacted on radio. “Let me explain how it was done,” he said:

We did the same thing in movies as in radio. We would do a basic script and we would play it to the audience, on Monday night,
a half-hour rehearsal. Then we would meet afterwards, and rewrite all night, and then on Tuesday, we would do it again, live,
on the air. Bob liked a little extra, so we would give him a few asides, a few changes, a few things that belonged to him
that Bing did not see. Bing would come with his writers — Bill Morrow, for one — who gave him things. Now on the movie set
the same thing would happen. They would go through rehearsal and Hope would say, “You know I could use something here, I could
use something there,” and we’d all write some jokes to go there. Then he’d pick the ones he wanted…. You have to understand
they were playing to the guys on the set. What stayed in and didn’t stay in depended on what got a laugh from the crew. The
cameramen broke up, the lighting men broke up, the carpenters broke up, set people broke up, sound people broke up. So the
attitudes in the
Road
pictures were different than in most movies. And that led to the breaking of the fourth wall, because they started working
directly to the audience.
⁴⁴

The writer — if one could call him that, since he never actually wrote anything — most often found in the crossfire of the
Crosby-Hope food fight for nearly fifteen years was Barney Dean, the most fabled
member of Bing’s extended family, beloved by all, as perhaps only a jester can be. He was the least likely figure in the inner
circle: a short, round, shiny-headed, Jewish gnome with bright blue eyes. “A pixie in human form,”
⁴⁵
wrote Bing, comparing him to the seven dwarfs — “not Grumpy,” he stipulated, though his facial expression was so intense
that he was sometimes called Cement Head. Reporters did not know what to make of him, because out of fierce loyalty to his
benefactors, he had one answer to any question about Bing or Bob. He would put his right forefinger to his forehead, ponder
deeply, and say, as if imparting privileged information, “Gee, I can’t remember now.”
⁴⁶

Barney Fradkin was born in Russia, in 1904, and came through Ellis Island to Brooklyn, at twelve. In 1920, after learning
a time step, he got a job in vaudeville with Eddie Leonard’s minstrels; “I was the guy that got the sand from the shuffle
dance because I had the least talent,” he told Barry Ulanov.
⁴⁷
He told Shavelson he was the “world’s youngest whirlwind dancer,” whatever that meant.
⁴⁸
Bing remembered he shuffled poorly and could not tap at all. Yet he toured in vaudeville for a decade before teaming up with
dancer Sid Tar-radasch. Barney convinced his partner that Fradkin and Tarradasch would never fit on a marquee, so — eyeing
silent film actress Priscilla Dean’s name on a billboard — they renamed themselves the Dean Brothers. They fared no better.
Barney went into a short-lived comedy act and found stand-in work in Hollywood. By early winter 1939 he was peddling Christmas
cards. Paramount allowed him to push his wares on the lot. When he went over to the stage where
Road to Singapore
was filming, Bing and Bob were delighted to see him.