Bing Crosby (103 page)

Barney Dean aside, Bob was the shadow figure who transformed the cinematic Bing, alleviating the intrusive blandness and whetting
Bing’s wit to a fine nub. As a foil, Bob deepened Bing’s ironic stance, his detachment, encouraging the sadistic touch present
in almost all movie comedy, from Sennett and Chaplin to Fields and the Marxes, though inhibited in Bing’s post-Sennett work.
Bing’s anxiety occasionally drove his characters to a stubborn solitude, a desire to escape to the ranch or the boat, to be
left alone, to wallow in a lack of ambition. Even when the plot did not demand it, the actor’s nerveless independence suggested
a willingness on the part of his characters to retreat from the world, a disposition his friends recognized in Bing. But love
always sneaked up and roped him back. The absurdity of the
Road
movies gave him a lot more rope.

Like the torpid
Paris Honeymoon, Road to Singapore
is superficially concerned with a rich man who abandons his rich fiancée for a peasant girl. This time, he is not self-made
but rather the heir to a shipping fortune who renounces responsibility, money, sex, and luxury in favor of a mock marital
relationship with a buddy on whom he wreaks havoc. Bing’s Josh sets out for Singapore but (as usual for the series)
never gets there. He does, however, get away. In the made-up province of Kaigoon, he is liberated, remade with an uncanny
compound of independence, intelligence, cruelty, warmth, and indifference — no longer the romantic crooner of the 1930s, but
more like the complicated man his associates recognized as Bing. As one Spokane classmate remarked to a reporter in the 1940s,
the
Road
pictures unleashed the Bing he knew as a kid.

Road to Singapore
begins a cycle in which Bing’s characters are obsessed with getting away for the sake of getting away. They rebel against
inclusion. In
Rhythm on the River, Holiday Inn,
and
Blue Skies,
he is hell-bent on escaping the city, celebrity, fortune, and accountability; specifically, he spurns his too easily won
— virtually unavoidable — success. When in
Holiday Inn
a Hollywood producer besieges him with offers other entertainers would die for, he gazes around at his isolated homestead
and complains: the idea that he could be left alone to hibernate with his talent was too good to be true. In
Road to Zanzibar
and
Road to Utopia,
he and Bob are on the lam, fleeing evildoers or the repercussions of their own schemes. The furthest Bing could go to duck
the mammon and romance eternally dropped in his unwilling lap was Father O’Malley’s cloister; in his last films the earth
itself can no longer hold him — he flies in and out of the frame at the close of
High Time
(1960) and lands on the moon in the road trip that was supposed to end in Hong Kong.

Many of Bing’s roles lacked history beyond the conventions of
Kraft Music Hall
and light comedy. As Josh Mallon, he has a pedigree: his first movie father and a heritage of seafarers not unlike that of
the Crosbys. Josh is agreeable, cocky, and attractive, but somehow not whole. He dismisses family tradition out of hand as
stodgy and pompous: “That’s not for me, Dad, I want to be one of the boys, a regular guy.” His father (Charles Coburn) is
reasonable and his fiancée (Judith Barrett) is pretty and pleasant, though he is so indifferent to her that one wonders how
the engagement came about. The obligations of the business are hardly onerous. Yet Josh prefers to rough it with Ace, broke.

Audiences in 1940 understood the gist, even if they could articulate it no better than Josh or Ace. With recovery imminent
and the war in Europe threatening to snare the United States, the Huck
Finn reverie of a retreat from civilization and its feminizing ways had renewed appeal. Men in particular responded to the
camaraderie of two resourceful and comical friends at a time when they were about to be plunged into the homosocial environment
of combat. As Huck learned, you can escape only when the wolf (in this case, his father) is no longer at the door. Josh finds
that feminization is everywhere he goes — and so is America.

The latter revelation was comforting. You could leave the United States without leaving it behind. Wherever Bing and Bob travel,
they bring American outlooks, American morals, and most of all, American show business, primarily vaudeville. Even in Kaigoon,
they hawk their wares with song and dance, like two old troupers on a smalltime circuit. From
Road to Zanzibar
on, the vaudeville connection is explicit — they play cheapjack performers of one sort or another, auguring the entrenchment
of American pop culture around the world. They adapt and burlesque local customs and rituals, ultimately changing them into
exotic reflections of home. The natives are their straight men, the villains their stooges, the women their props, the clothing
their costumes. Yet the mayhem is quelled by decency and light. They are anarchists with sweet souls.

A month before the Los Angeles preview of
Road to Singapore,
in February 1940,
Variety
published its annual analysis of film stars and their box-office clout during the preceding year. Bing still ranked as the
top male player at Paramount, while Bob straggled in at number ten.
Variety
expressed a guarded optimism about Bob’s future: his “questionable star quantity last year, progressed with
Cat and Canary
[a haunted-house comedy with Paulette Goddard], and properly tailored with material [he] can become a standard box office
figure for the company.”
⁷²
After
Singapore
Bob ascended to box-office heaven. In 1941 he was the first clown in five years, since Joe E. Brown, to make the Quigley
top-ten poll. For a couple of seasons, his numbers eclipsed Bing’s. Yet rarely did one of Bob’s solo efforts make as much
money as the
Road
films, while Bing’s solo vehicles often surpassed them.

The chemistry between Crosby and Hope was “like magic,” Mort Lachman said of
Singapore.
“It didn’t compare with
Morocco
or any of those later ones, but compared to the pictures it was playing against,
it was a miracle to see those two guys come to life on the screen. They were wild. It was
Wayne’s World
in 1940.”
⁷³
In the first scene, a ship bearing Josh and Ace docks in Hawaii and they watch from the bow as fellow sailors are berated
by their waiting wives.

Josh: You know, if the world was run right, only women would get married.

Ace: Hey, can they do that?

[Josh gives him a look.]

The lines are idiotic — the kind of thing you expect from Abbott and Costello. But something in their contrasting attitudes,
in the ingenuousness of Bob’s delivery and the wry forbearance of Bing’s look, lets the audience know instantly that it has
been introduced to a bona fide team — not just two actors but a rare and skillful duet, “cream and sugar,” in Dolores Hope’s
phrase. Their timing is as reflexive and infallible as that of two jazz musicians trading fours. Bob insisted that Bing was
the greatest straight man he ever saw, but as Lachman pointed out, “Hope was also the greatest straight man for Bing that
there ever was. Hope was such a good target, and the audience loved when Bing put him down.”
⁷⁴

As in the next scene: a couple of menacing bruisers demand to know which of them dallied with their relation, Cherry, and
Josh unhesitatingly points to Ace. When they order Ace to come with them, however, the unlikely heroes go into a practiced
patty-cake routine, an infantile diversion that stymies their adversaries, until the last pat turns into two fists, aimed
at their jaws. Here, in embryo, is the enigma of the friendship. They are at once true blue and murderously competitive. The
relationship was not terribly puzzling to contemporaries, who lived in a world saturated with Crosby and Hope insult gags.
They were ultimately as omnipresent as talk of DiMaggio’s streak or the war.

The gibes never did let up. They ricocheted back and forth from radio to movies to live appearances, eventually to television.
Hope counted on them. Bing’s cameos in his films often got the last and best laughs, as in the closing shot of
The Princess and the Pirate,
when Virginia Mayo walks past Bob’s open arms and into Bing’s. Earlier in the picture Bob tells her about a show he did on
the road to Morocco, ruined by “some overaged crooner with laryngitis [who]
kept cramping my act.” But by then the jokes were no longer confined to his films. In
Best Foot Forward
(1943), Lucille Ball remarks, “We’ve covered more road than Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.” Until Bing’s death, thirty-seven years
after
Road to Singapore,
neither performer could appear anywhere without making an obligatory crack about the other. The audience deciphered them
as proof of an exemplary friendship.

Bing’s comic disdain may have been influenced by his friend Oliver Hardy, who originated the quiet, long-suffering gaze. But
where Hardy’s impatience is a response to the fine mess he blames on Stan Laurel, Bing as often as not precipitates the mishaps
that jeopardize him and Bob. His passive hostility is consistent with his male relationships in two previous films; he talked
Stu Erwin into a suicide pact and betrayed his generosity in
The Big Broadcast
and tried to seduce his brother’s girl in
Sing You Sinners.
“I like most Bing Crosby films,” Martin Scorsese once remarked. “I was fascinated by his character. He’s charming, he sings
all the time — and meanwhile, he’s swindling everybody. In the
Road
pictures, he takes advantage of Bob Hope from beginning to end — and still winds up with the girl. He uses Hope so badly,
but with such integrity, such confidence. I used a variation of that in the
Mean Streets
relationship between Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.”
⁷⁵

As usual, autobiographical touches abound in
Road to Singapore.
In the homecoming scene in his father’s office, Bing references both sides of his own parentage. The writers drew on the
Crosby sea captains to flesh out Josh’s background. And when his fiancée, Gloria, walks in, Bing reflexively removes his gum
and hides it under the desk, as though she were his mother about to catch him with a cigarette or a drink. A newspaper headline
reporting on the brawl also suggests the Crosby touch (or that of writers who, like Carroll Carroll and Johnny Burke, drew
on his lingo):
AGAIN IN DURANCE VILE.
In the next episode Josh reels in a swordfish with overheated comical clumsiness, in stunning contrast to home movies in which
Bing catches far larger fish with the aplomb of a Hemingway hero — an instance of his lack of actorly vanity.

Schertzinger delivered on his promise to spruce up the major musical numbers. The first, set in the stateroom of Josh’s prospective
in
laws, serves as a template for the off-kilter union between him and Ace. Surprisingly, Hope is the picture’s first singer,
in a Burke and Schertzinger lampoon, “Captain Custard,” about a uniformed movie usher who fancies himself a military figure,
replete with references to Bank Night, double features, and free dishes. When Gloria’s smug and insulting brother, Gordon
— the sort of wealthy snob Josh does not want to become — sneers at Ace, Josh chivalrously announces that they are a team.
He puts a fezlike box on his head and leaps into the number with a phrase about “pitching for Paramount,” which virtually
erases the line between Josh and Bing and lets the audience know that it is in on a marvelous joke: this is a movie that
knows
it’s a movie.

This subtle assault on the fourth wall, which became less subtle in later
Road
films when a camel or a bear spoke directly to the audience, surprised people not because the device was untried but because
of the context in which it appeared. It built on a tradition of character breaking employed by the zaniest of comedians, from
Oliver Hardy looking straight at the audience in
Two Tars,
as if to say, “Look what I have to contend with,” to Groucho Marx in
Animal Crackers
cautioning the audience not to expect every joke to be good. Groucho revived the gambit in 1939, in
At the Circus,
but it was rarely used except in cartoons. In
Singapore
the actors never address the audience, but they make cracks to let us know that they know that we know that it is all artifice.
They are goofing on their celebrity and the social contract celebrity implied in that era. From the first, when he played
a crooner named Bing, Bing’s pictures often toyed with the audience’s involvement in his life. Now he conjured the illusion
of letting down his guard entirely, and the audience felt it was seeing a new and brighter Bing.

With Bing/Josh involved in “Captain Custard,” it becomes a full-fledged vaudeville number, firmly establishing Bing and Bob
as a couple. Indeed, Bob emerges for all practical purposes in a femme role; real women are employed tangentially in the piece
and discarded on Bing’s entry. Bob wraps himself in a dresslike cape, shakes his hips, and bestows upon Bing a military kiss.
In later films, the gender-bending was sometimes reversed. (In
Zanzibar
as they drink champagne in a nightclub, Bing squeaks in a little-girl voice, “Daddy, the bubbles make my nose tickle.” Bob
looks around and asks, “Was
that at this table?”) But either way, Bob was the schlemiel, a condition telegraphed by the names of his characters, which,
except for Ace, were never monosyllabic. Bing played Chuck, Jeff, and Duke; Bob played Hubert, Orville, and Chester, except
when he answered to nicknames like Turkey and Junior.

The “Captain Custard” number ends with the second patty-cake brawl in eighteen minutes. Clearly, they need to get away. Josh
and Ace sail for Singapore and get as far as Kaigoon, with $1.28 between them. They make a curious pact to swear off women
and go out to a saloon where the floor show is Mima and Caesar and his whip. (“I think he wants her to give up cigarettes,”
Bing says after he lashes one from her mouth.) Yet another brawl ends as they spirit Mima to their hut, where she takes over,
buying food, cleaning, and forcing Bing and Bob to sleep together under the same net. As they slumber, she sings “The Moon
and the Willow Tree.” Ace begins to get up, but Josh grabs him: “The night air’s bad for you, Junior, back in the net.” Instead
of driving them apart, Lamour’s Mima brings them closer. Bound by jealousy, each is afraid to let the other out of his sight.