Bing Crosby (34 page)

The band pulled into Los Angeles at 3:00
P.M
. on June 6 for a covert huddle with Universal officials, then continued to San Francisco to
play a week of vaudeville at the Pantages Theater. The official arrival in Los Angeles, preceding yet another week of vaudeville,
was accompanied by the usual ballyhoo at Central Station: speech by the mayor, key to the city, all the contract players Universal
could muster as a welcoming committee, plus a crowd of 500 fans. This was White-man’s first visit to California in three years
— he had been away since the time he recruited Bing and Al. Carl Laemmle brought the musicians to the lot to show off a clubhouse
he had built for them, called Whiteman Lodge, complete with rehearsal room, fireplace, billiard tables, library, lockers,
and showers. Transportation problems were solved when a Ford dealer offered each of Whiteman’s men a Model A roadster, almost
at cost, the payments to be deducted from their salaries over the course of their stay. Whiteman ordered thirty-five. Bing
chose a convertible. As a promotional gimmick, each roadster sported a prominent spare tire with the potato-head caricature,
which became a carrot for highway patrolmen who learned that if they followed one long enough, they would get to issue a summons
or two.

During an impromptu interview, Whiteman made the ominous remark “I haven’t seen the script yet, but I can tell you one thing.
Jazz is losing out to the slower rhythms. You might print that and quote me!”
¹³
If his statement was intended as grievance, he himself was partly to blame, having decided to hire a team of conventional
writers like Mabel Wayne (who wrote Whiteman’s hit “In a Little Spanish Town”) and L. Wolfe Gilbert (who wrote the Jolson
classic “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee”), when he might have had his pick of the sophisticated songwriting talents lighting
up Broadway. He also chose to leave Challis at home in favor of Grofe and Still. Whiteman’s concert violinist, Kurt Dieterle,
thought he made that decision because Challis was too painstaking and slow for the Hollywood mill. Challis, however, was not
nearly as slow as scriptwriter Ed Lowe. When Whiteman checked in with the front office on June 24, he was flabbergasted to
learn that there was no script. Furthermore, Grofe complained that time and again he was asked to score a tune and after finishing
the job was told the tune had been scrapped.

Aside from radio broadcasts, the band had nothing to do except golf, party, drink, and drive around, all on the Universal
dole. Mischa Russell was arrested for drunk driving and held by a peculiarly liberal turnkey; when some of his friends visited
the lockup, they were
informed that Russell and his jailer had gone to the movies but that they were welcome to wait if they liked. Comedy turned
to tragedy six weeks into their stay when several musicians took off in a fleet of cars for a gig in Santa Barbara. Venuti
broke from his lane to pass a slowpoke and crashed into an oncoming vehicle. His wrist was badly mangled; for a while it was
feared he would never play again. His passenger, Mario Perry, an accordionist and one of Whiteman’s earliest associates, died
en route to the hospital. The two women in the other car, though unharmed, filed suit against Venuti and Whiteman. Hollywood
had become a nightmare.

Bing stayed out of trouble. “Universal gave the boys two hundred dollars a week, each boy,” Kurt Dieterle recalled, “and we
also had the Old Gold broadcasts — that was another fifty dollars. The first three months they were rewriting the story, five
of us who were golfers — Chet Hazlett, Roy Bargy, Bing and Al Rinker, and myself — went and joined Lakeside. Hazlett bought
a regular membership and the rest of us bought associate memberships for five hundred dollars. We didn’t do a lick of work
as far as the orchestra. The five of us went to Lakeside in the morning, played a round of golf, each with our own caddy.
After lunch we would play another eighteen holes.”
¹⁴
Bing, Dieterle, and Mischa Russell rented a house for the summer on Fairfax Avenue and hired a cook. They visited Universal
only on payday. Bing recalled Whiteman’s saying, “Well, thanks a lot for managing to get over here for your checks — thanks
a lot.”
¹⁵

In those days, the membership of Lakeside Golf Club was dominated by the film industry, and Bing became friendly with several
actors, including Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers, Oliver Hardy, and Johnny Weissmuller. But his entree into Hollywood really
began to take wing after the Rhythm Boys, alone among the Whiteman musicians, sought a steady job. “We are trying to line
up some extra work while here but the rehearsals and radio just about make it impossible,” Bing wrote Kate, overstating their
labors:

However, we plan an opening at the Montmartre cafe in Hollywood for a short time to see how it works out. This will help to
tide us over during our enforced idleness. Picture work is, of course, possible for the trio, but we are prevented from doing
any of this until the Universal
picture is completed, and even in that it is quite probable that we’ll be left on the cutting room floor. In the meantime
I am going to make some screen tests for MGM, as has been suggested to me quite often since my arrival here, and, who knows,
something may come of them?
¹⁶

The Rhythm Boys were a hit at the Montmartre Cafe, but nothing came of Bing’s MGM tests or of subsequent tests at Fox, where
casting director Jim Ryan complimented Bing’s singing and asked him to read lines for chief of production Winfield Sheehan.
Bing recalled Sheehan’s saying, “Very good, but the ears are wingy.” Bing told the tale on TV in 1971: “I thought he said,
‘The years are winging,’ and I said, no, I’m twenty-whatever-I-was-then. He said, ‘No, the ears are winging, there’s no way
we can photograph you, it would be a lot of big problems.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid that there just isn’t a place for you in pictures.’
I went on my way and the years went by and I finally belonged to the same church he did, Blessed Sacrament out in Beverly
Hills. He used to sit in the third row, so when I went to communion, I’d come back and as I passed him I’d go [he mimed flapping
his ears].”
¹⁷
Bing never forgot the slights of those days and polished the particulars like old silver. To Jim Ryan he attributed the crack
“A camera pointed straight at you would make you look like a taxi with both doors open.”
¹⁸

Though he continued to make the studio rounds, Bing did not seem especially ambitious to those who worked with him. A member
of Whiteman’s radio cast, Dorothea Ponce of the Ponce Sisters, who occasionally sang with Bing, remembered: “He didn’t seem
star material at the time. He was simply a part of the weekly program with the Rhythm Boys. I never thought of him going out
on his own and leaving them.”
¹⁹
Bing rarely showed his hand. Sometimes he appeared not to know what cards he was holding. Rudy Vallee told of Bing’s diffidence
one evening in Baltimore, when he shared a bill with the trio:

Above the chatter of the diners the Rhythm Boys might just as well have stayed in bed; no one was paying the slightest attention
to them. But suddenly a hush fell upon this crowd of Baltimore’s elite. One of the Rhythm Boys was singing a song called “Montmartre
Rose,” and even though he lacked any amplification or means of channeling his sound waves to us, his voice commanded instant
silence [and] when
he finished the crowd applauded wildly and cried for more. As though he were oblivious to their shouts and applause, almost
as though he were hard of hearing, he threaded his way back through the tables and passed by our sax section, not more than
a foot and a half from me. I was struck by the lack of expression on his face, which was a mask of complete indifference.
Bing Crosby was a hit and didn’t even know it!
²⁰

Bing undoubtedly did know it, but he was not inclined to let on, then or ever. Although he sang solo on Whiteman’s broadcasts
as often as he sang with the trio, neither he nor his partners acknowledged the inevitable split that had to come. Whiteman
attempted to stifle his ambitions, threatening to fire him if he continued to seek screen tests. Yet pressure from Everett
and established agents was building for him to go out on his own. They all wanted a piece of him.

The young Hollywood crowd was captivated by Bing’s casually handsome composure. After the Second World War, an observer suggested
that if a celestial visitor arrived at a cocktail party seeking an earthling leader and was directed to a group in which Bing
was chatting with Winston Churchill and Douglas MacArthur, it would probably assume Crosby was the guy in charge. Even in
1929, when he was scrambling after a new career and shying from responsibility, peering at his future through the mist of
rotgut whiskey and generally preferring a life on the fairway, Bing imparted a near regal nonchalance. His innate propriety
deflected the kind of vanity that curdles into narcissism. The distinct warmth that defined his singing and later his acting
made him seem cool yet approachable. A young contract player named Sylvia Picker observed, “Truthfully, there wasn’t a girl
in town who wasn’t nuts about Bing Crosby.”
²¹
His working-class man’s-man insouciance was found no less fascinating by men. He had none of the brilliantined conceit and
manicured irony rife in Hollywood. He came across as an extraordinary ordinary guy.

The Rhythm Boys worked the entire month of July at Eddie Brandstatter’s Montmartre Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard. They were
billed as Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys and touted as the “Musical Sensation of Los Angeles,” “America’s Foremost Entertainers,”
²²
and, in a stretch even by Tinseltown’s standards, “Direct from Ziegfeld’s Roof in Their First Appearance Outside of New York.”
²³
The second-story cafe was a blocklong room with banquet tables (packed for fashionable
luncheons), a small dance floor ringed with tables, and a bandstand. It was the hot spot of the moment, and fans routinely
crowded under the ornate marquee to see who entered: a mix of celebrities and coddled would-be stars of the new all-talking
picture business. The
Los Angeles Evening Express
trumpeted Brandstatter’s coup in luring the trio away from New York (“at great expense”),
²⁴
and the club boasted increasing receipts as young Hollywood turned out every night to be in on something new and adventurous.

Bill Hearst and his college friends from San Francisco were regulars, as was another acquaintance from vaudeville days, Phil
Harris, who had just returned from a long tour of Australia and was playing drums and coleading a band. “The Montmartre was
the
place, that and the Cocoanut Grove,” said Harris. “And that’s the first time I heard him do a ballad, ‘I Kiss Your Hand,
Madame,’ and he knocked the roof in with it. When Bing finished, I mean, I never heard anything like it, you could hear a
pin drop.”
²⁵
The crowd demanded an encore, and the boys reprised their flagwaver, “Mississippi Mud.” The trio was invited to countless
parties, including one in Catalina at which Bing and Al ended up squiring Lita Grey Chaplin, recently divorced from Charlie
Chaplin, and her friend, starlet Catherine Dale Owen. One thing led to another, and the Rhythm Boys were soon engaged for
a week in a vaudeville package at the Orpheum, billed second (“syncopated song, melody, comedy you will talk about for months”)
to Lita, “California’s own crooning beauty.”
²⁶
They played two shows daily at the Orpheum, then rushed to make their evening sets at the Montmartre.

Among the starlets and hopefuls who crowded the Montmartre was a young couple, each recently signed to Fox. He was Frank Albertson,
the busy character actor who would be remembered as Sam Wainright in
It’s a Wonderful Life
and the lecherous millionaire robbed by Janet Leigh in
Psycho.
At that time, he was a fleshy-faced second lead and a friend of Bing’s, eager to introduce him to his beautiful seventeen-year-old
date. She was Dixie Lee, an introverted but temperamental southern-born actress and singer who dyed her dark hair platinum
blond and was fully expected to make the transition from starlet to star. Frank and Dixie had worked together in two films,
in the star-studded chorus of
Happy Days
and as the second leads in
The Big Party
(both released in 1930). Before she arrived in
Hollywood, Dixie had won a singing contest in Chicago that eventually led to a job understudying Peggy Bernier in
Good News.
Known as Dixie Carroll in those days, she had heard about Bing from her roommates, Bernier and Holly Hall, both of whom complained
about his habit of last-minute cancellations. “I just wanted to meet this character once and tell him off,” Dixie said in
1946. When Bing did call her in Chicago, wanting to meet her, Dixie asked one of her roommates to handle him: “You tell that
guy I’m not in the habit of going places to meet anybody — especially him.”
²⁷
Yet at the Montmartre, seeing and hearing him for the first time, she coyly asked Frank to introduce her to him by her real
name, Billie Wyatt. Dixie and Bing struck no sparks that night, but Bing was flattered when she returned to hear him sing,
especially when he found out she was the well-known Fox starlet Dixie Lee.

In late August, nearly three months after his arrival in Hollywood, Universal presented Whiteman with a script. He read it
with disbelief. To his utter bewilderment, the studio intended to make him a leading man in a conventional love story. Hollywood’s
incomprehensible, always unsuccessful attempts to make romantic figures of rotund or oddball music personalities would eventually
sink the cinematic aspirations of performers ranging from Kate Smith to Liberace to Pavarotti; it is to Whiteman’s credit
that he was appalled rather than tempted by Universal’s blandishments. Paul prepared to leave California as soon as possible.
He would return when the studio could assure him that it had a reasonable story idea. If Whiteman was mad, the Laemmles were
livid: they had already spent $350,000 and had nothing to show for it. After broadcasting on August 27, Whiteman’s troupe
boarded the train for New York and an emergency job Jimmy Gillespie had lined up at the Pavillon Royal. They had a stowaway
in Hoagy Carmichael, who had come west on his own without the prospect of work and without finding any; he shared a berth
with Bing.