Bing Crosby (35 page)

In fact, Whiteman made off with much more than Hoagy. At a party in New York a year earlier, he had met Margaret Livingston,
who played the vamp in the bulrushes in F. W. Murnau’s masterwork,
Sunrise,
a movie Whiteman adored and screened repeatedly. Though married to his second wife, Paul devoted much of his California sojourn
— when not in attendance at the dozens of parties thrown in
his honor by such film luminaries as Marion Davies, Richard Barthelmess, and Ronald Colman — to his courtship of Livingston,
who was filming on the Universal lot. In 1931, after he complied with her ultimatum to diet, they married; they remained a
devoted couple until his death in 1967.

He did no less well on the musical front, as Bing and Al finally found a way to favor their benefactress, Mildred Bailey.
Paul made it clear he wasn’t hiring anybody, including Hoagy, but Bing and Al knew that if they could get Whiteman to hear
Mildred, he’d fall under her spell. Millie became friendly with several guys in the band that summer. She took them horseback
riding in the Hollywood Hills, cooked up a storm, and served her home brew, which created quite a sensation, as decent beer
was hard to find. Bing and Al encouraged her to throw a party for the band and its leader. Whiteman, a prodigious beer drinker,
happily accepted the invitation. As Bing recalled, “Paul didn’t know it at the time, but he was a goner when he walked into
the house.”
²⁸

Hoagy, Roy Bargy, and pianist-arranger Lennie Hayton took turns at Millie’s Steinway. Rinker describes what happened next:
“Finally, Bing turned to Mildred and said, ‘Hey, Millie, why don’t you sing a song?’ No one had ever heard her sing but they
all joined in, ‘Yeah, c’mon, Millie, let’s have a song.’At first, Mildred acted reluctant, but I knew it wouldn’t last long.”
²⁹
She asked Al to accompany her on “(What Can I Say, Dear) After I Say I’m Sorry,” and “she sang the hell out of the song.”
After a brief silence everyone started to cheer, and Whiteman, who had been in the kitchen, asked who was singing. Bing barked,
“That was Millie, Al’s sister.” Whiteman joked, “Don’t tell me that there’s one in the family who can sing!” He then walked
over, kissed her, and asked for an encore. “All her past experience singing in speakeasies and night spots came out as she
sang. Her small, pure voice gave the songs feeling and meaning, and you knew you were hearing a singer who was very special,”
Al wrote.
³⁰
That night Paul hired her to sing the popular lament “Moanin’ Low” on Tuesday’s Old Gold show. Weeks later she was on the
train to New York, a contract in her purse — the first “girl singer” to tour with an orchestra. A year later she was the highest-salaried
performer on Whiteman’s payroll.

* * *

On the previous occasion when Whiteman played the Pavillon Royal, Bing had fallen into the Long Island Sound and almost lost
his job, if not his life. This time he had a dire experience of another sort. Bing and his brothers told the story so often
that it became family lore, the details mutating in the telling. Apparently the evening began when Kitty Lang rounded up some
Ziegfeld girls for a party and Bing found his companion less than stimulating. In their 1937 fictionalized biography, Ted
and Larry Crosby say he left the table and walked to the bandstand to hear a new song, “Singin’ in the Rain,” and returned
to find his date “pouting.” The gerund has the ring of discernment, because Bing could not abide pouting and found emotional
neediness as unpleasant as emotional dishonesty.

He left for another speakeasy, where a Valentino wannabe — padded shoulders, greased hair parted in the middle — recognized
him and bought him a drink. Bing joined the stranger’s party, embarking on a forty-eight-hour brandy binge. He came to in
a strange hotel room and stumbled into the bathroom seconds before the front door was blasted open by machine-gun fire and
his companions were sprayed by bullets, all wounded but none killed. Bing stayed in the bathroom “for what seemed hours,”
³¹
until a cop opened the door and asked him who he was, eliciting an innocent-bystander routine that Bing claimed surpassed
anything he did in the movies. The next day he learned he had spent two days in the hideout of Machine Gun Jack McGurn, the
dapper Capone killer who had taken part months earlier in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and had slit the throat of singer
(later, thanks to McGurn, comedian) Joe E. Lewis.

However mortified Bing may have been by his behavior — and if the McGurn story was embellished, his predilection for a binge
was not — he continued to make professional strides. During the band’s weeks in New York, before Universal summoned them back
to resume (or begin) work on
King of Jazz,
Whiteman and Columbia refused to record the Rhythm Boys because they had failed to develop any new material. Barris was not
included in any sessions at all. But Bing was still in demand for studio work.

He had finally exorcised the demon Vallee and was now intent on insulating himself from the word
crooner,
a term that due chiefly to Vallee was almost always used disparagingly, often implying deviance. Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell
denounced crooning as a force for evil and invited parishioners to share his “sensation of revolting disgust at
a man whining a degenerate song, which is unworthy of any American man.”
³²
Pundits followed suit. The
Springfield Union,
enraged to the point of grammatical chaos, reviled crooning as a “gratuitous insult to that intelligent person which rightfully
expects a better return for its expensive investment in radio equipment.”
³³

What, we may ask, were such laughable denunciations really about? Is the subtext nothing more than fear of homosexuality,
and if so, why all the indignation over Vallee and not the Nick Lucases, Gene Austins, and Jack Fultons who preceded him?
We may agree, from a musical point of view, that Vallee and company were “whining,” but the diatribes, with their emphases
on manliness and words like
degenerate
augur Hitler’s excuses for banning Weimar artists. In truth, Vallee was a big, convenient target. The real prey was the entire
sexual undercurrent manifest in the Jazz Age, particularly its music, which along with Prohibition lured women into saloons
and crossed racial boundaries. A youth music almost by definition implies rebellion, family tension, the potential for anarchy.

Bing’s singing was nothing if not virile. He would cause a far greater furor than Vallee, but the Cardinal O’Connells of the
world could never tag him with imputations of effeteness. After Bing achieved his breakthrough, the word
crooner
would usually be used descriptively or with admiration. In September Bing recorded for the first time in four months, since
the high-strung “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be?,” and gave free rein to his natural tones. His heartiness uplifts Grofe’s arrangement
of “Waiting at the End of the Road,” an Irving Berlin song memorably introduced in King Vidor’s black musical film,
Hallelujah.
This was the pre-Vallee Bing, restored and confident. His effortless swing was the flash point for the session, which proved
to be Bix’s last with Whiteman.

Bix, drinking excessively, was coming apart at the seams and ruined several takes. A few days later Paul put him on a train
for his family home in Davenport, Iowa, hoping he would cure himself. Paul kept him on salary for months, until it became
clear he would not be coming back to the band. Bix returned to New York, though, and freelanced on several sessions — playing
a memorably affecting solo on his last as a leader, “I’ll Be a Friend (With Pleasure).” He died in August 1931 at twenty-eight.
“Every once in a while he’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and make me change beds with him,” recalled Bing,
³⁴
who refused to concede that Bix was an alcoholic,
maybe because, like himself, he could go without liquor for days at a time. But Bing was kidding himself, more than twenty
years after the fact, when he wrote of a man who often started his day with four ounces of gin, “In the end, it was his lack
of sleep and his physical exhaustion which broke his health and killed him.”
³⁵

Bing’s third session under his own name, in late September, was little better than the first two and suffered from pompous,
non-jazz accompaniment. Columbia probably wanted to disabuse him of his inclination to scat or embellish. On the movie tango
“Gay Love” (written by Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare for
The Delightful Rogue),
he emotes with a purple bravado that prefigures his hit recording of “Temptation,” the movie tango composed for him a few
years later, sobbing the high notes and employing a robust attack no one could misconstrue as crooning.
³⁶
No less operatic is his work with Whiteman on two Vincent Youmans songs, “Great Day” and “Without a Song.” On the former
he staunchly sings the verse before disappearing into a trebly choir. “Without a Song,” however, taken at a peppy tempo that
displeased its composer, is a Crosby coup of the sort that encourages one to speculate on how inspiring it must have been
to, say, Frank Sinatra, who was fourteen when the Youmans numbers were released on a hugely popular platter. Bing’s phrasing,
breathing, vibrato, and projection are superbly coordinated, and he pins the high note free and clear, demonstrating hardly
a trace of his or anyone else’s mannerisms. His vocal is the more remarkable for crowning an otherwise dreary arrangement.

Bing is more in his element and again in marvelous voice with Whiteman on Lennie Hayton’s pert arrangement of “If I Had a
Talking Picture of You,” backed by Lang and Venuti. The chemistry between Bing and Eddie is fully realized on “After You’ve
Gone,” a delightfully cool William Grant Still arrangement with voicings that blend rather than separate the strings and the
winds, as well as a climax that includes an Andy Secrest solo in the style of Bix and a Joe Venuti solo in a style all his
own, complete with sparkling break. Directly after the session Whiteman returned to Hollywood, with the band following a day
or so later. This time there was no hoopla, no dispatches from the front, no broadcasts, just a quick jaunt to get the damn
movie made.

* * *

On October 22, 1929, a few days before the Whiteman band regrouped in Hollywood, Charles Mitchell, chairman of National City
Bank, responded to the sense of dread enveloping Wall Street with consoling words: “I know of nothing fundamentally wrong
with the stock market or with the underlying credit structure.”
³⁷
On October 23 Paramount and Warners called off their negotiations for a merger that might have completely altered Hollywood
history — not a moment too soon. Twenty-four hours later, Black Thursday, the market imploded as nearly 13 million shares
were traded at a loss of $6 billion. The band arrived in Los Angeles a day later; like most Americans, the musicians were
undistracted by the crash. Few of them were in the market, and no one believed that the panic on Wall Street would be anything
more than a brief inconvenience. In days that followed, experts reassured the country that the market had stabilized. But
on Tuesday, as Paul resumed broadcasting, the bottom fell out; nearly 16.5 million shares were traded at a loss of three times
the money circulating in the entire nation. Hollywood digested Black Tuesday with
Variety’s
famous headline:
WALL ST
.
LAYS AN EGG
.

Few Americans were worried even at that stage, certainly not members of the Whiteman band, several of whom had secured raises
just before the trip. No one saw the big bad wolf of the Depression slavering at the door. Nor could anyone have imagined
that, by a Hollywood-style contradiction, the nation’s financial ruin would have an even more salubrious impact on the fortunes
of show business than Prohibition. True, the movie business would never again enjoy the figures of 1929, when 23,000 theaters
were visited by an average of 95 million people a week. By 1936 the number of screens would be shaved by a third and would
not rise beyond 20,000 until the 1980s. The number of weekly filmgoers would also decline permanently, slashed by radio and
television and the Internet to a late-nineties average of 22 million. Still, never was escapist entertainment needed more
than during the Depression. Hollywood rose to the occasion.

As the wolf settled in for a lengthy stay, entertainment provided solace and balm. But reduced prices and varied giveaways
were not enough to lure people into trading hard-earned pennies for filmed vaudeville. They wanted magic and romance and novelty;
stories with happy endings and a chastened wolf. Whiteman’s
King of Jazz
would turn out to be a mammoth casualty of that demand — a sad irony,
because Universal’s was the most magical revue of an era in which every studio felt obliged to release an oversize, vaudeville-style
parade of talent. Had
King of Jazz
been finished on time, it almost certainly would have been a smash hit. Instead, because of the delays that plagued the production,
the first film revue announced was the last to be released; it would appear just as the excitement surrounding “audible variety”
ended.

When Universal signed Whiteman, it had no major stars, an inconvenience the studio hoped to disguise with Whiteman’s status
and a supercolossal production. Junior Laemmle decided that the solution to his script problems was a variety show. His writer,
Edward Lowe, could stay on to provide continuity between the numbers, but Laemmle sought a top theatrical showman to replace
his director, Paul Fejos. Whiteman lobbied for John Murray Anderson, a former dancer with whom he had worked at the Paramount
Theater in 1928 and whose lush and innovative direction of
The Greenwich Village Follies
(1919-24) thrilled Broadway. He was hired at $50,000, half Whiteman’s salary, but an extraordinary sum considering his total
lack of movie experience. Anderson, the nucleus of a formidable crew, brought in set and costume designer Herman Rosse, who
won
King of Jazz’s
only Academy Award (he later worked on set decor for
Frankenstein),
and choreographer Russell Markert, who went on to create the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Junior asked Anderson to
meet with Fejos and cameraman Hal Mohr to discuss the use of a twenty-eight-ton crane and boom camera built for the just released
musical
Broadway.
He then fired Fejos but retained Mohr — an innovator in color photography — and two other cameramen, color expert Ray Rennahan
and special-effects wizard Jerry Ash. Anderson insisted that Universal shoot the entire picture in the two-strip process (red-orange
and blue-green) developed by Technicolor.