Bing Crosby (60 page)

McMurtrie had produced Paul Whiteman’s Old Gold shows and hailed from Spokane. He understood Bing’s style and potential as
well as anyone but could do little more than suggest the rudiments of a radio identity for him. On the first show, Bing sang
“Thanks,” “Tomorrow,” and “The Last Round-Up”; bantered with announcer Ken Niles about cosmetics; and introduced Lennie Hayton’s
instrumentals and a vocal by a teenage singer, Mary Lou Raymond.
Billboard
liked the show, relieved that “he neither whistled nor dabbled in his famous impromptu obbligatos.”
²

A livelier atmosphere started taking hold in December, after Bing prevailed upon Woodbury to sign the Mills Brothers as weekly
regulars, singing their own numbers and — significantly — backing his. Though little noted or remembered, their hiring represented
a landmark for racial integration in radio and music, preceding by two years Benny Goodman’s road tour with Teddy Wilson and
by three Jack Benny’s signing of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. When the Mills
Brothers were unavailable, Bing sustained the broadcast’s high spirits with the Boswell Sisters, whom he famously introduced
as “three girls with but a single thought: harmony. And what harmony.”

Hayton, basking in the attention of the movie studios, did not renew his Woodbury contract after the first season. His replacements
included Gus Arnheim, Jimmy Grier, and ultimately Géorgie Stoll, who conducted the orchestra on more than half of Bing’s seventy-two
Woodbury shows, from mid-1934 through the end of 1935.
³
Like Bing, Stoll was an Armstrong fanatic, but little of that emerged in his arrangements, which, judging from the three
surviving episodes, were rather stuffy and unswinging. Other regulars on the show included the singers Kay Thompson, Irene
Taylor, the Three Rhythm Kings, and the Williams Sisters — Laura, Alice, and Ethelyn. Alice went on to work with the Music
Maids, a popular addition to
Kraft Music Hall
during Bing’s tenure.

The show was an instant ratings success. The
New York World-Telegram
observed that of the radio singers who had won so much acclaim only two years earlier, Bing alone maintained “the same level
of popularity,” adding that he might easily have sustained the Woodbury ratings through the summer had he not “put his foot
down” and insisted upon a vacation.
⁴
The same paper conducted a national radio poll, publishing the results in February 1934. Bing won Best Popular Male Singer
and the Boswells, Best Harmony Team. With the Boswells or the Mills Brothers at his side, Bing didn’t need much in the way
of guests, and he had few good ones — mostly dull comics and stillborn starlets. Radio had yet to become acceptable to Hollywood’s
supernovas, many of whom would later snub television for the same reason: it was free and common. But in plugging his concurrent
movies, Bing scored appearances by his leading ladies, notably Carole Lombard, Kitty Carlisle, Miriam Hopkins, and Joan Bennett,
prefiguring the movie colony’s delayed appreciation of radio as a publicity bonanza.

Bing’s years of undergraduate oratory had taught him that great speakers don’t pontificate to the great unwashed. They make
contact with their fellows. That was Bing’s natural way, enabling him to speak as intimately via the microphone as he sang.
Orotund announcers were on their way out — they were silly at best, snobbish at worst. Bing occasionally reached for their
affectations (his Woodbury performance
of “Just a-Wearyin’ for You” is painfully genteel), but he got over the temptation quickly, poking fun at the highfalutin
by italicizing a rolled r or inserting a ten-dollar word in his plainspoken repartee.

Bing was not the only radio personality who tailored his style to speak to individuals at home rather than to a massive congregation.
Nor was he the only one to understand that the public responded to a well-spoken man as long as he refrained from talking
down to them. Bing may have learned a trick or two from President Roosevelt, that master of aristocratic candor, whose “fireside
chats” debuted seven months before the Woodbury show.
⁵
With 60 million people tuned in to his first Sunday-evening broadcast, March 12, 1933, FDR spoke warmly and directly, without
patronizing folksiness or condescension: “My friends, I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was
done, and what the next steps are going to be.”
⁶
He said it was safe to put money in the bank, and people did. His secretary of labor (and the nation’s first female cabinet
member), Frances Perkins, recalled, “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch
or in the parlor with them.”
⁷
Roosevelt’s inauguration won Outstanding Broadcast in the New
York World-Telegram
poll.

Roosevelt had begun using radio when he was governor of New York. He was more practiced than Bing in projecting personality
through speech. Yet he applied basically the same techniques of directness and enunciation that Bing had mastered in selling
his musical style. On one occasion FDR seemed to acknowledge Bing’s influence. According to Eddie Cantor, during a March of
Dimes broadcast from Warm Springs, Georgia, the president tested the microphone by “crooning in a cracked baritone, ‘When
[sic] the blue of the night… bub-bub-bub-boo!’”
⁸
The wonder of it is that so few, beyond Bing and Roosevelt, recognized radio’s unique power to convey rapport and empathy.

Still, compared with what he later achieved on radio, Bing sounded hesitant on the Woodbury show, though his artless, neighborly
way struck a chord. Listeners who once tuned in to hear the crooner now discovered a friend. Bing, logically, began to infuse
the show with elements of his personal life. After he attended the Rose Bowl game between Stanford and Columbia in 1934, he
talked about it over the air. After Dixie gave birth to twins during his summer break, he employed
them in a song cue: “Speaking as the father of twins, I might say, in fact I will say, that it is a double pleasure to be
back on this program again. As a result thereof ‘I’m humming, I’m whistling, I’m singing.’” The dialogue was often fairly
stilted, but it was appealingly modest, even adorable, and usually revealed his singular personality:

Niles: Say, have you learned much about [the twins]?

Bing: No. It’s a new racket for me. But what would you like to know?

Niles: Well, tell me something about them, anything.

Bing: Well, twins usually look alike, having been born more or less under the same conditions and having no preference in
the matter.

Niles: There you go, Bing!

Bing: Sure, and if they resemble their mother, they have what might be called a flying start in life.

Niles: What if they resemble their father?

Bing: Well, in that case, they should be held right side up and patted lightly on their respective backs.

Niles was invariably upbeat, nudging the audience about Bing’s linguistic playfulness. Bing was more earnest, taking his time,
peppering convoluted phrases with slang, and averting banality with little more than a slightly reticent, vernacular charm.

It was too vernacular for Woodbury. On the surface, the company seemed content with its spokesman. Before Bing took his summer
break, the sponsor celebrated his success with a giveaway:

Niles: We think you’ll agree the Woodburys have done two very important things this year. They’ve brought Bing Crosby back
to this radio audience, with whom he is such a favorite. And they’ve created a ten-cent size of Woodbury’s facial soap in
order that new millions may enjoy the blessings of this scientific beauty aid at a price never heard of before. Tonight Woodbury’s
makes you an extraordinary offer. In exchange for ten cents, one dime, Woodbury’s will send you an attractive gift, the Woodbury
loveliness kit [and] an autographed photograph of Bing Crosby…. Please send a dime, not stamps.
⁹

Yet despite solid ratings, the marriage between sponsor and spokesman was rocky. Woodbury argued that Bing’s cool delivery
did not confer enough dignity on its products. That impression solidified
after
Variety
conducted a street-corner poll on sponsor recognition: fewer than one-fourth of those queried knew who paid Bing’s bills.
For his part, Bing had a hard time with Woodbury’s idea of dignity, as expressed in commercials that managed to insult the
very women it hoped to reach. One sketch began with Ken Niles confiding to Bing that he was in love with a woman he had never
seen. When Bing tells him he is “full of that boulevard gin,” Niles explains that she wears a mask. Two songs later Niles
reveals that she removed the mask and was so homely that he pretended not to know her. “Sure glad you didn’t get stuck with
her,” Bing commiserates, to which Niles responds: “The poor thing, Bing, and you know, there are hundreds just like her, who
if they only knew about Woodbury’s facial soap might easily capture such a prize as Bing or, ah, me.”

What really rankled Woodbury was Bing’s effectual control of the series. By May 1935 the company made clear its intention
to challenge him. The first showdown took place after Bing announced on the air that his friend, actor Andy Devine, would
be a guest the following week. The sponsor told Bing that Devine could not appear because his voice, a comically strained
gargle caused by a childhood accident, was unsuitable for the air. Next week Bing arrived at the station with Devine and calmly
refused to go on unless Andy accompanied him. Minutes before airtime Woodbury backed off and inadvertently launched Devine’s
long career as a radio entertainer.

Bing refused to relinquish authority in choosing songs or guests, and the company refused to renew his contract, which was
up June 11, 1935. Yet even with the end in sight, the clashes continued; at one point Bing would have walked (John Boles,
of all people, was hired as an emergency substitute) had not CBS convinced him to complete his obligation. After Woodbury,
Bing would not be at liberty for long. NBC became interested in him late that summer when Bing appeared alongside the Dorsey
Brothers as guests of
Kraft Music Hall’s
ratings-challenged host, Paul Whiteman. By December Bing would be Kraft’s new host, commencing an eleven-year run that not
only redefined the variety show — it reinvented the image of Bing Crosby.

One reason professional strife never got the better of Bing is that he always had so many fish to fry. Pursuing work and play
with equal diligence,
he consigned virtually every minute of his day to a schedule — to the dismay of his family, which was not always accorded
prime time. While Woodbury was pulling its hair, Bing shot one picture after another: four features and one short subject
between January 29, 1934, and January 19, 1935. After he completed
Too Much Harmony,
Bing owed Paramount one picture on his original contract. Chagrined by the difference in quality between MGM’s
Going Hollywood
and its own Crosby vehicles, the studio resolved to make it a first-rate production. Paramount could ill afford to lose him
and had recently endured a reminder of his finicky independence.

Paramount’s stars had been assigned small parts in a film of
Alice in Wonderland,
in which they were disguised by makeup intended to approximate John Tenniel’s illustrations. While the other contract players
signed on, Bing (through Everett) opened negotiations. Although he could not see the point of appearing under a mound of makeup,
he agreed to participate on two conditions: a week’s salary and permission to do another picture for an outside studio. Paramount
agreed to the first and balked at the second. Furious at Bing’s intransigence, the studio offered his part to Russ Columbo
before settling on Cary Grant. It also signed Lanny Ross, a tenor who became popular on the
Show Boat
radio hour, promising a big buildup and casting him in
College Rhythm
(opposite Jack Oakie as a football star). As insurance against Crosby, Ross was marginally more viable than, say, John Boles,
and the executives knew it.

They also knew that Bing had been damn shrewd to avoid
Alice in Wonderland,
a miserable flop, and that although Everett served as his cover, Bing made the decisions. As Bob Crosby once noted, “A lot
of people thought Everett was a financial wizard, but he wasn’t. He would maybe get a call from someone that would want Bing
to make a picture, and he’d go to Bing and say, Do you want to do it or don’t you want to do it? And Bing would say yes or
no or I want more money or I’d like to read the script, whatever.”
¹⁰
While Lewis Carroll took Paramount to the cleaners, Bing prepared for the adaptation of another British classic, by Carroll’s
young Scottish contemporary, James M. Barrie.

The Admirable Crichton,
a comedy about class divisions and the perfect butler, had been Hollywoodized as a silent film,
Male and Female,
and was now decked out as a musical, ominously titled
Cruise
to Nowhere.
Enigmatically renamed
We’re Not Dressing,
the result was frothy and absurd but vastly entertaining, the class war having been reduced to a more dependable formula
of boy meets girl, annoys girl, wins girl, rejects girl, and walks into sunset with girl. In this instance, the girl is a
rich and haughty brat, played by Carole Lombard, and the boy a lowly sailor (who wants to be an architect, so it’s all right)
employed on her yacht. The yacht sinks and, mirabile dictu, all the stars drift to the same spot on an apparently deserted
island, where the sailor’s skills create a turnabout, placing him in charge. An elaborate joke involving Lombard’s panties
(an example of pre-Code raffishness) uncovers the presence elsewhere on the island of a pair of natural scientists. Before
the castaways learn they are not alone, however, the sailor (Bing) has brought Lombard down a peg, and they are chastely reconciled.

The making of
We’re Not Dressing,
including three weeks of shooting on Catalina Island, was a happy experience for everyone, especially Bing and Lombard, who
became fast friends (although she was then engaged to his rival Russ Columbo).
¹¹
It was an important picture for her, the first to suggest the screwball flair for comedy she unleashed in
Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred,
and other films before her much lamented death in a plane crash. She had not been the studio’s first choice. Miriam Hopkins
demurred because she thought the script trivialized Barrie, and Paramount unsuccessfully asked MGM for the loan of Karen Morley
or Mae Clarke (Charles Butterworth and W. C. Fields were also sought, presumably for the role played by Leon Errol). Two years
earlier Lombard had turned down the Leila Hyams part in
The Big Broadcast,
which might well have salvaged Carole’s faltering career. She leaped at the offer of a second shot in a Crosby picture.