Bing Crosby (61 page)

Carole, bemused by Bing’s cool tact, played off it between takes in a series of practical jokes. Bing enjoyed her dedicated
swearing — “colorful epithets” he described as “good, clean, and lusty. Her swearwords weren’t obscene. They were gusty and
eloquent. They resounded, they bounced. They had honest zing!”
¹²
With amazement, he described her dash to the ocean after inadvertently dousing herself with wintergreen: “She appeared practically
unclothed,” he wrote, the adverb added as a gentlemanly euphemism.
¹³
She occasionally enlivened the set by flashing him. While breakfasting at Catalina’s St.
Catherine Hotel, where elderly regulars stared disapprovingly at the movie clan, she “came slinking in” and loudly cried,
“Bing! Did I leave my douche bag in your room last night?”
¹⁴
For two days she sent Bing a one-word telegram every fifteen minutes or so: the word was
NOW
. “The fact that she could make us think of her as being a good guy rather than a sexy mamma is one of those unbelievable
manifestations impossible to explain,” Bing wrote. “She was the least prudish person I’ve ever known.”

Carole had one weak point, however; she could not stand to have her face touched, and one scene called for Bing to slap her.
At her request, he refrained during rehearsal, but when the scene was filmed, she responded violently. Howard Hawks liked
to take credit for creating Lombard as a comic actress by encouraging her to kick John Barrymore in the balls in
Twentieth Century.
According to Bing, she required no coaching; she kicked, punched, bit, screamed, tore off his toupee, and finally “wept hysterically.”
¹⁵
Bing recalled that he refused to do a second take and that some of the tantrum was actually used, but it wasn’t. In the film,
she returns his slap with a kiss.

Bing also had trouble with Bruno, the ship’s pet bear, whom the sailor is obliged to soothe with a lullaby, “Good Night Lovely
Little Lady.” One scene in which he narrowly averted disaster did get into the film. While brushing the bear’s fur, Bing sings
“She Reminds Me of You.” Bruno suddenly tries to get away. Bing grins but continues lip-synching while manfully holding on.

Norman Taurog directed
We’re Not Dressing
with brisk confidence, sprinkling story points amid musical numbers, not allowing a dull moment to intrude in its seventy-four
minutes, thanks to a splendid cast — Burns and Allen (never better), Ethel Merman, Leon Errol, Ray Milland — and no less than
six songs expertly rendered by Bing as the radiant, funny Lombard gazes at him, alternately happy and dismissive, but mostly
happy, especially during his swing chorus on “May I?” The film’s luminous look was created by photographer Charles Lang. Like
many great stars, Bing developed a keen interest in cinematography, realizing that its masters influenced not only a film’s
veneer but the actors’ glamour. More than half of his fifty-four features (excluding those in which he makes cameo or one-song
appearances) were shot by just four of Hollywood’s most accomplished cameramen: Lang, Karl Struss, Lionel Lindon, and George
Barnes. Lang worked on six Crosby pictures, and his contribution here is evident in the sharp black-and-white contrasts, plush
shots of Catalina, and unmistakable aura surrounding the principals.

Though cheeky and adult,
We’re Not Dressing
lacks the sophistication of the year’s best comedies,
It Happened One Night
and
The Thin Man,
but remains a standout among the musicals of 1934.
Dames
and
The Merry Widow,
though more assured, restate the tried-and-true formulas of Busby Berkeley and Ernst Lubitsch. By contrast,
We’re Not Dressing
and
The Gay Divorcee
(the first film in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers assume lead roles) augur the musicals to come, for they are built
around virtuoso American performers, not the stock juveniles, backstage wannabes, and Continental rascals of the past. Ballyhooed
by Paramount for featuring more Crosby songs than any of its predecessors,
We’re Not Dressing
proved that Bing could enchant audiences through three-minute vocal close-ups and offered his most informal and amusing performance
to date.

He was immeasurably aided by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel’s energetic score, which exploits his gifts for jazz and lullabies.
Bing had known the team in New York — they entertained at his Friars Club send-off — and loved the way Gordon, an ebullient
man and lively singer, demonstrated his new songs. For their first Paramount picture they wrote “Did You Ever See a Dream
Walking?,” which became an outstanding Crosby recording at the close of 1933 — boldly expressive and stoked with understated
rhythm.
We’re Not Dressing
was their second film, and no less than five of its songs became Crosby hits: “May
I?,”
“Once in a Blue Moon,” “She Reminds Me of You,” “Good Night Lovely Little Lady,” and “Love Thy Neighbor.” Inevitably, Gordon
and Revel were hired for his next film, which went into production in April, the same month
We’re Not Dressing
opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the usual lively crowds.

Most critics found it breezy fun and generously lauded Bing (the
New York World-Telegram
called him “an excellent comedian”), while
Time
reliably snorted: “Interspersed liberally with shots of Crooner Crosby’s blank, adenoidal face,
We’re Not Dressing
is fair entertainment, easy-going, incredible and sanitary.” If the movie was all those things, it was clearly because of
and not in spite of Bing — not least the sanitary part. Bing looks desolate during his big love scene, which lacks the anticipated
kiss. Lombard supplies heat in her revealing
gowns, as does an exasperated Bing, when he drags her off and chains her to a tree. “I suppose a fate worse than death awaits
me,” she says. “How do you know it’s worse than death?” he replies. “You’ve never been dead, have you?”
¹⁶
Bing’s acting had improved, though he was still given to moonfaced pouts. A breakthrough would occur late in the year with
Here Is My Heart.
But first came the gender-reversal comedy,
She Loves Me Not.

Miriam Hopkins did not know Bing would be her costar when she accepted the role of Curley Flagg, a nightclub hoofer who witnesses
a murder and hides out in a Princeton dorm, disguised as a boy. The role of college student Paul Lawton was first offered
to Gary Cooper, who refused it because he feared Hopkins would steal the picture, her forte. A busier, twitchier actress never
lived, though she could be highly effective in dramatic roles.
She Loves Me Not,
however, was farce with a pedigree, first as a novel (by Edward Hope), then as a Howard Lindsay stage hit, which was packing
the Forty-sixth Street Theater as the film went into production and did not close until four months after the movie’s release.
All the play’s political satire was deleted, but Paramount retained a few barbs about salacious movie producers and arrogant
press flacks. Gordon and Revel wrote three songs, but Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin contributed the picture’s immensely popular
ballad, “Love in Bloom.” One Paramount executive demanded that their song be pulled, citing it as too sophisticated for the
general public.

Hopkins’s scene-stealing shenanigans were legendary,
¹⁷
but her confidence was shaken when she saw that the picture would now be perceived as a Bing Crosby vehicle. The imperturbable
Bing, fast becoming renowned for his letter-perfect first takes, knew how to handle her, as she explained to interviewer John
Kobal:

And do you know another
doll
was Bing Crosby. Oh my God! We did
She Loves Me Not.
Now I thought I was a dramatic actress, you see, and I want to rehearse everything first. I was on his radio show all the
time, and I said, “Bing can’t we rehearse this show?” He ran through it once and we went out and sat in his car and had a
cigarette. And I said, “Can’t we do it again?” And he said: “Sweetie, no! We’d get stale. Let’s just do it, you know, we’ve
got the line. I’ll say something and [you] ad-lib back and forth with me.” Well, there was one scene in
She Loves.
I
said: “Bing, I’d
like
to rehearse this with you.” He says…, “Now, you know very well, you’ve been in the theater and New York, and I’m just a guy
who dropped a load of pumpkins.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘dropped a load of pumpkins?’” And that was the famous line, “I’m
just a guy who dropped a load of pumpkins,” you know. Oh, but so darling!
¹⁸

Kitty Carlisle, who played the university president’s daughter and Paul’s true love, considered Hopkins surprisingly nice,
“the most generous of colleagues, offering to rehearse before each scene.”
¹⁹
Carlisle had appeared in only one other film,
Murder at the Vanities,
but — trained in opera and theater — she tended to look upon Hollywood from an aristocratic perch, condescending and ambitious.
Yet she was startled by Bing’s singing. “I was a serious singer, I had studied seriously, and I was impressed by his technique,
his effortlessness, the fact that his voice was so much bigger and more available for, really, operatic roles than you saw
in the movies. To me there was Bing Crosby and then everybody else.” She also marveled at his unaffectedness: “He certainly
didn’t pamper himself. He’d come in chewing gum and eating chocolate and then just begin to sing and it was melting.” They
had little in common and nothing to talk about, she with her “European social training” and he “a man’s man who got along
very well with the crew.” She could recall only one personal moment off the set, when Bing showed her “a very pretty, rather
modest diamond necklace. He said, Did I like it, did I think [Dixie] would like it? I said I think she’d adore it.”
²⁰

Bing was enthusiastic about the film, but the overall pressure was beginning to tell. Bing confided to Ted his need for a
break:

I am three weeks along into
She Loves Me Not
a collegiate comedy with a couple songs, from the play now current in New York. It has a terrific script, great dialogue,
and grand situation. I don’t see how it can fail to be a great laugh picture, and fine for me.

Dad had some teeth out the other day and was a little out of line for a bit, but is okay now. I have been so busy I haven’t
seen much of mother or anyone else for that matter, but at last reports she was in good health and spirits. Everett is, of
course, living the life of Riley, and his family are well.

I finish the picture in another week, the radio May 26th, and following this plan on resting for possibly a couple months.
Feeling a
little tired, and further income in May & June will put me in a very disagreeable income tax bracket. So I might as well rest
as give it back to Uncle Sam. I am trying to pick up a ranch near San Diego, not too elaborate, and if successful, you can
come down and start me off rite on some intensive gentleman farming.
²¹

Elliott Nugent, a successful stage actor, director, and playwright, directed
She Loves Me Not
with little flair, from a script by producer Benjamin Glazer. The film has dated badly, in part because Hopkins, in her determination
to be funny, goes so far over the top that no one can reign her in, certainly not Bing or Eddie Nugent, who plays Paul’s housemate,
Buzz (the role that made Burgess Meredith a Broadway star). The most persuasive bits poke fun at Hollywood: Buzz’s father
(George Barbier) is a producer who intends to capitalize on Curley’s notoriety by putting her in a picture (replacing one
Yvonne Lamour, a name that was considered satirical until Dorothy Lamour came to town). He promises his backers that her clothes
will be ripped off in every scene, while she remains a virginal victim of circumstance.
²²

She Loves Me Not
is of interest for the way it cuts against the grain of the era’s other transvestite movies, in which women invariably play
men as serious and sexually repressed. Hopkins’s Curley Flagg is initially hesitant about entering the dorm. But as soon as
she loses her hair to Paul’s scissors and trades in her clothes for Buzz’s pajamas, she becomes sexually ravenous, while the
boys act like affronted fops. Paul stammers and turns schoolmarmish: “Now you listen to me, Curley Flagg, I got no more interest
in you than I have in the United States Senate.” But the joke is muffled, because Curley is very girly — mascara will do that.
Only a murderous goon is, briefly, confused by her wiles; he figures she’s gay.

Bing, who turned thirty-one during filming, is an absurdly seasoned undergraduate. He offers a few comical double takes (notably
a Stan Laurel turn at the end), but his vest buttons do not close. “He was very good in movies except that he didn’t look
right,” Kitty Carlisle remembered. “He had a behind the size of a barn. There’s a shot in
She Loves Me Not
where he turns and walks — I mean, it was like a ship leaving shore. But Bing could make fun of anything about himself. He
was not at all pompous.”
²³
A mystery to several leading ladies who felt neglected by him off the set, Bing — as he once said
of his association with Bob Hope — preferred to save it all for the camera, a practice that clearly pays off in his duets
with Kitty. However aloof he may have acted between takes, he genuinely lights up as he sings to her “Straight from the Shoulder”
and “Love in Bloom,” at the thirty-minute mark. Kitty, too, registers delight when they sing together. One reason the duets
are so convincing is that Nugent shot them live, an unusual and risky decision. “Why we did it live I’ll never know,” Kitty
said. “I never asked questions. I got onto the set at nine and there was a little orchestra and we recorded. I was so nervous
I thought I’d jump out of my skin. We did it two or three times and that was the end of it.”
²⁴
Watching footage of Carlisle and Bing, Para-mount’s pint-size studio chief Emanuel Cohen must have imagined he was brewing
his own version of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He signed Kitty to Bing’s next film.