Bing Crosby (73 page)

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The
KMH
Bing was almost instantly reflected on the silver screen. Paramount bought a Damon Runyon story, “Money from Home,” that
Ernst Lubitsch wanted to direct him in; the idea, in part, was to show off Bing’s riding abilities. The story was rejected,
however, in favor of
Rhythm on the Range,
a contemporary western designed to capitalize on Bing’s success with cowboy songs. The plot, a wire hanger on which to drape
the music and comedy, recycled one of the Depression’s favorite fairy tales, apotheosized in Frank Capra’s
It Happened One Night:
a wealthy and beautiful heiress runs out on her effete fiancé and finds happiness with a penniless, average Joe — average
like Clark Gable or Bing Crosby. Bing himself had snared an heiress in
We’re Not Dressing,
and he would get two more in
Double or Nothing
and
Doctor Rhythm.
In the early drafts, the heiress was a mere showgirl fleeing the bright lights, and Jack Oakie and singer Frances Langford
were set to costar. Those plans were scuttled with many others. Paramount kept Bing on salary for three months before a story
was finally approved.

After producer Benjamin Glazer hired director Norman Taurog, and a roomful of writers cobbled together the script, production
was delayed by the search for a leading lady. The contenders included Jean Arthur and Olivia de Havilland, but the choice
narrowed to two talented but little-known Paramount starlets: sweet-faced nineteen year-old former model Marsha Hunt and stunning
twenty-two-year-old University of Washington graduate Frances Farmer. “I lost out, and it broke my heart,” Hunt recalled.
“For once, instead of just being a pretty young thing, like most leading-lady roles, here was something where Bing sang to
you. He would win her, lose her, and win her back, and then fade out. Frances, who was not a comedienne, got the role, and
it broke my heart.”
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Hunt’s booby prize was a publicity stunt: she escorted two frogs representing Bing and Burns to the annual jumping frog contest
at Angel’s Camp, a ghost town in northern California. Neither frog won.

By the time the film began to shoot, in late April,
KMH
had been on the air for three months, and Burns was tapped to reprise his role of Bing’s pal on the big screen. He had already
played small roles in a few Saturday-matinee westerns, but
Rhythm on the Range
established him as a briefly dependable if minor movie star in his own right. Playing opposite Burns was another newcomer,
a veteran vaudevillian of nineteen, who some thought walked away with the picture. Martha
Raye was an original, and if her knockabout antics quickly dated, they overwhelmed audiences in the 1930s. Sharing a stage
with her parents since the age of three, Maggie, as she was known to friends, climbed the lower rungs of show business, desperate
to make herself known and liked. She perfected an aggressive and lusty attack, shorn of vanity. She was also a stunning singer,
and her powerful rhythmic sense and brassy projection might have earned her a reputation as a Swing Era warbler. Yet she trusted
only her comedie ability, a talent recognized by Charlie Chaplin, who cast her as his unsinkable victim in the 1947
Monsieur Verdoux
and allowed her to steal their every scene. Maggie’s wacky humor was bolstered by a rubbery face centered on a square maw
of a mouth and a curvaceous figure that gave a shivery edge to her manhungry bellow, “Ooooh boy!”

While singing at a club outside Los Angeles, she signed up for a Sunday-night turn at the more glamorous Trocadero, where
performers on the make entertained performers who could afford places like the Trocadero. In the audience were Jimmy Durante
and Joe E. Lewis, who assisted her with friendly heckling, and an astonished Norman Taurog, who offered her a screen test.
At Benjamin Glazer’s request, Sam Coslow went down to the joint where she was working and volunteered to write a specialty
number for her test. The result, “Mister Toscanini,” was perfect — part fake ballad and part raucous swinger. The test delighted
Glazer and Taurog, who resolved to add the song as well as Maggie to the picture. In order to avoid offending a living maestro,
however, a change in title was mandated. Reborn as “Mr. Paganini,” it became her trademark number. Coslow recalled that at
a sneak preview of the picture, Raye’s delivery of the song literally stopped the show — the audience cheered until the projectionist
reran the scene.

That response was appropriate enough for a movie that was, in effect, filmed radio — specifically, filmed
Kraft Music Hall.
It is not a succession of radio numbers strewn around a plot, like
The Big Broadcast,
but rather a variety show in which plot is routinely interrupted to accommodate specialty numbers. The action revolves around
Bing, but his character has little history or depth beyond his on-air personality. In this kind of picture, it does not matter
whether he is decked out in a Stetson or a yachting cap; he is basically the same guy — winning, then losing, then winning
the girl while singing
like nobody’s business. Ever the cordial host, he took it upon himself to soothe the nerves of movie newcomers Raye and Frances
Farmer, calming them down and boosting their confidence.

It’s a shame
Rhythm on the Range
didn’t have a script worthy of the potential chemistry between Bing and Farmer, whose brief, stormy career virtually began
here. (Howard Hawks saw the rushes and chose her for
Come and Get It,
her best film; the next year she joined New York’s Group Theater to star in Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy.)
An opalescent blond beauty, she was obliged to dye her hair bright red, as was Raye, the better to accommodate Karl Struss’s
cinematography. Farmer was slim, secure, and observant, an expert listener with the manner of a patrician coed, cocking her
head and looking at her costar with bemused innocence. She described the filming as “a long sweet nightmare,”
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claiming that she never really knew what the film was about. But as the only cast member who wasn’t called upon to be musical
or funny, she brought depth to a shallow role. The fetching contrast between Crosby’s chaste shyness and her glimmering frankness
defined a new motif in Bing’s movies: the KMH-era Bing, unlike the Sennett Bing, is always pursued, never in pursuit. Bing
and Dixie invited Frances and her husband, actor Leif Erickson, to Rancho Santa Fe. Bing was enchanted by her. After the wrap
he gave her a diamond necklace she treasured all her life.

Bing enjoyed making
Rhythm on the Range
and more than a decade later said the part of Jeff Larabee, the singing cattleman turned rodeo performer, was his favorite.
Much of the filming was done on location in the High Sierras, where, as he wrote, “every prospect pleases and only work is
vile.”
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He took full advantage of the opportunities to fish and ride and claimed that the experience of working on the picture inspired
him to purchase, in 1943, his own working ranch in Elko, Nevada. Bing avowed that he wore no makeup beyond a suntan and dropped
twelve pounds before shooting commenced, though he looks chunky in his flannel shirts and jeans. His most exhaustive preparation
entailed two weeks’ perfecting a technique for hand rolling cigarettes. In the film he hands the results to Frances; Mother
Crosby’s boy refrained from puffing onscreen.

With its quartet of stars and an octet of contributing songwriters, the picture is so free with in-jokes and non sequiturs
that it doesn’t even bother to deliver on the promised confrontation with the bad
guys who vainly contrive to kidnap the heiress. Bing’s Jeff Larabee was named after an offscreen character in
Two for Tonight.
His boss, the mannish Aunt Penny (Lucille Webster Gleason), suggests, as she stomps around Madison Square Garden, Bing’s
ancestor Cornelia Thurza Crosby, the trout expert who scandalized that very venue by wearing a green skirt seven inches above
the floor. Since Martha Raye was known for a drunk routine, one was pointlessly thrown in, allowing her to murder “Love in
Bloom.” Bing, who routinely used his movies to employ friends, found a slot for Louis Prima, whose jazz was pulling them in
at the Famous Door, and Bob Nolan’s Sons of the Pioneers, including Leonard Slye, who later changed his name to Roy Rogers.
His most important hand up was to a new acquaintance who had been working New York and Hollywood for years with infrequent
success, Johnny Mercer.

Born in Savannah in 1909, Mercer got his break as Bing had, with Whiteman. Although he sang with southern-fried gusto and
occasionally played juveniles (Leo McCarey thought he had potential as a film actor), Mercer was first and last a lyricist
of genius, known for his peerless ear for the vernacular. Except for two or three revues, however, he enjoyed little attention
on Broadway, and in two years out West he placed songs in only three pictures, notably
To Beat the Band
(“If You Were Mine”). But none were hits, and offers were drying up. While driving home to Savannah through Texas, he came
up with an idea — words and music — for a song about ersatz westerners. He showed “I’m an Old Cowhand” to Bing, who put it
in the film and later made a jolly and tremedously popular record with Jimmy Dorsey. “I really think he saved my Hollywood
career,” Mercer said.
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It marked the beginning of a long personal and professional relationship. “It was my good fortune to know him when he was
married to Dixie and his boys were small,” Mercer wrote a friend long afterward. “They often rode on my back and I enjoyed
the happy days around the track and poolside with this most attractive couple. She was very kind to me, as I was in such awe
of him and she knew it. Also, I was a Southerner, and she made me feel at home. I shall never forget their kindness to a very
young writer and performer.”
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The film rendition of Mercer’s song lacks the swinging élan of the record, but it’s the picture’s hot spot, a jam session
in which Bing, Raye, Burns, Prima, and the Sons of the Pioneers trade choruses, each leading to a satirical break, for example:

I know all the songs that the cowboys know,

’Bout the big corral where the doagies go,

’Cause I learned them all on the radio.

Yippy I O Ki Ay.

Bing displays many facets of his vocal and comedie charms. When he sings “Empty Saddles” mounted on a horse in Madison Square
Garden, his pianissimo head tones are uniquely affecting, a style derived from John McCormack and beyond the ken of most popular
singers; Sinatra, for example, never attempted it, though Presley did. Bing’s love of silent comedians comes through when
least expected; while serenading Farmer in a boxcar headed west (and hanging a modesty curtain in the process), he does a
funny Stan Laurel nod. When they finally reach the ranch and embark on “I’m an Old Cowhand,” he demonstrates all his patented
vaudeville shtick — jerky short-arm movements, tap dancing, torso wiggling — and, backed by guitar only, swings the tail of
his solo chorus.

Rhythm on the Range
easily returned its million-dollar investment as one of the top-grossing pictures of the year, number one on Para-mount’s
roster. It was, as usual, a smash in towns and cities all over the country, breaking several house records, including one
in Tucumcari, New Mexico, where the marquee promised, “Bessie Patterson in
Rhythm on the Range.”
Bessie, whose walk-on was so fast that even her mother had to forbear blinking to see it, was the girl who had won the Miss
College Humor contest in 1933, for which she was promised a bit part. Now that she was eighteen, Paramount gave it to her,
quietly. She was not necessary for the publicity campaign, which began with Bing, in cowboy regalia, whistling a few measures
of “Where the Blue of the Night” while preserving his hands and feet in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Kraft delivery
trucks were billboarded with the film for weeks. A thousand Kraft dealers in New York alone were provided window displays.
Jukeboxes were prepped with Crosby records. The reviewers went along, although
Variety
was at a loss for a pigeonhole: not really a western, it advised, not really a musical — the cowboy stuff takes place in
New York, the jazzy stuff takes place at the ranch, and most of it takes place on the road. Nevertheless, the paper concluded,
Crosby “will satisfy most everybody.”
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Bing had planned to spend the summer — the racing season — in New York with Dixie and made plans to travel there with Everett
and his wife. But with
KMH
finding its footing, John Reber persuaded him to postpone the ten-week vacation stipulated in his contract until September,
to continue broadcasting. Bing probably didn’t need a lot of persuading. On June 1 the Crosbys took possession of their new
home at 10500 Camarillo Street.
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The custom-tailored southern colonial could accommodate three boys and more, should any arrive, as well as servants. It was
a picture-postcard house, and the Crosbys loved it. Bing’s dad regarded it with awe as a “mansion or palace.” “It sure is
some place,” he remarked.
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A driveway curved through a ranging front lawn and up to the front door, while out back nearly half a block of trees made
way for a tennis court, pool, bathhouse, and chicken coop. The roof, flat but for two modest gables, shaded a porch the length
of the house with the help of six slim pillars. Inside, the spacious and pillared foyer faced a magnificent winding staircase
that led to the bedrooms on a balconied second floor. Downstairs were Bing’s den and bar, a playroom, and the living room
— with fireplace and imposing chandelier — where Christmas and other parties were held. The design and furnishings mixed Georgian,
Regency, Chippendale, Dresden, Victorian, and more; the walls were a panorama of linen, damask, and mirrors, the colors dark
oak and a sedate blue-gray. The twenty rooms were, on balance, snug and lived-in. An official of the American Institute of
Decorators remarked that no more than two rooms, the living room and dining room, could be described as formal.
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The new house motivated Bing to renegotiate contracts; his price soared to $150,000 per picture, $3,500 per broadcast.