Bing Crosby (75 page)

After Trotter left Kemp in 1936, he visited the West Coast for the first time, as a tourist. He had taken an apartment for
a few months when Burke arrived with his wife to work on the film. Like Burke, he was twenty-eight, and for a while all three
lived together. When Burke told him about the picture, Trotter protested that he was on vacation and turned it down — until
he saw the songs. He arranged all but the Armstrong number. On the day the recording of the score was completed, Trotter packed
his car and headed for New York, where a job awaited him with ARC, supervising recordings by the Andrews Sisters, Duke Ellington,
Raymond Scott, and others, including a few historic sessions by Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson. (John Hammond, the initiator
of the Holiday series, dismissed Trotter as an intrusive executive, but the presence of Bunny Berigan and
Pennies from Heaven
songs would seem to support Trotter’s claim to having produced those sides.) In June 1937 he received a wire from Larry Crosby:
CAN YOU BE HERE 2IST. DORSEY LEAVING
.
YOURE TO TAKE OVER MUSIC ON KRAFT SHOW
.

The Swing Era was in full flower, and Jimmy Dorsey felt he was missing out. Tommy and many musicians he came up with were
now
leading popular bands, and their record sales not only were unprecedented for jazz but were stimulating the whole recording
industry. And here was Jimmy, nationally prominent because of his role on
KMH
yet reined in by it all the same. He was encouraged to leave by Kapp, for whom he had already scored one hit, and his agent,
Cork O’Keefe. With Fud Livingston writing his arrangements (“Too hot for you, Uncle Fud?” Bing ad-libs on their tub-thumping
version of “I’m an Old Cowhand”) and an appealing Crosby-style baritone in Bob Eberle (who attended each
KMH
broadcast as a band member but never sang on the show), Jimmy was ready for the road. Carroll Carroll later implied that
had Jimmy not quit, he would have been removed by Kraft in favor of a more versatile musical director. In any event, Jimmy
left after the July 1 broadcast and prospered with the Swing Era.

Trotter could hardly have been more different. Of his July 8 debut, Cal Kuhl’s only comment was that the featured instrumental
was “not effective.”
⁵⁸
But that was Bing’s final show of the season. When he returned in October, Bing and John Scott became working chums. Writing
for Hal Kemp, Trotter had developed a vibratoless staccato style that he characterized as a refined Schottische rhythm; Johnny
Mercer, a fan, more colorfully described it as a “typewriter” attack, clipped and orderly.
⁵⁹
Trotter had also become accustomed to doubling the melody for singers who needed all the help they could get, while Bing
preferred an arranger who let the singer alone. He surprised Trotter by emphasizing that opera orchestrations do not double
the singer’s line and asked him to write “just that way.”
⁶⁰
Bing chose the songs he sang on the air, in contradistinction to those he waxed for Jack Kapp. After each show, Trotter recalled,
“Bing would go into the booth and select his numbers for the following week.”
⁶¹
He listed them on the left-hand page of a loose-leaf binder; a secretary typed them on the right-hand page. Trotter took
the selections and went to work arranging them, his job for the next seventeen years.

He was a huge but nimble and amiable man, as obsessed with cooking and antiques as he was with music. Though immensely well
liked, Trotter was something of a loner, traveling the country to sample fabled restaurants or to London to visit Georg Solti,
his lifelong friend. His solitary, self-sufficient manner appealed to Bing.
John Scott, a popular weekend and dinner guest, maintained a friendship with the Crosbys long past the
KMH
and Decca years, encouraged by Bing’s second wife, Kathryn. Trotter never married, never lived with a lover; if he was gay,
no one knew for certain. Alan Fisher, the Crosby butler during his second marriage, said, “He was totally asexual. Wasn’t
interested in women, wasn’t interested in men, wasn’t a closet anything. He was very close to the first Mrs. Crosby and, if
anything, closer to the second Mrs. Crosby, who adored him. He formally helped decorate their homes. Extremely good taste,
beautifully mannered, witty and funny, the children loved him. John Scott Trotter coming to stay was always a joy. Bing Crosby
loved him, I’d have to say that. And if he was going to confide in anyone, I’d almost say it would have been him. They always
sat in the library to talk.”
⁶²

“He was fun,” Johnny Burke’s daughter, Rory, remembered. “He was at our pool all the time, a very large man in his swimming
trunks, a little flamboyant with a big face, lots of curly brown hair, burly, strong, light on his feet — I can still see
him jumping off the diving board.”
⁶³
Stories of his devotion to food are legion. “When we had the private house he used to come often,” Frieda Kapp recalled.
“A lovely fellow. Big. Once he came to the house after one of our holidays and we had a lot of gefilte fish left. And Jack
says, ‘Give some of this gefilte fish to John.’ I said, Are you crazy? John, a southern gentile, what’s he going to do with
it? He ate the entire platter.”
⁶⁴
Carroll Carroll told of a weekend morning when John called Carroll’s wife to say he was making vichyssoise and wanted to
bring them some. They arranged to have dinner that night, but John never showed. He apologized in the morning, explaining
that the soup was so good that he ate it all himself, then went to sleep.

In selecting musicians for the band, a new experience for Trotter, he drew on Hollywood studio players and added a small string
section (it grew over the years) to the conventional big-band instrumentation. To sustain the swing and spontaneity Bing demanded,
he peppered the ensemble with jazz musicians, including two former Whiteman trumpeters, Andy Secrest, whose solos carried
a hint of Beiderbecke’s bright lyricism, and (when he could get him) Manny Klein, whose lustier attack was in demand all over
town. Trotter also recruited trombonist Abe Lincoln, who became a Dixieland regular; drummer Spike Jones, who achieved much
fame as a musical parodist; and,
most important, guitarist Perry Botkin, who had worked as a New York session man with Victor Young, Red Nichols, and Crosby
himself, on the later Brunswicks. Like Trotter, Perry was a large man and a Crosby loyalist; he occupied Eddie Lang’s chair
for the next two decades. He was also a studio politician, and Trotter appointed him contractor, in charge of hirings. As
the band grew, with violas and cellos, Trotter took to farming out many if not most of the arrangements. Among the young writers
he apprenticed were Nelson Riddle and Billy May.

“Really, I can think of so many times when he has rescued me from glaring gaffes and melodic clichés,” Bing wrote of Trotter,
“when his choice of material, his arrangements, his use of voices and instruments meant the success of an album or a record.”
He continued with the usual excessive modesty: “If I am able to distinguish the good from the bad, if I know anything about
music at all, what little I know rubbed off Trotter onto me.”
⁶⁵
What surely rubbed off on him was John Scott’s musical conservatism. For if he helped make
KMH
homier than ever, the cost was the accelerated weaning of Bing from jazz and his corresponding conversion to a more decorous
and conventional style. Trotter was Bing’s man, not Decca’s, but as a versatile musician who preferred the middle of the road,
he was a dream come true for Jack Kapp. Trotter conducted the majority of Bing’s records, but Jack knew better than to allow
him full rein.

As the impoverished thirties caromed into the murderous forties, the middle of the road — alongside Bing — was for many the
only place to be. Crosby embodied stability, his life an apparently open book, his voice a healing balm. “The other man puts
a nickel in the phonograph,” John Steinbeck writes in
The Grapes of Wrath,
“watches the disk slip free and the turntable rise up under it. Bing Crosby’s voice — golden.”
⁶⁶
Bing was everywhere. KMH filled out the world’s mental picture of the man it knew from records, pictures, and fan magazines.
If those close to him found him remote, ultimately unknowable, those at a distance thought they knew him about as well as
you could know a man. Everyone thought he could sum up the public and private Bing, including a calypso legend named Roaring
Lion. In 1938, when Portuguese businessmen paid his way from Trinidad to New York to popularize the music of the islands,
the Lion
played for President Roosevelt and appeared on Rudy Vallées show. After Bing dropped by for one of his recording sessions,
the Lion commemorated his idol with a song released by Decca in 1939. It was called, simply, “Bing Crosby.”

Of all the world’s famous singers

That I have ever seen

On the movie screen,

Of all the world’s famous singers

That I have ever seen

On the movie screen,

Lawrence Tibbett and Nelson Eddy,

Donald Novis and Morton Downey,

Kenny Baker and Rudy Vallée,

But the crooning prodigy is Bing Crosby.

Bing has a way of singing

With his very heart and soul,

Which captivates the world.

His millions of listeners never fail to rejoice

At his golden voice.

They love to hear his la-da-de-da [whistles]

So sweetly and with such harmony

Thrilling the world with his melody.

Mention must be made of Bing’s romantic life,

Centered on his wife.

As lovely as the soft sylphs of poetic dreams

Her smile is like the moonbeams.

A former star, we know she can sing.

But now her voice she has reserved

for her sons and Bing.

So, so happy must be Bing Crosby

That he married a beauty like Dixie Lee.

I wonder if you heard him singing that song

“May I (be the only one to say I)?”

And yet I’m wondering if you heard again,

“(Every time it rains, it rains) Pennies from Heaven”?

But “Love Thy Neighbor” was the most thrilling song,

And “Git Along, Little Dogies, Git Along.”

So sweetly and with such harmony

Thrilling the world with his melody.

Bing has a most interesting personality

Beloved universally.

He has two private horses, Double Trouble and Ligaroti,

Pipe smoking is his hobby.

He has a queer eccentricity
—

Takes off his hat very infrequently.

So one and all, let’s unanimously

Shout three cheers for this golden voice prodigy.
⁶⁷

Where most of the Hollywood stars look upon personal publicity as the lifeblood of their business, stooping to inane invention
and trickery to get it, Bing thumbs his nose at it…. [He] is unco-operative because he just doesn’t give a damn.

—H. Allen Smith,
Life in a Putty Knife Factory
(1943)
¹

Bing’s role as the Technological Man reflected his introduction to the world of music and entertainment; much as Louis Armstrong’s
career reflected his reverse initiation in New Orleans’s honky-tonks. For Bing, the passkey had been the Edison gramophone
his father brought home when he was three. It introduced him to a procession of performers — concurrently and without prejudice
— that included Irish tenors, Jewish vaudevillians, Sousa marching bands, barbershop quartets, jazz bands, and dance bands.
Canned music was unknown to the young Louis, who encountered no less varied a musical banquet— from blues, rags, and minstrelsy
to opera, quadrilles, and marches — in the flesh, at picnics and funerals and on the street. When Louis was able to purchase
his first wind-up phonograph, as a teenager, his favorites included Caruso and John McCormack, whom he valued for his “beautiful
phrasing.”
²

As Bing’s interest in music matured, he continued to find inspiration in the recordings he and Al Rinker memorized and copied.
The
Musicaladers were, in effect, a garage band — school kids emulating the popular music of the day. But Louis served a true
apprenticeship with the very giants he venerated, learning their music and customs firsthand, working alongside experienced
men who encouraged his every step. Louis established records as the definitive texts for a new art (his glorious bands, the
Hot Five and Hot Seven, existed only to record), yet music remained for him a social experience that required an audience
to complete the circle. Bing established all-time statistics with his extended stay at the Paramount Theater, yet music remained
for him a skill best realized through mechanical reproduction. After the war, when he made several appearances on Bing’s radio
show, Louis played to the audience while Bing played to Louis.