Bing Crosby (86 page)

Bing’s finesse was of no use a couple of weeks later, when Tuttle was directing a scene set in the Central Park Zoo in which
Andy Devine’s inebriated character frees the animals, including a cage full of monkeys. A net had been draped over the soundstage,
but as the actor opened the latch, a lot of monkeys — 150 according to a newspaper account, 300 according to a Paramount press
release, 350 according to Bing’s autobiography — broke out, ripping the net apart and escaping. Four hysterical hours later
forty of the monkeys had been seized; the rest toured Los Angeles, many of them swarming through trees in the district of
Belmont High School. Cohen offered students a one-dollar bounty per head for every monkey captured. Monkey sightings were
reported for weeks.

The studio got better publicity when Bing challenged Bob Hope to a round of golf. Hope was about to film
The Big Broadcast of 1
938, the picture in which he and Shirley Ross sing “Thanks for the Memory,” so the outing bolstered two pictures. On the first
hole only, for the benefit of press photographers, Ross caddied for Bob and Mary Carlisle for Bing. The loser was supposed
to work as a stand-in for a day on the winner’s picture. Bing won handily, though no one knows if Bob spent a day baking under
the lights on the
Doctor Rhythm
set.
⁵⁷

The fun and games turned treacherous by late January 1938, after principal shooting ended, when the film was assessed at $350,000
over its $800,000 budget. Various technical problems were blamed, as well as Cohen’s desire to give greater prominence to
Bea Lillie. Zukor charged in, demanding control. Cohen’s only leverage was his possession of the script and cutting print,
and he withheld them. Paramount seized the negative, created its own print, and tried unsuccessfully to get Tuttle to supervise
the editing. Why Tuttle refused is not clear, as he omits the episode from his unpublished memoir, though he writes at length
of what a delightful experience the film was for him and Bing: he describes working with Bea Lillie as “one of
the biggest kicks of our careers.”
⁵⁸
The studio assigned Herb Polesie the impossible task of cutting the film with no more than, as
Variety
noted, “his own conception of what the playwright had in mind.”
⁵⁹

Emanuel Cohen was a tiny (under five feet) tin-pot Napoleon who became head of production in Paramount’s darkest days, 1932,
making numerous enemies as he bullied artists and displaced such industry stalwarts as B. P. Schulberg and Jesse Lasky. After
his own fall some thought he was a model for the eponymous double-crosser in
What Makes Sammy Run?
by B. P.’s son, Budd, who denied it. Herman Mankiewicz said Cohen’s only virtue was his diminutive size: “You don’t have
to see the sonofabitch — unless you look under the desk.”
⁶⁰
Yet in the early 1930s, when Paramount’s value plummeted and Zukor (unable to repurchase stock he borrowed to acquire a chain
of theaters) declared bankruptcy, ham-handed Manny was credited with keeping the studio afloat. He encouraged adult features
like A
Farewell to Arms
and the sex farces of Mae West and Carole Lombard and launched the unexpectedly nimble crooner, Crosby. Now it was over for
him. In exchange for a settlement of $400,000, he turned over all materials relating to
Doctor Rhythm
and relinquished claims to the nine pictures he made for distribution by Paramount, as well as the lease to his studio property.
He was said to be planning productions with Gary Cooper and Mae West, but they never materialized.

Tuttle credited Polesie as “a contributor to the success of
Doctor Rhythm
… as adviser on story construction and picture planning,” but others also had input on the post-production edit.
⁶¹
Acting on Zukor’s orders to revise the footage to evenly balance Bing and Bea, LeBaron hired producer George M. Arthur to
supervise, committing $150,000 for new scenes pending the response to a sneak preview. How much work was done is not known;
but when the completed film was officially previewed several weeks later at the Los Angeles Paramount, it ran eighty minutes
and there was no sign of Louis Armstrong. None of the remarkably favorable reviews noted his disappearance — except in black
newspapers and England’s
Melody Maker,
which raised a ruckus, reporting that the cut was made “in spite of Bing Crosby’s urgent request to leave Louis in the film.”
⁶²

Bing told the
Pittsburgh Courier,
a black paper, that cuts were made to accommodate increased footage of Bea Lillie, affecting his
and Andy Devine’s scenes as well as Louis’s. He continued to exert pressure on Paramount, which ultimately agreed to supply
a complete print with the Armstrong sequence to theaters requesting it. Only theaters in black communities did so, including
the Regal in Chicago, which billed Louis as the star, and the Regent in Brooklyn. Those prints are not believed to have survived,
and except for a few stills, the sequence is presumed lost. Late that summer Larry Crosby offered
Melody Maker
an explanation, denying “racial or professional jealousy” and repeating the need to give more footage to Beatrice Lillie.
⁶³

In truth, the film is so dizzy with specialty numbers, mistaken-identity gambits, and chases that Louis’s number might very
well have slowed the proceedings. Besides, his featured number, “The Trumpet Player’s Lament,” which Armstrong recorded for
Jack Kapp at the same session that produced two of his masterpieces (“Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and “Jubilee”), was unworthy
of him. Trashing jazz and everything he stood for (“I wish that I could play like José Iturbi…”), it was perhaps better off
buried. Yet in noting that “Louis appeared in front of a white [actually mixed] band in the film,” Larry leaves the unmistakable
impression that Zukor took to heart the warnings of southern exhibitors.
⁶⁴
Larry concluded, “Bing, who is Louis’ bosom pal, was dissatisfied with the results and has sworn to get Louis a big part
in the next Crosby musical.”
⁶⁵

Alas, that musical was far from “next.” It was postponed eighteen years, until they made
High Society
at MGM (1956), though there were many collaborations on radio, a movie cameo, and a hit record (“Gone Fishin’”) in the interim.
Bing’s feelings for Louis are captured in a story told by Joe Bushkin, the pianist who led the quartet that backed Bing on
his tours in the mid-1970s.

This will give you an insight about Bing. We went to the track to see an Australian horse called Turn Unstoned. So I always
like to bet, not as a big gambler or anything, at least fifty dollars…. So I see the fifty-dollar window, there’s three people
there. I can go right there and get the goddamn ticket and tell Bing, I got you covered. But I thought, that was not a housebroken
way to operate with Bing. I was very conscious of Bing’s style and I figured if he said, Put two dollars down, I was going
to give him a two-dollar ticket. I had to do that. The goddamn line at the two-dollar window — this was before they had the
automatic teller — was huge and I get to the thing, sweating it out,
because the horses are on the track. And I order twenty-six two-dollar tickets, fifty dollars for me, two for him. And the
guy keeps punching two-dollar tickets on me and the bells rang and people in back of me are really pissed off because they
can’t make a bet. It was a scene. So I go back and I told Bing what I bet. He said, What? He really got uptight with me. He
said, For chrissake, if you win is it going to change your style of living? I said, No, Bing. He said, But if you lose, think
of all the Louis Armstrong albums you could have picked up for that money.
⁶⁶

Doctor Rhythm
made money, but not the usual windfall, although the reviews were generous.
Newsweek
reported that at one preview, the laughter drowned out “substantial portions of the dialogue” while “members of press, profession
and public were heard to proclaim it Bing Crosby’s best picture and many took in much more territory.”
⁶⁷
Lillie received much of the attention for her parody of a coloratura and her routine involving dinner napkins. The movie’s
grosses were helped by the early release of Bing’s recordings of the film’s songs, which received extensive radio play, especially
the cheerful “My Heart Is Taking Lessons” and the winsome “On the Sentimental Side.”

A great deal was made of the opening sequence, one of the most surreal in any American film of the period. Screenwriters Swerling
and Connell created it as a throwback to the René Clair and silent-movie conceits Tuttle employed in
The Big Broadcast. A
doctor (Bing), policeman (Devine), Good Humor man (Sterling Holloway), and zookeeper (Rufe Davis) meet at night at the zoo,
unfurl a banner proclaiming their fifteenth annual reunion of a relay race they won at P.S. 43, gorge on food and beer, sing
the school song, strip down to running suits, and re-create the race around the seal pool. In the morning Bing, boozily blissful,
sings “My Heart Is Taking Lessons” to birds in the park and is overheard by Carlisle, who tosses him a coin, while Devine
dives into the pool and is bitten on the seat of his pants by a seal. Except for songs and grunts, the opening eight minutes
of the picture are completely silent. Paramount boasted that
Doctor Rhythm
had less dialogue “than any American film in years” and claimed to have “evolved a new method of unfolding a story.”
⁶⁸

The film becomes all too conventional when the dialogue kicks in, though the plot offers a twist on the usual Crosby formula:
Bing loves the girl, but the girl loves a scoundrel, until one of Bing’s ballads, “This Is My Night to Dream,” brings her
to her senses. Despite the
title, rhythm is kept to a minimum. Yet Bing holds his own with Lillie in the concert parody, “Only a Gypsy Knows,” complete
with a patty-cake bit and a mock ballet.
⁶⁹
“Bing, who is a born athlete, leaped into the air and did a couple of entrechats,” Tuttle wrote. “I believe he was prouder
of this accomplishment than of winning an Academy Award for
Going My Way.”
⁷⁰

Sing You Sinners
was Claude Binyon’s baby. In the years since
College Humor,
he and director Wesley Ruggles had developed an enviable track record with a series of edgy screwball comedies that advanced
the careers of Paramount players Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, and Carole Lombard, notably
The Gilded Lily, The Bride Comes Home, I Met Him in Paris,
and
True Confessions.
As a result, Binyon worked as an equal with Ruggles, an A-list director. The younger brother of Charles Ruggles, Wesley entered
the business as an actor, leaving high school to organize a minstrel troupe. Mack Sennett made him a Keystone Kop in 1914,
and he soon graduated to editor and director, assisting Chaplin on his last six films for Essanay.

Ruggles and Binyon had been looking for an idea that would suit Bing, their neighbor in Toluca Lake. The writer suggested,
“I’d like to do a story about Crosby as I see him at his home and as I’ve watched him at the racetrack.”
⁷¹
The director agreed, and Binyon came up with a story about three brothers who hate to sing but have no other way to pay the
bills. Like princes in a fairy tale, the eldest is solid, responsible, and hardworking, and the second is a ne’er-do-well
dreamer striving for a pot of gold and unwilling to settle for anything less. (The third brother is a boy caught between the
two.) Bing was slated for the role of the no-account, who earns desperately needed money and squanders it on a racehorse.
William LeBaron, who hoped to find a racetrack story for him, was pleased, as was Bing, who after reading the script remarked,
“I guess I can act myself.”
⁷²

The brothers, who live with their mother in the reduced circumstances of a working-class home stomped by the Depression, are
Joe, David, and Mike Beebe, and the script was initially called
The Unholy Beebes,
a title Bing admired, though Paramount figured people would not know how to pronounce it and demanded a change. For a time
the brass favored
Harmony for Three.

Bing’s siblings were originally to be played by Don Ameche and Mickey Rooney, but Ameche fell out quickly and Fred MacMurray
replaced him as David. Rooney remained with the project until shortly before shooting began in April 1938, when he was suddenly
pulled by MGM. Ignoring Paramount’s casting department, Ruggles told his assistant director, Arthur Jacobson, “Find me another
Mickey Rooney and we’ll start the picture.”
⁷³
It so happened that Jacobson was scheduled to attend a benefit for the Motion Picture Relief Fund at the Biltmore Hotel,
emceed by Bob Hope; in addition to movie stars, a few vaudeville acts were recruited to fill out the bill, among them the
O’Connor Family, with its sparkling twelve-year-old wunderkind, Donald.

Jacobson made an appointment with O’Connor. “I asked him if he could act. He said, ‘If it’s entertainment, I can do anything.
I can sing, I can dance, I can act.’” Asked if he could ride a racehorse, Donald replied, “No, but I’ll learn,” and did.
⁷⁴
Jacobson asked him to listen to prerecordings by Bing and Fred and harmonize with them. Within days Donald knew the script
cold. On Monday morning Jacobson brought him to see Ruggles, who immediately advised Paramount to sign him. O’Connor had been
on the stage since he was three days old. He had played every kind of theater and circus. When he met Bing, he felt as though
he already knew him:

I would see him on the screen in between shows and, like everybody else, I always thought he was a friend of mine. So when
I met Bing, he was extremely nice. Had a wonderful smile. And he never said too much to me on the movie. He was very, very
patient with me. I was a very small child at twelve and I was riding this big goddamned racehorse and I was scared to death
of this horse. There was one scene down at the track, an exposition scene, where I tell him I’ve been bribed, I’ve got the
money and I feel awful, I’m letting the family down. It’s a long scene and Bing is in front leading me on the horse and he’s
pumping me and at the same time reassuring me not to be worried. We get right down to the end and I blow my lines. So we turn
the horse around, all the way back, and it was a cold day at Santa Anita, and we have to start again with all the crying and
everything. I blow the line again. We must have done that forty times. And Bing never complained, not once. I told him, “I’m
so sorry, my mind just can’t get this.” He said, “Don’t worry about it, kid, you’ll get it, we have no place to go.” We had
a lot of fun on that movie. He treated me like a pal.
⁷⁵