Bing Crosby (91 page)

Bing’s sides with Bob Crosby followed “Mexicali Rose” onto the hit parade in the closing weeks of the year, but his last hit
of 1938 was a return to solemnity that launched a new tradition for the record business and the country. In December Kapp
issued Bing’s “Silent Night”: not a new version, but the one he had made in 1935. Before 1938 reissues of any kind were rare
and usually came out on bargain-label subsidiaries so as not to compete for consumer dollars with new product; during the
past decade Victor, Brunswick, and Columbia combined enjoyed no more than six or seven reissue hits. But with the vast increase
in record sales in 1938, reissues became more profitable. RCA re-released old records by Tommy Dorsey and Kay Kyser; Brunswick
did the same with early sides by Raymond Scott, Louis Armstrong, and most timely of all, the Boswell Sisters — their 1935
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” rode the coattails of the duet by Bing and Connie. Jack followed the trend when he reissued Decca’s
first big hit, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around,” and its first Christmas song, “Silent Night.”

But “Silent Night” was like no other reissue, thanks to its seasonal attachment. Kapp realized that it had the makings of
a national observance. Bing’s holiday classic could be brought to market year after year, with dependable results. Over the
next few years, the annual release of Christmas songs would become a recording-industry staple and a holiday tradition as
steadfast as Christmas trees, fruitcakes, and Dickens. Where once Americans had celebrated with carols, hymns, and the
Messiah,
they would now grow accustomed to hearing — and buying by the millions — pop-record perennials, first Bing’s “Silent Night”
and (as of 1942) “White Christmas,” and then a spate of new songs conceived to exploit the demand, from Nat “King” Cole’s
“The Christmas Song” and Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to Harry Simeone’s “The Little Drummer Boy” and Bobby
Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock,” and on and on.

And what of his concurrent movies?
Paris Honeymoon
was remembered by its participants for a pun, alas not in the picture, delivered grandiloquently by Bing in reference to
his costar, Franciska Gaal. The Budapest-born actress and cabaret star was brought to America by Cecil B. De Mille for
The Buccaneer,
the first of three Hollywood pictures she made in 1938, after which — her starlight diminished — she returned to Europe.
A beautiful, wired Kewpie doll with beseeching Luise Rainer eyes and the pep of Miriam Hopkins on a diet of triple-espressos,
she played basically the same role in
Paris Honeymoon
(which has no honeymoon and only a few minutes of Paris) and MGM’s
The Girl Downstairs:
an unyielding peasant girl who lands a millionaire. When she wasn’t chewing up scenery and actors, she raged off camera at
cast and crew. After one violent tantrum, she stormed off the set. Bing broke the stunned silence:
“I’d
like to divide Gaal into three parts.”
⁴¹

The picture, rushed to fulfill Bing’s three-picture quota that year, was not without promise. Paramount reassembled the
Waikiki Wedding
team. Frank Tuttle and Karl Struss shot a Frank Butler and Don Hartman script, and Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger supplied the
songs. The studio certainly appeared confident. It issued a publicity release revealing that Bing might rethink the “freak”
⁴²
clause in his contract prohibiting it from billing him above the title: “It may be ‘Bing Crosby and Franciska Gaal in
Paris Honeymoon,’”
the release
timorously announced.
⁴³
The studio even attempted to have a print of the film interred, instead of a Crosby record, in a 6,177-year time capsule
created by Thornwell Jacobs of Oglethorpe University.
⁴⁴
Paramount assured Jacobs that its latest cellulose film stock would last 100 years but failed to explain what use that would
be to a capsule under seal until 8114. (Jacobs chose 6,177 years because that’s how far back from 1938, he said, the Egyptians
developed calendars.)

Bing himself knew the picture was a runt, and far from accepting star billing had his name listed, after the title, on the
same card as five other actors, of whom Akim Tamiroff, possibly inspired by Gaal, wins honors for over-the-top histrionics
that broke up Tuttle and Bing. His big speeches, as the con-man mayor of a Ruritanian country, are filmed in single-camera
setups over Bing’s shoulders, with few reaction shots to break his timing. The plot reverses the male fantasy of a few years
earlier in favor of a Cinderella variation; instead of an heiress forsaking her kind for a common Joe, the self-made millionaire
abandons his wealthy fiancée to anoint a poor serving girl. The trouble is that Bing’s heiress as played by Shirley Ross (his
leading lady in
Waikiki Wedding)
is more appealing than the wacky laundress played by Gaal. By the time Gaal’s Manya tells Bing’s Lucky she loves him (really?
he had no idea), Bing plays their scenes as though he were contemplating root canal.

Bing’s Lucky is every bit as superstitious as Fred Astaire’s Lucky in the 1936 classic
Swing Time,
which is also contrived around a postponed engagement. Strangely, no one remarked on the similarities. The movie begins with
an inside joke. Lucky’s butler, Edward Everett Horton (known for his pictures with Astaire, but an old acquaintance of Bing’s
from
Reaching for the Moon),
retrieves a shoe from a horse that trumpet player and memoirist Max Kaminsky would later describe as “a moth-eaten, sway-backed,
ancient yellow nag.”
⁴⁵
The horse had been a birthday gift from Joe Venuti, so Bing put it in the picture. Returning with the horseshoe, Horton points
out a joke that Bing’s radio audience could appreciate: Lucky wears argyle socks with his dress suit.

Frank Capra rated Bing “in the top ten of all actors” and explained why: “He has a complete faculty of being able to work
with props; you give many actors props and they can’t do it, but he can juggle balls and have Bob Hope cracking ad-libs on
the side and still say his
stuff.”
⁴⁶
Bing’s first song as Lucky, a rich cowboy, is a sterling example. He dons his Stetson and sings “The Funny Old Hills,” casually
performing a world of shtick: making and twirling a lariat, chewing, spitting, hopping up and down on a bed, stroking a nonexistent
mustache (a favorite bit of mime he repeated in
East Side of Heaven, If I Had My Way,
and elsewhere). Bing amused the crew with one ad-lib that did stay in the picture. He is supposed to kiss Ross, who wears
a veil. Instead of lifting the veil and taking her in his arms, as every other actor would have done, he tells her, “You better
lift up that pup tent,” before bestowing his peck.
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Ross and Bing sing a bathtub duet that got past the censors because Bing telephones his part, crooning, “I have eyes to see
with,” long-distance, as she soaks.

The mediocre score yielded three substantial hits, arranged by Trotter: the loping “Funny Old Hills,” the exceptionally well-sung
“I Have Eyes,” and the patronizing “You’re a Sweet Little Headache.” Bing’s energetic warbling could not, however, salvage
“Joobalai,” a fatuous attempt at a peasant folk song that portends the kind of novelties Perry Como made his province in the
1950s. The records did not help the picture, Bing’s least successful to date. When it debuted at the New York Paramount in
January 1939, live music won the day. Bob Crosby’s Bob Cats, wrote the New York
Daily News
reviewer, were “the answer to an alligator’s prayer.”
⁴⁸

East Side of Heaven
was an altogether more pleasant experience for Bing and moviegoers. It developed a situation that had first been exploited
in
Pennies from Heaven:
Bing as a surrogate father. After the back-to-back disappointments of
Doctor Rhythm
and
Paris Honeymoon,
he needed a pick-me-up movie quick and, having fulfilled his Paramount obligation for the year, was entitled to produce this
one himself. His friend David Butler said, “Why don’t you let me do your outside picture?”
⁴⁹
Butler, riding high as the director responsible for the incredibly profitable stardom of six-year-old Shirley Temple, had
left Fox and was negotiating a deal with Universal. Bing told him to go for it.

Butler surrounded himself with story men, chiefly the then ailing William Conselman (he died a year later) and James Kern,
who had come to Hollywood as a member of the comedy-vocal group the Yacht Club Boys (sort of a musical Ritz Brothers). Out
of respect for
Conselman, Butler gave him the screenwriting credit on
East Side of Heaven
but in interviews for the Directors Guild of America’s oral-history program said that he and Kern devised the story. In any
case, Universal pounced. To be sure, the studio was desperate and would likely have signed Bing had he wanted to play Ming
the Merciless in a Flash Gordon serial. Deanna Durbin was its only moneymaker and, for that matter, only star. Early in the
year two erstwhile RKO executives, Nate Blumberg and Cliff Work, were recruited to revive Universal’s fortunes, and by the
early 1940s the company would be in the chips with W. C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Maria Montez, and a monster revival.
East Side of Heaven
was a transitional project, and in order to get Bing back on the lot for the first time since
King of Jazz,
Universal conceded him a 50 percent profit split in exchange for his services and personal investment of half the final budget.

It was a wise deal for all concerned. With Bing’s money on the line, he was doubly inspired to make an entertaining picture
while keeping an eagle eye on the budget. The latter function he delegated to Herb Polesie, who served as his associate producer
(the movie credits do not acknowledge a producer, though Polesie shares a card with Butler for original story). A wonderful
cast was assembled, with Joan Blondell, Mischa Auer, Irene Hervey, C. Aubrey Smith, Jerome Cowan, and a personality from Bing’s
first days in Los Angeles, Jane Jones, the big-boned singer and hostess of the speakeasy where Mildred Bailey worked. The
production number with Jones, as the owner of the Frying Pan Cafe, introduced — as singing waitresses — the Music Maids, who
simultaneously became regulars on the
Kraft Music Hall.
For good measure, Matty Malneck and his orchestra and pianist Joe Sullivan were also drafted.

For Universal, the most important member of the supporting cast turned out to be the infant daughter of a milkman, who upon
hearing of the studio’s need for a ten-month-old baby dropped four snapshots along with the morning milk on the doorstep of
Charles Previn, Universal’s musical director. The pictures were turned over to Butler, who told
Life
he hired the baby without asking its sex and did not know he had a girl in a boy’s part for two days.
⁵⁰
He later admitted he tested numerous babies and found the milkman’s, Sandra Henville, to be the cutest. “I said, ‘Nobody
will know if this is a boy or girl. We’ll call it a boy.’ We put the kid in as Baby Sandy, and the kid was wonderful.”
⁵¹
The studio made another picture with Baby Sandy, then disclosed that she was a girl and made a bunch more — eight in all,
and all moneymakers. Only the studio of Maria Montez could have mined silver from a gurgling genderproof infant. When her
three-year contract ended, Sandy did a cameo for Republic and retired at age four.

“East Side of Heaven
was good fun under the expansive aegis of D. Wingate Butler,” a buoyant Bing wrote Johnny Mercer after completion. “Never
engaged in a more pleasant and, I hope, profitable enterprise. The budget was astonishingly low and, if John Public takes
to the picture favorably, we’re a cinch to make a meg or two.”
⁵²
Butler had known Bing since the Cocoanut Grove. He directed Dixie in
Fox Movietone Follies
and mistakenly believed that Dixie and Bing met at a party he and his wife gave for a visiting German opera company. “Bing
was there, and he sang with all the opera fellows, and we were very friendly,” he recalled.
⁵³
The two men grew closer at Del Mar (“the happiest days of my life”).
⁵⁴
An early investor, Butler led the cheering squad for Ligaroti at the famous match race.

Born in San Francisco in 1894, Butler began in movies as an actor for Thomas Ince in 1913 and earned major parts in numerous
pictures for D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, and John Ford before he turned to directing in 1927. An impersonal but prolific and
reliable filmmaker, he made lucrative comedies and musicals for every major studio over a thirty-year period before turning
to television in the late 1950s (all six seasons of
Leave It to Beaver,
among dozens of episodes for other programs). The year before his death-in 1979, Butler was awarded an honorary lifetime
membership in the Directors Guild of America — the fifth director so honored. A portly, funny, easygoing man with a passion
for sports, he was a perfect match for Bing.

As Universal anticipated, the production was pragmatic and efficient. With a script completed early in the new year of 1939,
the cameras began to roll on Friday, January 13. Polesie’s first status report was optimistic; they scheduled the picture
for thirty-six days, but figured forty more reasonable. A week later he presented a budget — “worked over and reduced in every
possible way”
⁵⁵
— of $686,000, noting they had fallen behind two days and would exceed that sum if they fell behind any more. The weekly
status reports were written with an inflated sense of drama (“only fair progress during the
past week,” “a rather disastrous setback last night”),
⁵⁶
as if to lowball expectations, but the model production averaged fifteen minutes of footage a week, and most of the delays
concerned Sandy, who was not permitted to work more than four hours a day. Butler maximized the shoot by switching to a different
set when Sandy was whisked away; if he did not have to shoot close-ups, he replaced her with a doll.