Bing Crosby (102 page)

Barney had shared vaudeville bills with Bob and was present, in 1931, when the Friars saluted Bing. While reminiscing, Dean
took out of his pocket a card from a penny weight machine promising he would never lose his fortune. He said, “If I go back
to my hotel and find they locked me out of my room, I’m going to sue the weighing machine people.”
⁴⁹
They returned to the set to shoot the “Sweet Potato Piper” number, involving dance breaks. Barney suggested a step, and they
incorporated it into the routine. Bob recalled: “I said to Bing, ‘This guy’s too funny. He could help us with a lot of lines.
Why don’t we get him on the set?’ So Bing called the assistant director and said, ‘Tell them I want to put Barney Dean on
for writing here.’About five people came out from the front office to check, you know. They
were so thrilled to be talking to Bing, they never even mentioned Barney Dean, and Barney went on working with us until he
died. Every scene, we’d discuss it, and he would come up with a couple lines.”
⁵⁰

Barney demurred, for the most part. They devised the gags by themselves, he said, then gave him the credit. But he was always
around, trading off between Bob’s pictures and Bing’s and aiding both when they collaborated. For a number of years, they
arranged for Barney’s salary to be figured into the budget of each movie. In the
Road to Morocco
financial report, his contribution is described as twenty-nine bits and gags; a few are detailed, the rest summed up as “And
several pieces of business which are very difficult to explain.”
⁵¹
After the war, concerned about his future, Bing and Bob asked Paramount to install Barney permanently on the writing staff.
Paramount did not decline outright but dragged its heels.

Basil Grillo, who had just been hired to supervise Bing’s business interests, was inadvertently caught up in the dispute over
Barney’s job. At that time he hardly knew Bing and needed him to sign some checks. Bing told him to meet him in his dressing
room the next morning at nine but never showed. Instead, Leo Lynn came and told Basil to meet Bing in his dressing area on
the set. It was early 1946, and they were filming
Welcome Stranger.
“I go out there and they’re shooting this big production number, ‘Country Style,’ with maybe a hundred dancers. And all of
a sudden Bing comes off the set, and I think he’s coming to the dressing room. But he never shows. Now I’m really hurt. I’m
taking all of this very personally, because I am sure he doesn’t like me.”
⁵²
Bing disappeared for more than an hour, then returned to the set as Basil silently composed his resignation speech. “He saunters
in and they get ready to shoot when he says, ‘Wait a minute, one of my men is here, I have to see him.’A hundred extras are
waiting and Bing comes over to the dressing room. He greets me like I was his long-lost son, puts on that damn Irish charm
— could charm you right out of your socks. And he sat down, signed the checks, chitchatted, and so on, wasting time. None
of this makes sense to me at all.”
⁵³

Leo Lynn eventually explained it to him. “This particular day,” Grillo learned, “Bing and Bob went into the front office as
soon as they got in the studio, and said, ‘Look, we want Barney Dean to have a contract, and we want it now. And we feel very
bad, we feel very ill
about this whole thing and we’re not going to be able to do much work until Barney gets a contract.’ “ Bing had been stalling
everyone all day — his idea of a work stoppage. Bob, also filming on the lot, did the same thing. “At two o’clock that afternoon,”
Basil said, “Barney had his contract signed, sealed, and delivered. That’s the kind of power they had, though they never really
used it except as a last resort.”
⁵⁴

Shortly afterward, Bing put Grillo in charge of Bing Crosby Enterprises dictating a letter to that effect to his staff; no
deals of any kind could be consummated without Basil’s personal approval. But Grillo continued to feel like an interloper
until he went to see Bing one day in his dressing room. “I’m sitting there, waiting for Bing, and Barney comes in. He was
a real nice little guy, but he didn’t know that anybody in the world existed other than Bing and Bob. Everybody else he called
Major. He says, ‘Hi Bas, how are you today?’ Well, geez, I nearly fell off my chair. From Barney, this was real recognition.
It meant I was accepted.”
⁵⁵

Songwriter Johnny Lange recalled a number he wrote for Walt Disney’s
Song of the South
(“Uncle Remus Said”): “Bing sang it several weeks in a row on his show, because I put the name Barney in the song. I drove
Barney once to see the Ritz Brothers so he could sell postcards. Not long after that Bing and Bob Hope made a job for him
at Paramount and he was making five hundred dollars a week.”
⁵⁶
Gary Crosby recalled Barney sitting off to the side of the set as the scenes were blocked. “After you block, you step out
to get your makeup fixed while the lighting men light the thing and there’s about a twenty- or thirty-minute period there,
and the old man and Hope would go over to Barney and say, ‘Give us something to make this thing better.’ So Barney threw lines
to them. Then they come back and the director would say, ‘Roll ‘em,’ and the dialogue would be different from what they had
just rehearsed. Barney was a sweet guy. Dad loved Barney Dean to death. He was at our house all the time.”
⁵⁷

Bing’s aversion to hospitals and funerals, evident after Eddie Lang’s death and more pronounced after the media circus attending
Dixie’s, was absolute. His friends accepted his detachment as characteristic. He was consistent, demanding that his own funeral
be held privately and secretively, before the cock crowed. So while some people groused, few were surprised that he did not
visit Barney in the hospital, where he died of cancer in 1954. Barney’s death, two years after
Dixie’s, was hard on Bing, but his way of acknowledging it was typical, a fitting gesture that — mutual friends agreed — Barney
would have relished. Within weeks of the burial, Bing was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on
Person to Person,
a popular television program that specialized in fake candor, with Murrow sitting in the studio, asking prearranged questions
of famous people who were filmed in their homes.

As Bing’s segment concluded, Murrow said, “Bing, thanks for letting us come visit you tonight….” Bing interrupted him. “Wait
a minute, you’re not gonna get away. I have something else I want to show you. Don’t take off. This is really my pride and
joy.” He strode into the hallway, as another camera picked him up, and, standing before a huge painting, said, breathlessly
and without garbling a word:

Everyone has something in their home that they really like to go into rhapsodies about. This is a canvas by Sir Alfred Munnings,
who was the head of the British Royal Academy for years. He’s considered the finest painter of the English country life and
country scene. It represents the hunting scene and it recalls a very amusing story to me. Barney Dean, the late Barney Dean,
the beloved gag writer who worked for us for so many years. We were having a party here. It was getting late-ish, four-ish
or so. Just a few stragglers out in the hall, two or three people, you know how they like to dawdle at a party, hate to say
good night. And Barney was looking up at the picture sort of ruminatively and I said, ‘Barney, what’s on your mind?’ Barney
was from New York, Brooklyn, never left the pavement, never been off the bricks in his life, and he looked at the picture
and said, ‘How come we never do this no more?’ Ed, I know you’re in a hurry. You’ve got a time factor back there in television
that you’re fighting all the time, so I want to say good night to you.
⁵⁸

Another remembrance was inserted two years later into
High Society,
when Trummy Young, the trombonist in Louis Armstrong’s band, mutters, as they approach C. K. Dexter-Haven’s mansion, “I forgot
my library card.” Barney made the crack when Bing brought him to a New Year’s Eve party at Winthrop Rockefeller’s estate in
Tarrytown, as he recounts in his autobiography (Barney makes an early appearance, page two). Later at that same affair, as
they stood unrecognized — Bing wasn’t wearing his hairpiece — on a gallery watching an indoor tennis game, a reveler asked
them, “Has anyone seen Millicent?” Barney offered, “Maybe she’s upstairs playing polo.”
⁵⁹

Barney Dean stories, like those told of comedians Groucho Marx, Joe Frisco, W. C. Fields, or Phil Harris, became part of the
currency of Hollywood wit. Skitch Henderson, the pianist whose career Bing launched when he made him a regular on his 1946
radio show, was present for one of Barney’s most frequently cited one-liners. “There was a coffee shop across Hollywood Boulevard
and all of us would go — Bing, the writers, Barney, of course. And the Hollywood cops suddenly decided they didn’t want any
jaywalking on Hollywood Boulevard. So we all cross the street, about five of us, and a cop strides up to us and puts his shoulder
over Barney Dean, and before the cop can say a word, Barney asks, ‘How fast was I going officer?’”
⁶⁰

“I loved that man,” Eddie Bracken said. “He was great. We were doing a picture and a horse stepped on his toe. The first thing
a normal person would say is ‘Ow!’ or scream. Barney turned around, looked at the horse, and said, ‘Jew hater.’”
⁶¹
The picture was Para-mount’s wartime flag-waver,
Star Spangled Rhythm,
in which Bing and Bob also appear. Barney showed up in
Variety Girl, Duffy’s Tavern,
and
Thanks for the Memory
— in all, two pictures with Bing and Bob, one with Bing, one with Bob. He is himself the subject of a punch line in
Road to Zanzibar:
Bob complains that he wants to return to the United States, and Bing says, “Yeah, you’ll wind up in Barney Dean’s Beanery,
blowing up bloodwurst,” which doubled as a joke about Bing’s bu-bu-bu
bs.

“There were nine million writers on the set, and all Bing or Bob wanted to talk to was Barney,” Mort Lachman recalled. “You
know what they were jealous of? They were jealous of Barney’s affection.”
⁶²
“He was their lucky charm,” Shavelson said. “They had to have Barney around, and he was such a nice guy. Bing was going to
New York once, so he said to Barney, ‘Can I do anything for you?’ Barney says, ‘Yeah, go up to One hundred and twenty-first
Street and so-and-so, the big building on the corner; you go to the thirteenth floor, ring the bell for Mrs. Rosenzweig. She’ll
come to the door, she’s a nice lady. Give her five thousand dollars.’ Bing asks why. Barney says, ‘She’s my mother.’ Barney
was the kind of guy who gave the head of the studio, Buddy DeSylva, a gold watch, and he had engraved on it, ‘This is a lot
of shit, but when you don’t have any talent, you have to do these things.’”
⁶³

“Barney didn’t have a lot of confidence with women,” Rory Burke, Johnny’s daughter, recalled.
⁶⁴
After Jimmy Van Heusen joined the inner circle as Burke’s partner, he took it upon himself to fix up Barney. A bachelor of
legendary appetites and connections, Van Heusen, a licensed pilot, was once presented with an airplane by one of Hollywood’s
top madams. “They would go whoring,” Rory recalled. “I really should not have been hearing these things, but we had big ears
and we’d kind of listen around the corners. But they couldn’t talk about it when Bing was around; he wouldn’t have liked that.
Not at all. Bing was something of a gentleman in that respect. He might have gone along with them, but he wouldn’t be talking
about it. Everybody had their part in looking out for Barney.”
⁶⁵
Barney called his protectors the hoodlum gentlemen, and with Bing and Bob occupying different social circles, he became a
tether between them.

But there was a dark side to the friendship. Antisemitism was rife, and Bing occasionally received hate mail, calling him
a “Jew lover. “ Rory Burke remembered Bing reading aloud one letter after the war, which said all the Jews should be gassed.
Barney said, “Well, that’s one way to handle us.”
⁶⁶
Intolerance was a bond between them, because anti-Catholic hatred was also rampant. Rory recalled that before she and her
siblings were sent to parochial schools, their father cautioned them not to tell anyone they were Catholic.

Barry Ulanov grew smitten with Barney while writing his book about Bing in 1948, invoking Etienne Gilson and Saint Augustine
in his attempt to describe “the ‘cry’ and the ‘clamor’ of Barney’s heart.” He concluded, “It is no mere coincidence that this
little Russian Jewish dancer with four steps should be such a close associate of the American Catholic singer.”
⁶⁷
Fifty years later he continued to ruminate about the relationship. “He was the jester, but there was a sour note, a pathos
— if not tragic, then at least pathetic — that reinforces my understanding of Bing’s irony. Bing never freed himself from
the fear that the source of his gift would dry up. There was always some small element of anxiety that fed into his sense
of irony, which I have persuaded myself is his great talent — not just an amiable standing aside, but something better than
that, more thoughtful than that. You’d never think of Barney Dean and Bing Crosby as a natural connection — so different in
their backgrounds, in their attitudes. But I think Bing saw in him his shadow. Things Bing could not
quite acknowledge, he could accept in Barney, some of whose stories had a very somber aspect. Of course, he was a very lovable
man, too.”
⁶⁸

It is nonetheless obvious that many of Barney’s lines don’t travel well; the cautionary adage “you had to be there” is inescapable.
The same is true of many
Road
wisecracks, at least on paper — not much to daunt the Marx Brothers, let alone Oscar Wilde or Billy Wilder.
⁶⁹
Yet the pictures abide as classic comedies, able to sustain grateful smiles even when they fail to elicit outright yucks.
Along with the films of Preston Sturges and the last works of Lubitsch, they are among the few Hollywood comedies to survive
the war years, successfully recycled for every subsequent generation. The film historian David Shipman expresses a prevalent
tone when he writes, “They have turned out — surprisingly, I think — to be ageless.”
⁷⁰
Gilbert Seldes called them the “second great series of comedies with a group of stars made after sound came in,” the first
being those of the Marx Brothers.
⁷¹
Their enchantment derives not from the jokes — whether copyrighted, kibitzed, or ad-libbed — but from the infinitely appealing
and enigmatic rapport between the two principals.