Bing Crosby (36 page)

Never before had a Hollywood studio bestowed upon a first-time director as much money and control as Universal yielded to
John Murray Anderson; nor would any studio follow suit until RKO imported Orson Welles from New York a decade later. Whatever
he desired, he received — dozens of extras in flamboyant and costly foreign costumes, a 500-foot bridal veil, the first-ever
Technicolor cartoon, film rights (estimated at $50,000) to “Rhapsody in Blue.” He
did accept a few constraints. The nightclub act of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante held out for too much money, and negotiations
with Rodgers and Hart fell through. But he was able to reassign the score to the team that had written his recent Broadway
flop,
John Murray Anderson’s Almanac:
Jack Yellen and Milt Ager, old-school songsmiths whose many hits included “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” and “Happy
Days Are Here Again.” He kept only two of Mabel Wayne’s tunes, including the waltz “It Happened in Monterey.”

Anderson also recruited sixteen chorus girls and two sister acts: the Sisters G, a Yiddish vocal and dance team from Europe,
and the Brox (originally Brock) Sisters, a close-harmony trio who got their start by auditioning for Irving Berlin on the
telephone from their home in Edmonton, Canada. They became regulars in Berlin’s
Music Box Revues,
including one in 1924 staged by Anderson. The Brox Sisters were already in Hollywood; along with Cliff Edwards, they introduced
“Singin’ in the Rain” in MGM’s
The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
Bing became smitten with the pretty married one, Bobbe.

Junior, preoccupied with his production of
All Quiet on the Western Front,
not only allowed Anderson three months to rehearse and shoot the picture but permitted him to improvise sequences as he advanced,
shooting acres of film. A script was transcribed after the fact. Rehearsals began November 6, but as of December 11 Universal
had yet to nail down a final cast. An ad in
Variety
boasted “the biggest news you’ve ever heard since the advent of the audible screen… a luxury of song, dance, music, and joy.”
³⁸
The promised lineup of performers included Joseph Schildkraut, Mary Nolan, Ken Maynard, and Hoot Gibson, none of whom appeared
in the finished film. The shooting was fraught with problems. The Technicolor lighting was so severe that it peeled the varnish
off the violins (a Warners technician measured the heat on a closed Technicolor soundstage at 140 degrees). It was impossible
to move the crane, erect sets, or film dancers while recording music, a problem Whiteman solved with a prophetic fiat: “Let’s
prerecord it.”
³⁹

Most early recording engineers in the movies were moonlighting radio technicians, who considered prerecording an affront to
their craft. They played out the old debate between live (radio) and canned (records) entertainment, a debate that peaked
in 1946, when Bing produced the first transcribed network radio show. The soundmen
argued that the public had accepted direct recording in earlier films and pointed to disastrous attempts at dubbing in Fejos’s
Broadway.
Although a few musicals had been prerecorded in part — most notably, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” in MGM’s
The Broadway Melody
a year earlier — live recording remained the standard procedure until 1932, when Paramount prerecorded
Love Me Tonight
and Warners followed suit with
42nd Street.
Whiteman, though, was adamant and he prevailed. That decision not only expedited the filming but produced clean musical tracks.
The cast mimed to records as carpenters hammered the sets, just like in the recently departed days of silent movies.

No incident in this period is more emblematic of Bing’s ambivalence about stardom and success than his arrest that November
for drunk driving. As maddening as the seemingly endless production of
King of Jazz
was, the picture held tremendous promise for Bing. His screen tests and auditions had led nowhere, but Whiteman offered him
a prominent role in what everyone expected to be one of the most important pictures of the coming season. In addition to numbers
with the Rhythm Boys, he would be featured as soloist in a lavish episode built around the key song in the Yellen-Ager score,
“Song of the Dawn.” He scuttled his chance.

The trouble began with a tiff during the rehearsal of “A Bench in the Park,” a Brox Sisters number for which the Rhythm Boys
provided harmony. As recalled by Bobbe Van Heusen, nee Brox, Bing arrived on the soundstage cheerful and slightly flush with
drink. Bobbe had argued with him about his drinking before. This time she got mad. “I was told to sit on his lap during the
number and I refused. I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “It was really silly, like kid stuff, you know. But I wouldn’t do it. So
he went out and got drunk and he practically drove through the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. And of course he
was arrested, and came to rehearsals with two detectives for the rest of the picture.”
⁴⁰

Despite several versions of the tale and the disappearance of Bing’s arrest record, no one disputes the basic facts. After
the rehearsal and argument with Bobbe, Bing walked to Whiteman Lodge, where an elaborate studio-catered party was in progress,
celebrating the end of the first week’s filming. The musicians played, Bing sang, and shortly
after midnight, a woman asked him to drive her to her hotel. As they approached the Roosevelt, Bing made a left turn into
an oncoming car with such force that he and his passenger were knocked over the windshield and onto the pavement. He was fine,
but the woman was bloody and unconscious. Bing carried her into the Roosevelt lobby, where the house doctor assured him that
she was all right. Just then a policeman collared him and the other driver — who in Bing’s account was more inebriated than
he was — and took them to Lincoln Heights jail.

Kurt Dieterle, the violinist Bing roomed with, observed, “Well, Bing is a boy that does what he wants when he wants to do
it. This night I went out for a date after I had my dinner, and the woman cooking for us said, ‘How about Mr. Crosby?” I said,
‘Just leave it on the stove, he’ll be back later, I’m sure.’ I went out and came home. He wasn’t home yet, must have been
after twelve, one o’clock. I was in bed when the phone rings, and who was it? Bing. I said, ‘Where in the hell are you?’ He
said, ‘I’m in jail.’ Said he got into a confrontation. ‘It’s cold here, bring me a couple blankets.’That was the end of our
apartment with Bing. I gave it up and moved in with Roy Bargy and his family.”
⁴¹

The next morning Jimmy Gillespie arranged bail and a trial was set for the following week. Bing agreed to plead guilty and
pay the fine, but at the hearing he could not resist riling the judge. He arrived in court directly from the golf course,
wearing green plus fours, an orange sweater, and check socks. The judge, noting the H.B.D. (had been drinking) complaint,
asked if he was familiar with the Eighteenth Amendment. Bing’s reply ran along the lines of “Only remotely” (according to
his brothers’ account)
⁴²
or “Yes, but nobody pays much attention to it” (according to his own).
⁴³
He was sentenced to sixty days.

Unable to contact his friends, Bing stewed in his cell for a day, until his brother Everett discovered he had not come home.
Bing was stung by the severity of the sentence, and Whiteman was irate. The combined pleas of Ev, Whiteman, and Laemmle succeeded
in getting him transferred to a Hollywood jail with a liberal visitation policy. After a great deal more pleading, Bing’s
new jailers agreed to a scheme that allowed him to work at the studio under police escort and return to his cell after the
day’s shooting. But it took two weeks to
make that deal, and Whiteman could not or would not postpone “Song of the Dawn.” He gave the number to John Boles, a thirty-five-year-old
former World War I spy and stage actor who had made the transition from silent to talking films with his chesty operatic voice
and conventional Hollywood good looks: dark hair, trim mustache, square jaw, gleaming eyes. As the closest thing to a movie
star in the cast, billed second to Whiteman, Boles was an obvious choice for the number, an ersatz aria with the martial optimism
expected of at least one song in every Hollywood revue.

Bing steamed, complaining repeatedly to Everett that Paul should have waited for him. Whiteman, sick of waiting, argued that
he could not afford to postpone a major production number, though at this stage he undoubtedly felt little compunction in
lowering the boom on Bing. Whiteman barely acknowledged him when he returned to the set. Bing’s continuing obsession with
the accident and its aftermath is evident in his repeated assertion — until the day he died, decades after there was any reason
to airbrush the story — of his innocence and relative sobriety. He may indeed have been the victim of a bad driver and a zealous
cop. But it was his brazen court performance that ruined his chance and required him to explain to Kate why he would not be
featured as promised.

In one of his memoir’s oddest passages, Bing considers what might have happened had he performed “Song of the Dawn” in
King of Jazz.
Observing with a trace of resentment that it “certainly helped” Boles, he concludes that it all worked out for the best,
because the number might have short-circuited his career. “He had a bigger voice and a better delivery for that kind of song
than I had,” Bing wrote. “My crooning style wouldn’t have been very good for such a number, which was supposed to be delivered
a la breve like the ‘Vagabond Song.’ I might have flopped with the song. I might have been cut out of the picture. I might
never have been given another crack at a song in any picture.”
⁴⁴

Bing had a gift for mocking his own powers: note the humble reference to his “crooning style.” But any doubts he or anyone
else may have entertained about his ability to sell “Song of the Dawn” had been put to rest right after the film wrapped,
when he recorded it with Whiteman. Bing never sounded more determined to prove how stentorian he could be; yet even belting
that operatic rubbish, he
lightens an overwrought arrangement with a touch of impudent swing. Still, he had self-inflicted a professional wound, and
his indignation and guilt would not let it heal. Bing suffered several disappointments during the next year. Sometimes he
feared he would never get another shot at Hollywood, while Boles, who had made many films, continued to make many more. However
facetious Bing meant to be in his 1953 memoir, his desperation back in 1930 was real, and it survived in his fixation on a
song and a movie that are no better remembered than John Boles.

On New Year’s Eve the picture’s production was threatened again by a car accident, in which violinist Mischa Russell suffered
four broken vertebrae and trombonist Boyce Cullen a broken arm, though this time the other driver accepted full blame. A week
later, in an attempt to quell rumors of catastrophe, Paul, Grofe, Anderson, Rosse, Markert, and featured vocalist Jeanette
Loff took a seasonal-greetings ad in
Variety,
announcing their joy in completing
King of Jazz.
When that failed to squelch the gossip, Junior Laemmle arranged for reporters to visit the set to watch him shake hands with
Whiteman.

Bing’s jail sentence was ultimately reduced by a third, and he was released before the New Year. Bobbe Brox never did agree
to sit on Bing’s lap for “A Bench in the Park,” which was consequently staged with the Rhythm Boys chirping behind the bench.
“He had to come to the rehearsal with those detectives and he looked so terrible. He didn’t like it very well,” Bobbe recalled,
laughing. “But he was so charming, so very charming. I loved Bing and we were good friends for a long, long time. He was lots
of fun — great sense of humor, fun to be with. But he did something a lot of boys do at that age. They do not know how to
hold their liquor. That was the only thing about Bing that I didn’t like. Of course, he grew up, thank goodness, and never
did that anymore and we remained friends.”
⁴⁵

In her last years Bobbe claimed that she and Bing might have married but for his drinking. Apparently she had forgotten that
a year earlier she had married William Perlberg, who booked the sisters and had helped secure the Montmartre engagement for
the Rhythm Boys. Perlberg later became a film producer and worked closely with Bing. After she ended their long marriage (some
thirty-five years), Bobbe married another Crosby associate, songwriter Jimmy Van
Heusen. Bing sent them a telegram in 1969 that, in Bobbe’s recollection, read: “I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives
me to see my two oldest friends married — to each other.”
⁴⁶

The film finally wrapped on March 11, 1930, and by then the Whiteman band had resumed its theatrical jobs in Los Angeles and
San Francisco, reaping tremendous gates.
(Variety
reported that when the band went into “Rhapsody in Blue,” a woman advised her girlfriend, “That’s the Old Gold theme song.”)
⁴⁷
During the weeks leading up to the film’s April 20 premiere in Hollywood and May 2 premiere in New York, Whiteman ceaselessly
plugged the cast and songs on radio and recorded the main tunes for Columbia. Universal announced that Anderson would be retained
to direct a second film with Whiteman. Everyone was hopeful.

They were whistling in the dark. At $1.5 million,
King of Jazz
cost more than four times the average musical. Translated into today’s dollars, the budget was as high as a modern special-effects
action extravaganza (about $75 million) — this in a year when movie tickets averaged thirty-five cents. The industry began
to realize that the vogue for filmed vaudeville was over shortly before
King of Jazz
debuted, when Paramount Pictures released
Paramount on Parade
(a revue packed with real stars) and saw business fall sharply in the first weeks. Universal’s hopes sank precipitously.
King of Jazz
opened well at the Los Angeles Criterion.
Variety
projected first-week receipts of $18,000. But business tapered off so badly by the third day that the theater took in only
$13,000.
Variety
ran an unusually vicious review, attacking Anderson (“who knew nothing about picture direction and didn’t seem to know any
more either at the finish of the film”)
⁴⁸
and accurately predicting a two-week life span. Most critics, however, were dazzled and supportive.