Authors: Gary Giddins
Paramount’s second smart move was to assign the picture to Frank Tuttle, who in 1932 was one of the studio’s most highly regarded
contract directors. A Yale graduate who had served as assistant editor at
Vanity Fair
and as publicist for the New York Philharmonic and
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (he married dancer Tatiana Smirnova), Tuttle came to Hollywood as a writer and was encouraged to
direct by veteran filmmaker Allan Dwan. He was tall, lean, bespectacled, donnish, and famously efficient; he helped found
the Screen Directors Guild. Tuttle had made stars of Clara Bow and Eddie Cantor in silent pictures and would do as much for
Bing, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, no one played a more prominent role than Tuttle in Bing’s
first decade in Hollywood. They worked together on six pictures between 1932 and 1939, and when Bing formed his production
company in 1945, he hired Tuttle to direct its first feature. Bing once named him and Leo McCarey as his two favorite directors
— a remarkable statement, as McCarey was widely ranked with John Ford and Frank Capra as one of America’s greatest filmmakers
in the years between the advent of sound and the end of the Second World War.
Yet Tuttle was soon forgotten, his reputation demolished by his craven performance before the House Un-American Activities
Committee in 1951.
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Tuttle had been a Communist Party member for eleven years, breaking off in early 1949. After a witness named him and his
career was put on the line, he signed a loyalty oath and appeared as a friendly witness, confirming thirty-six names the committee
already had and inadvertently adding three more (wives of the accused). Tuttle’s liberal politics were well known in the years
before he joined the party and dismayed no one, certainly not Bing. During the filming of
The Big Broadcast,
Tuttle introduced Bing to John Bright, a screenwriter
(The Public Enemy)
who was raising money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. Bright asked Bing for a contribution. “He asked me one simple
question,” Bright remembered, and quoted Bing as follows: “Nine colored boys in the South accused of rape. They didn’t do
it. How much do you want?”
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Bing wrote him a check for $1,000.
Looking back on that incident, Bright attempted to explain Bing’s generosity. “He had worked with black people in the music
industry all his life and had never shown any prejudice. That was the early thirties. Later on, he became very, very reactionary.”
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In truth, he was far from reactionary and rarely discussed politics at all. Despite his resentment of confiscatory wartime
taxes and a traditional Catholic’s distrust of change, his conservative inclinations tended to be undercut
by his live-and-let-live disposition. Nancy Briggs learned as much in 1960, when she worked as Basil Grillo’s secretary in
the largely Republican offices of Bing Crosby Enterprises, Inc. “I was at the water cooler getting a drink,” she recalled.
“I was so proud, I had just gotten a JFK button. Larry [Crosby] came back and said, ‘You don’t wear that in this office.’And
all of a sudden there was Bing — he just appeared out of nowhere. He said, ‘Larry, you don’t tell anybody what to do in this
office.’ He said, ‘You don’t tell anybody not to wear a JFK button or a Republican button or a Communist button if they want
to.’ Larry kind of folded and Bing said, ‘Good luck, Nancy,’ and walked off.”
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Bing was tagged a conservative for criticizing FDR during the 1940 election, for appearing in a Chesterfield-sponsored propaganda
short during the Korean War, and for supporting religious causes, like The Christophers (a progressive organization also supported
by Jack Benny and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson), yet he let it be known that he opposed the Vietnam War, advocated the legalization
of marijuana, and despised Richard Nixon. In politics, he publicly declared himself only once, for Wendell Willkie, the most
liberal Republican presidential candidate of the century, after Theodore Roosevelt. He instantly regretted it, and though
he later appeared on radio with Democrat Alben Barkley (Truman’s vice president) and played golf with President Kennedy, he
never again professed sides, never allowed himself to be exploited by or photographed with a politician. Basil Grillo said,
“He didn’t believe actors should be influencing people on serious matters. It didn’t make any difference what it was… he thought
actors should not use their prominence that way.”
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Like several men important in Bing’s career (Buddy DeSylva, David Butler, Stuart Erwin), Frank Tuttle had worked with Dixie
before he encountered Bing, directing her in Clara Bow’s futile comeback,
No Limit,
which Dixie had filmed shortly after her wedding. But he bonded quickly with Bing, who, like many actors, enjoyed working
with Tuttle. “He was very much a gentleman,” Tuttle’s daughter Helen Votachenko observed of her father, “not at all abrasive.”
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Bing especially admired his comédie talent. With few exceptions, most of his work was bland, but given the right story and
performers, Tuttle could summon forth a visual flair worthy of his masters, Ernst
Lubitsch and René Clair. He made his name with the startlingly inventive 1926 Eddie Cantor silent comedy,
Kid Boots,
and in 1933 he directed Cantor’s finest talkie,
Roman Scandals,
the giddiest antifascist pro-socialist picture of Hollywood’s golden age. Today Tuttle is best remembered for the 1942 Graham
Greene thriller,
This Gun for Hire,
the scathing portrait of capitalist venality that paired and made stars of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. But
The Big Broadcast,
his thirty-ninth picture, is perhaps his most charming film. It not only launched Bing but initiated a successful series
at Paramount and helped revive the benighted musical, which got an even bigger boost a few months later with the release of
Warner Bros.’
42nd Street.
An homage to René Clair,
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who pioneered the blending of musical and visual effects in such influential films as Sows
les Toits de Paris
and
Le Million, The Big Broadcast
is a brisk confection that marries song, sex, comedy, and trickery and might almost be considered an American
Le Million,
with radio replacing opera as its setting. Tuttle adapted several of Clair’s trademarks, among them long traveling shots,
miniature sets, accelerated motion, recitatives, sound effects, and silent sequences, adding his own touches, including animation,
visual puns, and clever editing that integrates into a Hollywood setting footage of entertainers (Cab Calloway, Kate Smith,
Arthur Tracy, Vincent Lopez, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters) who were shot at Astoria Studios in New York.
Writer-producer Benjamin Glazer concocted a story, and George Marion Jr. dressed the bare-bones situation with details drawn
from Bing’s own life. But if Paramount had no qualms about presenting Bing in the role of a reckless, alcoholic libertine,
it drew the line at allowing his ears to wave and his pate to shine. Bing was required to spend the better part of a day at
the House of Westmore, while Wally Westmore’s protégé, Harry Ray, fitted him for a hairpiece and glued back his ears. Wally,
who later named Bing his all-time favorite client, flatly refused to work on the singer when he first arrived at Paramount,
and tried to discourage the studio from signing him. His animus stemmed from an evening two years earlier when he had taken
his wife to hear the Rhythm Boys at the Cocoanut Grove and Bing retched onstage. So it fell to Harry Ray to overcome Bing’s
aversion to a procedure described by the makeup clan’s chronicler, Frank West-more: Ray had to “stick back the ears and then
wrap Crosby’s head with a turban until he was sure they’d stay pinned back.”
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Ray tried
to convince Bing to have surgery to flatten his ears (recently undertaken by George Raft), but Bing refused, much as he loathed
the daily ritual. “It was terrible,” Bing remembered. “They put this glue back there and it hurt, it would sting, and after
a few days, the skin would get raw. Oh, I hated it. They kept popping out — the lights would be hot and all of a sudden one
of these things would pop out, and the director would holler, ‘Cut! Fix that guy’s ears.’”
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Tuttle was more concerned with Bing’s acting. After screening the Sennett shorts with Glazer, he expressed his delight with
Bing’s voice and personality, and concern about his awkwardness: “Bing didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.” Tuttle’s
fears were allayed as soon as they began shooting. “Bing was extremely cooperative and his sense of comedy was first-rate
from the opening shot,” he wrote. “His approach was casual and he liked to move around. We worked out interesting pieces of
business so that he wouldn’t have to just stand there and deliver a number.” The physical business minimized Bing’s tendency
to gesticulate, and his acting improved markedly. Tuttle admired Bing’s predilection for working with top performers and learning
from them, and he got a kick out of Bing’s verbal gifts: “Between shots he spoke a language of his own, a slang-enriched Americanese
that is almost impossible to describe, but was amusing as it was unique.”
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Bing did win one argument against Hollywood conventions. He refused to accept top billing, reasoning that if the film tanked,
it would sink his career. Although he played the lead role, Bing was second-billed to Stu Erwin, who had a track record in
movies. (By contrast, Guy Lombardo refused to appear in
The Big Broadcast
after learning he would be billed below Crosby.)
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Bing considered his judgment vindicated the following year, when Kate Smith’s much ballyhooed
Hello, Everybody!
turned out to be her movie hail and farewell. He believed that if she had been billed as one of many performers rather than
as the sole reason for making or seeing the picture, she might have survived the debacle. Billing aside, few radio stars were
able to make the transition to movies; after Bing, the most successful was Bob Hope, who debuted at Paramount six years later
in
The Big Broadcast of 1938.
Bing never took his stardom for granted. Even when he topped the Quigley box-office poll five years running (an unprecedented
achievement), his movie contracts always contained “the Crosby clause,” as
it became known in the industry, enjoining producers from billing him alone above the title. His insistence on sharing credit
— or blame — prompted David O. Selznick to cite him as the smartest man in movies. (Selznick had another reason to value his
acuity. In 1937 Bing sent him a note to suggest Hattie McDaniel for the role of Mammy in
Gone With the Wind,
to which Selznick replied, “Dear Bing, Thanks for the suggestion. And also for not wanting to play Scarlett.”)
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Almost two decades later, when
The Country Girl
was released in 1954, much was made of Bing’s courage in playing an alcoholic, because of his own past. Yet from the beginning,
his movies were filled with autobiographical references that track every stage in his life, from his drinking days to his
love of horses and sports to his problems dealing with his sons. Those allusions range from inside jokes to blatant reenactments
and contribute to a portrait of a highly unorthodox film idol, one who always got the girl yet was most admired for playing
a celibate. Audiences and critics often failed to notice the darker aspects of his persona and the way it linked Crosby’s
life and art. Consider
The Big Broadcast.
The picture opens with a shot of an electric speaker, from which a voice announces, “Clear all stations for the big broadcast!”
As the camera pans over a board of publicity photos of radio stars, the performers come alive one by one and sing a few bars
of their theme songs, beginning with Bing’s peppy strain of “Where the Blue of the Night.” During the ensuing credits, an
orchestra plays “Please,” one of only two songs (“Here Lies Love” is the other) written for the film, and the first of many
hits tailored for Bing by the resourceful team of lyricist Leo Robin and composer Ralph Rainger.
The only sound heard in the first episode is the beating of a clock, a ticktocking rhythm to which the action is precisely
measured, partly through the use of reverse action, still frames, and other camera tricks. When the sponsor, Mr. Clapsaddle,
tromps down the corridor, a terrified cat liquefies and slides under a door. The first words are not spoken but displayed
in a wire that fills the screen one word at a time,like the typed opera review in
Citizen Kane:
BING ISN’T HERE YET
. Panic ensues. When a station manager motions for Cab Calloway to fill in for Bing, music supplants the ticking and a clarinetist
mimes
on a rubbery instrument (literally a licorice stick, slang for clarinet). Clapsaddle, who is the president of Griptight Girdles,
orders the station to fire Bing — the Griptight Troubadour — for chronic lateness. The scene cuts to accelerated footage of
Bing driving a cab through traffic while the cabdriver lounges in the backseat. Bing screeches to the curb and is mobbed by
hundreds of women, including an elderly lady who leaps from a wheelchair, all in silence except for the musical score. Disheveled,
covered in lipstick, Bing races to the studio in time to sing the last line of “I Surrender, Dear.”
Bing is absentminded, we are told, because he is in love with Mona Lowe (Sharon Lynne, whose every appearance is augured by
a few bars of Ralph Rainger’s “Moanin’ Low”), whom he plans to marry. This disturbs Anita, secretary to station manager George
Burns, who tells her Bing isn’t her type. She sighs, “Yes he is. He’s everybody’s type. That’s the trouble.” Anita is played
by sloe-eyed Leila Hyams, an alluring former model and vaudevillian whose brief Hollywood career included a couple of shock
movies
(Freaks, The Island of Dr. Moreau)
and an enchanting and largely improvised two-minute scene teaching Roland Young to play drums in Leo McCarey’s
Ruggles of Red Gap.
The purehearted Anita will surely win Bing from the haughty vamp, or so we think, especially after Mona suddenly elopes with
a millionaire.