Bing Crosby (52 page)

A trio of telephone operators harmonize over Mona’s perfidy, which Bing doesn’t know about: “He blew out of here so bright
and breezy / And he’s probably in some speakeasy.” Cut to Stu Erwin as jilted millionaire Leslie McWhinney, getting drunk
in the same speak where Bing, unaware that he too has been jilted, is buying rounds. Bing attempts to cheer him up, but is
crestfallen to find that Leslie has never heard of Bing Crosby. After learning from a newspaper headline how low Mona is (much
as the real Bing learned from a newspaper that Dixie had taken a powder), he gets loaded with Leslie, as Arthur Tracy and
his accordion maul “Here Lies Love.” A sensational traveling shot through a model of the city shifts the scene to Bing’s art
deco apartment, where he convinces Leslie that they have no choice but suicide. As soon as he raises the subject, the cinematography
changes: Crosby looms in a doorway, Leslie is beset by shadows (a parody of James Whale’s horror style at Universal). The
radio blares “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.” They turn on the
gas and collapse in a stupor, hallucinating a skull and ghosts and… no, not Frankenstein’s monster, but Arthur Tracy and his
accordion.

Anita drops by with the joyful news that Bing was not fired after all. Finding the men unconscious, she carries them to the
bedroom, where the waking Leslie nervously asks Bing, “Are we married?” During a nicely handled mistaken-identity scene about
who is in the shower (it’s Anita), Bing inadvertently mangles his theme song, substituting
when
for
where
and transposing the lyric (“and the blue of her eyes crowns the gold of her hair”); either no one noticed or no one thought
it worth retaking. Anita emerges from the shower and reveals herself as Leslie’s beloved and Bing’s adoring angel. Encouraged
by her to rethink his life and career, Bing deadpans one of his best lines: “You sing into a little hole, year after year.
And then you die.”

Bing falls for Anita but regrets taking her from the magnanimous Leslie, who buys the troubled radio station and arranges
an all-star broadcast to save it. Happily, the plot takes a backseat to a couple of privileged musical interludes: Bing’s
brief but lively chorus of “Dinah,” accompanied by a rhythmic and uncredited bootblack (anticipating Fred Astaire’s “A Shine
on Your Shoes” number in
The Band Wagon),
and a beautiful “Please” by Bing and Eddie Lang, who was cast at Bing’s insistence. Then Mona returns — to a crashing orchestration
of her theme — and Bing is once again besotted. She has had her marriage annulled, she declares, and has made off with a fat
settlement. Bing, reenacting the Peggy Bernier debacle in Chicago, goes off with her, assuring Leslie he’ll be back in plenty
of time for the big broadcast. But when the forlorn Leslie tracks him down, Bing gets rid of him by pretending to be soused.

Leslie has a brainstorm: he’ll pass off a Crosby recording as the real thing. The rest of the film veers between an extended
silent sequence in which Leslie attempts to find a record late at night and interpolations of the radio stars, introduced
by their respective announcers (“… the songbird of the South with her Swanee music, your own Kate Smith”). Unable to locate
a playable disc, Leslie commences a caterwauling impersonation of the reckless crooner, backed by Lang. Just then, Bing coolly
arrives and croons to his lover, Mona, who sports a black eye (that’ll teach her), thereby saving his job while following
his worst impulses. Bing goes off with the shameless vamp. Anita settles for Leslie.

Critics complained that the film and Bing’s character were unbelievable.
Variety
was unusually captious, grousing that
The Big Broadcast
was neither exposé nor documentary, predicting that it would fail everywhere but “the hinterland.” The critic nonetheless
considered the picture a “credit to Crosby as a screen juve possibility” despite a “dizzy and uncertain role which makes him
misbehave as no human being does.” (The piety of that last comment was ingested with more than a grain of hilarity by Bing’s
friends.) The reviewer was especially troubled by scenes depicting Bing’s tardiness, which, he insisted, could have “no foundation
in fact, for the biggest of ether names know better.” He was also affronted by Sharon Lynne’s false bosom (“so artificial
it’s bound to be noticed by the femmes”) and bangs.
²⁴

Some reviewers revised the script in their heads, refusing to accept what they had seen, for example, the
Spokesman-Review:
“Bing is unable to decide whether he prefers Miss Lynne, the siren, or Leila Hyams, the sweet girl from Texas, and in the
end Miss Hyams turns out to be Erwin’s old sweetheart from the great open spaces.”
²⁵
Others ignored the plot to announce the arrival of a new star. The
New York Daily Mirror:
“No radio star ever has photographed better, or faced the cameras with greater poise and assurance than the pleasing Bing.”
²⁶
The
New York American:
“Bing Crosby is the star, make no mistake about it. The ‘Blue of the Night’ boy is a picture personality, as he demonstrated
in his two-reelers. He has a camera face and a camera presence. Always at ease, he troupes like a veteran.”
²⁷
In its newspaper advertisements, Paramount cut to the chase: “Stars of Stage, Screen and Radio in a lightning-fast, romantic
drama of Radio-land! Listen in on the hilarious secrets and romances your radios never reveal!”

The picture did only fair business in New York, where the radio stars could be seen in person, but made a fortune around the
country, far surpassing expectations. The studios turned out eleven musicals in 1932 (down from seventy-eight in 1930), and
five made money, four of them for Paramount: two Maurice Chevalier classics (Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor’s
One Hour With You,
Rouben Mamoulian’s
Love Me Tonight);
the Marx Brothers’
Horse Feathers;
and
The Big Broadcast.
The fifth was Leo McCarey’s Eddie Cantor entry,
The Kid from Spain,
for Samuel Goldwyn. But Chevalier bedroom farces were on the censors’ death list — even
The Big Broadcast
put them on
their guard (Leila Hyams’s shower scene, revealing her ankles, was excised in Ohio and Pennsylvania) — and Cantor and the
Marxes represented a fading stage tradition transferred to movies.
²⁸

Bing embodied something native and new. Paramount, reeling from the Depression, banked its future on him. Despite several
popular films, the studio lost nearly $16 million in 1932, and in the first days of 1933, Paramount-Publix went into receivership.
After a bloodbath that consumed its production heads and pushed even foxy Adolph Zukor “upstairs,” the company was reorganized
as Paramount Pictures. In the time between the premiere of
The Big Broadcast
at New York’s Paramount (October 14) and the bankruptcy hearing (January 26), the studio offered Bing a $300,000 contract
for five pictures to be made over three years and announced that he would star in
College Humor
come spring. Other studios had also bid for Crosby’s services, but Paramount had two advantages: it was the first major studio
to come calling, and it was home base to Gary Cooper, whose friendship and advice meant a lot to Bing. In many respects, the
two men were alike. Privately, what Frank Tuttle said of Cooper applied equally well to Bing: “Despite his friendly warmth,
he never let you get really close.”
²⁹
They were the sort of friends who could spend days together on a fishing boat without feeling the slightest inclination to
unburden themselves. As film actors, they were perceived as strong, solitary, men’s men, taken to heart by a public that gleaned
a comforting familiarity in their reticence.

In December
Variety
reported,
FILM MUSICALS ARE BLOOMING
.
³⁰
Hollywood was beginning to understand the kind of entertainment a bowed and bleeding nation demanded — not the Lubitsch touch
but a hearty American slap on the back.

He would sing at the drop of a hat. He would sing all the time. He’d sing when he was riding a bicycle, he’d sing when he
was walking down the street, he’d sing on a train
—
he had a singing habit.

— Rosemary Clooney ( 1991 )
¹

Launched by
The Big Broadcast,
Bing Crosby’s career soared in a steady arc, a trajectory ascending with greater velocity every year until, at its late-1940s
pinnacle, he would be transformed from an actor-singer-star into an incontestable national icon, a match for motherhood, apple
pie, and baseball. Pundits would resort to epic encomiums, saluting him, not untypically, as “the first of the Universal Common
Men.”
²
Even before then, the adulation was such that, in the recollection of his eldest son, it blurred the boundaries between “God
and dad, because everybody revered both of them.” Looking back at his early childhood, Gary Crosby recalled, “People crossing
streets, running up to the side of the car, or, if I was in some place, coming over and kneeling in front of me to tell me
what a wonderful man he was and what a thrill it must be to be his son, and how they loved him so much, and he had done so
much for them, and his singing was so great, and it went on and on and on, the way people spoke about God.”
³

Before a society invests its dreams in an individual, particularly one without military power, it must detect in him the exemplary
tribal disposition. Bing was quintessentially American, cool and upbeat, never pompous, belligerent, or saccharine, never
smug or superior. He looked down on no one and up to no one. In an age when other nations invested everything in despots,
America could feel proud not only of Bing but of its pride in Bing.

The transformation was gradual and largely unforeseeable, ultimately tethering Bing and the country in a pact neither could
afford to break. Having left his wildness behind him and having attained prosperity far beyond that of Whiteman or the “ancient
king” of his high-school reverie, Bing was able to mine a magical perquisite of old Hollywood, the power to remake oneself.
He was free to choose and reject aspects of his past, or images from his imagination, to concoct the better man he resolved
to be. In Hollywood, shopgirls became queens, cowards warriors, gay men Don Juans, scoundrels gentlemen, and gentlemen mugs.
Bing created the most astute role of the era, and he played it exceedingly well for forty-five years — never more engagingly
than during the 1930s, when his metamorphosis was fresh and providential. During Prohibition he had been a drunk. During the
Depression he became, FDR-like, an aristocrat of the people: a North Star of stability, decency, and optimism.

Yet while he allowed the Paramount publicity department and brother Larry to reinvent him in a blizzard of press handouts,
he found the conversion from entertainer to secular priest disturbing. It violated his sense of irony and modesty. “That modesty
is real, realer than anybody understood,” Barry Ulanov, his first biographer, would later reflect. “Quite apart from faith,
in the sense of something you believe in and follow, he had in his education an introduction to some of the greatest thinkers
the world has ever known — tough, philosophical minds.” In short, Ulanov argued, he was too well educated
not
to be modest. “Audiences felt that about him,” he continued, “and didn’t feel envious — they didn’t feel this guy should
not have so much talent, success, and money. I never heard that, not once. Audiences were knocked out by him because they
recognized in him a person who did not exaggerate his skills, who even had doubts about those skills.”
⁴
The taller he stood, the more Crosby ducked flattery. “He is a very odd individual,” wrote Adolph Zukor of the man who rescued
his movie empire from insolvency. “He doesn’t like to listen to praise. He likes to listen to criticism.”

Modesty sobered his ambition without weakening it. Though Bing insisted he was a mildly talented, profoundly lucky entertainer
(never an artist), he did not turn to Providence to guide his career; he relied on hard work and astute, obstinate bargaining.
Bing had reason to credit his success to the help and advice of others, yet he was the one who pulled the strings in forging
an entertainment corporation without precedent. If Bing was disinclined to make claims for his gifts, he wagered aggressively
on his market value. His reputation for knowing his own mind grew in the early 1930s as he played simultaneous career chess
with the bosses of movies, records, and radio, casually moving his pieces until one opponent after another conceded defeat.

He knew that however much he might enrich himself, he could only enrich his masters more. As they accepted the unassailable
logic of his position, they lined up for a piece of the action. The emerging house of Crosby served as a template for subsequent
entertainers who gambled on the same trifecta: first recordings, then radio or television, finally Hollywood. Only Frank Sinatra
in the forties, Elvis Presley in the fifties, and Barbra Streisand in the sixties, each working the Crosby strategy, came
within hailing distance of his success — though a great many others tried — and only Bing and, to a far lesser degree, Sinatra
enjoyed a consistently successful broadcasting career, as opposed to specials and guest appearances. But career statistics
tell only a part of the story. No other pop icon has ever been so thoroughly, lovingly
liked
— liked and trusted. Bing’s naturalness made him credible to all, regardless of region, religion, race, or gender. He was
our most authentic chameleon, mirroring successive eras — through Prohibition, depression, war, anxiety, and affluence — without
ever being dramatic about it. He was discreet and steady. He was family.