Authors: Gary Giddins
After Bing recorded his single perfect take of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” emotions ran high in the studio, and Bing’s
way of diffusing them was to swing some jazz. Lennie Hayton was supposed to conclude the session with a couple of piano solos,
but he never got around to them. Instead, Bing instigated a duet with him on Victor Young’s first hit, recently revived by
the Mills Brothers, “Sweet Sue — Just You.” The rollicking result is in some respects as stunning as the number that preceded
it, though it remained a secret for thirty-five years. Bing and Lennie claimed the tune in a loose treatment that begins with
stride piano in the style of Fats Waller. Bing enters cocksure, coolly exchanging phrases with Lennie and deftly interpolating
— in his scat chorus — a passage from the solo Bix Beider becke played on an otherwise bombastic 1928 recording by Paul Whiteman.
20
He is bright and moving, as if tempered by the Depression song. Yet Kapp rejected “Sweet Sue,” which did not see the light
of day until 1967.
Days before Bing’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” achieved instant prominence, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president.
Though neither man was especially happy about it, Roosevelt and Crosby became associated in the public’s mind as twin forces
against the unknown. Just as he had haplessly incarnated the excesses of Prohibition, Bing would emerge as a source of strength
and community in that precarious era when parents dreaded the approach of Christmas, and bank robber John Dillinger commanded
grudging admiration. There were those who longed for take-charge guys like they had in Europe — Mussolini, who made the trains
run on time, and Hitler, soon to be appointed chancellor of Germany. From 1929 Studebaker marketed an automobile called The
Dictator. But most sought the reassurance FDR inspired as a man of the people, no matter how highborn, and the reassurance
they found in Crosby, an entertainer of the people, a straight shooter and good guy, with a voice as resonant and natural
as every Joe imagined he produced in the shower and as chivalrous as every Jane imagined of her heart’s desire. Bing, approaching
thirty, had no real competition for the job. In the sound of his voice, people knew who they were and where they stood.
21
After vacationing with Dixie in Miami Beach and playing a week at a theater in Baltimore, Bing debuted his Chesterfield series
on January 4, 1933; he was on twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, from 9:00 to 9:15. Arguing that listeners might be tired
of “Where the Blue of the Night” and wanting to purge memories of his previous affiliation, Bing’s sponsor urged him to change
his theme, so for a short while he used “Just an Echo in the Valley,” one of his sappier records, which consequently became
a major hit. Once again Bing was prohibited from speaking on air; Norman Brokenshire did the announcing. On the first broadcast
he sang “Please,” “Love Me Tonight,” “How Deep Is the Ocean?,” and, because of time constraints, half of “Echo in the Valley.”
Hayton conducted an instrumental number.
Variety
found it “highly palatable stuff if not particularly distinguished. Crosby and Hayton are both adept but the presentation
is quite formula.”
22
The announcer was criticized for his “rather saccharine overly benign wordage.” Radio fans had no such reservations. In February
the show ranked ninth in
Variety’s
nationwide
survey, and in a poll limited to singers, Bing ranked first, trailed by Vallée, Downey, and Columbo.
23
He continued to pack them in at theaters as well. Irving Mills negotiated an impressive $3,000 for a week at the Albee in
Brooklyn (he shared the bill with vaudeville legends Weber and Fields). In March Bing returned to the Capitol Theater to share
a bill with Eddy Duchin’s band and Milton Berle, who relished the marquee —
BERLE DUCHIN CROSBY
— though, in fact, Bing hijacked the audience, performing numerous encores and clowning with the comedian for the finale.
24
It is tempting to imagine that every time Bing stepped out on a stage in 1933, his last year as a concert performer until
1975, aspiring singers experienced jolts of recognition. Within ten years the pop-music terrain would be crowded with his
musical offspring — among them Perry Como, Dick Todd, Herb Jeffries, Bob Eberle, Buddy Clark, Andy Russell, Bob Carroll, Dick
Haymes, Bob Stewart, and Tony Martin, who remembered, “We all loved to sing like Bing — to listen to Bing was taking lessons.”
25
In the same period, Bing’s influence reached country singers like Jimmy Wakely, Roy Rogers, and Eddie Arnold, and European
singers like Paris’s Jean Sablon or London’s Jack Cooper, Denny Dennis, and Sam Costa, who noted, “All the singers tried to
be Crosbys. You were either a high Crosby or a low Crosby.”
26
Even Count Basie’s majestic blues shouter Jimmy Rushing revised his style after hearing Bing. Rushing, who named Bing, Louis
Armstrong, and Ethel Waters as his favorites, was “a high Crosby,” according to Costa’s formulation.
27
The finest “low Crosby” was Billy Eckstine, who covered numerous Crosby hits and bred a generation of bass-baritones known
among musicians as the Black Bings.
28
Yet none of those singers, however popular or distinctive, provided Crosby with any real competition. Only one singer challenged
him. Right before Bing played the Capitol, he and Eddie Lang worked a week at Jersey City’s Journal Square Theater. In attendance,
with his girlfriend and future wife, Nancy Barbato, was seventeen-year-old Frank Sinatra, who credited Bing’s performance
that day with his own decision to embark on a musical career. Sinatra set out to fulfill his ambition immediately; by 1934
he was singing with the Hoboken Four, with whom he auditioned for Major Bowes and his
Original Amateur Hour.
One of the quartet’s numbers was an imitation of the Crosby-Mills Brothers record, “Shine.”
Despite his tremendous impact, Crosby was going through a transitional period, as he attempted to jettison mannerisms in favor
of a more level, straightforward, speechlike approach. At the same time, he was helping define the American songbook by introducing
a batch of important new tunes. For Sinatra, Bing’s 1933 recordings provided a trove of durable material as well as a guide
to vocal devices he could use, reject, or revise. Consider Bing’s hit record of “Street of Dreams,” with its ominous lyric
by Sam Lewis and dramatically ascending melody by Victor Young.
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Bing begins with a dark rendition of the verse, establishing the theme of opium-induced dreams; stresses the first chorus
with mordents; and, inspired by Tommy Dorsey’s breathless chorus (thirty-two bars without a rest), demonstrates his skillful
phrasing in the finale as he glides without a pause into and out of the release. Sinatra, nine years later, discarded the
sinister verse as well as Bing’s fluttery mordents but retained the breathless phrasing, meticulous enunciation, and feeling
for the song’s drama.
If Sinatra thought Bing’s 1933 records dated, Bing himself seems to have chafed at the pedestrian arrangements. In “Try a
Little Tenderness,” a love song peculiarly germane to the Depression (“women do get weary / wearing the same shabby dress”),
he spurs the sluggish tempo with adornments like the unexpected high note on
happiNESS.
In a recording with Guy Lombardo of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” he counters the band’s hopelessly rigid inflections
with his own infallible rhythmic pulse and caps his first chorus with a blues locution. Surprisingly, Lombardo’s clipped brasses,
buttered reeds, and staccato rhythms propel Bing (much as Lombardo-style arrangements had roused Louis Armstrong to fanciful
flights a couple of years earlier). Bing’s embellishments are relatively mild, but his time is vigorous, particularly on “You’re
Beautiful Tonight, My Dear,” a second-rate song made unaccountably affecting in his sure interpretation. His buoyant scat
solo and reprise on “Young and Healthy” are insurgent statements of self in the face of Lombardo’s stuffy rectitude. “Young
and Healthy” and “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” both from
42nd Street,
were combined on a platter that topped sales charts twice within a month — first one side, then the flip.
For Bing’s next sessions, Kapp returned him to the arms of old friends, but despite Bing’s evident enthusiasm, the results
are uneven.
Lennie Hayton backed him with a crew that included Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, trumpeter Sterling Bose, and forgotten drummer
Stan King, who knew how to drive home an out-chorus, as on “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Yet the session’s highlight turned
out to be the last record by Bing and the Mills Brothers, “My Honey’s Lovin’Arms.” Bing vigorously romps the first chorus,
the brothers imitate instruments in the second, and Bing ad-libs against the scrim of their harmonies in the third. This savory
performance boasts a rapid-fire in-joke that Crosby expert Fred Reynolds has noticed: in the third chorus (of take A), Bing
does an easily overlooked but unmistakable Jolson imitation on the line “I know that I belong.” Bing’s teaming with the Mills
Brothers had been initiated by the singers, not Kapp, and from now on it would continue only on the radio.
A couple of weeks later, with four violins added to the mix, Bing covered Ruth Etting’s hit “You’ve Got Me Crying Again” and
gave his all to the Depression tearjerker “What Do I Care, It’s Home,” almost overcoming Roy Turk’s quatrain: “It’s a weathered
shanty / On a barren mountainside /You may think it’s rough / But mom and I are satisfied.” The material was marginally better
at a session with the Dorsey Brothers, for which Bing played a supporting role, singing single choruses as he had in his Whiteman
days. Two faux-preacher numbers, “Stay on the Right Side of the Road” and “Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn,” elicit his asides
in southern dialect. Yet Bing and the band — including the masterly trumpet player Bunny Berigan — grill the smart, energetic
arrangements to a turn.
On nearly all his recordings, at his radio broadcasts, and in theaters, Bing was backed by Eddie Lang, sitting at his right
elbow, sharing a microphone, steadying him with strummed chords, leading him with calculated arpeggios, pacing him with a
lissome yet resolute accompaniment. He “just made you feel like you wanted to ride and go,” Bing said.
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They looked out for each other on- and offstage. “Eddie had everything to do with the radio show,” said Barry Ulanov, “but
he also took a great deal of responsibility for Bing as a person, Bing as a singer, Bing as someone who could be a front man
for the music that Lang loved.”
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In return, Bing stipulated that Paramount include Eddie in all his projects, specifically guaranteeing him a speaking role
in
College Humor.
Lang’s Paramount contract, netting him $15,000
per Crosby picture plus a salary of $1,000 a week while touring, made him the highest-paid sideman in the country.
Eddie was apprehensive about his part in
College Humor.
He was suffering from chronic and painful laryngitis and worried that he might not be up to it. Bing encouraged him to have
his tonsils removed, and the doctor assured Eddie that a tonsillectomy was a safe and simple procedure. The operation was
scheduled for Sunday morning, March 26, at ten, so that Eddie would be able to leave for the Coast with Bing on Wednesday.
A few days earlier Dixie had asked Kitty Lang to join her and Sue Carol on a steamship voyage that would take them to California
via stops in Bermuda and Cuba. Kitty wanted to go but told Dixie that she could not leave Eddie during the operation and would
travel by train with the boys. As he was wheeled into the elevator, Eddie asked her to buy a racing form so he could pick
her a winner on Monday.
When Eddie came out of surgery, the doctor told Kitty he was fine but heavily sedated and suggested she go home. She refused,
and remained by his bed for hours with a racing form in her lap, comforted by a nurse who told her that patients often slept
that long. At 5:00
P.M
., the nurse took his pulse and raced from the room. An oxygen machine was wheeled in, but he had hemorrhaged and it was too
late. “I must have screamed, for I remember hearing a child start screaming, too, and realized that it was someone down the
hall and that I must not frighten this child,” Kitty recalled. A doctor gave her an injection, and she felt her throat constrict
until she could not speak. “Someone must have called Bing on the phone, he was at the Friars Club. Needless to say, he came
right over and into the waiting room. He fell on his knees with his head in my lap and started to sob, ‘Kitty, he was my best
friend.’ “
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When the news was announced, the radio networks observed a minute of silence for the luminous twenty-nine-year-old musician
who more than anyone else invented jazz guitar in the era before Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. Kitty waived the
autopsy, and Eddie’s brother Tom made arrangements to send the body home to Philadelphia, where friends and relatives filled
the family home. Eddie’s father, who had built him his first instrument out of a cigar box and thread, paced the floor for
days while Kitty sat in a trance. She lost thirty pounds. “I remember someone touching my shoulder
and telling me that Bing had arrived to take me to the funeral. Poor dear Bing, my heart went out to this great man who was
sitting on top of the world as the greatest singer the world had ever known, and yet he lost the one companion who had been
instrumental in putting him there.”
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The service was hell for Bing, his first taste of the madness of celebrity. He was accustomed to autograph seekers in person
and through letters; these he efficiently answered, usually plugging his current projects. But until now he had been mobbed
only in
The Big Broadcast,
and that was for laughs. At Eddie’s service, people closed in on him and turned the ceremony into a circus. In their haste
“just to touch him,” in Kitty’s words, they overturned pews and the appalled priest was forced to implore mourners to take
their seats. Bing was already phobic about hospitals and funerals, but this was unendurable, an intrusion on his and the family’s
grief, and he resolved never to let it happen again. A welterweight named Marty Collins volunteered to protect Bing, who was
impressed with his manner and effectiveness. Afterward, when Bing and Kitty had a moment alone, he asked her to Los Angeles
to stay with him and Dixie, promising her a home as long as she wanted. Dixie had become pregnant during filming of
The Big Broadcast
and was expecting in June. They needed her, he said. Kitty joined them in April, and Bing looked out for her all his life.
But a part of Bing died with Eddie, and he never allowed anyone else to get as close.