Authors: Gary Giddins
Paramount agreed to the loan-out, reasoning that a little MGM stardust could not hurt the value of its property; besides,
Hearst always paid his way. Everett, who closed Bing’s deal, put to good use the rumors about Davies’s leisurely way of working.
He negotiated a payment of $2,000 a week above and beyond a lump sum. This produced a windfall as the picture, slated to shoot
between August 30 and October 13, wrapped several weeks late, netting Bing $75,000
and leading
Time
to describe him as “probably the world’s best paid male singer.”
18
Bing relished
Going Hollywood
for the partying and the clique of top-notch talent.
It had all begun when Cosmopolitan, the production company Hearst created for Marion Davies, bought a treatment called
Paid to Laugh,
by Frances Marion, a prolific scenarist of the silent era who also directed a few Davies films. A synopsis was given to playwright
and novelist Donald Ogden Stewart, then at the beginning of a stellar career as a screenwriter —
Holiday, Love Affair, The Philadelphia Story
— that was curtailed twenty years later by the blacklist. He completed his final draft in August, by which time six songs
were written by Brown and Freed, the team that put the MGM musical on the map in 1929 with
The Hollywood Revue of 1929
and
The Broadway Melody.
Supervising the musical score and fashioning some of the most refined movie arrangements of the era was Lennie Hayton, who
became a mainstay of the Freed unit in 1942. Davies, at thirty-six, was six years older than Bing and looked it; she required
a premier cinematographer and found one in George Folsey, who shot
The Big Broadcast
among numerous other black-and-white films and would also become a Freed unit regular, setting Technicolor standards in pictures
like
Meet Me in St. Louis
and
Ziegfeld Follies.
Walter Wanger, soon to be a major force in Hollywood, was chosen to produce.
Last on board was director Raoul Walsh, a legend at forty-six, though his best work lay ahead of him
(The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde, White Heat).
He accepted the picture because he was eager to work with its two stars. Walsh had known and admired Bing as far back as
the Cocoanut Grove (“he had come a long way with talent and a big future sticking out all over him”),
19
and he wanted to meet Marion, by then a reluctant actress, often maligned as Hearst’s Galatea by those who had never seen
the superb comedienne’s work. Born to an Irish Catholic family that prospered in the Garment Center, Raoul grew up in a posh
Manhattan town house bustling with servants and visited by the celebrities of a fading era, among them Edwin Booth, Diamond
Jim Brady, Buffalo Bill, and John L. Sullivan. Yet, like Bing, he had a yen for the wild side, which he exercised swimming
in the East River and frequenting Bowery saloons and bordellos.
Walsh was fifteen when his mother died and an uncle took him to Cuba. He made his way to Mexico, where a job driving cattle
led to parts in western movies and an apprenticeship with D. W Griffith, who cast him as John Wilkes Booth in
The Birth of a Nation.
He developed into an instinctive and stylish filmmaker, renowned for dynamic action scenes; an early triumph was
The Thief of Bagdad,
with Douglas Fairbanks. Though Walsh directed few musicals during his long career, he loved the sentimental ditties of old
New York, and several of his most hard-bitten pictures are cued to those songs. Wearing an imposing eye patch, the result
of an automobile mishap, he was not averse to drinking and brawling. He was popular with actors, though he could be acerbic
on the set, grumbling his pet phrase “otra vez” — Spanish for “another time” or “not now” or “let’s get the hell out of here,”
depending on his inflection.
Stu Erwin was again recruited as a rich, nebbish producer. Walsh filled out the cast with Fifi D’Orsay as the bad girl competing
for Bing’s attention, comic Patsy Kelly as Marion’s pal, and sour Ned Sparks as a film director. Hearst summoned them all
to San Simeon, his 350,000-acre estate, commanding thirty miles of shoreline. Bing reluctantly boarded a plane with the director
and the songwriters. They were ensconced at the castle for the week, rehearsing and socializing with, among others, Winston
Churchill, who puffed on a cigar and generally ignored them. One night at dinner, Marion, who was born and bred in Brooklyn,
asked Walsh if as a boy he had ever visited Rockaway Beach. When he assured her he had, she named him Rockaway Raoul, which
Bing amended to Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.
Except for exteriors filmed at Walsh’s Encino ranch, the film was made on the MGM lot, where Marion had a bungalow fit for
the mistress of the world’s wealthiest press lord: fourteen rooms. The powers at MGM were tiring of Hearst, especially his
tirades about Norma Shearer, executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, and the roles he thought Marion and not Shearer should have
been given, like Marie Antoinette and Elizabeth Barrett. For her part, Marion was tired of the whole routine. Hearst pushed
her into unsuitable parts and rammed her down the throats of his tabloid readers, and she went along to please him. Yet she
had long ago proved herself a sparkling comic actress with a trenchant gift for mimicry, especially in such
movies produced by Thalberg and directed by King Vidor as
Show People,
remembered for her hilarious spoofs of Mae Murray and Gloria Swanson. Neither she nor Hearst thought filmmaking should crimp
a good party, however, and they let Wanger worry about the hopeless task of keeping the train on track. The costs eventually
exceeded $900,000, making
Going Hollywood
Marion’s most expensive movie, and consequently a money-losing hit.
The aspect of talking pictures that most bothered Marion was having to learn dialogue. Taking literally the idea that one
could memorize something one slept on, she kept her script under her pillow. “But that didn’t work,” she admitted. “When I
got on the set, I didn’t know one line of it.” Nor was she inclined to walk the block and a half from her bungalow to the
set before eleven. She refused the assistant director’s pleas, with the excuse that she was studying her lines. “Bing got
mad at me every once in a while, but W.R. never did. He used to coax us not to work.”
20
Bing would arrive at nine, make up, and wait two hours for Marion, who was accompanied by a five-piece band that serenaded
her between shots. They would listen to pop tunes for half an hour, at which time Walsh would tear himself away from such
pursuits as driving golf balls into a canvas net or playing cards or conducting the band, to discuss the first scene. Then
they repaired to lunch, a two-hour production in Marion’s bungalow, described by Bing as Lucullan: Rhine wines, foie gras,
chicken in aspic, Bombay duck. Now they needed to make up again, after which they paused for another musical interlude, and
finally prepared to shoot around five. “Flushed with the success of our first scene,” Bing noted,
21
they were ready to tackle another, but either the crew punched out or Hearst stepped in to avoid overtime. Alone, Marion
did her close-ups. “That was kind of smart of me, anyway,” she said.
22
Soon a competition in pranks evolved, as Raoul encouraged Bing to trick Marion into acting scenes when the cameras were not
rolling and the mikes were off. Once, Marion, who was terrified of horses, looked out from her bungalow and saw Bing and Raoul
on white steeds, determined to ride into her living room; she locked the door in the nick of time. The day they shot “We’ll
Make Hay While the Sun Shines,” Bing and Marion had imbibed an excess of Rhine wine. The scene required them to stroll through
a field of eight-foot cellophane daisies that waved from side to side like pendulums. Bing and Marion,
waving a bit themselves, found the swaying reeds so nauseating that they could barely stand. Marion cried out for Bing to
hang on to her, and they made a pact not to look at the daisies. In the completed film, they walk through the scene with Bing
singing to the sky and Marion gazing raptly at the side of his face.
They became good friends. “He was very cute and very sweet, and he was crazy about his wife Dixie,” Marion said. He talked
about Dixie constantly, phoning between shots, until Marion suggested he pretend that she was Dixie to rev up their love scenes.
“Oh, no,” he told her, “you’re not nearly as pretty.” “I understand that,” she said, “but just close your eyes.” Marion named
Bing and Cooper as her favorite leading men, for the same reason: “Gary would give the star the benefit of the scene. Only
a real man does that, and Bing did that, too. Other actors don’t.”
23
Bing described Marion as generous, charming, funny, with a “heart as big as Santa Monica.”
24
Both of them enjoyed the irascible Walsh. At a wrap party at San Simeon, Bing announced that he and Arthur Freed had written
a song about Walsh, set to the melody of “The Bowery.” He performed it, complete with spoken interlude in which he mimicked
Walsh’s voice and manner:
Rollicking Rockaway Raoul
When clad on the beach in a towel,
He’s terrific, colossal, stupendous, and grand.
He’s the lay of the land, of the land.
Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery,
He never goes there anymore.
A good pal and true,
That old Kerry blue,
Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.
[Spoken] Hello, Greenwood! Greenwood! Get me a bottle of that Royal George. What? No Royal George? Oh, Newman, is it too late
to replace Greenwood? And where’s my Bull Durham, goddamnit, where’s my Bull Durham? No Bull Durham? Nuts! I tell you what
we’ll do, Bing, we’ll go over to Davies’ bungalow. Maybe she’ll pop out with a drink. Okay, let’s go. Wait a minute, wait
a minute, wait a minute. There’s Waange-er, Wanger. Turn ‘em over quick! Wanger’s here. Bing, otra vez.
Rollicking Rockaway Raoul,
He thinks highbrow operas are foul,
But bimbos and sailors and chippies and such,
He gives them that old Rao-oul Walsh touch.
“Otra vez,” “otra vez,”
We’ll never hear that anymore.
And now that we’re through,
MGM can go screw,
Says Rollicking Rockaway Raoul.
25
As Bing’s best attempt at lyric writing to date, it reveals a more penetrating talent for satiric observation than for love
songs, and he wrote several more in later years. This one was recorded on the spot (after giggling through the opening lines,
he sings it with characteristic esprit) and found its way to the underground circuit of Crosby collectors. According to Walsh,
MGM moguls were so incensed by the song’s last line and the implication that Walsh and associates fiddled while studio chief
Louis B. Mayer burned (even if Hearst, and not MGM, footed the bill), they barred Bing and Walsh from the lot for life and
would have fired Freed but for an ironclad contract.
26
Except for a B-film by Walsh — who enjoyed a dazzling twenty years at Warners — and Bing’s appearance in the Cocoanut Grove
two-reeler, both in 1935, neither man worked at MGM until after Mayer was deposed, in 1951.
Going Hollywood
was forgotten for decades, until excerpts appeared in the 1974 compilation
That’s Entertainment!,
reviving interest in a fascinating film. By then the Bing persona had become so upright, at least in memory, that one chronicler
of film musicals described “Temptation” as “a drunken paean to lust and self-loathing [and] the last thing one associates
with Crosby.”
27
That may be true today, but it wasn’t in 1933. In two of his first four movies, Bing played a man with a drinking problem;
in one he attempts suicide, and in all four he lusts and is lusted after, usually by two women.
Going Hollywood
was the formula as before, but with intriguing twists.
Marion’s Sylvia is a French teacher at an impossibly stuffy girls’ school where the rest of the faculty is spinsterish, butch,
or old. Transported by the voice of Bill Williams (Bing) on her contraband
radio, she quits her job and pursues him — despite his consistent rejections — to his hotel bedroom, train stateroom, and
movie set, calmly disparaging his hot-tempered fiancée and leading lady, Lili (D’Orsay). Sylvia is a female version of the
Sennett Bing, who invariably runs off with the affianced. Here, he is passive and vulnerable, while Sylvia dogs his tracks,
refusing to be thwarted. The comical sparring for power between Erwin’s producer and Sparks’s director parallels the catfights
between Sylvia and Lili. Sparks riotously mimics Walsh, grousing and grumbling, contemptuously walking off whenever the producer
arrives on the set. At one point he snarls at his stars: “Off to Rockaway Beach for the both of ya, if you don’t get this
right.”
Davies is fun to watch, in part because she is so clearly uninvolved with the proceedings, sleepwalking through scenes and
almost falling over during a dance routine that unflatteringly reveals her pudgy legs — she looks at her feet like Ruby Keeler
and waves her arms to keep upright. One remarkable shot is an almost gratuitous example of what George Folsey’s glamour photography
could achieve for an aging ingenue. Sylvia lies in bed at school, listening to Bill on the radio, and the camera gazes at
her face for an astonishing ninety-plus seconds, with only two brief cutaways. In a soundstage scene, she appears in blackface
as an extra — Bill doesn’t recognize her — yet charmingly reveals herself with a beautifully unadorned smile. Bill reaches
past her to a black boy and rubs his cheek; “I’s real, Massa Williams,” the kid says. Erwin, who also fails to recognize her,
tells her she’s changed quite a bit. “It’s the climate,” Sylvia deadpans. But it is more than climate; it’s going Hollywood,
which means she walks onto a set with no thespian experience and is chosen — after Lili conveniently throws a fit — to play
the lead in the picture. Ever the mimic, Marion/Sylvia does a mean Fifi/Lili.