Bing Crosby (63 page)

Another career ended, tragically, on September 2, 1934, when Russ Columbo died in a bizarre shooting accident, at twenty-six.
Though no longer a major rival, he had continued to shadow Bing, aiming for a career in movies. Appearing in the tawdry
Broadway Through a Keyhole
(based on Ruby Keeler’s affair with a mobster when she was young), he did well enough to land a contract with Universal.
But Latin lovers were out of season, and his
Wake Up and Dream
was a disaster; that it provided him with his first hit in two years, “When You’re in Love,” could be largely attributed
to the controversy surrounding his death.

Russ had been killed while visiting a friend, Hollywood photographer Lansing Brown, who showed him a set of antique dueling
pistols, not realizing that one pistol held a live charge. When it went off accidentally, the bullet ricocheted off a mahogany
desk and through Columbo’s eye. A new Columbo legend sprang to life as Carole Lombard, who called Russ “the great love of
my life,”
⁴³
and other friends conspired to keep Russ’s ailing mother from learning of his death; they regularly sent her checks and letters
purportedly mailed by her son from various European cities where he claimed to be in great demand. The charade continued until
Mrs. Columbo’s passing, two years after Lombard lost her own life. At the funeral, Carole had sobbed uncontrollably, comforted
by Bing, who served as a pallbearer. Five years later she married Clark Gable. In January 1942, while returning from a midwestern
tour to promote U.S. bonds, Carole Lombard died in a plane crash, at thirty-three.

Larry’s disappointment with Dixie’s retreat from show business was matched by his general frustration with the entertainment
world and his brothers. He wrote to Ted: “Bing too heavy — testy & hard to handle. May quit anytime. Ev a big shot, etc. The
future —
very
indefinite. All depends. This is a
tough
racket! Nothing done in a business way! Merit is the last thing that counts.”
⁴⁴
Yet at that very moment, Bing’s film acting was rising to a new level. While Dixie
vainly went through the paces of her comeback, Bing completed the picture that would at last convert his detractors and secure
his position as a captivating comic actor —
Here Is My Heart.
Improbably, the plot hinges on antique dueling pistols.

Adapted from Alfred Savoir’s play
The Grand Duchess and the Waiter
(filmed in 1926), the picture reunited Bing with director Frank Tuttle and inaugurated his long collaboration with his favorite
cameraman in the prewar period, Karl Struss. Having served up “Love in Bloom,” Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger helped Bing to
three more brass rings with their new score: the perennial jazz standard “Love Is Just Around the Corner” (written by Robin
with Lewis Gensler), the bygone “With Every Breath I Take,” and the classic ballad “June in January,” which dominated sales
charts for nearly two months.

As casting began, Paramount sounded out the idea of promoting Bing and Kitty Carlisle as a new romantic team by asking exhibitors
for their opinions. The results convinced Manny Cohen he was on the right track. The pair’s costars included some of the finest
character actors in the business: Roland Young, Alison Skipworth, Akim Tamiroff, and William Frawley (a longtime Crosby pal),
as well as the mysterious Marian Mansfield, a fetching and enthusiastic young woman whose only other appearance in pictures
was a minor role in Dixie’s
Love in Bloom.

Once again Carlisle was touched by Bing’s professionalism and modesty. “He was always right, Johnny-on-the-spot. We had Alison
Skipworth and Roland Young and Reginald Owen, three first-class stage stars, much older than we were, and we were doing a
scene with them, and he turned to me and he said, ‘What the hell are we doing starring in this movie with those folks?’ He
could not get over the fact that they were the supporting cast.”
⁴⁵
According to Tuttle, the script was written by Harlan Thompson (who shares screen credit with Edwin Justus Mayer) with an
assist from playwright Vincent Lawrence, who was hired to write an extended love scene between a waiter (Bing) and an impossibly
lofty White Russian princess (Kitty). “They played it to the hilt,” Tuttle wrote. He believed that Bing had “developed into
a first-rate comedian” and was especially tickled by an episode in which Bing serves the Russians while wearing a fake mustache
that falls into their soup: “He played this broad scene with the telling seriousness of an accomplished farceur.”
⁴⁶

The story concerns a radio singer named J. Paul Jones, who, having made his first million, sets out to do all the things he
dreamed of doing as a boy, including fishing dead center in the Atlantic Ocean, singing “Yankee Doodle” to the Sphinx, presenting
dueling pistols owned by John Paul Jones (no relation) to the Naval Academy, and marrying a princess. He already has one of
the pistols and learns that the second is owned by Princess Alexandra, in Monte Carlo. Money and class drive the plot. To
get access to the princess, he pretends to be a waiter, secretly purchasing the hotel to further his ruse. When he discovers
that the high-living Russians are penniless, he surreptitiously stuffs their purses with cash. As in
We’re Not Dressing,
he brings the highborn down to his own exemplary plane. “You can’t offend royalty,” his hotel manager cautions. “No, you
probably can’t,” Bing says, “but let’s make an effort anyhow.” He ultimately lands his princess and converts her family to
capitalism, offering one relative an honest day’s work as a hotel doorman.

The Ruritanian romance between commoner and royalty was old hat long before 1934, but Bing gives it a new twist, playing the
commoner as an Everyman American of such good and honest disposition that Old World values crumble before him. His performance
is utterly relaxed and infectious. He more than holds his own with those eminent stage actors, taking quiet command of every
scene, confidently inserting Bingisms: a pet phrase (“keep it shady”) or a cowboy inflection or an Oliver Hardy chin waggle.
Bing’s love of the old comedians is particularly apparent in a scene in which he adopts the mustache and squint made famous
by Jimmy Finlayson, a ubiquitous actor in the classic shorts of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.

Tuttle, who propels the film at a clip, is no less sure of the material. A sequence in which several servants squeeze Bing
into his waiter uniform is worthy of Lubitsch, and a strangely disconnected passage in which Bing stalks a man down a corridor
is his homage to silent comedy. No little credit must go to Karl Struss, who won the first Academy Award for cinematography,
for
Sunrise.
Bing finally looks handsome, every vestige of callowness gone. Struss shadows Bing’s features to make them appear chiseled
and strong, while his eyes are limpidly romantic. In one diverting scene, the camera is all but stationary as Bing governs
and sustains the action on his own: he is in his room, listening to his own record of “June in January,” whistling a
duet, reading a paper, changing from a robe to a dinner jacket, singing along. When his recorded self finishes with a head
tone, he kibitzes, “Well, you made it.”

Paramount knew it had something special and issued several publicity shots, most featuring Tuttle, including one with Kitty
and Bing hanging on to the director’s tall shoulders. As usual, Bing did not allow himself to be billed alone or above the
title; in the ads Carlisle’s name is the same size as his. But billing, publicity, and good reviews did not help her case
at Paramount, which deemed her neither beautiful nor charming enough to go the distance. “There was something in
Photoplay
that I was sort of the young star of the year. And I got notices,” she recalled. “I really thought I was on my way. That’s
why I was so surprised when they paid me off and sent me home.”
⁴⁷

The reviews focused on the leading man. “Bing Crosby is something more than a crooner; he is a comedian with a perfect sense
of timing,” declared the New York
Daily News.
⁴⁸
The venture was praised by
Variety
as “an excellent example of musical comedy picture making,” especially Bing’s duet with his own recording.
⁴⁹
Even
Time,
which months earlier had found the Crosby face blank and adenoidal, capitulated: “To cinemaddicts who share the Princess’
feeling about crooners,
Here Is My Heart
will reveal that Bing Crosby is not only an accomplished singer but a talented comedian.”
⁵⁰
Marquis Busby expressed the consensus in the
Los Angeles Examiner:
“As I see it, Clark Gable, Fredric March, and Gary Cooper had better take a good look at the writing on the wall. They’d
better hurry and take some singing lessons. Now all the studios are looking for another Bing Crosby.”
⁵¹

Yet
Here Is My Heart
was for many years a forgotten film, out of circulation since the 1930s. Paramount’s copies rusted, and the picture was presumed
lost, though Bing’s version of the commoner had a lingering afterlife. Billy Wilder reworked it in his script for Lubitsch’s
Ninotchka,
in which a Soviet snob succumbs to the American way, and in his self-directed
The Emperor Waltz
(1948), starring Bing as a phonograph salesman who brings to heel an Austrian countess. Then in July 1977, three months before
his death, Bing invited film preservationist and Crosby collector Bob DeFlores to his home to screen for him some rare short
films Bing had not seen since they were made. At the end of the day, he offered DeFlores anything he wanted from his
nearly complete vault collection, including a pristine duplicate of the original print of
Here Is My Heart.
The picture’s long neglect is puzzling because it is central to Bing’s canon, both for the quality of his performance and
for launching his new image as an all-American character: a plucky, eternally boyish, self-made millionaire with a common
touch and uncommon voice.

Midway through shooting
Here Is My Heart,
Tuttle threw a party for Bing and Dixie to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, a lavish Beverly Hills affair climaxing
with a midnight swim.’ It had been a blessed year — the twins, the ranch, a career of limitless horizon. On Christmas Day,
shortly after the film debuted in New York, Bing celebrated the reopening of the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, a bedroom
community northeast of Los Angeles. It was a momentous occasion. The original Santa Anita was built in 1907 and failed quickly;
but the new one, constructed at a site several miles from the first, brought racing back to the San Gabriel Valley for the
first time in twenty-five years. Bing invested $10,000 to secure box seats. Hardly a day passed that he did not visit his
investment.

On Christmas night he sang “Silent Night” on the radio, initiating a tradition that continued for forty-three years and associated
him as closely with Christmas as anyone since Charles Dickens, if not Santa Claus. When the 1934 Quigley poll was tabulated,
Bing was seventh among the top-ten box-office attractions, the first and — until 1936, when Gary Cooper scored — only Paramount
male to make the list. One other Paramount player, Mae West, also ranked, for the last time, in a field dominated by stars
at Fox (Will Rogers, Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple) and MGM (Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressler, Norma
Shearer). For Bing, who became a fixture in the poll, placing in fourteen of the next twenty years, the victory signaled a
new beginning. He was about to take charge of
Kraft Music Hall
and, with Jack Kapp, revolutionize the record business.

I know how to keep my pulse on the multitude.

—
Jack Kapp
(1947)
¹

The cornerstone years of the Bing Crosby legend stretch from 1934 to 1954, peaking in the middle and late 1940s. During those
two decades his popularity attained an unexampled luster at home and abroad. What changed in 1934, to accelerate the public’s
acceptance of him? After all, he had been a successful entertainer for nine years — he had recorded much of his finest music
while triumphing on the stage, on the air, and in motion pictures. The answer has less to do with the nature of his work than
with Bing’s willingness to redefine his public role. He was now on the verge of reinventing common-denominator aesthetics,
creating a national popular music that pleased everyone. The cost, in the opinion of many observers, was encroaching blandness.

Like the once knavish, now suburbanized Mickey Mouse or the once succulent, now prim Betty Boop, Bing had to be housebroken.
America’s puritan strain always kicks in when disaster strikes, especially after a long night of partying, as though depressions
and plagues and floods and earthquakes were retribution for staying out till dawn. Time to sober up and knuckle down. But
whereas Mickey and Betty became so innocuous as to be of no use except as corporate symbols
and souvenir adornments, Bing blossomed in the process. His own moralistic streak emboldened him as an actor and personality.
What his singing forfeited in muscularity, it gained in poignancy. When he periodically reasserted his jazz chops, he revealed
a maturity and eloquence that often trumped his Jazz Age triumphs. In this regard, Bing’s metamorphosis suggests Chaplin,
who reduced his Tramp’s original sadistic streak in favor of a pathos that afforded him far greater nuance. Like Charlie,
Bing never totally abandoned his scampish irreverence, as became clear in the 1940s
Road
movies. Nor was his stubborn streak diminished, as corporate chiefs who crossed him or underestimated his resolve learned
to their dismay.