Authors: Gary Giddins
An enduring irony of America’s secular religious life is the influence of Jews in promoting Christmas songs, most obviously
Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Kapp’s role in this regard was considerable: he overcame Bing’s adamant refusal to venture
into the field. In keeping with his determination to offer classical pop from an earlier period, Kapp asked him to record
the nineteenth-century hymn “Adeste Fidelis” (a John McCormack hit in 1915) and “Silent Night,” which Whiteman had recorded
when the Rhythm Boys were out of town. Bing had sung the latter on his Christmas Woodbury show, but it was one thing to go
caroling, even on the air, and another to mix religion
with the rank commercialism of records — “like cashing in on the church or the Bible,” he argued.
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Bing repeatedly spurned Kapp’s requests, insisting that he lacked “sufficient stature as a singer to sing a song with religious
implications.”
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The situation was resolved when Father Richard Ranaghan of the St. Columban Foreign Missionary Society, recently returned
from China, was referred to Bing as someone who might help him raise money for his mission in Hanyang. Ranaghan hoped to generate
funds at American churches by showing an old film of China depicting famine and orphans. He wanted Bing to underwrite a new
negative and arrange for the loan of sound equipment to record a narration. According to Bing, his brother Larry suggested
that he also sing a few songs on the soundtrack, which could be released on a special white-label Decca, selling at five dollars,
with all royalties going to the mission. Accompanied by celesta and the Crinoline Choir, Bing sang an abridged medley of “Adeste
Fidelis,” “Lift Up Your Hearts,” and “Stabat Mater.” But to release a disc, Kapp had to have a B-side. Knowing the money would
go to a worthy cause, Bing agreed to record “Silent Night.”
Bing’s readings are surprisingly stiff, with halting rests and strained top notes, but “Adeste Fidelis” — despite his rusty
Latin, resulting in a couple of mispronounced vowels — is flavored with a choirboy candor and a lovely mordent on the first
syllable of
Bethlehem.
Having broken the ice, Kapp convinced him to record full-blown versions of “Adeste Fidelis” and “Silent Night” nine months
later, accompanied by Victor Young’s orchestra and the Guardsmen Quartet. Oddly, Bing and the choir sing
dominum
when they mean
dominus
in the former (not until his definitive version of 1942 did Bing conquer classic Latin), an otherwise cautious but subtly
individualized performance. Gilbert Seldes wrote, in 1956, of “Bing’s special endearing quality [that] makes everyone want
to appropriate him,” and asked, “how can one take possession better than by seeing the essential more clearly or catching
the miraculous trifle that others have missed?” He cited as an example: “A long time ago, when I first heard his recording
of ‘Adeste Fidelis,’ I imagined that I caught in the last bar of the song a tiny, delicate syncopation.” He thought it “right
and reverential.”
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Bing was downright cowed by “Silent Night,” with its more profound religious history; it was introduced at a midnight mass
on
Christmas Eve 1818. An awkward key does not help him, though Bing’s final chorus is poignant. One imperious reviewer conceded,
“His style is reverent and the effect is not as incredible as you might have thought.”
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According to Bing, the recording generated $250,000 in royalties, but little of it went to Ranaghan’s cause. The missionary
was killed in a traffic accident shortly after the soundtrack was made, and Japan’s invasion of China ended contact with the
St. Columbans. As a result, royalties were dispersed to sundry charities in the United States and abroad, from convents in
India to leper colonies in Africa.
Kapp’s devotion to evergreens received an unexpected boost when Bing inherited the lead in
Mississippi,
a role created for Lanny Ross, the tenor Paramount hoped to establish as his rival. The film, costarring W. C. Fields and
Joan Bennett and boasting a score by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, was just getting under way when Paramount-Publix mutated
into Paramount Pictures. Adolph Zukor was kicked upstairs to preside as outlying chairman Barney Balaban became president,
and Ernst Lubitsch — a sublime director who thought he could improve the work of every other director — was disastrously miscast
as chief of production, replacing Manny Cohen after not quite three years at the helm. Lubitsch survived barely a year, at
which point Balaban appointed Y. Frank Freeman head of West Coast operations. But Freeman, a onetime Coca-Cola executive and
a southerner with antediluvian racial notions, knew and cared nothing about making movies, so he delegated the job of running
the studio to his assistant, William LeBaron.
Balaban himself looked at a rough cut and was so disenchanted by the colorless Ross that he halted production and offered
the part to Bing. Director Eddie Sutherland, who remained friendly with Bing after
Too Much Harmony,
was delighted and so were Rodgers and Hart — but not for long. Lubitsch declared that Bing “was going to be a great artist,”
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yet he had reservations about
Mississippi’s
score and expressed them to its producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr. Bing was also displeased. Backed by Balaban, he requested new
songs. When Hornblow insisted on retaining the Rodgers and Hart music, Bing came up with a compromise. The songwriting team
would provide him with a new ballad, and he would interpolate the minstrel aria “Old Folks at Home,” a Stephen Foster song
with an ancient pedigree
in the record business. Len Spencer, the first nationally recognized recording star, scored one of the medium’s earliest coups
with his rendition in 1892. Until Bing revived it, the song had not been successfully recorded since 1919.
At it turned out, the agreement benefited everyone. The best of the original songs were employed, Foster’s melody did little
damage, and “It’s Easy to Remember,” the new ballad Rodgers and Hart were obliged to write, turned out to be a major hit and
one of the most beloved songs in their matchless oeuvre. Still, Hart was incensed by Bing’s intransigence concerning “Old
Folks at Home.” He declared they would never again write for Bing, who, in turn, declined to record their songs until the
patriotic “Bombardier Song” of 1942. A shame all around, though Hart’s antipathy toward the interpolated Foster is easy to
understand.
Interpolations were commonplace on the stage and in films. Most of the studios had songwriters under contract who, in exchange
for salaries, gave up their publishing royalties. When a studio purchased film rights to a Broadway score, the royalties went
to the songwriters, so in order to generate royalties for itself, the studio would replace some of the Broadway songs with
those by its own writers, who in many instances were hacks. Needless to say, this galled the Broadway writers. Rodgers and
Hart would not hear of it; their contract specifically mandated that they provide all the songs for
Mississippi.
The Foster song violated their contract and particularly offended them because of its theme of a former slave who longs for
the old plantation.
Bing did not see Foster’s song in that light, and he sings the lamentation with tremendous vitality. In his interpretation,
it becomes a universal venting of desire for the lost places none of us can ever regain. Yet for all the emotion he wrings
from the lyric and despite its undeniable historical appropriateness, his performance is enfeebled by Foster’s minstrel grammar
and the allusion to
darkies
(in later years Bing sang
people).
In the picture, Fields opines that the song won’t last two weeks because “people can’t remember the tune,” then walks away
whistling it. Jack Kapp must have been whistling, too; with that song, Bing led the way to a trove of nineteenth-century public-domain
standards, and within a year he, Armstrong, the Mills Brothers, and other Decca artists were reviving them in bunches.
Rodgers and Hart were more insulted than injured when the movie credited Foster’s song, retitled “Swanee River,” to them.
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But their chagrin should have been tempered by Bing’s renderings of their genuine songs, two of which became number one hits.
He uses a touch of parlando on “Soon,” emphasizing his range with high sighs and chesty curves, and delivers the definitive
interpretation of the marvelous “It’s Easy to Remember.” Its deceptive simplicity — a string of B flats that arcs to a D natural
— and the sloping release suit him as well as the wistful lyric and lulling tempo. A third song, “Down by the River,” elicited
an indifferent recording but is sung with great relish in the film, building to a rousing finish.
One fourteen-year-old in North Dakota who never forgot that finish was Norma Egstrom, who saved her pennies to see Crosby
movies as an escape from her abusive stepmother. Years later, after she had changed her name to Peggy Lee and become a regular
performer on Bing’s radio show, she told him about seeing
Mississippi:
“He had lost the girl and sang ‘Down by the River’ and I was crying so, because I wanted everything to turn out right for
him. And when I told Bing how heartbroken I was, he took me all over San Francisco, one place after another, searching for
a pianist who knew that song, and sang it to me. Imagine your idol singing that song to you.”
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On paper, the film promised a concoction worthy of Ziegfeld: Bing’s songs and W. C. Fields’s comedy. Sutherland, close to
both men, seemed the ideal director. He knew that no one could ad-lib or steal a scene like Fields, who, though drinking heavily,
was inspired throughout the shoot. In one of his funniest routines, he recounts his battle with Indians (“I unsheathed my
Bowie knife and cut a path through a wall of human flesh, dragging my canoe behind me”). Bing, who often broke up during their
scenes together, did not mind the upstaging. A longtime fan, he memorized Fields’s best lines. Sutherland grew concerned,
however, as the story — a moldy Booth Tarkington play that had been filmed twice before
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— shifted in Fields’s favor. He felt obliged to warn Bing: “I’m worried now that he’s going to be so funny, he’s going to
steal the picture from you.” Bing shrugged it off. “Is it good for the picture?” Sutherland said it was great. Bing told him,
“Forget it, it’s got my name on it, what do I care what Fields steals? I’m not a fundamentalist. This is business. If it’s
funny, okay. I think he’s great, don’t you?”
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Still, rumors of rivalry between them were rife. Crosby was reported to have demanded recuts after a preview (the changes
he mandated actually occurred when he came onboard), and Fields was said to have disdained his singing. They were, in fact,
friends and Toluca Lake neighbors, occasionally playing golf and drinking together. “Fields had real affection for Bing Crosby,”
Robert Lewis Taylor wrote. “In turn, Crosby had an idolatrous, filial attitude toward Fields, whom he always called ‘Uncle
Bill.’”
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When Fields went to visit him at Del Mar racetrack a year later, Bing bought him an expensive pair of binoculars. Film preservationist
Bob DeFlores recalled that upon visiting Bing’s baronial home in Hillsborough in 1977, he drawled, “Nice little lean-to you
have here.” Without missing a beat, Bing provided the citation: “Bill Fields,
Poppy,
1936.”
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The only downside of the production for Bing was that his weight had increased to 190 pounds and he was obliged to wear a
girdle, a nuisance he accepted with more equanimity than he did the requisite toupee. By this time, however, he made a point
of avoiding the scalp doily by wearing hats in as many scenes as possible. Charles Lang devised several fancy shots — reflections
in mirrors, Bing singing through harp strings — and managed to make him appealing even with a mustache and muttonchops, about
which he remarked to Quentin Reynolds, who profiled him for
Collier’s,
“Looks like hell, don’t it?”
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The story wasn’t much, with Bing as a sensible Philadelphian who refuses to engage in a duel, thereby losing the love of
Gail Patrick while earning the adoration of her kid sister, Joan Bennett. (Frank Capra had used the same device of rival sisters
and family honor the previous year in
Broadway Bill,
which he remade in 1950 as a vehicle for Bing.) Reviews were mixed, but despite strong competition in a spring rendered heavily
Gallic by
Les Miserables
and
Cardinal Richelieu,
it made pots of money.
Paramount was so pleased that it renewed Bing’s contract in a three-year, nine-picture deal, at $125,000 a film, plus a salary
of $15,600 for each week past the eighth one devoted to any film, plus a new clause that had become singularly important to
Bing.
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Crosby’s negotiators initially suggested twelve pictures at $200,000 each; they did not expect to get it, but in maneuvering
toward common ground, they finally wrangled from Paramount permission for Bing to make
one film annually for another studio. That set off fierce competition for his services, with offers coming in from such past
associates as Fanchon and Marco, Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions, Manny Cohen, and film pioneer Jesse Lasky, who had been
ousted by Cohen and now vainly sought to launch a production company with Mary Pickford. Bing signed with Cohen, who already
owned an interest in his services, to coproduce an independent feature for Columbia Pictures in 1936.
The new Paramount covenant began poorly. One remarkable indication of the studio’s confidence in Bing was its perverse reasoning
in deciding to release a turkey called Two
for Tonight.
Initially, it promised to be a sure-fire production: reuniting Bing with Joan Bennett, Frank Tuttle would direct a farce
adapted by George Marion Jr., shot by Karl Struss, and supported by such expert hams as Mary Boland, Thelma Todd, and Ernest
Cossart. Resting at Rancho Santa Fe, Bing lost twelve pounds in preparation, while Mack Gordon and Harry Revel wrote the songs.
What they produced was a calamity. Tired of the usual froth, Tuttle was preoccupied with adapting Dashiell Hammett’s
The Glass Key,
one of his best pictures, and allowed
Two for Tonight
to lurch between screwball comedy and romance with timeouts for music. The romance amounted to little: Bing and Bennett “meet
cute” when he rolls downhill in a runaway wheelchair and she is scooped onto his lap. “Going my way?” he asks. “Apparently,”
she says. For comedy, Tuttle turned to the silent era for a long, elaborate bout of seltzer-squirting, his homage to a Laurel
and Hardy pie-throwing epic.
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